"It was late. I was supposed to be sleeping, but I came down because I forgot my book. The lights in the kitchen were off, but I could hear voices on the back patio. Two people, a woman and a man. The man was not from the house. I had never heard his voice before, and the woman was Mrs. Callaway." Richard kept his face very still. "She said," Elijah continued, "everything is ready for the morning. She said the driver had been replaced."
"She said her husband would be in the car at 8:30, and that he would not notice because he never notices anything in the morning because he is always reading his phone." Elijah paused, and his eyes filled with something that looked older than 10 years. "And then she said, sir, that after today she would finally be free." Richard Callaway stayed very still behind the cypress trees, listening to his own heartbeat in his ears, and felt the entire shape of his life shifting underneath him like a floor that had just stopped being solid.
For a long moment, Richard Callaway did not speak. He stayed crouched behind the cypress trees, one hand resting on the cold stone of the garden wall, the other still holding his briefcase as if it were the only thing connecting him to the world he had walked out of 3 minutes earlier. The sound of the town car's engine drifted softly from the gate, patient, mechanical, indifferent. "Elijah," he said quietly. "Do you have anything else? Anything you can show me? A note, a picture, anything?"
The boy hesitated. He looked down at his shoes for a second, then reached into the front pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small black object. It was an old phone, the kind that had been new maybe 6 years ago with a cracked screen held together by clear tape along the corner. "My mom gave me this one when she got her new one," Elijah said. "It still records sound. I was scared, so I pressed the button. I held it near the door."
Richard took the phone carefully, the way a man might handle a piece of glass that had been pulled out of a wound. He looked at the screen. There was a single audio file saved from the night before, 11 minutes and 42 seconds long. "You recorded it," Richard said. "I didn't know what else to do, sir. I thought if I told my mom she would say I was dreaming. I thought if I told nobody then nobody would believe me later."