“I guess I’ll see if I can catch them before they go. I’m actually headed to Salem, but I’m several hours away.”

Michael glanced at Chris as he ended the call. “Feel like seeing The Senator today?”

Chris stared back at him.

“Better get your story ready.”

See the senator, thought Chris. In a few hours?

His life had completely turned upside down and inside out in a matter of hours. He’d put the senator and Cecilia out of his head years ago. It was the only way to keep his sanity.

He leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, a dizziness settling in his brain. For a few years as a kid, he’d fantasized about his reunion with his real parents, but he’d always felt a shadow watching over him, waiting for him to make one wrong move that would signal the Ghostman to kill them and Michael. So he’d stopped thinking about them, forcing himself to look at the Jacobses as his real parents, and he embraced Jamie as his sister.

But now it was time to own up to the truth.

His stomach churned, and he swallowed hard. He didn’t want a repeat performance of the scene in the alley.

“They’re gonna stop him, right? He’s not going to hurt anyone else.” He didn’t clarify whom to Michael.

“If the police don’t stop him, I will. They’ll spot that car on the highway, and I’m not going to stop until I know what he’s done with Jamie.”

Chris opened his eyes and studied his brother in the dim light. Even though it’d been twenty years, he knew the determined set of that stubborn jaw. When Michael had his mind set on something, he didn’t rest until he achieved it. Right now that obsession was Jamie.

He noted his brother didn’t say “when I get Jamie back.”

There was a very good chance his sister was dead.

Chris took a series of deep breaths. Everything was coming to a head. He was caught in the nightmare he’d been trying to prevent for twenty years. A killer had his sister.

He turned in his seat to check on Brian. The boy looked at ease with his head tipped back in the corner of a seat, his mouth slightly opened, deep in the sleep of childhood.

Brian was safe.

He might be able to put an end to his nightmares tonight. If he knew the Ghostman was behind bars, he’d be able to sleep.

Why him?

He’d asked that question for twenty years. Why had the Ghostman threatened his family and no one else’s? Obviously, he’d kept Daniel and the real Chris alive the longest because he’d had a taste for young boys. How much longer would they have survived? The real Chris wouldn’t have lasted another month. Maybe even a week.

“I still don’t know why he took us,” Chris told Michael. “We all asked him several times why he had to take all the kids from the bus. He never said why.”

“How did it happen?” asked Michael. “I never understood how someone could make a whole group of people and a vehicle vanish the way he did.”

“We were all back on the bus after touring the capitol building. The younger kids were getting whiny. It was a long day for them. I loved going there, you knew that. I loved visiting Dad’s office, and Uncle Phillip’s new representative office wasn’t too far away. Other kids weren’t excited about politics the way I was.”

Michael snorted. “Politics suck.”

“I wanted to be president one day.”

“I remember,” Michael laughed. “I was so fucking jealous of you. The Senator gave you so much more attention because you wanted to follow in his footsteps.”

“No, I was jealous of you. You could do sports and didn’t care what other people thought of you. Your mindset was always independent and cool. I wanted to be like that.”

The two men locked gazes for a split second. Chris saw shock in Michael’s eyes.

“Bullshit.” Michael broke the moment. “You had nothing to be jealous of. Mom and The Senator thought you were perfect.”

“Doesn’t mean I thought I was. I wanted to be more like you.”

“Jesus Christ. Once I realized you probably weren’t coming back, I tried to turn myself into you. Tried to show more interest in The Senator’s job, tried to make my schoolteachers happy. That lasted about a month.

“I had so much guilt. Did you know I lied about being sick to get out of that field trip? For years, I blamed myself for you getting taken. If I’d been there, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe I could have talked him into releasing you and taking me instead. Fuck. I figured Mom and The Senator hated me because you were gone and they were stuck with me. The lazy kid, the school skipper and skateboarder who nearly flunked out of math. How many times do you think they said, ‘If only Michael had vanished instead of Daniel’?”

“They never said that!”

“They did in my brain. I believed they were too polite to say it out loud.”

Chris stared at his brother. He’d often wondered how Michael had handled being left behind. As a kid, he’d figured his brother probably missed him on one level but cheered that he was an only child on another.

The Ghostman had wreaked havoc on everyone.

“I had no idea,” Chris said quietly. “You know those are probably normal thoughts for a kid who experienced what you went through, but Mom and The Senator always loved you. They didn’t wish you were gone.”

Michael shrugged. “You have to love your own kid.”