The Night Caller

by James H Lewis

When her cell phone roused her from sleep, Teri Bevan thought it must be morning, but when she stared at the screen, it read 12:44. Someone had interrupted her first decent night’s slumber since her husband Mark had died of a heart attack on a flight home from the Twin Cities.

She muttered a sleepy hello into the phone and heard something rustling like dry leaves, scraps of paper, or starched sheets. “Who is this?” she whispered.

The noise turned to scratching, like someone running their fingernails over material. She spoke a third time, then hung up. At the foot of the bed, Fred, her beagle, stirred, but continued his heavy breathing. “I’m glad someone’s sleeping,” she said.

Teri lay awake for nearly an hour, turning the pages of her life with Mark, their first date, wedding, his unwavering support both times she miscarried. When his lifelong friend Jake Weatherby threw over his wife for his young nurse, Mark had embraced her and, with tears rolling down his cheeks, said, “I would never do that to you. I would never leave you.” Thirteen days later, he left, just not in the way either of them had imagined.

Finally giving up, she got out of bed and grabbed her phone. She shoved her feet into her pink slippers and descended the stairs with Fred following her, wagging his tail in the expectation she’d interrupted her sleep to give him a treat.

As she brewed a cup of herbal tea, she saw her phone was in sleep focus. Shouldn’t that have silenced the call? She turned the mood off to search the recent call list. At first, she didn’t comprehend what she was seeing, so she scrolled through other calls, then back to the top. There it was: Mark, 12:43 AM.

Someone using her late husband’s phone had called her an hour before. But that was impossible, for Mark’s cellphone was in front of her, attached to its charging cord. She opened it and searched for recent calls. Teri, 12:43 AM.

My God, she thought, someone has broken into the house, someone who might still be here.

#

The patrol officer was young and earnest, treating her as though she was his mother, which she was old enough to be. He wandered through both floors of the house, stepping aside to push open the door to each room and closet before he entered. He checked all the windows and the rear door. “You’re certain you locked the front door?” he asked.

“Locked and bolted,” she said, kneading her hands as she stood in the middle of the kitchen in her housecoat.

The officer looked down at Fred, whose bark had awakened half the neighborhood when he arrived. “And your dog didn’t sound an alarm?”

She shook her head. “He slept through it. He always alerts me when someone comes to the door. You heard the racket he made when you arrived.”

“And your husband’s phone was sitting where it is now?” he said.

She assured him that after picking it up, she’d returned it to where it now rested. “After my husband died, I was going to turn it in,” she explained. “The counselor at the funeral home advised me to keep it active for at least a year, that he might have messages from utilities, financial matters, that sort of thing.”

“Good advice,” the officer said. He placed both hands on the pass-through counter . “Did you use his phone before you turned in tonight?”

Teri hesitated as she searched her memory. “After dinner, I paged through his emails to see if there was anything I should attend to.”

“That’s it, then,” he said. “It’s an accidental dial. Some people call it a pocket-dial, but if you leave the phone on, it can automatically trigger a call. Always push the side button when you’re finished,” he said, “like so.”

Teri wasn’t satisfied, but there was nothing more the officer could do. He agreed to stay outside in his cruiser until another call came in. While that was of some comfort, she couldn’t fall back to sleep until dawn poked holes in the venetian blinds, and then only for an hour.

The following morning, she took both phones to the electronics store. The sales assistant, who looked no older than eighteen, inspected both phones and gave her the same assessment. “You butt-dialed it,” he said. He smirked as though, at forty-seven, she was too old to understand.

#

Two nights later, her phone rang at 1:21. Once more, the sound of rustling turned to scratching, like a cat sharpening its claws on the back of a chair. Racing downstairs and almost tripping on the bottom step, she opened Mark’s phone to find it had dialed her number. She checked all the doors and windows but found no sign of entry. “What’s happening to me?” she cried, for now she suspected she was going mad.

She shivered with fear, turned on the gas fireplace, wrapped herself in a blanket, and huddled on the sofa until morning, Fred snoring at her feet.

A week later, the caller rang again. Behind the rustling sound, she heard a muffled voice as though coming from the end of a long hallway. Her hand shook the next morning as she fought her way through the phone tree of her cell phone carrier. The tech support agent treated her like a child, insisting no one could call from a phone not in their possession.

She argued with the woman, who finally said, “Just turn it off.”

The solution was so simple she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her. Once a week, Teri fired up Mark’s phone long enough to check for anything that needed her attention, usually a recurring subscription to a professional publication. Then she’d leave it off. She received no more calls and, as summer approached, she resumed sleeping through the night. Mark’s absence left a gaping hole in her life, but a group of girlfriends dragged her out for lunch, and the diversion so lifted her spirits she made it a weekly event.

At the end of June, Teri sat down to pay bills. She turned Mark’s phone on and scrolled through his emails. By now, she’d transferred most accounts to her own name. Finding nothing to address, she wondered if it might be time to close the account.

She paid most bills through her bank, but the county would only accept her property tax bill by check. But where was the checkbook? In this age of credit and debit cards and automatic payments, she’d had no need of it until now. “Mark,” she said aloud, “where did you stick the checkbook?”

Her phone dinged. She looked at the message: Back of top right desk drawer.

“Oh, God,” she said, a chill washing over her despite the heat of the day. She stumbled into the den, opened the drawer, and fished out the checkbook.

Teri held her hand to her mouth. A stream of tears welled in her eyes and overflowed their banks as a warm glow enveloped her. “Oh, Mark,” she said. “You promised you’d never leave me. How could I have forgotten?”

* * *