Page 17 of The Whisper Place
I’d met Eve while searching for my niece, Celina. I’d dreamed about her bound and bleeding in a barn and had driven myself to the brink of sanity searching every barn in the state trying to findher. In the end, she wasn’t in any of them, at least not by the time we found out what happened to her.
“Yes and no.” There were certain triggers. It had taken months of seeing the Celina Investigations sign on the office door before I could breathe normally reading it. The right pitch of a squeaky barn door, a voice that sounded like Celina, gunshots. Any of it could send me spiraling into a panic attack or drifting into an ocean of sucking grief. It helped, though, to remember other things. Her sweaty childhood hand slotted in mine, the convictions of the players in the drug cartel she helped destroy, the bald shock and rage on her murderer’s face in the second before he died. I took comfort where I could.
“I’ve been doing some version of this since I was twenty years old. It’s familiar, the only thing I know. And it’s easier with Kate, because—”
“—you haven’t dreamed about her.”
I nodded as we turned into the gravel driveway of the other property. It did make it easier, not being haunted by the missing person, not feeling their desperation or fear tainting every interview, shredding the edges of every clue, stretching each step in the case as taut as a wire. But this time I almost wished I could dream about her. Kate—the woman with half a name, no family, friends, or connections, who’d trod through life so deliberately lightly she hadn’t left a single footstep behind. The dreams at least gave Max and me places to start looking. With Kate, we had an evasive, broken ex-boyfriend and a Milk Duds box.
I looked behind us at the road, the last confirmed place Kate—or whoever she was—had been seen. “Would you go for a casual morning jog before you abandoned your life?”
Eve considered the question and the buzz of her analysis was as comforting as white noise. I drifted closer.
“I might,” she decided. “It’s good for your circulation, especially if you’re planning to be sedentary for an extended period, such as driving a long distance.”
“It just seems—”
“Mundane,” she finished.
“I was going to say hellish.”
“No, you weren’t.” She laughed and moved into step with me, shoulder to shoulder, the backs of our hands brushing each other as we crossed the weedy front yard. There was no sidewalk, just a path of worn dirt through the dandelions and crabgrass. We hadn’t even gotten to the cracked concrete slab in front of the house before the screen door banged open into the siding.
“I’m not buying any.”
A white guy, late seventies or early eighties, with a face that could double as a russet potato, barred the entrance to the house. He wore a bathrobe and sweatpants. A TV remote stuck out of his pocket. Eve stopped walking and a twinge of unease pinged through her. She didn’t show it, though. All she gave away was a calm, professional smile. “We’re not selling anything.”
“What do you want?”
I showed him the picture and explained our visit. He barely looked at the photo, but he didn’t have to. His reaction was visceral as it echoed through me. Recognition, anger, a hint of greasy fear: he knew who Kate was.
“Did you see her that morning?”
“No.” He started to shut the door.
I stepped forward, bracing against the wave of toxicity spewing out of this guy. “Did you ever talk to her when she was out on a morning run?”
Yes. The unspoken answer came instantly, making the anger inside him swell.
“No.” He slammed the door in my face and locked it.
Eve already had her phone out and was photographing everything from the house to the tilting outbuildings to the view of the road. From this vantage point, russet man would’ve been able to see Kate coming as she cut through the field. He would’ve had plenty of time to intercept her if he had a mind to.
And he had.
“Put it away.”
Eve swiveled back to the property. “But I haven’t gotten—”
“He’s watching.”
She didn’t ask how I knew, didn’t demand her usual reams of evidence when I said something that couldn’t be observed by normal people. She turned toward the road before startling into me with a jolt of surprise. I steadied her and followed her gaze to a small trailer off to the side of the house. A face peered out from a dirty window. Long, blond hair, round cheeks, pale eyes that followed our every move. But it wasn’t the face that sent a current of fear coursing through Eve and bleeding into me. It was the shotgun barrel the girl aimed through the window.
Darcy
The trees painted black spiderweb shadows on the bay window as we shuffled around each other in the bright work lights of the kitchen, hitting the high notes of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” while the world beyond the shadows still slept. I beamed, singing with my entire half-awake, raspy-lunged being. It was almost impossible to believe I used to work in a drab cubicle, jumping every time the phone rang and listening to coworkers who were decades older than me complain about their spouses, their joints, their raises. I dreaded being there as much as I dreaded driving there and home, looking over my shoulder at every noise, checking the rearview mirror like a nervous tic I couldn’t shake. Every hour of the day felt like a bargain between the bad and the worse, and I couldn’t imagine any other options. I didn’t know my life could be anything different, that it could be something beautiful.
Pastries & Dreams was the best job I’d ever had. The store was open Tuesday through Sunday, and Blake told me I only had to work five days a week, but I didn’t have anything else to do and it felt wrong sleeping in while Blake worked downstairs. A few part-time workers came in to handle the counter in the afternoons, butother than that Blake ran the whole place. I learned everything I could to help her and make myself worth her unfounded faith in me. She paid me cash weekly and I used most of it on groceries or items for the apartment. The twelve thousand dollars I’d brought from my old life sat untouched in a safe deposit box, opened with the same student ID I’d found, in a town thirty minutes down the road. It would be there when I needed it.
