Page 12 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

It was getting late. The sky outside the Celina Investigations storefront had softened into a hazy overcast. The parking lot was empty except for Max’s and my cars, and the businesses on either side of us had fallen quiet.

I loved this time of day, when people retreated to their homes, sealing the chaos of their minds away into the night.

I had hours before sleep and whatever nightmares would come with it, hours to enjoy the relative quiet with only Max’s brain for company.

“Go.” Max threw a stained tennis ball at me, which had shown up at the office months ago and weirdly become our talking stick during these sessions.

We were in the storage room, a dark rectangle of a space with a bathroom on one side and clunking pipes snaking overhead.

Three rolling white boards stood against the wall, procured by Shelley during a purge at her school.

We’d repurposed them from geometry lessons to investigation boards, a place for me to keep notes, maps, pictures, leads, and random thoughts on our more complicated cases.

Max called them my shrines; he preferred his mini notebooks and computer, but I’d always needed to make cases more tangible.

Seeing a missing person’s face outside my head, taped to a wall or whiteboard, calmed me in a way I couldn’t completely explain.

It made them real. It made them part of a world outside my nightmares.

Not that I’d dreamed about Kate, but somehow that made her even harder to manifest. The woman with no identity, no past, and maybe no future.

I tapped the tennis ball on the blown-up picture of her cuddled into Charlie’s side on his living room couch, which was the central image on the current shrine.

“I’m not getting any vibes that she left voluntarily.”

Max sat backwards on a folding chair, drinking a beer as he stared at the board. “Okay, I agree, but why?”

“She took nothing with her. Her overnight bag is still at Charlie’s house.

She left everything in her apartment, including her suitcase and her toothbrush.

If she did disappear on her own, at the very least, it wasn’t planned.

” I tapped the photos of her abandoned stuff and tossed the ball back to Max.

“Don’t forget the dough cutter.” Max snorted.

I walked over to it and picked it up like a hot coal.

We’d googled the thing already and watched how it sliced balls of dough into smaller balls of dough, scraped surfaces, and smoothed cakes.

None of those functions prepared me for the shot of heat and emotion singing off the metal when I first handled it.

“It’s important.” I closed my eyes and tried to feel through the tangle of impressions.

Deep breaths. Yoga breaths. “It’s the most personal thing she owns.

A piece of her past. There’s a lot here.

Trauma. Reclamation. Severance. Love.” Max’s skepticism wove through the energy of the dough cutter. “Yeah, all of that. Fuck you.”

“How?” He stared at the tool, which I put as far away from my chair as it would go. “How can something so random have that much emotion associated with it? What does it mean?”

He threw the ball back at me. I took it to the board and started writing.

“She knows how to bake. She learned that somewhere. The dough cutter might’ve come from a kitchen she used to work at.

It could symbolize anything or anyone from that time and place—a mentor or boss.

Maybe something that happened to her there. ”

“We could call bakeries around the Midwest, see if anyone matching her description used to work there.”

“Let’s start with independent ones. Mom-and-pop places. I don’t get the feeling she’d be making cakes at Hy-Vee.”

Max nodded as I added an arrow and action item to the board.

“I wonder if you could slit a throat with that thing.” He took another swig of beer.

“Jesus.”

“What? You said trauma and severance. Maybe she severed an artery with it.”

“And uses her murder weapon at work every day?”

“Blake said she seemed protective of it. Kept it close to her.” Max got up and tossed his beer can in the recycling, stretching and grunting as he cracked his back like gunshots.

There was no stutter in the energy, no jolt of nerve pain shooting through him.

After almost three years, his shoulder had finally healed.

Max turned and caught me staring. “What?”

I shook my head and turned back to the board.

“I wish you would’ve been at the bakery and gotten a read on Charlie’s sister.”

“You think she’s hiding something?”

“I can’t tell. Everything she said about Kate seemed so . . .”

“Generic.” I picked the word out of his head.

“Yeah.” Max shrugged on his coat. “Kate liked movies, walking, and fresh air. Mind-blowing. Oh, and she liked Charlie, too.”

“Don’t forget the dough cutter.”

“Christ, I need a drink.”

“You just had one.”

Max paused at the door. “You coming over for dinner?”

Having dinner at Max’s house with his wife and kid wasn’t something that happened much before the pandemic.

Shelley and I had never gotten along, and I didn’t blame her for keeping her husband’s unhinged friend at arm’s length.

When Max went off the rails on his last case as an ICPD investigator, though, Shelley and I had found common ground as two people who loved this dipshit, in spite of his thick skull and savior complex.

I had dinner with them now almost more than I ate alone.

“I can’t. I’m cooking for Earl tonight.”

“And Eve?” Max grinned.

“No, she’s having dinner with some colleagues and her new PhD student.” Chris. They were going to be discussing his “brilliant” research from Australia.

Max pulled out his keys and opened the back door. “Already jealous, huh?”

“Good night, Max.”

Retired farmers were seriously underrated investigators; they had a lot of time on their hands and an ingrained need to fill it.

Earl had been in a wheelchair since I’d met him and he communicated mostly by text, but none of that kept him from googling with the best of them.

After I got to the house and filled him in on Kate’s case, he started compiling a list of independent bakeries in Iowa and Illinois while I made dinner.

Eve had left ingredients and a recipe for jerk tofu bowls with plantains and quinoa.

She made or picked up mostly vegan dishes in light of Earl’s condition, citing all the evidence in favor of low salt, low sugar, plant-based diets for stroke survivors.

Earl put up with it, but he’d been the happiest I’d ever seen him when I brought steaks over a few times while Eve was in Australia.

Tonight, we had bloody ribeyes with onions and baked potatoes that we drowned in butter, sour cream, and bacon.

I opened all the windows, hoping most of the meat smell would air out before she got home.

It felt right being here, sitting side by side as we licked our plates clean and mapped possible prior bakery jobs for a missing woman.

If Eve were home, she’d be arguing with Earl over the benefits of tofu, her hair glinting off the pendant lights, her eyes sparking with love and logic and the challenge of getting her meat-and-potatoes father-in-law to admit he liked curdled soy milk.

It’s functionally the same process as cheese-making , she would say.

Cheese doesn’t taste like soggy cardboard , Earl would jab out on his iPad.

And I would let them bicker, listening to the affection weaving in and out of their heads as I cleared the table.

We’d bubbled over the pandemic and I knew where all the dishes went and which utensils Earl could use with the least amount of problems. I knew the looks Eve would shoot me behind Earl’s back, the grunts Earl would send in my direction when he knew he was losing the fight.

Everyone lost their fights with Eve. She won every debate because she was smarter than all of us and she saw our points coming days and weeks ahead of time.

She’d been trained to dissect storms long before they crested the horizon.

After we finished the list and dinner, I lingered longer than I should have. Eve didn’t say when she’d be home and I resisted the urge to text her. Earl was watching the news and playing Candy Crush, perfectly content on his own. There was no reason for me to stay. Except that I wanted to see her.

Our date this morning had ended when I’d dropped Eve off with a stitch in my side and covered in dried sweat.

Any thought of kissing her had evaporated during an intense discussion of the woman holding a gun on Charlie’s neighbor’s property and a debate over the difference between explicit and implied threats.

And for the rest of the day my brain had been on a loop, watching her climb out of the car again and again.

I’d see her soon. I knew that, rationally. But my body wasn’t in a place of logic.

A thwack brought me back to reality. Earl hit the couch again, inviting me to sit down and join him.

Eve hadn’t told Earl that we were dating yet, and I understood her hesitation.

Earl was her father-in-law. They were bound together through a dead man whose picture still hung on a few walls in this house.

Eve and I being together wouldn’t only change our relationship; it could change things between them, too.

If she got home and both of us were sitting here, it might be awkward for her.

“I should go.” I picked up the list of bakeries and clapped Earl on the shoulder. Satisfaction and gruff affection emanated through him. “Thanks for the legwork.”

Thanks for dinner , Earl typed. You can throw the tofu in the trash on your way out.

“Nice try. I’m not taking the heat for that.”

I drove around the city for a while, staying well clear of the restaurant Eve and her colleagues were at, and made myself think about bakeries instead.

Pastries & Dreams sat on a side street in the shadow of the ped mall, an old converted house with gables and a wide porch.

The sign in the window said closed, but as I drove past, covered windows glowed with light in the back of the bakery.

I parked and paced up the block, inhaling sweet explosions of lilac bushes crowding the sidewalk, the faint stink of a dumpster due for pickup, and the sharpness of cut grass from an apartment building lawn.

The city had quieted, as it always did, after graduation and the exodus of the undergrads.

Even the noise of the bars on the ped mall was muted, letting the quiet of the early summer night steal over the city.

I breathed deep, centering myself in the here and now, in the case I needed to solve to prove I could.

I could be part of a world outside my nightmares, the world where Eve lived.

Security cameras were mounted on the front door and along the narrow, overgrown sidewalk to the backyard.

I skirted the house and tried the gate to the backyard, which was locked.

The fence was privacy height, too tall to climb.

I could’ve knocked on the front door, but something told me not to, to keep moving to the other side of the house, where a path had been worn toward the gap of a loose board in the fence.

I squeezed through and crept into the backyard, where motion-activated security lights immediately flooded the grass with me standing in a black trench coat, hair obscuring most of my face.

The blinds on the bay window were yanked up, revealing two people inside.

The woman screamed when she saw me. And through the wood and glass and the stutter of shock piercing the night, I understood what was really happening at Pastries & Dreams.