As far as I could see, there was nothing else on any computer or downloaded anywhere that could incriminate Whisper in any way. He did a lot of the hard work for us himself. He was careful. He didn’t want her to be discovered.
There was the possibility that William wasn’t the only one who had access to this footage, but I had no way of knowing. I had to hope this was all there was.
Whisper said there was the woman he had killed. I saw no evidence of her existence, not how Whisper described her, anyway, in all the years she had lived with William. She had been killed eight years ago, and I had lived here for ten. Whisper said she never left the house, and there was no sign of a grave on the property, so William made that easy for us. We didn’t need any of his past rearing its ugly head in the future. He would have been smart and disposed of the body off his property. He would never have let himself be caught for her death.
Nobody had missed this woman, even though she had been dead eight years, and nobody had traced her to William’s home. He would have been careful and chosen her well for the task of raising Whisper.
She was a nobody.
A ghost who served William.
That was not my concern or business.
Whisper was my business.
The smell was getting worse, and the cleaning service was gonna get a rude shock, but this couldn’t be helped. It will be a natural discovery. The cleaning service is from New Orleans. He was smart. He didn’t contract anybody too close to home.
They would come to the door for their routine clean, and the smell will be enough to alert them to enquire more. The police would get involved, and it will look like the stupid accident it was. A man living alone had fallen by his own drunken stupidity to his death.
He must have gone on a bender, and that decision had set Whisper free. I feel bad for her because she had enough nightmares stashed in that young mind of hers. Now, the sight of another dead person has been added to it.
The thing with William is he didn’t expect to die before Whisper, but he still kept his files organized. His security was no match for my hacker. It was all very easy for us to retrieve and delete. He felt powerful in his role as her master, not believing for one minute she would outlive him.
The beatings, and the power that was taken away from her at such a young age, were hard to watch, but I had to make sure this girl was telling me the truth without a doubt.
She neglected to tell me she was locked up in the old slave cabin out back when the cleaners came to the house. She had been drugged and handcuffed to an old bed. I could hear William’s voice as I watched some footage. I only ever saw the back of him. He would carry her in already totally out of it and handcuff her.
I fast forwarded three hours and he would be back, calling her name and telling her the cleaners had gone, and then he would carry her unresponsive body back into the main house.
It made my skin crawl to see the young Whisper like that.
All the hard drives will be locked away in my safe. They are hers to do with what she wishes.
We were on a tight schedule with time, so we watched as many as we could, but the others would have to be watched away from here. No wonder Whisper took the last hard drive, so nobody would stumble across it. I can only imagine the nightmares it would contain.
My conscience is clear knowing I’ll be doing everything in my power to show her how to protect herself from now on. I’ve watched only moments in time, but at least I know about what Whisper is dealing with by herself, and we are now here to help her if she allows us to.
William was living under the town’s noses with his captive for nearly two decades. To have been able to uphold that secret is a pretty frightening thing.
Whisper’s life had been wrenched from her, but at least now the twisted fuck is well and truly dead. I have no doubt he would have eventually killed her, and nobody would have been able to mourn her.
That would have been a real sad fucking thing.
Miss Catherine would have already pictured in her mind what the girl had gone through, because she has her own horror stories locked in her mind. She knew straight away listening to the girl that I would be helping out, because somebody needs to try to right the wrongs that were rained down upon her.
With the help of my team, one member being a computer hacker genius, we cleared any personal files we deemed ‘too close to the subject’ from his computer, and we got necessary information off his phone. William was a smart man; he had deleted all messages, assuming he had any, because he lead a fairly hermit existence. He covered his tracks well. If I hadn’t observed the footage, I would never have believed the monster he was capable of being.
The time I spent doing this clean up job, Whisper stayed true to her word and didn’t run. I need a bit more time because now I have to convince her that I can help her and give her a new life, but I need time to think this through.
The three of us have been up for nearly forty-eight hours straight, catching a couple hours sleep on rotation until we had the job completed. When we weren’t at the house, we were at my bar in the back rooms, going through the files and hard drives we had taken. The files we retrieved had to be thoroughly examined to make sure nothing was going to come and bite us in the ass in the future with William’s untimely death.
Who did the house go to in the event of his death? I need to find these things out before his death is on record. I had my accomplices help me scour the files, and that’s when we found William’s will.
Thank God there were no surprises. There is a son, who will get the lot. Whisper is free to stay a secret. I took a copy of the will for my records, always being on the over-precautionary side. It has saved my ass on more than one occasion.
I think finally our job here is done. The stink of William Dupré is getting to be too much, so it’s time to leave and let everything play out naturally in a couple of days’ time.
We breeze out like we breezed in, without leaving a stitch of evidence we had been there.
We are that fucking good.
The past three days have really opened my eyes to the generosity and kindness of my new friends.
I asked Miss Catherine this morning to cut my hair shorter, because it was too long. She took a good foot off the bottom, and it was still too long, but I felt better for having that much cut off.
On the first day, in the afternoon, a big burly man a few years older than me introduced himself to Miss Catherine as Lincoln, and he was there on Boxer’s orders. He had brought over clothes for me from one of Boxer’s friends. He came to the door, but he did not come in.
I was a little overwhelmed this person was kind enough to share her jeans and shirts with me, and she didn’t even know me. It was a really nice feeling getting out of the clothes I had worn from the house. I was thin, and she was a little bigger than me, so the clothes were a little loose, but they felt like honest clothes.
Boxer had called Miss Catherine earlier that day to explain that Lincoln would be coming and going while he was working at Master William’s house and that he was discreet and trustworthy. Lincoln was polite and very unassuming with his presence. I felt safer with him being around.
Boxer wasn’t leaving us alone until he had everything sorted at Master William’s house. He let Miss Catherine know not to be alarmed if she sensed somebody watching, because he had a man outside at all times keeping us safe until he knew there was no danger.
I did not leave the house to go outside. I stayed indoors, where I felt protected by the walls, and it was what I was used to.
The second day, I mainly slept on the couch. I think my body was exhausted from the life I had led, always keeping my guard up.