The Caller

Twenty

Cassandra left her cul-de-sac house in Granada Hills, San Fernando Valley, about an hour after Mr. J. It was Thursday morning, and every Thursday she volunteered at one of the several charity shops for ‘WomenHeart’ — the national coalition for women with heart disease.

Her mother, Janette, with whom she had been very close, had passed away eight years ago, victim of coronary thrombosis, caused by a severe spasm of the left coronary artery. Her father wasn’t home at the time, and Janette, who was outside, attending to her garden, didn’t manage to get to her phone in time. She died in her backyard, surrounded by roses and sunflowers, but the real shock was that no one saw it coming. Cassandra’s mother had never showed any symptoms related to heart disease — no upper-body discomfort, no chest pains, no shortness of breath, no dizziness, no nausea, no sleeping problems — nothing. In fact, she was a fairly fit sixty-one-year-old woman, who exercised regularly and ate a well-balanced diet. The reason for the coronary artery spasm was never identified.

After her mother’s death, Cassandra decided to dedicate some of her time to helping people with heart problems. At different times she volunteered at different heart disease organizations. WomenHeart was her favorite one.

Cassandra checked her watch as she locked her house’s front door behind her. There was no need to rush. She had plenty of time to get to the shop before it opened at 11:00 a.m. She jumped into her silver Cadillac SRX, which was parked on her driveway instead of on the road, and switched on its engine. She shifted the transmission into reverse and checked her mirrors.

‘Huh?’ she murmured to herself, narrowing her eyes at the interior mirror before turning around to check her rear window. There was something caught between the window and the rear wiper. It looked like a white piece of paper. More rubbish advertisement, she thought.

Cassandra flicked on the wiper to get rid of it, but instead of disposing of the piece of paper, it simply dragged it along from left to right a couple of times.

‘Oh, for crying out loud!’

Cassandra undid her seatbelt and opened her car door. As she got to her rear window she realized that it wasn’t a piece of paper, but an envelope. She reached for it. There was no stamp and no recipient or sender’s address. All she could see was the name — Cassandra — across the front of the envelope, but it hadn’t been handwritten or typed. Someone had cut out each individual letter from a magazine page and glued them together to form her name.

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ she said out loud, her tone of voice immediately breaching the threshold into ‘anger’ level. She quickly swung around, throwing her gaze up and down her street. There was no one there, and the only cars she could see she recognized as belonging to her neighbors.

She kept her eyes on the street a moment longer, before bouncing them back to the envelope in her hands. She knew that inside it she would find another note.

This one made it three in total. The first two had been left on the counter in the Women’s Heart shop where she had been volunteering for the past seven weeks. Just a white envelope with nothing more than her name across its front, formed by a collage of individual cut-out letters.

‘I think you have an admirer, Cass,’ Debora, a senior fellow volunteer worker, had told her as she handed Cassandra the first envelope almost two months ago. But the note inside it was no admiring one. The clear intention of the message was to frighten her; but it actually made Cassandra chuckle.

Cassandra asked Debora if she had seen who had left the note on the counter, but Debora said that she had no idea. She said that the note had been left by the cash register, and she only saw it when she rang in an item.

The second note, delivered four weeks later, was pretty much a repeat of the first one, also left by the cash register. This time the message it carried didn’t make Cassandra chuckle, it made her angry. In her mind, the notes had clearly been the handiwork of some ‘idiot’ trying to be funny and maybe scare her, but failing miserably at it... but who?

Unfortunately the charity shop she volunteered at had no CCTV camera, or else Cassandra would’ve worked her way through the footage until she had identified the culprit, and the next time he or she stepped into the shop, she would have given the person a piece of her mind.

Despite everything, Cassandra didn’t give the notes much importance, so much so that she had completely forgotten about them. In fact, she had never even mentioned any of it to Mr. J, or anyone else.

OK, Cassandra thought, her eyes going back to the note in her hand, now this has gone too far.

Whoever this person was, he or she had come to her home to place the note on her car, and she wasn’t about to just let that one slide.

Cassandra thought about tearing up the whole thing right there and throwing it all in the trash, but, in a burst of anger, she ripped open the envelope and pulled out the piece of paper from inside it. It looked just like the previous two notes — a white, eight-by-five sheet of paper, where someone had glued together letters and words that had been cut out from a magazine to create a message.

Her eyes scanned the short note and she paused. This time the message didn’t make her chuckle. It didn’t make her angry either. It finally made her scared.