Sue doesn't say anything. Can't, really. Standing in the middle of her kitchen, gazing out the window where her three acres of dark woods slope away underneath the moonlight, she's hearing things in the man's voice, a barely suppressed note of hilarity underneath what she first thought was a toneless growl. She can hear him breathe between phrases, as if it's difficult for him to get whole sentences out without inhaling. There are no other sounds in the background.
Somehow she has the presence of mind to think that when things like this happen in the movies or on TV the person's first response is to accuse the caller of playing some kind of joke, or to get angry and accuse them of lying. But somehow she knows that this is not a joke and the man on the phone isn't lying to her. And anger is a long, long way from what she's feeling right now.
"I haven't lost you, have I, Susan?"
No,she tries to say but no noise comes out. There is still the sense of not touching anything, not even the clothes she's wearing. In fact she is floating, suspended in a gel of utter disbelief, not even horrified yet, although the horror is certainly out there and she can feel it corroding its way inward. "No," she says again, louder. "Who is this?"
"We'll get there," the man says. "We've got all night. And after all this is December twenty-first. The longest night of the year."
She has absolutely no idea how to respond to that observation. "Is she there?" she asks. "Is my daughter there with you?"
"Of course she is, Susan. You don't think I'd leave a little one-year-old unattended, do you?"
"Where's Marilyn?"
The man hesitates like he has to think about it. "Oh," he says, "she's here, too. We're all here, Susan."
"Let me talk to my daughter. Please."
"I'll put her on soon, I promise. Before that we need to establish a few ground rules. You've got a long way to go in the next twelve hours. It will make everything much easier and that way there won't be any misunderstandings between us later on." The man is speaking a bit quicker now, out of excitement, she senses. "First, it's important that you don't call the police. Not that I don't trust you, Susan, but you should know that I have tapped your phone and I'm scanning your cell, so if you make any calls to anyone, I'll know. Now I'm going to hang up and wait, and if you've followed rule number one, then in ten minutes I'll call back and we'll go from there. Are you with me so far?"
"Wait-"
"I'll take that as a yes," he says, and hangs up on her, gone, just like that. She stands there with the phone buzzing in her hand and then it leaps upon her, the fullness of it, with all its weight. She has never been one to absorb things gradually. When the unexpected happens she would always rather grapple with it immediately and to hell with denial, anger, and all those other stages of acceptance.
The room begins to tilt and she feels her knees buckle as she sinks to the floor still clutching the phone, realizing she's not breathing yet unable to will herself to inhale. From somewhere deep in her chest she hears the low, slow whine of her lungs pleading for air. Instead she begins slowly and deliberately to bring order to the available facts. She forces herself to think rationally. She hears Marilyn's voice on the phone from an hour earlier:
This loser in a van is just riding my tail.
The realization kicks the door wide open to a blizzard of images. The man who was following her forcing the Jeep off the road, dragging Marilyn from behind the wheel, putting a gun to her head, and forcing her out of the car. Climbing into the Jeep with Veda still strapped into her car seat, Veda facing backward, her round, mostly bald head cocked in confusion and alarm at her nanny's screams and cries for help, the faceless one putting the vehicle in gear and driving off into the night. The man and Sue's daughter somewhere out on the freeway now, somewhere in the black expanse of a New England winterThe phone rings again and Sue almost screams.