Page 65 of The Whisper Place
“It’s not an exact science. Or a science at all. Sometimes my dreams are echoes or recycled images.”
“Have you dreamed about anything like this before?”
Jonah shook his head. “It felt real to me. As real as us sitting here now.”
Charlie’s voice shook. “She doesn’t like the dark. She puts lights on every night. And she can’t do enclosed spaces. Even a regular room was hard. I can’t imagine . . . Oh god. Kate.”
We’d tried calling Valerie on the way here this morning. Her phone went straight to voicemail and she hadn’t returned our messages. She was probably still recovering from our last conversation. This one wouldn’t be any more comforting, but she’d asked Jonah to dream about her daughter. And he had.
“It’s Silas. It’s gotta be him. That building out back he kept going to.” Charlie shoved away from the table. “He’s keeping her there.”
“We don’t know that.” I stood up, too.
“She threatened him and then the money I paid him goes missing, so he blames her. He hates women. And he had the perfect opportunity while she ran by his house.”
Jonah glanced at me. He’d taken a Xanax on the way here and was keeping it together, despite Charlie’s stress. “The only other person we know who wanted to hurt Kate is in the ground. Silas is our best possibility right now.”
It was true. If Kate was being held hostage less than two miles from where we stood, we didn’t have a choice. We had to go there.
“Okay, here’s the plan.”
Twenty minutes later, I hiked through a field of knee-high stalks, their glossy leaves fluttering in the wind. Silas’s buildings stood in front of me. The low building with the rusted roof was on the left. I’d come in from the west, keeping the main barn between me and the view of the house. I was blatantly trespassing, breaking the law and code of conduct I was supposed to follow as a private investigator, but it didn’t matter at this point. Silas was already planning to sue us. What was one more infraction?
I’d debated taking my gun. If Silas saw me armed on his property, it would only help his “stand your ground” case. But if he really had Kate locked in one of his outbuildings and he found me snooping around, he would shoot regardless. In the end I took it, and I felt better with the weight of it against my chest.
I skirted the edge of the barn, past the rusted pickup where they’d had their target practice and peered around the end of the barn to check the house. The back of the rambler had three windows. I couldn’t tell if any of them were open.
Staying low, I ran to the propane tank in the yard and took a better look at the house. The windows were dark and covered. Jonah and Charlie were supposed to knock on the front door at ten o’clock, drawing their attention. I checked my watch. 10:02. It was now or never.
I ran to the outbuilding and tried the door. It wasn’t locked, but the screech of rusted hinges carried across the dirt yard. Ducking inside, I eased the door closed and peered through a broken slat. Still no movement by the back of the house.
I unholstered the gun and crept through the dark space. Rows of rotted beams and chicken wire lined the walls, and there was so much mud, debris, and layers of white splatter on the ground I couldn’t see the floor. The place had the stench of animal and mold. It had been a chicken barn once, and it smelled like someone had left all the chickens in here to fester and die.
“Kate?” I moved through the space, checking walls and testing floorboards, trying to find a secondary room where she might be locked. At the end of one row was a door. There was no padlock. The arcing pattern of dirt on the floor suggested that this door had been opened a lot, and recently.
“Kate? Are you in there?”
Silence.
I opened the door and shone my phone flashlight inside. The space was empty. It looked like it had been a storage room with broken bins, shelves, and hooks on the walls. I checked each bin,finding nothing until the last one, which held a stack of porn and a baggie of weed. I let the lid go with a bang.
Kate wasn’t here. Fuck. We were trespassing, risking our business—again—for nothing. The boards creaked and groaned as I stalked back to the main door, holstering my weapon and trying not to breathe any more of this foul air than I had to. Checking the house through the broken slats, I made sure the coast was clear before opening the screeching door and slipping back outside.
The butt of a shotgun rammed into my face, knocking me into the wall of the barn and onto the ground. Stars burst in front of my eyes. I scrambled to unclip my holster when another blow caught my hand and a foot stepped on my neck.
When my vision cleared, Silas Hepworth was pointing his shotgun at my face.
Jonah
Charlie was a ball of anxiety and fear as we knocked on Silas Hepworth’s front door at exactly ten o’clock. Thank god for Xanax.
I hadn’t needed to take one this morning, wrapped up in a blanket on the deck with Eve. She’d brought me to a place of stability that usually wasn’t possible without a liberal application of chemicals, meditation, or turbo engine speed. I wanted to live in that moment, to take her back to bed for days, to listen to her read radar models over coffee and debate the morning news. And we would. I was only able to leave because I knew I would come back to her—comehometo her—wherever she was in the world or in the sky. I could chase these nightmares for the rest of my life as long as Eve was on the other side.
The girl who’d aimed a gun barrel at us the other day answered the door on the third knock. She was bleary-eyed and looked like she’d spent the last two months in a dirty bed. Her hair fell into her face as she glared, squinting into the sun. “What?”
I held out our business card. “We’d like to talk to Silas, if he’s available.”
The girl’s energy was a sleepy cocktail of irritation and apathy. She didn’t seem to recognize me and tried to shut the door. Charlie put his foot in the jamb, holding it open. “It’s important.”
