The First Phone Call From Heaven: A Novel

by Albom, Mitch

  Elias looked away, ashamed. “He’s calling me.”

  “Who?”

  “Nick. That’s who’s been calling from . . . you know. Heaven. Wherever. He’s angry. He wants me to do something. He said it was for Nick, and I thought he meant himself. But now I think it’s his son.”

  Warren narrowed his gaze. “Is this why you went away?”

  “I was scared, Pastor. I’m sorry. I didn’t know he had a child—”

  “It’s all right, Elias—”

  “I would never have fired him—”

  “It’s not your—”

  “No matter how much he messed up—”

  “It’s all right—”

  “These calls. His voice. They haunt me.”

  Warren reached for Elias’s arm to comfort him. He caught Sully looking, and tilted his head toward him.

  “What do you make of all this, Mr. Harding?”

  Sully touched a hand to his chest. “Me?”

  Warren nodded.

  “Well, Pastor, no disrespect, but I don’t believe in heaven.”

  “Go on.”

  “I think someone is manipulating these calls. Someone who knows a lot about the dead. If you didn’t know about Nick’s son, there can’t be many who do, right? But the voice that Elias talks to, it knows. So either it’s really Nick—even though he couldn’t answer some basic questions that the real Nick would know—or it’s someone with access to a lot of information.”

  Warren dropped his head into the pillow. He looked at the intravenous connection on the back of his hand, taped over several times so he couldn’t see the needle or the fluid entering him. Come to me, you who are weary and burdened.

  “Elias . . .”

  He wiggled his fingers. Elias took his hand.

  “You did not know about the child. God will forgive you. Perhaps there is a way to help the boy now?”

  Elias nodded. A tear rolled down his face.

  “And Mr. Harding?”

  Sully straightened.

  “I do believe in heaven. And I do believe God might grant us a glimpse.”

  “I understand.”

  “But not this way.”

  Sully blinked. A man of God was agreeing with him?

  “Who do you think could create such a thing?”

  Sully cleared his throat. “There’s someone at the newspaper who has access to all this data.”

  Warren nodded slowly. “Newspapers,” he whispered. “Very powerful things.” He closed his eyes. “You know that firsthand, don’t you?”

  Sully felt a breath escape his chest. So Pastor Warren knew his story too.

  “Yes, I do,” Sully confirmed.

  Winter nights fall early in northern Michigan. By five o’clock, Coldwater was dark. On the high school football field, under giant klieg lights, Jeff Jacoby inspected the stage. He had to admit, the producers were right; money could get anything accomplished. There was scaffolding everywhere, a huge white tent overhead, multiple lighting grids, portable heaters, and a smooth hardwood surface for the rolling cameras, which had been trucked in from Detroit. The whole thing was illuminated as bright as day, with the far stands closed off and the near ones covered with tarps in case of bad weather. Two massive projection screens stood to the left and right of the platform. In all his years living in Coldwater, there had never been such a setting. Jeff felt a surge of pride—followed by a wave of concern.

  The schedule had been set. The “chosen ones” were to sit down with the famous host at precisely 1:00 p.m., when the live broadcast would begin. They would be interviewed and take questions from the audience and from the nation via the Internet. All this would happen while Katherine waited for her call from Diane. A camera would be on her at all times. The producers had already tested her salmon-pink Samsung flip phone through the loudspeakers.

  If a voice from heaven materialized, it would be clearly heard.

  Of course, Jeff worried about the obvious: What if no call came? Katherine had assured them it would happen, but what proof did they have? To fatten the broadcast, the producers had brought in numerous “experts.” There were clairvoyants who said they spoke regularly to the dead. There were paranormal specialists who had tapes of ghostly voices captured through radio frequencies. There was a woman who had suffered a near-death experience and now claimed she saw the spirits of the deceased all around her, even as she was being interviewed.

  After a few hours of this, Jeff walked away wondering not whether the Coldwater phone calls were possible, but why they hadn’t happened sooner. He’d heard Anesh Barua—in a “pre-interview”—speak about his daughter, who had told him heaven was “endless light.” And Eddie Doukens, whose ex-wife described heaven as “our first house together, when our children were playing.” Tess Rafferty claimed her mother, Ruth, told her that heaven is where “all is forgiven,” where there are no “terrors of the night or arrows of the day.”

  This was powerful testimony. Still, Jeff worried. But when he pulled Lance aside and said, “What if Katherine’s call doesn’t come for three or four hours?” the producer grinned.

  “We can only hope.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” Lance said, wryly. “You don’t.”

  Lance knew the truth: it really didn’t matter. The longer the program ran, the more ads were sold. The more ads sold, the more money was earned. In the end, the network treated proof of heaven no differently from a royal wedding or a reality-show finale: it weighed the costs of production versus the return on investment. Viewer interest in Coldwater was immeasurable; people would watch. And they would keep watching—as long as they thought a blessed voice was coming.

  Whether heaven truly existed never entered the equation.

  In the dream, Sully was in the cockpit. The plane was shaking. The gauges were dropping. He readied himself for ejection—and suddenly the sky went black. Sully turned to his right and saw, pressed against the window, the face of Elwood Jupes.

  He burst awake.

  From that gasping moment Thursday morning—the day before the broadcast—he’d been chasing his suspicion. He’d gone by the Gazette parking lot and peeked inside a blue Ford Fiesta—which, he had learned, was indeed Elwood’s car. He saw boxes on the backseat, including several from Radio Shack.

  Sully went inside and busied himself with fake ad-sales paperwork, glancing up several times to see Elwood staring at him. At ten thirty, Elwood left the building. Moments later, Sully followed.

  He trailed Elwood from a safe distance. When the Fiesta turned off Lake Street, Sully did the same. A few blocks later, he slammed on the brakes.

  Elwood was pulling into Davidson & Sons, the funeral home.

  Sully parked down the road. He waited over an hour. Finally he saw the blue Fiesta pass him, and he followed it down Cuthbert Road, to the home of Tess Rafferty. Elwood went inside the house. Sully waited down the street.

  A half hour later Elwood emerged and drove to the high school field, site of the upcoming broadcast. When he parked and got out, Sully waited a minute, then did the same, ducking and hiding behind the production trucks. He saw Elwood examining the staging, the lights, and the control center—flashing his press credentials if anyone approached him. After an hour of this, he returned to his car and drove back to the Gazette.

  Sully swung by the library and found Liz, who had a line of people at her desk. He motioned her into the back room.

  “Elwood Jupes,” he said.

  “The guy from the newspaper?”

  “Is there any way he could be more than that?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Would he have a reason to be making these calls? Some kind of motivation?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe his daughter?”

  “What about her?”

  “She killed herself a few years ago. Drove off the bridge. It was terrible.”

  “Why’d she do it?”

  Liz shook her head. “Why does anybody do it?�
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  “Do you have the story?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  She left. Sully waited in the back. Ten minutes later, Liz returned empty-handed.

  “It’s missing. That whole edition. Not here.”

  The next few hours were a blur of activity. Sully sped to the Dial-Tek store to see if Elwood Jupes was connected to the phone plans of the chosen ones. While Jason started checking for him, Sully drove to the Gazette to search for the missing newspaper edition. Elwood was there, huddled over his desk, and he eyeballed Sully as he went to the stacks.

  “Twice in one day,” he remarked. “What’re you looking for, eh?”

  “One of the clients wants an original copy of an old ad.”

  “Mmm.”

  When he found the actual paper (Liz had given him the date) he barely glanced at the headline—DEATH ON BRIDGE BEING INVESTIGATED—before folding it and putting it in his briefcase. He didn’t want Elwood catching sight of what he was looking at.

  He then raced to the school, picked up Jules, dropped him at his parents’, and drove quickly home to his second-story walk-up, where Elias Rowe was waiting on the steps.

  Over the next few hours, they reviewed everything. They read all of Maria’s transcribed discussions with the mourning families. They found out from Jason that Elwood was indeed on the same phone plan as the others. They read the old newspaper together, the tragic story of a twenty-four-year-old woman driving her car into the freezing November waters.

  But most unusual was the byline.

  The story was written by Elwood Jupes.

  “He wrote about his own daughter?” Elias asked.

  “Something’s weird.”

  “But how does this connect to my phone calls?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m telling you, it was Nick’s voice.”

  “The others say the voices are real, too.”

  “It’s spooky.”

  “He must be doing something.”

  They sat in silence. Sully glanced to the window; the sunlight was gone. In less than twenty-four hours, the whole world would be here in Coldwater, or virtually here, hoping to solve the greatest mystery in the world: Is there life after death?

  Bumm-bummp-bummp!

  Sully froze. He looked to the door.

  Bumm-bummp-bummp!

  His stomach tightened.

  “You expecting someone?” Elias whispered.

  Sully shook his head. He moved to the peephole, leaned in, and felt a shiver from his feet to the top of his head. A sick, familiar feeling enveloped him, one he’d promised himself the day he walked out of prison that he would never feel again.

  “I’m Police Chief Sellers,” said the uniformed man when Sully opened the door, “I need you to come with me.”

  Katherine and Amy stood on a small hill overlooking the football field and the massive stage. It was freezing, and Katherine pulled her scarf tighter.

  “CHECK . . . CHECK, CHECK . . .”

  The voice boomed, an audio man testing the microphones. The stage was lit in a wash of light that made it look as if the sun were hanging over it.

  “What do you think?” Amy said.

  “It’s very big,” Katherine replied.

  “You can still back out.”

  Katherine smiled weakly. “This isn’t up to me anymore.”

  The voice boomed again. “CHECK . . . ONE-TWO . . . CHECK . . .”

  Amy saw at least half a dozen TV crews filming the final preparations, beefy men in parkas with cameras on their shoulders, pointed at the stage like bazookas. She felt an ache of injustice that she was not down there, breaking the latest news. Yet she had to admit she also felt some relief, like a student excused from a test.

  “I can say something to them,” Katherine offered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can say I won’t participate unless you’re doing the story.”

  “But that’s not true.”

  “I can still say it.”

  “Why would you do that for me?”

  “Don’t be silly. I’d do it because it’s you.”

  Amy smiled. For the first time since they’d met, she could envision Katherine’s relationship with her sister Diane, and why Katherine felt such a deep loss. Loyalty ruled this woman’s soul, but loyalty needs a partner.

  “Thanks. I’m OK.”

  “Did you try calling Rick again?”

  “He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  Katherine looked down.

  “You all right?” Amy asked.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t get your phone to answer, and I can’t make mine ring.”

  In the decade following the telephone’s invention, Alexander Bell had to defend his patent more than six hundred times. Rival companies. Greedy individuals. Six hundred times. Bell grew so weary of lawsuits that he retreated to Canada, where at night he was known to sit in a canoe, smoke a cigar, and study the skies. It grieved him that people would accuse him of stealing the very things most precious to him—his ideas—and that the lawyers’ inquiries suggested as much. Sometimes questions can be more cruel than insults.

  Sully Harding sat in a back room of the Coldwater Police Department as Jack Sellers rifled such questions at him.

  “What do you know about these phone calls?”

  “What phone calls?”

  “The ones from heaven.”

  “The ones people say are from heaven?”

  “What is your involvement?”

  “My involvement?”

  “Your involvement.”

  “I don’t have any involvement.”

  “Then why are you with Mr. Rowe?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Friends?”

  “New friends, yes.”

  “Is he getting phone calls?”

  “You have to ask him.”

  “Why were you at the Gazette today?”

  “I work there.”

  “You’re an ad salesman.”

  “Right.”

  “Why would you be going through old newspapers?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “I want to know your involvement.”

  “What involvement?”

  Sully’s head was spinning. Elias was somewhere outside, in another office. He’d seemed scared when the police arrived. Neither man had spoken to the other since.

  “Are you arresting me for something?”

  “I’m just asking questions.”

  “Do I have to answer them?”

  “Not answering won’t help your position.”

  “What’s my position?”

  “That you’re not involved.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why were you at Davidson’s funeral home?”

  “They’re a client.”

  “Why were you at the football field?”

  “Wait, how do you know all this—”

  “Why are you following Elwood Jupes?”

  Sully shivered.

  “Were you ever in prison, Mr. Harding?”

  “Once.”

  “What for?”

  “A mistake.”

  “Why were you following Elwood Jupes? What is your involvement? What do you know about these phone calls?”

  Sully swallowed; then, against his better judgment, he blurted it out: “I think Elwood may be making them.”

  Jack straightened. He pushed out his jaw.

  “That’s strange.”

  He stepped to a side door and opened it, revealing Elwood Jupes, standing with a notepad.

  “That’s what he says about you.”

  Jack did not watch cop shows. Most real cops don’t bother. When you live in that world, false drama seems silly. Anyhow, things never go the way they do on TV.

  Jack knew his line of questioning with Sullivan Harding was buckshot at best. He had no real right to interrogat
e him. He had only heard a complaint two hours earlier—Elwood, from the Gazette, who Jack knew well because any police chief in any small town is going to know the town’s only reporter.

  Elwood had called with a theory. This guy Harding, now an ad salesman, was hanging around with Elias Rowe, who had made himself scarce since announcing his call. Why? What did the two of them have in common? And Harding had been asking Elwood all kinds of questions. He talked about obituaries. He tried to find old newspapers. It was suspicious, no?

  At other times, in other cases, Jack would have said, no, Elwood, it’s not suspicious, and ignored the whole thing. But what he couldn’t say—yet desperately wanted to know—was, could it be true? Could this whole thing be a hoax? It mattered too much. To him. To Doreen. To Tess. To everyone in town. He had his son back. Tess had her mother back. People shouldn’t play with those emotions. That, Jack felt, was criminal in a way nothing on the books could be.

  So he brought in Sully, on a flimsy premise, and he grilled him—until he realized Sully was thinking of Elwood what Elwood was thinking of Sully. It degenerated into an almost comical exchange of finger-pointing.

  “Why were you at the funeral home?” Sully said.

  “I was asking them about you,” Elwood said. “What were you doing after hours in the library?”

  “I was researching you. Why were you at the football field?”

  “I was seeing if you’d been there.”

  And on and on. Finally Jack scratched his head and interrupted them, saying, “Enough.” He was worn out from listening. And it was clear that neither man had anything more than suspicions.

  Same as Jack did.

  “I’m sorry to barge in on your place,” he said.

  Sully sighed. “Forget it.”

  “It’s not generally how we do things in Coldwater.”

  “Coldwater isn’t Coldwater anymore.”

  “You can say that again,” Elwood interjected.

  “My son thinks he’s gonna get a call.” Sully was looking at his feet. He surprised himself. Why did he just say that?

  “From his dead mother?” Elwood asked.

  Sully nodded.

  “That’s tough.”

  “It’s why I wanted to prove this wrong.”

  “Don’t want to give him false hope?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Like some ghost is gonna call and say everything’s all righ—”