THE 3:17 CALL
THE 3:17 CALL
The phone rang at exactly 3:17 a.m.
Only one sentence came through the speaker.
"Don't let them find the body before I do."
Then the line went dead.
I stared at my phone.
No caller ID.
No number.
No breathing.
Nothing.
Except...
The voice was mine.
Detective Noah Carter had spent fifteen years solving murders across rural Maine.
He believed every mystery had an answer.
Every killer made mistakes.
Every ghost was simply a frightened person hiding behind a lie.
Until the Henderson case.
The victim had disappeared thirty-two years earlier.
No blood.
No witnesses.
No body.
The town eventually stopped talking about it.
People always do.
But someone had reopened the investigation.
Someone had mailed Noah a yellowed photograph.
On the back were four words.
"Dig beneath the chapel."
The abandoned chapel stood alone in Black Pine Forest.
Its wooden cross leaned sideways like a broken finger.
Nobody had entered it in decades.
Locals claimed the place whispered after midnight.
Noah laughed when he heard the stories.
He stopped laughing when he stepped inside.
The dust covering the floor had only one set of footprints.
Fresh ones.
Leading toward the altar.
None leading back.
His flashlight flickered.
The air suddenly became colder.
Not naturally cold.
Heavy.
As if the room itself had inhaled.
Then he heard it.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Someone was knocking from underneath the wooden floor.
Three slow knocks.
Then silence.
Noah pulled up the loose floorboards with a crowbar.
Beneath them lay a narrow crawlspace.
Inside rested an old cassette recorder.
Nothing else.
No skeleton.
No coffin.
Only the recorder.
He pressed PLAY.
Static crackled.
Then a little girl's voice whispered.
"If you're listening..."
"...you're already too late."
The tape stopped.
A second sound echoed behind him.
Another cassette clicked into place.
But Noah hadn't touched anything.
He turned.
The recorder was still in his hand.
Yet another identical recorder now sat on the altar.
Playing by itself.
A man's voice filled the chapel.
"I buried her because she asked me to."
Pause.
"I buried the wrong child."
Noah's pulse hammered.
He rushed outside.
The forest was silent.
His patrol truck waited exactly where he'd left it.
Except the driver's door was open.
Inside the front seat rested a newspaper dated tomorrow.
The headline covered the entire page.
LOCAL DETECTIVE FOUND DEAD INSIDE ABANDONED CHAPEL
Below the headline was a crime scene photograph.
His body lay on the chapel floor.
The same flashlight beside his hand.
The same recorder.
The same expression frozen across his face.
The only thing different...
May you like
Someone had written one sentence across the newspaper in fresh black ink.
"You should have answered your own call at 3:17."
