The Whisper Man

“Yes,” he said. “Sir.”

Fifty-eight

It felt like a transgression as I opened the Packet and looked inside at the contents.

It was an assortment of paper, fabric, and trinkets, much of which overlapped with my own past and memories. The first thing I saw was a colored wristband, pulled taut at the plastic clasp where Rebecca had stretched it over her hand rather than cut it off. It was from a music festival we’d been to in the early days of our relationship, long before Jake had even been thought of, never mind born. Rebecca and I had camped with friends who had slowly drifted away over the years, and spent the weekend drinking and dancing, not caring about the rain or the cold. We had been young and carefree, and as I looked at it now, the wristband seemed like a talisman from a better time.

Excellent choice, Jake.

I recognized a small brown packet, and my vision blurred slightly as I opened it and tipped the contents into my palm. A tooth, so impossibly small that it felt like air on my skin. It was the first one Jake had lost, not long after Rebecca died. That night I’d slipped money under his pillow, along with a note from the tooth fairy explaining that she wanted him to keep the tooth because it was special. I hadn’t seen it again until now.

I replaced it carefully in its envelope, and then unfolded a piece of paper that turned out to be the picture I’d drawn for him: a crude attempt at the two of us standing side by side, with that message underneath.

Even when we argue we still love each other.

The tears came at that. There had been so many arguments over the years. Both of us so similar, and yet failing to understand each other. Both of us reaching out to the other and always somehow missing. But God, it was true. I loved him through every single second of it. I loved him so much. I hoped that, wherever he was right now, he knew that.

I worked my way through the other items. They felt sacred to the touch, but also sometimes oblique in their mystery. There were several more bits of paper, and while some made sense—one of the few party invitations he’d ever received—much of it was incomprehensible to me. There were faded tickets and receipts, scribbled notes Rebecca had made, all so apparently meaningless that I couldn’t fathom why Jake had dignified them as being special. Maybe it was even the smallness and apparent insignificance of them that he liked. These were adult things that he lacked the experience to decode. But his mother had cared enough to keep them, and so perhaps, if he studied them for long enough, he might understand her better.

Then a much older sheet of paper—torn from a small ring-bound notebook, so that one end was frayed. I unfolded it and immediately recognized Rebecca’s handwriting. A poem she’d written, presumably as a teenager, based on how faded the ink was. I started to read it.

If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.

If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.

If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.

If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.

I read it again, the living room receding around me, then examined the writing once more to make sure. It was Rebecca’s—I was certain of it. A less mature version than the one I was familiar with, but I knew my wife’s handwriting.

This was where Jake had learned the rhyme.

From his mother.

Rebecca had known it when she was younger, and she had written it down. I did the math in my head and realized that Rebecca would have been thirteen years old at the time of Frank Carter’s murders. Perhaps it was the kind of thing that would have caught the attention of a girl that age.

But that didn’t explain where she had heard it.

I put the note to one side.

There were a number of photographs in the Packet, all of them so old that they must have been taken with a physical camera. I remembered doing the same as a child on holidays, and my mother and I had also done what Rebecca and her parents apparently had with these, writing a date and description on the back.

August 2, 1983—two days old.

I turned the photograph over, and saw a woman sitting on a couch, cradling a baby against her. Rebecca’s mother. I had known her briefly: an enthusiastic woman, with a sense of adventure she’d passed on to her daughter. Here, she looked desperately tired but excited. The baby was asleep, swaddled in a yellow woolen blanket. From the date, I knew it had to be Rebecca, even if it was impossible to believe she had ever been so small.

April 21, 1987—playing Poohsticks.

This one showed Rebecca’s father standing on a slatted wooden bridge with lush green foliage in the background, holding her up so she could dangle a stick over the water rushing past below. She was facing the camera, grinning. Not yet four years old, but I could already see the woman she would become. Even back then she had the smile that I could still picture so clearly in my head.

September 3, 1988—first day at school.

Here was Rebecca as a little girl, dressed in a blue jumper and pleated gray skirt, standing proudly in front of …

Rose Terrace Primary School.

I stared at the photograph for several seconds.

The school was familiar by now, and the photograph was certainly of Rebecca—but those two things did not go together. And yet there was no mistaking either of them. Those were the same railings, the same steps. The word GIRLS was carved into the black stone above the door. And that was my wife, as a child, standing outside.

First day at school.

Rebecca had lived here in Featherbank.

I was stunned by the discovery. How had I not known that? We had visited her parents on the south coast several times before they died, and while I was dimly aware they’d moved when she was younger, that had certainly been home for her: where she had thought of herself being from. All her friends at our wedding had been from there, and they’d seemed to share so much history that I’d assumed they’d grown up together. But then, maybe that was simply where, as a teenager, her life had flowered—where the friends she made and the stories she gathered were the vivid kind that people carry into adulthood. Because the evidence was right in front of me. Even if Featherbank had felt of little consequence to her as an adult, Rebecca had lived here as a child—or at least close enough to attend the school.

Close enough to have heard the Whisper Man rhyme.

I thought about how focused Jake had been on our new house when he’d seen it on my iPad—how all the others in the search results had become invisible to him after viewing the photographs of it online. It couldn’t be a coincidence. I quickly flicked through the other photographs that he had kept. Most were snaps that had been taken on holiday, but a few of the locations were more familiar: Rebecca eating an ice cream on New Road Side. High up on a swing in the local park. Riding a tricycle on the pavement by the main road.

And then—

And then our house.

The sight of it was as incongruous as the school photograph had been. Rebecca in a place where she simply shouldn’t and couldn’t be. Here, she was standing on the pavement outside our new home, one foot placed backward on the driveway. The building behind, with its odd angles and misplaced windows, looked frightening, looming over the little girl who was just far enough over the threshold of the property to get the kudos for daring.