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Chapter 3:- Unknown Caller
Inside the two-flat's ground-floor apartment, Lilly-Rose Whitehorse could not hear her cell phone ringing. She kept it on "vibrate" so she could feel it when calls came in, but just at that moment the phone was lying on the sofa-bed in the front room, and she was in the kitchen cooking dinner.
Lilly-Rose's hearing dog alerted to the sound. He nudged her leg with his nose and lifted a front paw to tap her.
She followed Max toward the front of the apartment, thinking someone might be knocking on the front door. But instead he led her to the sofa-bed. The cell phone lay there on a sofa cushion. She picked it up and flipped it open.
'That's odd,' she thought. The caller ID displayed a local number she didn't recognize. It couldn't be a friend -- everyone knew she was hearing-impaired. The only phone communications she could receive were text messages.
She let the phone vibrate in her hand, knowing the number would be recorded as a "missed call." She could track down the source later: all she had to do was use reverse phone-number lookup on the web.
*
The Chalk Ghost watched Lilly-Rose through the picture window, wondering why the young woman didn't answer the phone -- and why she looked familiar, a bit like her sister maybe. Straight black hair. High, flat cheekbones. Like the girl that used to be her sister, that is. A dead person really has no sisters.
*
Where is my sister now? I think it's someplace far north where tree trunks are carved to look like eagles' heads.
