In For a Penny Read Online Free Page B

too confused to speak.
    “Art?”
    “Yeah. I guess I
did
call you. What happened was that I got a call, and I couldn’t answer it, so I hit star-six-nine to call back. Apparently it was your number.”
    Now it was Nancy’s turn to be silent. “But I didn’t call you,” she said after a moment. “To tell you the truth, after you called me, I called Gayle to get your number. I don’t have it in my book. I didn’t want to use the star-six-nine function, because what if it
wasn’t
you? I’d end up talking to some nut.”
    “You couldn’t have called me by mistake the first time?”
    “Not if I didn’t have your number. And besides, I didn’t call anyone. I was doing the dishes. Do you have
my
number? My new number? Because we moved to San Antonio last year.”
    “I don’t know,” Art said, although it came to him then that he in fact didn’t have it. Not a week ago Nancy’s name had come up in conversation with a mutual friend, and Art had realized in a moment of passing nostalgia that he had lost touch with her and most of the rest of his old school friends. He flipped through the pages of his and Beth’s address book now and read off the number written down there, apparently years ago, given its position at the top of the B page.
    “That’s the old one,” Nancy told him, and she filled him in on the new phone and address before chatting some more and hanging up.
    Art realized that he had been holding his breath off and on, and he let it out now and walked into the living room, swamped with a strange fear and nearly reeling with vertigo. Why Nancy? Only because her name had been in his mind a week ago, fleetingly, unimportantly? And now he had connected with her in this bizarre way. …
    He saw through the sliding glass doors that Nina was out in the back yard, playing on the swing, which was good, because even a child like Nina could have seen that he was blasted, and he didn’t need that. He couldn’t let this affect Nina. He headed upstairs to the bathroom, where he was impulsively sick. Then he lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, the pieces of the puzzle going around in his head.
    . . .
    “I don’t know if I
can
explain it,” Beth said, putting away the groceries. “It’s pretty weird. But there’s one obvious explanation, and you already know what that is, I think.”
    “What?”
    “That you’re going crazy.”
    “Wait, though. I’ve been worrying about that. I thought that maybe I blanked out or something and called her up using her number, but I didn’t know I used her number, because I was blanked out, and when I un-blanked I remembered it as a star-six-nine call. You get what I’m saying?”
    “Yeah. Maybe you did.”
    “But where’d I get her number? We don’t have it. I couldn’t get it from information, because I didn’t know her address. I didn’t even know they’d moved to San Antonio till she told me. And Anthony heard the call-waiting click, too. I didn’t imagine that part.”
    Beth shrugged. Apparently she had nothing to add. He wondered if her silence was fear, and, if so, what she was afraid of. Him? He didn’t like the thought, but he realized that he was fearful himself. Perhaps she was fearful
for
him. He saw that he had to work this out logically, find the rationale behind the irrational before it
did
drive him crazy.
    “The thing is, if this is another psychic episode, it’s different again. This is
way
more complicated than the possum.”
    “That’s for sure,” she said.
    “Seriously. It involves screwing around with the phone lines, you know what I mean? Manipulating them with my mind. I push a couple of buttons and come up with Nancy Bronson, just like that, out of nowhere. If she didn’t call me, then I had to have contacted her … psychically, I guess you’d say. And I used the telephone to do it. This involves electricity, numbers, distances….”
    “How do you know she didn’t call you? That’s an easier explanation. Maybe