A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

  When Hoffman released Catherine Lamb’s hand, she wrote: “i am so ashamed of what i have done i deserve whatever happens to me.”

  “Sounds like you dictated what you wanted them to say,” Paul said under his breath, shaking his head.

  Hoffman took the two sheets of paper from the typewriter, put them in a drawer in the kitchen, and returned with a single steak knife that he used to slit the women’s throats.

  Hoffman then wrapped the women in sheets of plastic, loaded them in the back of his Volvo. He also placed into the front passenger seat of the car the antique typewriter, which had the victims’ blood on it.

  North of Milford, he pulled over, thinking he might have found a wooded area suitable for disposing of the bodies. West Haven College colleague Paul Davis spotted his car and pulled over. When Davis saw the bodies in the back of the station wagon, Hoffman tried to kill him with the shovel he’d brought to dig his victims’ graves.

  “If the police had not come along when they did,” Davis said in an interview, “I wouldn’t be here now.”

  Davis could not explain what made Hoffman, a former mentor, commit such a heinous crime.

  “I guess there are things we just never know about people, even those closest to us,” Davis said.

  His comments were echoed by Angelique Rogers, 48, a West Haven College political science professor who went public about an affair she’d had with Kenneth Hoffman four years earlier.

  “She was the one,” Paul said to himself. “She was the one coming out of his office.”

  “I can’t stop wondering, all this time later, how close I came to meeting the same fate as Jill and Catherine,” Rogers said. “Did Kenneth think I had betrayed him at some level, too, by not leaving my husband?” She said Hoffman had not made the same demands of her that he reportedly had of the two women he killed.

  (Rogers and her husband have since divorced. She still teaches at West Haven.)

  Hoffman himself seemed at a loss to explain his actions.

  When asked how he could have slit the throats of the two women, Hoffman reportedly shrugged and said, “Who knows why anyone does anything?”

  Paul read the story through a second time. It raised as many questions as it answered. Why did Hoffman make such strange demands of the two women? Expecting them to stop having sex with their own husbands? Seriously? Why invite them to the house together, allow them to meet each other? Okay, they might have already known one another through college functions, but why put them together like that, at his house? What was the point? He must have known from the beginning what he was going to do, but why kill both of them? What had snapped in Kenneth’s mind?

  And a minor question the story failed to address was that typewriter. The reporter mentioned that Kenneth put it in the car, but not what he had done with it.

  At least, where that question was concerned, Paul had a pretty good idea. His memory of events that night had taken time to come back to him, but while recovering in Milford Hospital he did tell the police about Kenneth’s side trip into that industrial plaza to throw something into a Dumpster.

  He never heard anything more about it after that. He supposed if the police had found it, they would have used it in building their case against Hoffman, had he not confessed and pleaded guilty. But it was more likely that by the time Paul remembered what he’d seen, the Dumpster had been emptied and the typewriter was in a landfill somewhere.

  “I’m sorry about this.”

  Kenneth’s voice, in his head, again.

  “No, you’re not,” Paul said. “You never were. Not for a goddamn minute. The only thing you’re sorry about is that you got caught.”

  Paul heard the front door open downstairs.

  “Paul?”

  Charlotte was home. It wasn’t unusual for her to pop by through the day, especially if her evening was going to be taken up with showings.

  “Up here!” he shouted. “In the think tank!”

  He heard her walking up the steps. No, not walking. More like running.

  “Paul?” she said again, her voice on edge.

  Paul got up out of the computer chair and went back into the kitchen in time to see his wife reach the top of the stairs.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  “Who’s that guy parked across the street, watching the house?” she asked.

  Five

  After lunch, Anna White sat at her desk, opened her laptop, and made some notes from her three Friday morning sessions.

  Her first visitor was a retired X-ray technician who was having a hard time getting over the death of her dog. It had darted out into traffic, and the woman blamed herself. Anna understood why that was making it difficult for the woman to move on. Anna’s second client of the day, Paul Davis, was making some headway. Anna was not yet entirely sold on his idea of writing about Kenneth Hoffman, but he might be onto something. She wasn’t going to tell him not to do it. If Paul believed the exercise would help his recovery, she wasn’t going to discourage him.

  And then there was Gavin Hitchens.

  She had her work cut out for her where he was concerned.

  He said he wanted to get better, and she wanted to believe that was true, but she had her doubts. She knew the young man was not being entirely open with her. She didn’t know that he was outright lying to her, but he was definitely holding things back.

  At least he wasn’t denying the basic facts about what had gotten him into trouble.

  Sitting in a coffee shop, he’d taken from the table next to him the unwatched cell phone of a distracted babysitter and used it to call the father of a soldier who’d died in Iraq. Gavin claimed to be the dead son. Told the dad he’d faked his death so he wouldn’t have to return and face the father he hated so much.

  Gavin didn’t even know the man. He’d seen his name in a newspaper story. He thought it would be fun.

  What he hadn’t counted on was the surveillance camera.

  When the call was traced back to the woman who owned the phone, she swore she hadn’t made it. Besides, the caller had been male. She knew she’d been at the coffee shop at the time. Police recovered security camera footage that showed Gavin grabbing the woman’s phone when she wasn’t looking, then tucking it back under her purse when he was done with the call.

  Gavin had tried to dismiss his actions as a “prank,” but the authorities didn’t see it that way. A look into Gavin’s history revealed other, possible “pranks.” Sneaking into an elderly woman’s home and hiding her cat in the attic was one.

  Anna had been trying to get Gavin to search within himself to understand why he perpetrated such cruel hoaxes. He’d been quick to blame a sadistic, unloving father.

  Gavin had spun a pretty good tale of abuse and belittling. His father had mocked him for things he was good at (high school theater, sketching, playing the flute) and ridiculed him for things he was not (football, baseball, pretty much anything sports related). His nicknames for Gavin included “flower fucker” and “Janice.” Gavin’s dad figured if you didn’t know how to rebuild an engine block or throw a left hook at somebody in a bar, you were some kind of cocksucking faggot. (Putting that flute in his mouth, Gavin’s father maintained, was a clue.)

  “I don’t know why he hated me so much,” Gavin had said in one of their earlier sessions. “Maybe he had low self-esteem. He could have been haunted by how he was mistreated by his own father.”

  When patients started tossing around phrases like “low self-esteem,” Anna suspected them of trying a little too hard.

  But Gavin’s story didn’t end with his childhood.

  At nineteen, he left home. Four years later, his mother killed herself after downing a bottle of sleeping pills. Three years after that, Gavin’s father was diagnosed with liver cancer, and leaned on his son to move back home and look after him.

  Gavin conceded to Anna that he saw it as an opportunity to exact some revenge.

  He’d hide his father’s reading glasses. Put h
is pills in a different medicine cabinet. Leave his slippers out on the deck when it rained. Change appliance settings so that when his father made toast it came out burned. Unplug the heating pad Dad sat on as he watched TV.

  One time, he added laxative to the old man’s soup, and removed the toilet paper from his father’s bathroom.

  “I know it was wrong,” Gavin told her sheepishly. “I think maybe, after he died, I couldn’t stop. I had to find others to torment.”

  Maybe there was something to all this business with his father, Anna thought, assuming the story he told was true. She had checked some of the details—the mother’s suicide, the father’s liver cancer— and they’d turned out to be true. But the story seemed a little too pat, Gavin’s excuse too convenient.

  It was also possible Gavin had perpetrated those “pranks”—the ones she knew about and the ones she didn’t—not because of a miserable father but because at his core, there was something just not right with him.

  It was entirely possible Gavin wasn’t wired right. Maybe taking pleasure in the pain of others was part of his DNA. It could be that he just got off on finding people’s weaknesses and exploiting them.

  Sometimes, the reasons were elusive. People were who they were.

  She wondered if there might be a way to find out more about his teenage years, if there were things he might have done that no one had—

  Hang on, Anna thought.

  When she’d sat down to make these notes, she’d had to open her laptop.

  But I left my laptop open.

  And then she remembered that she’d found Gavin behind her desk, supposedly looking at the books on the shelves, when she’d come into her office.

  Six

  Paul went immediately to the window that looked down onto the street. He peered through the blinds.

  “Where?” he asked. “What car?”

  Charlotte dumped her purse onto a chair and rushed over to join him. She looked between the slats.

  “It was right—”

  “There’s no car there,” Paul said. “Where was it exactly?”

  “Right there. Right across the street. It’s gone. It must have taken off.”

  “Who was he?”

  Charlotte stepped back from the window “I don’t know. Just some guy. I didn’t get much of a look. The windows were tinted.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  Charlotte sighed. “It was kind of boxy. It was like the car you said you saw out there the other day.”

  Paul looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “What was it? Saturday? When you said there was someone on the street watching us?”

  “I . . . don’t . . . Saturday?”

  She nodded. “I was sitting right there.” She pointed to one of four stools tucked under the kitchen island. “You were looking out the window wondering about a car. A station wagon. You said some guy got out, stood there for a second, and pointed right at you. Shouted your name.”

  Paul moved slowly back into the kitchen, turned, and leaned against the counter. He ran a hand over his chin. “I don’t have any memory of that.”

  Charlotte approached him slowly. “Okay.”

  “When I told you this, did you see him?”

  She shook her head. “I got to the window fast as I could, but there was no car there. But I couldn’t help but remember that when I saw that car, right now.”

  “But that guy didn’t get out?”

  “No.”

  “Was he looking at the house?”

  “Actually, not so much.” She shrugged. “It could have been anybody. I shouldn’t even have mentioned it.” She shook her head. “God, you’re starting to make me paranoid.”

  Paul visibly winced.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “I totally take it back. It was—”

  “Don’t worry about it, really.”

  They said nothing for several moments. It was Charlotte who broke the silence with a tentative question. “How did it go today with Dr. White?”

  Paul nodded slowly. “It was okay.”

  “You told her you’re still having the nightmares?”

  “Yeah. And I told her about my idea of facing this whole thing head-on.”

  Charlotte pulled out a stool and sat down. “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t try to talk me out of it. I told her you were on board with it.”

  “Did you tell her it was my idea?”

  Paul frowned. “I didn’t. I’m sorry. I should have given you credit.”

  She waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. I’m just glad she didn’t shoot it down. If she had, maybe that’s when you’d have told her it was my idea.”

  That brought a smile. “Anyway, when I got home, I actually got started.”

  Charlotte looked into his office off the kitchen, saw the open laptop. “That’s great.”

  “I’m starting by reading all the news accounts of the trial. I want to know everything, including the things I forgot afterward. And anything I can’t learn, I’m going to . . .”

  “Going to what?”

  “You know how, in American Pastoral, Philip Roth has his alter ego character, Nathan Zuckerman, write about this guy’s life—he calls him ‘the Swede’—and he starts with what he knows, but then when he gets to the parts he doesn’t know, he imagines them? To fill in the narrative blanks?”

  Charlotte looked at him and smiled. “Only you would use an example like that to try and explain something. I’ve never read that book.”

  “Okay, forget that part. And anyway, I’m no Philip Roth. But what I want to do is, write about this. The parts I know, and even the parts I don’t know. Not to actually be published. I don’t even know that I would want it to be published, assuming any publisher even cared. I’m thinking that writing it would be a kind of catharsis, I guess. I want to try to understand it, and I think that might be the way to do it. Imagine myself in Kenneth’s head, what he said to those women, what they said to him.”

  “I’m not so sure in Kenneth’s head is a place you want to be.”

  “I said, imagine.” Paul saw hesitation in Charlotte’s eyes. “What?”

  “I know it was my idea, but now I’m wondering if it’s such a good one. Maybe this is a really dumb thing to do.”

  “No, it’s good,” Paul said. “It feels right.”

  Charlotte went slowly from side to side. “You have to be sure.”

  “I am,” he said. “I . . . think I am.”

  She slid off the stool, walked over to him, slipped her arms around him, and placed her head on his chest.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help, just ask. I have to admit, I’m alternately repulsed and fascinated by Hoffman. That someone can present as friendly, as someone who cares about you, but can actually be plotting against you. He didn’t come across that way when I met him.”

  “You met Kenneth?” Paul asked.

  She stepped back from him. “You know. From that faculty event we went to a couple of years ago, when I thought he was coming on to me? How smooth he was? He wanted to read me a poem he’d written that afternoon, about how a woman is exquisitely composed of the most beautiful curves to be found in nature. I thought it’d be creepy, but God, it was actually pretty good, but then, I’ve never been much of a judge of poetry.”

  “I don’t—when did you tell me this?”

  Charlotte shrugged. “I don’t know. More than once. Around the time it happened, and then, you know, since . . .”

  “You’d think I’d remember something like that, I mean, if it involved you.”

  “Anyway, it’s not like I got a case of the vapors and started going ‘Ah do declare, Mistah Hoffman, you are getting my knickahs in a twist.’” She laughed and tried to get her husband to see the humor in it. But Paul looked troubled.

  “I’m sorry. It worries me when I can’t remember things.”

  Her face turned symp
athetic and she wrapped her arms around him. “Don’t worry about that,” she whispered. “It’s nothing.” She squeezed him. “I nearly lost you.”

  He placed his palms on her back. “But I’m here.”

  “I feel . . . like I can’t forgive myself.”

  Paul tried to put some space between them to look into her face, but she held him tight. “What are you talking about?”

  “Before . . . before it happened, I wasn’t a good wife to you. I—”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “Just listen to me. I know I was distant, that I wasn’t . . . loving. I wasn’t there for you the way I should have been. I could offer all kinds of excuses, that I was all wrapped up with myself, wondering about my choices in life, whether my life was going the way I’d imagined it when I was younger and—”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Paul said.

  “All I was thinking about was me. I wasn’t thinking about us. And then that horrible thing happened to you, and I realized . . .”

  She pressed her head harder against his chest. He could feel her body tremble beneath his palms as she struggled not to cry.

  “I realized I couldn’t just wait around to receive what I thought was owed me. I realized that I had to give, that I hadn’t been giving to you. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “I think so.”

  She tilted her head up. Tears had made glistening, narrow tracks down her cheeks. She wiped them away before managing a smile.

  “Josh’ll be here in a couple of days. Maybe, while we still have the house to ourselves . . .”

  He smiled. “I hear you.”

  She gave him a quick kiss, broke free, and said, “How about a drink?”

  He’d already had a prenoon beer, but what the hell. “Sure.”

  As she headed for the refrigerator she said, “I picked up a little something for you the other day.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’ll have to wait and see,” she said.

  He was about to press for details, but his phone alerted him to a text message. He dug it out of his pocket. It was from Hillary Denton, the dean of faculty at West Haven College, and read: Sure, any time you want to come in I’m available.