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There was no dial tone. I pressed it twice, waited and tried the line again. It was flat, dead. I was frightened, and then angry as well as frightened. Angry for being such a coward. Ghost wouldn’t stand here like a little bitch. Ghost would march up there with a butcher knife and shred anyone who dared to trespass in his castle.
     
    I went to the kitchen and yanked open the utensil drawer. I found a long meat fork with a thick black handle. I shoved the phone into my back pocket and walked to the stairs. I went up at a steady pace, determined not to slow down or panic. I made it to the landing and flipped on the hall light. I listened for any movement and heard nothing. I squeezed the meat fork handle and began my circuit of the halls, which formed a rectangle around the ballroom - a space smaller than it sounds and might once have been a library or large study of some sort, but which Stacey had decided would become the ballroom - at the house’s center.
     
    The first longer leg of this rectangle, immediately off the stairs, was flanked by a linen closet, then the main bathroom, followed by another closet and finally the master bedroom at the end. I checked the bathroom and the closets, opening and closing the doors with delicate precision. None contained a person. I continued to the master bedroom and found the door closed. Had I left it open or closed? I could not remember, and it didn’t matter much because Olivia, the woman who cleaned the house every two weeks, might have shut it after her dusting or whatever she did in there nowadays. She could have left it open, too, and the fact was I had no way of knowing. The master bedroom was maybe halfway across the house from the living room. It might have been the bedroom phone that had been dropped, but the noise I heard had sounded closer than that, toward the center of the house.
     
    I decided to check the other rooms first and finish my inspection in the master. I walked around the ballroom’s doors, into the second long hallway. I checked the three smaller bedrooms, the second half-bathroom and the wider closet where we stored the Christmas tree decorations and other boxed junk we rarely used.
     
    All of the rooms were empty. I backtracked, passing the ballroom’s double doors again, and suddenly wanted to be in the master bedroom and done with this distraction. I twisted the knob and barged in, the meat fork at my side. I flipped the light on.
     
    The bed was made. Everything was neat, ordered, just as I had left it. Olivia had kept it clean, ready for my return. It was like a hotel room, the sheets folded back, the pillows plumped. The walk-in closet harbored no trespasser.
     
    On the nightstand was a square lamp with a clear glass base, the clock radio and the telephone. The handset was standing appropriately erect on the cradle. No one was here. No one had used the phone. No one was in the house. The thunk sound was just one of those random old house sounds.
     
    Unless the thing that made the random old house sound is in the ballroom. Go on, you big pussy.
     
    No, I wasn’t going in there tonight. There wasn’t a phone in the ballroom, and this inspection was about the phone, the caller. Nothing more.
     
    So, who had called me? And how did they manage to replay my voice? My voice, repeating things I said months ago, back when I spent a good portion of the evenings drunk and bawling and talking to myself so that I didn’t have to listen to her voice in my head - or worse, the vacuum of silence when she refused to talk to me? Had I used the phone then? Had I called someone in my misery? Could they have recorded me and played it back to taunt me? Who would do such a thing?
     
    No one called me these days, except for Lucy. Everyone else had stopped calling months ago, when they realized I wasn’t going to leave Los Angeles until I was good and ready. It’s better to leave him alone , they said, though they couldn’t understand how I could stay in that