Page 21 of The Whisper Place
What did you get from him?I texted back.
Anger. Fear. He felt threatened by us. According to property tax records, his name is Silas Hepworth. There was someone else on the property, too. Watched us while holding a shotgun.
Hepworth have any priors?
TBD.
Blake waited impatiently at the bottom of the stairs, a kitchen tool in her hands. I put the phone away and joined her. “Does the name Silas Hepworth mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Did Darcy ever mention running into someone when she went for jogs at Charlie’s place?”
Another negative. I broadened the question.
“Did she feel uncomfortable around anyone at the bakery or in town?”
Blake glanced through an open doorway to the front of the store, where a line of customers waited for their coffee and pastries. She leaned against the butcher-block work surface in the center of the kitchen.
“Yeah.”
“Who?” My attention sharpened.
“Everyone. Everyone except me and Charlie. She never wanted to work the front counter, hated talking to people. She was just shy. An Allison.”
“A what?”
“Allison fromThe Breakfast Club. She’s shy, but she wants to belong because she’s never belonged anywhere before. I think Darcy was dealing with some past trauma, too, just not parents who ignored her like Allison’s. But she wanted to belong to us. An Allison, you know?”
The only thing I understood was that it was some kind of metaphor and I didn’t have to add another alias to the case file.
“Here.” Blake thrust the thing she was holding at me. It was a flat stainless-steel rectangle with a rubber handle along one of the long edges. The opposite edge ended in a single, sharp line that glinted in the work lights of the kitchen.
“A . . .”
“Dough cutter.” She supplied. “You asked if she owned anything that seemed to have significance.”
I ran a finger along the cutting edge. It was duller than a knife, sharper than a mail opener. “This was special to her?”
“She brought it to the kitchen in probably the first week she started working here and she always used it, even though I’ve got commercial-grade cutters that are way more efficient. That’s for home use. But Darcy always reached for this one. Once I saw her put it into an apron pocket when she was scooping cookies. Totally unnecessary for the job but maybe it was like an emotional support animal, you know?”
Or like she wanted to hide it. Keeping it close for another reason. Pulling the case notebook out of my pocket, I tested the cutter on a few pages. They sliced away with little force. The dough cutter, whatever it meant to her, could fucking cut.
Blake braced against the butcher block, her face falling into quiet, somber lines. “Do you think you’ll be able to find her?”
With no name, a complete lack of physical or electronic trails, a mystery kitchen tool, and an angry neighbor as our only possible lead?
“It might depend on whether she wants to be found.”
Jonah
It was getting late. The sky outside the Celina Investigations storefront had softened into a hazy overcast. The parking lot was empty except for Max’s and my cars, and the businesses on either side of us had fallen quiet. I loved this time of day, when people retreated to their homes, sealing the chaos of their minds away into the night. I had hours before sleep and whatever nightmares would come with it, hours to enjoy the relative quiet with only Max’s brain for company.
“Go.” Max threw a stained tennis ball at me, which had shown up at the office months ago and weirdly become our talking stick during these sessions. We were in the storage room, a dark rectangle of a space with a bathroom on one side and clunking pipes snaking overhead. Three rolling white boards stood against the wall, procured by Shelley during a purge at her school. We’d repurposed them from geometry lessons to investigation boards, a place for me to keep notes, maps, pictures, leads, and random thoughts on our more complicated cases. Max called them my shrines; he preferred his mini notebooks and computer, but I’d always needed to makecases more tangible. Seeing a missing person’s face outside my head, taped to a wall or whiteboard, calmed me in a way I couldn’t completely explain. It made them real. It made them part of a world outside my nightmares.
Not that I’d dreamed about Kate, but somehow that made her even harder to manifest. The woman with no identity, no past, and maybe no future. I tapped the tennis ball on the blown-up picture of her cuddled into Charlie’s side on his living room couch, which was the central image on the current shrine.
“I’m not getting any vibes that she left voluntarily.”
