Chapter 21

Meredith heard herself scream. The scream was high, coming in two broken bursts. Then it fell silent. Then it rose again, shrilling in measured shrieks. It cut the air like two knife strokes, slashing once, slashing twice. Meredith felt her body tumbling, suddenly turned sideways and sliding on the edge of a soft ridge, like the edge of a couch or a car seat. The two screams rang out again and she grappled with what felt like solid air, trying to push herself up while descending into darkness. She felt her body pressed backward, and the last sensation was of falling into darkness. She was barely aware that her body thumped against something hard.

She awoke feeling pain. She lay on the floor, her arm bruised where it had struck a coffee table when she fell from the couch. A magazine lay where it had dropped. The room was filled with too much light, and the phone was ringing. She gripped the arm of a gray chair and pushed herself to her feet, not knowing whether she was hallucinating or dreaming. Morning light filtered through a slit where gray drapes met. She stumbled toward the kitchen and the ringing phone. Too much time had passed. Had she been unconscious or asleep? She did not know, and her fear said that it made little difference.

The phone rang again as she reached for it. For no reason she could understand, she placed her hand over the phone and listened without speaking.

“Mrs. Morgan. Hello?”

The voice at the other end of the line made her breathless. It was Arthur, but this could not be a dream. She could see a tree moving in the wind beyond the windows, could hear the sound of traffic passing somewhere nearby.

“Yes?” she said hesitantly. Her voice came out sounding too high-pitched, timid, and fearful.

“Mrs. Morgan, this is Arthur, Arthur Watson. Today’s mail came and I just wanted you not to worry. The check will come back if you’ve sent it. I don’t yet have a forwarding address.”

Meredith’s own words cut him off. She spoke those words, feeling her lips move to shape them, yet they were not in her voice. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Please, Arthur, I’m sorry. I tried, but it isn’t my fault. I can’t help what happened.”

The words tumbled over one another in a breathless rush. Meredith wanted to stop them, but they kept coming, building in layers like the ice in the dream. She wanted to apologize, to reach out to him somehow and make it clear that she loved him. Suddenly, in midsentence, the words stopped. An almost tangible chill issued from the silence at the other end of the line.

No sound came. The line remained open. She heard a harsh intake of breath. Then nothing.

“Arthur?” A voice that was not her own cracked with tension. “Please, say something.”

“You are not there,” he said at last. Desperation and fear made his voice tremble. The fear turned to terror. “What number is this? Patty? Who’s doing this? Who are you?”

Who is Patty? Meredith wondered, and in the same instant she knew. She was Patty, she herself. But there was another Patty, too. Patty was the name of that woman who had died in the stairwell. Arthur had called her by the name of a dead woman. He had something to do with the woman who killed herself in this house.

The roar of his fear and confusion sounded in Meredith’s mind, and she wondered if both of them were going mad. A second later, the dial tone whined, like a whir of insects in the air.

Meredith lowered the receiver to stop the sound. She stared down at it. The phone was black, not the bright red she had chosen. The surface of the table had changed and she knew if she lifted her eyes that the room would also be different. A coat hung over a kitchen chair and she grabbed at it, feeling blindly for the keys in the pocket as she pushed her way out the back door. As she ran toward the garage she heard the phone at her back, ringing, ringing.