Whisper of the Ocean

By Nita Fox

Alone on the beach, Emma heard a voice summoning her and she followed the call as a massive storm quickly blew in. Celia, sensing Emma's danger, rushed into the storm to rescue her best friend. Both girls disappeared from the shores of Wister Island. Detective James Maples, accompanied by his son Alex, had been called in from the mainland to aid in the investigation. James soon discovers that he is searching for more than just two missing girls. Alex begins to realize what he and his father have come up against, but will Alex's secrets and a "condition" that has always been viewed as a disability be enough to go up against the greatest evil he has ever known? Alex must discover his own true strength in order to save the island from a darkness that threatens the very lives of the ones he has grown to love. Are the powers of the mind truly greater than any other powers combined?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477282014

Nita Fox

Nita Fox is the author of the memoir, 'One Tiny Soul' and also the 'Captain Benjamin Dale' series of early reader books. She is also the mother of an Asperger's son, who was the inspiration for 'Whisper of the Ocean'. She lives in Tennessee with her three children, seven dogs and seven cats.

Book preview

Whisper of the Ocean

Nita Fox

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AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

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© 2012 by Nita Fox. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Cover Art by: Kara Van Veghel

Cover Design by: Laura I. Young

Published by AuthorHouse 10/15/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-8202-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-8201-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919602

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

For Alex

My true Asperger’s baby

I love you, son.

Chapter One

E mma stared at the clouds above her and cringed as they grew darker and darker. Her ten-year-old mind assumed it was a nasty storm brewing that would drift off as quickly as it had drifted in, much like the waves crashing around her feet. Wister Island was good for that. Thunder would pound as fierce as Hercules for a short period of time and then dissolve itself to make way for the sun.

She’d lived on the island since she was born and knew her home well. From the changing waves on the ocean side to the sound water between the island and the mainland, she had explored every inch. She was comfortable there. She knew what the clouds would bring because she’d seen it nearly every day of her young life.

She also knew it was time to head for shelter. Standing alone on a beach while a storm brewed over your head was never a good idea. Even a ten-year-old knows that.

Emma’s mother was at work and right now was probably ringing up a couple of those icky romance love books for a sun-burned mom to read while she sat under her beach umbrella to watch her kids dig holes in the sand or splash in the salt water. Book Trends, the local bookstore on the island, treated her mother well but sometimes she worked long hours, which most times didn’t treat Emma well at all. Sometimes it worked out well, though. It gave Emma time to get out and rummage around her beloved island with only her bucket hat and her purple pail for her shell collection.

Today, however, Emma was pretty discouraged. The clouds above her were sure to cut her exploration short, and the only times she could go on her no-rules outings was if she snuck out after her mother left. Her mother had just recently forbidden her from venturing out alone, but that didn’t stop Emma from following her almost-daily routine. After all, it was summer. She knew her island and she knew her people well. There were bad stories, of course, but in her opinion they were only made-up stories designed by all the parents as one with the only purpose in mind being to frighten the kids into just staying home and out of trouble. To Emma, they were poorly planned and full of nonsense.

Well, Emma wasn’t scared. And she had absolutely no intention of staying cooped up in a lonely house all day when there was water and sand that needed fresh footprints.

Usually, there were two sets of footprints, two lines of travel forever side by side extending as far as they wished. The solo set of prints today was the result of Emma’s best friend, Celia, being stuck at her own home with a grandmother who was extremely overprotective and didn’t think that Celia should be doing anything other than sitting inside in a too-quiet living room with the television off and a Monopoly game perfectly displayed on the rectangle coffee table, ready for play. How boring!

Her grandma was only visiting for a couple of weeks, so Emma knew that she and Celia would be out on their explorations again very, very soon. It was a lonely shoreline with one half of a perfect duo currently on lockdown, but it wasn’t forever. It was only for now.

Thinking about her best friend, and missing her partner in crime, Emma hung her head as she flung sand from her toes and made a U-turn. Her quiet home is where she would go, even though that’s not even close to where she wanted to be. She glanced up to scowl one more time at the irritating clouds over her head and realized that something was wrong.

She’d been wrapped up in her thoughts and frustration that she hadn’t even noticed the change in the storm. She glanced further down the beach and saw a couple of young children playing in the sand with colorful pails and shovels while their mother eyed them cautiously from her beach chair. Even farther down the shoreline was a gathering of people, but Emma couldn’t tell if they were big or small. They were too far away.

The strange part was the difference in the light from where Emma stood to where the rest of the people played out their vacation time. Emma had to be standing directly under the storm clouds. She looked at her feet instead of raising her face to the sky. She had no shadow and the sand was cool to the touch, not burning her heels like it would have been had the sun been toying with it today. It was like she was standing under a shade tree, yet the families down the beach from her were basking in the sun.

The moms weren’t scanning the cloud-cover or moving in swift circles trying to gather their children out of the line of the storm to avoid the rain that surely was inevitable. In fact, the large straw beach hat that one mom had chosen to adorn her head was one of the most eye-catching items, even more attracting than the brightly colored shovels the children were throwing around. That meant sunshine. That meant no storm clouds.

Confusion was evident in the look on Emma’s face. She turned around to check out the other end of the beach. She saw no clusters of people, obviously no families basking in the sun like the picture from the opposite direction, yet the scenario was the same. Beach houses gave their monstrous shadows to the ocean as the silhouettes were elongated versions of the houses themselves. The sun was there and the storm was not.

Quickly shifting her view from one end of the island to the other, Emma noticed that on either side of her was an almost perfect line between the light enveloping the entire rest of the beach and the shadow that seemed to envelope only her. It was a perfect line between light and shadow, and that very thought entered Emma’s mind like a tidal wave. Everything else on the beach was in the light. She stood alone in the shadows.

The nearest family to her was close enough to yell at, so she tried. Strangely enough, her sound seemed to echo right back to her and the family didn’t acknowledge her voice at all.

When it looked like they were facing her direction, she waved. She waved big, with both her hands way up in the air like she was flagging down an airplane or a helicopter for a rescue but they never saw her.

She was afraid of the shadow yet she was also afraid of the light. She was frozen in her own sandy footprints and she breathed heavier by the minute. It seemed as if she had already stood there for hours yet she knew deep down it had only been a few minutes.

She found herself longing for Celia and the security of where she was right now. She wished that she had listened to her mother and stayed indoors and she also wanted Celia to stay far away from the beach. Emma tried hard not to think of Celia, feeling that if she thought too hard about her then Celia would actually hear her and just show up out of the blue, and seeing that Emma was in danger she would try to save her. Emma felt as though she was in danger out here all alone, and she didn’t want Celia in the same danger.

Maybe the people honestly just didn’t hear her. Maybe she was farther away from them than she thought. Maybe she’s just making this whole thing out to be more than it really is. Maybe there truly was nothing wrong after all.

Maybe there really was.

Emma slowly turned back toward the people in the light. She took a deep breath and then another. Forcing her right foot out of the sand, she took her first step toward the line between light and shadow. Closing her eyes, she took a second step. Then a third.

Well, so far so good. She opened her eyes and realized that the line was only a mere five steps away. With her eyes open, facing her own fears, she continued with her baby steps. One more, then another.

Two steps away from the line, Emma stopped. Looking at her feet, and willing them to move, she saw that the dry sand around her was rumbling-not making a noise, but each grain of sand was jumping as if a giant was making the ground shake with its heavy, sturdy footsteps.

The more she willed her feet to move, the more the ground shook. With every pressing thought, another rumble would vibrate through the earth. Taking a deep breath and huffing it out fast, and with all the willpower she had inside her soul, she lifted her foot.

Almost like a tidal wave, the sand stirred at the base of the shadow line and rose so quickly she could do nothing to counter the attack. It threw her backwards further into the shadows. Landing hard on her backside, she immediately began to cry.

She sat on her behind exactly where the sand-wave had placed it and cried hard as her best friend crept into her mind again. She couldn’t help it. Celia was all she had. All her power couldn’t keep Celia out of her mind and heart. They were the same person, and held the same thoughts, same interests and same feelings. Celia was there for the happy times, sad times, scary, fun and lonely times. She was there for just about any kind of times Emma could think of, yet for the first time in Emma’s life, she wanted Celia far, far away. At the same time, however, she wondered if anything would be different if Celia had been close to her now.

Pushing Celia out again as best she could, and listening to her surroundings, she searched her tiny space for answers. Sand, more sand, water rushing in and out. It seemed to be all there was, and she felt as if her only answer would be to dive into the ocean and swim past the shadow line, around the end of it and back to shore. But who knew where the line ended? It could travel all the way to the next continent for all she knew. Just then the thought occurred to her that if the sand could shoot her backwards with that kind of phenomenal power, then the ocean would surely break her small frame in two.

Still searching the shadowed ground, her eyes darting back and forth, there it was.

Nestled in a small hill of wet sand, where nothing was present a moment ago, sat a perfectly beautiful, extra-large conch shell. It was pinkish in color and no doubt the largest shell she’d ever seen in her life and it was one of the cool ones, too. It was the kind that if you held it up to your ear, the ocean would talk to you.

As if this one certain shell possessed a summoning power, Emma was immediately drawn to it. As she made her way toward the shell and crossed from the dry sand into the wet, she heard it call her. It was very faint and completely jumbled, but she understood her name. A seashell was calling her name. The closer she got to the shell, the harder it was to stop following the sound. Still moving forward, she tried to stop. She couldn’t take her eyes off the shell, and couldn’t look away from it. It was just so beautiful.

In the back of her mind, she heard her name again, but clear this time. The jumbles still spoke to her, but something else now did as well. Someone else. Even though the terror rushed through her veins she could not show fear. She could not scream or run or hide.

As she neared the seashell, within only a couple of footsteps, over all the chaos in her mind, she heard Celia. As she bent to touch the shell, Celia’s voice grew louder.

As Emma’s fingers grazed the smooth surface of the conch, the shadow line around her shook fiercely as Celia broke the shadow line from the outside. As Emma lifted the shell to her ear to understand the jumbles better, Celia screamed her name one last time.

As Emma felt Celia grab her arm, something else grabbed her from the inside. Celia’s grip tightened but so did the talons wrapped around Emma’s stomach. Everything grew pitch black in Emma’s line of vision and she vaguely realized she had stopped breathing. As both girls blacked out, the unique shell vanished into thin air, taking both girls along with it.

The shadow line faded almost immediately and the beaches of Wister Island returned to normal once again.

Chapter Two

W ister Island was considered the largest of a string of islands off the east coast, yet the local population stayed right around three thousand. During the summer months, however, tourists brought the population up significantly. The private beaches and long, sandy stretches of nothing but serenity were a big draw for the big city tycoons and their rich kids who flooded the island summer after summer with their fancy cars, high dollar fashion statements and better-than-you attitudes.

Summertime most definitely tested the wit and patience of every small-time police officer from every corner of the island, which in this case included only four. Part-time officers were shuttled in from the mainland on weekends but only during peak season. The full-time local force included an elderly sheriff, two young guns, and one lady cop who was as tough as they come. Their in-season duties expanded drastically as soon as May rolled around each year. Their responsibilities were transformed from standard beach patrol and performing routine daily rounds that were about as eventful as a chess game to more intense activities like citizen patrol, street clean up, designated driving, vandalism watch, playing angels for idiots and being surrogate parents to the disrespectful offspring that showed up year after year.

Deputy Chief James Maples was only beginning to understand the concept of this island life. The whole tourist town thing was very different than the city life he was more accustomed to, and only a month into summer, his patience was already wearing thin. He had come to the island on February 15th, the day after a very lonely Valentine’s Day, when nothing on the island was bustling except small-time after-school activities and the local pizza joint.

Most of the island had shut down back in November and didn’t reopen until March, but even then, when the local natives came out of their hibernation and began to move back into their daily routines, things weren’t all that crazy yet.

June came and went easily enough. It was the last month of school for the mainlanders, and that kept the island more low-key.

July, however, brought the crazies in. Everything turned red, white and blue and anyone and everyone celebrated Independence Day in their own way. College kids camped on the beach burying their beer cans and cigarette butts in the sand and setting off their own displays of fireworks, not worrying if they left debris everywhere or hit a neighbor’s house with overzealous bottle rockets.

Today was the first day of August and the investigation was proving to be difficult. Deputy Chief Maples had become an unwilling resident of Wister Island. He and his son, Alex, had come here six months ago as part of an ongoing investigation when the local sheriff had called the mainland for help when he had hit brick wall after brick wall in the search for two missing girls.

Celia Donnelly and Emma Bradford, two local girls, had disappeared without a trace on August 2nd of last year. Tomorrow would be the one-year anniversary of their disappearance and even Deputy Chief Maples was hitting the bricks. Even with all his high-tech equipment and his extensive investigative knowledge, he couldn’t break the wall down. He couldn’t even make a dent.

The month of August was supposed to be, as it had been every year since the beginning of time, the calmer of the summer months. The college kids packed up and headed back to their mainland homes to prepare themselves for school and all that should have been left were the touring families with their smallish children and the elderly couples who hid in the beach cottages until the rowdy crowd was gone.

Last August was calm, and the one before that. And even before that. When Celia and Emma disappeared, there wasn’t much activity on the island yet when the news got out about their mysterious disappearance, people began to flood onto the island with their twisted curiosity and supernatural assumptions about what really happened to the two girls. Had those groups of inquisitive teens and twenty-somethings been on the island at the time of the girls’ disappearance, the investigation may have had more direction and there might have been even a suspect or two. In this situation, though, there was nothing.

A month before Celia and Emma went missing, an eight-year-old boy disappeared. He hadn’t been a local but on July 3rd of last year, Trevor Bentley’s family had become transplants. Trevor was their only child and his parents couldn’t leave the island without their son, so they waited and waited, always hoping for closure. Over a year later, they still waited.

Everyone’s hopes were higher over Trevor’s disappearance because there were at least suspects in the investigation. He disappeared in July, the day before a very hectic Independence Day, and that day it was a beach smothered with coconut oil-covered tourists, not a nearly abandoned stretch of shoreline providing no witnesses or clues. It was believed that Trevor would be found quicker and more efficiently than the girls because his situation was more public than theirs had been. Yet nothing had surfaced in his case.

Trevor had been on the beach with his family when he disappeared. He was last seen surrounded by people, both teenagers and adults, when a sudden onset of storm clouds forced everyone to pack up and head for shelter, at least everyone on that one section of the beach. A large group of college kids who had been drinking out of their coolers on the beach were the last to run for shelter. Trevor was seen near the group of boys when the clouds began to roll in but when his parents called for him, he disappeared into the crowd.

Various witnesses to the storm that day had several different recollections, and the variances had all the investigating officers confused. It was the general consensus of all the island officers that the storm was indeed a bit of falsified information and that all the college kids in the group were lying but they had no proof of anything.

Of course, the college kids all said they thought they remembered a kid that fit Trevor’s description being over near their party spot before the alleged storm arose out of nowhere, but not one of them had a single clue what happened after the black clouds rolled in.

Even stranger, other people who were on the same beach at the same time recalled a brewing storm that dissipated as quickly as it had risen. Further down the beach, witnesses remember running from the rain. Even others recalled no storm at all. It seemed, oddly enough, that part of this particular storm attacked one isolated stretch of the island and was invisible to the rest of the world, while another part of the storm sent rain down in buckets for more than thirty minutes. So, in conclusion, and by the recollection of all witnesses, there might have been a weird storm that only part of the beach saw, and there might have been a boy named Trevor or there may be two crazy people currently living on Wister Island who just thought they had a son but really didn’t. There might actually be a case of a missing boy with strange circumstances or there may be a conspiracy going on here that makes absolutely no sense at all. The college kids were the key to the bizarre facts.

They claimed that when they discovered the weird clouds, they gathered their coolers, left their trash and ran for shelter. They said it got so dark on their part of the beach that everything was unclear. One section of the beach was so fuzzy with clouds and darkness that they couldn’t see the other end toward the pier.

The whole group claimed that they went indoors and, since their rental was directly on the beach, some of them decided to watch the storm from the large bay windows of their cottage. After all, it was a weird storm and might have had some pretty cool lightning phenomena so they dug out their phones and cameras to catch the action. The part of their seemingly manufactured story that didn’t add up during their questioning was the group recollection concerning the end of the storm.

According to each of the kids, as soon as they got inside and dumped the items they had each carried in, a small group of them headed straight for the window only to discover that there was no storm at all. It was gone.

Just like that. Gone.

And so was Trevor Bentley.

Thirteen months later, his parents still searched. His mother still cried every single day. The authorities were still stumped. The kids still denied any involvement in the case whatsoever. And Trevor was still missing.

During the summer months over that past year, photos of Trevor, Celia and Emma joined the faces on the wall of the police station. There were thirteen young faces in all.

Some of those photos dated back three years. Celia and Emma were the most recent, and the photos were still right at a year old. Children change a lot in a year or two or three, so the likelihood of finding any of these kids after such a large amount of time was diminishing rapidly. This was the fact that tore at the heart of Deputy Chief Maples. He was beginning to feel that his position in this case was almost worthless and that his efforts were a lost cause.

He had read every file on every child until the papers in those files were worn and tattered. He had questioned every resident of Wister Island at least a hundred times. He had visited every site where each child was last seen at least twice a week since he arrived on the island, hoping for the scene to speak something more positive to him. He hoped and searched, all the while his keen eye digging for a little more truth.

Yet he was starting to think there was no truth. And there was no hope. He didn’t want his thoughts to go there, but his mind led him down the road of negativity to a city of no possibilities where there was no chance on God’s green earth that he would ever find any trace of thirteen missing children.

Chapter Three

A lex Maples had no choice but to follow his single father to this place called Wister Island, but that was something he was used to. He had followed his father on many occasions to several different cities, and even once to a different country. He supposed he had no choice and he supposed it was all good for him to learn about the world this way. After all, there was only so much a kid could learn from books and pictures, so he also supposed that since that’s how most kids figure out the world then he was considered lucky. Plus, he had a pretty cool dad to tag along with so he was double-lucky. His father was all he had left in the world.

Alex had a mother once, but even in his dreams he can’t remember what she looked like. He doesn’t remember how her voice sounded or how her hair felt when he gave her a hug. Not even whether she was fat or skinny. He had no memories of her at all except for the stories his father had told him, and those were few and far between. They got jumbled in his mind when he tried to think about them. A lot of things got jumbled in his mind. The world to him was a very strange place.

Alex had a condition. That’s what his father had always called it—a condition. The doctors had a different term for it, though. They called it Asperger’s disorder, a rarely diagnosed form of autism.

Ten-year-old children, as any parent knows, see the world as a conflicting place, full of nonsense and confusion. Ten-year-old autistic children held a higher regard for that conflict. At least to a regular kid, other kids made sense even if the rest of the world really didn’t. They had friends and played sports and talked about normal stuff during lunchtime at their schools. To an Asperger’s kid, other children didn’t make sense, adults didn’t make sense, and the world appeared to be a place designed to make their lives as difficult as possible. It became a very literal place in the mind of an Asperger’s kid where jokes were nonexistent and part of the child’s livelihood will forever be two years old.

On the flip side of that, in the first grade, Alex was reading and understanding books and stories meant for people in their adult years. He could solve problems in mathematics that high-schoolers struggle with and solve a Sudoku or jigsaw puzzle with lightning speed.

Asperger’s disorder is a very high-functioning form of autism and carried very few of the symptoms that people would normally consider autistic, like rocking back and forth or having limited or no speech. Alex had plenty of speech. Sometimes people would say he had a little too much speech, yet it was intelligently displayed and as logical as any adult could have come across.

People surrounding Alex, on the surface, saw none of the symptoms of his condition. They merely saw him as a peculiar child with an extremely smart mind and an unstoppable imagination.

But they didn’t see what his father saw. They didn’t spend