Page 5 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

Twenty thousand dollars sat on the desk between us. I’d counted it.

I’d texted Jonah to stop into the office after his assignment. By the time he got here it was after ten o’clock and the other businesses in the strip mall had closed up shop ages ago.

Jonah paced the same track Charlie Ashlock had worn into the floor earlier tonight. His hair fell into his face as he shook his head at things I couldn’t see. “You said you weren’t going to pull this shit again.”

“I know, but we need more paying clients.”

“This case sounds like a needle in a haystack.”

He didn’t know the half of it. I’d given him the basics, but I was still easing him past the fact that I’d broken business Rule #3, mostly by pointing at the big pile of cash.

“We’ve got the time. You said you got enough footage for the Jensen case.”

“Yeah.” He pulled a hand through his hair, still pacing. He seemed edgier than he normally did after fieldwork. Which was probably my fault.

“Great. I’ll call her on Monday and wrap that one up. And you haven’t had any dreams lately.”

He didn’t disagree and I was doing everything I could to keep my energy light and positive. Jonah picked up a lot from the people nearest to him. In the last twenty years I’d become the poster boy for Good Vibes Only, at least when I needed to.

“What about Nicole?” Jonah asked.

“She’s completely happy.” Nicole Short was the HR manager of ACT, one of the biggest employers in Iowa City.

They administered standardized tests to assess high school students’ readiness for college.

My wife, Shelley, knew Nicole from book club and had spent countless unpaid hours talking up the agency to her.

Six months ago Nicole hired us to perform a background and due diligence check on a single new hire.

It was a test, obviously. We killed it, bending over backward to deliver everything she asked for and then some.

Nicole was thrilled and ACT quickly became our steadiest income stream.

“I had coffee with her the other day. She said they might be on a brief hiring freeze soon. So we’ll have even more time for this case. ”

Jonah grunted. “And you panicked and grabbed for the first shady stack of cash you could find.”

“Technically it found us, not the other way around.” I scooped up said stack and locked it in our safe. “Let’s talk over beer.”

Jonah and I spent happy hour in one of two locations: his deck overlooking the Mississippi on the eastern edge of the state, or my backyard fire pit. Since my suburban Coralville neighborhood was five minutes from the office, we generally ended up at my place.

When we got there, Jonah grabbed beers from the garage fridge and headed out back.

I stopped inside first. Garrett was already asleep, his lanky fourteen-year-old limbs hanging off his twin bed and every light in the room turned on.

I switched off lamps, screens, and devices before heading to our bedroom, where Shelley was rubbing lotion on her legs and reading a book.

I leaned in to kiss her. “He barely fits on that bed anymore.”

She made a noise of agreement. “I saw a full-size frame on Facebook Marketplace the other day. Just needed some paint.”

“And a mattress.”

“Which would be three hundred dollars, delivered, but I’m waiting for an end-of-season sale.” She smiled at me. “How did the new client meeting go?”

Nightly check-in time. Before I left the force, things were rough.

It was early-pandemic. I’d been investigating a case that spiraled out of control and almost got me killed in the process.

Again. Shelley had reached her limit with me and I got it.

I didn’t just need a new start in my career.

Our marriage needed it, too. So, for the past year and a half, we’d been seeing a therapist on Zoom and this was one of her suggestions.

Checking in with each other every night.

Taking time to share what was important.

Being honest. And honestly? I sucked at it.

“The meeting was interesting. Jonah’s out back. We’re going to talk it over.”

“So you took the client without asking him.”

I sighed. Calling me on my bullshit was one of my wife’s superpowers.

“He gave us twenty thousand dollars, Shel.”

Shelley whistled. “Damn. Good call.”

“But it’s complicated.”

“You’ll figure it out.” She rubbed my arm. “And Garrett needs a new bed.”

Shelley’s day at school was fine. She showed me a picture of one of her student’s final exams with the D+ circled and a comment underneath that read: I studied this time so I think I should get at least a B.

Points for effort. That was the question all around today.

I headed out back where Jonah already had a fire going.

It was probably unnecessary in early June, where the days were breezy and already edging toward hot, but I preferred a fire to the glare of the porch light any day.

Garrett’s baseball equipment had been tossed in a heap on the grass, nearly squashing Shelley’s lilies.

Behind the snaps and pops of the fire, frogs called to each other in the distance.

Spring was giving way to summer in Iowa.

“Shelley says hi.”

Jonah tipped his beer in reply and added another log to the fire. I dropped into an Adirondack chair and cracked open the can sitting on its arm.

“Hear me out on this.”

“I heard the pitch already.” Jonah sat down across from me. “It’s your turn to listen.”

I nodded.

“We’re partners in this. We’ve always been partners. But you’re trying to pull seventy percent of the weight. You pay the bills and send the invoices and file the taxes. You meet with the clients. You do all the talking. And I know you’re doing it because you think I can’t.”

“I don’t think you can’t.”

“Shut up. I’m still talking.”

I nodded again and he stared at the fire. It took a lot of willpower not to point out or think too hard about his lack of talking. He shook his head, having conversations I couldn’t hear, and shoved the hair out of his face before leaning forward.

“I knew you would do this, Max. I knew going in that it would be like this. And I was fine with it for a while, because you’re better at all this stuff. You’re better at life than I am.”

“It helps to have a really thick skull,” I cut in.

“I want to change. I want this to be a real partnership. Fifty-fifty all the way. I don’t know if I can do that, but I need to try. To find out if it’s possible.”

“I shouldn’t have taken the client without talking to you.”

“No, you fucking shouldn’t have.”

“Fifty-fifty.” I toasted him across the flames, trying to project confidence with absolutely no idea what an equal partnership with Jonah would look like.

I took on everything I could carry, in every situation.

It’s how I was built. Nightly check-ins and compromises and handing responsibility off to someone who could barely shoulder the load he already carried went against my entire identity.

We’d never talked about the work we each did for the business before, but I’d known Jonah long enough to know he’d been thinking about it for a while.

That it bothered him. And he wouldn’t have brought it up if he didn’t need things to change.

So, all right, we were going to try. Fifty-fifty, whatever that meant.

Jonah slumped back in the chair, like the speech had cost all his energy, and took a long drink. “So we don’t know her name. Sounds like one of our cases.”

It really did. Usually, when Jonah dreamed about someone, we picked as many details as possible out of his head and compared them to active missing persons reports.

Once we had a match, all the legal and demographic information came with it.

The person’s background—their life up to that point—was there for us to use.

We didn’t have any of that with Charlie Ashlock’s girlfriend.

“He never knew her last name. Asked her once, and she said it wasn’t important. Her first name—he’s pretty sure—is Kate.”

Jonah groaned. “Bills. Credit cards. Driver’s license. He never saw any of that?”

“Nope. And she paid for everything in cash.”

Jonah took a swig of beer. “They have that in common.”

“She was flying way under the radar. She’d only been in town a few months according to him, rented a room in Iowa City, started dating him, and then vanished.”

“What makes him sure about the name?”

“She went somewhere a few weeks ago. Gone the whole day, which was out of her routine. Apparently most days she either worked or spent with him. Didn’t tell him where she was going.

When she came back, he noticed a box of Milk Duds in her bag.

It had a heart drawn on it with the word Kate inside the heart. ”

Jonah drained his beer and chucked the can onto the grass. “Our source is stale caramel?”

“He said she kept the box for a few days, even though it was empty. Unlike her to keep trash around.”

“Does he still have anything of hers?”

“Unclear.”

Jonah nodded, staring at the flames. “Then we make a house call.”