Page 34 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

“Thanks for showing me what I’m definitely not missing,” Mom said, and I couldn’t help it. She’d slightly misquoted Legally Blonde , one of our all-time favorite movies, and I burst out laughing.

Everything spun out of control. The gate my mom had unlatched flew wide, and the monster barreled into the room.

Ted lost it. Face boiling red, he lunged for my mother.

Time seemed to slow down. Adrenaline flooded me, replacing the giddiness with burning intent.

I stepped between them and sprayed the mace directly in his face.

He crashed into me, sending both me and Mom flying back into the stove.

It was that night all over again, only magnified with time and rage.

I heard screaming. Bodies thudded together, ripping at each other.

Groin. Throat. Eyes. The areas they’d taught us to strike in self-defense flashed through my head, but I couldn’t land a single punch.

Somehow he had me by the neck. He was too strong.

I’d lost my phone and the mace; there was no way out.

My vision shrank and tunneled and just as my legs started to give out, I saw it: Mom’s knife making a swift, shining arc through the air.

I could breathe again. Blood flew everywhere.

He lost his balance and fell. His head smashed onto the floor in front of me, and everything came into focus.

I kicked at the back of his head, connecting my boot with his skull over and over again, needing it to disappear, to be smashed into oblivion forever.

There was a crunch that could have been from far away or deep inside my own head.

I didn’t know, couldn’t tell inside from out, waking from dreaming.

Vaguely, I felt hands pulling me away from the wrecked, bleeding body and then I was in my mom’s arms and we were shaking and holding each other on the floor.

I don’t know how long we sat like that. Mom rocked us back and forth, stroking the hair away from my forehead. We stared at Ted’s body—the man who’d terrorized us for years, lurking at the edge of every thought—lifeless.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

Mom let go of me and moved to check his pulse. I grabbed the bloody knife and hovered behind her, ready to attack if he reared up and grabbed her.

“I can’t feel a pulse,” she said after a minute and sat back on her haunches, staring at his bruised and bloated face. “I can’t believe I killed him.”

Using the knife to lift his shirt, we looked at the long, shallow cut across his torso.

It wasn’t a fatal wound. There was another stab in his knee, seeping dark into his pants.

Also not fatal. We glanced at each other, both of us realizing at the same time that she hadn’t killed him.

I had. I’d literally beaten him to death.

I ate the whale.

I should have been afraid or worried—anything—at the thought of facing a murder charge.

But I’d been afraid for so long. All I felt at the sight of Ted’s body was relief, a euphoric lightness running through my veins, lifting everything.

When we’d escaped this house years ago and Mom asked if I was okay, I hadn’t even known what the word meant.

I was so far away from it, looking at it through a dark, distorted ocean.

Now it felt like I’d crossed back over the water.

I could see it now. I’d murdered my stepfather and I was finally okay.

When Mom told me to go to the garage and touch nothing except two shovels and a sled, I agreed with a smile.

I felt like whistling. We wrapped him in a sheet, rolled him on the sled and spent the ten minutes until sundown scrubbing the kitchen with bleach and tossing the used towels onto the body.

Ted didn’t have any close neighbors, but we still waited for heavy twilight before we pulled the sled into the woods.

It took every ounce of strength we had. We were sweating and cursing and grunting and I would have done it a hundred times, spent every night for the rest of my life dragging Ted’s corpse out of our world forever.

We didn’t dig as far down as we should have.

There were too many tree roots and rocks, and it was barely April.

The ground was still hard and it got more compact the farther down we went.

The grave we managed to dig was barely two feet at its deepest point, and more like one in the shallow spots.

Our arms shook. Our hands bled. Finally, Mom said it was enough.

We both knew it wasn’t, that we needed to deposit Ted into the bowels of the earth and let the magma incinerate any evidence of him, but I also felt like the night was spinning around me.

I heard sounds everywhere, below and above us.

Did people come into these woods? I hadn’t seen anyone out here when we lived with Ted, but to be fair I hadn’t paid much attention to these trees before Mom and I had escaped into them.

Now the woods were delivering us again, taking the last part of Ted that could hurt us.

We upended the sled into the grave and Ted fell at a weird angle into the sad, shallow hole.

For a second I thought his arm moved, but when I shone the flashlight on him, the body was crumpled and still.

He wasn’t coming back. We piled the dirt back on until he was covered in a weird mound and dragged a few fallen branches over the top.

Then we stumbled away, coming out of the woods farther south than we meant to and having to backtrack to the house.

We stripped down and bagged everything—our clothes, the mace, the knife, our phones, the shovels and sled—and stuffed it all in the trunk of my car. We drove home in bras and underwear, not having the foresight to pack a change of clothes in case we had to murder a man.

Details popped and fizzed in my head. We hadn’t worn gloves.

The blood on our blistered hands had dripped into the grave as we dug.

Our phones had recorded everything, tracking exactly where we’d been all night.

I wondered about the difference between first- and second-degree murder and decided not to google it.

It seemed serious, all of it, the kind of serious that could ruin our lives forever, but there was only one detail I could hold on to, only one phrase repeating on a glorious loop in the PTSD whiplash that was my head.

“ Legally Blonde ?”

Mom sat ramrod straight in the driver’s seat, her blue satin bra gleaming in the flash of streetlights.

“It came to me in the moment.” She turned to me, bags like welts under her eyes, hair dirty and stuck to her head. I’m sure I looked the same or worse. “Maybe we’ve watched it too many times.”

“Better Elle Woods than Elizabeth Bennet.”

“‘You’re the last man in the world I could be prevailed upon to marry.’”

“Meh.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t work without the accent. And it’s about a decade too late.”

The laughter started deep in our chests, rumbling like earthquakes until it broke loose. It felt like it would shake the whole car, that we would laugh for the rest of our lives.

It’s hard to cover up a murder when you have no practice or skills in that area.

I deleted the video of killing Ted I inadvertently recorded, but I also had cloud service on my phone and we didn’t know if the cloud had automatically archived it somewhere, just waiting to be pulled with the right warrant.

We checked into a campground the next day, without our phones, and burned the clothes we’d worn.

We scrubbed the shovels and sled with bleach and dropped them at three different dumpsters in three different towns.

We went to a self-service car wash that had no cameras and vacuumed the back of my car, scrubbing it with more bleach.

I was weighing our options for what to do with the actual murder weapons—the knife, the mace, and my boots—on our way home from the dumpster drops and car wash when Mom interrupted me.

“You have to go.”

“Go where? Where should I take them?”

“Listen to me. You have to leave, Kate. You can’t come back.”

It took a minute for what she was saying to sink in. I’d been so focused on getting rid of the evidence. It never occurred to me that we’d have to disappear, too. But wait. No. She wasn’t talking about us anymore. She was talking about me, alone.

“Why can’t you come?”

“Once they realize he’s missing or find his body, I’ll be the first person they interview. If I’m gone, they’ll know exactly what happened.”

“Who’s even going to miss that bastard?”

“His church. His men’s group. The county when he doesn’t pay his property taxes. The post office, when he stops getting his mail. They don’t even have to look. We didn’t bury him deep enough. Animals could get him—”

“Good for the animals.”

“—dogs bring human bones home all the time.”

“We don’t know—”

“And Theo.”

That shut me up for a second. Ted’s son had left for college almost as soon as Mom and I moved into the house.

He came home the next summer, a skinny, greasy kid with black eyes that didn’t blink.

He did everything his father told him without a word, too whipped from a lifetime of following orders to ever fight back or even offer an opinion.

He’d already learned there was only Ted’s way in that house.

He’d found an apartment by the next year and hadn’t come home for the summer when Ted imprisoned us.

Neither of us had been in contact with him since we’d escaped Ted.

Once or twice Mom had mentioned him, hoping he’d gotten away from his father and started his own life, but she hadn’t been willing to chance any communication.

A connection to the son might become a connection to the father.

“Theo’s long gone,” I said, hoping more than believing it. Once Ted had control of someone, he didn’t let them go. We were living proof of that. “Or,” I tried again, reframing, “he’ll be grateful that I—”

Mom shot me a look.

“—that someone—” I amended quickly, “took care of his dad for him. He’s probably been considering patricide for years.”

We argued the rest of the drive home. Nothing I said changed her mind.

She was convinced Ted’s body would be found and the absence of his still-on-paper wife would lead authorities straight to her.

Ted might have even left evidence of his recent stalking, which would make her even more of a suspect.

She had to keep living her life as though nothing happened.

When I suggested going back to the house to get rid of anything that might point to us, she refused.

When I suggested burying him better, she flatly rejected the idea.

“We can’t go anywhere near there again.”

She was right. I knew she was right, but the urge to go back and do better was overwhelming. If only we’d planned a murder contingency, this could’ve all been different.

The problem, we both knew, was that if the authorities started to look into Mom as a suspect, what they would find was me. My car at his house. My phone pinging the nearest cell tower practically the whole night. My literal video recording of killing my stepfather.

“We escaped that prison, Kate, and I’m not letting you spend one more minute of your life locked away because of him.”

She wore me down over the next few days, until I started believing what she said.

It made sense for me to leave town. There was already a record of me being a runaway on file with the local police.

On paper, I had a history of disappearing.

If they came to question her, she could tell them we’d had a fight and I’d left on bad terms. She hadn’t heard from me since.

It would hold up, as long as they didn’t dig deeper.

The next Friday, she was gone for most of the day and when she came back, she had twelve thousand dollars in cash.

“Where did you get that?” I’d saved less than a thousand since I graduated college. Most of my paycheck went to our rent, gas, groceries, and restaurant takeout.

“It’s for you.” The bills were bound with rubber bands, not the paper wrapping they used at the bank, and the whole pile was stuffed in a plastic grocery bag. She handed it to me, then she gave me the dough cutter.

“Mom, no.”

“I don’t need it.” Her eyes were suddenly bright. She tucked the dough cutter in my other hand and bracketed my shoulders, holding me in place. “You take it and then wherever you go, I’ll be there, too.”

“Mom—” Tears welled in my eyes and spilled, making her blurry.

“I couldn’t have gotten it back without you. It’ll make me happy, knowing you’re out there using it. Do you know how many times I’ve looked at you and marveled at all the things you’re capable of, everything you could do if only you let yourself?

“You don’t have to worry about me anymore. You don’t have to hold yourself back. I want you to fly, Kate. I want you to see the world and fall in love and get your heart broken and know you have it inside you to get up and try again. To do anything you set your mind to.

“You’re the best daughter I could have imagined.” She hugged me to her chest, hard, and I felt shudders running through her. I couldn’t absorb what was happening. We’d been talking about it for days and still I was blindsided, numb.

“I’ll love you, forever, Kate.” She whispered in my ear before backing away, eyes running over every inch of me as if memorizing this moment. “You have to leave. Now.”