The Whispering Hollows

by Lisa Unger

  “No,” said Eloise. “No. This is not my problem.”

  Things like this are everyone’s problem.

  “No,” she said stubbornly. “I’m dealing with enough. How much can one person take?”

  But she was aware of that low buzz of anxiety, the feeling you get when you think you might have forgotten to unplug the iron or left the Christmas tree lights on. She could live with it. If she ignored it, it would pass. She cleaned up the mess and finished mopping the floor.

  Life ground on. And Eloise continued to go through the motions—taking care of Amanda, doing the odd babysitting job, some cleaning for the working moms in the neighborhood. Just to keep money flowing in, just to keep busy and spare herself any empty moments. And, then, of course, there was the small matter of the trial of the man who murdered her family. She was attending that even though Dr. Ben questioned the wisdom of this. Will it help you, Eloise? Will it help you to accept and move on? She didn’t know the answer to that. She just knew that she had to be there. Anything else was neglect, abandonment of Alfie and Emily.

  And that buzz, that anxiety, was a hum in the back of her head. Not going away. Quite the opposite. When Eloise saw the girl lying in the bathtub, in the hallway by the front door, in the driveway when Eloise took out the trash, Eloise ignored her. She wasn’t there. Eloise was more stubborn than whatever this was. Alfie had always called her his little mule.

  • • •

  On top of ignoring the girl, the trial of the man who had killed Alfie and Emily was almost too much to bear. Before it began, Eloise had entertained fantasies about buying a gun and killing the truck driver Barney Croft in front of everyone.

  She’d imagined, in vivid Technicolor detail, herself standing and pulling the gun from her purse, lifting and just unloading it into Croft while everyone screamed and scattered around her. She could hear the shots ring out, smell the gunpowder, watch bloody holes open in his chest, his head. Her ears actually rang from the imagined sound of the weapon firing. She’d never even held a gun, had no idea where one might acquire one. And, of course, there was Amanda to consider. Eloise was all she had now. She couldn’t go to jail.

  So Eloise lay in bed at night, vibrating with hatred, wishing Barney Croft every possible ill—that he’d lose everything he loved, that his family would die as horribly as hers had, that he’d get murdered in prison. The colorful ferocity of her imagination was shocking even to Eloise. She had never experienced hatred before; it was toxic. It made her ill, as if she were taking a teaspoon of arsenic every morning in her coffee. For the first time in her life, she’d completely lost her appetite. Her stomach roiled; she’d stopped eating anything but the blandest foods. Her shoulders and neck ached from a tension there that never released. Her jaw was stiff and sore from clenching her teeth. And yet she found she couldn’t release her feelings of hatred. Could not let them go. She wanted them. In fact, her dark thoughts comforted her even as they were hurting her. Meanwhile, the girl would not go away. She kept hearing the calling of those crows. It was an impossible ratcheting of tension day after day. How could anyone survive it?

  • • •

  And then, in the final days of the trial, she saw Barney Croft outside the courtroom. Eloise was coming back from her car, and he was standing outside with his lawyer. He was smoking a cigarette, talking in a desperate, impassioned way—his face earnest, his palms wide. She wasn’t supposed to talk to Croft or even go near him. Even so, she found herself marching toward him. The lawyer, a slick-looking young man with a blond crew cut and a fleshy, youthful face, held up his hand when he saw her. He moved his body between her and Croft.

  “Mrs. Montgomery,” he said. He was kind, respectful, lifting a placating palm. Eloise thought his mother must be proud of him in spite of the fact that he was trying to get a murderer free. He believed in the law, thought he was doing a right, if not a good, thing. She could see all of that in him. “Nothing positive can come of this.”

  But Barney Croft was pushing his lawyer aside. Eloise was surprised to see the man weeping, the cigarette fallen from his mouth to the ground.

  “Oh, sweet Lord,” he said. He dropped to his knees on the ground beside his lawyer. “Please forgive me.”

  And Eloise saw him completely. She saw his addiction and his hardscrabble life. She saw how he drove to support his family and took drugs so that he could drive longer, so that he could do more for them. She saw how life had ground him down and how the mistakes he’d made had cost them both everything. And that this was how life worked. We were all connected, no one separate. Things like this are everyone’s problem.

  And something moved inside her. The muscles in her neck and shoulders released a little.

  “I forgive you,” she said. There was no tearful embrace, no real warmth. There was, of course, no love for this man who had robbed Alfie and Emily of their lives because of his mistakes. There was just a sudden release within Eloise of rage and that sickening hatred. Her words only seemed to make him cry harder, bending all the way down so that his head touched the ground.

  She walked away from him, feeling lighter, less bound up inside. And she was hungry for the first time in months.

  That night she heard the girl again, not louder, not more insistent. She wasn’t a haunting specter demanding attention. But Eloise understood finally that there was no ignoring it. This was how her life worked now.

  • • •

  He had pictures. Eloise stood behind him and watched. And yet she wasn’t quite behind him; she was in him. But that wasn’t quite it, either. He was a man in a boy’s room, and he sat upon a twin bed made up in navy blue sheets. He sifted through his pictures of the girls. How he prized them. How he looked forward to his time alone with those stolen photographs.

  His breathing came heavy and hot, wheezy, almost asthmatic. Some of the girls in the photos Eloise recognized—students of Alfie’s, acquaintances of her daughters. The Hollows wasn’t a big town. She’d seen some of them on the soccer field, at dances, Girl Scouts, swim team. Some of them she’d never seen before. Eloise watched as he took the pictures out from the shoe box under the bed; she felt his alacrity, his appetites. The photos were mainly school shots—yearbook portraits, pictures taken at winter social or homecoming. He had access to the school, to the girls. And yet they were always just out of his reach. He had always been on the outside, laughed at, bullied, and mocked. He expected nothing more from people.

  He was a child in a man’s body, not intelligent, with little insight. He lived and worked with his father, who still thought it was okay to hit him on the head when he made a mistake. He was afraid and lonely, a misfit. His mother was gone—dead or left, Eloise didn’t know. But there was an emptiness in him always wanting to be filled. She tried to stay as far outside of him as she could. His inner life was a suffocating quicksand. Could she disappear into him? What were the rules? Eloise didn’t know. She could hold herself back, though; so she did.

  He was a watcher. He stood in the shadows and watched the kids who would have nothing to do with him. Whatever his role was, he was invisible to them. And he had been watching when the girl in the woods was in trouble. He had been following her for days, saw her get into that boy’s car with the other kids. He knew the woods, cut through and got there not long after they arrived by car. He saw her run, heard her scream. He enjoyed her fear. The sound of her frightened voice excited him in a way he didn’t quite understand and knew was bad, bad, bad. He did nothing to help her.

  After the others left her there, he waited, watching. Would they come back for her? Had they gone for help? Would the police come? When the sun finally set, and darkness fell, and she didn’t move, he took her. He ventured out from his hiding place and lifted her tenderly from where she lay.

  She was heavy for someone so small. He carried her through the woods over his shoulder with effort, out to an old hunters’ blind that had long b
een forgotten.

  Eloise didn’t want to see what he did to her. By some mercy, she was able to turn away from it. He’d kept some things. One of her barrettes, her underpants. Her heart-shaped locket. They were in the box where he kept the pictures of the other girls, the others he watched.

  What he’d seen, what he’d done, had awaked some sleeping dog within him. It was pacing. Eloise didn’t know him—who he was, where he was.

  But that voice kept ringing and the crows kept crying. She kept seeing those hands, nails caked black with something, sifting through the pictures. She watched the news, waiting for the story that would make things clear. But there was nothing, until finally one morning after she dropped Amanda off at school, she just couldn’t take it anymore. She knew what she needed to do, even though it seemed crazy. She drove to the police station, intending to ask for Ray Muldune, The Hollows Police Department’s only detective. What was she going to say to him? She had no idea. She just knew that it was the right time and he was the right person.

  When she arrived, the station house was vibrating with urgency. A girl had been reported missing last night. A frantic, all-night search was still under way.

  Then she saw the picture that was circulating. A plain girl, with straight blonde hair and smiling dark eyes—Sarah. She was an only child, a talented violinist, a good student, someone who would never be late without calling her mother. Eloise realized that she recognized the girl. Eloise had cleaned the Meyers’s house once when she took on jobs to help Alfie make ends meet. It had been a big, gorgeous place with no one home, just a key under the mat at the door.

  “I need to see Ray Muldune,” Eloise told the female officer at the front desk.

  “In reference to?”

  “I may have some information about—Sarah.”

  The woman held her eyes for a second, a cop’s stare—assessing, suspicious, wary. If she recognized Eloise, she didn’t say anything. The officer picked up the phone in front of her. “Someone with possible information about Sarah.”

  It wasn’t a minute before a gray-haired man with a thick unkempt mustache (his wife hated it) was standing in front of her. He had dark circles under his eyes, a look of terrible weariness that was more than fatigue (unhappy marriage, struggling with his teenage children, fed up with his job).

  “Can I help you?” Something crossed his face. Recognition. He knew who she was.

  There was something about him. Something strong and appealing, a man who handled things, who didn’t rest until a job was done. He was the right person to talk to; she was sure of that. His name had been in her head, even though she’d never met him. Of course, The Hollows was a small town. She’d probably heard everyone’s name at least once, knew what most people did for a living.

  “Can we speak alone?”

  He squinted at her, then led her into his office. She told him the truth—everything, from the accident, to the first vision about the girl in the well. (He liked that; a fact he could confirm. He opened a notebook, jotted something down, then turned back to her.) This was long before computers were a feature on everybody’s desk. He watched her attentively, head tilted, eyes narrowed, as she recounted the visions she had about Sarah.

  Well, she didn’t exactly tell him the whole truth. She told him about the man who took Sarah, everything about him, even the things she had not acknowledged fully to herself, including what she thought might be the first letter of his name. The words just tumbled out of her, almost as if she didn’t have anything to do with what she was saying.

  She didn’t tell him exactly the way Sarah had died. That was not the reason she’d had the vision; she knew that. She was here to help them find her. She was here to make sure the man didn’t do what he would eventually do to another girl. It was a cold, hard certainty within her.

  “You said dirt under his fingernails,” Muldune said when she was done. He was doodling on a pad in front of him. (Something he did that helped him think. His wife hated that, too. She hated a number of his little quirks, things he was powerless to change.)

  “Not dirt,” she said. “Oil maybe.”

  “Hands calloused, dry?”

  She closed her eyes, trying to remember. “Yes,” she said finally. “I think so.”

  “Like maybe he worked in a garage?”

  Eloise shook her head thoughtfully. It sounded right, but she’d reached the end of her knowledge, and that horrible thrum of anxiety had subsided. She’d done what she needed to do. A tremendous wave of relief and fatigue crashed over her.

  “Well,” he said after another moment. “Thank you for your help. We’ll be in touch if we need any more information.”

  A respectful blow off—which was actually fine. She wasn’t one of those glommers-on, someone who wanted to help solve crimes, or stand on the sidelines watching the investigation unfold. She didn’t want attention or credit. She wanted to do what she had been asked to do, nothing more.

  She left then, got in her car and drove home and cleaned the house. Maybe that was it, she told herself as she scrubbed the floor with a nearly religious zeal. Maybe that was the final event. Sarah was gone—not in the foyer, not in the kitchen or the upstairs bath.

  The house was quiet except for the soft mewing of Oliver, the new kitten that she had brought home for Amanda. Alfie had always been allergic, so they’d never had pets. Oliver wasn’t much of a consolation prize, but he brought some much needed cuteness and comedy relief into their grim little house where the dead dominated.

  Eloise had thought a kitten might be good for her daughter, who recently seemed to have discovered rage. Amanda was angry at Eloise—for having a doctor’s appointment that morning Alfie and Emily died, for the crazy visions, because Eloise had forgiven Barney Croft.

  How do you forgive the man who killed your family? What right do you have to forgive him? Amanda had shrieked, when Eloise shared her experience. Dr. Ben said that anger was healthy for Amanda, way better than the depression that comes from turning anger inward. But it certainly wasn’t pleasant—the screaming, the door slamming, the sudden hysterics. Eloise’s nerves were frayed.

  She’ll work through it, Dr. Ben promised. Trust me, you would rather deal with this than the alternatives. Speaking of which—how are you doing?

  • • •

  Detective Muldune knocked on her door at five to midnight. It was a loud, insistent knock that woke both Amanda and her instantly.

  “Who is it?” Amanda whispered. She was still sleeping in Eloise’s bed, a habit Eloise had no intention of trying to break right now.

  “I have no idea,” she said. As Eloise climbed down the stairs, she saw the flashing lights in her driveway, Detective Muldune standing on her porch with his shield out. Eloise experienced a dump of fear. Oh, God, she thought. I knew all sorts of things I shouldn’t know. Maybe they think I had something to do with it?

  “Mrs. Montgomery, can you open the door? Detective Ray Muldune of The Hollows PD.”

  She pulled it open, aware that Amanda, who was creeping down the stairs behind her, had come to sit on the middle step. Was Amanda going to have to witness Eloise being hauled off by the police?

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Can you?”

  The desperation was coming off of him in waves. She saw that he was alone; there were no other cars, just his empty prowler in the driveway, red lights silently spinning.

  “We can’t find her,” he said. “We have no leads. Her parents are beside themselves. We’ve had people out looking for nearly forty-eight hours. Time is running out.”

  Eloise shook her head. She thought her job was finished; she didn’t know what to say. Was she supposed to help him further?

  “Trust me,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here if I had anywhere else to go.”

  “Let me get dressed,” she said. He offered
a solemn nod and walked off her porch back to his car. She quietly closed the door and turned toward the stairs.

  “You’re going with him?” said Amanda. She wore this particular angry scowl when she looked at her mother now. She hates me, Eloise thought.

  “I have to,” said Eloise moving past her.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she said nastily.

  “I think I do,” said Eloise.

  “You’re going to leave me here? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “You can come,” Eloise said.

  “The hell I will,” said her once sweet daughter. Amanda got to her feet and stormed up the stairs past Eloise. She slammed her door so hard that the china in the cabinet downstairs rattled, channeling Emily.

  “This is bullshit,” her daughter screamed through the closed door. “You. Are. Not. A. Psychic.”

  A psychic? The word conjured women in flowing skirts and headscarves, crystal balls and fortune-telling cards. Is that what she was?

  Eloise got dressed and tried to push open Amanda’s door. It was locked.

  “Amanda,” she said. “I know you’re angry. Try to understand, okay?”

  Nothing.

  “I didn’t ask for any of this,” she said. She rested her forehead on the door. “I’m just—” What? What was she doing? “I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

  Nothing.

  “I love you.”

  Eloise waited.

  “I love you, too,” Amanda said after a moment. That was something, at least. She didn’t open the door, though. It had always been a rule of the family, never part without saying “I love you.” They both knew the worst thing could happen.

  • • •

  Ray Muldune’s car was overwarm and smelled of fast-food hamburgers. He filled his seat, belly hanging over his belt. His jacket was wrinkled and soft with overwear.

  “I brought you something,” he said. He pulled it out of his pocket and let it rest in his open palm. It was a red Goody barrette. There was one in the box in the man’s room. This must be the other one. “A volunteer found this in the woods.”