Whisper to Me (7 page)

Silence.

“You want me to find out who did this to you? You want revenge?”

Silence.

“I think I’ll just turn the TV on, watch a movie.” I held my breath. Usually if I said something like this, the voice would tell me to slap myself or walk into a wall. I had done that a few times, walked into the wall, for considering anything that might be construed as entertainment.

Silence, still.

I sat there in wonder. The voice was a ghost, murdered by the Houdini Killer, and she wanted me to make it right. That was why she appeared after the foot, that was why she was so angry, that was why she’d picked me. Hell, I guessed it was probably
her
foot.

I knew what I had to do now.

I had to find the Houdini Killer. If the police couldn’t do it, maybe I could. People who hurt other people always get away with it, don’t they? That was what I’d wanted to tell Mr. Nakomoto.

Well.

Maybe not.

IMPORTANT CAPS-LOCK SPOILER:

I was not right thinking that the voice was a ghost.

I was very, very wrong.

I’d already read a lot about the Houdini Killer and what it amounted to was:

0.

Absolutely nothing.

No one knew anything because there were no bodies, only a foot—thanks to me—and nothing to link the girls, except their work.

Since the foot, of course, there were some more conjectures: most of the stuff online—the voice was cool with me researching online as long as I didn’t go on Facebook or whatever—agreed that the killer must have dumped the bodies at sea, and that was how come the foot ended up on the beach. Just like Dad said.

So they cross-referenced the dead women’s client lists and the membership lists of the strip clubs, where they could, with people who owned boats. But they didn’t find anything.

I know this because:

I was in the kitchen with Dad one morning, and I asked him, as casual as I could, if his buddies at the police station knew anything about the foot and the whole maritime-burial theory.

“You want to know what the cops are doing about finding this guy?”

“Uh … yeah.”

He looked at me with uncharacteristic concern. “You afraid?”

“Of the killer?”

“Yes.”

“I guess,” I said.

He nodded. “Thing like that, finding a foot. That’ll screw you up. Make you … struggle.”

NOTICE THE CODE WORD? The one people use about people with mental problems, as previously discussed? I didn’t, at the time. I wish I had. It meant that he had spotted that something was up with me. It should have been blinking with red lights, that word, flashing.

“Hmm,” I said, instead of noticing.

“I’ll ask at the restaurant,” he said. “See what the latest is.”

“Oh, okay, thanks, Dad,” I said.

“Don’t let it get to you so much, Cass,” he said.

ANOTHER WARNING SIGN I MISSED. People were already talking.

“I won’t, Dad.”

“Just, you know, keep safe,” he said. “Keep sensible. Don’t go out after dark. Keep dressing sensibly.”

“Dressing sensibly?” I asked.

“Yeah. You know. Like, not provocative.”

“Provocative?” I probably shouldn’t have been getting into an argument, but I couldn’t help it.

He blinked. “You see the photo in the paper of the last girl who went missing? See what she was wearing in that photo, taken just before she left the club? Looking like that, I’m not surprised that—”

“That someone decided to kill her?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m—”

“Dad,” I said. “This is called victim blaming. Girls don’t ask to be attacked. Everyone should be able to wear what they want without creepy guys going after them.”

“I know that, but—”

“And men are not animals. I mean, shouldn’t we expect them to control themselves if they see a girl in a short skirt?”

“Yes, Cassie,” he said with a sigh. “You’re right. But I’m not victim blaming. I’m protecting my daughter.”

“Really?” I said. “Because mostly I thought you just played with bugs.”

Silence.

A long silence.

But he didn’t leave. Just stood there outside the door, on the top step, the garage below us, a motion-activated light above us that gave harsh halogen light and always came on automatically. Moths circling. The sound of a distant car engine, and way under it, ever present, the hushing noise of the sea.

“Cass, I—”

“What?”

He swallowed. “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t be late for school.”

Of course, he never did find out anything at the restaurant. If he even asked.

“Slap yourself again.”

I slapped my face; it stung.

“Again.”

“Please. Please, no more.”

“Oh, okay, don’t. Let’s go play on the slot machines instead.”

JUST KIDDING.

Can you guess what the voice actually said? Yes! One hundred points to you. It said: “No. Do it.”

So I did.

I was in my bedroom in the apartment, sitting on the bed. Sunday before the last week of school. Outside it was getting hot, bright sun in the blue sky. A few scraps of cloud. The town was getting busier already. The workers for the piers had started arriving too. I even recognized a couple of them when I saw them walking down the street. Men and women who had been running concession stands since I was a kid. What they did in the winter, I didn’t know.

I went across to the main house. Dad was in his insect room, standing over a tank filled with tree bark and leaf mulch. He beckoned me in. I went over and stood by him. Shirtsleeves pushed up, he lifted a box. The tattoo of the seal on his arm seemed to swim as he moved. It was weird—he’d spent his whole life in the ocean, diving, and he lived in a town by the Atlantic, but he never went down to the beach anymore, not since he’d taught me to swim. Just played with his bugs in his study.

“I called your cell,” he said.

“Yeah? I must have missed it.” This was not true. I had taken the battery out and hidden the thing under the seat in the apartment. When you hear a voice that isn’t there, a disembodied voice, a cell phone becomes an unsettling object.

He sighed. “Okay.” He opened the lid of the box, which had holes punched in the side of it, and used tweezers to gently lift out a wriggling millipede. The thing was the length of his finger, bright pinkish red with spikes on its back, huge, like something out of a horror movie.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“
Desmoxytes purpurosea
,” said Dad. “People call this one the dragon. Because of the red. From Uthai Thani province.” He deposited it on a branch, then reached into the box and took out two more.

“It’s gross,” I said.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

This was a script we followed. But then I went off-script because I realized he was holding his arm kind of funny. His hand and wrist were swollen. Then I saw the purple bloom around his eye. “You get in a fight?” I asked.

He grunted.

“At a bar?” This would have been bad. There had been a time after Mom died. A time with bars. And fights. Now there was a sponsor on the other end of Dad’s cell phone, and a disk in his pocket with
ONE YEAR CLEAN
written on it.

“Cass! No.”

“The restaurant?” I frowned.

“Yeah. Guy was making out he was a SEAL. Bragging, you know. Had a bunch of people with him, girls.”

“And he wasn’t?”

“Wasn’t what?”

“A SEAL.”

“Oh. Yeah, no.”

“How did you know?”

Dad looked at me. “He was bragging.”

I waited, just looking back at him.

“You see the shit we saw, you do the shit we did, you don’t brag about it.”

“So what did you do?”

“I said, ‘What team were you in, team twelve?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ and then I told him to get out of my restaurant. There are only ten SEAL teams. Guy didn’t want to lose face in front of his friends—so it got a little physical.”

“And you got a black eye.”

“Less than him.”

This I believed. “You in trouble?”

“Come on, Cass. Half the guys in the place are police.”

I had no comeback to this. “You want an ice pack?” I asked. “I’m going to the library, but I can grab one for you before I go.”

Dad shook his head. “School’s nearly out. You need a job,” he said. “You can’t be hanging around in the library all summer.”

“I don’t just hang out there.”

“Yeah, you hang out in the apartment above the garage too.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, Cass. About that …”

You know the cliché “I had a sinking feeling”? It’s a cliché for a reason, because you do feel like you’re sinking, down into the ground. “What?” I asked.

“I’m renting it. A couple of kids from up north. Lifeguard and a concessions’ stock boy.”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, no?” He took a step forward.

“No, no, no.”

“Cass, you’re shaking.”

I didn’t know that. Panic had cut all the connections between my mind and my body. I kept opening my mouth, but nothing was coming out except for
no
. I was like a goldfish spewing the word no instead of bubbles.

“Jesus, Cass, stop it, you’re scaring me.”

I took a deep breath. “I need the apartment.”

“So do I. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a recession, and someone’s snatching women, which isn’t exactly the world’s greatest tourist advertisement. People aren’t lining up for bottles of Chianti at the restaurant. The boardwalk is almost empty.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Maybe. But it’s not like it was. And the overheads have not gone down.”

“School’s not out yet.”

“Cass.”

“I’ll get a job.”

“Good. We need all the money we can get.”

“So you can buy more insects?”

His eyes went cold. “Come work at the restaurant. The customers like you. They ask about you.”

I couldn’t believe he was suggesting it. “You know I can’t do that.”

He deflated a little. “Yeah, yeah. Something else then. Two Piers has jobs going. You could work one of the stands—hand out plush toys to kids who get a ring on the bottle. Or run one of the rides. Maybe take your old basketball-game job. You know they’d let you have it.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“And get out of the apartment. It’s not good for you, all this staying inside.”

“But I’m
safe
there.”

“You’re safe here in the house. I’m here.”

I stared at him a moment too long, and I saw the skin of his face flush, the shame rising, with its anger chaser.

“*****, Cass, I wouldn’t hurt you.”

Again, I didn’t reply quickly enough, and I saw the red spreading.

“I get angry sometimes, I know that, but I’m trying to—”

He stopped.

Threw the box across the room—it was stapled wood; it exploded when it hit the wall, pieces raining down on the computer monitor. A millipede landed, twitching, on the keyboard. It scuttled across the letters, as if typing a Mayday message.

“You’re out of the apartment by the end of the week,” he said. “And you get a ********* job or you’re working at the restaurant, even if I have to drag you there.”

I should back up and explain the whole Navy SEAL thing: Dad was a SEAL twice, so it was doubly important to him. The first time was when he was young—he fought in the first Gulf War, was stationed on a destroyer in the Persian Gulf. When I was small, he used to tell me stories about the dolphins they worked with, which would patrol the ships, trained to look for mines. As a kid, my whole image of the Gulf War was like a SeaWorld show. I just imagined guys like my dad playing with dolphins, in warm, glittering seas out of the
Arabian Nights
.

Like I said before, he didn’t talk about it much. The only real story he ever told was about during his second stint as a SEAL in Afghanistan with Mike Osborne, a British guy. Mike was in the same unit. He and Dad both loved bugs—they would collect spiders and beetles and stuff when they were out in the mountains and fields. So they became friends.

Then Dad’s SEAL team got a call one day. A load of Taliban who had surrendered had been taken to an old nineteenth-century fort in the desert, to be interrogated. Dad said the place was beautiful—sandstone walls rising out of the plain, all scrub and goats and the occasional tree, like something from an adventure story.

But then it turned out that the whole thing was maybe a Trojan horse, because these Taliban prisoners—and there were hundreds of them—suddenly rose up and killed their guards and seized the fort.

So now there was a heavily armed group of Taliban in a fortress, basically, with rockets and guns and mortars, and Dad and the SEALs were sent in to take control. Dad was put in a small team with Mike Osborne. Their job was to get as close as they could to the part of the fort that was most strongly defended, and to use GPS tracking to call in air strikes.

So they snuck up to the walls, and managed to get into the main compound through some sort of side door—I think they killed some people to do this, but Dad glosses over that part. From their position, hidden by a low wall, they could see Taliban fighters up on the north side of the fort, embedded with their guns.

They got on the radio and called in a strike.

And someone on the support team got one of the coordinates wrong, just a decimal place, but it was enough.

So when the plane came over and dropped the JDAM smart bomb that was supposed to destroy most of the Taliban resistance, it actually fell closer to where Dad, Mike, and two other SEALs were hiding. The explosion ripped out a whole section of the fort’s exterior wall, deafened Dad for a week, and threw Mike Osborne fifteen feet through the air to an exposed part of the fort’s interior. Dad meanwhile was smashed into a rock or something, and lay there dazed. He said it was like the whole world had tuned to static.

Dust hung in the air, blurring everything. His ears registered only white noise. It was terribly hot too—he was baking in his helmet and uniform like he was in an oven. He could smell fireworks, and it weirdly made him feel like he was a kid back in Jersey.

Immediately Mike Osborne, who Dad could see through the hole in the wall, was surrounded by enemy fighters. In the middle of all the fuzz that had fallen over everything, the dirt in the air and the buzzing—