Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  I thought back to the conversation with Julie. What was the song she’d had in her head? An earworm—that was what people called it, wasn’t it? It had been triggered by seeing Brian’s cop car turning up …

  That was it. “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police … woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police …”

  It was a stupidly catchy song. And now it was going around in my head, again and again. Impossible to make it stop, once you thought of it. I was only half-aware of it though; it was playing in the background of my thoughts.

  Oh, I thought.

  Oh, ****.

  I should have gotten it quicker. I mean, old-school hip-hop was my thing. Before the voice anyway, it was my thing. Because of Travis and the other kids who used to hang out at the restaurant.

  “KRS1,” I said, to the voice. “That’s what Julie saw. That license plate. That’s what put the song in her head.”

  “Yes,” said the voice.

  Julie had been pissed with herself; guilty about the earworm, I remembered. She thought it was bad that when Paris was being … whatever happened to her … that she had this old rap song going around in her mind. “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police.” She had thought it was random, had been angry with her own distracted mind, the disrespect of it.

  But it hadn’t been random. When I asked her about the license plate, what was it she said? That there was something “on the tip of her tongue.” Something bothering her. But she didn’t know what it was. Except that her subconscious knew. Her subconscious knew what she had seen, what the link was.

  KRS-One, the rapper from the nineties. Whose biggest hit was a song called … yes … “The Sound of da Police.”

  ****, it was so clear now. Julie had seen the Jeep driving away, and on some level, she had registered the license plate.

  KRS1-GH7.

  And seeing that—that coincidental conjunction of numbers and letters—followed by the sound of an actual police siren, had got KRS-One’s most famous song playing on her mental stereo.

  Holy ****. This was the car Julie had seen. This was the actual car.

  Without any moment in between, any transition, at least that I was aware of, I was running, following the car.

  “It’s turning,” said the voice.

  “I see that,” I said.

  Sure enough, the black car was pulling into the driveway of a house just in front of me. My scribbled map was in my inner eye, like a pilot’s heads-up display, superimposed on the real street, and I realized that this house, this place where the black Jeep was parking, was maybe two or three houses south of the one Paris had gone into.

  And so already I was thinking … I was thinking, It’s just a neighbor …

  But it was like that thought was a thorn I wanted to pull out, something I wanted gone; I still moved, I was still running, the main control for my mind had been wrested from me, the copilot had taken over, and wanted to see who was in that Jeep.

  I mean, I’d told Dwight about the SRT8. And he would have passed on the information, and the police would be looking into it. Horowitz probably, and his team. But they were looking in the wrong place, weren’t they? Checking out the demolition company, probably running the backgrounds of every employee, when they weren’t investigating Paris’s dad.

  “It’s just a neighbor,” said the voice. “Julie saw the car turn because they were leaving the house. That’s all.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  I got to the driveway as a woman got out of the driver’s seat of the car.

  “A woman,” said the voice.

  “I can see that,” I said. I stopped, out of breath. I wasn’t used to exercise.

  The woman was staring at me. I’m not good at judging the age of adults. I guess she was in her thirties? No makeup, hair pulled back. Tight yoga leggings and a zipped-up body warmer. I assumed she had been at the gym. She looked hard. Wiry. Like she spent too much time there.

  “You think this is the killer?” said the voice. “Really?”

  I scanned from her to the car. There was no one else in it.

  “Uh … can I help you?” she said. Blond eyebrows tight together. Concerned.

  “I …”

  “Yes?”

  I breathed deep. I suddenly felt like this was a big mistake. A feeling that was familiar to me.

  “Is your husband home?” I said. I had seen the ring on her finger.

  “No, I’m afraid not. Do you … I mean … what do you want him for?” Worry in her voice now. Is this girl having an affair with my husband? I bet that’s what she was thinking.

  Come on, Cassie, come on.

  “I, uh, my dad owns Donato’s. The pizza place? Your husband left his business card in our prize drawing? Raffle, you know? It’s a big prize. A vacation to Italy. I … My dad sent me to tell him.”

  “Oh.” Still suspicious. But curious too. “Italy, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s a vacation for two.”

  “Well, he’s working in Dubai. He’s in construction project management.”

  I nodded. “We called his phone. I figure that’s why it wouldn’t go through.”

  The woman examined me. “You’re shivering.”

  I glanced down. There were goose bumps on my bare arms.

  “You should get inside,” said the woman. “Storm’s coming.” She wasn’t inviting me into her house. That much was obvious. It was clapboard, but from what I’d seen on Street View, better maintained than the one Paris had gone into. Clean paintwork, no peeling—a new mailbox bolted to a post. Little round trees by the door.

  I looked up. The sky was a bruise now, thin sickly bars of light showing through clouds that were almost black. Pressing down. The air was frigid on my skin. How had I not noticed? I’d been running, I guessed. But also I was in my head, thinking of Paris. Always thinking of Paris.

  And how all hope was gone now.

  Almost all hope.

  “How long has he been in Dubai?” I said. “I mean, I’m trying to figure when he put his card in the jar.”

  “Four months,” said the woman.

  Nope.

  That was it.

  All hope gone.

  “He wasn’t here when Paris … disappeared,” said the voice.

  “I know that, genius,” I said.

  “What?” said the woman.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Sorry. I’m sorry I came. I’ll go now.” I started to walk away, down the street, toward the house, the one where … the one where … I could feel it pulling me, could feel its painful gravity.

  “What about the vacation?” she said to my departing back.

  “Can only give it to him,” I said. “Call us when he gets back.”

  I kept walking.

  “Wait,” said the woman. “Wait. His business card would have his work address. How did you find us?”

  I ignored her. I ignored her and kept walking. I heard her go into the house. Maybe she was going to call the cops. Maybe she didn’t believe my story.

  I didn’t care.

  The license plate was a dead end, and that just left the Houdini Killer and Paris’s dad and there was nothing a seventeen-year-old girl from Jersey could do about either of those.

  I didn’t care about anything anymore.

  We’re coming to the part when I died, now.

  I know, spoiler alert.

  But I’m writing this, aren’t I?

  So maybe that’s spoiler number two.

  The woman was gone now, forgotten.

  The wind was up, whipping from the ocean, leaving a thin layer of freezing water on my skin, but it was okay, I deserved it.

  I took maybe ten more steps, and I was right outside the house. Wooden numbers, one of them with screws missing and tilted on its side, were screwed to the wall.

  3151.

  The number I had written down.

  3151 Seafront Drive.

  I would like to say the house loomed or crouched there, or something that migh
t make it seem evil. But it was just a one-story clapboard house, on a seen-better-days street near the ocean. But where the neighbors had gentrified, here the neglect was obvious. Everything was dirty or worn or peeling or all three. The front yard was overgrown with weeds. There was a little driveway, and the house had windows and a door and all the stuff you would expect. There was a satellite dish on the roof.

  Even now, there was a police tape across the door. But I could see that it was standing open. “Ajar”—the word popped into my head. There was a discordant ringing in my head too, a sickly resonance. Spray painted on the front of the house were the words SICK ****.

  Kids, I realized. Kids had tagged the place, and broken in. Probably they went in there at night, with a Ouija board. Got stoned, drank 40s. I don’t know. Dared one another, maybe. It was the kind of thing kids did.

  I stood there, looking at the open door. I took a step forward, and stopped.

  See, I had imagined her death so many times. I had played scenes in my head, little snippets of film, of video. I had run it through, over and over, different permutations, different scenarios.

  A hammer a knife a rope a gun a bat a chain a—

  But in my imagination, the house was always vague, always diaphanous, a construct of clouds and smoke. And the actors on that stage, Paris and her dad, were not much more solid, their mass leached by the blurred background, the whole thing barely coalescing in my mind, before dissolving into nothing.

  It was never very real, even though I tortured myself with it.

  And if I went in there?

  If I went in there, I wouldn’t find any clues. I was starting to realize that now. I was not Sherlock Holmes, as Dad had said. I wasn’t going to uncover some link to the killer that the crime-scene technicians had somehow missed; I mean, real life just doesn’t work like that.

  I’d known one thing, had worked out one thing, which was that a car turned in front of Julie and so must have come from a drive on the street, and it turned out that, yes, it had, it had come from the neighbors, where an uptight gym-bunny wife whose husband was in Dubai had been driving out to the store or the yoga class or whatever.

  It was nothing.

  And if I went into that house, I would find nothing.

  I would just know where she died; I would have a stage for my worst imaginings, a stage with depth and width and heft and presence. A stage that would make the scenes on it more real.

  I remember being asked if I wanted to see my mom when she was dead. In the funeral home, I mean. And I said yes, because I thought that was what I was supposed to say; I thought I was supposed to say good-bye; I thought my dad would be hurt if I didn’t.

  But she was a waxwork doll; she was empty; she was nothing but skin and makeup that she wouldn’t have chosen herself; and I wish, wish, wish that I had never seen her like that. I wish I had said no.

  Standing outside the house where Paris died, I took a deep breath.

  Then I turned, and walked away.

  I wasn’t going to go in there.

  It was as I neared the next house on the street that I saw it.

  A narrow gap ran down the side of the house. There was a rusting old bike propped there, between the wall of the house and a wooden fence; a couple of trash cans, one fallen over.

  And beyond, in the gray pre-storm light, a sliver of a pier, just a narrow one it seemed like, visible through the thin opening. A rickety old thing, collapsing at the end into the ocean, green with seaweed.

  I didn’t think; I just turned and headed down, past the side of the house, and then I was on a path that ran the length of the backyard. Similar paths came from the other houses and it seemed like at some point the pier must have served the row, a shared resource, for people to moor their boats.

  Now, it teetered into the ocean drunkenly, on sea-slimed pillars, many of its boards broken like smashed teeth. I gazed at it. The water was high; coming up almost to the backyard. Above and around me and out over the ocean, merging with it, indistinguishable from it at the horizon, the sky was a boiling mass of darkness now, tinged with white. To the south, I could see rain slanting down on the water, turning it from smooth glassy expanses and waves to a lo-res pattern of gray dots—blurred; pixelated.

  And there was the old pier, jutting out into the water like a gesture, like an invitation.

  Paris died here.

  It wasn’t the voice. It was a conviction, deep inside me. I could see her, being dragged down the backyard from the house, then along the pier, screaming maybe, or maybe unconscious. Feet trailing. Hands under her arms. Pulled like a slack puppet down the length of the wooden jetty, bump, bump, bump, her feet over the joints, to the end. Weighed down with rocks. With chains. I don’t know.

  And pushed into the ocean.

  My body was moving now with no control, no input from me, and I was out over the churning water before I really did any thinking at all, over the chop and swell of it, the inky darkness.

  The planks were slippery. I walked carefully, gingerly, finding what purchase I could among the seaweed, slicked by the water, which was rising up in a spray all around me, a rain that came from below.

  And then the rain came from above.

  Just like that:

  No warning, no boom of thunder, just one moment no rain and the next the skies opened like the jaws of those grabbers you see in movies at garbage heaps, dumping the contents of all those roiling clouds on the ocean, on the pier, on me.

  It was almost full dark, the sun gone; you would barely know it was day.

  Instantly I was soaked to the skin. The rain was colossal, unbelievable, not single discrete points falling through the air but simply a wall of water, everywhere. Then there did come a flash, shocking white light, illuminating the world—I saw the pier in X-ray relief, the house to my right, a skeleton structure, pale in the darkness; even the grass behind me and the grains of the wood under my feet, the eyes, the whorls, all flooded with light, monochrome.

  And—

  Black again.

  One,

  Two,

  Three,

  Four—

  Boom.

  The thunder didn’t roll over me, like people say, it detonated around me, seeming to come from just outside my ears, punching me, shivering my foot on the slippery pier, making me lunge forward to keep my balance, shaking now with cold too, the water plastering the clothes to my skin.

  “Well, this was a smart move,” said the voice.

  I ignored it. I kept on moving, slowly, treading oh so carefully, the soles of my Converses sliding on the treacherous surface. The ocean boiled beneath me, frothing, leaping, as if excited to finally let go of everything it was pretending to be. As if letting out the predator within.

  One plank.

  Two planks.

  Three planks.

  I did it like that, three at a time, counting again and again.

  FLASH.

  The whole world lit up, full black and white, contrast whacked up to maximum, and then went black again, and three seconds later, the explosion of thunder shook my eardrums again.

  I kept going.

  One plank.

  Two planks.

  Three and then I was there. Waves were crashing into the woodwork below me now.

  I was at the end of the pier, or at least the end of the walkable pier, because the rest was in the ocean, bare struts, the walkway that was held up by them long since fallen into the water and washed away.

  I looked down into the shifting murk. Water was still falling from the sky, baptismal, epic in its scale, the day pretty much midnight black now, lightning occasionally floodlighting everything, this whole stage for … what?

  What was I doing here?

  “A very good question,” said the voice.

  And then I saw it.

  I looked down, and there in the water was a white shape, and I leaned closer. My toes were over the edge of the wooden structure, and for a second I thought of Paris standing at
the edge of the pier, just before your truck arrived below, and how she thought we were playing Dare, how she thought the game was to get close to the edge, to play with death, and I’m seeing Paris in my mind’s eye, losing her balance, nearly falling and then—

  FLASH.

  I was seeing Paris below me. Her face, looking up at me through the water, it was her body down there, floating, I knew it; her hair was billowing around her face, haloing it, her beautiful black hair framing her skin, the paleness of it, spreading around her, and her eyes were looking up at me but seeing nothing.

  Boom.

  I was so startled—though not afraid, never afraid of Paris—that I took a step back, and the plank cracked beneath my foot, and then the whole thing must have been rotten because the next one along broke too, and then there was a creaking that I heard even over the thunder that was just echoing out of the sky, fading, and the pier fell away beneath me, and I was weightless, just for a moment.

  Then

  I

  fell.

  And as I fell, I twisted, or something, I had no sense of the orientation of my own body or what had collapsed, whether it was just part of the pier or all of it, or even if I was facing down or up, and anyway the important thing is my head smashed against some object, hard, I mean smashed hard and the thing was hard too, and stars burst out of the storm-curtained sky, where there was nothing but rain clouds, and I blacked out.

  And then I was in the freezing water, plunging under, feeling it enveloping my body and head, my eyes half-open so the world was suddenly darkness and bubbles.

  I tried to swim up to the surface, but I was too weak, and my head was nothing but agony now, a sensation in place of an object, a sensation of gripping, vice-like pain.

  My eyes were still open though, so I could see up through the thin layer of water that was going to drown me—it doesn’t take much water to drown you—and I could see that the clouds had tattered, just for a second, the wind whipping open a vortex in the sky, exposing for a moment the glow of the half moon and the icy sparkle of the stars.

  I looked around me. Half the pier was gone, and I was in deep water. I turned toward the beach. But it wasn’t a beach.