Kathleen O'Brien - The Stranger

Great. Just what she needed. Darth Vader peddling pink votives and silver-tasseled chair shawls.

“Thanks, Wally,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”

He ducked out, clearly relieved that she hadn’t asked him to get rid of the caller.

“Good morning,” Mallory chirped as she pulled the phone toward her. You’ve reached the offices of Maxed Out and Dead Broke. But when she picked up the receiver, sanity reasserted itself, and she merely said, “Rackham Books. This is Mallory Rackham.”

“Good morning, Miss Rackham,” a strange, electronic voice said slowly.

Mallory’s hand tightened around the telephone. How bizarre. The voice didn’t even sound quite human, and yet it managed to convey all kinds of unpleasant things with those four simple words. Everything from an unwanted familiarity to a subtle threat.

That was ridiculous, of course. A threat of what? She was a small-town bookstore owner, not James Bond. And yet this voice was mechanically altered. Why would anyone do that?

“Who is this?”

“I want you to listen to me carefully. I have some instructions for you.”

“Instructions for me? Who is this?”

He ignored her question again. “I want you to go to the bank this afternoon. I want you to get fifty twenty-dollar bills and wrap them in a plastic baggie.”

Oh, good grief. This was ridiculous, like something out of a gangster movie. Did she recognize anything about this voice? Could it be a joke? Roddy loved jokes.

But the hard kernel of anxiety in the pit of her stomach said no. She didn’t begin to understand what was going on here, but she somehow knew it was no joke.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t like your tone. I’m going to hang—”

“I’m only going to say this once, Mallory, so you’d better listen.” The metallic voice had an implacable sound, a cruel sound. She felt her spine tingle and go soft. She leaned back against her chair and tried to think clearly. Who would dare take this tone with her?

“Put the baggie in a small brown lunch bag and close it with packing tape. Then take the bag to the Fell’s Point Ferry tomorrow morning.”

In spite of her confusion, in spite of her outrage that anyone would talk to her this way, she instinctively reached for a pencil and began to make notes.

“Buy a ticket for the 11:00 a.m. trip,” he continued. “The Green Diamond Ferry. When you get on, go immediately to the front. Put the bag under the first seat on the left, the one closest to the bow. And then get off the boat and go home.”

She scribbled, her mind racing. Not because she had any intention of taking orders from an anonymous blackmailer, but because, at the very least, she should have some concrete record to show the police.

“Did you get that, Mallory? Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”

“Yes,” she said. She put down her pencil. “What I don’t know is why you think I would agree to do it.”

He chuckled. It was a terrible sound, full of unnatural metallic reverberations, like laughter emanating from a steel casket.

“You’ll do it because you’re a good sister. You’ll do it because you love that spoiled brat Mindy, and you wouldn’t want to see anything happen to that classy wedding of hers.”

Mallory scalp tingled. “Her wedding?”

“Yes. You wouldn’t want me to ruin her wedding, would you? Senator Earnshaw’s son…Frederick, isn’t it? He’s such a good catch. So handsome, so—”

“How could you do that?” She reached out blindly and clicked off the computer screen, her body on autopilot while her mind struggled to figure out what was going on. What was he getting at? What exactly was he threatening to do? “How could you possibly ruin my sister’s wedding?”

He laughed again. “Easy,” he said. “I’d just tell the senator and his son about Mindy’s nasty little secret.”

For a second Mallory couldn’t answer. She was suddenly aware that her heart was thumping, hard and erratic, like a fish struggling on a wooden dock.

This wasn’t possible. This couldn’t be happening. No one knew about…that. Not even Tyler Balfour, big-time, muckraking, investigative journalist, had discovered Mindy’s part in the whole—

“Are you there, Mallory?” The voice slowed, no doubt savoring her shock. “Are you thinking about it? About the scandal? Mindy’s always been a little weak, hasn’t she? Not too stable. God only knows what she’d do if her fancy wedding fell apart.”

Mallory opened her mouth, but in place of her normal voice she heard only a strange, thin sound, so she shut it again.

The electronic voice hardened. “Be on that ferry, Mallory. Or I’ll have to tell poor Freddy Earnshaw that his lovely bride is nothing but a two-bit prostitute.”

FOR AS LONG AS she could remember, when things got a little bumpy, Mallory had turned to her smart, sensible mother for advice and comfort.

Elizabeth Rackham had a straightforward approach to life. She called it “Eliminate Step B.” Life was as simple as ABC, she said. Everyone faced problems—that was Step A. Most people dithered and worried and agonized, which she called Step B. Then they reacted, which was Step C. Elizabeth’s theory was that, if you could just discipline yourself to eliminate Step B, you’d make much better decisions about Step C. And save yourself a lot of grief in the process.

So naturally, as soon as Mallory closed down the bookstore that night, with the ugly echoes of the metallic voice still ringing in her ears, she headed straight for a visit with her mother.

The Heyday Chronic Care Center was brightly lit and welcoming, though it was late by the time Mallory arrived. The nurse at the front desk smiled and waved her back to the private rooms. No one bothered to make Mallory sign in anymore. They all knew her too well. She’d been coming through those double glass doors almost every night for two years now.

Her mother’s room was dim, and the satellite television was set to a classical music station. Small white letters inched their way up the black screen. Verdi, the letters said. Rigoletto.

In spite of everything, now that she was here, Mallory felt herself begin to relax. Her mother always had that effect on her. Even now.

Dropping her heavy purse on the floor, she plopped down onto the bedside chair, kicked off her sandals and took her mother’s hand in a warm hello squeeze.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Mom,” she said. She leaned her head back against the soft headrest and shut her eyes. Verdi washed over her like a bath, cleaning away the dirty feeling that had clung to her ever since she’d spent five minutes on the telephone with a blackmailer. “It was a crazy day.”

But where should she begin? Ordinarily, on these visits, she kept the conversation light and upbeat. She didn’t burden her mother with the petty problems of everyday life. She didn’t mention the overdue bills or the crummy book sales. She didn’t mention that Dan, her bum ex-husband, who had never forked over the last installment of the divorce settlement, was now dating a teenager and said it was “serious.” Not that Mallory cared, except that apparently this teenager was expensive, which meant that Dan was even less likely to get around to paying up.

And, of course, she never, ever mentioned what she had discovered about Mindy. How could she? They’d all been so horrified when Tyler Balfour had uncovered a prostitution ring at Moresville College. And when they had learned that the Rackhams’ own little café had been the headquarters, the rendezvous point for the girls and their customers, her mother had been furious and mortified.

Then, about three months later, one of the betrayed wives whose husband had been “outed” in Balfour’s story had thrown a gasoline can through the front window of the café and followed it with a lighted match. Heyday firefighters had done their best, but the place, which Elizabeth Rackham had built from scratch after her own divorce twelve years ago, had burned to the ground.