Whisper to Me (3 page)

Dad blinked and took my hand to lead me out of there.

Kennedy passed Dad a card with his pudgy fingers. “Call us if she thinks of anything else.”

I thought:
I’m right here
.

As I was thinking it, Horowitz caught my eye and rolled his, mocking his colleague, it seemed like. I laughed.

“What?” said Dad.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Shock,” said Horowitz, straight-faced. “A tub of Ben & Jerry’s. Helps every time. Take it from me.”

I’ve just realized I never told you my real name is Cassandra. You probably figured I was just Cassie.

It’s kind of a screwed-up name, isn’t it? I mean, if you know your Greek myths, which of course you do.

Cassandra: doomed to give true prophecies about the future but have no one ever believe her.

It’s not a name, it’s a curse.

Me, I have never been able to see the future. If I could, I would have left Oakwood that day, for sure.

Deep breath.

So this is when something really important happened, and I need you to bear with me with all this stuff because, not to sound overdramatic or anything, but what we’re getting to now is pretty much the whole reason I hurt you and the whole reason I’m having to write this e-mail to explain what I did.

To explain what I am.

I was alone in the police station bathroom, the stall doors all open. I looked at myself in the mirror, hating my freckles and dinky nose.

That was when I heard the voice.

It was a woman with a New Jersey accent, and this is what she said:

“You’re disgusting. You leave the house like that?”

This time I
did
do exactly what a person in a film would do: I whirled around to see who was behind me. There was no one. Nor beside me, nor in the stalls—I checked. No one standing on the toilets or hiding behind the main door or anything.

“I’m talking to you, ugly ****,” said the voice. “You ever think of coordinating? Or brushing your hair?”

“What? Who are you?
Where
are you?”

Silence.

In the mirror, my eyes were liquid with fear. “Your little prank isn’t funny,” I said. “Wherever you are.”

Still nothing. My heartbeat started to slow again. I figured there was a camera or something, one with a speaker that enabled someone in another location to speak to me.

“Hello?” I said.

No voice.

I glanced at the mirror again before leaving the bathroom. Here’s the thing: the voice wasn’t wrong. I’d left the house without thinking about what I was wearing; I had on old, saggy sweatpants and one of my dad’s T-shirts, the green of which really did not go with the pink of the pants. I hadn’t brushed my hair.

Stupid kids
, I said to myself. Though right at the back of my mind was the thought, already, that it was weird they had somehow managed to get a woman to join in with the prank. I mean, it was definitely a woman’s voice, not a girl’s. Anyway, I didn’t want to give them any satisfaction, whoever they were, so I smiled at myself and walked out, trying to make my gait casual, though of course that’s impossible to do when you’re thinking about it.

That was the first time I heard the voice, but even though it made me angry, it didn’t scare me. That came afterward in the car with my dad.

We were in the black Dodge Ram, Dad’s pride and joy. I had been almost surprised to see that it was dark out when I left the station through the revolving doors. The lights on the instrument panel were glowing as Dad drove, and there were goose bumps on my skin. I wished I had a sweater.

Thinking about that brought back an echo, not the voice, but the memory of it. “
You ever think of coordinating?
”

I shivered, and tried to think of something else. I don’t think I was aware of how badly my mind had been—and this is the proper word—
disturbed
by finding the foot. Tilted, like a spinning top, gyrating wildly, wobbling from side to side.

“You should be at the restaurant,” I said to Dad. Everything, the inside of the car, the signs—
24/7 LIQUOR ASK ABOUT OUR WINE BOXES
—seemed so
there
, so present, that it shimmered. A white seagull flashed past in the dark sky, like a comet.

“I get a call saying my daughter’s with the cops, I’m gonna come.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

He didn’t answer that. “You shouldn’t have gone out,” he said, his eyes on the road over the steering wheel, driving past what seemed like the same streetlights we had already passed a block back, this faceless chain-store sprawl on the outskirts of town like a cartoon background the animators were recycling, using the same frames again and again. “I can’t keep you safe out there.”

“It’s the beach,” I said. “In daytime.”

“Dusk.”

“Daytime, dusk, whatever. It’s safe.”

“It’s a murdered young woman is what it is.”

“What is?” I asked.

“The foot, genius.”

“They said that?” I was surprised. Like I said, I assumed it was a man’s foot.

“Those guys? No. But I spoke to Mastrangelo.” This is a cop who eats in our pizza place all the time. “One of the victims was wearing Air Jordans when she went missing.”

I had been watching the wide road going past, as we crossed from the copied-and-pasted strip-mall wasteland into the first layer of “real” Oakwood, the poor part, apartment blocks and smaller stores, the closed-down entertainment places,
BASEBALL LANES 24/7
over shuttered-up windows, endless stop signs. “Someone cut her up? Ugh.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think she was whole when she was dumped out at sea.”

“What?”

“Thing about shoes that come up over the ankle—they protect the foot inside. The ocean’s violent. It throws the body around, takes it to pieces. At the joints, you know. Knee, ankle, elbow. Like pulling apart a chicken.”

“Dad …”

“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, the ankle separates and other parts disintegrate, or whatever. Clothes don’t help at all. But the foot in the shoe, it’s kept intact, and eventually it washes up.”

“How do you know this?”

He looked at me, then tapped his shoulder.

Oh.

His shoulder is where he has a shiny, puckered scar—a bullet went through from one side to the other, in the caves at Zhawar Kili, fired from a Taliban AK-47 when I was three years old. Dad was a Navy SEAL, until he got shot anyway. The other bullet pretty much vaporized his knee. They rebuilt it—the Navy has good doctors—but he wasn’t going to be jumping off a landing vessel again, or diving from a Zodiac to check for mines, so he was discharged.

But his tapping his shoulder, that was also code for the Marines. As in:
I know that when people drown at sea their feet often wash up in their shoes because I have seen it in the Navy.

Weirdly, it made me feel close to him that we had both seen the same thing. Even if that same thing was a rotting foot in a shoe. I know, it’s not exactly a sitcom bonding moment.

“You told them?” I said. “The cops, I mean?”

“Yup,” he said. “Told Officer Fat and Agent Thin when you were in the bathroom. I think they knew already though. Oh, this is hush-hush, by the way. They don’t want publicity yet. Till now they’ve never had a body; all the women have just disappeared.”

I was silent for a moment.

Then …

I mean, we take what we can, right? Life is not a sitcom; life is not a movie.

“So … Dad … You’ve seen … what I saw?”
A foot in a shoe, washed up on shore.

“I’ve seen a lot worse than that.”

He didn’t say this proudly or anything. Just straight. Ex-military guys can be jerks, I’ve met plenty of them, but he wasn’t like that.

He didn’t speak much about the things he saw, or the things he did. I only knew the name Zhawar Kili because Mom mentioned it once, when he wasn’t around. And since she died, I don’t have any way of knowing more about it.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“Back then? Yeah. I was scared a lot.”

“Dad—” I started, but then I stopped.

“Yeah?”

I wanted to ask him,
Did you kill people
? It was something I was always wanting to ask him. But how do you ask a person something like that?

And also: What would be the point?

Because I knew the answer already.

The answer was:

Yes. A lot.

So instead I just shut up. We were turning onto our street, cruising past the lights from the front windows, all of them identical. Slowing as we reached the drive into the garage. Turning, our headlights briefly illuminated the mobile home in the front yard of the neighbor’s house, on its cinder blocks, rusting. It takes up the whole space and has been there forever; you would think the garden had been planted around it.

That was when the voice spoke again. The voice of the woman I couldn’t see. It said:

“Ask me if
I
was scared.”

I must have jumped in my seat because Dad hit the brakes and grabbed my arm, hard. “What the ****?” he said.

“N-nothing,” I managed to stammer out. It was like the voice was
in the car with me.
“Just the shock, I think.” I sensed it right away: that this wasn’t something I could tell him about. Dad frowned and eased the car into motion again.

“There’s Coke in the garage,” he said. “Bad for your teeth, but I guess you need it.”

I nodded.

“Ask me if I was scared when he killed me.”

That was the voice again, not Dad.

I tried to control myself so Dad wouldn’t freak out. Kept myself very still. But inside it was like I was falling from a building, gravity lifting my organs into my mouth.

I gripped the door handle very tightly as Dad pulled up.
There is no woman in this car
, I told myself.
There is no woman in this car
. I even took a peek at the backseats, and it was true: there was no woman in the car.

“I’m dead and you did nothing. Are you happy now?”

Take deep breaths
, I told myself.

Take deep breaths
.

The world narrowed, became something looked at through the wrong end of a telescope.

Please
, I told the voice silently.
Please, leave me alone.

Dad was standing outside the car, opening the door for me. I hadn’t even noticed him getting out.

“Inside,” he said. He took my arm and led me to the house. “Jesus, I thought I’d die with worry,” he said as we crossed the porch. His fingers were biting into my forearm, bone deep. “You know there’s someone killing women in this town, or did that not occur to you? Seriously, Cass. Never ****** do that to me again. And clean your ******* room.”

I told you: 0–60 anger in four seconds flat, my dad.

IMPORTANT CAPS-LOCK SPOILER:

THE VOICE DID NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.

But I did clean my room.

Next day was a school day. Sunlight woke me, slanting through the venetian blinds in my bedroom. I lay there, thinking I must have imagined what happened the previous day. Not the foot—that was undeniable. But the voice.

I got up, pulled on Levi’s and leather motorcycle boots. I don’t have a motorcycle, but I liked the boots when I saw them in a magazine someone had left at the library, so I saved up and got them on eBay. Vintage. In the photos in the magazine they went well with jeans and a loose, plain white T-shirt, which is what I put on next, yanking it over my head.

Of course, when I looked in the mirror it didn’t quite work on me. The T-shirt wasn’t fitting right, and it was creased. The boots and jeans, which had looked so good on the model, somehow didn’t click, somehow made me seem less like a fashionista slumming it and more like white trash on a break from busing tables in a late-night dive.

This is what always happens: I try to put clothes together and something is invariably missing, I get some detail wrong, I don’t know how. Even when I buy the exact same things that I see on TV or in a mag or whatever. Even when I put on the same eyeliner, the same bracelets. Something about me, some combination of my face and body, ruins it.

“You get a job as a day laborer?” said the voice as I regarded myself in the mirror.

I felt a tight, cold sensation in my chest. So the voice was still there. Fear twisted inside me, coiling around anger.

“Shut up,” I replied. I left the room, with a backward glance in the mirror at my terrible ensemble, and went downstairs.

Dad grunted at me when I reached the kitchen. He was holding a mug of coffee and eating a bagel. I waved to him. “See you after school,” I said.

He looked up. “You okay?”

“Sure.”

He nodded. “Take the bus. Safer.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

That was it. The extent of our conversation.

Of course I had no intention of taking the bus, even if there was a murderer in town. I mean, I didn’t fit the victim profile. So far, the killer had targeted what the media called “sex workers.” Prostitutes, a girl from a massage parlor, a stripper. And it was morning—not really a time of day conducive to serial killings.

I grabbed a bagel and went out the front door. It was still early—in the east, out over the ocean, bundles of pink clouds were gathered, achingly beautiful against the blue sky. I barely noticed.

Jagging right and then left onto Fourth, I headed toward school. I started eating the bagel and imagined I was on an interstellar transport and it was a space-age snack, designed to fuel my body and provide all my nutrients, the old-fashioned mess of a meal crammed into something convenient and tasteless.

I walked through layer three, the long strip of suburban houses between the boardwalk and the empty lots, the faceless wide streets of malls. I passed a couple of people getting little kids into cars, someone pulling a suitcase on wheels, just back from a business trip maybe. I wasn’t really concentrating, but then something made every detail snap into focus, and I was standing by an orange Chevy Camaro, on the back a Calvin-pissing-on-a-Ford logo.

The something was the voice, and it said:

“I’m dead, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. It’s all your fault.”