Page 6 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

Charlie Ashlock’s house was about what you’d expect from a thirty-something single guy on a hobby farm in central Iowa.

The driveway was dirt and potholes, the lawn overgrown, and the side of the house looked like a landfill specializing in broken lawn furniture.

I parked my Lancer Evolution, a bright blue rally spec car with racing harnesses and a rear fin, next to Charlie’s rusted Chevy pickup and killed the engine.

A row of pines created a windbreak from the road, and a few outbuildings were scattered behind the garage.

None looked in use. I didn’t see any animals or farm equipment, no obnoxious ATV collection or any other reason he’d be living out here by himself.

It was a half hour from Iowa City. The only signs of life for the last ten miles were an animal sanctuary and a cluster of wind turbines on the horizon.

“Pretty isolated.” Max echoed my thoughts.

The cloud of dust the Evolution had kicked up was still settling as we walked across the weedy yard to the house.

“You okay?” Max asked.

“Fifty-fifty, remember?”

“I know. You just seemed out of it on the way here.” Max knocked on the door and stood back. “A dream?”

Hardly. I’d barely slept last night. Normally, living Max’s insomniac life would be a reprieve.

No terror or pain leaking into my mind from the lost people of the world, their silent, displaced screams shaking me awake without knowing who or where I was.

I wouldn’t have to spend the morning huddled over my recorded sleep talking, sweating and nauseous as I hunted for clues to bring the lost people back. To find them.

Instead, I’d spent most of last night tossing and turning in bed, wrecking the sheets before giving up and pacing the house in the dark.

Because Eve and I were dating.

Eve wanted to date me .

The rotting drainpipes, the people I couldn’t save, they all sat on the sidelines eating popcorn while the idea of the two of us together, for real, made my brain explode.

I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus. I’d spent more than two years telling myself we were just friends, that she felt close to me because of all we’d been through together, and there was no chance in any reality that someone like Eve would want someone like me. Yet somehow she did.

I barely noticed the road on the way here, let alone Max. I pictured her sleeping off the jet lag and wondered how soon I could text her this morning, what the rules were, and what I could say without scaring her off before we’d even started.

There was no getting into any of that now, because Charlie Ashlock opened the door to his house looking like shit and feeling—from the punch of nerves and misery—a hundred times worse. I could relate.

He invited us in and Max took the lead, introducing me and explaining we were looking for any clues to Kate’s actual identity.

“I told you she didn’t keep much stuff here.” He ran a hand over his beard and pointed somewhere toward the back of the house. “I mean, you can look around, but you should check her place in Iowa City.”

“We will,” I said, moving through the living room, careful not to touch anything. “But this was the last place she was seen.” The last place any traces of her energy might still be lingering.

Charlie gave us a tour of the house, which didn’t take long.

Two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and an eat-in kitchen straight out of the seventies.

There was garbage everywhere. Beer cans, snack wrappers, piles of clothes, a TV remote in the toothbrush cup in the bathroom. Charlie Ashlock wasn’t fine.

The tour ended in the main bedroom, where a mangle of blankets and pillows reminded me of my own barely-slept-in bed.

“Is any of this hers?” I nodded at the closets and Charlie brought over a small, gray duffel bag.

“This is her overnight bag.”

I braced myself. Objects carried impressions of the people who collected them. Not always, and not usually in any helpful way when it came to finding people, but Max liked to be thorough. He wanted as much information as possible, claiming you never knew what could be important.

Kate’s duffel bag had a dull hum, a well-used and comfortably faded feeling.

She’d owned it a while. A pair of jeans with fifty dollars in the pocket and a few shirts were tossed inside, unfolded.

A toiletries bag held the basics—toothbrush, lotion, some mascara, and an almost-empty lip gloss.

She liked the lip gloss. The feeling struck me as I unscrewed the cap and held up the applicator.

It was brighter than she’d worn before. A happy pink. Maybe she could be brighter here, too.

“What is it?”

I started, realizing Charlie and Max were both watching me stare at the lip gloss. I stuffed it away. “She never left this bag behind before, did she?”

“No. She always took it with her when she went back to the city.”

Charlie’s anxiety spiked. The walls of the bedroom started closing in around me, making it hard to breathe. Max immediately took over and suggested looking around outside. Charlie followed us to the door, but got even more panicky in the front yard.

“Which way did she run?” I leaned against the trunk of a giant oak tree and pretended to be interested in the road, trying to untangle myself from Charlie’s erratic stabs of panic and paranoia.

“I don’t know. I mean, she usually went by herself before I woke up.”

“Did you ever take walks together?”

“Yeah, a few times.”

Max sent him inside to get his phone so he could show us their walking route on a map. Then he leaned on the other side of the trunk. “You holding up?”

“He’s falling apart. He doesn’t want us here.”

Max watched Charlie disappear into the house, giving him a cop’s once-over that looked for weapons and weaknesses. “I’m not getting the desperate lover vibe either. He was different last night.”

“He’s hiding something.”

“Related to Kate?”

“I can’t tell.”

“What did you get from the bag?”

I glanced at Max. He already knew the answer, but he needed to hear the confirmation out loud.

“She wouldn’t have left without it.”

Charlie showed us the route he’d walked with Kate, a circuit that started on the road and cut through two fields and along a few other properties. It looked about two miles, a decent jog for someone who didn’t know the area well.

“And you didn’t hear her leave that morning?”

“No.” He shoved his phone away, turning to the driveway and the cars parked there as if for help. “But I sleep pretty hard.”

“What makes you think she went for a run before she left that morning?”

“Her running clothes were gone, and the shoes she ran in. Everything else is still here.”

I pictured it. The sweaty woman returning to the yard. Going straight to her car instead of the house. Not showering. Not grabbing her overnight bag, her money, or her favorite lip gloss.

“Wouldn’t she have come into the house to get her keys?”

He shook his head. “She always kept her keys with her. She had pepper spray on them, and an airhorn.”

“She needed that out here?” Max glanced around the horizon, clocking the total absence of threats. “Were there any problems with neighbors? Anyone she didn’t feel comfortable with?”

“She didn’t know anyone here. Except—” Charlie’s energy stuttered with a sudden memory.

“Except who?”

“No one.” Charlie dodged, avoiding eye contact.

There were three houses along the route, tops. It wouldn’t be hard to talk to everyone who might have seen her that day, and find out whether she’d had contact with any of them. I flashed a glance at Max, letting him know I was on it, and he nodded before shifting tactics.

“Where do you think Kate would go, if she decided to leave?”

Charlie answer was immediate, the most confident thing he’d said all morning. “Somewhere open.”

“Open?”

“She needed big spaces. Fresh air, sunlight. She always hovered near the door in any room. When she stayed over, she had to sleep with all the windows open and the shades up in the bedroom every night. Even if it was pouring rain or cold as hell. One time—” He cut off, panic rising as he choked on whatever memory had bubbled up.

Max’s attention sharpened, but his face remained cop-placid as he switched topics again. “Did she ever talk about other towns she’d been or places she wanted to visit?”

Charlie shook his head. “It was only ever today. Not the past. Not the future. Just now .” He backed away from us, stumbling over exposed tree roots into the sunlight beyond the shade of the branches.

I could feel his heart pounding, the heat of light baking his clammy face.

He felt sick, and an answering wave of bile swelled in my stomach.

“She told me, right at the beginning, that it wouldn’t work.

That she couldn’t commit to a long-term relationship.

” The wind whispered in the oak leaves above me, daring me to look at the sky.

I slumped against the trunk a little more, losing purchase in the bare dirt.

Charlie swallowed and looked right through me, his eyes distilled into bleak shadows in his head.

“She never got it. I could never make her understand. I wasn’t picking out wedding rings or planning our future. All I wanted was her.”

“Well, this just got a lot more complicated.” Max finished jotting notes as we hit the highway and I dropped it to ninety, cutting off a freight truck and darting into the left lane.

Speed was a balm. It washed out my head, obliterating the thoughts and emotions that seeped in and swamped me, emptying it of everything except adrenaline and asphalt.

I swerved around a Dodge Ram to open road, not a car in sight ahead of us, and edged toward a hundred.

Max flipped his notebook closed. “The way he tells it, she was half out the door their entire relationship. It makes sense that she would leave without any good-bye.”

“Not without her bag.”

Max grunted, oblivious to the landscape blurring around us. “But she did. Her car is gone and she left the bag behind.”

After another mile I eased back on the gas. My heart rate evened out and the nausea in my gut receded. I could breathe again.

“Better?” Max asked.

I nodded. “Let’s go through scenarios.”

Fifty-fifty. I was holding up my end.

The first, most obvious, option was that Kate had left. She’d gotten tired of nows with Charlie and headed for the next town to live her cash-only existence under a brand-new pseudonym. And for whatever reason, she’d left some things behind.

The second option was that she hadn’t left voluntarily. Someone or something had scared her into leaving, and she hadn’t had the time or opportunity to take her things with her.

The third option, Max pointed out, was that she hadn’t left at all.

“You think Charlie could’ve killed her?” I asked.

“Yesterday I would’ve said no, but today? He didn’t want us on that property. I’ve never seen anyone sweat that much outside an interrogation room.”

“Why hire us then? Why drop twenty grand on a PI if he killed his girlfriend and ditched her car to make it look like she split?”

“Maybe he wants to seem like he’s trying to find her. To create a narrative.”

“For who?”

“Law enforcement, if a case gets opened or a body turns up.”

“Go to that much trouble and forget to get rid of her possessions? It doesn’t add up, Max.”

“There was something off when he talked about her. Did you notice the past tense? ‘All I wanted was her.’ Like he knows she doesn’t exist anymore.”

People thought I was the dark one, with my horror show dreams and antisocial personality. They never noticed that under his Joe Protector facade, Max Summerlin was always calculating the odds of someone stabbing their grandmother.

I focused on the farm behind us. Now that I had some distance, I could let Charlie’s energy back in and sift through it for clues.

“He’s a mess. Emotional chaos. Panic, fear, but genuine grief, too. He’s broken without her.”

“Could be regret over what he did.”

“You’re one sunshiny motherfucker, you know that?”

“Yeah, yeah. But after today?” Max made another note. “Charlie Ashlock is officially on the suspect list.”