A Candidate for Murder (3 page)

Mom’s questions were almost identical to Dad’s, and she finally said she was satisfied that there was nothing to worry about, although every now and then throughout dinner I caught her sneaking looks at me as though she were afraid I might disappear.

I ate fast because I had that history paper to write. I went up to my room, sat in the middle of my bed with my notes spread around me, opened my notebook, and got to work.

I must have been awfully tired, because the sudden, shrill blast of the telephone sliced into my dreams like a scream. I let out a yelp as I scrambled across my bed to snatch up the receiver before it could ring again.

Still half asleep, I mumbled, “Hello?”

A woman answered me. Her voice was low and slurred, and at first I couldn’t tell what she was saying. I thought I heard her say my name, but I couldn’t be sure.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked.

“You beg my pardon?” she said mockingly, each word
slow and careful. She made a snuffling noise that could have been a laugh or a cry, and her voice dropped. “I asked you, what do you know about it? What do you know?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“If they think you don’t know nothin’ you’ll be all right. You don’t know, do you?”

It was pretty obvious from the way the woman’s conversation rambled that she was drunk. She hadn’t called me. She thought she was talking to someone else. “You have the wrong number,” I told her.

“You’re just a kid,” she said, and she started to cry.

“You dialed the wrong number,” I said. “Hang up and try again.”

I put the receiver back in its cradle and slid off the bed, tugging my rumpled T-shirt and jeans into place. I tried to gather my history papers, which were scattered on the bed and the floor. So much for leaving my report until Sunday night.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the phone. What if the woman did dial again? What if she dialed this number? Her words stayed in my head, and I could still hear what sounded like
Cary Amberson.

But why would she be calling me? Why would she ask me what I knew? It didn’t make sense.

I sat there maybe five minutes before I began to relax. She wasn’t going to call, I reassured myself. But I felt uncomfortable, even a little scared.
Had
the woman said my name?

I needed to talk to someone about the call. I needed to talk to Mom or Dad.

The door to my parents’ bedroom was closed, which meant that Mom was probably asleep, and the lights were still on downstairs, which told me that Dad hadn’t come upstairs yet.

I winced as I stepped on the squeaky board just outside my bedroom door and hurried down the stairs as quietly as I could, thankful that the thick gold-colored carpet absorbed the sound of my footsteps. I raced across the entry hall and down the short hallway leading to the library, where Dad would be working.

He was bent over his desk, writing in the greenish-gold puddle of light from his desk lamp. As he looked up, his eyes widened in surprise. “Cary?” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I was,” I answered and smiled. “I fell asleep while I was writing my history report, but I got a phone call, and it woke me up.”

It was late, and yet my father looked as he always did, tall, good-looking, and dignified, in total command, without a single blond hair out of place. It was a different story with me. As I’d passed the hall mirror I’d caught a glimpse of myself and wasn’t happy with what I’d seen. My long light-brown hair looked as though it had lost a battle with my blow dryer, my right cheek was still marked with red lines from sleeping on top of the wrinkled quilt, and my eyes (their bright blue color was the one great thing I’d inherited from my father) were puffy and red-rimmed.

“It’s pretty late for your friends to call.”

“It wasn’t one of my friends,” I said. “It was a woman saying some weird things.”

Dad slowly laid down his pen and took off his glasses, never taking his eyes from my face. “Here …” He pointed to the chair across from his desk. “Sit down. Tell me about it.”

I did as he suggested, facing Dad across his wide desk as though I were one of the officers in his oil company there to discuss business. It was a formal setting, but Dad’s a formal kind of person. It’s hard for some people to understand Dad. He’s even been accused of not having a sense of humor, but that’s not true. It’s just that he doesn’t laugh at a lot of silly stuff, and he’s never been very good at telling jokes. He wouldn’t laugh at a comic who slipped on a banana peel. He’d be more concerned about whether the person was hurt, because Dad is a kind, loving man. And he’s smart. He was smart enough to keep his company going during the oil bust back in the eighties, at a time in which a lot of independent companies folded.

When I had told Dad everything I could remember about the conversation, he said, “It’s most likely that the woman dialed your number by accident.”

“That’s what I thought.” Dad had said just what I’d hoped he’d say. I felt a thousand times better.

“However,” Dad went on, “since you think you heard her call you by name …”

“If,”
I said.

“
If
you did, it’s possible that somehow she had come into possession of your telephone number.”

“But my number’s unlisted,” I complained. “It’s my own private line.”

“A person’s privacy is never totally protected,” he
answered. “Human nature being what it is, there can always be slipups.”

I leaned back in my chair and grumbled, “Okay. Supposing the woman really did want to talk to me. Why? What she said didn’t make any sense.”

Dad leaned back, too, and rubbed his chin. “Cary, honey, I’m sorry, but crank calls like that one seem to be part of the game of politics. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. I’d hoped that our home phones would be protected, and anonymous callers would simply phone the Amberson Company, but apparently that’s not the way it’s worked out.”

“Are you telling me that crank calls have come to your office?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

The dark shadows that licked the edges of the room shifted and moved closer. I shivered and hugged myself, trying to rub warmth back into my upper arms. “You mean just because you want to be governor, crazy people are going to come after you?” I asked.

Dad explained patiently, “No one’s coming after me. There are a certain number of unbalanced people in the world who enjoy making strange telephone calls. A detective with the police force explained that people of this type get their satisfaction out of just making the calls. They usually don’t do anything to cause physical harm.”

“When did you talk to a detective?”

“Delia took a threatening call. She was frightened and called the police.”

I could just picture Delia coming unglued. Delia was Dad’s personal secretary at his Amberson Oil Company, and now that his campaign headquarters had been officially opened in a vacant store downtown on Commerce Street, she’d been put in charge of the volunteer staff.

Delia usually fussed over me. She fussed over herself, too, but her strawberry-blond hair color was as fake as the smile she always gave me, and I didn’t like her.

I was getting sidetracked. “Dad, if someone threatened you, shouldn’t you and the police take the call seriously?”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Dad tried to reassure me. “People who make calls like that have so much bottled-up anger it has to spill out somewhere, so it does through anonymous threats and obscenities.”

“And you believe the detective? Are you sure that all these crazy callers want to do is talk?”

Dad looked tired, and a frown wrinkle flickered between his eyebrows. “Cary,” he said, “all I can do is repeat the detective’s assurances that crank callers are usually harmless.” He shifted in his chair. “Look, honey, it’s late, and I have a great deal of work to finish.”

“Okay, Dad,” I said. I got up, walked around his desk, and bent to kiss his cheek before I headed back to my bedroom. It really was late—almost midnight—so I quickly washed my face, pulled on the oversized T-shirt I sleep in, and climbed into bed.

My gaze was drawn to the telephone as I turned off my light.
“Don’t ring,”
I told it.
“Please don’t ring.”

I wouldn’t let myself think about the woman who had called. She was drunk. She was a nut. She was history.

But the whisper of her words slipped through my mind.
Cary Amberson.
She had said it. I knew she had called me by name.

D
ad had already eaten breakfast before I came downstairs the next morning. It dawned on me that last night was one of the first times I’d been able to talk to Dad alone since he’d filed for the governor’s race.

I helped myself to some of the scrambled eggs and toast that Velma Hansel, our housekeeper, had brought to the table, and sat down opposite Mom.

I know everybody’s supposed to think of their mothers as old, but I’ve never been able to do that with Mom. She always looks terrific, even when her hair is out of place, even when she isn’t wearing makeup. Dad says that Mom still looks just like she did when she was in college. Of course, he has to be exaggerating, but Mom likes to hear it. I’ve never seen her in the courtroom, but if I were on a jury, and Mom were one of the attorneys on a case, I’d give her points just for the sharp, confident way she looks and moves and talks.

Mom wasn’t confident this morning. She sat slumped over the open newspaper, just staring, not reading it.

She’d mumbled a “good morning” at me when I
came in and kissed the top of her head, and I hadn’t thought anything of her mumbling, because Mom’s always like that when anyone catches her in the middle of reading something important. But this was different. As Mom looked across the table at me, her face was pale, and the skin was tight around her eyes and mouth.

“Mom, what’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you sick?”

Mom shook her head. “It’s so unfair,” she said.

“What’s unfair?”

Mom stabbed at an editorial cartoon with one finger, so I got up and hurried around to her side of the table, leaning over her shoulder to see it.

There was a cartoon of Dad. Anyone could tell it was Dad, and yet it didn’t look just like him, because the cartoonist had turned down Dad’s lips in a sneer. His nose was in the air, his eyes were half-closed, and there was a crown on his head.

“What’s he supposed to be sitting on?” I asked, and then I saw it was a throne made out of a tangle of tiny oil derricks and pumpers and tank trucks and dollar signs.

I gripped Mom’s hand, and she held mine tightly. “Dad’s not like that!” I knew my voice was too loud. “He’s running for governor because he wants to do a good, honest job, and that’s not what we’ve been getting. He doesn’t want to be a king, and he isn’t a snob! That cartoon is a lie!”

There was more I could have said, but Mom folded the newspaper over, got up, and put her arms around me. “There’s a lot we’ll have to get used to, Cary.”

“It hurts, Mom,” I said. “It hurt you, too. Your face was so white it scared me.”

“Well, yours is red,” Mom said. “We must make a funny-looking pair.”

We both tried to laugh, but it didn’t come off. “Sit down and eat your breakfast,” Mom told me. “You’ll be late for school.”

“I don’t feel like eating.”

“Cary,” she said, “going hungry won’t solve the problem. There’ll be many more attacks like this, and we’ll have to get used to them.”

“That’s not something I want to get used to. I hate reading lies about Dad,” I said, but I did pull out my chair and sat down.

“You’re going to hear a lot of things that aren’t true.” Mom leaned over to give me a quick hug. “Don’t let it get to you, honey,” she said. “We have to keep up a good face. How we react and what we do is going to reflect on Charles.”

“Good advice, but that means you, too, Mom.” I forced myself to smile, trying to make it easier for both of us.

“You’re right,” Mom said. “I’ll have to practice what I’ve just been preaching.”

Just then Velma opened the door from the kitchen. Her hair was more gray than blond. It was pulled up into a knot on top of her head and anchored with two barrettes which matched her extra-large-size pink blouse and slacks. “Oh, there you are, Cary,” she said pleasantly. “You and your mother sound so much alike, now that you’re gettin’ older, sometimes I can’t tell if it’s the two of you or if your mother’s talkin’ to herself again.”

Mom looked surprised. “Talking to myself? You make it sound pretty bad, Velma.”

“You know what I mean,” Velma said. “It’s when you sometimes like to read your lawyer stuff aloud.” She smiled at me. “Want anything else for breakfast?”

“No, thanks,” I answered, but I still had questions for Mom. As Velma shut the kitchen door I asked, “Why is this newspaper attacking Dad?”

“They support the other party. It’s a matter of politics,” she said.

I shook out my napkin so hard I nearly knocked over my glass of orange juice, but I grabbed the glass in time and managed to get the napkin spread across my lap before I answered. “It should be a matter of truth, not politics. Doesn’t anybody care about the truth?”

Mom reached across the table and placed a hand over mine. “Honey, it’s not as cut-and-dried as that. To begin with, people have to find out the truth, and that’s what a campaign is all about.” She smiled and added, “That reminds me—Charles told me you’re going to do volunteer work at headquarters.”

Mom has always called Dad
Charles
, and he’s called her
Laura
, but for the first time it struck me how much this tied into Dad’s formal attitude. Didn’t they ever call each other nicknames? I tried to think of Dad as a
Charlie
or a
Chuck
or a
Bubba
and almost laughed. Not Dad. He was definitely a
Charles.

“I want to work in the campaign office every afternoon after school,” I said.

“That may be too often,” Mom told me. “Your homework comes first.”

“But I want to help Dad.”

“Eat your eggs,” Mom said. “We’ll talk about it.”