you still alive.” I paused. “Maybe that sounds like a lie, but it isn’t. It really isn’t.”
Then I went back to bed and was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. There were no dreams.
* * *
It was my habit to turn on my phone even before I got dressed and check the Newsy news app to make sure no one had started World War III and there hadn’t been any terrorist attacks. Before I could go there on the morning after Mr. Harrigan’s funeral, I saw a little red circle on the SMS icon, which meant I had a text message. I assumed it was either from Billy Bogan, a friend and classmate who had a Motorola Ming, or Margie Washburn, who had a Samsung . . . although I’d gotten fewer texts from Margie lately. I suppose Regina had blabbed about me kissing her.
You know that old saying, “so-and-so’s blood ran cold”? That can actually happen. I know, because mine did. I sat on my bed, staring at the screen of my phone. The text was from pirateking1.
Down in the kitchen, I could hear rattling as Dad pulled the skillet out of the cabinet beside the stove. He was apparently planning to make us a hot breakfast, something he tried to do once or twice a week.
“Dad?” I said, but the rattling continued, and I heard him say something that might have been Come out of there, you damn thing.
He didn’t hear me, and not just because my bedroom door was closed. I could hardly hear myself. The text had made my blood run cold, and it had stolen my voice.
The message above the most recent one had been sent four days before Mr. Harrigan died. It read No need to water the houseplants today, Mrs. G did it. Below it was this: C C C aa.
It had been sent at 2:40 A.M.
“Dad!” This time it was a little louder, but still not loud enough. I don’t know if I was crying then, or if the tears started when I was going downstairs, still wearing nothing but my underpants and a Gates Falls Tigers tee-shirt.
Dad’s back was to me. He had managed to get the skillet out and was melting butter in it. He heard me and said, “I hope you’re hungry. I know I am.”
“Daddy,” I said. “Daddy.”
He turned when he heard what I’d stopped calling him when I was eight or nine. Saw I wasn’t dressed. Saw I was crying. Saw I was holding out my phone. Forgot all about the skillet.
“Craig, what is it? What’s wrong? Did you have a nightmare about the funeral?”
It was a nightmare, all right, and probably it was too late—he was old, after all—but maybe it wasn’t.
“Oh, Daddy,” I said. Blubbering now. “He’s not dead. At least he wasn’t at two-thirty this morning. We’ve got to dig him up. We have to, because we buried him alive.”
* * *
I told him everything. About how I’d taken Mr. Harrigan’s phone and put it in the pocket of his suit coat. Because it came to mean a lot to him, I said. And because it was something I gave him. I told him about calling that phone in the middle of the night, hanging up the first time, then calling back and leaving a message on his voicemail. I didn’t need to show Dad the text I got in return, because he’d already looked at it. Studied it, actually.
The butter in the skillet had begun to scorch. Dad got up and moved the skillet off the burner. “Don’t suppose you’ll be wanting any eggs,” he said. Then he came back to the table, but instead of sitting on the other side, in his usual place, he sat next to me and put one of his hands over one of mine. “Listen up now.”
“I know it was a creepy thing to do,” I said, “but if I hadn’t, we never would have known. We have to—”
“Son—”
“No, Dad, listen! We have to get somebody out there right away! A bulldozer, a payloader, even guys with shovels! He could still be—”
“Craig, stop. You were spoofed.”
I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. I knew what spoofing was, but the possibility that it had happened to me—and in the middle of the night—had never crossed my mind.
“There’s more and more of it going around,” he said. “We even had a staff meeting about it at work. Someone got access to Harrigan’s cell phone.