Page 9 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

Fields met the horizon in every direction.

The newly planted corn shimmered in the sun, stalks still young enough that the dark tilled earth was visible between the rows.

It was a pattern, hypnotizing us as we jogged along the edge—green, brown, green, brown, with the flawless blue sky arching overhead—a world distilled into color, breath, and pungent earth.

It was beautiful. I wanted to die.

“Jesus.” I stumbled, bending in half to brace my hands on my legs. My lungs felt like burning pulp.

Eve ran a few paces ahead, then circled back, grinning. She wasn’t even out of breath. The only concession she’d made to this torture was unzipping her running jacket, baring her stomach beneath a shiny sports bra. If I wasn’t already dying, her clothing choices could’ve done the job.

“Don’t,” I said as she approached. “I don’t want to hear about a single study right now.” The benefits of running could go fuck themselves.

When I called Eve on my way home last night, I’d just wanted to hear her voice and find out how her day went.

She didn’t have any more summer classes to teach, and the Australia trip research was winding down.

I still hadn’t figured out what to do for our official first date.

I was debating between dinner on Joan —Eve’s high-tech weather plane—or ice skating at Coral Ridge.

When I mentioned the new case and how I’d be retracing Kate’s jogging route this morning, Eve invited herself along.

It was an excellent opportunity, she reasoned, to try running as a form of therapy.

I agreed and she threw my heart into my throat by saying, “Perfect. It’s a date. ”

Maybe I hadn’t pictured dying on our first date, but investigating a missing person felt undeniably on-brand for us.

She slipped into step next to me as we walked to the edge of the field, where a county highway bisected the world. The sky stretched huge and unbroken over us, giving Eve the unobstructed views she always craved, the ability to see what was coming. Hands on her hips, she swiveled in each direction.

“Which way did they go from here?”

“East,” I waved, pathetically grateful that it was slightly downhill with the wind at our backs.

We were taking the route Charlie had shown us.

It started out on the street and cut through two fields to the road we’d come out on now.

A mile or so east of here was a creek that wound back to the edge of Charlie’s property.

I could see two houses from here, which meant two houses could see us and might’ve seen Kate if she jogged this way on the morning of her disappearance.

We found the first homeowner in his barn, half buried in the motor of a tractor. He didn’t recognize Kate’s picture. Max had cropped a selfie of her and Charlie to show just her. She was slightly out of focus, facing the camera with a reluctant smile.

“Seen a woman jogging out this way a time or two. Didn’t recognize her.” He wiped his face with a handkerchief and asked for an impact wrench. I handed it to him. He was telling the truth. More concerned with the motor than the missing woman, but honest.

“Any chance you saw her two weeks ago? June 7?”

“Don’t know as I did.”

Eve stepped forward. “It was an especially windy morning. Twenty-five-mile-an-hour gusts. You might’ve been worried about crop abrasion.”

It clicked for him and he smiled, bouncing the impact wrench in Eve’s direction.

“Sure, I remember. Walked the property to see how the fields were faring.” He paused, thinking.

“Seems I did see her out that day. T-shirt looked like a sail in the wind, ponytail getting blown all over. I waved to her, but she didn’t see me. ”

He confirmed the route and her direction matched the one we were retracing, causing a hum of satisfaction to emanate from Eve. We were on the right track.

We left the farmer to his engine and headed toward the other property, falling silent. The sun baked the strip of pavement, unseasonably warm for June, and the wind made the young leaves of the planted fields rustle, whispering around us. Eve’s energy shifted into a more solemn, questioning tone.

“Is it hard?”

I glanced at her profile. “Maybe. Be more specific.”

“Walking into a barn with a picture of a missing woman.”

I’d met Eve while searching for my niece, Celina. I’d dreamed about her bound and bleeding in a barn and had driven myself to the brink of sanity searching every barn in the state trying to find her. In the end, she wasn’t in any of them, at least not by the time we found out what happened to her.

“Yes and no.” There were certain triggers.

It had taken months of seeing the Celina Investigations sign on the office door before I could breathe normally reading it.

The right pitch of a squeaky barn door, a voice that sounded like Celina, gunshots.

Any of it could send me spiraling into a panic attack or drifting into an ocean of sucking grief.

It helped, though, to remember other things.

Her sweaty childhood hand slotted in mine, the convictions of the players in the drug cartel she helped destroy, the bald shock and rage on her murderer’s face in the second before he died. I took comfort where I could.

“I’ve been doing some version of this since I was twenty years old. It’s familiar, the only thing I know. And it’s easier with Kate, because—”

“—you haven’t dreamed about her.”

I nodded as we turned into the gravel driveway of the other property.

It did make it easier, not being haunted by the missing person, not feeling their desperation or fear tainting every interview, shredding the edges of every clue, stretching each step in the case as taut as a wire.

But this time I almost wished I could dream about her.

Kate—the woman with half a name, no family, friends, or connections, who’d trod through life so deliberately lightly she hadn’t left a single footstep behind.

The dreams at least gave Max and me places to start looking.

With Kate, we had an evasive, broken ex-boyfriend and a Milk Duds box.

I looked behind us at the road, the last confirmed place Kate—or whoever she was—had been seen. “Would you go for a casual morning jog before you abandoned your life?”

Eve considered the question and the buzz of her analysis was as comforting as white noise. I drifted closer.

“I might,” she decided. “It’s good for your circulation, especially if you’re planning to be sedentary for an extended period, such as driving a long distance.”

“It just seems—”

“Mundane,” she finished.

“I was going to say hellish.”

“No, you weren’t.” She laughed and moved into step with me, shoulder to shoulder, the backs of our hands brushing each other as we crossed the weedy front yard.

There was no sidewalk, just a path of worn dirt through the dandelions and crabgrass.

We hadn’t even gotten to the cracked concrete slab in front of the house before the screen door banged open into the siding.

“I’m not buying any.”

A white guy, late seventies or early eighties, with a face that could double as a russet potato, barred the entrance to the house.

He wore a bathrobe and sweatpants. A TV remote stuck out of his pocket.

Eve stopped walking and a twinge of unease pinged through her.

She didn’t show it, though. All she gave away was a calm, professional smile. “We’re not selling anything.”

“What do you want?”

I showed him the picture and explained our visit. He barely looked at the photo, but he didn’t have to. His reaction was visceral as it echoed through me. Recognition, anger, a hint of greasy fear: he knew who Kate was.

“Did you see her that morning?”

“No.” He started to shut the door.

I stepped forward, bracing against the wave of toxicity spewing out of this guy. “Did you ever talk to her when she was out on a morning run?”

Yes . The unspoken answer came instantly, making the anger inside him swell.

“No.” He slammed the door in my face and locked it.

Eve already had her phone out and was photographing everything from the house to the tilting outbuildings to the view of the road.

From this vantage point, russet man would’ve been able to see Kate coming as she cut through the field.

He would’ve had plenty of time to intercept her if he had a mind to.

And he had.

“Put it away.”

Eve swiveled back to the property. “But I haven’t gotten—”

“He’s watching.”

She didn’t ask how I knew, didn’t demand her usual reams of evidence when I said something that couldn’t be observed by normal people.

She turned toward the road before startling into me with a jolt of surprise.

I steadied her and followed her gaze to a small trailer off to the side of the house.

A face peered out from a dirty window. Long, blond hair, round cheeks, pale eyes that followed our every move.

But it wasn’t the face that sent a current of fear coursing through Eve and bleeding into me.

It was the shotgun barrel the girl aimed through the window.