Cold Calls Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CLARION BOOKS

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2014 by Charles Benoit

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Benoit, Charles.

  Cold calls / Charles Benoit.

  pages cm

  Summary: While on suspension, Shelly, Eric, and Fatima, who have nothing else in common, try to identify and stop the person who blackmailed each of them by phone to perform very specific acts of bullying at their high schools.

  ISBN 978-0-544-23950-0 (hardcover)

  [1. Extortion—Fiction. 2. Bullying—Fiction. 3. Revenge—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B447114Col 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013016271

  eISBN 978-0-544-23911-1

  v1.0414

  It’s no secret, it’s all for Rose.

  One

  THE PHONE RANG AND HE ANSWERED IT.

  Later, when it looked like it was over, he’d think back on that moment and what he could have done different.

  But that was weeks away, and it was just a phone call.

  No number came up on caller ID. It was weird, but it happened now and then, somebody calling from a pay phone or using a cheap throwaway. If he had recognized the number—Nick or Duane or Andrew or Yousef or one of the guys from the team—he would have said something that sounded like “’Zup.” If it had been Kate or Tabitha or Felicia or Emma or any girl—even April—he would have said, “Hey.”

  It wouldn’t have been April, though. It was still too early to say if they’d even get back to being just friends.

  With no number to recognize, he went with “’Zup?”

  There was a pause on the other end and the sound of air being sucked through a straw, then two quick clicks, and then a voice, computer generated and pitched low like distant thunder. “Eric Hamilton.”

  At first he thought it was the library. They had an automated system that called when a book went overdue, and the calls would come around that time in the evening, not so early that it disturbed dinner, not so late that it was rude. But he hadn’t been in any library since June. Besides, their message started friendly before getting into the details. There was nothing friendly in this voice.

  More clicks, static. “Eric Hamilton.”

  Somebody screwing around. The stupid kind of thing you did in sixth grade, or the first time you got high. And it wasn’t even funny then. He pressed END, tossed the phone onto his bed, and went back to Gears of War.

  Ten minutes later, the phone buzzed and he answered without thinking.

  That hollow air sound, the clicks. “Eric Hamilton.”

  If he was outside or home alone, he would have rattled off some f-bombs and hung up, but he could hear his mother outside his door, shifting things around in the hall closet, and he didn’t talk like that when she could hear him. And maybe it wasn’t a prank. Maybe it was some new computerized program telling him there’d be no school tomorrow.

  Probably not, but it was worth checking.

  “Yeah, this is Eric,” he said, then heard himself saying it, a faint echo that swirled out into the airy static.

  There was a pause and something that sounded like a breath.

  Then a single whispered sentence that made his stomach drop.

  Then nothing.

  He held the phone tight to his ear, waiting for more, holding it there until three quick beeps told him the call was over.

  He sat at the edge of his bed, the phone in his lap, his thumb hovering above the keypad, the caller’s whispered words still in his head.

  After a minute, he swiped the phone back on and went to the list of recent calls. It showed only one that day—a missed call from his mother around noon. So either he imagined the whole thing or whoever it was knew a few clever phone tricks.

  He knew he hadn’t imagined the call, but maybe he had imagined what he heard. Or maybe he was just reading too much into the static, making words out of the random sounds, putting them together into that sentence.

  Besides, even if he did hear it right, it was the kind of thing you can say to anybody and it would make them nervous.

  Eric put the phone on his desk, then pulled a sweatshirt out of the bottom drawer of his dresser. It was a warm night, but still he shivered. He went back to the game, and after a dozen stupid mistakes and restarts in a row, he closed out, set his alarm for six, turned off the light, and stared at the ceiling for an hour until he fell asleep.

  The fifth time the buzz sounded, he hit the snooze on his alarm. Then the buzz sounded again, and he realized it was his phone.

  One eye open, he lifted his head enough to see the red 2:47 on the clock. He reached for the phone, knocking it off the desk. It fell onto the carpet and under the bed. He listened through his pillow as it buzzed seven more times. It stopped and he waited, picturing the call going to voice mail, then the hang-up and the redial.

  It started again, and on the ninth buzz he leaned over the side and fumbled until he found it. The blue light from the screen lit up the dark room, the swoosh of the static roaring in the silence. He was squinting to see the keypad, trying to remember what buttons to push to activate call blocking, when the voice said, “Check your inbox.” Then the line went dead and the blue light faded down to a soft glow.

  Eric dropped the phone back on the floor and rolled over, wrapping the pillow around his head. He lay like that for fifteen, twenty minutes, not moving, telling himself he was just about to fall asleep, when he gave in, sat up, and tapped on his iPad.

  He had opened a Gmail account a couple of years back but never used it. Everybody was on Facebook or they just sent a text. He needed an email address to put on college applications, and he checked it now and then, but all he got were generic ads and personalized invitations from the army and marines.

  It took him three tries to get the password right.

  He had a dozen unopened messages—the first several were weeks old, the last one had come in at midnight.

  There was nothing in the subject line, and the return email address was a bunch of question marks from an EarthLink account. He clicked it open, and when it loaded, a pasted-in picture filled the screen.

  A black rectangle at the top, a rough white area in the middl
e, a dark brown bar along the bottom.

  No people, no words, nothing else in the shot.

  Eric rubbed his eyes and leaned in to the screen.

  It was obviously a zoomed-in part of a bigger picture, with the squared-off edges and boxy patches of computer pixels. But a picture of what?

  The brown part could be leather or wood or paint or dirt.

  The black part looked shiny, so maybe it was metal. But then, it could’ve been the way the camera flashed.

  The white space was too rough to be paper and too smooth to be concrete, and not white like milk—more like vanilla ice cream.

  Whatever it was, the voice had assumed he would recognize it and would know what it meant.

  But he didn’t.

  Eric studied it until his eyes went heavy, then turned off the screen and crawled back into bed.

  Eight hours later, he was sitting in history class, supposedly watching a video on the Electoral College, when it hit him.

  He knew the parts in the photo.

  He could see how it fit in place, see the other parts the photo didn’t show.

  The black rectangle was the bottom left corner of a Maxim swimsuit-model poster.

  The brown bar was the top of a wooden headboard.

  The white area was a bedroom wall.

  His bedroom wall.

  His headboard.

  His poster.

  It took a minute for it to click, but it came, rolling like a bead of cold sweat down his spine.

  Whoever had taken the picture had been in his room.

  Two

  WAITING FOR IT WAS THE WORST.

  At first, anyway.

  Eric knew there’d be another call.

  There had to be.

  You don’t go through all that trouble for a few fuzzy calls that nobody else heard. If it was a joke, they’d call again with the you-got-punked slam and the what-an-idiot insults. That was the whole point, the payoff that made it worth the effort.

  He’d expected somebody to say something at school, since that’s where the big audience would be—the caller walking up behind him, whispering his name like Darth Vader, him jumping or freaking out in front of everybody, somebody posting it online—but it didn’t happen. That was a good thing. But it meant that whatever it was going to be, it was still coming.

  If any of his friends were in on it, he would have known. They would have been trying too hard to act normal, but they were lousy actors and he would have seen through them as easily as their teachers and parents and the other people they lied to did. Duane would have had that smart-ass grin he got when he knew something you didn’t know, and Andrew would have had that nervous laugh that always meant something was up. Tabitha and Wendy and Dana would have rolled their eyes at the stupidity of it all, Tabitha saying “Whatevs” for the hundredth time that day. But Nick would have told him right away. Not because Nick was his best friend or anything, but because Nick would have forgotten it was supposed to be a secret.

  Eric checked his Gmail a dozen times before school was out and then a few times after practice, but there was nothing new. The same spam and that one email with the picture.

  Back in his room, he held up his iPad, aligning the black rectangle in the image with the corner of the poster, the brown bar with the headboard. Whoever had taken the picture had stood somewhere between the foot of his bed and the closet door, but since it showed only that little part and it was all zoomed in and grainy, he couldn’t tell exactly where.

  The poster had been up since last winter, when April’s brother, Garrett, had sent it from college. His note had said that he found posters of half-naked women to be exploitive and disrespectful. Posters of half-naked men, however, were apparently different, as the walls of Garrett’s dorm room could attest. Since Eric had put up the poster, just about everyone he hung with had been in his room at one time or another, if only for a minute. It would take a lot less than that to snap a picture.

  Now, why they would do it was something different. His friends could be weird like that.

  But what if it wasn’t a friend?

  What if it wasn’t anybody he knew?

  A stranger.

  The house was empty half the day. You could break in, have a look around, take a picture or two, sneak out without anyone knowing, not leaving a single trace. True, when he and his father had gotten locked out over the summer, they’d spent an hour trying to figure a way in before giving up and waiting for his mother to get home, but just because they couldn’t do it didn’t mean somebody else would have a problem. So, yeah, it could’ve happened.

  Maybe.

  The more he thought about it—a burglar breaking into his house to take a picture of his room—the more ridiculous it sounded. Still, the idea wouldn’t go away, and when it crept close to the surface he could feel the hairs on his neck twitch.

  There were no calls that night and no new emails in the morning.

  He’d received a normal number of text messages and forwarded Facebook postings and Tweets, all big news flashes like “Watching Transformers IV,” “Going 2 bed,” “Should be studying for physics test,” and “Eating pizza. YUMMM!!!” He could’ve sent his own, something like “Waiting for stalker asshole to call back,” but that would’ve gotten his friends asking questions and let the caller know that he had got in his head.

  Eric checked his email again on the way to school.

  Nothing.

  His father was used to him zoning out during the ride, leaving him free to stare out at the road in front of the Bronco. At first, all he could think about was the caller, but there was nothing new to think about, so other things popped in, things like the reading he forgot to do for English, the run he should have gone on that morning, the ambush he had walked into last night playing Gears of War, and, eventually, predictably, unavoidably, he thought about April.

  Two months ago next Saturday.

  He was positive she would remember.

  Not the kind of thing you celebrate, not out loud anyway, but still not the kind of thing you forget.

  At least, that’s what the movies said.

  But then, the movies also said it was all fireworks and funky bass guitars, that it’d be wild and there’d be no guilt or embarrassment and definitely no regrets, especially for him. Well, it wasn’t the first time that the best parts were all in the previews. He just wondered if there’d ever be a sequel.

  “Anybody home?” his father said, tapping him on the shoulder. Eric blinked, and there he was, back in the Bronco, idling in the bus loop in front of the school.

  His father laughed. “I was tempted to see how long you’d sit there like that, but people were starting to stare.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t sleep that good last night,” Eric said, then cut off questions by adding, “I had this stupid song stuck in my head is all.”

  “That’s what you get for listening to stupid music.”

  Eric mumbled something about classic rock as he climbed out of the truck.

  “Here, take this,” his father said, handing him five bucks. “Get yourself a tall black coffee. That’ll wake you up.”

  He beeped twice as he drove off.

  Eric checked his phone. Nothing. He checked it between classes and one more time before practice, but somewhere in the middle of wind sprints it slipped to the back of his mind. That night, he had too much homework to catch up on to waste time waiting for an email that might never come, and he fell asleep fast, so deep under, he wouldn’t have heard a hundred phones ring. On Friday, he started focusing on not thinking about April, and by the time the weekend was over, the whole mystery-caller photo thing was as forgotten as last year’s Super Bowl loser.

  But on Monday night when he answered his phone and heard the techno static and the airy whoosh, it all crashed back—the calls, the photo, the whispered words that made his stomach roll. He waited, listening, and then he couldn’t wait any longer. “Who is this?”

  The caller laughed, the voice aut
otuned dark, deep and not human. Eric strained to hear through the white noise. He thought for a moment, then said, “No big deal. I got an app that traces calls, so I’ve got your number now—”

  Another laugh.

  “Yeah, it won’t be so funny when I—”

  “Tell me the first three numbers and I’ll leave you alone.”

  The words came as a surprise, and for a second Eric was tempted to guess, but whoever it was had called his bluff, and he had nothing. He lowered his voice in case his mother was nearby, then rattled off a handful of f-bomb insults before hanging up.

  It was stupid, yeah, and probably what the caller wanted him to do, but he needed to do something, and what else did he have?

  Lying on his bed, Eric gritted his teeth till his jaw muscles burned, mentally beating the crap out of . . . who? It didn’t matter—he’d do it, even if it was a senior. But what senior would waste time doing this? No, it was someone in his class. Or one of the freshmen. Phone pranks were more their speed. But it wouldn’t be one freshman acting alone, since freshmen didn’t do anything alone. No self-confidence and a pack mentality, especially when it came to kid stuff like this. And since it probably was a bunch of freshmen, the last thing he should have done is what he did, lose his temper. They were probably all huddled together, giggling on the other end, finding it so frickin’ hilarious that they made a junior swear. He tried to remember a time when stuff like that was funny. He couldn’t, but the first months of ninth grade sounded about right.

  It wouldn’t be anyone who played sports. Even the ninth-graders knew that the coaches had zero tolerance for athletes living up to the stereotype. Low grades, disrespecting substitute teachers, that jock swagger—the coaches came down hard. Prank phone calls weren’t up there with stuffing some kid in a locker, but it wouldn’t be worth the risk of all those extra laps to find out.

  He considered the theater gleeks. The calls had the over-the-top drama and cheesy audio effects, plus there was that unwritten, always there, jock-gleek animosity that gave this kind of prank a higher purpose. But it wasn’t them. Tryouts were starting for the school musical, and they’d be wrapped tight in their own little dramas, too busy destroying each other to worry about some soccer player.