Page 27 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled over and over again, as Ted asked them to go easy on me. “Her mom and I are just glad she’s home.” His hand hovered over the back of my chair, decorated with three long scratches that no one else seemed to notice.

“Get some rest,” the cop told me, standing up to escort us out of the station, “and stay sober.”

On the way back to his house, I asked about Mom again.

He didn’t reply and I became more and more freaked out that I’d just done the completely wrong thing.

The cops thought I was an unreliable, drugged-out teenager.

I was done with high school now. No one would report my absence or even notice I was gone.

I wanted to jump out of his truck, run to any of the houses flashing past us and pound on their doors.

Or I could grab the wheel and pull it into an oncoming car.

He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He might fly through the windshield.

Die on impact. A dozen different ways to escape or attack him flew through my head, but I couldn’t make myself go through with any of them.

Because maybe my mother was alive. I could still hear the echo of his voice as he locked me in the time-out room, telling me my behavior would decide my mother’s fate. And the thing was, it could be true.

I loathed Ted. I’d disliked him the minute he and Mom started dating.

He was too charming, too polished. He had all the right answers and he handed them out with the kind of over-the-top love bombing flair that made me question everything he said.

Mom told me not to be so negative. She believed in love enough to ignore the red flags and marry him less than three months after they started dating.

We moved into his giant house, surrounded by fields and woods, where no one could witness the monster he started to become.

Suddenly, everything was about him. Mom had to cater to his every whim and if she didn’t, we heard about it for days.

He reminded us of the exact words he’d used if we messed up a chore.

“Did I tell you to take out the trash and leave the can behind the garage? I told you, specifically, to wheel the cans next to the mailbox before 7:00 a.m.”

If the trash cans were on the wrong side of the driveway, it was a problem.

If they were out at 7:01, even though the garbage truck didn’t come until after noon, it was a problem.

If a single tissue was stuck to the bottom of a trash basket inside the house, he would show it to me, putting the whole basket right in my face, and ask me if I knew what the problem was. Actions have consequences, Kate.

Listening to him, paying attention to every nuance and syllable, was the key to surviving in his house for the last year and a half.

That’s what kept me frozen in the seat as he drove us back from the police station.

He’d told me not to make a sound and I’d spent two days in a pitch-black crawl space without once calling for help.

He ordered me to wash up and change, and I did.

He told me to lie to the police and I had.

My behavior, my ability to listen to his exact, unhinged instructions, might actually decide her fate.

At the house, I got out of the truck and hovered out of his reach as he unlocked the door and went inside.

He ordered me to my room. Not the time-out room, but the bedroom on the far side of the second floor with sharp eaves that always smelled faintly of gasoline, since it was right above the garage.

He followed three steps behind, the stairs groaning under his weight and sending all the hair on the back of my neck up.

I tried to listen for other sounds in the house, to catch my mother’s breathing or words, but I couldn’t hear anything over the wind whistling through the leaves in the woods.

Their bedroom door was shut. I wanted to pound on it, to shout for my mom, but I kept walking down the long hallway until it stopped at my room.

“Sit down on the bed.”

He waited until I complied. My heart filled my ears and throat with panicked thuds, but I lowered myself gingerly on one corner of the twin bed, hands in my lap, looking at his stomach so he could see I was paying attention without challenging him.

He stood in the doorway, flipping something metal in his hands. I couldn’t tell what.

“You’d better hope you did good enough at the station.”

I nodded.

“Do you even understand what I had to do to get us through this? The amount of groundwork, the details. Neither one of you appreciates my ability to plan on a master scale. I can see every move everyone will make from a thousand yards away.”

He kept raging about his incredible brain, drifting into a rant about getting fired from his job and how it was all a giant conspiracy because his “foreign” bosses were threatened by his intelligence.

I nodded and made small agreeable sounds, but my mind had tripped over the words “Neither of you appreciates” and stuck there.

Appreciates , as in my mother was well enough to not appreciate this whining asshole right this very second.

I didn’t know where she was, but she was conscious and alive. She was present tense.

He went on for at least another ten minutes, devolving further into how everyone in his life was against him (duh) and how all he wanted was a tiny shred of gratitude for all he did (good luck).

The whole time he kept pacing in front of the doorway and flipping the metal tool in his hand, fingering it like a stress ball.

Then, without warning, he slotted the piece of metal into the jamb of the bedroom door and I realized what it was.

A lock. Another way to keep me imprisoned.

I chanced a glance at the window and saw a fresh line of screws along the bottom of the sill. A bucket sat in the corner of the room, with a small bag of groceries next to it.

This was my new time-out room.

“Actions have consequences, Kate. Things are going to be different around here.”

I looked him in the eye for the first time since we’d left the police station. A burning certainty ran down the length of my spine, the gut-deep knowledge of how completely one hundred percent different things were going to be.

“I know.”