Page 51 of The Whisper Place
We pieced together what must’ve happened next. I’d missed the last few days of my senior year and, on top of that, had made a 911 call. The cop was probably sent out to do a welfare check, which is when Ted came up with the bullshit story that I’d run off with some drugged-out guy. Maybe he said Mom had gone looking for me. Who knew? He was charming when he wanted to be, could convince people he possessed genuine human emotions and he always had answers for everything. He’d probably turned on the concerned-protector-father act and the cop had lapped it up. Maybe they were even in the men’s group together. The visit from the cop explained why we had to go to the station, to make the police close their file and validate every bias along the way.
We still would’ve been trapped if Mom hadn’t found access to the attic in the ceiling of their bedroom closet. When Ted locked her in their bedroom, she climbed the closet shelves and hid in the insulation, waiting for him to notice she was missing. As soon as he left to track her down, she climbed down and rescued me.
Walking through the woods felt like a dream, the trees closing green over our heads, shadowing our pain, soothing our shock with birdcalls and the gentle dampened breeze winding through the rolling hills and valleys. We climbed over piles of moss-covered branches, stopped to rest against a giant, sprawling oak tree, and watched the squirrels and chipmunks dart through the canopy. I didn’t know what lay beyond the woods, where Ted might be lurking, but it felt like he couldn’t touch us here, that as long as we stayed in this breathing, beautiful forest where there was a hundred directions to run, we couldn’t be trapped alone in the dark again.
We slept there for one night, but hunger drove us out in the morning. On the other side of the woods, we found a farm with a silver-haired woman working in a massive garden. She jumped when she saw us and I can only imagine how we must’ve looked: filthy clothes, glazed, exhausted eyes, the brass pipe clutched in my hand.
“My daughter and I need help,” Mom said as my eyes darted to the road, the outbuildings, searching for any sign that Ted was going to jump out at us.
The woman stepped forward with immediate understanding in her eyes. Her shoulders straightened and she stretched out a gloved hand to us. “You’re safe here.”
It took years to rebuild our lives, to come to terms with the fact that the police didn’t believe us. Ted had gotten there first, told them I’d gone into a teenage rage and fed my mother enough lies to make her believe that he was a monster. Monsters do that; they twist the story until fiction feels truer than fact. And Ted was a world-class expert in spinning his bullshit until dogs talked, the sky was purple, and the entire world hung upside down around him. No charges were ever filed. In the end, that was Mom’s decision and she never said why, but I think she couldn’t handle the trauma of seeing him in a courtroom for weeks or months, trying to convince strangers they should believe her over him. Because that’s all we had. Our word against his. It’s why she never filed for divorce; she knew it would give him a way back into our lives and the leverage to make us suffer even more. She could barely stand going back to his house to get our stuff. We did it while he was at church and two of her old coworkers came with us, standing sentinel at Ted’s front doorin case he showed up while we packed what would fit in the back of her car. We moved across the state and tried to restart our lives.
Mom rented one side of a duplex from an elderly couple who owned a restaurant and were delighted to discount the rent in exchange for bookkeeping services. I enrolled in a community college and lived at home. Mom wanted me to go to the university where I’d been accepted and live in the dorms, but I couldn’t leave her. What if he came back and I wasn’t there? What if something happened to her and I could’ve prevented it? I commuted to my classes and took a part-time job near home. Mom enrolled us in self-defense classes at the Y and insisted onGreat British Bake Offbinge nights. It felt like she was preparing me for the worst while still hoping for the best.
After college, I took a mind-numbing office job in the next town over. I dated a little, but the tiniest red flag had me swiping left so fast it froze my phone screen. Every Sunday, Mom baked a quiche and a batch of muffins or scones, and we spent hours picking at our plates and reading the newspaper. It was a Sunday when the first text arrived.
My mom’s phone dinged with an incoming message from an unknown number. It was a picture of the front of our duplex. The text was two words:Nice place.
She dropped the phone like it was a snake and, after I read it too, we both stared at the front door. It had been years, but neither of us questioned for a second who’d sent the text. He was using a new phone line or a burner or whatever, and somehow he’d tracked us down. Despite the sudden rush of adrenaline, the crash of my heartbeat against my chest, and the desperate desire to run far, far away as fast as we possibly could, I stalked to the kitchen counterand drew the biggest cleaver out of the butcher block. Mom was right by my side with a hammer in tow as we opened the front door and walked out to the lawn.
The street looked the same as it always did. It was a residential road, with duplexes on one side and tiny ramblers on the other. A few cars were parked along the curb and it didn’t look like anyone was lurking in any of them, but I checked each interior anyway, phone actively recording in one hand, knife in the other. Mom waited by our place, blocking the open doorway with a wide stance as she rapped the end of the hammer against her palm.
I worked my way from one end of the block to the other, scaring a mother out for a walk with her kids, before returning to Mom.
“He could’ve taken the picture anytime,” she said.
We stood there, weapons in hand, guarding our new home, but at the same time I felt nauseous and panicky, like the time-out-room bugs were crawling over my skin. The urge to run, to not get locked inside a small, black cage, was almost more than I could bear.
Mom put a hand on my arm. “He’s not here.”
“He’ll come back.”
She didn’t reply. We both knew it was true.
Max
When people heard I was a private investigator, they got a very specific image in their heads. It usually involved me in a trench coat and a hat, sitting in a car at a stakeout holding binoculars. I had to explain that the lion’s share of PI work was digital. I spent most of my days online, in databases and searching through electronic archives. The old-school stereotype of some PI in a noir movie wasn’t true.
Except when I was sitting in a car at a stakeout with binoculars.
Jonah passed me a Red Bull, which he claimed was from Eve, and stretched until his entire spine cracked. “I don’t think he’s coming out. It’s after ten o’clock.”
We’d been parked on the side of the road leading to Silas Hepworth’s property for over two hours. A large oak tree partially shielded the car, but we still had a decent view of the side of Hepworth’s house and were taking turns with night vision binoculars. If he went to the same outbuilding Charlie described, our plan was to drive up to the house and pretend that we needed to ask him some follow-up questions. With any luck, we could get a glimpse of what he was doing out there.
“Charlie said he went out after the news last night. Let’s give it another hour.”
Jonah grunted and thumped his head on the headrest. He hated the passenger seat. “If he doesn’t show tonight, I can’t do this again tomorrow.”
“Hot date?”
“Yeah, actually.” Even the hair falling in his face couldn’t cover the smile.
“Good for you, man. You deserve it.” I punched him in the arm and focused on the house. “I can’t tomorrow, either. Shelley and I have plans.”
“So whatever this guy’s getting up to, he better get up to it tonight.”
We traded the binoculars every ten minutes, yawning and listening to NPR. The security lights flicked on at one point, but it was just a deer wandering through the yard. I was nodding off when my phone buzzed with an incoming text.
