The Whisper Man

And then I frowned.

“You said you had better offers on the house?”

“Oh, yes—very much so, actually. One man was prepared to pay far more than the asking price.” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “But I didn’t like him at all. He reminded me a little of the others. He was very persistent, as well, which put me off even more. I dislike being pestered.”

I leaned forward again.

Someone had been prepared to offer way over the asking price for the house, and Mrs. Shearing had refused him. He had been persistent and pushy. There had been something off about him.

“This man,” I said carefully. “What did he look like? Was he quite short? Gray hair round here?”

I gestured to my head, but she was already nodding.

“That’s him, yes. Always impeccably dressed.”

And she pulled another face, as though she had been no more fooled by that veneer of respectability than I had.

“Mr. Collins,” she said. “Norman Collins.”

Twenty-seven

Back home, I parked and stared down the driveway.

I was thinking—or trying to, at least. It felt like facts and ideas and explanations were all whirling in my head like birds, slow enough to glimpse but too swift to catch.

The man who had been snooping around here was called Norman Collins. Despite his claims, he had not grown up in this house, and yet for some reason he had been prepared to pay well over the asking price to purchase it. Which meant the property obviously meant something to him.

But what?

I stared down the driveway at the garage.

That was where Collins had been skulking when I first spotted him. The garage, filled with the debris removed from the house before I moved in, some of which had presumably belonged to Dominic Barnett. Had it been Collins at the door last night, trying to persuade Jake to open it? If so, maybe it wasn’t that Jake himself had been in danger, just that Collins had wanted something.

The key to the garage, perhaps.

But thought could only take me so far. I got out of the car and headed to the garage, unlocking it and then pulling one of the doors and wedging it open with the can of paint from yesterday.

I stepped inside.

All the junk remained, of course: the old furniture; the dirty mattress; the haphazard piles of damp cardboard boxes in the center. Looking down to my right, the spider was still spanning its thick web, surrounded now by a few more remnants than before. Butterflies, presumably, chewed into small, pale knots of string.

I glanced around. One of the butterflies remained perched delicately on the window. Another was resting on the side of the box of Christmas decorations, its wings lifting and lowering gently. They reminded me of Jake’s picture, along with the fact that he couldn’t possibly have seen them in here. But that was a mystery I couldn’t solve for now.

What about you, Norman?

What were you looking for in here?

I scraped some dry leaves away with my foot to clear a space, then took the box of decorations down and began sifting through it.

It took half an hour to work my way through all the cardboard boxes, emptying each in turn and spreading the contents around. While I was kneeling down among it all, the stone floor of the garage felt cold, as though the knees of my jeans were gathering ovals of damp.

The garage door rattled behind me, and I turned around quickly, startled by the noise. But the driveway was sunlit and empty. Just the warm breeze, knocking the door against the can of paint.

I turned back to what I’d found.

Which was nothing. The boxes all contained the kind of random debris you had no immediate use for but were still unwilling to throw away. There were the decorations, of course; ropes of tinsel were strewn around me now, their colors dulled and lifeless with age. There were magazines and newspapers, with nothing obvious to unite the dates and editions. Clothes that had been folded and stored away and smelled of mold. Dusty old extension cords. None of it looked to have been deliberately hidden so much as casually packed away and forgotten about.

I fought down the frustration. There were no answers here.

My investigation had disturbed several more of the butterflies, though. Five or six of them were crawling over the debris I’d unpacked, their antennae twitching, while another two were fluttering against the window. I watched as one on the tinsel lifted up into the air, then flickered past me, heading for the open door, before the stupid thing looped back in again and landed on the floor in front of me, on one of the bricks there.

I watched it for a moment, once again admiring the rich, distinctive colors on its wings. It crawled steadily across the surface of the bricks, and then disappeared down into a crack between them.

I stared at the floor.

A large section of the garage floor in front of me was made up of haphazardly arranged house bricks, and it took me a second to recognize what I must be looking at. An old mechanic’s pit, where someone could lie down underneath a car to work on it. It had been filled in with bricks to approximate a flat surface.

Tentatively, I lifted up the one the butterfly had been on. It came out of the floor covered in dust and old webbing, the butterfly clinging obstinately to one side.

In the hole the brick had left, I could see the top of what appeared to be another cardboard box below.

The garage door banged again behind me.

Jesus.

This time I stood up and walked back out onto the driveway to check. There was nobody in sight, but in the last few minutes the sun had disappeared behind a cloud and the world felt darker and colder. The breeze had picked up. Looking down, I saw that I was still holding the brick, and that my hand was trembling slightly.

Back in the garage, I put the brick to one side, and then began to remove more from the pit, gradually revealing the box hidden underneath. It was the same size as the others, but had been sealed across the top with parcel tape. I took out my keys and selected the one with the sharpest tip, my heart humming.

Is this what you were looking for, Norman?

I drew the point across the center of the tape, then dug my fingers in to pull the seams apart. They came away at each end with a crackling sound. Then I peered inside.

Immediately I sat back on my heels, either unable or unwilling to comprehend what I had seen. My thoughts went back to what Jake had said last night after he’d been talking to himself in the living room. I want to scare you. That was when I’d assumed the imaginary little girl had come back into our lives.

A car door slammed. I glanced behind me and saw that a vehicle was parked at the end of my driveway, and that a man and a woman were walking toward me.

It wasn’t her, my son had told me.

It was the boy in the floor.

“Mr. Kennedy?” the woman called.

Instead of answering her, I turned my attention back to the box in front of me.

To the bones inside.

To the small skull that was staring up at me.

And to the beautifully colored butterfly that had landed and rested there, its wings moving gently, like the heartbeat of a sleeping child.

Twenty-eight

Back in the day, Pete had encountered Norman Collins on several occasions, but he had never had cause to visit the man’s home. He knew of it, though: it had once belonged to Collins’s parents, and Collins had never moved out. Following his father’s death, he had lived there alone with his mother for a number of years, and then continued to do so after she died.