4
Karen checked on baby Charlotte for the third time in 15 minutes. As before, her baby was sound asleep. Karen knew that she was growing paranoid, but after that obscene phone call she had received earlier she could not help herself.
In her mind, she had visions of the caller climbing in through her daughter’s bedroom window, and her walking in to find him standing over her with a carving knife in his hand. The fact that they were eight floors up and it would be physically impossible for anyone to reach them did not help to allay her fears. As far as she was concerned, that obscene caller could be an acrobat, or one of those idiots she had read about in the papers who scaled tall buildings for their own amusement.
The worst part for her was that she could not seem to shake the man’s vo
