Page 14 of The Whisper Place
“You changed it now. You’re changing your own life, finding a new way forward.” I hoped it sounded like something our therapist would say. This wasn’t my territory. Jonah was the one who understood feelings, who could see beneath the surface of things.
She ignored the offered napkin and downed her coffee like a shot before pulling out a checkbook. “Do you keep secrets from your partner, Mr. Summerlin?”
I fumbled, unsure how to respond. With a flourish, she ripped the check out and pushed it across the table. The zeros at the end of the number distracted me from the conversation at hand.
“Of course you do. We all do. But trust me, they’re going to find out eventually. It’s up to you how they do. And that’s the key. That’s how they’ll know what to do about your secrets.”
The client’s parting words stayed with me all afternoon as I typed variations of ‘Kate’ into the Tracers database. Catherine. Kathryn. Katrina. Katie. Katelyn. Assuming it even was her first name. Could we trust the source? A name scrawled on a Milk Duds box wasn’t the least reliable piece of information I’d ever worked off of, but it was damn close.
The missing woman never told Charlie her name was Kate. She hadn’t given up that secret. But when he found it on a box of candy he’d immediately recognized it as truth. Would he have felt the same way if the information came from her? Would she have stayed with him, if she could’ve trusted him with her identity?
Jonah worked on the other side of the room, depositing the client’s check and going through our monthly expenses looking like someone was forcing warm keg beer down his throat.
“Kathleen?” he suggested. I typed it in. Zero hits.
“Maybe we need to widen the geographical area.” I expanded the search area and dates. We’d decided not to start looking for where she’d gone, but where she’d come from, tracing her movements backward to find her actual identity. There was also a stronger possibility that a missing person’s case had been opened in her hometown, and although we’d promised not to involve the police in our investigation, we had no problem pulling as much information from them as we could.
Her license plates were from Illinois, according to Charlie, although he couldn’t remember the actual plate number. He thought there might have been a three in it. So helpful. We’d been running under the assumption that she was from Illinois, but maybe she’d just picked up the car there. Her accent, according to Charlie, was as neutral as a native Iowan, which placed her original homesomewhere in the lower Midwest. “I’m going to check Indiana. Maybe Ohio. Let’s assume she picked up the car on her way west.”
“Check Catriona, too.”
“You sensed it?”
“No, Google says it’s a variation of Kate.”
Expanding the search yielded more hits under various names. I eliminated some based on age, others on ethnic identity. By the end of the session, I had two possible Kates who’d disappeared in the last three years and looked enough like the photo Charlie had shown me that I texted their pictures to him. I didn’t see a huge resemblance in either one, but wanted to show Charlie we were working, earning the brick of cash I’d deposited at the bank earlier today.
Then I turned my searches on him.
Charlie Ashlock was a much easier target to investigate. A lifelong Iowan, he’d graduated high school in Cedar Rapids, got an associate’s degree in computer science, and worked a variety of jobs, never staying anywhere longer than a few years. He’d bought the hobby farm five years ago. A lot of mildly late payments on his credit report, no arrests, no marriages. He had a Facebook page, but the only posts were from his mother tagging him in random memes and old photos of him and his siblings. A bigger kid even then, Charlie hung at the back of the pictures, letting his brother and sister pull faces and absorb the camera’s attention. His profile said he was single but it also said he lived in Cedar Rapids, a home at least ten years out of date.
“Still trying to pin her disappearance on him?”
Jonah dropped the paid-in-full invoice on my desk, scanning the social media page over my shoulder.
I pushed away from the desk, rubbing my eyes. “Nothing violent in his past, at least on paper. The guy’s a slacker, coasting through life at the fringes.”
“Until she showed up. And changed everything.”
“Is that what you got from him?”
Jonah looked queasy and started pacing the office. “Yeah.” He picked up a mug and set it down without drinking it. “I don’t know.”
“Jonah.”
He kept pacing, avoiding me.
“Did you have a dream last night?”
He shook his head.
“Then what is it?”
“Nothing.” He stopped at the storefront window, looking blankly at the curb outside.
“How’s Eve?”
He whipped around, shrugging and making an incoherent noise. Bingo. The investigator in me wanted to press on the crack until it broke wide open. Thank god the friend in me had enough decency to get another cup of coffee and wait out the silence. Another tactic, sure, but a friendlier one.
