Chapter 2
T here’s something in the hallway.
I keep hearing a scratch or a whisper or . . . something like clothes tumbling in the dryer with the handful of pennies Maya always inexplicably leaves in her pockets. A low scratch and then a dull thud.
I don’t know what the hell it is.
I let my book drop to my chest and sit up in bed. Every time I think I’ve imagined it, I hear it again. But Maya’s room is dark and the only other thing on that side of the hallway is the linen closet I’ve never been able to open more than two inches. We store hand towels in there. Boxes of tissues that we’re never able to retrieve. Other small objects that we can wedge through the tiny crack.
Oh god. Is our linen closet haunted? Is there a malevolent spirit who is pissed about my inability to fold a fitted sheet? If this house is haunted, I’ll burn the whole place to the ground. Maya and I will move into the coffee shop across the street. Our clothes will smell like everything bagels and too-strong coffee, but we’ll be spirit-free.
I slip from the bed and grab my empty tea mug, brandishing it like a weapon. I have no idea what I’ll do with it if I’m faced with the vague outline of a Victorian woman floating down my hallway, but it makes me feel in control of the situation. Slightly.
I lean out of my doorway, glancing down the stairs to the front door to make sure that it’s still dead-bolted. Golden light from the streetlamp out front filters in through the stained-glass windows on either side of the door, illuminating our small foyer in a kaleidoscope of muted color.
Everything is exactly where it should be. Our shoes are stacked neatly in a line beneath a row of hooks on the wall. My work bag is next to Maya’s backpack.
Nothing malevolent and ghostly down there.
I hear the sound again, closer than our maybe-haunted linen closet. I turn my head sharply toward Maya’s room. There’s something shoved in the crack between the floor and the door. Navy blue, like the comforter Maya has on her bed. Another sound trips through the wood. Laughter this time. It specifically sounds like the laughter of my twelve-year-old daughter. My twelve-year-old daughter, who should be asleep in her bed with her comforter and not talking or laughing with anyone.
I tiptoe closer to her room and press my ear to her door. We painted it pale pink with sparkly stars when she was eight, but she decided she hated it when she turned eleven. I tried to peel off the stars, but the stubborn ones still cling to the very top edge where neither of us could reach, their faded tips curling up.
“I don’t know,” I hear Maya say through the door, her voice hushed. “I’m not sure my mom would be happy with that.” There’s a long pause. “Yeah, I mean. You’re right. She’s not here now. And we’ve come this far.”
Who is we ? They’ve come this far doing what ? My stomach drops to my toes and panic grabs me by the throat. I’m suddenly faced with every preteen horror story I’ve ever read on the internet. I reach for the door, reduced to a series of fear-inspired chemical reactions. A Mento dropped into a bottle of soda, something terrifying fizzing up. I fling open the door, floating somewhere above my body in a cloud of anxiety. My mug somehow ends up across the room in the soft, squishy chair Maya likes to read in. I’m pretty sure my heart is with it.
Maya screams at the top of her lungs at my sudden appearance, the blanket she’s huddled beneath twisting around her lanky body. She tries to hide her phone beneath it, but I rip the blanket off her and fling it in the same direction as my mug. I am officially more terrifying than the ghost in the linen closet.
“Who are you talking to?” I yell, anxiety clawing at my throat, the sharp edge of fear beneath. I’m channeling approximately zero percent of those gentle parenting books I compulsively checked out of the library when she turned six, but I can’t be bothered.
My daughter is whispering on her cell phone in the middle of the night and she’s hiding it. This is how every Dateline episode starts.
Maya hides nothing. Every thought that enters that cute little head of hers, she tells me about. Even when I desperately don’t want her to. The only time she has ever lied to me was when she was in the third grade and all her lunch money kept mysteriously disappearing. Apparently, she was buying her entire class soft pretzels. Every day. She called it pretzel party. I told her she had to stop and she wept quietly about it at dinner for close to two weeks.
She’s a good kid. A softhearted kid. She does her homework. Helps out around the house. She puts up with my sometimes odd hours and she doesn’t have hushed, secretive conversations with strangers in the middle of the night.
I reach for her phone and she tilts it out of reach again, cradling it close to her chest. Moss green eyes—a perfect match for mine—widen in fear.
“No,” she whispers. “You can’t.”
I hear the low tones of a voice on the other end of the phone, lilting up at the end like they’ve just asked a question. It’s someone with a deep voice. A man voice.
A man voice that is talking to my underage child on her cell phone in the middle of the night.
“Maya.” I try to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. “Give me your phone.”
Her fingers tighten around the case. “It’s not what you think,” she whispers.
“You have no idea what I’m thinking right now.”
“Yes, I do. You have your Dateline face on. You’re probably thinking that you should have kept a closer eye on my internet use, but I’m telling you it’s not what you think.” She brings the phone slowly to her ear without breaking eye contact with me. I feel like we’re at the climax of one of those wildly violent movies my dad always had on when I was a kid. The villain has a cute, fluffy dog dangling off the edge of a skyscraper. I don’t know if I’m the villain or the dog.
“Give me one second,” Maya says to the man voice on the other end of the phone.
My eye twitches. I’m the villain. I am definitely the villain and this is my origin story.
“You have no seconds. Give me your phone,” I say as calmly as I can manage, which is not calm enough given the flinch Maya darts in my direction. She nods, then shakes her head, then nods again.
“Okay,” she mumbles to herself, still nodding. “Moving along a little faster than I’d like, but I can work with this.”
“Work with what?” I bark.
“This phone call,” Maya says, holding up her phone and shaking it around. The duration of the call is around ten minutes and my heart cartwheels into another panic spiral. She’s been talking to someone for ten minutes while I’ve been lying in my bed debating the plausibility of laundry ghosts. “It’s for you.”
“What?”
“This phone call. It’s for you,” she repeats calmly.
I talk to exactly four people, and one of them is in this room. “Great. Then give me the phone.”
“I just—” She presses her lips together. “Give it a chance, okay? Have an open mind.”
My mind will be plenty open when my head explodes in the middle of this bedroom.
“Give me the phone.”
“Okay.” She shuffles to the edge of her bed and hands it to me. Like a bomb disposal specialist. “Cool. Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.”
“Don’t suck up,” I say through clenched teeth. She gives me a shaky thumbs-up.
I bring the phone to my ear. I’m breathing like a dragon. Or a serial killer. A dragon serial killer. I keep taking deep, panting breaths to try to regulate my heartbeat, but I don’t think it’s working.
“Who—” I lick my dry lips and try to clear the rasp out of my voice. I want to sound powerful. I want to sound terrifying. “Who the hell is this?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. I hear a muffled sound. A cough, maybe. Or a laugh.
All my fear crumples into a tiny ball until I am rage personified.
“Did I say something funny?”
“I’m sure you’ll understand my amusement in a second,” the stranger on the other end of the line says. He doesn’t sound surprised enough that the girl he was talking to is suddenly a fire-breathing woman. “Hello. My name is Aiden.”
“Okay, Aiden.” I look at my daughter sitting with her legs tucked beneath her at the very edge of the bed, a blanket with mermaids printed all over it wrapped around her shoulders. I blink and she’s four years old, hair in uneven pigtails and bare feet dangling above the floor. I blink again and she’s a preteen, staring at me with watchful eyes. “Why are you talking to my kid at ten forty-two at night?”
Another pause. “Would you believe that she called me?”
“I don’t care if she called you.” Some of my control slips. “I don’t care if she is secretly Jack Reacher and this is a hostage situation. She is twelve years old.”
Maya claps her hands over her eyes and falls back onto the bed with a huff.
“I don’t like what you’re insinuating,” he says.
“Well, I don’t like what you’re doing.”
“Now, hold on a second. If I could just explain—”
“Do you make a habit of having late-night phone calls with underage girls?”
“I don’t make a habit of anything with underage girls,” he sputters.
I am deeply pleased by the break in his voice. Aiden is no longer amused. Good.
“I’m not—” He huffs, puffs, and makes a bunch of other frustrated sounds. “I think we should start over.”
“No, thank you. I’ve indulged in enough of this conversation. I’m hanging up now.”
“Wait a second.”
“For what?”
“For an explanation.”
“I’m sure you have an excellent one, but I’m not interested.”
He makes another rumbling sound on the other end of the line. “Ask Maya, then.”
“What?”
“Since you’re unlikely to believe anything I tell you, ask Maya why she’s on the phone with me at ten forty-two at night.”
His voice is low. Rough. Like the storms that come in quick over the harbor and sit there, thunder rumbling, one rolling into another until the sky vibrates in your bones. Or maybe that’s my rage. I don’t know. I narrow my eyes and tilt the phone away from my mouth, covering the microphone with the palm of my hand.
“Did you join a cult?” I ask Maya. He sounds like he’s part of a cult. Or at the very least in charge of a multilevel marketing scheme.
She shakes her head silently.
“Is this a cry for help?”
A smile twitches against her lips and she has the good sense to beat it into submission. “Not for me,” she mumbles.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She means it’s for you,” Aiden interrupts. That voice might work on whatever unsuspecting, innocent soul he’s trying to lure into his essential oil empire, but it’s not going to work on me. “It is a cry for help, but it’s for you. That’s why she called.”
“Help with what?” I snap, annoyed that he apparently heard that.
I am two seconds from hanging up this phone and dropping it down the garbage disposal in the kitchen. My patience is gone. Evaporated. Dust. Shoved in the tiny linen closet with the hand towels and the matchbox cars Maya tossed in there when she was six years old, never to be seen again.
“I host a radio show,” Aiden says calmly. “Maya called in to ask for dating advice.”
My hand clenches around the phone. “Dating advice? She’s twelve.”
“She didn’t call for herself. She called for you.” He makes a small huff of amusement. “My name is Aiden Valentine and you’re live with Heartstrings , Baltimore’s romance hotline.”
AIDEN VALENTINE: Welcome to Heartstrings . You’re live on the air.
CALLER: Really? Like right now?
AIDEN VALENTINE: Yup. Right this moment.
CALLER: Awesome.
AIDEN VALENTINE: You sound . . . young.
CALLER: Not that young.
AIDEN VALENTINE: Younger than our usual caller.
CALLER: Pretty sure your usual caller is a lady named Charlene who thinks you’re a Chinese restaurant.
AIDEN VALENTINE: Fair point. What’s your name?
CALLER: Maya, but I’m not calling about me. I’m calling about my mom.