Chapter One

Present day:

"Are you alone?"

Emma Bowers strained to hear the raspy words over the static-riddled connection. The telephones had been acting up ever since the afternoon storm. The voice had definitely sounded creepy, but she remembered the construction crew had played a similar joke on her last week when she had worked late. Only, then she hadn't been alone in the creaky doublewide office trailer.

"Jeremy?" she asked, and wondered if she'd guessed right. The young, energetic steelworker was the biggest prankster on the job. The gravel-like voice seemed to match the one he'd used before. The phone crackled and he didn't answer. Either he didn't hear her or he wanted to continue his practical joke a little longer.

She chuckled. "Don't you have anything better to do than harass a lonely working girl? And no cracks about the working girl part. You know what I mean."

Hugging the receiver against her shoulder, she typed out another line of the proposal she'd been working on. She could just hang up--serve him right for trying to scare her--but she couldn't let them get the best of her or next time they'd try something even more provoking.

She waited for the voice to admit he was one of the employees. Instead, she got a full thirty seconds of heavy breathing. The men did like to have their fun, but this was irritating and...and unsettling. She'd assured Ben she wasn't afraid of staying by herself while he went to attend his son's birthday party, but that was before the tomb-like sound of the front door closed behind him.

"Sorry to disappoint you jerks, but I'm not falling for--" A loud crackling sound drowned out her words.

"I know yo--" a crackling, then "'lone," intermittently filtered through the noise. The disjointed conversations she'd had to put up with all afternoon had been driving her up the wall, but the phone company said repairs couldn't be made until tomorrow morning.

All right, she thought, enough is enough. But she couldn't allow the men to know their persistent joking around shook her or they'd never let her live it down. She would feel a lot better if they'd just own up to the prank before hanging up. She asked flippantly, "This is Jeremy Bates, isn't it?"

With no static interference, this time when she received no answer, she began to feel more confident. "I knew it! You can't fool me by disguising your voice like that. Look here, Jeremy, you tell all the guys, who I'm sure are standing around you snickering their cone-shaped heads off, to try this trick on some unsuspecting soul who doesn't know what a sick sense of humor construction workers have."

"You are alone, aren't you?" the raspy voice insisted over the now clear line. The seriousness of the man's tone, combined with her doubts even Jeremy--the most mischievous of the lot--would be perverse enough to carry a joke this far, caused a prickling sensation along the back of her neck. She remembered hearing somewhere that criminals often checked before breaking into a building by calling ahead to see if it was vacant. Maybe they didn't even care if it was empty as long as the occupant posed no threat. With more bravery than she felt, she said, "There are at least ten other people in the building with me. Which one do you want to speak to?"

"Lying bit--" Line static cut off the expletive.

"You have a wrong number." She slammed the receiver down hard, hoping the line had cleared long enough to give the ill-mannered caller ear damage. Her hands shook. She'd never been defamed in such a manner before, least of all by the good-natured employees of Benjamin-Micah Construction Company.

Emma stared at the ivory-colored instrument for a moment as if it might grow fangs and bite her. Then aware of the absurdity of being afraid of a telephone, she laughed. She looked at the blinking cursor on her computer screen for a moment, then continued with her work. But, she couldn't put the call out of her mind.

What was the point of anyone trying to scare her, and why had he been so insistent in knowing if she were alone? Could it really have been one of the guys having some fun as she originally suspected? She didn't think anyone in the construction crew would stoop to calling her vulgar names. Maybe she'd mistaken that last word the man had said, but bitch with lying seemed more in context than anything else she could come up with.

It could have just been an obscene caller. Deciding that must be the case, she knew those people rarely did more than make sick innuendoes. "Creep."

Emma tapped out the last few lines onto the computer screen, checked for errors, and then depressed the print key. The whir of the office LaserJet broke the quiet of the empty building.

"All alone am I..." She half sang, half hummed the oldies tune softly, keeping time by drumming her fingertips rhythmically on the desktop.

When the printer stopped, she rolled back her chair and gathered the pages of the proposal. She tamped them into a neat stack along with the bid bond and other necessary forms for tomorrow's bid opening. Clipping the papers to the front of the manila envelope she'd already prepared, she dropped the bundle into the top drawer of the file cabinet.

Ben wouldn't bother signing the bid proposal until morning. When he returned to drive her home, he'd be anxious to drop her off at her apartment and get back to his pregnant wife, Lauren.

Copyright © 2005 Irene Estep