In the Middle of the Night Read Online Free PDF

about wrong numbers, people making mistakes.
Wrong number
echoed distantly from the past. “There’s no murderer here.”
    “Course there is,” the voice said, suddenly not angry anymore, almost gentle. “Your father’s John Paul Colbert, isn’t he?”
    “Yes.” Almost stammering that simple word. That simple word that was hard to say all of a sudden.
    “Well, if your father is John P. Colbert and you’re hisson like you say you are, then you are the son of a murderer. How old are you?”
    The question, asked in a return to the angry voice, caught him off guard. “Seven,” he said. “Going on eight.”
    “Too bad,” the voice said. “Too bad to be the son of a murderer at seven years old.”
    “My father is not a murderer,” he said, shouting into the phone. “My father is John Paul Colbert and he is not a murderer.”
    The telephone was snatched from his hand. He turned to find his mother standing beside him, all paleness gone, her face flushed, eyes flashing, her eyes so blazing with—what?—he did not know what, had never seen it there before. Anger, yes, and something else. She slammed the phone down on the receiver. Took a deep breath and swiveled around.
    “I’m sorry, Ma,” he said, tears springing to his eyes, turning the world liquid, like he was underwater.
    “Hush, hush,” she said, her voice funny. “I’m not mad at you.” She clutched him to her. He dove into her, his face in her skirt, ignoring the terrible smell of vomit that still clung to her, that obliterated the perfume she always wore, the smell of flowers in the summer after a rain.
    “That man on the phone. He said that Daddy …” He could not say the word, could not get it out.
    She thrust him away from her, looked deeply into his eyes with those deep dark eyes of hers, like the color of black olives in a jar. “Your father is not a murderer.”
    “Then why did that man say he was?” he asked. Surprised by the loss on her face, in her eyes, he suppliedhis own answer: “Was he joking? Playing a trick on me?”
    She smiled, sadly, wanly, a thin smile, a smile without warmth. “There are strange people in the world, Denny. Crazy people who do things that are hard to understand.”
    And suddenly she was sick again. He saw the sickness in her pallor as if someone had opened a faucet and drained the blood from her face, and she murmured something he did not understand before running off to the bathroom, where he once more heard the terrible sounds of her retching.
    Putting his hands over his ears, blotting out the awful sounds, he heard, dimly, the telephone ringing again. He bolted from the room, ran to his bedroom, slammed the door behind him, fell on his knees and crawled under the bed, into the darkness, curling up, arms hugging his knees, eyes closed, glad to be here in the dark where he could not hear the telephone ringing or his mother vomiting.
    When his father came home from work, he made the rule:
    Never,
never
, answer the phone.
    Now, on a September afternoon all these years later, he had broken the rule. The sky hadn’t fallen. Lightning hadn’t struck. He wondered why he had waited so long.
    Suddenly, he was eager for the telephone to ring again.
    But it didn’t.
    That night, he awoke to a deafening silence. Checking the digital clock as usual, he saw that it was 3:10, almost the same time as last night’s phone call.
    The house was quiet—more than quiet: wrapped in an absence of sound so profound that it seemed to be a sound in itself.
    But something had awakened him.
    Noise in the hallway now, familiar to his ears: a footstep, a door closing, another footstep. His father, of course.
    Denny had never feared a burglar prowling the rooms, because his father often wandered the apartment during the night. Investigating, Denny sometimes found him sitting at a window in the dark or reading a day-old newspaper in the living room, or watching television with the sound turned off.
    He wondered now if his