“Here is a print-out of the text messages that were received by eleven of the students in Jeffers’ chemistry class the morning of the explosion,” he said and slid a paper across the desk. “Here is the serial number for Jeffers’ phone, and other information and records pertaining to that particular phone.”
Conner nodded.
“I need you to find this phone. Use the serial number, locate by satellite, or any other means you have available. If someone has it, I have a warrant to confiscate and to detain. Hopefully you will bring me both a phone and a breathing body.”
Conner narrowed his eyes with determination. “I’ll get on this right away,” he said.
“Good,” Kennedy said, and rose, taking up the folder and tucking it back into his brief case. With a nod, he turned to the door and before leaving, said, “And Conner, do me a favor for now and don’t mention this to the other deputies. I don’t feel like filling out paperwork.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, “I won’t tell anyone, sir.”
Kennedy lifted the corners of his mouth, and then left the room, shutting the door behind him.
CHAPTER THREE: The Trespasser
Sometimes his eyes were green, other times they were slate gray with flecks of gold. Today, he wore a light blue tee shirt, and it made his eyes turn a penetrating steel blue with a corona of amber around each pupil. Sabrina tried to guess his age. She couldn’t. Twenty-two? Twenty-six? She couldn’t tell.
“So today you are going to learn the register,” said Sean. Behind him, John was busily rushing around the kitchen, prepping the work area, stocking the items the way Sabrina had normally done up until now. “Leah had to take a sick day, so I’ll be here all day to help you.”
As he leaned over to refill the roll of receipt paper in the register, a gentle drift of piney-sweet cologne reached her nose. His lats flexed through his form-fitting cotton shirt. He had beautiful shoulders. She tried desperately not to blush.
When he was done he faced her again, and she found that he was standing very close to her. “Did you see how I did that?” he asked.
Sabrina nodded.
He was in her bubble, a little too close. A little too direct. She was afraid he might be able to hear her thoughts, standing that close to her.
He walked her into the office in back and showed her how to count out her drawer, and how to use the outdated credit card machine. She was very aware of him in this small space, his nice masculine scent, and his wide rib cage. She wondered what it would feel like to hug him.
At first he had appeared short and average. Not like Antonio, whose body was thick and layered with muscle. But on further inspection she found that Sean was surprisingly quite muscularly built, but he was compact. His build was more dense. His jeans sloped over his buttocks and his thin shirt clung to his lower back. He had the perfect back muscles, the kind that taper together in a dip at the bottom.
“Did you get that?” he asked.
She shook her head and snapped to. “What?”
“Fifty and hundred dollar bills go in the safe,” he repeated.
“Okay,” she said. She shook her head again, perplexed by how distracting his body suddenly was to her.
Sooner than she expected, she was alone at the register, and customers were piling up. She diligently counted change, but somehow, at the end of the day when she counted up her drawer, she was almost twenty-two dollars short. Sean made her re-count it, and sure enough, twenty-two dollars were missing from all the cash sales she had rung up that day.
He tried to act nonchalant about it, but Sabrina could tell that he was disappointed and perplexed, scratching his head.
“It’s okay,” he started, but she was shaking her head.
It wasn’t okay. She couldn’t even count right.
When she got home, she buried her face in Gabriela’s shoulder and sobbed.
“No puedo hacer nada bien,” she cried.
“Noooo, que no es cierto. Tú eres el más inteligente chica que conozco,” she soothed.
She pried open Sabrina’s clenched fist and put something inside. Sabrina recognized the long chain of smooth, cold beads. Her rosary beads. She had been trying to throw these things away for years, but every time, her mom had found them and rescued them, and eventually they had simply disappeared.
Sabrina took the beads, kissed her mother on the cheek, and then slipped upstairs to her room.
***
She awoke at one-thirty in the morning to a strange sound.
Jumping in alert, she gathered her blanket around her chest. She was alone in the house tonight, her parents at the coast with friends. She told herself she was just alone, that the house was settling, the silence playing tricks on her.
Buzz-buzz-buzz.
She jerked her head side to side, listening. She scanned the window, the curtain just a gray outline of lace against the black sky.
Buzz-buzz-buzz.
It came from her desk.
She rose and inched her way through the dark to the desk, pulling open the drawer. The phone was buzzing. Relief washed through her. Of course. She had forgotten to turn off that phone.
Scolding herself, she reached for the phone and thumbed the screen. The screen flashed and then a square logo appeared. It was a capital D, light blue, and it filled the screen for a moment, then blinked and became a thumbnail in the corner.
Confused, she tried to close the screen and return to the main menu. There was no option to close the application, though.
Light blue words scanned across, flitting dimly in and out of brightness.
Loading, please wait.
She tried to press the power button. She held it down for several seconds. The screen appeared to go black finally, but as she was about to set it down, the blue lettering flashed on the screen.
Hello, Sabrina.
She dropped the phone as though it had burned her. She nearly screamed. Grabbing her hand, she imagined that her fingers were tingling where she had touched the thing. She automatically grabbed the string of rosary beads and rubbed them with her thumb like a lucky charm, then slipped them into her pocket.
A noise crept up the stairs to her ears, a ticking, a movement, a sweeping. The hairs on her arms pricked like needles, her skin chilled. She perked her ears and tensed.
A door clicked shut downstairs. She reached for her backpack, thinking of her “real” cell phone, and then stopped. Footsteps began to sound, slowly, padding, squeaking on the tile kitchen floor. Someone was in her house.
“Dad?” she called out, weakly.
Immediately, the phone buzzed again. She cringed back from it, like it was a poisonous snake. The blue lettering was there on the screen again, and she stepped closer to it, kneeling down to look intensely at the screen. She stooped over, bending to read the words.
Be quiet, the text said.
She began to panic, her breath ripping in and out of her lungs in short gasps. Her hair trembled around her neck. The sound of footsteps was now on the stairs.
She finally picked up the phone and gazed into the screen. She searched for a reply button, or a call button. There was no sign of a sender, no way to acknowledge where the message was coming from. It vibrated in her hand. The text changed.
Go out the window. Now.
The demand startled her, and suddenly she was compelled to obey. She scrambled to the bedroom door and locked the handle just as the foot falls became a run and a large mass smashed into the other side of the door. She screamed. A lumbering body slammed the door again, and wiggled the door handle violently. A loud crack came from the door jamb as the person kicked the door.
She turned and opened the window, looking down at the ground two stories below. Panic-stricken and full of adrenaline, she took a long, deep, full-bellied breath, and leapt.
As she fell there was a rip of splitting wood from the bedroom door, and she watched the ground coming toward her, bunching her legs, her bare feet splitting the air. When she contacted the groun
d, she sprung off her legs and fell to her side, her arms splayed. When she regained her feet, she looked behind her, up the side of the house, up to the window above. Impulsively she grabbed her legs and ankles, and then her arms and wrists. Nothing was broken. Her eyes were gleaming, triumphant. Her heart-stricken panic mixed with amazement, and with newfound strength, she bounded barefoot in her satin night clothes toward the hedges dividing her house from the neighbor’s.
She slinked into a shadow and folded herself into a ball. The screen of the phone had darkened, the text and the icon gone. Then she spotted it. A sleek, black Mercedes, idling at the corner of her street and the next cross street, about two blocks down. The windows were dark, the headlights off. Her lungs clamped closed when she saw a figure in black, large in stature like a man, run from the backyard of her house to the street. The car pulled forward, almost nonchalantly, down the avenue. As it neared her house, it only slightly slowed for him to jump inside and then passed only a few feet in front of her in the hedge before disappearing around the next block. She tried to take a picture of the license plate, but her fingers trembled and the phone, unresponsive, fell into the dirt.
Sabrina still could hardly move and she knelt in the shadows for another several moments before she had calmed herself enough to call 911. She whimpered into the phone and within a few minutes, which to her felt like an hour, a police car and an ambulance turned the corner with lights flashing.
The officer had a hard time believing Sabrina when she told him she’d jumped out the window. The ambulance team had to lift her sleeves to take her blood pressure and generally give her a physical examination, and the officer had a chance to see the sinewy muscles of her arms and shoulders; the taught globes of her buttocks spoke of her advanced physical condition. The examination proved her to be strong and healthy and in no need of medical attention, but they took her to the police station wrapped in a soft cotton sheet.
She sat for several hours in the station, as she told the incident over and over and gave account of the car, the figure dressed in black, and her brave escape. She was brought hot coffee and a cinnamon bun, and the cops gently patted her shoulders when they walked by, and refilled her coffee.
Kevin came in the door, his eyes glazed and his hair mussed. He scooped her up in a bony warm Kevin hug, and walked with her to her car.
“Follow me over to my house tonight,” he said.
His small apartment was over on the south side of town, closer to where he worked and studied as a research assistant, and she followed him there, blinking hard although she didn’t feel tired in the slightest. When they arrived at the complex, she stood up outside her car door, and Kevin stood nearby, his presence comforting although she was really the one who would have to fight if there were another intruder, and she felt inside her pockets. In one hand lay her rosary beads, dusty maroon colored, shiny from being rubbed. In the other hand was the phone with the app which had saved her life. She tossed the beads dismissively into the passenger seat and slid the phone safely in her pocket, and then slammed the door.
They curled up on Kevin’s crusty brown couch, one on each end, as they had done when they were growing up, and ate tortilla chips while watching late-late-night re-runs of The Letterman Show. Frantic fear slowly melted away and was replaced by familiarity and affection.
She looked over at Kevin when she heard him snoring, and saw that he had passed out, his head lolling to the side and his mouth open. Soft fingers of love for her older half-brother enveloped her in warmth, and feeling safe, she finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER FOUR: Hello, Sabrina
The weeks passed with prickling uncertainty, and every shadow made Sabrina jump. She watched cars in the rear view mirror, staring so intently behind her that she nearly rear-ended a few in front of her, watching for a shiny Mercedes with blackened windows. She tossed and turned at night, grim sounds coming from downstairs, the clacking and sliding of windows opening, the rustling of foot falls in the lawn, cars passing slowly and stealthily below her window. She would leap to her feet, rushing to lock the door, despite the new improved burglar alarm her dad had installed, always to find this time it was her imagination.
Many times she also thought that the talking phone also had to be her imagination, but each day when she woke up, it was there, saying her name, and giving her instructions.
She had begun, after the break-in at her house, to take the phone with her in her pocket everywhere she went. Maybe it was superstition, like a lucky charm or a rosary bead. But she knew that the phone had saved her. She knew that without the phone, she would not have been able to escape the attacker.
The Drip had been crowded the first time the phone had communicated with her at work. She was again making drinks after several attempts at working the register and each proving disastrous. Sean appeared to want to keep her as an employee, but it was clear that if she did not improve soon, he would have to fire her. When the phone had buzzed - an unusual buzz, like several short bursts - she’d stopped what she was doing to look. Guiltily, she peeked at the screen.
Double caramel whip, the screen said.
She let the phone fall back into her pocket.
She fumbled around for the cinnamon to top off the drink she was making, popped the lid on, and then passed the drink to John who would serve it.
“Double caramel whip,” he said to her as she handed off the drink. Her mind began to whirr. She began the espresso, steamed the milk with the horrifying steaming wand, and mixed the drink. As she popped the lid on this one, the phone buzzed again.
Three regular coffees and a chocolate latte whip.
She handed off the drink to John. “Three regular coffees,” he said.
She poured the coffees, but, on a thrilling whim, she began to mix a chocolate latte, getting the milk ready to steam.
Sure enough, when John came for the coffees, the customer had added a chocolate latte whip.
Tendrils of excitement bloomed across her chest. She mixed the drink as quickly as possible, without rushing herself and causing clumsiness, and handed off that drink too. John looked impressed by her speed. Sabrina sparkled.
The thrill of the mysterious phone was dark and awesome at the same time. For all she knew, she could be completely hallucinating or dreaming or becoming schizophrenic. But anything, simply anything that helped her get through a day at work without complete humiliation, was a complete miracle to her.
She tossed that word around a bit: miracle. Her mother would have said it was God’s will. Anything unexplainable and mysterious was by default God to Gabriela. Sabrina, however, intuitively understood that the unexplainable was simply that. Unexplained. No trump meaning. No roll-off category. She felt like she had finally come across something that would pick her up, give her that extra boost she needed, push her across the starting line like she saw in so many of her peers who seemed to have it all, plus confidence.
And maybe it really was God “speaking” to her. Who was she to know? The messages had started coming around the same time she had gotten the rosary beads back in her room. And she remembered as a kid always asking her mother why God didn’t speak to her, when everyone else said God was speaking to them. And Gabriela had explained that God had his very own special way of “speaking” to each person. So maybe there was some divine essence, or something, that could literally speak to her, after all. Maybe all those years of praying on her knees in front of her bed had come to fruition. Maybe the phone was a prayer answered.
Sabrina felt the phone buzz and peeked down at the screen again. She went to work on the drink, just to find a few moments later that the next customer had wanted just that. With a guilty tingle in her gut, Sabrina was a step ahead the whole day, and made it through an entire shift with no accidents or incidents.
Within a few days of her improved performance, Sean inevitably caught wind of the change. He came up behind her at the steaming wand and put a hand on her shoulder, and when she spun around in fright, he sto
od there with a beautiful smile.
“Sorry, did I scare you?” he asked, his steel gray eyes shimmering.
She nodded and dutifully went back to her drink before he could notice the heat in her cheeks. Her skin was on fire where he touched her, his hand nestling on her shoulder.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leah saw the hand and quickly did a double-take, her eyes an intense glare. She saw Sabrina looking and turned away with her nose in the air to serve some pastries, but it was too late. Sabrina had seen the look.
“Heard you’ve been getting better and better every day,” Sean commented. She nodded, and then popped the lid on the drink in her hand. The phone buzzed, and she saw a man walking in the door toward the counter. He had a worn denim jacket and an extraordinarily large nose, crooked as though it had been broken a few times. Nervously, she glanced over her shoulder, knowing that he was thinking about what he wanted to order and she would be getting a buzz soon.
“I better get back to work,” she said.
But Sean lingered. He leaned his firm build against the counter, arms crossed, casual smirk. His jeans were fitting and the muscular curvature of his thighs poked through. Again the phone vibrated in her pocket.
“So, Sabrina, what are you doing this weekend?”
She wiped sweat from her hands onto her apron. Her heart leaped in her chest. Why now? she thought.
“Working, on Saturday morning, anyway” she managed, under an anxious grin.
“Well, considering your shift ends at eleven, how about you and me go out to a movie Saturday night?”
The buzzing continued, this time longer. Unable to hold off any longer, she pulled it out and stole a glance.
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