Sitting at the desk in his study, eating a ham sandwich, trying to puzzle meaning from Reynerd?s six taunting gifts, Ethan found his thoughts drifting repeatedly to Duncan Whistler.
[320] In the garden room at Our Lady of Angels, when he had initially learned that Dunny?s body had gone missing, he had known intuitively that the uncanny events at Reynerd?s apartment and Dunny?s dead-man-walking stunt were related. Later, Dunny?s apparent involvement in the murder of Reynerd, though unexpected, had been no surprise.
What did surprise Ethan, the more he thought about it, was the close encounter with Dunny in the hotel bar.
More than coincidence must be involved. Dunny had been in the bar because Ethan was in the bar. He had been meant to see Dunny.
If he?d been meant to see Dunny, then he?d been meant to follow him. Perhaps he had also been meant to catch up with Dunny.
Outside the hotel, in the bustle and the rain, unable to get a glimpse of his quarry, Ethan had received the urgent phone call from Hazard. Now he paused to think what he would have done next, if he had not been obliged to meet Hazard at the church.
He obtained the number of the hotel from information and called it. ?I?d like to speak to one of your guests. I don?t know his room number. The name?s Duncan Whistler.?
After a pause to check the hotel computer, the desk clerk said, ?I?m sorry, sir, but we have no registration for Mr. Whistler.?
Previously, only a few table lamps had been lit here and there throughout the big room, but now all the lamps glowed, as did the ceiling lights, the cove lights, and the looping strings of tiny twinkle bulbs on the Christmas tree. The library had been nearly as purged of shadows as any surgery would have been; but it was still not bright enough for Fric.
He had returned the phone to the desk. He?d unplugged it.
He supposed that the phones were ringing in his third-floor rooms and that they would ring for a long while. He wasn?t going to go up there to listen. When Hell was calling, it could be persistent.
[321] He had dragged an armchair close to the Christmas tree. Close to the angels.
Maybe he was being superstitious, childish, stupid. He didn?t care. Those desperate people on that phone, those things
He sat with his back to the tree because he figured that nothing could come through all those branches full of roosting angels to take him by surprise from behind.
If he had not earlier lied to Mr. Truman, he could now have gone directly down to the security chief?s apartment to seek help.
Here in Fricburg, USA, the time was always high noon, and the sheriff could not expect backup from the townsfolk when the gang of outlaws rode in for the showdown.
Ethan concluded his conversation with the hotel desk clerk and picked up the remaining wedge of his ham sandwich, but one of his two phone lines rang before he could take a bite.
When he answered the call, he was met with silence. He said, ?Hello,? again, but failed to elicit a response.
He wondered if this might be Fric?s pervert.
He heard no heavy breathing, suggestive or otherwise. Only the hollowness of an open line and a hiss of static so thin as to be just this side of subaudible.
Ethan rarely received calls this late: nearly midnight. Because of the hour and the events of this day, he found even silence to be significant.
Whether instinct or imagination was at work, he could not be sure, but he sensed a presence on the line.
During the years that he had carried a badge, he?d conducted enough stakeouts to learn patience. He listened to the listener, trading silence for silence.
Time passed. Ham waited. Still hungry, Ethan also grew thirsty for a beer.
[322] Eventually, he heard a cry, repeated three times. The voice was faint neither because it whispered nor because it was feeble but because it arose from a great distance, so fragile that it might have been merely a mirage of sound.
More silence, more time, and then the voice rose again, no less frail than before, so ephemeral that Ethan could not confidently say whether it was the voice of a man or a woman. Indeed, it might have been the mournful cry of a bird or an animal, repeated three times again, with a damped quality similar to that provided by a filter of fog.
He had ceased to expect heavy breathing.
Although no louder than before, the quiet hiss of static had acquired a menacing quality, as though each soft tick represented the impact of a radioactive particle on his eardrum.
When the voice came a third time, it didn?t resort to the short cry that it had previously repeated. Ethan detected patterns of sound surely meant to convey meaning. Words. Not quite comprehensible.
As though broadcast from a distant radio station into an ether troubled by storms, these words were distorted by fading, by drift, by scratchy atmospherics. A voice out of time might sound like this, or one sent by spacefarers from the night side of Saturn.
He didn?t remember leaning far forward in his chair. Neither did he recall when his arms had slid off the arms of the chair nor when he had propped his elbows on his knees. Yet here he sat in this compacted posture, both hands to his head, one holding the phone, like a man humbled by remorse or bent by despair upon the receipt of terrible news.
Although Ethan strained to capture the content of the faraway speaker?s conversation, it continuously sifted through him without sticking, as elusive as cloud shadows projected by moonlight upon a rolling seascape.
Indeed, when he struggled the hardest to find meaning in these [323] might-be words, they receded farther behind a screen of static and distortion. He suspected that if he relaxed, the flow of speech might clarify, the voice grow stronger, but he could not relax. Although he pressed the handset to his head with such force that his ear ached, he was unable to relent; as if a brief moment of less-intense focus would prove to be the very instant when the words would come clearly, but only to he who faithfully attended them.
The voice possessed a plaintive quality. Although unable to grasp the words and deduce their meaning, Ethan detected an urgent and beseeching tone, and perhaps a yearning sadness.
When he assumed that he had spent five minutes striving without success to net those words from the sea of static and silence, Ethan glanced at his wristwatch. 12:26. He had been riveted to the phone for nearly half an hour.
Having been crushed so long against the earpiece, his ear burned and throbbed. His neck felt stiff, his shoulders ached.
Surprised and somewhat disoriented, he sat up straight in his chair. He had never been hypnotized; but he imagined that this must be how it would feel to shake off the lingering effects of a trance.
Reluctantly, he put down the phone.
The suggestion of a voice in the void might have been that and nothing more, merely a suggestion, an audial illusion. Yet he had pursued it with the single-minded sweaty expectation of a submarine sonar operator listening for the ping of an approaching battleship as it off-loaded depth charges.
He didn?t quite understand what he?d done. Or why.
Although the room was not excessively warm, he blotted his brow with his shirt sleeve.
He expected the phone to ring again. Perhaps he would be wise not to answer it.
That thought disturbed him because he didn?t understand it. Why not answer a ringing phone?
[324] His gaze traveled across the six items from Reynerd, but his attention settled longest on the three small bells from the ambulance in which he?d never ridden.
When the phone had not rung after two or three minutes, he switched on the computer and again accessed the telephone log. The most recent entry was the call that he had placed to the hotel to inquire about Dunny Whistler.
Subsequently, the call that he?d received, which had lasted nearly half an hour, had not registered in the log.
Impossible.
He stared at the screen, thinking about Fric?s calls from the heavy breather. He?d been too quick to dismiss the boy?s story.
When Ethan glanced at the phone, he discovered the indicator light aglow at Line 24.
Sales call. Wrong number. And yet
Had it been easy to satisfy his curiosity, he would have gone up to the third floor where the answering machine serving Line 24 was isolated in a special chamber behind a locked blue door. By the very act of entering that room, however, he would be surrendering his job.
To Ming du Lac and Charming Manheim, the room behind the blue door was a sacred place. Entry by anyone but them had been forbidden.
In the event of an emergency, Ethan was authorized to use his master key anywhere in the house. The only door that it didn?t open was the blue one.