The Pair at the Pedestal
Episode 2 of 3 of Four Minutes Ten by Marcy Loeb
“Nobody hangs up eleven times to the second,” I said.
Arden Poole had been a splice tech for the phone company for twenty six years and had the voice of a man who takes calls like mine about twice a month. He did not argue with me. He asked for the number, and then he was quiet for a while with a keyboard going under him.
“That pair is live,” he said.
“The house burned down.”
“The house did. The pair didn’t. Whoever cut in the drop at the meter after the fire cut the drop. The pair keeps going. It runs to a pedestal about six tenths of a mile up your Egypt Hollow, and it’s bridged.”
“Bridged to what.”
“To a second service point, which in 1974 is how they did a barn or a well house or a mother in law place, one bill, two phones.” Keys again. “Second point is on the parcel north of you. Records have it as Pardue.”
I wrote Pardue on the back of a call slip and then I said the sensible thing out loud, because I have learned it is better to say the sensible thing out loud than to have somebody else say it to you later.
“There were four copper thefts in this county last spring. A man with a lineman’s handset can clip onto that pedestal and dial anything he wants.”
“He can,” Arden said. “Although I will tell you, a man stealing copper generally does not call the police eleven times about it.”
“No.”
“I’ll get a ticket in for the pedestal. Thirty days, maybe.”
Lonnie Boyce took his lunch in my center most nights, because the sheriff’s office had no night shift to speak of and the vending machine here worked. He usually came at two. After I hung up with Arden I asked him to start coming at three and to keep the Blazer fueled, and when he wanted to know why, I told him every one of those calls had landed between midnight and half past three and I wanted a car inside reach of Egypt Hollow when the next one came. He was thirty one and he had opinions about everybody in the county, which is a useful quality in a deputy if you can stand the delivery.
“Pardue place,” he said, with his mouth full. “Wade. He came back after the fire, he’s in a trailer up behind where the house was. Walks like he’s got a nail in his boot. You ever watch that man cross a parking lot? You could read a magazine.”
“What happened to his folks?”
“Lois died in the fire. Smoke, they said.” He shrugged. “Old man had a stroke that same night, that’s what I heard. Daughter took him out to Mesa. Wade got the insurance on the house and he’s been drinking it ever since.”
“He’s out there alone?”
“Him and about nine outbuildings.” Lonnie balled up the wrapper. “Porch light on all night, every night. My uncle hunts that draw and it drives him crazy.”
The call came in at ten after three, on the fourth night he stood in my doorway with a sandwich.
I put it on the overhead so he could hear it. The screen door, the soft weather. And then, under it, a chirp. One chirp, then a gap of about forty seconds, then another. Anybody who has ever slept in a house with a smoke alarm going bad knows that sound and knows exactly how long you can stand it.
And then, far off and small, a voice. Two syllables. Not words. Just a man’s voice making a shape with nothing in it.
Lonnie set his coffee down on my console, which he had never once done.
“That’s not a squirrel,” he said.
He took the Blazer out with no lights and I sat with the mic in my hand and the call still open in my other ear. At four minutes and ten seconds it ended, the way it always ended.
He raised me at three forty from the top of the Pardue lane.
“Trailer’s dark,” he said. “Porch light’s on.”
“Outbuildings?”
“Working on it.” A door, gravel, his breathing. “There’s a well house back here with a cord run out to it. Somebody ran a drop cord a hundred feet through the weeds to a well house.”
“Lonnie.”
“Door’s not locked.” Hinges. Then a long pause with him in it. “Jo, there’s a phone in here. It’s screwed to the stud, it’s got to be forty years old, and the handset is laying on the floor.”
“Is anybody in there?”
Then Lonnie stopped talking.