Page 33 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

The next eighteen months were some of the worst of my life.

Ted found ways to torment us that could never be definitively traced back to him.

Flowers arrived, lilies rancid in their cloying sweetness.

Pictures of us sent from a series of untraceable phone numbers: my mom at work, me at the grocery store, the two of us drinking White Claws on a restaurant terrace.

He made anonymous complaints about each of us at our jobs, forcing weeks of humiliating meetings with HR.

And he found my only social handle on Instagram, posting as various trolls until I deleted the entire account.

We shrank into ourselves, constantly looking over our shoulders, assuming our every move was being watched.

He made us as paranoid as he was. When weeks would pass quietly without any incidents, we questioned our own sanity.

Was it happening or not? Had we turned a series of random, bizarre events into a boogeyman?

It was exhausting, the constant watchfulness during the day and lying awake in our beds at night, unable to turn off our racing thoughts.

Mom started antidepressants and I began antianxiety meds.

We met in the dark kitchen at three or four in the morning at least one night a week, silently pulling flour and sugar from the cupboard with zombie-like intent.

If we couldn’t think or sleep or medicate our demons away, we could always bake them.

“I’m going there,” Mom announced one Sunday morning over quiche and newspapers.

“Where?” We’d had zero conversation about any trips or errands today.

“His house.”

A cold dread knotted my stomach. I didn’t need to ask who he was. It was clear from the set of her mouth, the deadness of her words.

“Mom. No.”

“He still has my dough cutter. I want it back.”

We’d forgotten a few things in the rush of getting the hell out of Ted’s house and the dough cutter was one of the abandoned items. It didn’t matter at the time; we could always get new stuff.

But Mom hadn’t found the exact model. I bought her a replacement for Christmas, and she never complained about it, but sometimes she still talked longingly about the old one.

And more than its handle or weight or sharpness, I knew it was the fact that it was still there, that part of her was still locked in that house.

“We can’t go there.” Even the thought of the place filled me with choking panic, the walls closing in, darkness clawing at me. I went to the window and stood in a shaft of morning sunlight, trying to find my balance in the sudden chaos Mom had thrown like a bomb into our Sunday routine.

“You’re not going, Kate. I am.”

“Neither of us is going.”

She stood up, too. The tendons in her neck were taut, her mouth set, not a hint of backing down anywhere in her slight frame. She faced me, squaring off with a quiet, fierce determination.

“I want my dough cutter back.”

It was insane. Drive over a hundred miles and go back to that psycho’s castle, for a stupid utensil that for all we knew he’d thrown away or burned in effigy by now?

I’d rather walk into traffic. But as we faced off across the kitchen, I knew it wasn’t about the dough cutter.

It was about everything he’d taken from us, everything he held hostage, taunting us with his ghost stalker messages.

And Mom was over it. She vibrated with a fury I’d never seen in her, without one drop of the fear that invaded my entire body.

I knew she was going to do this no matter how much I argued or tried to reason with her.

She wanted her dough cutter and she was going to get it back.

I forced a breath into my lungs, fighting against constricting, overwhelming panic. “You’re not going alone.”

The house looked the same as it always had. Two sprawling stories, perfectly manicured hedges lining the foundation, the glossy black front door.

His truck was in the driveway. He was home.

We sat in my Mazda a hundred yards down the street, car idling, neither of us speaking.

Mom’s gaze was fixed on the house, her jaw working like she was rehearsing what she was going to say.

I’d tried to convince her that we should go when he wasn’t home.

Try a Sunday morning when he might be at church.

Maybe he hadn’t changed his security code.

We could slip in, get the dough cutter, and leave.

But she vetoed that idea hard. He could get us arrested for trespassing, or worse, catch us in the act and wreak his own revenge.

She wanted him to be home, to have it out with him once and for all.

I tried to convince her to bring more people.

Some of the old coworkers who’d helped us move, a neighbor, or any of the new acquaintances we’d made.

I spent a solid half day campaigning for her to ask the movie theater manager she’d been casually flirting with for the last year, but she refused.

“He won’t be himself if other people are there.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t want to see the mask, Kate. I don’t want to be gaslit or feel insane anymore. I need to talk to the real Ted.”

I hated that I understood. She was calling out the monster, and he only showed himself to certain people. For the first time, I was grateful to be one of them. At least I could stand by my mother’s side as she had this out once and for all.

After another minute of gathering herself, Mom looked at me.

“Are you okay?”

“Is that a real question?”

She laughed, breaking the tension in the car a little. “Okay, fair. But I’m ready to do this. I want it over.”

“Then let’s get your damn dough cutter back.”

She pulled into the driveway, blocking his truck in.

We got out and walked to the sidewalk, stopping well short of the door.

There was no need to ring the doorbell. Mr. Paranoia was aware of everyone who breathed on his property.

I had my phone in one hand, recording, and pulled a bottle of mace out of my other pocket, opening it with the practiced ease of someone who’d been stalked for the past year and a half.

Mom stood with her hands empty, but there was a switchblade in her pocket. We’d gone over this plan for days and reviewed every detail on the way here. Despite all our preparation, I still felt a rolling wave of nausea when Ted opened the door.

Unlike the house, he’d changed. He still stood with his chest puffed, wearing a shirt tucked into his jeans, gold belt buckle flashing in the sun.

His hair was still trimmed to military specification, jaw immaculately shaved, skin spray-tanned to match the belt.

But there were puffy lines around his eyes and forehead.

He sagged in some spots and was carved out in others like a cancer had been slowly feasting on him.

His eyes gleamed blacker than I remembered them being as he stared at Mom, and the way he looked at her, like a naughty runaway pet had come crawling home, made sickness well in the back of my throat.

“Well, well.” The dark, oily words landed like bile.

“We need to talk,” Mom said. “Can we come in?”

He glanced at the phone in my hand and I could see the conspiracy theories clouding his obvious pleasure at luring us back here. He seemed to be weighing his options, planning the best way to manipulate and control the situation. He finally agreed, standing back and swinging the door open further.

It took everything I had to follow my mother inside that house. The can of mace turned slippery in my hand and the phone shook as I passed within feet of him. Mom went to the kitchen and straight to a side drawer, pulling out her dough cutter and pocketing it without a word.

“I invited you inside. I didn’t give you permission to steal from me.” He filled the kitchen doorway, making it impossible to get past him back to the front door.

Like a true queen, Mom didn’t even blink. She refused to take the bait. She pulled her hand out of her pocket, but instead of the utensil, it was a switchblade. She opened it one-handed.

“You think any of this bothers me? Your threats, your sad little pictures of our house, your pathetic calls to our jobs. You think any of it makes you matter? Makes you worth responding to?” She laughed again but it wasn’t like earlier in the car.

This laugh was broad, unmitigated disdain.

It was an unleashing, the click of a gate opening that could never be shut again.

“You’re nothing, Ted Kramer. You’ve always been nothing, and you’ll always be nothing. I came back for my dough cutter, because it’s worth more than a hundred of you.”

Her voice was steady and strong. Her eyes were blue fire.

She was everything I wasn’t in that moment.

Hair undone, makeup-less, wearing an old hoodie, with the might of a thousand women distilled into her slight body, she faced the monster who’d tried to destroy her and laughed in his face.

I’d never loved her more than I did right now.

“If I’m nothing, why is your daughter shaking like a leaf?” Ted leered at me, and I felt the nausea give way to a bone-deep hatred.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, feeling my mother’s courage move into me. “Maybe because you kidnapped and locked me in a crawl space for two days.”

He shook his head in mock sympathy, performing directly to the camera in my hand. “Hard to kidnap someone in their own home. Which, I might remind you, this was. I provided everything for you, for both of you, and here you are, back for more, aren’t you?”

He kept talking, piling bullshit onto twisted bullshit.

Trying to spin this situation until he was at the center of the narrative again, making himself the used, tragic hero.

I don’t know how long he would have monologued, but Mom ended his garbage by yawning right in the middle of it.

A huge, bored, over-it yawn and he stopped mid-sentence, a vein popping in his forehead.