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she’s had a thing for you all these years and she
did
call you, but she won’t admit it, because she had second thoughts when she heard your voice. It’s an easier answer, isn’t it?”
    “But she said she had to call Gayle to get our number. …” He stopped. Nancy’s calling or not calling Gayle had nothing to do with psychic phenomena. If this whole thing was initiated on Nancy’s end, then Beth was probably right. But the thought of Nancy “having a thing for him” didn’t seem likely, not after ten years. On the other hand, he had always thought Nancy had been attracted to him a little bit back in the old days. It wasn’t so hard to imagine that some sort of fresh spark had reignited an old flame.
    Beth was grinning at him. “I love it that you came up with a lame-brained psycho explanation instead of the obvious thing. If Nancy calls back, let
me
talk to her.”
    “Sure,” Art said, but he was somehow certain that Nancy wouldn’t call back. Beth’s explanation was too simple, too pat. There was a flaw in it somewhere. The mere fact that Nancy’s name had passed through his head a week ago had monstrous implication here, if only he could see what it was.
    Now he thought of something else: who had made the
first
call, the call-waiting call? He could grasp the idea that a person might somehow make a telepathic phone call, that he might get Nancy on the phone for mysterious telepathic reasons. But if she hadn’t called him first, who had?
Had he called himself?
But how could he call himself if he was on the phone talking to Anthony? It suggested an independent consciousness—someone or something inside his head who, or which, had set off the call-waiting beep. His brain reeled. Again the specter of schizophrenia loomed in his mind.
    He wandered out back to find Nina, who was in the sandbox building a fort out of twigs, and for a half hour he crawled around helping, finding sticks and leaves and rocks so that Nina could keep building. In the shrubbery he found a fallen nest, which he showed to her. Pushed down into the bent twigs was a plain brown and black feather, a sparrow feather, beautiful in its simplicity
    . . .
    It was three days later, after he’d had time to simmer down again, that there was another phone call. It happened the same way as before, except this time he ignored an incoming call because he was talking to his father, who was ninety and troubled and couldn’t grasp the idea of being put on hold. After hanging up, still worrying about their chat, he punched in the star-six-nine return without any anticipation at all, the Nancy episode temporarily forgotten. The strangely familiar voice at the other end brought him instantly to his senses.
    For a moment he was at a loss, but then, as before, he identified himself and asked if anyone there had called him.
    “Art? Is that you?”
    “Yeah,” Art said, “it’s me.” He still didn’t place the voice.
    “This is Steven. Steven Nichols.”
    “Steven! How the hell are you doing?” His hand trembled so violently that he knocked the telephone receiver against his teeth, and he had to force himself to ask Steven the same questions he had asked Nancy. He was distracted the entire time by the uncanny coincidence of having seen Steven’s name on their Christmas card list just a couple of days ago. He hadn’t given it a moment’s thought at the time, just a glance, but he recalled that it had been there, on the dining room table along with four boxes of Christmas cards that Beth was determined to get into the mail early. Here it was again—the same damned thing as with Nancy. He hadn’t talked to Steven in years.
    “Not me,” Steven told him when Art asked if he’d called. “I made a couple of phone calls fifteen or twenty minutes ago, but I didn’t call you. Mine were local calls anyway. What the hell’s your area code?”
    “Seven-one-four,” Art said pointlessly. He already knew beyond doubt that Steven hadn’t called