A Noise Downstairs by Linwood Barclay
Anna held her spot.
“The charges got dropped.” Gavin grinned. “They gave that dead soldier’s dad three voice recordings to listen to, and he couldn’t pick mine out. Plus, the coffee shop surveillance video’s time code is all fucked-up. They can’t tell for sure when I was actually there. So, there you have it.” A broad smile. “I’m an innocent man.”
“There’s a big difference between not guilty and innocent,” Anna said.
“But I was thinking, we could still have our sessions. I liked our little talks.”
Anna was about to turn away, unable to endure his smug expression another moment, when she saw Arnwright sidling up behind him. Gavin saw her looking beyond his shoulder and turned to see the detective.
Arnwright exchanged a nod with Anna, leading her to think he wanted to speak with her, but that wasn’t the case.
“Mr. Hitchens,” he said.
“What’s up?” Gavin said breezily.
Arnwright smiled. “Guess whose surveillance system’s time code is working just fine? And crystal clear, too?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A house in Devon,” Arnwright said.
Gavin started to pale. “Uh, what?”
Arnwright appeared to be struggling to keep the smile from growing into a grin. “Yeah. Seems some folks lost their dog. Got the whole thing on video.” Arnwright looked Anna’s way. “Nice to see you, Dr. White. You have a nice day.”
She felt herself being dismissed, but she walked away with a sense of relief. Maybe Hitchens was finally going to get what was coming to him. Her encounter with him had delayed her enough that she was now among the last to file out of the church.
Anna found herself trailing behind Charlotte and Bill. They walked with heads lowered, shoulders touching. Soon, they’d be outside, where many were waiting to say a few words, if not to Charlotte, then to Hailey and her son.
She worked to push Gavin Hitchens out of her mind. If she had to, she thought, she’d get a restraining order. She’d talked to Arnwright about that.
Anna had already decided against offering any more words of comfort or regret to Charlotte. Her visit the day before had not gone well. Once Anna had cleared the church doors, she headed for her car. She had left her father in the care, once again, of her retired neighbor, but she didn’t like to take advantage.
As she trailed Paul’s friend and widow, Anna had her chin down, close to her chest. If she’d been holding her head high, she might have failed to notice Bill reaching out a hand to hunt for Charlotte’s.
He found it, and when he did, he did more than simply hold it. He laced his fingers in with hers in a gesture that struck Anna as more than comforting.
There was something almost intimate about it.
Well, it’s a difficult time, Anna thought.
Almost as quickly as he had found Charlotte’s hand, he let it go and thrust his own hand into his pants pocket.
But then he turned to Charlotte, leaned in closely to whisper something in her ear.
Two words.
Anna was close enough that she was able to make them out, although even as the words were whispered, she questioned whether she had heard correctly.
Yet they had been as clear as if Bill had whispered them into her own ear and not Charlotte’s.
“It worked,” Bill said.
Fifty
Yes, Charlotte thought. It did.
But just because they’d pulled it off didn’t mean they could start getting careless. What the fuck was Bill thinking, reaching for her hand like that, whispering in her ear, with people all around them. Sure, he’d be expected to console her, but he needed to dial it back a bit.
This was when they had to be the most on their guard.
Charlotte was already worried that she’d made a mistake, going out and getting all those empty boxes at the liquor store. The way Dr. White looked at them had made Charlotte nervous. She hoped she’d explained herself well. The truth was, she’d been itching to start packing up Paul’s stuff from the moment she and Bill had decided what they were going to do.
But they had to be careful.
Which was exactly why she had been declining Bill’s calls since Paul’s death. It didn’t look good for them to be talking. Sure, the occasional phone conversation could be explained, should they ever be asked. But the smarter course was to not talk on the phone at all. That was also how Charlotte had wanted it in the months leading up to Paul’s so-called death by misadventure. Even though Bill and Charlotte worked together, only so many calls could be attributed to real estate.
There were plenty of opportunities for them to talk at work. In person. Those kinds of interactions didn’t leave a trail.
And, of course, there were all those empty houses.
Not every home that went on the market was occupied. Many people who’d put their places up for sale had already moved. Some were homes that developers had built on spec, awaiting a first buyer.
When you slipped into a house like that for a fuck, you didn’t have to worry about the homeowner coming back early.
Most of these empty houses had been “staged.” Furniture was moved in to make the place look lived-in. Books were put on shelves. Magazines fanned out on coffee tables. Pictures hung on the walls. A bowl of fruit—preferably plastic—on the kitchen table. Maybe one bedroom was done up as a nursery, another as a teenager’s room, with sports posters on the wall. And they’d dress up a master bedroom, too, with a king-size bed and fancy linens and assorted throw pillows.
Charlotte and Bill had access to many such places.
Not only was it a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a hotel—and to play it safe they’d have had to go to one well outside Milford—you didn’t have to use a credit card. Nor did you have to worry about why your car was parked out front of your coworker’s house.
They often joked about how much more convenient it was to have an affair when you worked in real estate.
The other thing they joked about, at least up until Kenneth Hoffman had nearly killed him, was how nice it had been of Paul to bring them together. Putting in a call to his old college friend, now working in real estate, to see if he had any advice for his wife, new to the whole business of buying and selling houses.
“Send her around,” Bill said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Charlotte went to the agency for a visit. Bill took an instant liking to her and was very interested to learn that she had been, at one time, an aspiring actress.
“That’ll serve you well here,” he told her. “You’ll find yourself working for a seller and a buyer, working both sides, and they both have to believe all you care about is getting the very best deal you can for them. Some performance skills will come in very handy.”
She saw something she liked in Bill, too.
She liked all the things he was that Paul was not. More self-assured, more handsome, in better shape. And even though he had one failed marriage behind him, there were no kids, and his former wife was remarried and living in France. Paul, Charlotte soon came to understand, had enough baggage to fill a 747’s cargo hold. There was always something with Paul’s ex. Working out the visits with Josh, the plans that were always changing. Having to listen to Paul complain about Walter’s superficiality and name-dropping. Paul’s real complaint, Charlotte knew, was that Hailey had traded up. She’d found a go-getter, a man with ambitions, a man who did not spend his evenings grading essays and writing next week’s lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson but was out meeting with company bigwigs and sports team owners about how to raise their profiles.
It was Charlotte who now had the guy who spent his evening grading essays and writing next week’s lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And was there anything wrong with that? she sometimes asked herself. Maybe not. Unless you’d suddenly woken up to the fact that you wanted more.
It was Bill who’d reawakened her, who had shaken her out of her complacency.
<
He seemed . . . electric.
God, and the man even owned more than one suit.
Bill was always looking to try something new.
I could be something new, Charlotte thought.
One time, she said to Paul, “Have you ever thought about packing a bag full of Agent Provocateur lingerie and just heading into New York and booking into The Plaza and fucking our brains out?”
And Paul had said, “Agent Who?”
So one day, hosting an open house with Bill where no one had shown up for the better part of an hour, she tried the same question.
He looked at her and said, “Tonight works.”
They didn’t make it to The Plaza. At least, not that night.
There was the ritual of self-recrimination the first few times. Maybe they thought it was expected of them.
“This did not happen,” Charlotte said, splayed across the covers in the oversize master bedroom of a three-thousand-square-foot ranch that was close to schools, had a finished basement, and had dropped ten thousand in price in the last week.
“I know,” Bill said. “It just . . . Paul’s my friend. I mean, he was my friend. Maybe not so much now. This was just one of those things, right? It won’t happen again.”
But it did.
One night when Charlotte had told Paul she was showing a condo to a woman from Stamford, but instead was in a darkened empty house with her head in Bill’s lap, Bill said to her, “I’d like it to be just you.”
She looked up and said, “What? What does that mean?”
“Is there a way? Is there a way that we could do this without having to be in a different fucking house every time? A way where we didn’t have to pretend anymore? A way where we could just go wherever we want and do whatever we want? Because if there is, I’d want that. Just with you.”
Which would mean, of course, that she would have to leave Paul. That she would have to divorce Paul.
It could be done. It would be messy. It would be hateful. It would take time. But it could be done.
Paul had already been through one divorce, and from the tales he’d told her, it had nearly destroyed him. He had not made it easy, he had to admit, for Hailey when she wanted to separate. Lots of pleading. Plenty of late-night calls. Failing to see things as they really were.
Refusing to accept that it was over.
“I made a fool of myself,” he conceded. “I kept thinking I could win her back when it was clear she’d made up her mind.”
He’d been afraid to commit to another marriage, so great was his fear of failing again. “But there’s something about you,” he told Charlotte. “I’m willing to take a leap of faith.”
Leap he did.
And now, Charlotte was going to give him news she knew would destroy him. She’d met someone else. Hey, and guess what? It’s your old college pal, Bill!
But she was prepared to do it. It would be horrible, but she told herself, if you didn’t seek out your own happiness in life, no one else was going to do it for you.
She wanted to be happy with Bill.
And then Paul nearly died.
He stumbled upon Kenneth Hoffman getting rid of those two women he’d murdered. Kenneth clubbed him on the head. Paul went down. Kenneth knelt down beside him, ready to finish him off.
Enter the police.
Charlotte was willing to admit, to herself, that her feelings had been mixed. If only Kenneth had gotten away with it. If only that single blow to Paul’s head had been fatal. It wouldn’t have been her fault. She’d have been blameless. An innocent beneficiary.
So close.
Charlotte wondered, should she feel guilty, thinking that way? Because she didn’t. What she felt, overwhelmingly, was frustrated. It was a bit like checking your lottery ticket, thinking you have every number, then double-checking and finding that you’re off by one.
Paul had lived. Therapy had followed. He had to take a leave from West Haven while he recovered, and that recovery was slow with numerous setbacks. There were the nightmares. Waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, screaming.
Paul Davis was a broken man.
“You can’t do it now,” Bill said. “You can’t tell a man who’s coming back from a fucking attempted murder that you’re divorcing him. Think what it would be like for us. At the agency? In this town? You, the woman who left a guy at his lowest point, when he needed your support more than ever before, and me, the guy you left him for.” He shook his head. “I can tell you one thing for sure. We’d never sell another house in this market.”
Charlotte considered all of his points. She went very quiet.
“What?” Bill asked her. “What are you thinking?”
“Maybe,” she said, “there’s another way.”
Fifty-One
Anna White kept wondering whether she could have heard it wrong.
Maybe Bill Myers had not whispered the words “It worked” into Charlotte’s ear as they were walking out of the church together. But what else could it have been? What sounded similar to “It worked” but was not “It worked”?
Surely not “It sucked.” Bill wouldn’t have said that about the service, unless he was being self-deprecating about his own words honoring Paul’s memory. Yes, perhaps that was it, Anna thought. He believed his eulogy was inadequate. He should have said more. And he’d whispered those two words to Charlotte as an apology. He could have done better. Maybe he was looking for some reassurance, hoping that she would then tell him he was wrong, that his words about Paul were from the heart and that they definitely did not suck.
Yes, Anna thought. That could have been what she heard.
But even if he had said what she initially believed she’d heard, so what. “It worked” could have referred to any number of things. The service worked. What the minister had said worked.
And yet Anna couldn’t shake the feeling the words meant something very different.
If all she’d heard were those two words, she might have been able to let it go. But it was what she saw in the seconds before Bill leaned in and whispered in Charlotte’s ear.
The way he took her hand.
He did not simply hold it. He entwined his fingers with hers. Gave them a squeeze.
Anna told herself she was reading too much into the gesture. At times like these, people did strange things. Charlotte had lost her husband. She was grieving. It made sense that she would accept comfort from a friend.
But then Bill Myers did something Anna could not explain. He withdrew his hand quickly and thrust it into his pocket.
It was as if he feared someone might have seen what he did.
Anna continued to walk along behind them as they exited the church. As Charlotte and Bill emerged into the daylight, they encountered people who had been waiting for Charlotte so they could offer their condolences. Charlotte found herself in the arms of one person after another. Bill stepped back, gave her some space.
As Anna came out of the church, she moved slowly past those paying their respects to Charlotte, down the steps, and toward the sidewalk. But instead of heading for her car, she stood close to the street and watched.
She thought more about what “It worked” might have meant.
It means nothing.
Yet Anna could not shake the feeling there was something conspiratorial in the way Bill had said it. That it was their secret.
That they had pulled off something.
No, Anna thought. I’m just looking for a way to ease my own conscience.
She’d barely slept since Paul’s death. She had not been able to shake the guilt she felt. Paul’s suicide was proof she’d failed him. She should have pressured him to go into the hos
Bill talked him out of going to the hospital.
“It worked.”
The words suggested the successful execution of a plan. What plan? Some kind of plan that would result in Paul’s death?
Could you really make a man take his own life?
No, impossible.
Unless you could somehow drive him to it. Push him to the brink of madness. Make him believe something that was unbelievable.
“It worked.”
Anna had accepted that there was only one explanation for the notes in that old Underwood. Paul was writing them. He might not have known it, but he was. His memory lapses were evidence that it was possible.
There was, however, something about Paul’s typewriter delusion that left her troubled. Simply put, it was insufficiently elaborate. It was not wide-ranging. It was too specific. It did not live up to the standard set by other patients she’d seen over the years who’d endured hallucinations. She’d had clients who’d spun out conspiracies of great intricacy. One man she had seen three years ago was convinced Russian president Vladimir Putin was trying to brainwash him into turning over U.S. government secrets. Putin was communicating with him through various household appliances, including his toaster oven. That part was strange enough, but why would this man be tapped to hand over top secret information, when he worked at Dairy Queen?
That job was just a cover, he explained to Dr. White. He was, in fact, in touch with people from the CIA and the NSA. That’s why it all made sense.
No matter how much she challenged his fantasy with logical questions, there was always an answer. She finally had him see a psychiatrist, who wrote out a scrip to keep his delusions in check.
But Paul, well, Paul was not like that.
His delusion was not immersed in multiple hallucinations and conspiracy theories. It was far from elaborate. It was specific. In every other respect, Paul Davis presented as a completely sane individual.
He didn’t fit the pattern.
He didn’t behave like a delusional man. Believing that Paul wrote those notes required some forcing of the proverbial square peg into a round hole.