Page 8 of The Whisper Place
Shelley whistled. “Damn. Good call.”
“But it’s complicated.”
“You’ll figure it out.” She rubbed my arm. “And Garrett needs a new bed.”
Shelley’s day at school was fine. She showed me a picture of one of her student’s final exams with the D+ circled and a comment underneath that read:I studied this time so I think I should get at least a B.
Points for effort. That was the question all around today.
I headed out back where Jonah already had a fire going. It was probably unnecessary in early June, where the days were breezy and already edging toward hot, but I preferred a fire to the glare of the porch light any day. Garrett’s baseball equipment had been tossed in a heap on the grass, nearly squashing Shelley’s lilies. Behind the snaps and pops of the fire, frogs called to each other in the distance. Spring was giving way to summer in Iowa.
“Shelley says hi.”
Jonah tipped his beer in reply and added another log to the fire. I dropped into an Adirondack chair and cracked open the can sitting on its arm.
“Hear me out on this.”
“I heard the pitch already.” Jonah sat down across from me. “It’s your turn to listen.”
I nodded.
“We’re partners in this. We’ve always been partners. But you’re trying to pull seventy percent of the weight. You pay the bills and send the invoices and file the taxes. You meet with the clients. You do all the talking. And I know you’re doing it because you think I can’t.”
“I don’t think you can’t.”
“Shut up. I’m still talking.”
I nodded again and he stared at the fire. It took a lot of willpower not to point out or think too hard about his lack of talking. He shook his head, having conversations I couldn’t hear, and shoved the hair out of his face before leaning forward.
“I knew you would do this, Max. I knew going in that it would be like this. And I was fine with it for a while, because you’re better at all this stuff. You’re better at life than I am.”
“It helps to have a really thick skull,” I cut in.
“I want to change. I want this to be a real partnership. Fifty-fifty all the way. I don’t know if I can do that, but I need to try. To find out if it’s possible.”
“I shouldn’t have taken the client without talking to you.”
“No, you fucking shouldn’t have.”
“Fifty-fifty.” I toasted him across the flames, trying to project confidence with absolutely no idea what an equal partnership with Jonah would look like. I took on everything I could carry, in every situation. It’s how I was built. Nightly check-ins and compromises and handing responsibility off to someone who could barely shoulder the load he already carried went against my entire identity. We’d never talked about the work we each did for the business before, but I’d known Jonah long enough to know he’d been thinking about it for a while. That it bothered him. And he wouldn’t have brought it up if he didn’t need things to change.
So, all right, we were going to try. Fifty-fifty, whatever that meant.
Jonah slumped back in the chair, like the speech had cost all his energy, and took a long drink. “So we don’t know her name. Sounds like one of our cases.”
It really did. Usually, when Jonah dreamed about someone, we picked as many details as possible out of his head and compared them to active missing persons reports. Once we had a match, all the legal and demographic information came with it. The person’s background—their life up to that point—was there for us to use. We didn’t have any of that with Charlie Ashlock’s girlfriend.
“He never knew her last name. Asked her once, and she said it wasn’t important. Her first name—he’s pretty sure—is Kate.”
Jonah groaned. “Bills. Credit cards. Driver’s license. He never saw any of that?”
“Nope. And she paid for everything in cash.”
Jonah took a swig of beer. “They have that in common.”
“She was flying way under the radar. She’d only been in town a few months according to him, rented a room in Iowa City, started dating him, and then vanished.”
“What makes him sure about the name?”
