Page 57 of The Whisper Place
I should have been afraid or worried—anything—at the thought of facing a murder charge. But I’d been afraid for so long. All I felt at the sight of Ted’s body was relief, a euphoric lightness running through my veins, lifting everything. When we’d escaped this house years ago and Mom asked if I was okay, I hadn’t even known what the word meant. I was so far away from it, looking at it through a dark, distorted ocean. Now it felt like I’d crossed back over the water. I could see it now. I’d murdered my stepfather and I was finally okay.
When Mom told me to go to the garage and touch nothing except two shovels and a sled, I agreed with a smile. I felt like whistling. We wrapped him in a sheet, rolled him on the sled andspent the ten minutes until sundown scrubbing the kitchen with bleach and tossing the used towels onto the body. Ted didn’t have any close neighbors, but we still waited for heavy twilight before we pulled the sled into the woods.
It took every ounce of strength we had. We were sweating and cursing and grunting and I would have done it a hundred times, spent every night for the rest of my life dragging Ted’s corpse out of our world forever.
We didn’t dig as far down as we should have. There were too many tree roots and rocks, and it was barely April. The ground was still hard and it got more compact the farther down we went. The grave we managed to dig was barely two feet at its deepest point, and more like one in the shallow spots. Our arms shook. Our hands bled. Finally, Mom said it was enough. We both knew it wasn’t, that we needed to deposit Ted into the bowels of the earth and let the magma incinerate any evidence of him, but I also felt like the night was spinning around me. I heard sounds everywhere, below and above us. Did people come into these woods? I hadn’t seen anyone out here when we lived with Ted, but to be fair I hadn’t paid much attention to these trees before Mom and I had escaped into them. Now the woods were delivering us again, taking the last part of Ted that could hurt us.
We upended the sled into the grave and Ted fell at a weird angle into the sad, shallow hole. For a second I thought his arm moved, but when I shone the flashlight on him, the body was crumpled and still. He wasn’t coming back. We piled the dirt back on until he was covered in a weird mound and dragged a few fallen branches over the top. Then we stumbled away, coming out of the woods farther south than we meant to and having to backtrack to the house.
We stripped down and bagged everything—our clothes, the mace, the knife, our phones, the shovels and sled—and stuffed it all in the trunk of my car. We drove home in bras and underwear, not having the foresight to pack a change of clothes in case we had to murder a man.
Details popped and fizzed in my head. We hadn’t worn gloves. The blood on our blistered hands had dripped into the grave as we dug. Our phones had recorded everything, tracking exactly where we’d been all night. I wondered about the difference between first- and second-degree murder and decided not to google it. It seemed serious, all of it, the kind of serious that could ruin our lives forever, but there was only one detail I could hold on to, only one phrase repeating on a glorious loop in the PTSD whiplash that was my head.
“Legally Blonde?”
Mom sat ramrod straight in the driver’s seat, her blue satin bra gleaming in the flash of streetlights.
“It came to me in the moment.” She turned to me, bags like welts under her eyes, hair dirty and stuck to her head. I’m sure I looked the same or worse. “Maybe we’ve watched it too many times.”
“Better Elle Woods than Elizabeth Bennet.”
“‘You’re the last man in the world I could be prevailed upon to marry.’”
“Meh.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t work without the accent. And it’s about a decade too late.”
The laughter started deep in our chests, rumbling like earthquakes until it broke loose. It felt like it would shake the whole car, that we would laugh for the rest of our lives.
It’s hard to cover up a murder when you have no practice or skills in that area. I deleted the video of killing Ted I inadvertently recorded, but I also had cloud service on my phone and we didn’t know if the cloud had automatically archived it somewhere, just waiting to be pulled with the right warrant. We checked into a campground the next day, without our phones, and burned the clothes we’d worn. We scrubbed the shovels and sled with bleach and dropped them at three different dumpsters in three different towns. We went to a self-service car wash that had no cameras and vacuumed the back of my car, scrubbing it with more bleach. I was weighing our options for what to do with the actual murder weapons—the knife, the mace, and my boots—on our way home from the dumpster drops and car wash when Mom interrupted me.
“You have to go.”
“Go where? Where should I take them?”
“Listen to me. You have to leave, Kate. You can’t come back.”
It took a minute for what she was saying to sink in. I’d been so focused on getting rid of the evidence. It never occurred to me that we’d have to disappear, too. But wait. No. She wasn’t talking about us anymore. She was talking about me, alone.
“Why can’t you come?”
“Once they realize he’s missing or find his body, I’ll be the first person they interview. If I’m gone, they’ll know exactly what happened.”
“Who’s even going to miss that bastard?”
“His church. His men’s group. The county when he doesn’t pay his property taxes. The post office, when he stops getting his mail. They don’t even have to look. We didn’t bury him deep enough. Animals could get him—”
“Good for the animals.”
“—dogs bring human bones home all the time.”
“We don’t know—”
“And Theo.”
That shut me up for a second. Ted’s son had left for college almost as soon as Mom and I moved into the house. He came home the next summer, a skinny, greasy kid with black eyes that didn’t blink. He did everything his father told him without a word, too whipped from a lifetime of following orders to ever fight back or even offer an opinion. He’d already learned there was only Ted’s way in that house.
He’d found an apartment by the next year and hadn’t come home for the summer when Ted imprisoned us. Neither of us had been in contact with him since we’d escaped Ted. Once or twice Mom had mentioned him, hoping he’d gotten away from his father and started his own life, but she hadn’t been willing to chance any communication. A connection to the son might become a connection to the father.
“Theo’s long gone,” I said, hoping more than believing it. Once Ted had control of someone, he didn’t let them go. We were living proof of that. “Or,” I tried again, reframing, “he’ll be grateful that I—”
