AMELIA WAS AT the back end of the yard, surrounded by a half dozen piles of brightly hued leaves. Beneath one of the piles lurked the allegedly invisible, yet still giggling, Madeleine St John.
‘Don’t get dirty,’ Amelia said to her daughter who wasn’t there.
Maddie remained silent.
‘Oh . . .’ Amelia began, as she heaped more leaves on Maddie’s pile, ‘I guess Maddie already went back inside the house. I guess I can call city hall and tell them to bring that huge vacuum cleaner back here and have them vacuum up all these leaves.’
Leaf Girl laughed.
Amelia had the cordless telephone in the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt and had been so far out on a daydreaming voyage as she raked leaves – a bizarre escapade that included Roger, Paige, Garth, Shelley Roth, Dag and Martha Randolph, her as-yet-unwritten antihero Gaspar Sencio, and the enigmatic Mr Curls – that the sound, emanating from somewhere on her body, nearly made her jump. It was almost an electronic whine instead of a ring, a sure sign that the batteries needed replacing. She removed the phone from the pocket, feeling a little silly, and answered. She was about a hundred feet from the house and the reception was terrible. ‘Hello?’
Through a barrage of static, it sounded like: ‘Izz Miz Say John?’ The batteries, she could tell, were going and going fast. ‘. . . ’lo?’
A man. Barely audible.
‘You’ll have to speak up’ Amelia said. ‘I’m on a cordless.’
‘Say John?’
No better. It still sounded as if the man were speaking through a yard of cheesecloth. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t hear you.’
Then there came another burst of static, a crack of electronic thunder beneath which Amelia could hear the man talking.
‘Hang on . . . let me go inside,’ Amelia said as she walked toward the house and closer to the telephone’s base station. Another burst of static, then she heard the line begin to clear.
‘. . . e-mail . . .’
‘Just a minute.’ Amelia was halfway to the house now and she began to pick up bits and pieces of what the man was saying, but the phone bouncing at her ear didn’t help in assessing the who and what of it all.
‘. . . of the police . . .’ the man said.
Amelia stopped in her tracks. ‘What? What’s this about the police?’ The word had come in loud and clear and it frightened her. ‘Hello?’
Silence.
‘Hello?’
Nothing.
The batteries were dead.
When she stepped into the house and picked up the telephone in the kitchen, all she heard was the steady drone of a dial tone.
The doorbell rang.
Or did it? Amelia shut off the vacuum cleaner. She hit the switch on the side of the upright, listened for a few moments as the motor ground to silence. Molson was out back, so she didn’t have the dog to tip her off as to whether or not someone had rung the bell. Ever since the phone call, the call that had mentioned the word police, she had been edgy, vigilant. This was the third time she had shut off the vacuum cleaner. The first two times she thought she heard the phone. She was just about to continue when the doorbell clanged, loud and resonant. She looked out the front window, at the driveway, her hand over her heart, but whoever it was must’ve pulled up tight against the garage. She could only see the rear bumper. She couldn’t tell if it was a car, a van, a truck.
As she moved to the front door she found that her heart was beginning to race, her mind was beginning to fill with a million dark vignettes: Roger’s plane had crashed, something had happened to Dag or Martha or both. Fire. Plague. Pestilence. Murder. She expected to open the door and be confronted with a grim-faced man in a policeman’s uniform, there to roughly remove her heart and soul, her very life.
But she opened the front door anyway, and came face-to-face with the last person on earth she would’ve expected to be standing on her front porch at that moment.
It was Dark Curls.