When she woke up, there were seventeen voicemails from a stranger. Laying in the dark she squinted sleepily at the little screen lighting her face.
“Unknown caller, unknown caller, unknown caller… seriously?” Ellen scoffed as she scrolled angrily down the list, knowing she’d have to sift through them to find the number. Worse yet, she’d need a pen to write down the number. “When are we getting a system where undisplayed numbers get automatically blocked?” she asked no one, continuing to scroll to the bottom of the list to find the first. “The whole point of this technology is so I can just tap and call back.” She shook her head, kicking her quilt off with both legs in a lethargic tantrum. She wanted to sleep in, but seventeen messages? There was a tiny chance it was important. Possibly urgent.
She sat up and felt horrible. Her head ached fiercely, her stomach was both empty and angling to make a refund. Her mouth was dry and there was an awful sensation running through just about every organ inside her. Grimacing, she started the first message to listen to while she looked around for a physical writing implement, “like it’s the eighteen hundreds or something,” she grunted, annoyed.
A recorded voice sighed with annoyance. “It’s gone straight to the message bank. No recording, nothing,” a man said, holding the phone away.
“Well, leave a message,” another man suggested.
Ellen’s hand explored the mess of the first drawer of her bedside table, finding nothing.
“And say wha-?” the message ended.
With a confused grimace, Ellen thumbed the next message as she continued her quest for a writing implement.
“Cathy, we have your sister,” the man from before said in a gruff voice.
Ellen froze.
Her name wasn’t Cathy, nor did she have a sister, but the message chilled her all the same. It wasn’t the sort of call she ever imagined receiving, and she was in no state to receive one now.
“She won’t be hurt as long as you do exactly what we tell you. If you contact the police, she will be.”
Ellen looked about with uncertainty. It wasn’t her problem, but if this was real, someone was in trouble, and the only person who could help her, wasn’t being contacted. This Cathy very likely didn’t even know her sister was missing.
“We will call again with directions. Make sure you answer your phone.” The second message ended.
Ellen looked at her phone in disbelief, hesitating before checking the next message. As she strained to make any sense of it, she realised she was terribly hungover. She looked back to her bedside table. Drunk Ellen hadn’t left her a glass of water, nor seemingly emptied one for herself. “You bitch,” she called herself, of several hours ago, and went to the kitchen.
She played the third message as she staggered into the kitchen.
“It’s nearly Eight-O-Clock, Cathy. You better start picking up your phone. If you want to see your sister alive again.”
Ellen took a glass from the dishwashing wrack and filled it with tap water. It had a bubbly head on it from using too much dish-soap, but her need for hydration superseded any action to rectify it. She guzzled the pine-lime scented soapy water with a desperate grimace then went to the cupboard where she kept the paracetamol. She took two, washing them down with a second glass of house chore flavoured water.
Gasping for air, she filled the kettle, turned it on, spooned some instant coffee and sugar into a nearby cup, and thumbed the fourth message.
“Eight-Thirty. Do you even want to see your sister again?” He barked. “If we haven’t heard back by midnight, we’ll start taking fingers.”
Flashes of the night before derailed her ability to cope with whatever she’d been dragged into. She was out with her friends, wearing that green dress she loved. She looked down and found she was still in it. She looked beyond to her bare feet, at least relieved she’d kicked off her shoes before crawling into bed. Green margarita slushy after another, she recalled. Her mouth still salty, now mixed with soap and pills. The image of some faceless girl tied to a chair in a warehouse, held by a pair of rough men, brought her back on track. She played the next message.
“It’s nearly Nine. We… have… your… sister. Pick up your goddamned phone.”
Feeling a pain in her chest, she realised her bra has twisted in her sleep. She put the phone on speaker and played the fifth message while she tried to make adjustments.
“Nine thirty, Cathy. Nine thirty. We have instructions to give you. I’m not leaving them on a recording. You understand that right?” He took a breath to yell, “Pick up your phone.”
Ellen looked to the phone concerned, holding the base of her dress up to her armpits while she fixed the situation with her bra. It was the least comfortable one she had, but the most flattering. Wearing it for a few hours was one thing, but sleeping in it? She’d done herself harm with a nightlong wiry Chinese burn. Partially relieved, she let the green fabric drop back into its usual form.
She leaned on the bench and took a moment to think about this Cathy, they were getting angry at. This Cathy whose number they’d taken down wrong. This Cathy who wasn’t actually hearing any of this. Or more to the point, never heard any of it. These messages were from hours ago. There were still a dozen to go.
Message six: “Two hours to midnight, bitch. You better get your phone up to your goddamned head soon.”
Message seven: a guttural scoff.
Message eight: “One hour, Cathy. One Hour.”
Ellen thought about the volume of music in the bar, she’d been in the night before. She hadn’t heard her phone once. Had it been on silent or was it really that loud in there. She did recall shouting a lot to her friends. As if it wasn’t enough to wake up with a frozen Margaretta headache, she had to have a sore throat from yelling all night at people right next to her. She moaned in a husky voice, deeper than she was accustomed to hearing from herself. At least she was living in the moment, as they say, instead of staring at her phone. Though, if she’d taken a look or been able to hear it, she might have steered these… kidnappers in the right direction.
Message Nine: a deep sigh. “She’s still not answering,” he told his cohort, while lowering the phone.
“Well… we can’t really start chopping fingers off if she doesn’t even know what’s going on, can we?” the other man reasoned. “We’ll never get the damned money.”
“So, what? This stupid bimbo’s gone on holiday or some crap, and we’re going to babysit this pain in the ass for a week?”
“I don’t know what to tell you Freddy, you’re just going to have to keep… wait, are you still on the call, you idiot?”
“Oh fu…”
Message ten: “Ten minutes to midnight. You’ve got to be… I mean, where is she?”
Message eleven: “Midnight. Midnight. Pick up your phone, Cathy. Pick it up. Put it next to your head. Slide the answer bar, start talking. Speak to us. Important instructions to follow. Instructions. How to get your sister back. Do you want your sister back? Answer your phone.”
Message eleven began and ended mid-scream of frustration.
Message twelve: “Hello Cathy,” the other man said, calmly. “It’s just after midnight. We still have your sister. If you want to see her again, make sure you answer your phone in the morning. But you had better answer.”
Ellen looked at the times on the messages. Message thirteen was left at seven in the morning. Then eight. Then nine. The last message had been at eleven. She looked to the time in the top right corner of her phone as the kettle began hissing, ready. They’d been making hourly calls, and it was Eleven-Fifty-One.
She poured the boiled water into the coffee and sugar granules and stirred it thoroughly, as if making a cake or omelette. She reached over with her other hand and played the thirteenth message, as she had nine minutes to kill before she could hopefully straighten everything out.
“Hi Cathy, just checking in to see if you want to see your siter alive again. I’m really going to need you to pick up your phone.”
Message fourteen: “Cathy…” then a sigh.
Message fifteen: “This is ridiculous.”
Ellen eventually stopped stirring her coffee and blew on it to cool it down. She took a sip and immediately felt a few undissolved granules slip through, making her eye twitch.
Message sixteen: “This is getting tedious, Cathy. If you’re screening your calls, just know that it’s going to cost your sister’s life. You better pick up soon.”
Ellen gulped the rest of her coffee and thrashed her tongue about her open mouth afterwards, only now remembering that she took her coffee with milk.
She picked up her phone and saw that it was only one minute to midday. She leant on the bench and stared at it, desperate for a hot elaborate breakfast cooked by someone else. Anyone else. But she wasn’t going anywhere till this Cathy’s sister situation was at least dealt with to whatever capacity she could manage. An ordeal some poor girl was in, and another didn’t realise she was meant to be involved in. If the bar hadn’t been so loud, perhaps the matter would have been resolved sooner. If she hadn’t got blackout drunk, she might have resolved it late last night. If she hadn’t slept through till damn near lunchtime.
She squinted angrily at her silent phone. Why was she taking on all this guilt? She didn’t kidnap anyone. She was just feeling hangover remorse. This was far too heavy to deal with. She felt delicate. She needed greasy food, more water, fruit juice, an afternoon nap, a wet cloth on her brow, a bath. She needed to undo all the self-inflicted damage of celebrating the end of the week. Instead, she was dragged into this crazy situation, staving off her voracious hunger while she waited for a complete stranger to call her, thinking she was some other complete stranger, to purchase the freedom of another complete stranger. She wanted to call the cops. She wanted the bathroom.
The phone rang. ‘Unknown number’ again.
“Hello?” she answered.
There was a moment of silence, followed by a surprised gasp. “Where the hell have you been?” the caller who left the first messages demanded.
“I was out drinking; I just woke up.”
“We have your sister, Cathy.”
“Okay, listen-“
“No,” he yelled. “You listen. You know what this is about and you’re lucky she’s in one piece. So, listen carefully. Come down to the Morton Bay industrial district. End of Lancaster Road, turn left on Bell Street, then it’s the old warehouse at the end. You got all that?”
“Listen…”
“Do you have all that? This is important, Cathy.”
Ellen sighed. “Morton Bay, industrial, Lancaster, Bell, old warehouse.”
“Bring the twenty thousand.”
Ellen thought about it a moment. It was a bewildering demand. She didn’t have that money, especially after last night, and even if she had, it was Saturday. Even if she had it in the bank, that money was going nowhere till Monday. Also, who brings money anywhere these days? A direct transfer would make more sense. This wasn’t the nineteen-nineties or whenever. No one had cash lying around anymore. Certainly not twenty thousand.
“Cathy?” he yelled. “Are you there? Do you hear me?”
“Jesus, Freddy, calm down, this is a lot to take in.”
“Well, you better… Wait. How do you know my name?”
“The other guy,” she said. “He called you Freddy in one of the messages.”
She heard the muffling white noise of a phone pressing into someone’s clothes to supress sound. “Frank, she knows my name. You said my name you idiot.” The two men started yelling over each other.
“Freddy,” she yelled, even though it shattered her delicate brain to do so. “Freddy. Freddy. Fred. Hey.”
“Alright, well, this changes things a little,” Freddy came back.
“Firstly, it’s not Frank’s fault, you should have hung up before having a conversation,” she asserted. “Secondly, you shouldn’t have named Frank just now while you had me on the phone. Thirdly, and I feel this is the most important, but this… isn’t… Cathy.”
“What?” Freddy asked with panic. “Is this a cop?”
“No.”
“Then who the hell is this?”
“Well, I’m not telling you my name now. All you need to know is this isn’t Cathy, I don’t have a sister, and I definitely don’t have that kind of money, and I wouldn’t even know how to get it. All I know is I woke up with seventeen damned messages yelling at me while I’m hungover, and now some jerk is talking over me while I’m in a fragile state. It’s all a bit much. But here’s what I have…”
“What do you mean you’re not Cathy. Don’t be playing games with us, this is serious.”
“I’m not playing any games. I don’t know who you are or who you have or who this Cathy is, but none of any of this has anything to do with me. So, instead of yelling at me, do you want to maybe double check the number?”
“Just bring the damned money, Cathy. We’re not screwing around.”
“Put Frank on,” Ellen found herself demanding.
The phone muffled again. “She wants to talk to you.”
“What?” Frank asked.
Ellen sighed. “There is a mute button, you know.”
No one seemed to hear her as the phone was being handed over as the shuffling sound suggested.
“Cathy?”
“No, Frank. As I was just explaining to Freddy, I’m not Cathy.”
“Oh, then who the hell are you?”
“Just some random woman. Best guess, a wrong number.”
“But we’ve been calling you since last night.”
“Yeah, sorry, I guess. But I’m not the person you’re after. You must have the number wrong. Because, as I just explained to that hothead Freddy, I’m not called Cathy, I don’t a sister, and I don’t have a cool twenty-K lying about in accessible cash. Frankly, Frank, I don’t even have it in the bank, which is closed today anyway. You’re really barking up the wrong tree here, and those seventeen messages were a hell of a thing to wake up to hungover.”
“If you’d answered at any time in the last seventeen hours, we might have been out of each other’s hair sooner.”
“Hey, don’t put this on me, you had the wrong number.”
“But we’d have known that if you answered your damned phone.”
“I couldn’t hear it. I was at a bar last night and the music was way too loud.”
He hummed to himself. “They do pump it up in so many places,” he admitted. “But still. Seventeen attempts to get you. What the hell?”
“I was having a night on the town with the girls, and didn’t have a sister to worry about. I was living life instead of planning around other people’s criminal dramas. That’s what the hell. Problem with an Unknown Number is you can’t call it back. So maybe think about that, moving forwards.”
“Well, it’s just obvious in these situations you don’t want a number to identify the burner.”
“Okay, well, I’m just telling you,” she said. “Even if the number had been available, I suppose I would have only called you back maybe twenty minutes ago. So here we are. I mean, most people I know wouldn’t have even answered, thinking it was a scam. Which… I guess this kind of fits.”
“Hey, this isn’t scam, Cathy and Emily’s father ripped us off. That’s the scam. We’re just getting our cut from… wait, why am I explaining this to you? In fact, you know what? Maybe record a message, so when people go to your voice mail, they at least know who they called. Like, ‘Hey, this is not Cathy, please leave a message’ or something like that.”
“I…” Ellen bit her lip in consideration. “Alright, yeah, that’s a fair call.”
“Yeah, instead of seventeen messages of us yelling at you, you’d just have a missed call from an unknown number, and it wouldn’t be your problem,” Frank said. “As an added bonus, we’d have checked the number and got in contact with Cathy seventeen hours ago.”
Ellen sighed. “I’ll record a message. Okay?”
“Right, well, good.”
“Now what number did you think you were calling?” she asked.
“Ah, well, just a second.” The phone muffled again facilitate a foul mouthed back and forth, resulting in the last three digits being argued. “This is one-one-two, not one-one-three. Goddamn it, Freddy.” He grunted annoyed. “Right, well, close, you fat fingered fu-”
“Right, well, it sounds like that’s all sorted out,” Ellen interjected. “If I’m done here, I’d like to free up my phone so I can get onto some food app so someone on a bicycle can bring me an overpriced, surcharged, fee charged, cold breakfast burger or burrito or whatever.”
“Ah yeah, sure,” Frank said before hanging up.
Ellen pulled her head back. “You’re welcome,” she scoffed, already dialling emergency. “Police,” she told the recorded prompt. “Morton Bay, industrial, Lancaster, Bell, old warehouse,” she rehearsed while waiting to be put through. “Frank, Freddy, Cathy, Emily, Morton Bay, industrial, Lancaster, Bell, old warehouse, twenty-K.”
Explaining everything to the police had been trying, with more follow up questions than she could answer. She gave the correction that was Cathy’s number, the address, the amount, everyone’s names, everything she could think of. It was also quite the effort convincing them she wasn’t pulling some prank. They also had her come down to her local station so she could let the officers there record all the messages and take a formal statement to send to the police nearest Morton Bay, which wasn’t even in the same state, as it turned out. Something that made her feel a little safer about her involvement.
She drank a multitude of little paper cones of water cooler water and a cup or two of filter coffee at the station before she was able to finally leave to pursue a proper breakfast. It was about Four in the afternoon before she found anywhere that did anything even remotely breakfasty. A green tortilla wrap, with haloumi, mushrooms, and scrambled egg, that no one had claimed for reheating since presumably morning.
She got three bites into it before her phone rang.
“Hello?” she answered with her mouth still full.
“Hello, Not Cathy,” a man said.
“Frank?”
“Yes.”
“Oh… uh… Hi.” She wasn’t sure what to say. “Where are you? How did your… ah… thing go?”
“Not well, the police showed up before the money did. We got arrested.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, yeah, oh. I’m guessing this was you.”
“Well, I’m not sure what you were expecting me to do there, Frank. I couldn’t exactly ignore all that.”
“We did tell you not to call the cops.”
“Technically, you told Cathy not to call the cops. I mean, I wasn’t exactly going to listen to that. ‘Don’t call the cops’ is just the kidnapper’s version of a creepy neighbour’s ‘this is our little secret, don’t tell your parents’ line. I didn’t play along. Sue me. Guess you shouldn’t have given me all that information.”
“Well, you really screwed everything.”
“Hang on… if you’re arrested, how are you calling me?” she asked taking another bite. “Did you use you’re one call on me? I’m flattered.”
“Well, Freddy already used his to call his lawyer, which is also my lawyer. I just wanted to find out why you turned us in?”
“Well, it could be because you never said ‘thank you’ once I helped you clear up the mistake, you never apologised for leaving seventeen threatening voicemails or calling me up while I was hungover and berating me. But largely I think it was the kidnapping and threats of violence against some women or girl that didn’t sit right with me.” She shrugged sarcastically for no one to see. “Who can say? Sorry you didn’t get your money. I guess Cathy and Emily are doing alright now though.”
“They’re both safe, if that’s what you mean, but… uh...”
“So, I suppose this is the bit where you tell me you’re coming after me when you get out.” She took another bite.
“We made our bed,” he surprisingly said. “I’ve made my peace with that. Freddy hasn’t, but by the time we get out, he’ll have probably let it go. We’re not really you’re problem, though. Just curious if you bothered to ring Cathy.”
She hummed to hold the thought while she swallowed her food. “No… I’ve been busy since we last spoke. I’m only just eating breakfast now, would you believe? Maybe I should ring Cathy so she can thank me where you didn’t.”
Frank chuckled. “I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“That twenty-K was our cut for a job we did.”
“Twenty thousand for two men? What kind of job was this? Did you knock over a burger joint or something?”
“We were tasked with getting rid of the getaway car after it had been dumped. Just a small part. It was for a jeweller’s that got knocked over. Cathy’s dad was supposed to distribute the cash that got taken, but the old bugger that ran the place had a gun under the counter and shot him, as it turned out. He didn’t make it. Turns out that’s why he hadn’t paid us or answered his calls. We only found this out after we spoke to Cathy, just after we last spoke to you. All a big misunderstanding, you see. She was more than happy to bring us the cash, she just didn’t have all the details, because she couldn’t get into her dad’s phone. She was very understanding about the whole thing and, needless to say, we were quite apologetic about over-reacting, given the unfortunate circumstances, passing on our condolences and all. But then, the cops knew our connection to the old man, so they went around and found all the cash, the old man’s… uh, work phone, and everything else from the robbery that hadn’t already been split. So, Cathy probably isn’t swimming in the thankyou end of the pool right now. Now, I know that stuff, but I don’t know if she’s been arrested or not. The police have definitely been around there, so I have to assume they’ve brought her in for questioning. She’s a clever girl, though. I’m sure she’ll talk her way out of a conviction or assumed involvement. It will be a bit hard for me to keep up to date with it all, as they’re not exactly going to tell us anything for the benefit of keeping us informed. Haven’t spoken to her since we got brought in, so not sure how exactly she might feel about you. I’d just avoid calling her, if I were you. Maybe even destroy your phone and get a new number. Or just wait. Because if she get’s off, convincing the police that she didn’t know about anything, she’ll probably tell the cops she’d like to thank the lovely woman who got the nasty kidnappers arrested. They’ll probably give it to her.”
“Oh…” Ellen said, still hovering the last bite of her wrap before her open mouth. She put it down and shuddered.
“Yeah, so that’s about all the time I have,” Frank said. “Enjoy your late breakfast.” He hung up, with the rare click of a land line phone being replaced on its receiver.
Ellen looked at her phone and switched it off. She stared at it as she let everything sink in. She was still too hungover to deal with it. She shrugged. “Screw it,” she said. “I was due for an upgrade anyway.” She crammed the last piece of her wrap in her mouth.
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