of the mezzanine floor, the screams, too—inaudible, they were still printed in the air.
Angola. The Rainbird Towers.
Jack felt his palms begin to itch and sweat, and he wiped them on his jeans.
THIRTY-ONE FLAVORS, gleamed out a chilly incandescent white light to his left, and when he turned that way he saw a curving hallway on its other side. Shiny brown tiles on the walls and floor; as soon as the curve of the hallway took him out of sight of anyone on the mezzanine level, Jack saw three telephones, which were indeed under transparent plastic bubbles. Across the hall from the telephones were doors to MEN and LADIES.
Beneath the middle bubble, Jack dialed 0, followed by the area code and the number for the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. “Billing?” asked the operator, and Jack said, “This is a collect call for Mrs. Sawyer in four-oh-seven and four-oh-eight. From Jack.”
The hotel operator answered, and Jack’s chest tightened. She transferred the call to the suite. The telephone rang once, twice, three times.
Then his mother said “Jesus, kid, I’m glad to hear from you! This absentee-mother business is hard on an old girl like me. I kind of miss you when you’re not moping around and telling me how to act with waiters.”
“You’re just too classy for most waiters, that’s all,” Jack said, and thought that he might begin to cry with relief.
“Are you all right, Jack? Tell me the truth.”
“I’m fine, sure,” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just had to make sure that you . . . you know.”
The phone whispered electronically, a skirl of static that sounded like sand blowing across a beach.
“I’m okay,” Lily said. “I’m great. I’m not any worse, anyhow, if that’s what you’re worried about. I suppose I’d like to know where you are.”
Jack paused, and the static whispered and hissed for a moment. “I’m in Ohio now. Pretty soon I’m going to be able to see Richard.”
“When are you coming home, Jack-O?”
“I can’t say. I wish I could.”
“You can’t say. I swear, kid, if your father hadn’t called you that silly name—and if you’d asked me about this ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later . . .”
A rising tide of static took her voice, and Jack remembered how she’d looked in the tea shop, haggard and feeble, an old woman. When the static receded he asked, “Are you having any trouble with Uncle Morgan? Is he bothering you?”
“I sent your Uncle Morgan away from here with a flea in his ear,” she said.
“He was there? He did come? Is he still bothering you?”
“I got rid of the Stoat about two days after you left, baby. Don’t waste time worrying about him.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Jack asked her, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth the telephone uttered a tortured electronic squeal that seemed to bore right into his head. Jack grimaced and jerked the receiver away from his ear. The awful whining noise of static was so loud that anyone stepping into the corridor would have heard it. “MOM!” Jack shouted, putting the phone as close to his head as he dared. The squeal of static increased, as if a radio between stations had been turned up to full volume.
The line abruptly fell silent. Jack clamped the receiver to his ear and heard only the flat black silence of dead air. “Hey,” he said, and jiggled the hook. The flat silence in the phone seemed to press up against his ear.
Just as abruptly, and as if his jiggling the hook had caused it, the dial tone—an oasis of sanity, of regularity, now—resumed. Jack jammed his right hand in his pocket, looking for another coin.
He was holding the receiver, awkwardly, in his left hand as he dug in his pocket; he froze when he heard the dial tone suddenly slot off into outer space.
Morgan Sloat’s voice spoke to him as clearly as if good old Uncle Morgan were standing at the next telephone. “Get your ass back home, Jack.” Sloat’s voice carved the air like a scalpel. “You just get your ass back home before we have to take you back ourselves.”
“Wait,” Jack said, as if he were begging for time: in fact, he was too terrified to know quite what he was saying.
“Can’t wait any longer, little pal. You’re a murderer now. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a murderer. So we’re not able to give you any more chances. You just get your can back to that resort in New Hampshire. Now. Or maybe you’ll go home in a bag.”
Jack heard the click of the receiver. He dropped it. The telephone Jack had used shuddered forward, then sagged off the wall. For a second it drooped on a network of wires; then crashed heavily to the floor.
The door to the men’s room banged open behind Jack, and a voice yelled, “Holy SHIT!”
Jack turned to see a thin crewcut boy of about twenty staring at the telephones. He was wearing a white apron and a bow tie: a clerk at one of the shops.
“I didn’t do it,” Jack said. “It just happened.”
“Holy shit.” The crewcut clerk goggled at Jack for a split-second, jerked as if to run, and then ran his hands over the crown of his head.
Jack backed away down the hall. When he was halfway down the escalator he finally heard the clerk yelling, “Mr. Olafson! The phone, Mr. Olafson!” Jack fled.
Outside, the air was bright, surprisingly humid. Dazed, Jack wandered across the sidewalk. A half-mile away across the parking lot, a black-and-white police car swung in toward the mall. Jack turned sideways and began to walk down the pavement. Some way ahead, a family of six struggled to get a lawn chair in through the next entrance to the mall. Jack slowed down and watched the husband and wife tilt the long chair diagonally, hindered
