Whisper to Me by Nick Lake Read Free Book Online

life worrying about my dad and the restaurant, even before what happened with my mom. And then there’d been the killings. A lot of people said the town wouldn’t recover until the murderer was stopped. Families with teenage girls didn’t want to come here on vacation, just in case.
    That was the theory anyway, to explain why the town was dying.
    I kept going. Came to a construction site where a row of old condemned houses had been. This was the other thing, along with stuff being boarded up: a load of projects had been abandoned. There were empty lots up and down the boardwalk and the avenues behind, like the sockets of pulled teeth, the closing bracket of decline. Scaffolding that never came down.
    The only new businesses you ever saw: gambling shops, bars, discount stores. The town had a lot of gamblers and drinkers now.
    “Are you a ghost?” I asked as we passed a rusting crane, towering above us. “Are you dead?”
    The voice didn’t answer.
    “Am I going mad? Answer me. Please.”
    “No,” said the voice.
    (NOTE: Remember me saying this exchange happened a lot?)
    “What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”
    “I want justice,” said the voice.
    “Justice?”
    But the voice was gone; I sensed it withdrawing, the dispassionate eye of some great predator wheeling away, distracted, for now.
    Justice? I thought. Justice for what?
    Unless … I thought of the foot on the beach.
    But no. It was a crazy thought.

 
    I kept walking to the library. This was another piece of vernacular architecture—white and blue, art-deco curves, on a street just one block back from the ocean. In any other town it would have been a tourist destination; it was beautiful. But people just walked past it.
    Not me.
    I went in, and Jane raised a hand. “Hey, Cass.”
    I nodded. The voice had said not to speak to anyone. But Jane didn’t seem to mind; she smiled. I liked her. She wasn’t much older than me, maybe twenty-two. Her hair had a streak of purple in it, and she had a tattoo curling all around and down her arm that she said came from a standard introduction to Russian fairy tales: WHAT WERE THE FAIRY TALES, THEY WILL COME TRUE .
    I paused, looking at the tattoo, thinking of fairy tales, and how I wished they would stay that way, just stories. I mean, a voice from nowhere was speaking to me, punishing me. I felt a twinge of sickness, deep in my belly. The fairy tales were coming true. The curse of Cassandra.
    I felt, at that moment, truly cursed. Like there was a spell on me, an evil one, and the worst thing was I knew that I deserved it.
    “You okay, Cass?” asked Jane.
    Cassie, get a grip on yourself , I thought. I nodded again and did my best approximation of a smile. Jane smiled back. “Well, you need anything, you call me,” she said.
    I nodded. I did a lot of nodding in those days. Then I was about to look at the fiction shelves when I remembered what the voice had said—no stories. I shook my head, thinking what am I supposed to —
    And then I saw a display Jane had made, a freestanding shelf with books on it about murders, most of them relating to the Houdini Killer. In my memory, a shaft of sunshine came through the window at that moment, breaking through the clouds outside, illuminating the books, trapping motes of dust suspended in light.
    I went over and took down a slim book called Murder on the Jersey Shore that Jane had put a staff recommended label next to. I carried it over to a table and started reading. It was pretty interesting. There wasn’t much detail about the murders; I mean, with no bodies it would be hard to give any. The focus was mainly on the girls—most of them under twenty—who had been killed. The author was disgusted at the lack of police progress; his whole thing was basically that it was a huge stain of shame on them and on the state of New Jersey and the entire country that these women had been murdered and that because of their profession no one cared.
    I care ,