The Whispers (6 page)

Eloise had spoken for leniency on his behalf.
Addiction is a disease. Barney Croft needs help, not just punishment.
And she believed that. When she looked at his weeping wife and his small children, their faces confused and sad, it was clear to see that a lifetime in prison served no one—not even Eloise and Amanda. Barney Croft’s children would be broken by this; perhaps they too would turn to drugs and ruin someone else’s life. Surely, there was a better way.

But the judge was not lenient; a life sentence was handed down, parole possible after thirty years. The courtroom erupted in wails of despair, chairs moving, cameras flashing, an angry call to order. Eloise and Amanda hustled out of there before the reporter vultures that
never
seem to tire of the Montgomery tragedy could corner them. They were in their car, safely driving away before the court adjourned.

“I don’t feel any better,” said Amanda. Eloise’s daughter had dressed in a simple black dress and white cardigan, patent leather flats as if they were going to church. (Which they never did anymore unless her in-laws were visiting. That was Alfie’s thing.) Amanda looked very grown up, a young woman.

“No,” said Eloise. Eloise had thought that she might cry today. But no. Tears came at odd times, not when you expected. Grief was not linear. It came and went in unpredictable ways.

“But I think I can forgive him. Someday,” she said.

“When you do that,” said Eloise. “You’ll feel better.”

“I guess,” said Amanda, unconvinced.

Eloise rested her hand on her daughter’s thigh. Amanda put her hands on top of her mother’s.

Amanda had released some of her rage. At least she didn’t hate Eloise quite as much. She’d apologized for blaming Eloise, even for just a little while. Amanda knew it was wrong. But there were no apologies necessary. Eloise blamed herself enough for both of them, even though she knew it was wrong to do so. The voice that wasn’t a voice had told her that.
We all have our time and our design. There are no accidents. And no one is to blame.

At home, the reporters waited, a throng that only seemed to grow. They parked their cars in the driveway. Amanda and Eloise waved politely as they walked easily up the path to the porch.

How do you feel today? Do you think Croft got what he deserved? Why did you speak for leniency? How would your husband have reacted to the verdict? What is your life like now?

Neither Eloise nor Amanda said a word, just pushed in through the front door and closed it behind them. There was nothing to say to anyone, least of all reporters—a pack of hyenas waiting to scavenge the dead. But, she supposed, even hyenas had to eat.

Amanda had picked up the paper on the way in, laid it flat on the kitchen table.
The Hollows News and Gazette
announced in its front-page headline that the murder trial of Tommy Delano, the mechanic’s son who had murdered Sarah, would begin next week. He had seen Sarah for the first time when her parents brought their car in for repair. He had watched her when he went to the school to work on the buses, as per his father’s contract with the district. He had watched her and watched her. And when he had his opportunity, he killed her, violated and mutilated her corpse. He kept his trophies in a box, a red barrette, her panties, her heart-shaped locket. Or so the accusations stated.

Eloise knew Tommy didn’t kill Sarah. In fact, it had been an accident of circumstance. She had told as much to Ray Muldune. And Tommy, too, pleaded his innocence on that count. But no one believed either one of them—not the so-called psychic, not the man with pictures of girls and a dead girl’s underpants under his bed. And all the evidence pointed to Tommy. It was up to a jury to decide the truth now.

Would justice be served? No, Tommy didn’t murder Sarah. But he was months away from murdering another girl. One who would now, because of what Eloise had done, live and go on to help a great many people. Or so the voice that wasn’t a voice told her.
Justice
, it promised,
will be served in other, more significant, ways.

Eloise wasn’t sure she believed it. But what did she know?

She decided that it was a good afternoon to clear out the garden in the backyard. The perennials needed trimming, the annuals to get pulled up, the soil turning. She had neglected the garden badly, like so many things since the accident. Amanda reluctantly helped pull weeds for a little while, but then she lost interest and Eloise let her go inside and watch television. It was awhile of being out there alone before Eloise was aware of it, how strange was the rustling of the wind through the trees.

She stopped what she was doing and pulled herself up from her gardener’s crouch, stretched out her aching lower back, and listened. The leaves were dancing in the wind that had picked up. And underneath the current of that sound she heard the distinct sound of whispering. Low and musical, eternal, a million voices telling their stories to the sky. She stood there awhile, letting the sound of it wash over her. She knew that she had never heard it before, but that it had been there all along, like a radio station she’d never been able to receive. There was something deeply sad and also joyful, a symphony of all the myriad notes of lives lived. Once Eloise heard it, she couldn’t stop listening. It was mesmerizing, a siren song. What rocks would it crash her upon?

“Mom?”

Emily was standing over by the rosebush Eloise had just trimmed back. “Mom, do you hear it?”

Emily was wearing the dress she’d worn to her first communion. It was a white, lacey thing that they’d had to wrestle her into. She complained the whole day about how it itched, and she’d torn it off and thrown it to the floor the minute she was allowed to change. But she looked like an angel while she wore it. Even frowning and fidgeting, she was the most beautiful creature.

“The whispers?” asked Eloise. Oh, she wanted to take that girl in her arms. It was a deep and powerful ache, but she kept her distance.

Emily nodded sagely. “Yes,” she said. “The Whispers. Not everyone can hear them, you know.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Eloise asked. She didn’t mean to sound sad and peevish, helpless. But she did. And she didn’t mean just about The Whispers. She meant everything. “Emily, tell me. What am I supposed to do?”

Emily smiled—her funny, crooked, one that was always just for Eloise.

“All you have to do is listen.”

Then she turned and left soundlessly through the garden gate. Eloise didn’t call after her. She just let her lovely lost girl go.

Turn the page for a preview of Lisa Unger’s next thriller, coming soon from Touchstone . . .

CRAZY LOVE YOU

prologue

As I pulled up the long drive, deep potholes and crunching gravel beneath my wheels, towering pines above me, I was neither moved by the natural beauty nor stilled inside by the quietude. I did not marvel at the fingers of light spearing through the canopy, dappling the ground. I did not admire the frolicking larks or the scampering squirrels for their carefree existence. No. In fact, it all made me sick. There was a scream of protest lodged at the base of my throat, and it had been sitting there for the better part of a year. When it finally escaped—and I wasn’t sure when that might be—I knew it would be a roar to shake the world to its core.

It was supposed to have been an auspicious year for me. According to all the astrological predictions—if you believe in that kind of thing—I was to have found security at home, success at work—rewards for all my labors. Megan, the sweet and willowy girl of my dreams—the kind of girl who asked the universe for what we needed, and who dwelled “in a place of gratitude,” and who regularly walked around burning sage and whispering her good thoughts—was no match for the tide of shit that was headed our way.

I should have told her not to bother. Part of me knew that I was only keeping it all at bay—the darkness, the bad luck, the ugly turn of circumstance, the destroyer waiting in the shadows. But I
wanted
to believe in her, in us. And for a time I did. Maybe it was all worth it, everything that followed, for the moment in which I was able to live in the sun with her. But now that moment makes the dark seem so much deeper, so much less penetrable by any kind of light.

I snaked along the winding, narrow path in my banged-up old Scout, steeling myself for the sight of the house, which waited just around the next bend. It shouldn’t have even been there. I’d finally scheduled it for demolition; should have done so long ago.

Megan and I talked about building our dream home in its place. Or rather
she
talked about it, and I made noncommittal noises. I might have known the house wouldn’t allow itself to be destroyed. In fact, maybe that was where I’d gone too far into my new life. It was one thing to move on. It was quite another to try to level the past, to pave it over and build it back as you would like it. That wasn’t allowed. Not for me.

And then there it was, as rickety as it was defiant. As fragile as it was indestructible—shutters askew, siding faded and slipping, yard overgrown, porch sagging. As I turned a hard corner with the mean winter sun setting behind me, it rose into view, looked bigger than it had a right to be. The sky behind it was orange and black, the trees dark slashes against the gloaming.

Oh, Meg had plans for this place—our country home, just a few short hours from the city. It was to be our retreat, a place where I would write far from the distractions and temptations of our urban life. No, we wouldn’t have wireless up here. It would have been our place to unplug. But those were
her
plans, not mine. As far as I was concerned, self-immolation was a more desirable option.

As I came to a stop, the whole place seemed to vibrate with malicious glee. The scream dropped into my belly and became a hard ache in my gut as I climbed out of the truck.
How is it possible that I am back here?
I asked myself. A place I fled, vowing never to return. Now it’s the only place I have left. Megan would have something to say, like:
It’s the universe forcing you to confront the thing you dreaded most.
It’s taken everything from you because that’s how important this is. What lesson is it asking you to learn?
In fact, that’s precisely what she had said.

Man, I ached to hear that bright and positive voice, to hear that vibration of love and confidence. But now, when I called her, I only got the clipped and professional tone she’d used for her voice mail.
I’m not available at the moment. Please leave a message.
She wasn’t answering my calls. I left long rambling messages; I wasn’t even sure she listened to them. Her last words to me:

We don’t have anything left to discuss, Ian. Don’t call me until something changes.

I don’t know what that means
, I pleaded.

But there was an expression she wore when she looked at me now—sad, disappointed, and angry. And that look was the only answer she gave me before she left me on our bench in Central Park by the
Alice in Wonderland
statue. It was the first place we’d kissed, and the last place I’d seen her. I watched her walk away, huddled into herself against the cold. She moved quickly past a little girl who was chasing a boy around the circle. The boy was crying but the girl was laughing, oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the game was frightening him.

I think I called Megan’s name, because the children stopped and looked at me, both of them staring with mouths formed in perfect O’s of surprise. Their nanny hurried over and shuttled them away from me, casting a disapproving look in my direction. But maybe I didn’t say her name. Maybe I said something else. Whatever it was I said, or yelled, Megan hadn’t stopped. She moved faster as if she was afraid, as if she couldn’t wait to be away from me. Why was she afraid of me? How could she be? I had watched until she was absorbed into the throbbing crowd of New Yorkers shuttling through the park on their various ways to various important things.

Now the thud of the hatch closing reverberated like a gunshot in the silence. I had one large black duffel bag, my leather art portfolio, my supply box. I slung the bag over my shoulder and left the portfolio and art supplies for later. The air was frigid, my bare hands raw and painful from just a few moments of exposure.

Then I turned to face the house. For the first time I noticed that lights were burning inside—one upstairs in my old bedroom and one downstairs in the small living room. Outside, darkness had fallen completely and suddenly like a shroud. There was movement inside and I wasn’t in the least surprised. I wasn’t angry or afraid, though I should have been both.

This was it. Rock bottom. The way I saw it, I could lie down, a pile of shattered bones, until I slowly bled out, fading into a blissful, delicious nothingness. Or I could pull myself up, one broken limb at a time, and fight my way back to Megan, to the life we were trying to build, to the child that was growing inside her. The decision wasn’t as easy as you might think. When the darkness calls, it’s a siren song—magical, hypnotic, and nearly impossible to resist. You
want
to go. It’s so easy to do the wrong thing, the bad thing. All you have to do is give in.

On the front step, I could smell her, that mingling of perfume and cigarette smoke and something else. A helix of fury and desire twisted in my belly as I pushed through the door. And she stood there, as wild and beautiful as she had always been—her hair a riot of white and gold and copper, her linen skin, her eyes the moonstone blue of terrible secrets.
Priss
. She took the stance of victory, legs apart, arms akimbo, a slight smile turning up the corners of her mouth. I almost laughed. I let the door slam behind me.

“Hello, Priss.” My voice didn’t sound right. It sounded weak, had the tenor of defeat. She heard it. Of course she did. And her smile deepened.

“Welcome home, asshole.”

PART ONE:

there was a little girl

1

It was the garbage truck that woke me. Rumbling, beeping down Lispenard Street. It crashed over the metal plate in the road, creating a mind-shatteringly loud concussive boom. And with my sudden, unwanted wakefulness came the waves of nausea, the blinding pain behind the eyes. I emerged jaggedly into the land of the living, rolled out of bed, and stumbled through my loft to the bathroom. Gripping the sink, I peered at myself in the mirror—three days since my last shave, my hair a wild dark tangle, blue shiners of fatigue, my skin pale as the porcelain bowl I’d soon be hugging. Not looking good.

“Oh God,” I said.

But the words barely escaped before the world tilted and I dove for the toilet, where the wretched contents of my belly exited with force, leaving only an acidic burn in my gullet.

I slid down to the ground. On the blessedly cool tile floor, I tried to piece together the events of last night. But there was nothing, just a gaping hole in my memory. I should have been alarmed that I had absolutely no recall of the previous evening. You probably would have been, right? But, sadly, that was the normal state of things. I know what you’re thinking:
What a loser
.

Loser. Weirdo. Queer. Douchebag. Freak. Shitbag. Fugly. Tool. And my personal favorite: Fatboy. Yes, I have been called all of these things in my life. I have been shunned, beaten, bullied. I have been ignored, tortured, teased, and taunted. My middle school and high school life were the typical misery of the misfit, though mine had an especially sharp edge because I was feared as well as hated. And so my punishments were brutal. I barely survived my adolescence. In fact, I barely survived my early childhood. I might not have survived either if it hadn’t been for Priss.

Of course, it wasn’t just Priss who helped me through. My mother did love me, though it seems odd to say that now. I think that’s truly what saved me, what kept me from turning into a raving lunatic—though some people think I’m just that. My mom was the kind of mother who spent
time
; she wasn’t just going through the motions of caregiving. All those hours with her reading to me, drawing with me, doing puzzles, looking up the answers to my endless questions in big books in the library—they have stayed with me. They have formed me. She loved stories, and she made up endless tales on the fly—the monster who was afraid of cake, the fairy who couldn’t find her magic, the butterflies that carried children off to dreamland. And she was a painter, a deep and compelling artist.

She gave those things to me, and that’s what I kept after she and my sister were gone. I took solace in those gifts in my bleakest moments. Everyone else forgot those things about her in the wake of her final deeds. But I never did. She only exists for me as she was in those times before my sister was born—when we were all happy and nothing ugly had leaked into our lives. And when I hadn’t yet met Priss, who would change everything for me. For good or bad, it’s impossible to say.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of that as I lifted myself off the floor and stumbled back to bed. The sun was high in the sky, too high for anyone my age to still be buried under the covers. Unpleasantly bright and sunny, the room was spinning and pitching like a carnival ride. I couldn’t have gotten up if I wanted to.

•    •    •

I wasn’t Fatboy anymore. I shed all that extra weight when I came to New York City on an art scholarship. I started running, and boxing at a crappy gym on Avenue D. I got a cool haircut and grew a goatee. When I look in the mirror today (okay, not
today
exactly), the angry, unhappy kid I used to be—he’s nowhere to be found. And the town where I grew up, that sad boy, that shitty life—I shed it like I did my old clothes that no longer fit, that hung off me like an old skin. I stuffed it all into a big plastic bag and shoved it down the trash chute. Good-bye. It was that easy. It really was. At least it was for me.

Now, in some circles, I’m the
shiznay
. My graphic novel series,
Fatboy and Priss
, is what they call a cult hit—not a mainstream success, necessarily, but something that every geek and weirdo, every comic book and graphic novel freak in the country knows about. I live in a loft in Tribeca, which is also my studio. (Read: I’m rich,
suckas
! Okay, well, I rent. I’ll own when the movie deal comes through and my agent says that should be any time now.) I publish a book a year, which I write and illustrate. I’m working on a novel. There’s an option for film. At Comic Con, I’m mobbed. Oh, the geek boys, they love me. They stand in long, snaking lines with their carefully maintained copies of my graphic novels, waiting for my signature.

Of course, it’s not me that they care about it, or even Fatboy. It’s Priss. She is every boy’s wet dream—with her wild hair and huge breasts, her impossibly narrow waist and her long, shapely legs. How my hands love drawing her, how I love putting the blue in her eyes, sketching the valentine curve of her ass. Priss loves Fatboy in spite of his many flaws. And she kicks ass, while Fatboy is a wuss, sensitive and artistic but weak. Priss is a powerhouse—she fears nothing and her wrath is a force to be reckoned with. No one messes with Fatboy, or they answer to
her
. It’s Fatboy and Priss against the world.

Is she real? Is there a real Priss?
they want to know.

Of course
, I tell them.

Where is she, dude?

It’s a secret
, I say. And they don’t know if I’m messing with them or not, but they laugh, give me a knowing wink. Even though they know nothing. Priss is a mystery. Even I can’t quite figure her out.

On that day, the day I met Megan, I hadn’t seen Priss in a while. Priss and I had been slowly drifting apart—spending less time together, getting into less trouble. You know how it is with your childhood friends. You reach an awkward point in your relationship where you’ve gone in different directions or are starting to. You start to judge each other maybe, agree less, and bicker more. Priss still wanted to raise hell, get drunk or high, get wild. But I had responsibilities, deadlines, meetings.

Still, I looked at her face every day on my drawing table. It was an intimate relationship, my hands always on her, my mind always on her—but that was just on paper, the version of her that lived and breathed within the panels of my books. For Fatboy, she was lover, avenger, and friend. Once upon a time she was all those things for me as well. Somehow, somewhere along the line, for me the real Priss and the one on the page had kind of morphed into one.

The truth was that the more I had of her in ink, the less I wanted or needed her in life. I was okay with that, because my relationship with Priss has always been complicated—
really
complicated—and not always pretty. Like everything in life, she was easier to deal with on the page.

“You don’t own me,” she said during one of our last conversation-slash-arguments. “Just because you put me in these neat little boxes, have me saying and doing what you want, you think you do. But that’s not me.”

“I know that,” I told her.

“Do you?”

•    •    •

I think what I liked about Megan, the first of many things I liked, was that she was nothing at all like Priss. And I mean nothing—not physically, not energetically. Megan was the good girl, the nice one, the one you took home to your parents. Well, not my parents. My father is dead, and my mother, Miriam, is, shall we say, indisposed. But
one’s
parents. She was the woman who would take care of your children, take care of you. There aren’t many of them, these types of girls. When you see one, you better be smart enough to recognize her. Lucky for me, I was.

By four o’clock, my blinding, take-me-to-the-emergency-room hangover was starting to abate. In the sundry bargains I’d made with God that day, I’d sworn off booze, pot, blowing deadlines, and being mean to people who didn’t deserve it. I’d done penance on the marble floor of my extraordinary bathroom, clinging to its cool, white surfaces, moaning. I’d made Technicolor offerings to my low-flow toilet. And a wobbly redemption was mine. The pain, the nausea, the misery had faded, and my body was looking for nourishment of the greasiest kind.

The late afternoon light was still impossibly bright, the traffic noise deafening, as I went uptown for the only thing that could save me: a burger, fries, and malt from the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. I waited on the eternal line, bleary and tilting, and finally made my way to the park bench near the playground to eat.

I liked watching them, those children of privilege, those New York City angels who see their high-powered parents for approximately three hours a day. They are coiffed and impeccably dressed, already wearing the blank expression of entitlement and neglect. They are tended to by nannies of various shapes and colors who always seem mindful that the children are, at once, their charges and their employers. An odd line to walk, I always thought. How terrible for all of them. Children don’t want power; they can’t handle it. And while I watched this frightful dynamic play out on little stages throughout the park—a tantrum on the jungle gym, a struggle over swings, a child weeping on the slide while her nanny chatted with another nanny, back turned, oblivious—I saw Megan.

She was not the kind of girl I’d usually notice. Typical of the Fatboy turned fairly-decent-looking-moderately-successful guy, my tastes ran to the cheap and flashy. I liked a blonde, one who wasn’t afraid to show a little skin, wear leather and denim, sport heels high and spiky, painted nails, glossy lips. You know, strippers. Other than Priss, I’d never really had a woman in my life, not a
relationship
per se. And Priss didn’t really count, for all sorts of reasons.

Megan’s glossy brown hair was struggling free of its stubby ponytail as she wiped the nose of a towheaded boy. She had a scrubbed-clean look to her, not a drop of makeup. Her black ballet flats were scuffed and worn. Her jeans had dirt on the knees. And yet a kind of innocent, peaceful beauty lit up her features.

“Are you okay?” she said to the little boy, who was crying in a soft, not-too-bratty way. And her voice was so gentle, so full of caring that it lifted me out of myself. I don’t think anyone other than my mother had ever talked to me so sweetly. I longed to be that little boy in her care.
No
, I wanted to tell her.
I’m not okay. Can you help me?

“Want to go home and get cozy?” she asked the little boy. “Are you tired?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking up at her with big eyes. Milking it. And I knew just how he felt. It’s so nice—and so very rare—when someone understands how you feel.

“Your mom will be home soon,” she said. “We need to get dinner ready anyway.”

I watched her gather up his little backpack and put him in his stroller. Her face, somehow pale and bright, somehow sweet and smart, somehow kind and strong, was the prettiest face I’d ever seen. But of course there was something else there, too. It wasn’t all light. Wasn’t there also a bit of shadow? A dark dancer moving beneath the surface? Yes, there was just a shade of something sad.

I started thinking about how to draw her, how I’d capture all the things I saw in just those few moments that our lives intersected. Faces are so hard because they are more than lines and shadows. They are about light, but a light that comes from inside and shines out.

So badly did I want to see her face again that—I am embarrassed to say—I followed her up Park Avenue South to a Murray Hill brownstone. I watched from the corner as she took the little boy out of his stroller, folded it up, and carried them both inside. The light was dim by then; it had turned to evening, the wintery afternoon gold fading to milky gray.

The artist wants to capture everything beautiful and make it his own. There is such a hunger for that. I went home and tried to draw her that night. But I couldn’t get her; she eluded me. And so I had to chase.

They went to the park every day. And every day I was there, unbeknownst to them, finding a perch outside the playground that was close enough to watch her and just far away not to arouse any suspicion. Because that’s what people love: a weird-looking single guy with no kids lingering around a park where children are playing.

But on the third day, she saw me. I
saw
her see me. She looked at the boy—his name was Toby. Then she said something to another young woman, a gorgeous supermodel of a nanny with café au lait skin and dark kinky hair beneath a red kerchief. That other one had a stare like a cattle prod and she turned it on me. Men had writhed in agony beneath that stare; I was certain of it. They’d liked it a little, too, I bet.

Then I was getting up and walking away, trying not to look like a caught stalker running for my life. I heard the clang of the playground gate, and her voice slicing over the traffic noise, the kids yelling, laughing, a siren fading down Broadway:

“Hey,” she called. “Hey! Excuse me!”

I thought about running; I really did. But imagine what a freak, a coward I would have been if I did that. I could never go back. I’d never see her again. And I was still trying to get her face right. All that light, and that subtle shadow, too—was it worry, anxiety, maybe even a tendency toward depression? I still didn’t have her on the page. So I stopped and turned around.

She was scared and mad, her eyebrows arched, her mouth pulled tight. All the other nannies were watching us from the playground fence, moving close together, staring like an angry line of lionesses against the hyena eyeing their adopted cubs.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you following us?”

“Uh,” I said. I looked up at the sky, then down at the silver-green-purple pigeon strutting near my foot. He cooed, mocking me. “No. No. Of course not.”

She did a funny thing with her body. She wasn’t quite squared off with me; she tilted herself away, ready to run if she needed to, back to the safety of the playground. “This is the third day I’ve seen you here.”

I held up the Shake Shack bag, offered a little shrug. I didn’t have to
try
to look sheepish and embarrassed. I was.