Page 29 of The Whisper Place
“Stop handling me.” I pushed away from the workbench, forcing myself to walk.Exercise, Eve had said. Physical exertion to keep my mind occupied within my own body. The swaying, uneven steps around Max’s garage were definitely not what she had in mind.
“Then stop trying to prove yourself.” Max got up, too. “Fifty-fifty doesn’t mean you have to stick it out in an interview like that. It doesn’t mean you have to bang your head against this case twenty-four hours a day.”
“It got us somewhere tonight, didn’t it?”
Charlie had confessed that Silas Hepworth had extorted five thousand dollars and free weed from him, in exchange for not going to the police. A week before Kate disappeared he’d increased his demands. He wanted twenty-five thousand dollars. Charlie told him to go to hell and left Hepworth raging in his living room.
It was a decent motive and a solid suspect, the first we’d had since this case began. I vaguely remembered Max convincing Charlie not to confront Hepworth alone—Max made him promise they would make contact together tomorrow.
“You’re not coming with.”
“Fine.”
Max was surprised. He’d expected a fight.
“I’m going back to the bakery.” It hadn’t registered until now. Security lights had flooded the property again when Max and I left, illuminating black eyes mounted in the eaves. “Blake has cameras all over that place. She might’ve caught footage of Kate’s car. We could get the plates.”
A slow smile spread over Max’s face as he shook his head. “Christ, I’m not going to have a job left.”
Max set me up on their basement couch with an old quilt and the same unopened beer from the garage. The couch was scratchy and uncomfortable, a nice reminder of who and where I was, but I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t afraid to; the furniture would ensure any dreams would be brief, only flashes of some faceless lost person between the squeaks of old springs and constant skin abrasions. But something Max said kept coming back to me, whispering from the places where the nightmares usually lived.
Stop trying to prove yourself.
It crept over me, seeping between my shoulder blades and under my sternum, settling in my bones with a feeling I barely recognized. My body relaxed, felt at ease, and for the first time in a while it felt like I might be enough. That I could do this. The whisper was interrupted by an incoming text.
Steak and potatoes?
The feeling expanded, multiplying inside my chest as I grinned at my phone.
He loved it.
The tofu was in the trash.
I had nothing to do with that.
How was your dinner?
Three dots appeared on the phone and stayed there for an impossibly long time. It felt like my entire existence hung at the edge of those dots. When her message finally came through, my heart leapt into my throat.
It would have been better if you were here afterward.
I left the house through the patio door. The bakery, and my car, were miles away. I followed the river and the moonlight reflecting off the dark slide of water. Shadowy trees loomed around me, their spring leaves rustling in the breeze. Distant engines zigzagged the city, people too far away to sense. My heart thumped strong and steady in my chest, picking up speed the farther I walked. When I reached the bridge to cross into downtown, I broke into a jog. It was still exhausting but I embraced it this time, letting my breath go ragged and my feet pound the pavement. My muscles burned and my thoughts flattened out into one refrain.Stop trying. Stop trying.
I passed the bakery and my car. I ran past businesses and apartment buildings, where laughter drifted like smoke off the balconies. I ran down a pitch-black hill, stumbling on the uneven sidewalks as the lactic acid chewed up my legs. I ran until I reached the far edge of town, where the housing developments stopped at a stretch of fields opening into the starry horizon, and slowed to a walk as I reached the street I’d left only hours ago.
I felt drained of everything, yet somehow wired, too. My skin hummed and my lungs ached. I could picture Kate more clearly now—leaving Charlie in bed and slipping out of his house as the sun rose. She’d needed to outrun something, to metabolize the thoughtsthat found her in the night, to burn them in the sunrise and the proof of a new day. Kate had made a life here in Iowa City. She’d found a friend, a job, a lover. She’d found a home, until something stole her away. Whatever it was, we were going to find it.
My breath had quieted. The thump of my heart returned to a steady, driving beat. On this street, a ring of townhouses circled a pond fringed with cattails. I moved silently to the backyard of the end unit and looked up at the four-season porch. The roof wasn’t like any other in the neighborhood. Instead of a smooth line of shingles and rain gutters, it was dotted with instruments, gauges, and equipment with strange arm-looking appendages stretching to the sky. The porch was screened, but a single light emanated from a laptop, illuminating the loveliest face I would ever see.
She was alone. I had no idea what time it was, but Earl would have gone to bed long ago. She was absorbed in whatever was on her screen, eyes darting back and forth as she processed and parsed data, frowning and making occasional notes before continuing to read.
Her mind was like a lighthouse, bright and steady, calling me to shore. Max said I didn’t need to prove anything to him. And I realized Eve had been telling me the same thing all along. That I was enough for her. That we could do this, together.
I opened my mouth to say something at the exact moment she glanced up. Our eyes locked. She closed the laptop and slowly stood, dropping a blanket to the floor.
What could I say? What did she need to hear? Her thoughts melted away in a warm, sudden rush of emotion that was answered in the pit of my stomach. She turned and disappeared inside the house. A light switched off somewhere inside.
I was trying to decide whether to knock on the front door or wait when she appeared around the corner of the house. We met in the middle of the yard, stopping a foot apart.
