by Libby Sparks
The last time she had spoken to her dad, yesterday, he had been quiet and unemotional. Like he was just reading the words he said to her off a script. Mom’s death was hitting him hard.
It was rough on Brianna, too, but right now she didn’t have the luxury of being the one who was sad. She had to be the one who was strong, the one who travelled across the country to help her dad take care of things. Maybe after all that, after she knew that her dad would be all right, she could find some time for herself, to think some things through.
So she dialed her dad’s number in New York. “Dial nine first, then one, three-one-five…” She talked herself through the whole process. It was just too quiet in this room.
The phone rang four times before someone picked it up on the other end. “Hello?”
“Hey daddy. How are you doing?”
“Are you almost home, honey?’
There were tears in his voice. “No, not yet. I’m in Minnesota. Or Iowa. I’m not really sure. I think the line runs right through here somewhere. I’m stopping for the night. Tomorrow, maybe. If not tomorrow, then the day after.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
“How are you doing out there?” she asked him, trying to be cheerful, pulling at a knot in the cord.
“Oh, I’m getting by, I guess. I miss her, you know?”
“I know, daddy. I miss Mom too. Is Aunt Judy there with you?”
Judy was her dad’s sister. She had promised to come over and help with things until Brianna could get there.
“Yeah, she’s here. She came yesterday. Cleaned out everything in the refrigerator and threw it all away. Then she went shopping and bought a whole bunch of lettuce and grass and stuff for animals to eat. She knows I hate salads.”
And that was the way Aunt Judy helped. She took over and changed everything to the way she liked it.
“I’ll be there soon, Daddy. I promise.”
“Okay, honey. Have a safe trip.”
And then he hung up.
She knew she shouldn’t expect much, not when he was still grieving for Mom. But he hadn’t even said that he loved her. That wasn’t like him. She really wished she was there, now, to take care of him. And then she wished she was back in school still and someone else could take care of her dad. And then she wished her mom had never died in the first place.
Her head was spinning as she lay there on the bed and let the phone’s receiver drop to the floor, its cord pulling it back and making it spin in a little half-circle.
Brianna had always been the one to be there when anyone else needed her; her parents included. She had put off going to college a whole year because her mom needed her. In fact, going to college in Seattle had been the first thing she had ever truly done for herself. And just when she was starting to build a life for herself, her mom had died.
She wasn’t angry at her mom for dying, not really, but she knew in her heart that this meant her chance at a life of her own was over. She was being sucked right back into the middle of everyone else’s life to be the dependable one. The one who was always there for anyone who needed her.
The one who missed out on everything.
That unwelcome thought trailed around in her mind, echoing and twisting into the sound of bells ringing in her ears.
She hadn’t remembered falling asleep, but the ringing of the phone jolted her awake on the bed, and she blinked her eyes open. They were heavy and raw. Brianna rubbed at them with the back of her left wrist as she felt around the floor for the receiver.
The phone rang again.
Her groping fingers found the cord and followed it to the handset where it lay near a leg of the nightstand. She picked it up and brought it to her ear.
And then stopped. The phone was off the hook.
How was it ringing?
She stared at it. It couldn’t be. Maybe she was still sleeping and—
It rang again in her hand, making her jump.
She took a breath. “Okay. Next time I’m definitely sticking with my cell phone.” Her voice was still shaking as she put the handset to her ear and said, “Hello?”
Ring.
This time she was so startled that she dropped the phone back to the floor, its coiled rubber cord bouncing and shaking and pulling the base across the top of the nightstand to the edge of the table.
“Oh, for crying out loud.” She got hold of herself and reached down to where the handset had fallen. The phone was obviously just malfunctioning. She picked it up and slammed it down hard in its cradle, the buttons on the front panel lighting momentarily and then going dark again.
Silence. The phone didn’t do anything. “There. Now stop it.” She sat up on the bed, knees drawn up to her chest, and rubbed at her eyes with both fists.
Ring.
She heard herself squeak as she nearly fell off the bed. With a growl of frustration, she grabbed the phone up and yelled into the mouthpiece. “Hello!”
There was silence on the other end for all of two seconds before she heard an uncertain voice. “Uh, hello. Is this Miss Maitland in room four-oh-three?”
Brianna sighed and raked her hand back through her hair. It was just the clerk at the front desk. She remembered the woman’s voice from when she had checked in. Brianna pictured her now, dark-skinned and pleasant, with a faint Indian accent. “Yes. Yes, this is Miss Maitland.”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but you have a package here at the front desk.”
“I have a what?” She couldn’t have heard that right.
“You have a package here. It was just dropped off. Shall I have it sent up to your room?”
“Um, no. No, that’s…I’ll be down to get it. Who delivered it?”
“The man didn’t leave his name. And there’s—” Brianna could just hear the faint sounds of the clerk turning the package over in her hands “—there’s no return address. Just your name and your room number.”
Her room number? Who would have known her room number? She had only just paid for the room an hour or so ago. She checked the clock. It read 7:38. Well, an hour and a half ago, anyway. But still, no one could know she was here.
“Miss Maitland?” the clerk prompted her.
“Oh. Sorry, I was just trying to figure out how someone could have delivered a package to me here. You know?”
“We take in packages all the time,” the clerk tried to rationalize it. “I’ll hold it here at the desk for you.”
And then she hung up.
Brianna didn’t understand. It had to be a mistake. Didn’t it? She replaced the handset on the cradle gently this time and then just stared at it.
It had to be a mistake.
Didn’t it?
Shaking her head, she went and found her sneakers where they had landed against the room’s air conditioner. She put the first one on and tied it tight, reached for the second one.
And the phone rang again.
She hopped back to the bed on one foot and sat down. With the phone cradled in one shoulder, she put her other sneaker on. “Hi. Did you forget something?”
It wasn’t the clerk. It was static. Just hissing, popping static.
“Hello?” she tried again. Still static.
“Stupid phone.”
Stupid phone.
The static twisted and coagulated into her own words.
Chills ran up her spine. “Who is this?”
“Who is this?”
“Okay. I’m…I’m going to hang up now.”
“Don’t hang up.”
The chills stood the hair up at the nape of her neck. Those weren’t her words.
“Listen to me. Stay away from him.”
“Who is this?”
“Don’t trust him.”
Brianna swatted the phone away. It landed on the table this time, the static loud and insistent.
“Stay away from him.”
And then the line went quiet with a little click.
She reached out a finger, slowly, tentatively
, and poked the receiver. It twisted in a half-circle and she jerked back away from it. But it was just moving in response to her touch. Nothing sinister, nothing bizarre. Just a phone.
Then what had she heard?
Brianna left the phone where it was on the table. Not that she was scared of it, she told herself. She just didn’t want it to ring again. That was all.
Keeping her eyes on it, she slowly backed her way to the door.
Chapter 3
Brianna took the elevator down to the main floor. It wasn’t until the doors closed that she felt the tension in her shoulders relax. The music in the elevator was soft and unidentifiable. It calmed her as she listened to it, though. Something about how mindless it was.
A noise escaped her throat that quickly turned into a giggle. She was being foolish. Her nerves were getting to her, what with all the stress. That’s all it was.
She was busy convincing herself that she was overreacting to nothing, when her stomach growled. Dinner. She needed dinner. It dawned on her that she hadn’t gotten around to lunch, either. After getting this package, she’d head out. There had been a variety of fast food restaurants on the streets around the hotel, which was perfect, because she just wanted something quick and easy. Maybe a burger and some fries, or a huge salad like the ones that they kept refilling for you. She could spend an hour in a place like that. Afterwards she was looking forward to sleeping the rest of the night away until she couldn’t sleep any more.
The front lobby was open and spacious, with a thin carpet of gold and brown patterns straight out of the 1970s. Against the back wall was a little space fronted by a low countertop of polished dark wood. A door to the side led to an office. Behind a computer screen at the countertop stood the clerk Brianna had checked in with earlier. The woman was dark-skinned, shorter than Brianna, with short dark hair cut into a bob, and a permanently wide smile. Her name tag said that her name was Mary.
“Can I help you?” Mary asked as Brianna stepped up to the desk.
“Um. I’m Brianna Maitland. You told me there was a package? For me, I mean?”
Mary’s smile never changed. “Yes. Here you go.” She pulled out a small and plain brown cardboard box from under the counter and presented it to Brianna.
She looked at the box. The flaps were sealed with clear packing tape. In the upper right corner was her name, written in blocky letters with thick black marker, the name of this hotel and her room number underneath. As the clerk had said, there was no return address or name.
“There’s no postage,” Brianna pointed out.
Mary the desk clerk looked down at the package and then back up at her like Brianna had just said that water was wet. She offered the box again.
Brianna had expected the box to have some weight to it. Instead, it was light and felt empty. She shook it. Something rattled softly inside. Not empty after all. She tapped a finger against the bottom in thought.
“Who did you say delivered it?”
Mary shrugged. “No one that I knew. But we take in packages all the time.”
“Yes,” Brianna mumbled. “You said that.”
She put the box down on the countertop and spun it in her hands. “You wouldn’t happen to have a knife or something to open this with, would you?”
“How about a letter opener?”
“That would probably do it. Thanks.”
Mary plucked the letter opener out of a desk organizer crammed with pencils, pens, paperclips, and other things. Then, she handed it to Brianna. The pointed metal opener slid easily through the tape along the top of the box.
She hesitated, hands poised over the flaps. Then in a rush she opened the top to look inside.
Crumpled brown paper. Like the kind used every day to mail ordinary packages. No ticking time bomb. No cobras coiled and springing the moment they spotted her. Nothing that her imagination had conjured up at all. Packing paper. Just packing paper.
She pulled some of it aside, using just the tips of her two fingers. In-between the folds of the crumpled packing material she saw something glinting. It was a slim gold chain. Eyebrows lowered in deep concentration, she picked the chain up. It snaked its way out of the box, weighted down by something at the end of its loop.
It was a pendant. Brianna held it up in front of her eyes and examined it. The pendant was an oval shape, gold in color, etched with black curling designs that intertwined over each other. There were actually seven interwoven spiral patterns, she saw, arranged in a circle with one in the center and the other six around the outside, thin and wispy arms radiating off each spiral to twist around and over and through all the others. She got lost trying to unravel which line went to which spiral. She would follow one only to find it had become a line attached to one of the others or that she couldn’t follow it back to where she had started with it or that it would continue on without end around the pendant or slip out from under her gaze entirely and leave her staring and wondering where it had gone—
“Miss Maitland?”
She blinked and looked up at the desk clerk. “Oh. I’m…I’m sorry, I got distracted for a minute, I guess.” Brianna felt foolish. What had just happened? The pendant was still in her hand, hanging heavily from its chain. There was something about it that held her attention. It was pretty, she decided. That was it. It was pretty and it had the look and feel of a real antique.
And someone had sent it to her, here.
Stuffing the necklace into the hip pocket of her jeans, she looked through the rest of the box quickly and found nothing else. “Okay, then. This isn’t weird at all.”
“I’m sorry?” Mary asked her with a quirk to her eyebrow.
“Nothing.” Brianna’s stomach rumbled again. Everything would make more sense on a full stomach, she reasoned. “I’m going to go out for some dinner. So, um, hold any more packages that come for me, okay?”
“Will do, Miss Maitland,” Mary said to her with that big smile, completely missing the sarcasm that Brianna had carefully laced her words with.
It was an unseasonably temperate day in April. Stepping out of the front lobby of the hotel, Brianna felt the wind caress her cheek warmly. She decided to walk down the street to one of the restaurants she had seen on her way. There had been a McDonald’s, and several other big-name chains. She was bound to find something.
Walking down the main street she passed any number of people, of all descriptions, busily going about their daily routines. The sun was only just touching the horizon now, behind the hazy clouds, which meant there most people still had a lot to do before calling it a day. She watched them as she passed and imagined a little story line for each of them. This one in the red baseball cap was going to meet his girlfriend. That one in the suit and tie was rushing to a last-minute business meeting. That girl staring in the window of a dress shop had a date this Friday, and wanted something special to wear for it.
Brianna smiled to herself. This was a game she and her mom used to play when she was little. They would make up entire life stories for people, sometimes, giving them lives full of troubles and triumphs that had nothing to do with what was really going on. It was just harmless fun. She missed doing this with her mom.
She missed her mom.
People continued to pass her by and she played the game as she went. That one was picking up bread for dinner. That one was…
Was the clerk from the gas station.
He was just standing there on the sidewalk, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his baggy brown pants, his stringy hair wisping out from his scalp in the breeze. And he was staring at her.
Brianna stopped still, unsure of what she should do. The guy never moved, never spoke, never blinked for all she could tell. Just stood there.
Other people passed by the two of them like a river parting around two islands. No one even noticed them. She realized she was gasping in short little breaths. This was crazy, she told herself. It was just a creepy old man. Nothing to be scared about. Yet there was something like an
alarm bell going off in the back of her brain.
Finally she pursed her lips and squeezed her eyes closed. This was stupid. He was just a man. He probably didn’t even mean anything by what he was doing. It was just the coincidence of seeing him twice in one day in a place that she had never been before that was setting her nerves on edge. That and the package at the hotel and the phone ringing and everything she was dealing with back at home.
She was being stupid. There was no reason to be acting like this.
She told herself that a few more times before she finally believed it.
She opened her eyes then and took a step forward to walk by him. Only to find he was gone.
Everyone around her kept moving while she looked both ways up and down the sidewalk. The guy was nowhere. He just seemed to disappear.
“Good. Stay gone,” she said under her breath, walking away again. Still, she checked over her shoulder a few times as she went.
A restaurant advertising a grilled chicken Caesar salad in its front window caught her eye. Her stomach responded to the picture on the poster with a little growl. “Okay. Sounds good to me too.”
She forgot the name of the place as soon as she entered the double doors, but the interior was all done in a contemporary dark-colored wood finish that gave it an upscale look. Wood furniture next to wood paneling on the walls and wooden ceiling fans. Potted plants that were taller than Brianna stood in the corners, and the waiter who met her at the door was wearing a black vest over a crisp white shirt with a white apron tied around his waist. She liked the place already.
The waiter led her to a table in the middle of the room with two place settings. “Will anyone be joining you this evening?” he asked.
“No. Just me tonight, thank you.”
“Very well.” Was it her imagination or did he actually sound disappointed for her? “Would you like a menu?”
“Actually, I think I’d like one of your Caesar salads. With the grilled chicken?”
He must have heard this order a few dozen times already today but he got out his notepad and pencil from his apron anyway and wrote it down as she said it. “A very good choice. Our chef makes the dressing himself. Sometimes I help him chop the lettuce.”