I Nannied for a Widower Who Plays a Voicemail Meant for Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Number
Bridie hears a dead woman's voicemail through the baby monitor on her first night as nanny, recognizes the number as her own old one, and tells the widower who plays it nightly.
The baby monitor on my nightstand crackled at 11:40, and a dead woman asked someone to call her back.
I was in a strange bed in a strange house on my first night as a nanny.
The voice was low and warm and worn thin.
"Nora, it's Callie. I'm calling 207-555-0143, the number I have for you."
I sat straight up.
"I know it's been a long time. I'm not angry anymore. I just want to hear your voice once."
A breath on the recording, slow and careful.
"If this is the right number, please call me back."
Another pause.
"And if it isn't, I'm sorry. Whoever you are."
The message ended.
Then came the tones of a phone being dialed, one key at a time.
It rang, and rang, and a recorded woman said, "The number you have dialed is not in service."
A man's voice said, very quietly, "Not tonight either, Cal."
The man was Jude Maddox, forty, a lobster-boat owner and my new boss.
Callie was his wife, dead twenty months, and their five-year-old daughter was asleep across the hall from me.
I should have lain back down and pretended I hadn't heard.
I couldn't.
I had said that number out loud a thousand times.
It was my number.
I'd carried it for three years, until last June, when I changed it to get away from a man who wouldn't stop calling.
The first month I had it, a dentist and a pharmacy kept ringing for somebody named Nora.
I had told them all the same thing: wrong number.
I pulled a sweatshirt on over my T-shirt and went down the stairs in my socks.
The house was gray shingle outside and bare wood inside, and it smelled like woodsmoke and cold salt.
The kitchen light was on.
Jude stood at the sink with his back to me, in a thermal shirt with the sleeves shoved up.
He was big, a good six-two, with a graying beard and hands scarred white across the knuckles.
His phone lay face up on the counter.
He turned the water on and held both hands under it.
"You heard that," he said, without looking around.
"The monitor picks it up," I said.
"I know. I'm sorry. I'll move the receiver."
"Don't."
He turned then.
His eyes were gray-green, red at the rims, and tired in a way sleep wouldn't touch.
He looked at my bare feet, then at my face.
In the interview, Iris, his mother, had done the talking.
He had stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and barely spoken to me beyond "Welcome" and "Thanks."
Now he took a clean glass down from the cupboard, filled it with water, and held it out.
"You're shaking."
I took it.
His fingers closed over mine on the glass for a moment, warm and rough, and neither of us let go.
I felt it in my stomach, which was the last thing I wanted to feel in his kitchen at midnight.
He let go first.
"She left that on a phone that didn't belong to anybody," he said.
"It was her friend's old number."
He wiped his hands.
"I've called it every night for twenty months."
"I've called the carrier twice and a lawyer once, and nobody can tell me who got the number after her friend dropped it."
He tossed the dish towel on the counter.
"I just want to know somebody heard her."
The glass was cold against my palm.
I looked at his phone on the counter.
I looked at the man who had been sitting on his daughter's floor at midnight for twenty months, dialing a dead line.
I thought about forty unheard voicemails I'd never once opened, because I don't do voicemail.
I put the glass down.
I walked to the counter, picked up his phone, and read the number on its screen.
It was the one I'd known by heart for three years.
Jude stepped toward me and his big hand closed around my wrist, not hard, just there.
"Miss Ellery."
"Call me Bridie."
I turned my wrist in his hand until my palm lay against his.
"Mr. Maddox," I said, "that number was mine."
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