Page 1 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

I used to love maps. As a kid, I’d follow the coastline and inlets, trace mountain ranges, and draw my finger along interstates that went from one side of the country to the other, seeing where they would end.

I picked out spots I wanted to live, tiny towns perched on the edges of massive lakes or tucked away in a national forest. I never looked at the cities.

Places like New York and San Francisco always sprawled too big, choked with grids of asphalt, turning the green of the landscape colorless.

They looked like cancer, devouring the world around them.

I liked places I could barely see, written in fonts so light it was like they were whispered onto the page.

The road map spread out in front of me, tented and creased in a way that brought back all those memories.

God, I had missed maps. I almost cried when I saw this one in a truck stop stuffed with novelty items, plastic toys, and travel-sized everything.

There it was, map of the USA, in a creaky turnstile full of paperbacks and travel guides.

“Don’t sell too many of these,” the ancient cashier commented as she rang it up along with my assortment of snacks and drinks.

She smiled as she said it, friendly, just making conversation with the only other woman in the store.

The greasy-haired kid on the other register probably wasn’t much for company.

I made a hmm noise and said something like “I’m sure” as I counted out a few twenties and took my change, tossed a smile that landed somewhere between the counter and her face, and left before she could find another topic.

The backseat of my Mazda was crammed full of suitcases, bags, books, and pillows.

I knew I’d forgotten things, but they were just things, and I’d packed the most important one: the dough cutter cradled in a stack of blankets on the passenger seat next to me.

There was plenty of room in the trunk for some of this stuff, but I wasn’t ready to open the trunk yet.

It wasn’t clean enough. It might never be clean enough, and I didn’t want to contaminate anything else with the dirt and darkness of that trunk, not when there was so much I didn’t know lying ahead.

Sitting at the gas pump, I found the whisper town where I was and traced the routes of all the whisper places I could go.

For the first time as I spread the map over the steering wheel and felt the subtle gloss of the paper under my fingers, a spark of something like excitement rippled through me.

I was tired and sore and wrung out from stress and adrenaline surges every time a door had opened or my phone had buzzed while I was packing, but I had the dough cutter, twelve thousand dollars stuffed under my seat, and possibilities stretching in every direction.

I drove west, toward the sun, which it felt like I hadn’t seen in so long.

I rolled up my T-shirt sleeves and put the visor up, letting the rays bake me as semitrucks and SUVs wove around my sedan and sped ahead to destinations known.

Choices they’d already made. And with every mile, the spark of excitement in my chest grew.