A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

  “I came here looking for some help, or failing that, some sympathy, maybe even a shred of insight,” she said. “But look what you’re doing. Seizing on Paul’s misfortune as an opportunity to keep sole custody of Josh.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Hailey said.

  “How dare you,” Walter chimed in.

  “That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? Full custody. Force Paul right out of his son’s life. In his current state, he needs the love of his son more than ever. He needs to know people love him.”

  “That’s absurd,” Hailey said. “I would never do that to Josh, or to his father.”

  “Seems to be exactly what you’re proposing. Maybe it’d make your whole life easier if Paul just did go ahead and kill himself.”

  Hailey gasped and recoiled. “Where did that come from? How could you say such a thing? Is Paul suicidal?”

  Charlotte burst into tears. “I don’t know! I hardly know anything anymore.” She quickly pulled herself together. “All I’m saying is, it would make it simpler for you.” She fixed her eyes on Walter. “Then you could stop bitching and moaning about getting stuck on the FDR while coming out to Milford.”

  “I think it’s time for you to leave, Charlotte,” Walter said.

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  As Charlotte moved for the door to the conference room, she stopped, as if she’d forgotten something.

  She looked at Hailey.

  “How did you let yourself in the other day?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Into our house. You had the door open before anyone could get down there to open it for you. Do you have a key? Did you make a copy of Josh’s?”

  “What on earth are you implying?” Hailey asked.

  Charlotte left without saying another word to either of them.

  Thirty-Nine

  Paul and Anna were not allowed to take much of anything into the main prison area. Car keys, purse, wallet, even spare change, all had to be checked. The guard asked what was in Paul’s envelope and he said “papers.” The guard flipped open the end of the envelope and peered inside long enough to see it did, in fact, contain papers and nothing else—Paul wondered if he was expecting to find a couple of joints in there—but did not pull them out far enough to see what was typed on them. Paul was allowed to keep them.

  “You got lucky,” Anna whispered to him as they were led through two sets of gates.

  It had been arranged for them to meet with Kenneth Hoffman in a room separate from the common visiting area. Paul had never set foot in a prison before—Anna said she’d been on a couple of “field trips” to correctional institutions during her training—and he found himself trying to take in everything along the way to their appointment. The cinder block walls painted pale green, the clang of gates closing, the smell of desperate men. It felt, in some strange way, like a high school, except instead of windows, there were bars, and instead of young kids bouncing off the walls, there were people without hope.

  Plus, there was the feeling that at any moment, someone would stick a shiv in your side.

  Paul had a dozen questions for the guard—the man was built like an armoire—leading them through the prison. Had there ever been a riot? Had anyone escaped? Did people really try to hide metal files inside cakes? But not wanting to look like an idiot, he kept all the questions to himself.

  “Here we go,” the guard said as they reached a metal door with a small, foot-square window at eye level. He unlocked it and showed them into a drab, gray space about ten by ten feet. The only things in there, aside from a camera mounted up by the ceiling in one corner, were a table and three chairs—two on one side, one on the other. Paul noted the metal ring bolted to the top of the table, and brackets that attached the table legs to the floor with bolts.

  “Have a seat,” the guard said, motioning to the two chairs that were side by side. “I’ll be back.” He left, closing the door behind him.

  They sat.

  After three minutes, Paul looked at Anna and said, “I hope they don’t forget we’re here.”

  Eight minutes after that, the door reopened. The guard stepped in, followed by Kenneth Hoffman.

  Paul stood and took in his one-time friend, stunned by what he saw. Dressed in a short-sleeved, one-piece orange coverall, Hoffman would probably have been six feet tall, but he had become round-shouldered, as though an invisible boulder were perched at the back of his neck. And a man who had once come in at around 180 pounds didn’t look much more than 150. His arms were thin and ropy, and beneath his scrawny gray beard—Paul had always known Hoffman to be clean-shaven—his cheeks were hollow. He’d lost much of his hair, his pink scalp visible through wisps of gray.

  All this in eight months.

  But what struck Paul most were Hoffman’s eyes. There was no sparkle, no depth to them. It was as though they were layered with wax paper.

  Dead eyes.

  “Paul,” Hoffman said, his voice low and leaden.

  “Kenneth,” Paul said. He was going to extend a hand, but they’d been cautioned about no physical contact.

  “And you are?” Hoffman said, looking at a still-seated Anna.

  “Dr. Anna White,” she said.

  “A head doctor, I understand,” he said. He smiled, showing off teeth tinged with brown. “You’re not here to give me a rectal exam.”

  “Sit down,” the guard said. As he slipped out the door, he said to Paul and Anna, “Need anything, just shout.”

  Hoffman sat. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Anna since she’d introduced herself.

  “It seems like the dumbest thing in the world to ask,” Paul said, “but all I can think of is, how are things?”

  Kenneth smiled weakly. “Just lovely.”

  “Thanks for seeing us,” Paul said.

  “I don’t get a lot of visitors,” he said, and shrugged. “Nice to break the monotony. And you’re the first one from West Haven to see me.” Kenneth shook his head. “I would have thought you’d have been the absolute last. How are things there?”

  “I haven’t gone back yet,” Paul said. “I’ve been on a leave.” He said it without a hint of irony.

  “Oh, yes,” Kenneth said. “That.” He looked Paul straight in the eyes. “If you’ve come here looking for an apology, you can have one.”

  Paul glanced at Anna. Her eyebrows went up a tenth of an inch. She knew Paul was not necessarily expecting one, and even if he had been, she figured he wouldn’t have been expecting it this quickly.

  “I’m sorry you got dragged into my mess,” Kenneth said. “I mean, I did what I felt I had to do at the time, but I wish it hadn’t happened that way.” He paused. “If I was going to be caught anyway, I’m glad you lived.” He smiled wryly. “Getting rid of two bodies was going to be hard enough, but three? I’d have probably died from a heart attack digging a third grave.” He smiled, turned over his hands to show his palms. “If not that, the calluses would have been brutal.”

  Paul sat with his hands clasped in front of him and smiled. “It’s nice to catch up.”

  Anna had spotted something on the inside of Kenneth’s left wrist, what looked like a fresh scar.

  “I was surprised to hear that Gabriella visits you,” Paul said.

  “She’s a saint, she is.”

  “I might have thought she’d want nothing to do with you.”

  Kenneth shrugged. “Go figure.” He smiled sardonically. “It must be the hypnotic hold I have over women, even those I’ve wronged.” He looked at Anna. “What do you think?”

  “Even Charles Manson had his admirers,” she said evenly.

  “Ooh, that stings,” he said. He looked down at the envelope on the table, and then to Paul. “So why are you here?”

  “Three reasons, I guess,” he said slowly, building up to it. “It’s been a rough eight months. There’s the physical recovery of course. That’s been hard enough. But there’s the mental one, too. You haunt me, Kenneth. You come to me more nights than
not. I’ve been looking for ways to deal with that, and believed one way would be to meet with you. To sit down with you. To remind myself that you’re not some, I don’t know, all-powerful evil force, but just a man. Nothing more. And seeing you here has helped me already. You’re a shell of what you used to be. You don’t look like you’d be much of a threat to anyone.” Paul leaned forward. “You’re broken, Kenneth. You’re a sad, broken man who’s tried to take his own life. So tonight, when I go to sleep, that’s the image of you I’ll take with me. Not the man who tried to kill me, but a pitiful, beaten man.”

  Kenneth held Paul’s gaze. “Glad to be able to help in that regard. Number two?”

  “I wanted to ask why. Why did a man I thought I knew do something so utterly horrible? What happened?” Paul tapped his own temple. “What snapped in here to make you do what you did? Or do you even know?”

  Kenneth appeared to take the question seriously. “You don’t think I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times since it happened? You know what I think? I think that inside of all of us—you, me, even you, Dr. White—is a devil just dying to break out. Most of us, we know how to keep him penned up. We lock him away in a personal jail with bars of morality. But sometimes, he’s able to pry those bars apart, just enough to slip out. And if he’s been in there a long time, when he does get out, he wants to make up for lost time.” He smiled. “Does that answer your question?”

  “No,” Paul said. “But it’s probably as close as we’re going to get.”

  Kenneth smiled. “And number three?”

  Anna glanced over at Paul and the envelope under his palm.

  Paul said, “Remember yard sales? Driving around the neighborhood, people putting out all their junk to sell.”

  “Of course. I haven’t been in here forever.”

  “Charlotte picked up something interesting the other day at a sale in Milford.”

  “Okay.”

  “An old typewriter. An Underwood.”

  Kenneth blinked. “So?”

  “It was an Underwood that you made Catherine and Jill type their apologies on, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Hoffman said. “It was.”

  “I’m going to tell you a story you’re not going to believe, but I don’t care. You may laugh, but I don’t give a shit. The typewriter that’s sitting in my house is, I’m certain, the typewriter you made Catherine and Jill use before you killed them.”

  Hoffman leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He looked dumbstruck for several seconds, then chuckled.

  “That’s not possible,” he said. “It was never found.”

  “Well, someone found it. Not the police, I grant you that. But someone found it.”

  “Bullshit. I tossed it into a Dumpster. It would have been picked up the next day. It’s long gone. It’s buried in a landfill.”

  “No,” Paul said.

  He turned back the flap on the envelope and pulled out the pages. He set them out for display, one at a time, for Hoffman to read. He studied each sheet as it was placed before him.

  “What the hell are these?”

  “Messages. From the women you killed.”

  Kenneth looked up from the pages into Paul’s eyes. “What?”

  “They’ve been showing up in that typewriter. All by themselves.”

  Kenneth tilted his head to the right, then the left, almost in the manner of a dog that can’t make sense of what it’s seeing.

  “This is some kind of joke.”

  “Not a joke.”

  Kenneth laughed, but it sounded forced. “No, really. This”—he tapped his index finger on one of the pages—“is complete and total bullshit.”

  Paul slowly shook his head. He noticed Anna had leaned back some from the table. This was his show.

  “I wish it were a joke. I was skeptical at first, too. I heard the typing in the night, when the only ones in the house were Charlotte and me. I’ll admit, I had to consider alternative explanations for a while. One, that someone was breaking in and doing it. Two, that I was losing my mind and writing these myself without even realizing it. But I’ve discounted both those theories. And I believe Dr. White here is with me on that one, am I right?”

  Paul looked at Anna, waiting for a reassuring nod that did not come.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I was left with only one possible explanation. That there are powers out there beyond our understanding, and that Catherine and Jill are reaching out. Looking for answers.”

  “You haven’t forgotten what I taught, have you, Paul? Math, physics? I dealt in the world of the rational. And what you’re saying is nuts.”

  “It would be nuts for messages like these to show up in a typewriter that was not the one you used.”

  Kenneth took another look at the pages. He ran his index finger over the typing. “The h,” he said, little more than a whisper.

  “It’s slightly off center,” Paul said. “And the o is a bit faint. Do you remember that from your Underwood?”

  Kenneth seemed to be struggling to recall.

  “I think I know what’s going on,” he said.

  Paul and Anna waited.

  “You and your shrink here are running some kind of game on me. I don’t know what it is, exactly, and I have no idea why, but that’d be the theory I’d go with, because I am telling you, one hundred percent, that this is a crock of shit.”

  “Why?” Paul asked. “Why isn’t it just possible something’s going on here that’s beyond our understanding?”

  Kenneth flattened his palms on the table and weighed his response. “I told you. The typewriter. I threw it away.”

  “Someone must have spotted it in the garbage,” Paul said. “Before the trash was picked up. Had no idea how it got there, didn’t care. And then it wound up in someone’s house, and they put it out one day to sell before they moved away from Milford. Tell me it couldn’t have happened that way.”

  For the first time, Kenneth’s face registered doubt. “Maybe, just maybe, that’s possible. But these notes? That’s nuts.” He looked down at them one last time.

  “What are you looking at?” Paul asked.

  “The e’s,” he said. “They’re a bit filled in . . .” Hoffman seemed to be drifting for a moment, then looked up. “The police don’t have the typewriter, but they have the notes . . .”

  “The notes you made Catherine and Jill write,” Paul said, getting ahead of Kenneth’s thinking. “Of course. They could compare these pages to the ones they have in evidence. Back in the day, samples of typing were like fingerprints. They could match them to specific machines.”

  Paul brightened and looked at Anna. “Why did I never think of that? Do you think the police would let us see that evidence?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “They might.”

  Kenneth did not share Paul’s excitement. He asked, “Is there blood on it? Is there blood on the typewriter?”

  Paul thought a moment and said, “Not that I’ve noticed.” There was Josh’s blood, of course, from when he caught his finger in the machine, but Paul knew that was not worth mentioning. “But there could be traces, I suppose, down between the keys. I guess whoever was selling it did their best to clean it up. I mean, who’d buy a used typewriter that was covered in dried blood?”

  Hoffman’s forehead wrinkled. His eyes went slowly around the room, then settled back on Paul.

  “What are you going to do with it?” he asked. “The Underwood.”

  “Why?”

  Hoffman shook his head angrily. “I just want to know.”

  Paul shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about that. For the time being, it’s going to stay in my house.”

  “Are you going to give it to the police?”

  Paul turned to Anna again. “Should I, if it’s evidence?”

  She shrugged. Before she could answer, Kenneth said, “What’s the point? You want to get my fingerprints off it?” Kenneth laughed. “They’ve got me. You think they want to conv
ict me again? Instead of getting out in a hundred years, it’ll be two hundred.”

  Forty

  Neither Paul nor Anna said a word until they were out of the prison and back in the car. Once the doors were closed they let out a collective breath, as though they hadn’t taken one for the last couple of hours.

  Anna turned to Paul and asked, “How are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m a little shaky,” he said, “but yeah, I’m okay. How about you?”

  “I’m fine.” She found herself smiling, almost against her will. “It was actually kind of exhilarating. Creepy, but exhilarating.”

  “Is creepy a psychological term?”

  She laughed. “Pretty much.”

  “I don’t feel . . . scared of him anymore.”

  “You made that pretty clear.”

  Paul was quiet for a moment as Anna started the engine and steered the car out of the prison parking lot. “I almost, for a second there, I almost felt sorry for him. When he was talking about how we all have this devil hiding inside us. I thought that almost made sense, in a way.”

  “Or else it was just an excuse,” Anna said. “Listen, I want to apologize for something in there. When you said I’d come to the same conclusion as you had about the source of those notes, I wasn’t exactly supportive.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I should have said something.”

  “Maybe I’m the one who should apologize. I presumed when I shouldn’t have.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t think Hoffman was convinced those letters were actually written by Catherine and Jill, that two dead women are speaking to you through that typewriter.” Another pause. “I’m having a hard time with that, too.”

  “You aren’t willing to consider that there might—just might—be forces at work in the world that are beyond our understanding? You think it’s impossible that something like this could happen? Because, for me, I’ve pretty much exhausted all other options.”

  Anna kept staring ahead through the windshield. “It’ll be almost dark by the time we get home.”

  “Isn’t that what you call avoidance?”