Page 8 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

“Secrets will kill a relationship.”

The woman pushed the photos back across the table and I tucked them into a folder that held a flash drive, our final invoice, and a comprehensive report on her husband’s infidelity.

The pictures Jonah had taken of the guy at the hotel turned out perfectly.

Full face, easily identifiable. Thanks to his complete idiocy it was some of the easiest money we’d made yet.

Or at least the easiest we’d worked for.

“He doesn’t have as many secrets now.”

The woman signaled the waiter and ordered a complicated coffee that might or might not have had alcohol in it.

She’d never met me at the office, preferring to conduct our check-ins at various five-star restaurants around town.

Today she wore a crisp, pale pantsuit and oversized sunglasses that surveyed the restaurant’s flowery patio.

“If you need any continuing assistance, we offer asset identification services, too.”

She waved a manicured hand. “I handle all our finances. He doesn’t own a dollar I don’t know about.”

“I’m sorry he’s put you in this situation.”

The waiter set a mug in front of her and she stared at the froth swirled into a flower design. This place loved flowers. The folder with its incriminating photos sat next to it, closed. “Are you married, Mr. Summerlin?”

“Yes.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? You can’t remember how anything started.

It all becomes a series of moments, petty grievances and stupid fights, silence that lasts for days, until you don’t know who stopped talking first. Who turned away quicker.

And you stop recognizing yourself. You don’t know where the coldness has come from, and the words coming out of your mouth don’t sound like yours.

You slip further and further inside yourself, like a voyeur to a life you can’t stop from happening. Until it’s too late to change it.”

Tears slipped underneath the sunglasses. She didn’t touch the coffee, didn’t lift her head. I awkwardly offered her a napkin, wishing I’d ended this meeting five minutes ago.

“You changed it now. You’re changing your own life, finding a new way forward.” I hoped it sounded like something our therapist would say. This wasn’t my territory. Jonah was the one who understood feelings, who could see beneath the surface of things.

She ignored the offered napkin and downed her coffee like a shot before pulling out a checkbook. “Do you keep secrets from your partner, Mr. Summerlin?”

I fumbled, unsure how to respond. With a flourish, she ripped the check out and pushed it across the table. The zeros at the end of the number distracted me from the conversation at hand.

“Of course you do. We all do. But trust me, they’re going to find out eventually. It’s up to you how they do. And that’s the key. That’s how they’ll know what to do about your secrets.”

The client’s parting words stayed with me all afternoon as I typed variations of ‘Kate’ into the Tracers database.

Catherine. Kathryn. Katrina. Katie. Katelyn.

Assuming it even was her first name. Could we trust the source?

A name scrawled on a Milk Duds box wasn’t the least reliable piece of information I’d ever worked off of, but it was damn close.

The missing woman never told Charlie her name was Kate.

She hadn’t given up that secret. But when he found it on a box of candy he’d immediately recognized it as truth.

Would he have felt the same way if the information came from her?

Would she have stayed with him, if she could’ve trusted him with her identity?

Jonah worked on the other side of the room, depositing the client’s check and going through our monthly expenses looking like someone was forcing warm keg beer down his throat.

“Kathleen?” he suggested. I typed it in. Zero hits.

“Maybe we need to widen the geographical area.” I expanded the search area and dates.

We’d decided not to start looking for where she’d gone, but where she’d come from, tracing her movements backward to find her actual identity.

There was also a stronger possibility that a missing person’s case had been opened in her hometown, and although we’d promised not to involve the police in our investigation, we had no problem pulling as much information from them as we could.

Her license plates were from Illinois, according to Charlie, although he couldn’t remember the actual plate number.

He thought there might have been a three in it.

So helpful. We’d been running under the assumption that she was from Illinois, but maybe she’d just picked up the car there.

Her accent, according to Charlie, was as neutral as a native Iowan, which placed her original home somewhere in the lower Midwest. “I’m going to check Indiana.

Maybe Ohio. Let’s assume she picked up the car on her way west.”

“Check Catriona, too.”

“You sensed it?”

“No, Google says it’s a variation of Kate.”

Expanding the search yielded more hits under various names.

I eliminated some based on age, others on ethnic identity.

By the end of the session, I had two possible Kates who’d disappeared in the last three years and looked enough like the photo Charlie had shown me that I texted their pictures to him.

I didn’t see a huge resemblance in either one, but wanted to show Charlie we were working, earning the brick of cash I’d deposited at the bank earlier today.

Then I turned my searches on him.

Charlie Ashlock was a much easier target to investigate.

A lifelong Iowan, he’d graduated high school in Cedar Rapids, got an associate’s degree in computer science, and worked a variety of jobs, never staying anywhere longer than a few years.

He’d bought the hobby farm five years ago.

A lot of mildly late payments on his credit report, no arrests, no marriages.

He had a Facebook page, but the only posts were from his mother tagging him in random memes and old photos of him and his siblings.

A bigger kid even then, Charlie hung at the back of the pictures, letting his brother and sister pull faces and absorb the camera’s attention.

His profile said he was single but it also said he lived in Cedar Rapids, a home at least ten years out of date.

“Still trying to pin her disappearance on him?”

Jonah dropped the paid-in-full invoice on my desk, scanning the social media page over my shoulder.

I pushed away from the desk, rubbing my eyes. “Nothing violent in his past, at least on paper. The guy’s a slacker, coasting through life at the fringes.”

“Until she showed up. And changed everything.”

“Is that what you got from him?”

Jonah looked queasy and started pacing the office. “Yeah.” He picked up a mug and set it down without drinking it. “I don’t know.”

“Jonah.”

He kept pacing, avoiding me.

“Did you have a dream last night?”

He shook his head.

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing.” He stopped at the storefront window, looking blankly at the curb outside.

“How’s Eve?”

He whipped around, shrugging and making an incoherent noise. Bingo. The investigator in me wanted to press on the crack until it broke wide open. Thank god the friend in me had enough decency to get another cup of coffee and wait out the silence. Another tactic, sure, but a friendlier one.

Eventually, he dropped into one of the client chairs and buried his face in his hands. I stirred cream into my coffee and kept my head as blank as possible. It looked like he had enough on his plate already.

“We’ve decided to start dating. Officially.”

“Congrats, man. That’s great.”

“It is, but I’m freaking out, Max. When have I ever had a girlfriend?”

“Never.”

“Exactly. I have no idea how to do this. Where am I supposed to take her? What do we do on a first date? Does it matter? I told her I’d think of something, and everything I think of is the dumbest, worst—like, what, a restaurant?

A hike? A picnic? No, I can’t take her on a picnic when her dead husband proposed to her on a picnic. What am I even . . . ?”

He shot out of the chair, back to pacing and running his hands through his hair. I hadn’t seen Jonah this bothered in—well, ever. Withdrawn, depressed, anxious, suicidal, sure, but never like he was about to implode with frustrated, incoherent energy. It was, frankly, adorable.

He glared, immediately picking up my mood. “Happy I can amuse you.”

“Okay, for the record,” I tried to keep the smile off my face, “Shelley thinks you’ve been sleeping together for at least a year.”

“I’ve never even kissed her.”

“Why not?” It was obvious to literally everyone who looked at them that they made sense. Opposites attract. Maybe a scientist and a psychic were more opposite than usual, but the principle held up. And Jonah had been gone on her since the day they met.

“Because I’m barely functional. I sleep in bathtubs.

I need enough medicine to tranquilize a horse in order to get through a regular day.

And beyond that, I can’t be in the same room as her without sensing every idea and feeling in her head.

I’m a mental stalker. There’s no restraining order for that, Max.

No consent on either side. If we do this, she’ll have no personal life, no boundaries. ”

“Do you hear me complaining?”

“That’s different.”

“How?” I pushed back in my chair, sipping coffee. “We’ve been friends for what, twenty-some years? And we lived together for the first five. The only time it ever got weird with you in my head was when I had a girl over.”

“That’s why I left the apartment whenever you brought someone home.”

“Exactly.” I remembered the first time it happened, making out on the couch with some co-ed and startling apart when Jonah stalked out of his bedroom and straight through the front door.

The girl didn’t understand why I started laughing, got mad when I wouldn’t explain it, and left a few minutes later.

“You knew when I needed space and you always gave it to me. You’ll do the same for Eve.”

He dropped into his chair again, spent. I didn’t wonder. The mental gymnastics he’d been doing looked exhausting.

“Look.” I set the coffee down and leaned forward.

“I’m lucky to have a partner who already knows what I’m thinking.

It’s a lot less work.” My life would be a hell of a lot easier if Shelley could read minds, too.

No more communication exercises or nightly check-ins.

“Eve’s already been in your life for what, two years?

She’s not an idiot. She knows exactly what she’s signing up for. ”

“Wait.” Something occurred to me. “Is this why you wanted to take on more work?”

He sighed and I knew I’d nailed it.

“I thought if I could handle more here . . .” He pulled out the notes I’d taken on Kate’s movements and her life in Iowa City, staring at the paper like the missing woman would appear between the scrawled details.

“Tomorrow morning I’m going back to Charlie’s place.

I’ll run the route she might’ve taken on her last morning, see if I can interview any neighbors. ”

I picked up my coffee and refreshed my search engine. “Good. I’ll go to her work and talk to her boss. See if I can dig up anything there.”

We dove back into our own rabbit holes for a while. I tried more variations of Kate, checked more years, more states. Nothing popped. It wasn’t until we were locking up the office for the day that Jonah asked.

“You honestly think I can do this? That I can be in a relationship?”

I wanted to say yes, to clap him on the back and tell him of course he could.

After all, if I’d managed to keep a marriage mostly together for fifteen-plus years, who the hell couldn’t?

But Jonah had never let a single person into his life further than he’d let me.

He’d have to change a lot of things to make room for Eve.

And even if he could do that, I still knew better than anyone, his wasn’t the easiest life to witness.

The worst part of having a psychic best friend was being unable to bullshit him. Reading all the hesitation in my head, he nodded and went to his car. “I’ll check in tomorrow after the farm.”

“Jonah.”

He shot me a wave and disappeared into his car.

It haunted me the whole way home.

Could a person ever really change? Could Jonah? Could I?

That was the question, the central problem I’d revolved around for the past year and a half.

I stared it in the face in therapy, at the office, at the dinner table, and in bed at night, wondering if it was even possible.

Can you rewire a forty-year-old brain? Can you unlearn instincts and habits you’ve built over a lifetime until they’re second nature?

I was used to taking charge, being the provider, the authority, the buffer who stood between the people I loved and the world.

I knew how to do that. I knew who I was when I did.

This new Max—business owner, private investigator, collaborative partner—felt like someone I was impersonating. Imposter syndrome, the therapist called it. I was fumbling through a performance of my own life.

Could I change?

I was the guy who asked the questions, not the one who had the answers.

But I needed this one to be yes. I needed to know this new life could work.

I was doing the nightly check-ins with Shelley.

And yeah, I’d taken a possibly shady client without talking to Jonah first, but I came clean quick and we were investigating this together, all the way.

I pulled into the driveway with conviction settling in my gut as solidly as last year’s leaves clogged dirt and debris into the rain gutters overhead.

If Jonah had the balls to change his life, so did I.