A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

“She could have fallen. She’s eighty-five, Gavin. You locked her cat in the attic. She heard him up there, dragged a ladder up from the basement, and climbed it to the top to open the attic access panel to rescue him. It’s a wonder she didn’t break her neck.”

  Gavin lowered his head and mumbled, “Maybe it wasn’t me.”

  “Gavin. Please. They weren’t able to prove you did that, not like with the phone call, but all the evidence suggests you did it. If we’re going to be able to work together, we have to be honest with each other. You get that, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” he said, looking suitably admonished and continuing to avoid her gaze. His eyes misted.

  “You’re right, I did the cat thing. And the phone call. I know I need help. It’s why I agreed to come here and see you. I don’t want to do these things. I want to get better. I want to understand why I do what I do and be a better person.”

  “Gavin, you were ordered to see me. It was part of the sentencing. It kept you out of jail.”

  His shoulders fell. “Yeah, I know, but I didn’t fight it. I heard you were really good, that you could fix me. I’m happy to come here as often as it takes to make me a better person.”

  “I don’t fix people, Gavin. I try to help them so they can fix themselves.”

  “Okay, sure, I get that. It has to come from within.” He nodded his understanding. “So how do I do that?”

  Anna took a breath. “Ask yourself why.”

  “Why?”

  “Why would you hide a lonely old woman’s cat? Why phone a still-grieving father claiming to be his son who died in Iraq?” Anna paused, then asked, “What would make a person do something like that?”

  Gavin considered the question for several seconds. “I know,” he said slowly, “how those actions might be viewed as cruel or inappropriate.”

  Anna leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Gavin, look at me.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to look at me.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, allowing Anna to fix her eyes on his. “What is it?”

  “Are there any other incidents you haven’t shared with me?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Any that you’ve contemplated but haven’t done?”

  Gavin kept his eyes locked on hers. “No,” he said. Then he smiled. “I’m here to get better.”

  Three

  Driving home, Paul was pleased Dr. White did not actively discourage his idea of delving more into the Kenneth Hoffman business, rather than retreating from it. He’d come to believe that the nightmares rooted in his near-death experience—“near-death” in the most literal sense, since he had almost died—would persist as long as he allowed the event to consume him.

  There needed to be a way to turn that horrific night into something that did not own him. Paul could not let his life be defined by finding two dead women in the back of a car, followed by a blow to the head. Yes, it was horrendous. It was traumatic.

  But there needed to be a way for him to move forward.

  Maybe there was a way to apply what he did for a living to the situation. Paul taught English literature. He’d studied everything from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Chaucer to Chandler, but more recently, his course on some of the giants of twentieth-century popular fiction, Nora Roberts, Lawrence Sanders, Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Mario Puzo, had proved to be the biggest hit with students, sometimes to the chagrin of his colleagues and the department head. His point was, just because something was embraced in large numbers did not necessarily make it lowbrow. These writers could tell a story.

  That was how Paul thought he could approach the Hoffman business. He would take a step back from it, attempt to view it with a measure of detachment, then analyze it as a story. With a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  Paul knew much of the middle and the end. He had, literally, walked into the middle of it.

  What he needed to do now was find out more about the beginning.

  Who was Kenneth Hoffman, really? A respected professor? A loving father? A philandering husband? A sadistic killer? Was it possible to be all these things? And if so, was the capacity to kill in all of us, waiting to break out? Was it possible that—

  Shit.

  Paul was home.

  Sitting in his car, in the driveway, the engine running.

  He had no memory of actually driving here.

  He could recall getting into the car after he left Anna White’s office. He remembered putting the key in the Subaru’s ignition, starting the car. He could even recall seeing her next client arrive, a young guy, late twenties, heading in.

  But after that, nothing. Nothing until he pulled into the driveway.

  Do not panic. This is not a big deal.

  Of course it wasn’t. He’d been deep in thought on his way home. He’d gone on autopilot. Hadn’t this sort of thing happened even before the attack? Hadn’t Charlotte teased him more than once about being the classic absentminded professor, his head somewhere else while she was talking to him? His first wife, Hailey, too. They’d both accused him of being off in his own world at times.

  That’s all it was. No reason to think he was losing his marbles. He was unquestionably on the mend. The neurologist he was seeing was sure of that. The MRIs hadn’t turned up anything alarming. Sure, he’d still have the odd headache, suffer the occasional memory loss. But he was improving, no doubt about it.

  Paul turned off the car and opened the door. He felt slightly light-headed as he got out, placing one hand on the roof of the car for a moment and closing his eyes, steadying himself.

  When he opened them, he felt balanced. Felt—

  “I’m sorry about this.”

  Suddenly, his temple throbbed where Kenneth had struck him with the shovel. He relived the pain, reheard those last words from his would-be killer.

  They’d sounded so real.

  As if Kenneth were here with him right now, standing next to him in front of his home. Paul felt a chill run the length of his spine as he struggled to get Kenneth’s voice out of his head.

  Not exactly a sign that my idea is a good one, Paul thought.

  No, he told himself. This was exactly why he needed to know more. He needed a Kenneth exorcism. Grab him by the throat and get him the fuck out of his head.

  Paul closed the car door and held on to the keys as he approached the front door. Charlotte’s car was not here, and this was not a week Josh was living with them, so he’d have the house to himself, at least for a while. Charlotte was rarely home in the late morning, although as a real estate agent her schedule was erratic. But if she wasn’t showing a place to a prospective buyer, or meeting with someone wanting to put their place on the market, she was getting caught up on the paperwork in the office she shared with half a dozen other agents. One of them was Bill Myers, whom Paul had known since before Charlotte joined the agency. Back when Charlotte was getting started, Paul had asked Bill to put in a word with his fellow agents about adding her to the team. He’d pulled some strings, and Charlotte was set.

  And working at the real estate agency had given Charlotte the inside track when the house they were now living in came on the market. They were on Milford’s Point Beach Drive, which ran right along Long Island Sound. The back of the house looked out over a beautiful stretch of waterfront. They loved the fresh sea air and the never-ending music of the incoming waves.

  The house was on three levels, the bottom mostly garage, laundry room, and storage. The middle level was made up of the kitchen and living room areas, and the bedrooms were on top. Both the living room and the master bedroom featured small balconies with views of the beach and beyond.

  The property had suffered a lot of damage when Hurricane Sandy stormed ashore back in 2012. The owner had sunk a fortune into rebuilding the place before deciding he no longer wanted to live there. This had been shortly after Paul and Charlotte got married, and the timing was right to move from their small apartment into something nicer. So long as the p
olar ice caps didn’t melt too quickly, this would be a great spot for the foreseeable future.

  Paul unlocked the front door and climbed the stairs with slow deliberation. Going up, or coming down, could sometimes make him woozy. Given that he’d felt a bit off getting out of the car, he took his time. But when he reached the top, and tossed his keys onto the kitchen island, he felt good.

  Good enough for a cold one.

  He opened the refrigerator, reached for a bottle of beer, and twisted off the cap. As he tilted his head back for a long draw he caught sight of the wall clock, which read 11:47 A.M. Okay, maybe a little early, but what the hell.

  He had work to do.

  At one end of the kitchen, on the street side of the house, was a small room the original owners had designed as an oversize pantry— it was no bigger than six by six feet—but which Paul had turned into, as he had often called it, “the world’s tiniest think tank.”

  He’d cut twelve inches off a seven-foot door that had been left in the garage by the previous owner after the reno, mounted it on the far wall as a desk, added some supports underneath, and filled with books the shelves lining two of the other walls that had been intended for canned goods and cereal boxes. By removing a few shelves he’d managed to carve out enough space to hang a framed, original poster for the film Plan 9 from Outer Space. He’d found it in a movie memorabilia store in London years ago. As there was no window, he’d lined the wall at the back of the desk with cork, allowing him to hang articles and calendars and favorite New Yorker cartoons where he could see them.

  Centered on the desk was his laptop. Also taking up space were a printer and several cardboard business boxes filled with lesson plans, lectures, bills, and other files.

  Paul dropped himself into the wheeled office chair and set the beer next to the laptop. He tapped a key to bring the screen to life, entered his password.

  He stared at the computer for the better part of five minutes. He thought back to when he was six years old and his parents started taking him to a community pool in the summer. It wasn’t heated, and Paul couldn’t deal with getting in at the shallow end and slowly walking toward the deeper part, the cold water working its way incrementally up his body. It was torture. He took the “ripping off the Band-Aid approach,” which was to stand at the edge and jump in, getting his entire body wet at once. The only problem was, the rest of his family could be ready to go home before he’d taken the plunge.

  Paul was standing at the edge of the pool again.

  He knew what he had to do.

  He needed to understand what had happened to him. And where there were holes in the story, he’d attempt to fill them in with what might have happened. Weren’t there photo programs like that? Where the image was grainy or indistinct, the computer would figure out what was probably there and patch it?

  What did Kenneth say to these women before he’d reached his decision to kill them? What were their intimate moments like? What lies did Kenneth come up with when questioned by his wife, Gabriella?

  Even a partly imagined story would be better than no story at all.

  Paul opened a browser.

  Into the search field he entered the words “Kenneth Hoffman.”

  “Okay, you son of a bitch,” he said. “Let’s get to know each other a little better.”

  Paul hit ENTER.

  Four

  Paul thought the best way to begin was with news accounts of the double murder. He’d read many of them before but never with quite the intensity he wanted to devote to them now. He recalled that when Kenneth was sentenced, one of the papers had carried a long feature summing up the entire story. It didn’t take long to find it.

  The New Haven Star carried it. Paul remembered that he had given an interview to the reporter. The story ran with the headline “A Scandal in Academia: ‘Apology Killer’ gets life in double murder.”

  He leaned in closer to the laptop screen and began to read:

  BY GWEN STAINTON

  There are some things even tenure can’t protect you from.

  So it was that yesterday, longtime West Haven College professor Kenneth Hoffman—the so-called Apology Killer—was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal murders of Jill Foster and Catherine Lamb, and the attempted murder of colleague and friend Paul Davis, bringing to a close not only one of the state’s most grisly homicide cases, but also perhaps the most bizarre scandal of academia in New England history.

  A lengthy trial might have brought out more details, but Hoffman waived his right to one and pleaded guilty to all charges. It was not difficult to imagine why he might have made that decision. When Hoffman was arrested, he was in the process of disposing of the bodies of the two women, and had just knocked Davis unconscious, striking him in the head with a shovel.

  Had he not been discovered by a Milford police officer who’d decided to go after Hoffman’s car—it had a broken taillight— Hoffman most likely would have buried all three in the woods. He was in the process of finding a suitable location when police happened upon him.

  Paul reached for his beer. Look at the words. Read them. Don’t look away. The man was going to make sure I was dead and then he was going to put me in a grave.

  The point of the exercise was to face this head-on, he told himself. No shying away. It occurred to him, for not the first time, that whoever’d bumped into Hoffman’s car in the faculty parking lot and broken that light had effectively saved his life.

  After conducting extensive interviews with court and police officials, friends and family of Hoffman and his victims, as well as people from the West Haven College community, the Star has been able to put together a more detailed, if no less puzzling, picture of what happened.

  Kenneth Hoffman, 53, husband to Gabriella, 49, father to Leonard, 21, was a longtime member of the WHC staff. While his areas of expertise were math and physics, he was perhaps even more skilled in one other area.

  Fooling around.

  West Haven College was, and remains, a close-knit community, and affairs in academia are hardly unheard of. Hoffman could have taught a course in them. From all accounts, Hoffman did not present as a so-called ladies’ man. He was a much-praised professor, admired by his students, and his affairs with college employees, or their spouses, were conducted with the utmost discretion.

  There is no evidence he had a sexual relationship with a student. Hoffman seemed to understand behavior of that sort could land him in serious, professional trouble. Nor was he ever the subject of a sexual harassment complaint.

  And yet, people knew. Or at least suspected.

  “Yeah,” Paul said under his breath. He could remember going to Kenneth’s office one time, and as he arrived the door opened and a woman came out, tears streaming down her cheeks. You might see a student emerge crying from a meeting with a professor, especially if the prof had found proof of plagiarism, but this woman was a colleague, not a student.

  When Paul came in he couldn’t help but ask, “What happened?”

  Kenneth had been unable to hide his look of discomfort. He struggled for an answer, and the best he could come up with was, “Some sort of personal issue.”

  Paul, at first, thought he’d heard “personnel” and asked, “Jesus, is she being fired?”

  Kenneth blinked, baffled. “If they were going to fire anybody, it’d be . . .”

  He never finished the sentence.

  Paul read on:

  While Hoffman had a pattern of one affair at a time, his statement after his arrest made clear he was seeing Jill Foster and Catherine Lamb simultaneously, although neither knew about the other.

  Also apparently in the dark was Hoffman’s wife, Gabriella. Interviews with various sources suggest Gabriella was aware of some of her husband’s acts of infidelity over the years, but she did not know he was juggling two mistresses in the last few months.

  Jill Foster, assistant vice president of student development and campus life, was married to Harold Foster, assistant manager of
the Milford Savings & Loan office in downtown Milford. Catherine Lamb, a senior sales manager at JCPenney, was the spouse of Gilford Lamb, director of the college’s human resources department.

  After his arrest, Hoffman admitted to police he’d become increasingly obsessive, and possessive, where the women were concerned. He wanted them all to himself, to the point of telling them they were forbidden to continue having sexual relations with their own husbands. It was a demand they’d each found impossible to accept, and no doubt, rather difficult for Hoffman to enforce. But just the same, they’d asked him how they were to explain that to their spouses. Hoffman told investigators he felt that for them to be sexually involved with anyone but him amounted to betrayal.

  In what one Milford detective called the understatement of the year, Hoffman told them, “Perhaps I was being unreasonable.”

  “Maybe just a little,” Paul said, moving the story farther up the screen.

  But it was during this period of “being unreasonable” that Hoffman set a trap for them both.

  He invited them one night to his home when his wife and son were out for an extensive driving lesson. (Leonard wanted to work on his skills to improve his chances of getting a job that involved operating a truck.) Both of the women probably expected a private romantic rendezvous and were undoubtedly surprised to discover each other. They were acquainted through college functions and must have wondered if they had been called there for some other reason.

  Posing as the perfect host, Hoffman offered the women glasses of wine, which they accepted. The wine, however, had been drugged, and soon Foster and Lamb were unconscious. When they awoke, they found themselves bound to kitchen chairs, an old-fashioned Underwood typewriter on the table before them.

  Hoffman demanded written apologies from them for—as he himself described it later to investigators—their “immoral, licentious, whore-like behavior.”

  With one hand freed by Hoffman, Jill Foster typed: “i am so sorry for the heartache i have brought to your life please forgive me.”