Page 39 of Catching Fire

Maybe it meant they'd found Marina!

But no. Maggie would have yelled that so the whole neighborhood could hear.

Now Seline was stuck waiting until Maggie's call finished. As she stood there, wondering if she’d ever find a way to live without this soul-twisting feeling in the center of her body, her phone rang again. If she wasn't young and healthy, she would have dropped dead of a heart attack right at that moment.

Flipping the phone to her face, she pressed the button even as she read the words, Redemption Public Library.

“May I speak to Dr. Seline Marchand?” It sounded almost identical to the start of the last call she'd gotten, but this time she recognized the voice.

“Ivy! I'm going to have to call you back.”

“Oh, did something happen?”

She wanted to sayyes. And thenNo. Because what did they really know? Except that they'd gotten a call from a stranger. But surely Sanders had given the strange woman in the parking lot Seline’s number. So she settled on, “maybe.”

“Well, fingers crossed! But I think I might have found something important, so call back as soon as you can.”

“Okay, I will.” That at least lifted her heart. Maggie had something good on her call, and Ivy had good news, too. She said goodbye and hung up. Even as she turned it off, she wondered now how quickly it could ring again.

Maggie hung up and told her, “Watson is getting the call traced. She pulled your records and thinks you kept her on the line just long enough to make it happen. She’s going to call back.”

Another sigh of relief hit her. Maybe Marina was still alive and maybe she would be found. A brief silence descended as she and Maggie stared at each other waiting for phone calls that didn't quite come.

Seline forced herself to move around. She was behind on her work. Even though she had her wonderful lab at home, she wasn't getting anything done. She had good reason to fear that she’d lose her track to tenure. But worse, Marina Balero was in the hands of that madman.

Though Seline hadn’t admitted it to herself, when they’d passed the fourteen-hour mark, she’d consoled herself that Marina wasn’t in any more pain or terror. Now her friend was possibly still alive. Was that better or worse? Seline didn't know.

It felt like an eon later, though it was barely a minute, that Seline asked, “Do we call Sebastian and Kalan?”

“What are Kalan and Sebastian going to do that we aren’t?” Maggie replied after a moment’s careful thought. “If they're out on a call, they won't even get the message. If they're in the station, they could decide to leave the shift. But if they leave, then they need to get subbed out first. Two of them getting a sub at the same time is harder than you might think.”

Seline understood. If they both left without subs in place, the station would be very short-handed in the face of an emergency. And the fire station faced real emergencies, while she’d had a concerning phone call.

Seline conceded. It hadn’t been her best idea, even if she wanted Kalan here. Even if he didn’t feel the same. She’d deal with her feelings when all of this was over.

So they stayed there in the living room, accomplishing nothing but discussing a few pointless options until Maggie's phone rang again. She smiled as soon as she saw who was calling and held the phone out with the speaker button on before she even answered it. “Watson!”

Without even a return greeting, Watson began explaining what they’d found. “I want you to leave Seline’s line open in case she gets another call. If someone calls you that you know, answer and hang up immediately. Message them that you’ll call back on another line. I want your line as free as possible.”

She could do that, but instead of just agreeing, she asked, “What do we know about that call?”

“Well, it's a landline, of all things. We figured out that it came from Stromsburg. Do you have any connection to Stromsburg?”

“No, I don’t even know where it is.” Seline had come to the US as a graduate student. She’d attended Cornell and, after completing a postdoc for two years in Georgia, she’d quickly landed the position at Lincoln.

It was Maggie who said, “It’s another small town. North and West of Lincoln.”

Watson continued matter of factly. “The call came from a payphone at Martin’s Grocery. It’s a mom and pop kind of place. Local chain with about fifteen stores across eastern Nebraska.”

After relaying as much of the conversation as she could remember, Seline heard Watson talking to someone near her. “Get footage from the parking lot of that store.”

Her heart breathed another sigh of relief. They were doing everything they could. The grocery store answer had been true. Maybe, so had the rest of it. And the footage they got might just show Sanders—or at least what Sanders looked like now. She added, “Her description of the man who gave her the money was relatively spot on to the real Sanders.”

“We're tracking him down. And we're looking in the area,” Watson told them before ending the phone call.

Once again, Seline was left pacing her own room. She had no work to do that she could accomplish. She had no way to save Marina, and nothing at her fingertips to even keep herself busy. She turned to Maggie. “Can I borrow your phone for a minute?”

Pulling the number up on her own phone, she dialed it into Maggie’s.

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