Page 76 of The Whispering Night
[He glances at his watch. Then closes the book and returns it to the folder.]
[9:18]
Jeremiah: If you want to play coy, Ms. Wednesday, then that’s fine. I’m not going to torture you for answers. I’ll give you time to think over everything we’ve covered, and when I come back tonight, I expect you’ll have more to say. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an All-Terrain 10K to win. In the name of scorpion pride, “we hold the line.”
[Jeremiah returns the photographs and birthday cards to the folder before him. He stacks it all neatly, then pushes to his feet.]
[9:49]
Jeremiah: Interview concluded at 6:55—
Winnie: [voice muffled by table] I’m the Midnight Crown. [She lifts her head.] People will wonder where I am.
Jeremiah: No, Ms. Wednesday. I really don’t think they will.
[End 10:00]
CHAPTER
32
If Jeremiah Tuesday thinks he is torturing Winnie, then he has no idea how good she is at torturing herself. He leaves her alone in the interrogation room with nothing but water and silence to keep her company, and she gets agreathead start on self-inflicted wounds. For hours, she has nothing else to do but go over what happened at the old museum.
A thousand times. A thousand thousand.What happened at the old museum? Where did it all go wrong?
There was Jay, as a human.I love you. I’m sorry.
Then there was Jay as a wolf while the Whisperer frothed with hunger.
Then there were her friends, who, logically, Winnie knows were only trying to protect her. Were only trying to get her away from a monstrous, unstoppable whirlwind that they finally understood was very real.
But Winnie hates them. All of them. L.A., Trevor, Katie, and yes, even Bretta. Even Emma. Even Erica. They took her away from Jay, and now Jay is gone because of it.
Maybe he isn’t gone,her brain spurts every five seconds, a caricature of the first stage of grief: denial.Maybe he isn’t gone, and the Whisperer didn’t destroy him.
“Except I felt it,” she tells the interrogation table. “Ifeltit.”
You don’t know what you felt. It might have been adrenaline.
Winnie wants it to have been adrenaline. Shewantsit to have been an awful dream she will wake up from, with the wordsTrust the Pure Heartechoing across her brain. But this isn’t a dream. ThePure Heartechoes are real because the Whisperer briefly had a voice that spoke to Winnie.
It made music too. Somehow, impossibly, it made music. And now the song that once belonged to Jenna is the soundtrack to a scene Winnie can’t stop playing in her head. Every time she finishes imagining each moment, each beat at the old museum, from Casey Tuesday in his Dracula costume to the kiss against the column with Jay, to the Diana hound in the bathroom with cards from Winnie’s dad…
To the voice at the gallery’s end that must have been the Crow… Then all the way through to that moment when Winnie felt Jay’s life vanish.
Every time Winnie reaches The End, her brain circles back to start the track anew while Jenna’s haunting song plays on.
Eventually, Winnie is escorted several hallways over to a cell with cinderblocks for walls, a squeaky cot with no blanket, and a toilet with a bare-minimum privacy screen. It’s soprison cliché,Winnie would find it funny.
Except nothing is funny right now. She simply drops to the cot, rests her head on her knees, and drapes her hands over her neck like she’s in a tornado drill. And that’s definitely what this feels like: a tornado. All that’s missing are the sirens.
It’s like these nightmares only show up when you’re around, Winnie.Mario said that to Winnie half a month ago at the dockside werewolf testing site.Or like you’ve got some special power that only lets you see them.
Well, this power sucks then,she answered. And it does. Even now when other people have seen the werewolf and the Whisperer…
This power sucks. Winnie wants it gone from her body, from her brain.
She has no idea how long she is in the cell like this. Only that it is enough time for her to start rubbing at another stage of grief like the scratch-off strip on a lottery ticket.Bargaining,the ticket reads.
