Whisper to Me(122)

“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 might 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.