Page 11 of The Whisper Place
“Where do you think Kate would go, if she decided to leave?”
Charlie answer was immediate, the most confident thing he’d said all morning. “Somewhere open.”
“Open?”
“She needed big spaces. Fresh air, sunlight. She always hovered near the door in any room. When she stayed over, she had to sleep with all the windows open and the shades up in the bedroom every night. Even if it was pouring rain or cold as hell. One time—” He cut off, panic rising as he choked on whatever memory had bubbled up.
Max’s attention sharpened, but his face remained cop-placid as he switched topics again. “Did she ever talk about other towns she’d been or places she wanted to visit?”
Charlie shook his head. “It was only ever today. Not the past. Not the future. Justnow.” He backed away from us, stumbling over exposed tree roots into the sunlight beyond the shade of the branches. I could feel his heart pounding, the heat of light baking his clammy face. He felt sick, and an answering wave of bile swelled in my stomach.
“She told me, right at the beginning, that it wouldn’t work. That she couldn’t commit to a long-term relationship.” The wind whispered in the oak leaves above me, daring me to look at the sky. I slumped against the trunk a little more, losing purchase in the bare dirt. Charlie swallowed and looked right through me, his eyes distilled into bleak shadows in his head.
“She never got it. I could never make her understand. I wasn’t picking out wedding rings or planning our future. All I wanted was her.”
“Well, this just got a lot more complicated.” Max finished jotting notes as we hit the highway and I dropped it to ninety, cutting off a freight truck and darting into the left lane. Speed was a balm. It washed out my head, obliterating the thoughts and emotions that seeped in and swamped me, emptying it of everything except adrenaline and asphalt. I swerved around a Dodge Ram to open road, not a car in sight ahead of us, and edged toward a hundred.
Max flipped his notebook closed. “The way he tells it, she was half out the door their entire relationship. It makes sense that she would leave without any good-bye.”
“Not without her bag.”
Max grunted, oblivious to the landscape blurring around us. “But she did. Her car is gone and she left the bag behind.”
After another mile I eased back on the gas. My heart rate evened out and the nausea in my gut receded. I could breathe again.
“Better?” Max asked.
I nodded. “Let’s go through scenarios.”
Fifty-fifty. I was holding up my end.
The first, most obvious, option was that Kate had left. She’d gotten tired ofnowswith Charlie and headed for the next town to live her cash-only existence under a brand-new pseudonym. And for whatever reason, she’d left some things behind.
The second option was that she hadn’t left voluntarily. Someone or something had scared her into leaving, and she hadn’t had the time or opportunity to take her things with her.
The third option, Max pointed out, was that she hadn’t left at all.
“You think Charlie could’ve killed her?” I asked.
“Yesterday I would’ve said no, but today? He didn’t want us on that property. I’ve never seen anyone sweat that much outside an interrogation room.”
“Why hire us then? Why drop twenty grand on a PI if he killed his girlfriend and ditched her car to make it look like she split?”
“Maybe he wants to seem like he’s trying to find her. To create a narrative.”
“For who?”
“Law enforcement, if a case gets opened or a body turns up.”
“Go to that much trouble and forget to get rid of her possessions? It doesn’t add up, Max.”
“There was something off when he talked about her. Did you notice the past tense? ‘All I wanted was her.’ Like he knows she doesn’t exist anymore.”
People thought I was the dark one, with my horror show dreams and antisocial personality. They never noticed that under his Joe Protector facade, Max Summerlin was always calculating the odds of someone stabbing their grandmother.
I focused on the farm behind us. Now that I had some distance, I could let Charlie’s energy back in and sift through it for clues.
“He’s a mess. Emotional chaos. Panic, fear, but genuine grief, too. He’s broken without her.”
