Page 30 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)
The day after Ted locked me in the bedroom with a bucket and some snacks, I heard a crash on the opposite end of the hall, followed by stomping and short, guttural yells.
It sounded like Ted was taking the house apart.
Did that mean my mother had escaped? Did it mean she was dead?
I didn’t know. I had zero information, but I’d spent the entire night dismantling the lamp next to my bed, shattering the lightbulb, and gluing the shards of glass to the end of the brass pipe.
I grabbed it and ducked behind the door, praying he would open it and come barreling inside.
I visualized the back of his head, the vulnerable skin at his throat, walking myself through each blow.
How he might counter, how I would respond.
He thought he was a whale, an instrument of God making me face my fate. He thought he could swallow up my whole life and no one would stop him.
Except me.
This time, Jonah was going to eat the whale.
I waited, gripping the glass-encrusted pipe like a lifeline, listening to the chaos erupting from him like bile as he crashed through the house.
Then I heard the front door slam. I crept to the window and watched him rage around the yard.
He stopped, looking at the woods as if he wanted to check them, but he didn’t.
He never went into the preserve. It was too dirty, too disordered.
The trees didn’t line up perfectly like the shrubs along his sidewalk.
He couldn’t douse the preserve in chemicals like he did with his fluorescent green lawn.
The woods were beyond his control, and he hated that.
After a minute, he turned and disappeared around the corner of the house.
His truck engine fired up and roared away.
The sound of my bedroom doorknob sent my heart into my throat and I panicked, running across the room, convinced that somehow he’d tricked me into giving up my hiding spot behind the door.
I raised the pipe as the door opened—ready to kill him anyway, the hell with the element of surprise, the hell with my sad Pinterest weapon, I would do it with my bare hands—before stumbling to a stop.
Mom stood in the doorway.
A cry tore out of my throat. I dropped the pipe and threw myself at her, sobbing before her arms even wrapped around my back.
“I thought you were dead.”
She kissed the side of my head hard, holding me like she would never let go again. But too soon she drew back, bracketing my shoulders and scanning every inch of me. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t. I was years and countless mental breaks and meltdowns away from okay. It would probably take more therapy than I could ever afford to think of myself in those terms again, but Ted was gone and my mom was here. My bedroom door was open and all we had to do was walk through it. I nodded.
She seemed to accept my answer for exactly what it was, her mouth turning into a thin, grim line.
“Get your weapon. Let’s go.”
The keys to my mom’s car were long gone and who knew what he’d done with our phones.
With no transportation or means of communication, we did the only thing we could: we escaped through the woods.
Once we’d gotten deep enough into the trees to feel comfortable talking, we traded horror stories.
Ted had left my mother in the pantry for hours, telling her the same thing he’d used to threaten me—that he’d murder me if she made a sound.
He knew exactly how to control both of us, to exploit our love for each other, knowing we would walk to the ends of the world to keep the other one safe.
He must’ve gotten bored at some point because eventually he dragged her out of the pantry in the middle of the night.
He made her cook for him, clean up the mess he’d made in the kitchen, and put the entire house in order.
He didn’t tell her where I was. She listened to his rants about being fired, raging for hours as she worked and searched for evidence of me.
He hovered over her, not letting her out of his sight until she realized she needed him to let his guard down, which—with a paranoid psycho like him—was going to be next to impossible.
Gradually, she began layering in compliments, telling him no one appreciated his genius, that he operated on a different level than the rest of us.
One of those things was a hundred percent true.
It might’ve worked. With enough time and lies, she might’ve been able to soothe him into submission.
But the next morning, a police cruiser pulled up to the house.
Before she could do anything, he dragged her upstairs to their bedroom, swore he would kill both of us if she made a single noise, and locked her inside.
We pieced together what must’ve happened next.
I’d missed the last few days of my senior year and, on top of that, had made a 911 call.
The cop was probably sent out to do a welfare check, which is when Ted came up with the bullshit story that I’d run off with some drugged-out guy.
Maybe he said Mom had gone looking for me.
Who knew? He was charming when he wanted to be, could convince people he possessed genuine human emotions and he always had answers for everything.
He’d probably turned on the concerned-protector-father act and the cop had lapped it up.
Maybe they were even in the men’s group together.
The visit from the cop explained why we had to go to the station, to make the police close their file and validate every bias along the way.
We still would’ve been trapped if Mom hadn’t found access to the attic in the ceiling of their bedroom closet.
When Ted locked her in their bedroom, she climbed the closet shelves and hid in the insulation, waiting for him to notice she was missing.
As soon as he left to track her down, she climbed down and rescued me.
Walking through the woods felt like a dream, the trees closing green over our heads, shadowing our pain, soothing our shock with birdcalls and the gentle dampened breeze winding through the rolling hills and valleys.
We climbed over piles of moss-covered branches, stopped to rest against a giant, sprawling oak tree, and watched the squirrels and chipmunks dart through the canopy.
I didn’t know what lay beyond the woods, where Ted might be lurking, but it felt like he couldn’t touch us here, that as long as we stayed in this breathing, beautiful forest where there was a hundred directions to run, we couldn’t be trapped alone in the dark again.
We slept there for one night, but hunger drove us out in the morning.
On the other side of the woods, we found a farm with a silver-haired woman working in a massive garden.
She jumped when she saw us and I can only imagine how we must’ve looked: filthy clothes, glazed, exhausted eyes, the brass pipe clutched in my hand.
“My daughter and I need help,” Mom said as my eyes darted to the road, the outbuildings, searching for any sign that Ted was going to jump out at us.
The woman stepped forward with immediate understanding in her eyes. Her shoulders straightened and she stretched out a gloved hand to us. “You’re safe here.”
It took years to rebuild our lives, to come to terms with the fact that the police didn’t believe us.
Ted had gotten there first, told them I’d gone into a teenage rage and fed my mother enough lies to make her believe that he was a monster.
Monsters do that; they twist the story until fiction feels truer than fact.
And Ted was a world-class expert in spinning his bullshit until dogs talked, the sky was purple, and the entire world hung upside down around him.
No charges were ever filed. In the end, that was Mom’s decision and she never said why, but I think she couldn’t handle the trauma of seeing him in a courtroom for weeks or months, trying to convince strangers they should believe her over him.
Because that’s all we had. Our word against his.
It’s why she never filed for divorce; she knew it would give him a way back into our lives and the leverage to make us suffer even more.
She could barely stand going back to his house to get our stuff.
We did it while he was at church and two of her old coworkers came with us, standing sentinel at Ted’s front door in case he showed up while we packed what would fit in the back of her car.
We moved across the state and tried to restart our lives.
Mom rented one side of a duplex from an elderly couple who owned a restaurant and were delighted to discount the rent in exchange for bookkeeping services.
I enrolled in a community college and lived at home.
Mom wanted me to go to the university where I’d been accepted and live in the dorms, but I couldn’t leave her.
What if he came back and I wasn’t there?
What if something happened to her and I could’ve prevented it?
I commuted to my classes and took a part-time job near home.
Mom enrolled us in self-defense classes at the Y and insisted on Great British Bake Off binge nights.
It felt like she was preparing me for the worst while still hoping for the best.
After college, I took a mind-numbing office job in the next town over.
I dated a little, but the tiniest red flag had me swiping left so fast it froze my phone screen.
Every Sunday, Mom baked a quiche and a batch of muffins or scones, and we spent hours picking at our plates and reading the newspaper.
It was a Sunday when the first text arrived.
My mom’s phone dinged with an incoming message from an unknown number. It was a picture of the front of our duplex. The text was two words: Nice place.
She dropped the phone like it was a snake and, after I read it too, we both stared at the front door.
It had been years, but neither of us questioned for a second who’d sent the text.
He was using a new phone line or a burner or whatever, and somehow he’d tracked us down.
Despite the sudden rush of adrenaline, the crash of my heartbeat against my chest, and the desperate desire to run far, far away as fast as we possibly could, I stalked to the kitchen counter and drew the biggest cleaver out of the butcher block.
Mom was right by my side with a hammer in tow as we opened the front door and walked out to the lawn.
The street looked the same as it always did.
It was a residential road, with duplexes on one side and tiny ramblers on the other.
A few cars were parked along the curb and it didn’t look like anyone was lurking in any of them, but I checked each interior anyway, phone actively recording in one hand, knife in the other.
Mom waited by our place, blocking the open doorway with a wide stance as she rapped the end of the hammer against her palm.
I worked my way from one end of the block to the other, scaring a mother out for a walk with her kids, before returning to Mom.
“He could’ve taken the picture anytime,” she said.
We stood there, weapons in hand, guarding our new home, but at the same time I felt nauseous and panicky, like the time-out-room bugs were crawling over my skin. The urge to run, to not get locked inside a small, black cage, was almost more than I could bear.
Mom put a hand on my arm. “He’s not here.”
“He’ll come back.”
She didn’t reply. We both knew it was true.