Page 25 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

Without any dreams to guide me, finding a body in the woods was a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack. Or finding a body in the woods.

Max and I hiked through stands of oak, maple, and pine as the daylight faded, turning the weak light filtering down through the canopy into a grayish twilight.

After our interview with Valerie Campbell, we’d driven directly to the house that—on paper—still belonged to Ted Kramer.

It was two hours away from Valerie’s duplex, outside a sleepy town well past the relentless rings of Chicago suburbs, giving Max plenty of time to dig into Valerie’s story.

He’d pulled as much information as he could find on his phone about Kate Campbell, her mom, and the man Valerie had claimed to have killed.

A standard background check showed Valerie had struggled with bills for most of her adult life, job hopping around Wisconsin and Illinois. A few traffic violations dotted her record and some utility bills slipped into collections. She’d hung on by her fingernails, until she’d met her husband.

“There’s a marriage certificate on file but no divorce decree.” Max processed everything out loud, filling the car with two hours of mostly one-sided conversation. “The marriage was eight years ago. Her rental history at the place she’s at now goes back at least five.”

“She didn’t want to make contact again, even to serve papers.”

“You sensed that?”

“Yeah, my superpower of listening when she said he threatened to track her down no matter where she went.”

He let that fly, turning his attention to the alleged murder victim.

Theodore “Ted” Kramer had a much larger presence on paper than either Valerie or her daughter.

He’d worked as a quality manager for several manufacturers around the Midwest and had a public Facebook page that went back ten years—the posts seemed equal parts criticism of defective products and lax quality standards mixed with quasi-religious posts.

“He liked getting into fights in the comments.” Max paused on what looked like a book-length rant.

“This one’s about that missing Malaysian plane; he blamed shoddy maintenance and belittled everyone who chimed in with other theories.

” Max kept scrolling. “Really long-winded posts. He starts using all caps on random words—God, I hate that. His last post applauded immigration restrictions. And that’s it.

The page is still up, but he basically disappeared from the platform. ”

“Maybe in real life too.”

There was no record of Ted Kramer in any active missing persons databases. Then again, no one had reported Kate Campbell missing either.

Ted Kramer’s yard was overgrown with weeds and waving white dandelion heads, which didn’t match the image of the closely-shaved buttoned-up guy on socials.

No one answered the front door and there was no sign of life inside, no waft of emotion or energy I could sense.

But the mailbox was empty—someone must have been checking it—and the house itself was an imposing two-story brick building with every curtain drawn.

I couldn’t sense much beyond the front door in a place this big.

Someone could’ve easily sat in the shadows upstairs as we prowled the neglected perimeter.

Max paced the edge of the property twice before moving into the woods.

I sighed, fantasized about getting in the car and driving away, before eventually following him in.

It was the wrong call. We were still hiking through endless stands of trees an hour later when even the sun started giving up for the day.

“We weren’t hired to find Ted Kramer.”

Max paused the bloodhound search to lift his phone, looking for service. “I know.”

“So what are we doing here?”

He gave up on the signal and climbed over a fallen tree, scanning the ground with his phone flashlight. The buzz of one-track, blinders-on energy radiating off him was as familiar as looking in a mirror.

“I don’t know. I’ll know when I find it.”

“Are you going to find it before we have to sleep here? Did you text Shelley about any of this?”

Max didn’t answer. I wanted to punch him.

Ted Kramer’s property backed up to the Wolf River Bluffs -Forest Preserve, an oblong stretch of green on the map that hugged the south side of the Wolf River in a chain of state parks and forests.

We could probably walk all night without seeing a single road or building.

If Max knew that, he wasn’t thinking about it.

He barely registered anything that wasn’t terrain.

Things moved around us—a creak of a branch, the crunch of leaves as something padded just out of sight.

I couldn’t sense anyone else in the woods, which would normally be comforting.

The farther away from humanity the better, in general, yet the absence didn’t bring relief here.

Something kept me on edge and it wasn’t just my idiot partner.

I couldn’t stop looking behind us, until I didn’t know whether I was imagining the hushed, rustling noises or not.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

To distract myself, I went over the interview again.

Valerie Campbell’s mind had been a complicated shell game, each layer hinting at something hidden beneath.

Even when she’d thought about her husband lying facedown in a trough of dirt and dead leaves, it was fractured pieces of a memory.

Hands bleeding on a shovel handle. Sweat dripping from her forehead to the corpse.

A frantic hug, pulling her daughter close as they both trembled with shock and exhaustion. Darkness and short, heaving breaths.

She didn’t linger long enough on any one thought or memory to give us a location for Ted Kramer’s body.

And despite talking for almost two hours, she never thought about his actual murder.

It could have been an intentional omission, once she knew what I was, but it didn’t feel like it.

Everything about Valerie’s thoughts screamed PTSD and the suppression of traumatic memories.

After another half hour when more shadow than light surrounded us, I asked Max, “Are we here because you want to find something or because you don’t?”

Max switched directions, doubling back on a slightly different path than the way we’d come in. This one was more crowded with trees and underbrush. Branches scraped us on all sides.

“Hard to say.” He was eager to start talking it out.

The words instantly relaxed him. “If we find Ted Kramer’s body, we’ve got confirmation of why Kate came to Iowa City in the first place.

But then we’d have to notify authorities.

” As he scanned the ground with his flashlight, a branch hit him in the face and he swore.

I grinned for the first time since we’d walked into the woods.

“Sure, let’s forget our track record on reporting crimes for a minute.

” He shot me a look, still rubbing sap off his face.

“If you did call the authorities to report a murder, that would put Valerie Campbell in jail and Kate, potentially, under more pressure wherever she is. Making her that much harder to find.”

“What did you make of that bit at the end?” Max asked. “Was she telling the truth?”

Just before we’d left Valerie’s house, Max had asked the question on both our minds. He’d explained how Kate was living under a pseudonym, paying only cash, and working under the table during her time in Iowa City.

“Is that behavior typical of your daughter?”

Valerie admitted it wasn’t.

“Why do you think she was living like that? She did everything possible to conceal her identity. Her closest friends didn’t even know her real name.”

Valerie had already walked us to the door at that point.

She gripped the deadbolt as she surveyed the street with careful eyes.

“I told her to. I wanted her to start over completely, to get as far away from me as possible. I knew someone would find Ted’s body eventually and come looking for me.

Kate doesn’t deserve to go to prison for the crime of being a good daughter. ”

Max glanced at me. Valerie didn’t miss it.

“They’d call it something else. Accessory or accomplice, I don’t know.

But that’s not what happened. She saved my life, and I would never allow her to pay for that with the rest of hers.

I’ve made my peace with what I did and what I’ll have to do when the time comes.

I don’t have any regrets besides marrying him in the first place. ”

Without warning, she’d reached out to me, holding my arm and my attention in a vise grip of desperation and love.

“Dream about her. Find her, please. You have to make sure she’s okay.”

I could still feel her hand on my arm, the sharp bite of her sudden plea.

As if I could dream about people on demand.

As if my abilities were in any way under my control.

I was an unconsenting voyeur to the worst moments of random victims’ lives, unable to do anything except watch as they thrashed and screamed or sank into the mire of their circumstances.

Lost and hopeless, they didn’t know anyone saw them.

I had no way of telling them I was there, that someone would be looking for them, and they weren’t alone.

And there was another reason I might not have dreamed about her. I never had nightmares about people who were already dead. Kate Campbell had a name now, but she might not have a pulse.

“She was telling the truth about the identity stuff,” I confirmed. “She’d told Kate to change her name and disappear. She didn’t want her daughter anywhere near the fallout zone.”

Max digested that as we came into an open area along a creek bed.

The water was dark and stagnant, and the forest swallowed the sucking sound of our shoes in the mud.

Twilight was settling in and it was getting harder and harder to see anything outside the beams from our phones. Somewhere behind us, a twig snapped.

“Would you do that?” Max asked.

“Which? Send someone I loved away to protect them or be the one who left?”

“Either.”

I had to breathe into the effort of separating myself from Valerie’s decisions and emotions.

Draw the boundary and think about what lay on my side.

The people in my life who mattered could be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.

But it was still impossible to imagine. I couldn’t see Max or Eve doing anything I told them, regardless of their own safety.

And I wouldn’t be able to stomach their self-sacrificing bullshit either. “I doubt it.”

He stood between a dead, uprooted tree and the water’s edge, staring at the black mirror of the creek. The sheen of his head was muted, turning hollow in the shadows and twisting half-light. I felt his answer before he said it.

“That’s what I was trying to do with the money from Kara. We needed it or we would’ve gone under, and I told myself we were doing good work, that the scales would balance in the end. By not telling you, I thought I was protecting you from the consequences, if it ever came to light.”

“You hear yourself, right?”

He sighed. “It was wrong and stupid. You can take a swing at me if it makes you feel better.”

He didn’t think I would, which made it more satisfying when I turned him around and punched him in the face.

He stumbled and fell into the fallen tree, cursing as he tried to untangle himself from the dirt, moss, and rotting roots splayed into the air like an autopsy.

I wished it was lighter so I could see the frustration and scrambling as clearly as I sensed it from the forest floor.

When he stopped struggling, I offered a hand. He paused before taking it and pulled himself out of the roots.

“We’re good,” I told him. “Don’t do it again.”

He clapped me on the shoulder and that was that.

He picked up his phone where he’d dropped it in the hole the fallen tree must’ve left in the forest floor.

The flashlight made a wild arc as he straightened, knees popping like gunshots, and moved on.

Something snagged in my brain, though—a dull warning.

Somewhere deep in the woods a chorus of crows screamed at each other.

I stopped walking, caught on the snag, the thing that wasn’t right.

Dread uncoiled in my gut as I retraced my steps and lifted my phone light to the trunk of the fallen tree. Underneath the base of the trunk, pulled up by the tug of earth, were a pair of stained, thick bones sticking out of the dirt.

“What is it?” Max was ten paces ahead, shining a tiny beam of light back at me.

“A grave.”