Chapter 3

She opened her eyes and shook her head, turning her attention to the newspaper in front of her, trying painfully to keep the next memories out of her head.

David had been the one to tell her of Nicholas death. He said that not long after the two cars had wedged her in that the police believed she lost control. The car he said slide on the wet road before flipping over onto its roof before slamming into a tree along the riverbank.

A search party had found them not long after the crash. He told her that Erica had survived the crash, and that she was right that she had hemregged after Nicholas birth. She'd lost a lot of blood and had a pretty nasty concussion, but they believed she'd make a full recovery. Ashlee herself was the most injured; she had a couple of broken ribs, a broken arm, and had had some swelling of the brain.

She remembered all of that, but it was what he said about Nicholas that was burned into her brain. The police hadn't found his little body, but based on evidence they'd come to the conclusion that at some point he'd fallen or had been thrown into the river on impact. The only evidence of his existence that they'd found was the tiny blanket he was wrapped in, half in the water.

Rescuers and the PVPD had searched the river and the banks along the river for days after the accident looking for Nicholas. But they never found anything, and were forced to officially declare him dead 3 days later.

Nicholas Michael Kane...Kane since they didn't know who the father was, was 'buried" or at least was given a headstone next to Mona, his grandmother...5 days after he was born.

She and Erica have never fully accepted Nicholas's fate. Something inside of both of them has always lead them to believe that Nicholas is still alive, where and how he'd survived they didn't know, but they still believed that one day he would show up on the doorstep alive and well.

She shook her head and wiped away a few tears that had managed to fall down her cheeks. David said it was good to cry, that the best thing she could do was let the pain take over for awhile. He knew how guilty she felt, and that she would always blame herself for what had happened. He was the only other person besides Erica who she could cry too, and she was so thankful for that.

Her paper that she had yet to start working on was supposed to be about a local politician, since the elections were just a few weeks away, she'd picked Pennsylvania's Lieutenant Governor Kevin Buchanan to write about. Politics wasn't her thing, but she had to take it so she might as well enjoy it. Her junior year at PVU had just started and she loved being pre-med. She was going to be a doctor just like her dad; only she was going to be pediatrician in honor of Nicholas.

She had spent her first two years at NYU but was so home sick that Erica offered to let her stay with her if she wanted to transfer to PVU. She loved it in Pine Valley, her family was here. She loved spending time with her dad, and watching Leora grow up. Having her baby sister in her life was the biggest help in healing her heart. She loved staying with Erica. Erica had become like the mother she never had, during her relationship with David. Bianca was more like a sister then a best friend, some how they seemed to complete each other...it was as if they'd been destined to be friends.

She laid back against her pillows, smiling for the first time that day. She finally had a family, a strange one, but a family no less.

The article she was reading was hardly holding her attention. It was your basic piece about Kevin Buchcanon and his life. She wondered if maybe she'd missed something by passing on a journalism career. She could spice up this piece without even trying. She read the last paragraph and flipped to the next page, expecting more of the same mindless political spin. Instead she found a picture of Kevin his wife Kelly, and their son Ben.

There was something about their son, Ben...that seemed so familiar to her. She didn't know if it was his big brown eyes or his sweet little smile...she'd seen him somewhere before.

It only took a few second for her to place where she'd seen Ben before...it was every night in a dream that she had. She'd always assumed that it was Nicholas in her dreams, or how he would look if he were still alive. In her dream the doorbell would ring and she would answer it, and there would be this boy...Ben. He would smile up at her and say "Hi" before asking if he could come home now. She would reach down to pick him up, and he would disappear, and then the dream would end.

She was so confused, why was Benjamin Buchanan the little boy in her dream? She read the article further; reading that Ben was three years old and had been adopted by the couple when he was only a few days old. Adopted...the words echoed through her brain, and she instantly had the desire to grab her picture of Nicholas. She held them both side by side, noting the eerie resemblance.

Ben's facial features where exactly what Nicholas's would have been had he been alive. He had the same eyes and smile, even the same hair color. It was like she was looking at a picture of a three year old Nicholas.

Was she, looking at Nicholas? The thought that he could be alive had always been in the back of her mind. They'd never found his body, and soon after waking up in the hospital, she started having what Jack and David called "dreams" and "denial". But she'd always believed they were memories of what had really happened that night...
She was in the car after it flipped over, and she had just regained consciousness...she could remember blinking her eyes to get the blood and rain water out of them before focusing on three figures. Two of the figures were men, she couldn't see their faces and they were standing on the opposite bank, watching. The third figure was a dark haired woman, she had been walking away from the car, she couldn't see Nicholas, but remembered hearing him crying from the woman's arms. She called out to the woman, what she said was never clear, but the woman turned to her looking at her for a moment before continuing to the other bank. The woman had talked to the men, showed them what was in her arms and then they'd disappeared into the stormy night.

David, Jack and hospital psychologist said that it wasn't a repressed memory, but was a fantasy a glimmer of hope that she was trying to hold on to, and nothing remotely similar had happened. The police backed them up, saying that there was no evidence that Nicholas had been kidnapped. The case was closed with the decliration of Nicholas's death. No one ever even stopped to look into any adoptions or check houses and interview people along the road where the accident had happened. They'd just given up.

She shook her head again, knowing that this was impossible. It was all just some sort of strange coincidence...wasn't it? She had to find out, one way or the other. She couldn't take this to Erica, or to Jack or her Dad. But she would take this to anyone else who would listen. All she wanted to do was know, no matter what the results proved to be. If Benjamin Buchanan was Nicholas she wanted to know how and why, and bring him home...and if he wasn't she wanted that sense of closure, so she could finally move on and begin to heal.

She jumped up from her bed, and grabbed her backpack emptying the contents onto her bed. She grabbed some clothes, a notepad, the article and her pictures of Nicholas and threw them into her bag. She was taking an impromptu trip to Llanview, but she had a stop to make first.

To be continued...