A Noise Downstairs by Linwood Barclay
Arnwright: Yes.
Hoffman: Maybe Bill and Charlotte got what was coming to them.
Arnwright: If you’re looking for a silver lining, I guess there’s that.
Hoffman: What happens now? Do you think I’ll be exonerated? I mean, I didn’t really kill those two women. And what I did to Paul, that was a spur-of-the-moment thing. There was nothing premeditated about it.
Arnwright: Are you saying you’re an innocent man?
Hoffman: I guess I wouldn’t go that far.
Arnwright: Neither would I.
Sixty-Six
I like this place,” Frank White told Anna. “I do.”
They’d been given a private tour of the seniors’ residence. They’d seen the dining hall and the recreation center and the exercise room, and the last stop was what might end up being his room. It was spacious enough. There was a bed, and a big cushy chair, and a television.
“And I can put my rowing machine right there,” he said. “Look out the window. You can see the water.”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Anna said. She’d been trying hard not to limp throughout the tour. Leonard had nearly broken a bone when he’d kicked her. She was going for physical therapy twice a week.
Her father had seemed remarkably lucid ever since that night. While he’d believed, at one point, that he was saving his wife and not his daughter, since then, he’d shown considerable understanding of what had happened.
He knew he’d killed someone, and put someone else into a coma. And he’d had not a moment’s regret.
“You do what you have to do,” he said.
But he did see it as a turning point. He’d insisted it was time for him to become independent, at least from Anna. They’d been arguing about it for days.
Now, standing in this oversize bedroom with a flat-screen and a view of the sound, she stated her feelings once more.
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I’ve lived with you for as long as I did for a reason,” he said. “And now we know what it was. It was to be there that night.”
“You don’t believe in that kind of thing,” Anna said. “You think that’s a load of shit, that our lives are somehow preordained.”
“You’d be surprised what I believe in.”
And that was when he told her.
“The night your mother died, I was sound asleep. And then . . .” He struggled a moment to find the words. “And then she spoke to me, like in a dream, and said I should get to the hospital as quick as I could.”
Anna said nothing.
Frank sat on the edge of the bed, ran his palms across the bedspread. “And I didn’t pay a goddamn bit of attention, because I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. And you know what happened. She passed that night. I should have believed. I should have listened.”
Anna, softly, said, “Why have you never told me that story?”
Frank shrugged. “I didn’t want to upset you. I didn’t want you to know I had a chance to say good-bye and didn’t take it.”
Anna sat down in the easy chair and looked away. Outside, a cloudless sky made the sound a deep blue.
“Anyway, I bring that up now,” her father said, “because your mother spoke to me again.”
Anna looked back, blinked away tears, tried to get her father into focus. “When did she do that?”
“After what happened with those people who tried to kill you. Couple of nights later, I guess it was.”
Anna wasn’t sure she could bring herself to ask. But she had to know. “What did she say?”
Now it was her father’s turn to gather his strength.
“Joanie said to me, she said, ‘Frank, you saved her life. The only thing more you can do is give her her life.’ And that was it.”
Anna stared at her father. He reached out a hand to her and she took it.
“I guess you think that’s a bunch of horseshit,” he said.
She shook her head from side to side.
“You believe it?”
Anna stopped moving her head and swallowed.
“I do.”
Acknowledgments
At HarperCollins and William Morrow, thanks to everyone for getting A Noise Downstairs ready, with a special nod to Liate Stehlik, and my terrific editor, Jennifer Brehl, who kept pushing when I thought we were done. We weren’t.
In the UK, I am grateful to David Shelley, Katie Espiner, Harriet Bourton, Emad Akhtar, Ben Willis, and the entire Orion team.
As always, thank you to my amazing agent, Helen Heller.
For all manner of support, current and past, thanks go out to Robert MacLeod, Bill Taylor, Douglas Gibson, and Stephen King.
And once again, a huge shout-out to booksellers. Thank you for everything you do to get writers’ works into readers’ hands.
Finally, I’m long overdue in recognizing two people who are no longer with us, but to whom I remain immensely grateful all these years later for their encouragement, guidance, and friendship: Margaret Laurence and Kenneth Millar.
ALSO BY LINWOOD BARCLAY
Parting Shot
No Safe House
A Tap on the Window Never Saw It Coming Trust Your Eyes
The Accident
Never Look Away
Fear the Worst
Too Close to Home
No Time for Goodbye PROMISE FALLS TRILOGY
# 3 The Twenty-Three # 2 Far From True
# 1 Broken Promise THE ZACK WALKER MYSTERIES
# 4 Bad News (published in the US as Stone Rain) # 3 Bad Luck (published in the US as Lone Wolf) # 2 Bad Guys
#1 Bad Move
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Orion Books Ebook first published in 2018 by Orion Books Copyright © NJSB Entertainment Inc. 2018
The right of Linwood Barclay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN: 9781409164029
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Linwood Barclay, A Noise Downstairs