Page 79 of The Fundamentals

“Because it must be about you!” he complained. “Hold on. It’s my daughter,” he said to someone else, and I heard a woman’s voice murmur something back to him.

“Dad! I don’t want to talk about your romantic issues in the middle of the night—”

“It’s your boyfriend’s mother calling,” he said angrily.

“Bowie is my husband,” I corrected automatically. “How does his mom have your number?” None of this made sense.

“No, the other one. Ward, it’s his mother. She’s on me nonstop, every two minutes, and I think she’s trying to tell me that she needs to talk to you. I can understand about every third word she’s saying, but now you know, so you can deal with her. She’s a damn hysteric.”

“What?” I rubbed my eyes. It was too late—no, too early for all this strange information. “Valerie is calling you to talk about what?”

He had already hung up on me and for a moment I sat looking at the screen, still totally confused. Valerie, who didn’t have my number, was calling my dad to get ahold of me. Ok, got it, that part I understood. But why? I sat in the bed for another minute before I realized that I should just talk to her to straighten this out, and it was only after I dialed and she answered that I also realized that I shouldn’t have called from my new phone. Now she would have my number and Ward could get it too.

“Who is this?” she said when she picked up.

“Valerie, it’s—”

“Sissy? Sissy, he’s…” She said something, but it was garbled.

“What? What’s wrong? Is it Ward?” I’d stood up from the bed and was looking around the room in a panic. Where was he? Was he here?

“…Ward, he’s…”

“What?” I asked again, and I made a large effort to calm myself. Ward wasn’t in this apartment; I was fine. Right? “Where is he?”

“I think he’s at…” Again, it was hard to understand but I thought I heard her say “Diane,” and that made sense since Diane was Ward’s grandma. I’d had a strong suspicion that she’d been helping him all along, even before Valerie had admitted it to me in the coffee shop this morning. Or had it been yesterday? I rubbed my eyes, still confused. “Valerie?”

“Sissy, he’s…”

“What did you just say?” I must have misheard, because she couldn’t have told me that he was dead. I was suddenly sitting again, and had been lucky that the mattress was behind me. Ward was dead? “Valerie, where are you?”

“At Diane’s,” she answered, and that part I heard for sure even though reception was terrible way out there.

“The Memorial Tree,” she said clearly. Then the call dropped, and she was gone.

While I was still talking into my phone, saying hello, Valerie, what did you say, and what about the tree, I got another call.

“Aubin?”

“Why is that woman bothering me?” my sister snapped. “She left me six messages that I can’t understand.”

“Is it Valerie?” I asked and Aubin angrily told me yes. “She was calling Dad, too,” I said. In the midst of this situation, I forgot how mad I was at my sister for plotting behind my back about the wedding and the sale of the cottage, for not really loving me after all. “I think it’s something to do with Ward. She told me…I think she said that he’s dead, and she said something about his grandma’s house that I didn’t understand.”

“Ward is dead?” Aubin said doubtfully. “I don’t think so.”

“I’m almost sure that was what I heard, but the signal was so bad. What if he is, Aubin? What if the reason that he hasn’t been coming after me is because he couldn’t?” I paused. “What could have happened to him?”

“Don’t tell me that you’re thinking of driving to that farm to find out. Don’t you dare act like a woman in some ridiculous movie who gets lured from her house to get killed,” my sister said. “Obviously, his mother is trying to get you there so he can attack you. It’s a plot between her and her son.”

I was more awake now. “Then why would she let two people, you and Dad, in on it? She called both of you to get to me. It’s a really bad way to secretly lure someone.”

“Why should I worry about how dumb those people are?” She paused. “Good Lord, you are going out there!”

“I have the bodyguard following me. I’ll be ok.”

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

“I have to know!” I told her. “Do you understand how it feels to live like this? It’s like waiting for the blade of a guillotine to fall on my neck, always! If he’s dead—I shouldn’t want him to be dead, but—”

---