Page 38 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

My favorite time of day was after Blake and I stumbled down to the bakery and turned the ovens on, and before she unlocked the front door and plugged in the neon pink open sign.

Neither of us were fully awake, scooping and rolling and kneading side by side as our playlists dovetailed into each other.

Flour coated our arms, sugar bloomed in the air, and the sky through the bay window turned from black to gray to lavender to pink.

We barely talked, silently exchanging tools and pans and fresh mugs of steaming coffee, moving through each other’s spaces with the practice of an old married couple.

I could almost feel my mom behind me, nodding her approval at the glossy egg-white finishes and pools of icing melting into a piping hot pan of rolls.

My hair was scooped up in a paisley handkerchief.

I wore a tight Fanta T-shirt under baggy overalls with the dough cutter in my back pocket like a talisman.

My shoes were glorified slippers, tapping out the Eurythmics under the table.

I’d thrifted the entire outfit and, like everything else in Darcy’s life, it fit me like a glove.

My boyfriend was upstairs snoring in bed while my best friend and I baked for a still-sleeping world.

I picked mint sprigs from the greenhouse by the window and arranged them on a platter of brownies. “If you could be anyone, who would you be?”

Blake drained her coffee, staring at nearly done trays of giant cookies filling the top oven. “Just lead roles or are we talking supporting characters, too?”

“Not in a movie.” I finished the platter and slid it into the display case in the front of the store. When I got back, she was still staring at the oven. “I mean you. If you could go anywhere and have any kind of life, what would you want it be?”

We pulled out the cookies and transferred them to cooling racks, working in silence.

I didn’t need to ask again. She was thinking, treating the question as seriously as a quantum physics thought experiment.

No one understood the lure of alternate realities, the importance of all our possible lives, like Blake did.

“We can’t time travel?”

“We can’t.”

She sighed, dumping the last empty pan in the sink.

“Then I’d pick up the entire bakery and put it at the edge of an ocean.”

“Beach bakery?”

“Not a scorching-sand-and-palm-tree beach. No one gorges on cinnamon rolls in a bikini. It would be a beach with hidden coves and cliffs, the store nestled right off a hiking trail with the sound of waves in the distance. And this guy runs a bicycle rental shop right across the street.” Her grin stretched wider, eyes lighting up as the idea unfolded.

“He’s huge and bald, with one of those sexy carpenter beards.

Full sleeves. Instantly in love with me but it takes him months of coming in for coffee before he says a word. The grump to my sunshine.”

“A beach and a grumpy bicycle guy.” I could already see her there. Blake was someone who could belong anywhere: a beach, a mountaintop, a city, a submarine. The world would open wider to make room for her.

“You would be telling me to make the first move, because obviously I’m smitten with him, too.

I’ve tried renting a bike and ended up with some hilarious scars.

Oh, and I have a moped. The town is so small, I can get anywhere on it.

But I still wait for him to make the first move and we end up thrown together in .

. .” She ran through a few meet-cute ideas, but I was still stuck on the thing she said first.

“I would be there?”

“You have to be there. It wouldn’t be my perfect life without you. I suppose Charlie can come too, if he must. But only to keep you happy. He has a different haircut. You’ll love it.”

My thumping, half-awake heart flooded with more emotion than I could handle at five in the morning. Tears welled in my eyes and I turned away from Blake, embarrassed.

“So what do you think? Beach town? Pastries & Dreams and endless shoreline, just waiting to be walked at sunset?”

“Yeah.” I blinked the water back and tried to make my voice sound normal. “I’m in.”

An arm looped around my shoulders and pulled me back until our heads bumped. “Good.”

I covered her flour-coated arm with mine and we stood there, sleepy and locked together, dreaming a life awake.

Concrete scraped my skin raw. Dirt, cobwebs, and sticky, seeping fluids coated my hands, my face, my throat.

The darkness pitched and rolled, my eyes adding color where there was none.

Waves crashed in my head, the white noise of nothingness breaking into patterns.

It wasn’t real, or maybe it was. My brain clung to anything, desperate for relief.

The memory of Blake and I in the kitchen faded, even as I tried to bring it back into focus, to feel the weight of her arm, the lilt of her voice.

But the moment was gone. And I was still here.

Caged in a black room.

None of it felt real now. Blake and Charlie shimmered like fever dreams. The bakery couldn’t have been an actual place, on the beach or in Iowa or anywhere else. Nowhere was that perfect. I’d never been allowed in a space that light.

All of it felt like a movie I’d watched once a long time ago, when I was young enough to believe another world was waiting, the colors and music and laughter etched in a deep trench in the bowels of my mind, creating a nostalgia for something I’d never known.

It was just a trick my brain had been playing on me since I was seventeen and Ted had dragged me down the basement stairs.

This was my life.

This was where I began and ended.

Noises gurgled out of me, shreds of sobs and syllables that lost any meaning. The walls breathed, sucking the oxygen from my lungs and shrinking the edges of the crawl space. They were trying to digest me, to work me into nothing. Or maybe they already had.

A clunk and a screech beyond the door sent me skittering backward. Heavy thumps came closer, the sound of boots on concrete. He came, I remembered. It happened once a day, I’d thought at one point. How many times had he come now? Ten? Twelve?

The metal padlock rattled on the door and then it was opening and the blinding light flashed on my head. I’d already buried my face and closed my eyes, knowing the light was worse than the darkness.

The bucket was dragged out and a fresh one put down. A softer thump—food—and a slosh—water.

“Why are you doing this?”

There was no answer, but the noises paused.

“Why don’t you just kill me?”

The flashlight clicked off and I heard the breathing, light and even. I felt his eyes on my back.

“That’s not the plan.”

The shock of hearing his voice made me raise my head.

It was higher, softer than I remembered.

Ted’s voice had always been loud and animated, filling any space it was in, crowding everything else out.

This voice slid into the edges of the crawl space, whispering to the spiders, running finger-light along their webs.

I looked up at the silhouette of the man crouched in the tiny doorway. He was lean, folded up comically small to see inside my prison. The basement light outlined his messy hair, too messy to ever belong to my vain, image-obsessed stepfather.

“You’re not Ted.”

He laughed and even though it was just as high, just as soft as his voice had been, the sound made my skin crawl.

“Did you forget who found you running on that gravel road? Who visited you in the bakery that day?”

I sat up, my arms shaking from the effort, and tried to make myself think, to separate the real from the not-real.

“I found you the first time when you came to visit your mom. You made such a big deal out of going to the movies with her every year. I knew you’d do it again, even if you thought you could just disappear after murdering my dad.”

“Theo.” The man’s outline wavered into focus, shadows settling into brow, nose, chin. Ted’s son crouched outside the time-out room. My stepbrother. My kidnapper.

He was still too thin, still carved out from a lifetime of skirting the edges of Ted’s ego, his shoulders permanently hunched and battered by Ted’s rage.

“That’s how you found me?”

“I followed her to the theater on her birthday and waited until you showed up. It was easy to tag your car and track you back to Iowa City.”

I could see him now, the cold shock of Theo Kramer ripped out of a nightmare and thrust into my new life, standing tall and awkward in front of the bakery cases. “Hello, Kate. Long time.”

I’d sputtered and struggled for words, trying to keep myself from sprinting out the bakery door and pretending this was normal.

He seemed normal, or normal enough for him that I thought he must not know.

I waited for him to bring up his dad, mention that he hadn’t seen him or maybe what a raging abusive asshole he was, since we were a full state away and far from the shadow of his rotting corpse.

But he didn’t. Theo ordered a black coffee and watched me while I filled it with shaking hands.

“It’s good to see you.”

I said something in reply. I have no idea what.

We made excruciating small talk for the length of time it took to ring up his order after losing all feeling in my hands.

Then he left. As soon as Blake came back from her errand, I told her I felt sick, tore off my apron, and practically sprinted outside.

I ran with my head on a swivel to try to see where Theo went, but he’d vanished as quickly as he appeared.

“I wanted to see how you’d react,” Theo said. He was still crouched in front of the crawl space door, running a finger lightly along the metal plate of the lock. “When I walked into that bakery, I didn’t know if you’d run or try to hide again. Maybe you’d lie and ask me how my father was.”

“I knew exactly how your father was.” Dead. Rotting.

He didn’t act like he’d heard me, still hunching into himself and brushing the lock plate with light strokes of his finger. “Or maybe you’d break down and confess what you’d done.”

My mind raced, trying to understand how Theo knew I killed his father.

Had he been in the house when it happened, sitting silently upstairs while I kicked Ted’s head in?

We’d never searched the entire home, too busy burying the body and scrubbing the kitchen clean.

Theo could have watched us pull his father’s body across the lawn from an upstairs window.

Or maybe there were hidden cameras in the house.

A surveillance system we’d never known about.

That would fit in perfectly with Ted’s controlling, paranoid brand.

Theo could’ve come home, found Ted gone, and watched the recording.

But if he’d done that, why hadn’t he just handed the evidence over to the police?

“Why?” I sat up as far as the crawl space allowed, studying the backlit shape of the man who’d returned me to the belly of my every nightmare.

As a teenager, I’d barely looked at Theo Kramer.

He shrank to the edges of the room, existing like a ghost in his father’s house.

When he wasn’t doing chores or eating meals with us, he stayed in his room and there was never any sound of music or videos coming from behind his door.

I imagined him googling flight schedules under a blanket, planning his exit strategy.

That’s what will happen to us , I’d thought.

If my mom never left Ted, we’d become ghosts, too.

When Theo left for college the fall after Ted and Mom got married, I was jealous because he’d gotten away.

I never expected to see Theo Kramer again in my life.

“Why did you track me down? Why are you doing this? You’re not Ted.”

His finger paused on the metal lock plate and his head tilted, considering me.

“Actions have consequences, Kate.”

Those words. They were Ted’s, spoken every time I’d done something that didn’t meet his impossible expectations. Ted, dumping a trash can out on my bed. Ted, locking me in my bedroom after making me lie to the police. Ted, speaking through his hunched, broken son’s mouth.

He flicked the flashlight on again, shining it in my face. I flinched and covered my eyes.

“You should know that by now. If you do something wrong, you get punished. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you have to be in time-out.”

The light danced away from my eyes and traced a path along the walls.

For the first time, I could see the room where I was being held prisoner.

The outside wall was concrete blocks, molded and covered in cobwebs.

The inside wall was wood. The dark panels looked streaky and mottled, but as my eyes adjusted I could see the streaks were claw marks, dug out by fingernails.

Near the top of the wall, four jagged letters had been scratched out.

The light disappeared and the door slammed shut. I barely heard the click of the lock. Crawling over to the wall, I ran my hand over the wood until I could feel the ridges of what my eyes had seen.

THeO.

I wasn’t the only one who’d been put in time-outs.