Page 43 of The Whisper Place
“You taught her to bake,” Jonah said.
We’d moved inside the house, holding steaming mugs of coffee around a small peninsula in Valerie’s kitchen. The knife was back in its place in the knife block. She glanced at Jonah like he was a zoo animal, something he got a lot, and eventually she nodded.
“It was cheaper to make our own bread and cook a pot of soup that could last a week. Kate loved baking. The chemistry of it, turning one thing into something else. She would sit in front of the oven and watch every pan of cookies until they were perfectly done.”
The summer Kate turned sixteen, they went to a county fair and Valerie met Ted Kramer. He was at the fair with his son and the four of them were paired up in the same Ferris wheel car. They started talking during the ride and afterward Ted invited the Campbells to join them at a contest he was judging for their church booth.
“I told him I was raised Catholic but hadn’t attended in decades. He laughed and said, ‘That sounds like every Catholic I’ve met.’ He promised his church was more welcoming. He said it was a good community, a place he’d relied on after his wife left and he had to raise his son alone.”
Ted seemed open and charming, buying the Campbell women food and souvenirs as they spent the rest of the day together. He asked Valerie questions about herself, but didn’t pry. He pointed out mud puddles around the carnival games so they wouldn’t get their shoes dirty. And he offered his sweater to Valerie after the sun setand he caught her shivering. When he asked for her number at the end of the night, she didn’t hesitate to give it to him.
“I’d had a few other relationships over the years, none that turned into anything long-term, but I always hoped I’d meet someone like Ted. He was handsome and well-spoken. He mentioned his job, but didn’t drone on about it, and was clearly family-oriented.”
Valerie went to the living room and pulled a box of photos off the shelf. Finding one at the very bottom, she stared at it, her mouth working.
“There were no red flags, or at least none I wanted to see. He owned a beautiful house with no mortgage and kept it nice, not like some disgusting bachelor pads I’d seen. He took me to good restaurants and sent fresh flowers to my work every week. Even Kate seemed to like him in the beginning. His son, Theo, was a little older than her, and quiet. I didn’t realize how quiet at the time, or think about why a teenager almost out of high school would be so quiet. I hardly saw him after that day at the fair, but I never wondered about it, not at first. Ted filled those spaces. He kept you focused on the things he wanted you to see.” She kept talking to the photo in a measured monotone, the story carefully, painfully stripped of any emotion.
“We’d been dating a few months when Ted suggested the trip to Las Vegas for the two of us. It was a spontaneous getaway, or so I thought. We stayed in a suite at the Bellagio overlooking the fountains. And when we were walking by a chapel, he pulled me aside and said we should get married. He didn’t ask. I remember thinking,Shouldn’t he get down on one knee? Shouldn’t I need to say yes to something?But he pulled a ring out of his pocket and I was dazzled, I guess, by the idea that he’d planned this. He swept meoff my feet. I didn’t realize that was on purpose. He took my ability to walk away.”
She crossed the living room and handed me the photo. In it, Valerie stood in an alcove with a tall, dark-haired man. He had black eyes, a precise mustache, and a thin smile—the kind of guy who ironed his sheets. He’d wrapped an arm entirely around Valerie, somewhere between her sternum and her throat, holding her against him.
“Kate was furious when I told her we’d gotten married. It was the worst fight we ever had. She begged me to get the marriage annulled, and when I refused she said she’d never accept him as a father. I told Ted, of course, because I thought we could work through it together, that we were a family now. I assumed he’d say something like ‘Give her time, she’ll come around.’ But he didn’t. His face went hard and blank. I remember how disturbing it was that first time, like he’d turned into a different person right in front of me. He told me not to worry, that he’d take care of Kate.”
Valerie rocked back and forth, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, still staring at the wedding photo. “I think I knew then. Part of me deep down went cold when he said that. But I talked myself out of it. I told myself he meant he would talk to Kate, that he’d work on the relationship.” She shook her head as her eyes flooded. “Kate should never forgive me for not listening to her.”
Valerie and Kate moved into Ted’s house, a two-story colonial that backed up to a wooded preserve. Ted’s son, Theo, left for college shortly after they arrived, leaving just the three of them in the last house at the end of a quiet road.
Ted’s behavior began changing after the wedding. He convinced Valerie to quit her job and take care of Kate and the house.He complained about his work—he didn’t like his new boss, a recent hire who happened to be Chinese—and started spending more time online. He brought his men’s group from church over for dinner without warning, and got upset afterward—always afterward, when no one else was around—if the house wasn’t cleaned to his standards or the meal wasn’t large enough to feed eight men. If she made extra food in case they had company, he said she was being wasteful.
“He never physically hurt me. I think he avoided it just so he could throw it in my face. ‘What, do I mistreat you? Do I hit you? Is the house and clothing and food I provide for you not enough?’
“Everything was about Ted. Our lives had to revolve around him. He demanded constant attention; he needed praise, sympathy, sex, gifts. And even with all of that, somehow nothing I did was enough. By our first anniversary I knew I had to leave him. But I was scared. He’d told me once, when I still thought he was being romantic, that he’d always find me. I belonged to him, and he would never let me go.”
Jonah glanced over periodically as Valerie talked, but I didn’t need a psychic’s confirmation to see she was telling the truth. I’d interviewed enough victims to know what trauma looked like. “What happened then?”
Valerie went still and her voice became distant. “A lot of things.”
“Where’s Ted now?”
“In the woods behind his house.” She looked up, suddenly calm. “This past spring, I killed him, and Kate and I buried the body.”
Jonah
Without any dreams to guide me, finding a body in the woods was a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack. Or finding a body in the woods.
Max and I hiked through stands of oak, maple, and pine as the daylight faded, turning the weak light filtering down through the canopy into a grayish twilight. After our interview with Valerie Campbell, we’d driven directly to the house that—on paper—still belonged to Ted Kramer. It was two hours away from Valerie’s duplex, outside a sleepy town well past the relentless rings of Chicago suburbs, giving Max plenty of time to dig into Valerie’s story. He’d pulled as much information as he could find on his phone about Kate Campbell, her mom, and the man Valerie had claimed to have killed.
A standard background check showed Valerie had struggled with bills for most of her adult life, job hopping around Wisconsin and Illinois. A few traffic violations dotted her record and some utility bills slipped into collections. She’d hung on by her fingernails, until she’d met her husband.
“There’s a marriage certificate on file but no divorce decree.” Max processed everything out loud, filling the car with two hours ofmostly one-sided conversation. “The marriage was eight years ago. Her rental history at the place she’s at now goes back at least five.”
“She didn’t want to make contact again, even to serve papers.”
“You sensed that?”
“Yeah, my superpower of listening when she said he threatened to track her down no matter where she went.”
He let that fly, turning his attention to the alleged murder victim. Theodore “Ted” Kramer had a much larger presence on paper than either Valerie or her daughter. He’d worked as a quality manager for several manufacturers around the Midwest and had a public Facebook page that went back ten years—the posts seemed equal parts criticism of defective products and lax quality standards mixed with quasi-religious posts.
