can…’
There was more of it, but I didn’t hear it. For now, suddenly, I knew
what had seemed so wrong. I had been looking at it all the while, of course,
but it was not until this moment that a full realization of it touched my
consciousness. There had been too many other things – the phone when there
should have been no phone, the sudden change of voices, the crazy trend of
the conversation. My mind had been too busy to grasp the many things in
their entirety.
But now the wrongness of the phone punched through to me and what the
voice might be saying became a fuzzy sound.
For this was not the phone that had been on the desk an hour before.
This phone had no dial and it had no cord connected to the wall outlet.
‘What’s going on?’ I shouted. ‘Who am I talking to? Where are you
calling from?’
And there was yet another voice, neither feminine nor male, neither
businesslike nor sweet, but an empty voice that was somehow jocular, but
without a trace of character in the fibre of it.
‘Mr Carter,’ said the empty voice, ‘you need not be alarmed. We take
care of our own. We have much gratitude. Believe us, Mr Carter, we are very
grateful to you.’
‘Grateful for what?’ I shouted.
‘Go see Gerald Sherwood,’ said the emptiness. ‘We will speak to him of
you.’
‘Look here,’ I yelled, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but…’
‘Just talk to Gerald Sherwood,’ said the voice.
Then the phone went dead. Dead, completely dead. There was no humming
on the wire. There was just an emptiness.
‘Hello, there,’ I shouted. ‘Hello, whoever you may be.’
But there was no answer.
I took the receiver from my ear and stood with it in my hand, trying to
reach back into my memory for something that I knew was there. That final
voice – I should know that voice. I had heard it somewhere. But my memory
felled me.
I put the receiver back on the cradle and picked up the phone. It was,
to all appearance, an ordinary phone, except that it had no dial and was
entirely unconnected. I looked for a trademark or a manufacturer’s
designation and there was no such thing.
Ed Adler had come to take out the phone. He had disconnected it and had
been standing, with it dangling from his hand, when I’d gone out for my
walk.
When I had returned and heard the ringing of the phone and seen it on
the desk, the thing that had run through my mind (illogical, but the only
ready explanation), had been that for some reason Ed had reconnected the
phone and had not taken it. Perhaps because of his friendship for me;
willing, perhaps, to disregard an order so that I could keep the phone. Or,
perhaps, that Tom Preston might have reconsidered and decided to give me a
little extra time. Or even that some unknown benefactor had come forward to
pay the bill and save the phone for me.
But I knew now that it had been none of these things. For this phone
was not the phone that Ed had disconnected.
I reached out and took the receiver from the cradle and put it to my
ear.
The businesslike voice spoke to me. It didn’t say hello, it did not ask
who called. It said: ‘It is clear, Mr Carter, that you are suspicious of us.
We can understand quite well your confusion and your lack of confidence in
us. We do not blame you for it, but feeling as you do, there is no use of
further conversation. Talk first to Mr Sherwood and then come back and talk
with us.’
The line went dead again. This time I didn’t shout to try to bring the
voice back. I knew it was no use. I put the receiver back on the cradle and
shoved the phone away.
See Gerald Sherwood, the voice had said, and then come back and talk.
And what in the world could Gerald Sherwood have to do with it?
I considered Gerald Sherwood and he seemed a most unlikely person to be
mixed up in any business such as this.
He was Nancy Sherwood’s father and an industrialist of sorts who was a
native of the village and lived in the old ancestral home on top of the bill
at the village edge. Unlike the rest of us, he was not entirely of the
village. He owned and ran a factory at Elmore, a city of some thirty or
forty thousand about fifty miles away. It was not his factory, really; it
had been his father’s factory, and at one time it had been engaged in making
farm machinery. But some years ago the bottom had fallen out of the farm
machinery business and Sherwood had changed over to the manufacturing of a
wide variety of gadgets. Just what kind of gadgets, I had no idea, for I had
paid but small attention to the Sherwood family, except for a time, in the
closing days of high school, when I had held a somewhat more than casual
interest in Gerald Sherwood’s daughter.
He was a solid and substantial citizen and he was well accepted. But
because he, and his father before him, had not made their living in the
village, because the Sherwood family had always been well-off, if not
exactly rich, while the rest of us were poor, they had always been
considered just a step this side of strangers. Their interests were not
entirely the interests of the village; they were not tied as tightly to the
community as the rest of us. So they stood apart, perhaps not so much that
they wanted to as that we forced them to.
So what was I to do? Drive out to Sherwood’s place and play the village
fool? Go barging in and ask him what he knew of a screwy telephone?
I looked at my watch and it was only four o’clock. Even if I decided to
go out and talk with Sherwood, I couldn’t do it until early evening. More
than likely, I told myself he didn’t return from Elmore until six o’clock or
so.
I pulled out the desk drawer and began taking out my stuff. Then I put
it back again and closed the drawer. I’d have to keep the office until
sometime tonight because I’d have to come to it to talk with the person (or
the persons?) on that nightmare phone. After it was dark, if I wanted to, I
could walk out with the phone and take it home with me. But I couldn’t walk
the streets in broad daylight with a phone tucked beneath my arm.
I went out and closed the door behind me and started down the street. I
didn’t know what to do and stood at the first street corner for a moment to
make up my mind. I could go home, of course, but I shrank from doing it. It
seemed a bit too much like hunting out a hole to hide in. I could go down to
the village hall and there might be someone there to talk with.
Although there was a chance, as well, that Hiram Martin, the village
constable, would be the only one around. Hiram would want me to play a game
of checkers with him and I wasn’t in the mood for playing any checkers.
Hiram was a rotten loser, too, and you had to let him win to prevent him
from getting nasty.
Hiram and I had never got along too well together. He had been a bully
on the schoolground and he and I had fought a dozen times a year. He always
licked me, but he never made me say that I was licked, and he never liked
me. You had to let Hiram lick you once or twice a year and then admit that
you were licked and he’d let you be his friend. And there was a chance, as
well, that Higman Morris would be there, and on a day like this, I couldn’t
stomach Higgy. Higgy was the mayor, a pillar of the church, a member of the
school board, a director of the bank, and a big stuffed shirt. Even on my
better days, Higgy was a chore; I ducked him when I could.
Or I could go up to the Tribune office and spend an hour or so with the
editor, Joe Evans, who wouldn’t be too busy, because the paper had been put
out this morning. But Joe would be full of county politics and the proposal
to build a swimming pool and a lot of other things of lively public interest
and somehow or other I couldn’t stir up too much interest in any one of
them.
I would go down to the Happy Hollow tavern, I decided, and take one of