Cell

With the lunatic down he could see the girl again, one knee on the sidewalk and the other in the gutter, screaming through the curtain of hair hanging across her face.

"Honey," he said. "Honey, don't." But she went on screaming.

Her name was alice maxwell. she could tell them that much. and she could tell them that she and her mother had come into Boston on the train—from Boxford, she said—to do some shopping, a thing they often did on Wednesday, which she called her "short day" at the high school she attended. She said they'd gotten off the train at South Station and grabbed a cab. She said the cabdriver had been wearing a blue turban. She said the blue turban was the last thing she could remember until the bald desk clerk had finally unlocked the shattered double doors of the Atlantic Avenue I

Clay thought she remembered more. He based this on the way she began to tremble when Tom McCourt asked her if either she or her mother had been carrying a cell phone. She claimed not to remember, but Clay was sure one or both of them had been. Everyone did these days, it seemed. He was just the exception that proved the rule. And there was Tom, who might owe his life to the cat that had knocked his off the counter.

They conversed with Alice (the conversation consisted for the most part of Clay asking questions while the girl sat mutely, looking down at her scraped knees and shaking her head from time to time) in the hotel lobby. Clay and Tom had moved Franklin's body behind the reception desk, dismissing the bald clerk's loud and bizarre protest that "it will just be under my feet there." The clerk, who had given his name simply as Mr. Ricardi, had since retired to his i

The man hadn't let Clay go without a parting shot, however. "Now we're open to the world," he said bitterly. "I hope you think you've accomplished something."

"Mr. Ricardi," Clay said, as patiently as he could, "I saw a plane crash-land on the other side of Boston Common not an hour ago. It sounds like more planes—big ones—are doing the same thing at Logan. Maybe they're even making suicide runs on the terminals. There are explosions all over downtown. I'd say that this afternoon all of Boston is open to the world."

As if to underline this point, a very heavy thump had come from above them. Mr. Ricardi didn't look up. He only flapped a begone hand in Clay's direction. With no TV to look at, he sat in his desk chair and looked severely at the wall.

Clay and tom moved the two bogus queen a

With these things seen to, and Alice Maxwell's radically abridged tale told, Clay finally went to the telephone behind the desk. He glanced at his watch. It was 4:22 p.m., a perfectly logical time for it to be, except any ordinary sense of time seemed to have been canceled. It felt like hours since he'd seen the man biting the dog in the park. It also seemed like no time at all. But there was time, such as humans measured it, anyway, and in Kent Pond, Sharon would surely be back by now at the house he still thought of as home. He needed to talk to her. To make sure she was all right and tell her he was, too, but those weren't the important things. Making sure Joh

He didn't have a cell phone, and neither did Sharon, he was almost positive of that. She might have picked one up since they'd separated in April, he supposed, but they still lived in the same town, he saw her almost every day, and he thought if she'd picked one up, he would have known. For one thing, she would have given him the number, right? Right. But—

But Joh

Still, the thought of John's red cell phone ticked away in his mind like a bomb.

Clay touched the landline phone on the hotel desk, then withdrew his hand. Outside, something else exploded, but this one was distant. It was like hearing an artillery shell explode when you were well behind the lines.

Don't make that assumption, he thought. Don't even assume there are lines.

He looked across the lobby and saw Tom squatting beside Alice as she sat on the sofa. He was murmuring to her quietly, touching one of her loafers and looking up into her face. That was good. He was good. Clay was increasingly glad he'd run into Tom McCourt . . .or that Tom McCourt had run into him.

The landlines were probably all right. The question was whether probably was good enough. He had a wife who was still sort of his responsibility, and when it came to his son there was no sort-of at all. Even thinking of Joh

When there was no answer from the i

"You can't do that," Mr. Ricardi said in a tone of surly instruction. "You are a guest of the hotel."

Clay thought of repeating what Tom had said to him while they were still outside—things have changed. Something made him keep silent instead.

"What," Mr. Ricardi said at last. Sounding more surly than ever. From overhead came a louder thump, as if someone had dropped a heavy piece of furniture. A bureau, maybe. This time even the girl looked up. Clay thought he heard a muffled shout—or maybe a howl of pain—but if so, there was no follow-up. What was on the second floor? Not a restaurant, he remembered being told (by Mr. Ricardi himself, when Clay checked in) that the hotel didn't have a restaurant, but the Metropolitan Cafe was right next door. Meeting rooms, he thought. I'm pretty sure it's meeting rooms with Indian names.

"What?" Mr. Ricardi asked again. He sounded grouchier than ever.