Page 15 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

“So, this is what you were hiding when we came out to your house.”

I stood in the kitchen of Pastries & Dreams at ten o’clock at night, bellied up to the butcher-block worktable next to Jonah and across from a very guilty-looking Charlie and Blake Ashlock.

Jonah called just as I’d finished cleaning up dinner and Shelley was prying the screens from Garrett’s hands to send him to bed. When Jonah explained the situation, I wasted no time driving to the bakery.

In front of us, a dozen pans held hundreds of brownies and bars, alongside molds of gummy-looking candy in every color of the rainbow. It was, apparently, the secondary business of Pastries & Dreams and a lucrative one at that.

“I wanted to tell you, but Blake said not to.” Charlie glanced at his sister, who glared at him.

“Your website bio says former cop.” Blake tossed her braid over her shoulder and started loading the gummy trays into a commercial refrigerator.

“And for bullshit red-state reasons, this is somehow a crime. So are you going to report us? Do you have some ex-cop code of honor obligating you to blow up my entire life’s work? ”

“He’s not going to shut down the bakery,” Charlie said, but Blake whirled on him, visibly cowing the brother who was twice her size.

“This is your fault.” She jabbed a tray into his chest. “You and Josh Grohl getting high every day during the summer after tenth grade, sitting out in the barn and inviting me to join you.”

“You could’ve said no.”

“To piercing blue eyes and a leather jacket? He was basically a young Rob Lowe,” she explained before turning back on her brother. “You coerced me with a young Rob Lowe. I never even got to make out with him and now I’m going to lose everything.”

“I think he’s in prison now if that helps,” Charlie mumbled.

The look Blake leveled on her brother could’ve shattered glass. I’d bet a thousand bucks Jonah could literally feel the guy’s testicles shriveling. Clearing my throat, I held up both hands.

“Let me stop you there. You’ve hired our firm to investigate Kate’s disappearance. We’re working for your benefit and your interests. We’re not obligated to report any criminal activity that we uncover during the course of our investigation.”

“But you could,” Blake said, slamming the refrigerator door.

“We could,” Jonah agreed. He’d been silent for most of the conversation so far, gripping the edge of the butcher-block as he rode the cyclone of emotions thrashing around this room.

It took visible effort for him to speak.

“But reporting our own clients to the police isn’t exactly great for business. ”

“You won’t turn us in?” Charlie asked, careful not to make eye contact with his sister.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” I gestured to the front of the café so Jonah could sit down. “What exactly are we talking about here?”

Over fresh coffee and leftover cinnamon bread, we found out that Pastries & Dreams had more than one original dream. After Josh “Rob Lowe” Grohl brought a batch of terrible pot brownies to the Ashlock family farm, Blake became determined to bake a better batch.

“Not because I wanted to make out with him.” Glancing at her brother. “Okay, not only because of that.”

Blake had always been a foodie and a perfectionist in the kitchen.

She spent years experimenting to find the exact balance of THC and other ingredients, to hide the pungent taste of the weed inside an envelope of dark cocoa, fat, and sugar.

After that hill was conquered, she moved on to other edibles: cookies, bars, and the current favorite in most dispensaries—gummies.

Charlie helped by procuring different strains of weed suited to each recipe and as soon as he bought his own place and got the opportunity to farm his own plants, he began in earnest.

He maintained a single, large grow room under his house, which explained why he’d acted so shady when we visited his place.

He wasn’t keeping Kate’s body on the property somewhere, but a thriving marijuana business.

It also explained the stacks of cash he’d used to pay for the case.

Celina Investigations had unwittingly accepted proceeds from criminal activity. And it was my idea. Awesome.

Jonah glanced at me, reading everything in my head as Charlie and Blake kept talking. He shrugged. I narrowed a look at him. He shook his head, telling me to calm down and get over it.

I turned back to the siblings. Charlie was detailing his products, a topic that—once he got started—made him surprisingly chatty.

Some strains, he explained, were sold as is for smoking and others went to his sister.

Afterward, Charlie sold the edibles wholesale to dispensaries in Illinois, who didn’t ask a lot of questions.

They’d been making products after hours and splitting the take since the bakery had opened five years ago.

It worked well for both siblings. Charlie got to live largely off the grid and Blake’s illegal business kept her legal one flush with cash.

“It was great when Darcy wanted to be paid under the table, honestly, because it meant less cash I had to try to funnel through the business.”

“Did she know?” Jonah asked, nodding as he sensed their answer before they even spoke. “What role did she play?”

“None, at first. She just worked in the bakery. She didn’t know about any of this until one night . . .” Blake explained the shock of seeing Darcy/Kate on the stairs, holding a knife like she was ready to stab them.

“She looked, I don’t know, like a completely different person. She was sweating and shaking. It was almost like she was in shock. We had to say things a few times before she heard us. I thought for a second she was going to attack us.”

“Blake,” Charlie scolded.

She shrugged. “What, you didn’t? It was weird, but then it was over and she offered to help.”

“Did any of your inventory go missing when Kate disappeared?”

Charlie seemed taken aback by the question. “No. Kate didn’t smoke.”

“She could’ve taken it to sell, not use,” Jonah pointed out, but both siblings denied the possibility.

Kate wasn’t money-oriented. She rarely shopped or went out, and the few things they could remember her buying were nominal and largely for the apartment or Charlie’s house: a soap dish for Charlie’s bathroom, a popcorn bowl for movie nights.

Blake explained. “Her love language was quality time, one hundred percent. Whenever I saw her alone in the backyard or walking through town she always looked sad, serious, like she was having some unending existential crisis. But when we were working or hanging out, she changed. She bloomed around Charlie too, for some reason.” He sighed and Blake hip-checked him from her chair.

“She was still quiet and I always knew there was a huge part of her she wouldn’t share, but she seemed happy.

At ease with us. Quality time, you know? ”

I’d been down this road with Shelley and the marriage counselor.

Love languages were a means to understanding your partner’s needs.

Shelley’s love language was acts of service, which basically meant I needed to keep the lawn mowed and the furnace running.

Thank god her love language wasn’t quality time, or we would’ve been years into a divorce by now.

Next to me, Jonah chuckled. The two siblings glanced at each other.

“What about your other customers besides the dispensary, the people you sold weed to?” I asked, making notes. “Any disputes or conflicts recently? Would any of them have a reason to want to hurt you or someone close to you?”

“No.” Charlie pushed out of his chair and started pacing the cramped dining room. “I’m not selling meth or fentanyl. It’s a pretty chill business.”

I could’ve told him stories from ICPD, the things I’d seen that resulted from a “pretty chill business.” Theft, assault, coercion, rape.

I guess I’d never seen anyone kidnapped or murdered over weed, but when you put an illegal substance into the public arena, it attracted more criminality, like gravity.

I looked out the dining room windows at the empty road where streetlights pooled like oil in dark water.

“Was Silas Hepworth one of your customers?” Jonah asked, bringing my attention back to the conversation.

Charlie came up short. His face turned red and his hands clenched into fists. “How do you know Silas?”

Jonah explained his encounter this morning with the angry neighbor.

He’d already run the background check before I’d even gotten back to the office.

Pulling his weight and then some. Hepworth came up mostly clean.

Vietnam vet, divorced twice, and on disability for the last decade.

He’d tried to sue various people over the years, and there’d been an incident in a grocery store parking lot, a fender bender that turned into a brawl.

That was twenty years ago, though. On paper, he’d quieted down.

Later, I’d quietly run the background check again, just to see if I could turn up anything else, something Jonah might have missed. I got nothing.

“He’s a sonofabitch,” Charlie spit out. His sister looked just as surprised as us by the outburst. Jonah slumped further down in his chair. Sweat broke out on his forehead as our client’s emotions swamped him.

“Is he all right?” Blake asked. She looked nervously between Jonah and her brother, as if unsure who was less stable in the moment.

“He’s fine. He’s a psych—”

“Explain what happened with Silas,” Jonah interrupted.

He leaned into the table and pressed fists to his temples, eyes closed.

I flipped my notebook to a fresh page and channeled the paper’s blankness—evening out my breathing and wiping my head of any speculation—giving Jonah a neutral place to land if he needed it. I wrote while Charlie talked.

Charlie first met Silas Hepworth the week after he bought his house. Silas had driven the short distance between their properties and, instead of introducing himself or welcoming Charlie to the neighborhood, started in on a property dispute he’d had with the previous owner.

“It was dumb. A damaged tree from my property that fell on his. He demanded I clean it up and give him the wood. I did, only to smooth things over. With the grow business, I didn’t want asshole neighbors who’d be watching my every move.

And when I brought him the wood, he started talking about Vietnam and his back and how he was in pain all the time.

Long story short, he became a customer.”

Charlie sold him weed regularly for years, stopping by on the second Wednesday of the month when Hepworth’s social security payments came through.

It wasn’t the most pleasant hour of the month.

Hepworth complained about the news, the government, the other neighbors, picking apart his limited world in front of a captive audience.

Charlie listened, nodded, took his money, and left as soon as he could.

“Who else lives with him?”

“No one. He’s alone, rotting in front of his TV.”

Fists still pressed into his temples, Jonah explained the face he and Eve saw in the trailer window when they tried to interview Silas.

Charlie shrugged. “I never saw anyone there except Silas.”

Jonah nodded imperceptibly. Charlie was telling the truth about the mystery face, which meant we still didn’t know who was tracking Jonah and Eve this morning with a shotgun.

Charlie kept talking. Apparently, things with Silas took a turn about a month ago. Hepworth ran into them while they were out on a walk.

“He was getting his mail as we passed and I introduced them. He didn’t say much.

Neither did Kate. I remembered being happy to get out of there fast before he could go on some rant.

Then I went to drop off his stuff the next time.

” Charlie stopped pacing, shaking his head at the ground.

His face turned a darker shade of red and his words were clenched, bitten out. “The crap he said about her . . .”

“What?” Blake was on her feet now, too.

Charlie tried to wave her off, but he was fighting revulsion. “He called her a whore. He said she was using me and I needed to put her in her place.”

“What the hell?” Blake looked ready to do violence. “He didn’t even know her, did he?”

“I don’t see how. He barely leaves his house. He’s just—”

“A misogynist,” Jonah said without lifting his head.

“Yeah,” Charlie agreed. “He was always trashing his ex-wives. Anyway, I told him I wasn’t going to listen to his bullshit, especially not about Kate. I cut him off. Said I was done selling to him.”

Finally, Jonah straightened up. He was way too pale, even in the half-light of the midnight bakery, but he looked straight at Charlie, understanding the situation more than anyone else in the room could.

“That’s when he began blackmailing you.”