Page 49 of The Whisper Place
“Yeah.” It was swollen and purplish and throbbed every time I sneezed. “I told him.”
“Are you two okay now?”
“Are we?”
She looked away and my heart fell into my gut. If this was the thing that broke us—after everything we’d been through and fought and survived—if this was how I lost the woman I’d loved for twenty years, I would lose my goddamn mind.
“Shelley, you know I’m shit at this. You know I’m going to say the wrong thing. I’m going to screw it up. And after this thing, I’ll screw the next thing up. I’m never going to get it right. But you also know that you mean more to me than anything in the world. There’s about thirty grand of the money left. I’ll go get it now and you can decide what to do with it. You can light it on fire. You can book your bucket list trip to Iceland. You don’t even have to take me, but I need you to come home to me.”
She still hadn’t turned around and the panic started building. I bargained with the back of her head, the messy bun that got in my face at night, the smell of her that I woke up to every morning.“There isn’t a home if you’re not here. You’re my home. You and Garrett. You’re the reason I go out there and screw everything up. Not that it’s your fault. I’m not blaming you, Jesus Christ, it’s—I’m trying to say . . .”
Digging into the Cheez-It bag, Shelley pulled out a handful. She turned around and her cheeks were wet.
Without saying a word, she slowly covered every square of my bingo card.
Jonah
“Kate Campbell.”
Charlie repeated the name and took my phone, studying the senior photo of Kate I’d taken at her mother’s house. Kate’s hair was shorter and her face was rounder, but there was something missing, that sense of confidence and possibility when a high schooler stood on the verge of graduation. She leaned against a tree, arms crossed and smiling closed-mouth at the camera. Everything else about her was closed, too. Guarded, like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Do you know what she was running from? Why she used another name?” Blake stared at the phone over Charlie’s shoulder. We sat in the dining room of the bakery after closing time, the air heavy with coffee grounds and cleaning products. The music was off, the only light filtering in from the late-afternoon sun. Both of them had become lost in the photo, in the glimpse of one of Kate’s other lives.
“We think so.” Max and I had debated how much to tell them. It wasn’t just Kate’s secret; it was Valerie’s, too. And Kate had started a brand-new life to keep that secret. Ultimately, though, Charlie was our client. He needed to know we’d found at least a piece of her.
I told them the basics about Valerie and Kate, the single mother and her teenage daughter. Then I told them about Ted.
“He abused them?” Blake’s energy went from shocked to murderous in a heartbeat. Charlie wasn’t far behind.
“There’s no record of charges being brought against him.” We’d looked, thoroughly, but Theodore Kramer had come up completely clean in the background check. He’d worked as a quality manager for various manufacturers in central Illinois, pulling a low-six-figure salary before he’d been fired from the last position a year ago. Several of the HR departments divulged that his performance had been “unsatisfactory,” but wouldn’t say anything else for legal reasons. We couldn’t find record of him working in the last year, even though his credit remained spotless.
He’d been active in his church, a place called Divine Light that took over a bankrupt office supply building and boasted a website made of sixty percent adjectives. There was no phone number, only an email address that auto-replied with a generic blessing and the assurance that they’d get back to us as soon as possible. They hadn’t.
He popped up in a few local newspaper stories, one about the church and another profiling “lovely lawns” in the area. His parents were dead, his first wife had left him, and his son lived alone in an apartment in the Chicago suburbs. Our attempts to contact the first wife and son had gone as well as the church.
“She was trying to get away from her stepfather?” Blake took the darkened phone out of Charlie’s hand and gave it back to me.
“No. Things came to a head with him years ago. Neither Valerie or Kate had any contact with him. Until this spring.”
I pulled up the media story about the body being exhumed in the woods behind Ted Kramer’s house and pushed the phone back across the table.
“Oh my god.” Charlie shoved out of his chair, full of nausea and fear. “Is it Kate?”
“No. The remains are too decomposed. She’s only been gone a few weeks. This body was, well, it had been there longer.”
“Oh.” Blake’s face went pale as she made the connection. “Oh, shit.”
I braced against the force of their emotions, breathing deep. Yoga breaths. Max had offered to come with me for this meeting, but he would’ve had to cancel a follow-up appointment with an infidelity client. I told him I could handle it. And I could.
“We don’t know whose body it is yet. Identification could take a while, and the authorities might not share information with us.”
“Have you talked to Ted Kramer?” Blake narrowed her gaze.
“No. We haven’t been able to locate him.” Above ground, anyway. Blake seemed to understand the implications.
“Good.” She nodded. “But that still doesn’t help us find Darcy. I mean, Kate.”
Charlie hadn’t leapfrogged to the Kate-and-her-mother-might-be-murderers conclusion. His energy had stuttered on the article about the body, and now worked its way into confusion. He’d started pacing again.
