Page 70 of The Whisper Place
“Anything?” I asked Jonah, who’d moved into the bushes near a bay window and was listening on his own frequency. He gave a negative sign.
“We can call the police, ask them to do a welfare check.”
“Can they enter the house?” Valerie pushed me aside and tried the door. It was locked. She keyed in a number to the combination lock. It beeped and flashed red.
“Yes, if they believe someone is injured inside. We can help them believe it.”
“Based on what? His dream?”
“Jonah’s worked with law enforcement before. And I’m a former—”
Valerie ran to the garage, leaving me in mid-sentence. She flipped the keypad up and keyed in a code. The garage door engaged and lifted. Jonah and I glanced at each other—at least it wasn’t breaking and entering—and followed.
We edged past a white BMW sedan and a CRV. Both were empty and the rest of the garage was military-neat, each individual tool hung on its own hook on a spotless wall.
“So he changed the front door code but not the garage?”
Valerie hesitated for the first time at the door to the house. She glanced at the garbage cans lining the back wall. “The garage code was our anniversary.”
Inside, the house was quiet and dark. We crept through a mudroom that opened into a living room with a wall of glass overlooking the backyard and the woods. A single opened Coke can sat on the coffee table next to a can of red spray paint. A fat fly landed on the soda and crawled inside.
Jonah went to the table, picked up the Coke, and immediately put it down. He looked off-balance as he turned back to us. “Where’s the basement?”
Valerie led us to a hallway, stopping short when she saw the door leading downstairs. It was hacked open, the wood splintered along the grain and the lock lying on the floor.
“Oh my god.”
Grabbing her before she could lunge down the stairs, I pulled my gun from the holster. “Let me go first.”
She struggled for a second before nodding.
I flicked on my phone flashlight and started a recording, edging the door further open with a long, high creak. The stairs were concrete. The only light filtered down from the first floor. I descended the stairs, gun first, sweeping the corners.
It was an unfinished basement. The floor was dirty; wooden studs and sheets of plastic marked outlines of walls, and oblong spaces disappeared behind pipes and utilities. Behind me, Jonah’s breaths became more and more ragged.
“Where is it?” I swept the light from wall to wall as the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
“On the left. The back corner.” Even Valerie’s voice was hushed, but she pushed me forward, toward the concrete block wall.
“I can’t.” Jonah doubled over, looking like he was going to be sick. He waved us toward the corner. “This is the place. God. I . . .” He leaned against one of the wall studs, pulling a pill bottle out of his coat.
We got close enough to make out a half-size storage door set into the wall. It stood open, and an overpowering smell of urine, feces, and unwashed human met us as we approached. Jonah started hyperventilating.
“Kate Campbell?”
I shone the flashlight inside the crawl space. It was maybe three feet wide by six feet long, with enough room to sit up. The floor was stained, the walls dirty and cobwebbed. Other than a bucket, a tipped-over water jug, and some slices of bread strewn across the ground, the space was empty.
Valerie crouched on the floor, shining her flashlight on a crumpled piece of clothing. I stooped down to look—it was a bloody pair of underwear.
“Oh god.”
I caught her before she fell backward. “We don’t know what happened, Valerie.”
“She’s not here. I thought we’d find her here.” Her voice caught.
“We’ll find her. Someone was here, and recently. That bread doesn’t have any mold on it.”
“She was bleeding.”
