Excerpt from Alibies by Sabrina

The phone lay in the middle of the floor, dial tone long since gone. Emma picked it up from the floor and stared at it a moment, then replaced it on it’s base. Probably out of charge and useless now. She turned away, planning on a quick trip to her room and to bed. It was past midnight and she didn’t want to deal with it anymore, “it” being Adrienne’s miscarriage, her husband’s dickheadedness, her own hallucinations, as Stacy suggested Hodges might be, and especially not Home Guard. If she could get past Hodges’ room without too nasty an encounter, she’d fall onto the covers and sleep, sleep, sleep until sunlight through the blinds woke her. Or not. Maybe she’d sleep through the day or even the week. She could dream, anyway.

The phone rang behind her. Emma stopped, surprised. She’d been sure there’d be no charge left.

The caller ID showed “caller unknown,” so she touched the red mute button.

When she checked, the charge indicator showed zero. Broken maybe. Like so many things.

Emma shook her head. Melodrama wasn’t something she indulged in often. Tonight it colored every thought.
She’d reached the soft carpet of the hall when the phone rang yet again. Louder than before, which wasn’t possible since she was farther away than when it rang the first time. Ridiculous, really. She didn’t quite run back across the space between herself and the phone, but she hustled.

The phone quit as soon as she reached the high table where it sat. “Unknown” stuttered and blinked at her on the little screen, as if struggling through low battery life. Throwing the thing across the room might be a lot of fun but not terribly smart. Clutching your purse to your side because you didn’t want to be parted from the gun inside was a pretty clear indication she needed a working phone. She did have her cell though.

Emma reconsidered throwing the handset, then set it back in the cradle. Stacy’s talk stayed with her, not because the woman had offered anything so amazingly astute, but for the talk itself. If Emma saw Hodges in every sunset and dealt with his ghost every night, that indicated she hadn’t finished dealing with her grief. It wasn’t quite what Stacy had said, but what Emma took away from their conversation.

“Hodges, if you’re doing this, I’d like you to stop. I’ve had a really rough day and I need to go to bed. Okay?”

No answer save silence.

The sillies struck and Emma offered a bad movie imitation. “Well, um, okay then, I’m just gonna have to go ahead and ask you to come back another time...”

The phone rang again, jangling until the entire contraption shook from base to handset. Emma eeped and clutched her purse tighter, going so far as to reach inside, as if a .38 might be of any use against a deranged phone. Clutching the gun, she stared at the phone as if expecting it to jump off the base and skitter across the floor after her.

No such thing happened. It just wouldn’t stop ringing. It seemed to grow exponentially louder until all that existed within the house was what was historically the most obnoxious sound in the world.

Emma gathered her courage and strode to the phone. She stopped a stride short of being able to pick it up and leaned in to read who was calling, expecting “unknown” again.

It said, “No.”

A hand batted the phone off its base. It was her own. She could tell because her fingers hurt from the force of the contact. The handset flew free of the base and broke apart on the floor. Emma didn’t even know she was pointing the .38 until the phone quit its ringing. Hands shaking, she kept the gun pointed at the broken pieces of plastic that used to be her phone's handset. When nothing more happened for several long seconds, Emma lowered the gun. As she did, that large, comforting hand she always associated with her husband returned to enfold her. At first her heartbeat magnified beneath that not quite restrictive warmth, then slowed to a regular cadence.

As she relaxed, the warmth and comforting presence of that hand lessened until it was gone. All that was left was Emma.

“Fuck it. It’s getting way too weird around here.”

She pulled her cell and considered. Before she could talk herself out of it, she’d dialed Sean.