Phantoms

still there. The lamps were lit, and the sails were properly rigged, and the food was on the table like I said; everything was exactly as it should have been, except that every last man aboard had vanished. It’s one of the great mysteries of the sea.”
    “But I’m sure there’s no great mystery about this ,” Jenny said uneasily. “I’m sure the Santinis haven’t vanished forever.”
    Halfway around the table, Lisa stopped, raised her eyes, blinked at Jenny. “If they were taken against their will, does that have something to do with your housekeeper’s death?”
    “Maybe. We just don’t know enough to say for sure.”
    Speaking even more quietly than before, Lisa said, “Do you think we ought to have a gun or something?”
    “No, no.” She looked at the untouched food congealing in the serving dishes. The spilled salt. The overturned chair. She turned away from the table. “Come on, honey.”
    “Where now?”
    “Let’s see if the phone works.”
    They went through the door that connected the dining room to the kitchen, and Jenny turned on the light.
    The phone was on the wall by the sink. Jenny lifted the receiver, listened, tapped the disconnect buttons, but could get no dial tone.
    This time, however, the line wasn’t actually dead, as it had been at her own house. It was an open line, filled with the soft hiss of electronic static. The number of the fire department and the sheriff’s substation were on a sticker on the base of the phone. In spite of having no dial tone, Jenny punched out the seven digits for the sheriff’s office, but she couldn’t make a connection.
    Then, even as Jenny put her fingers on the disconnect buttons to jiggle them again, she began to suspect that someone was on the line, listening to her.
    Into the receiver, she said, “Hello?”
    Far-away hissing. Like eggs on a griddle.
    “Hello?” she repeated.
    Just distant static. What they called “white noise.”
    She told herself there was nothing except the ordinary sounds of an open phone line. But what she thought she could hear was someone listening intently to her while she listened to him.
    Nonsense.
    A chill prickled the back of her neck, and, nonsense or not, she quickly put down the receiver.
    “The sheriff’s office can’t be far in a town this small,” Lisa said.
    “A couple of blocks.”
    “Why don’t we walk there?”
    Jenny had intended to search the rest of the house, in case the Santinis were lying sick or injured somewhere. Now she wondered if someone had been on the telephone line with her, listening on an extension phone in another part of the house. That possibility changed everything. She didn’t take her medical vows lightly; actually, she enjoyed the special responsibilities that came with her job, for she was the kind of person who needed to have her judgment, wits, and stamina put to the test on a regular basis; she thrived on challenge. But right now, her first responsibility was to Lisa and to herself. Perhaps the wisest thing to do was to get the deputy, Paul Henderson, return here with him, and then search the rest of the house.
    Although she wanted to believe it was only her imagination, she still sensed inquisitive eyes; someone watching… waiting.
    “Let’s go,” she said to Lisa. “Come on.”
    Clearly relieved, the girl hurried ahead, leading the way through the dining room and living room to the front door.
    Outside, night had fallen. The air was cooler than it had been at dusk, and soon it would get downright cold—forty-five or forty degrees, maybe even a bit colder—a reminder that autumn’s tenancy in the Sierras was always brief and that winter was eager to move in and take up residency.
    Along Skyline Road, the streetlamps had come on automatically with the night’s descent. In several store windows, after-hours lights also had come on, activated by light-sensing diodes that had responded to the darkening world outside.
    On the sidewalk in front of the Santinis’ house, Jenny and Lisa stopped, struck by the sight below them.
    Shelving down the mountainside, its peaked and gabled roofs thrusting into the night sky, the town was even more beautiful now than it had been at twilight. A few chimneys issued ghostly plumes of wood smoke. Some windows glowed with light from within, but most, like dark mirrors, cast back the beams of the streetlamps. The mild wind made the trees sway gently, in a lullaby rhythm, and the resultant susurration was like the soft sighs