A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

  “That’s okay,” she said. “How are you now, Paul?”

  “Better,” he said.

  “Tell me everything that happened.”

  He told her, even the parts about he and Charlotte killing off a couple of bottles of wine and having sex. But the story really started with the discovery of the typewriter next to his bed.

  “Is it still up there?” Anna asked.

  Paul shook his head. “We got it out of the house. It’s in Charlotte’s car.” He gave his head a slow, deliberate shake. “It’s not coming back in here unless it knows how to get out of a locked trunk.”

  Anna didn’t say anything to that.

  Paul leaned in closer to Anna and whispered, “Either that thing got up here on its own tonight, guided through the house by the spirits of those two women, or I brought it up here and have no memory of it.” He sighed. “Which would be worse? And if I did bring it up here, if I wrote all those notes, if I did all that, does it mean I’m crazy, or that I’m somehow possessed by the ghosts of Jill and Catherine? Anna, Jesus, there’s no good answer here.”

  “Sitting here, talking to you, you do not strike me as someone who’s detached from reality, Paul.”

  “Something’s crazy. It’s either me, or the situation.”

  Anna took out her phone. “I have to make a quick call to my father. I had to wake him before I left. I didn’t want him waking up and not finding me at home.”

  “Of course.”

  “Dad?” she said into the phone. “I’m just checking in. Okay. I’ll call you again in half an hour, unless you really think you can get back to sleep.” She nodded. “Okay. Love you, Dad.”

  As she put her phone away, Charlotte was getting out hers. “Who are you calling?” Paul asked.

  She glanced his way. “Bill.”

  “Bill? Why are you—”

  “He’s your friend. Maybe it would help if he came—Bill?”

  She turned away, walked toward the stairs where she wouldn’t be disturbed by Paul and Anna.

  “It might be good to talk to him,” Anna said.

  “I hate her waking him up in the middle of the night.”

  Anna managed a smile. “But it was okay for me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Kidding. What would you like to do, Paul? If you want, I could have you admitted.”

  “Admitted?”

  She put a hand on his arm. “For observation. For a day or two. And I know you’ve resisted in the past, but once we have you seen by a psychiatrist, and there are a couple of very good ones I can recommend, there might be a pharmacological approach to treatment that we—”

  “Drugs,” he said.

  Anna nodded. “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to be on drugs.”

  “You want to just stick with vodka?”

  He frowned. “Your point?”

  “I’m saying that if you drink, you’re self-medicating. There may be other, more productive approaches. But as a psychologist, I can’t prescribe for you. That’s where an assessment by a psychiatrist could be very helpful.”

  “That’s your answer? Go into the loony bin and get doped up.”

  “We don’t have to do that,” she said, her voice steady and measured. “As long as you’re not a danger to yourself or anyone else, no one’s going to force you to do that.”

  “I wonder what Charlotte thinks,” he said.

  “Why don’t we ask her?”

  Although still within earshot of the others, Charlotte had moved over to the stairs and taken a seat on the top step. She said into her phone, “I hate to call you in the middle of the night, but I thought you’d want to know about Paul.”

  “What’s going—hang on, I’m just turning on the light here— what’s happening over there?” Bill asked.

  “His therapist just came over. He had a full-blown meltdown.” Charlotte sniffed, then said, “He’s really messed up.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “Of course I’m crying.”

  “Okay, okay,” Bill said. “What do you want me—”

  “Hang on, Paul wants to ask me something.”

  Paul said, “Do you think I should go into the hospital?”

  “The hospital?” she said. “Like, what do you mean?”

  “The psych ward,” Paul said. “It’s an option. They could keep an eye on me and they might give me something. You know, to mellow me out, I guess.”

  “Shit, no,” said Bill, who could hear them both talking.

  “Hang on,” Charlotte said to Paul. Into the phone, she said, “I’m trying to talk to Paul here.”

  “Put him on,” Bill said.

  Charlotte held out the phone to Paul. “Bill wants to talk to you.”

  Paul held the phone to his ear. “Sorry. Charlotte shouldn’t have gotten you up.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bill said. “What’s this about the hospital?”

  “I’m talking about it with Anna.”

  “You do not want to go into the hospital. There’s no way you want to do that.”

  “But they might be—”

  “No, you listen to Bill here. Going into a place like that, it’ll only mess you up further. Those places are filled with crazy people, and you are not crazy. You hear me? Once you let them lock you up, they’ll never let you out.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Look,” Bill said, “how do you feel right now? Right this second?”

  “Shaky.”

  “But shaky enough to go into a hospital?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right.”

  “You bet I’m right. Whaddya say you give it a couple of days. I have to go out of town tomorrow—shit, it’s already tomorrow—but when I get back, you and me, we’ll get together, do something to take your mind off all these things. But not squash. We’re not putting that head of yours at risk. How does that sound?”

  Paul nodded slowly.

  “Are you there?” Bill asked.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll give it a couple of days and see how it goes. Charlotte’s taken the typewriter away.”

  “There ya go,” Bill said. “You hang in there, pal.”

  Paul handed the phone back to Charlotte and turned to face Anna, who was now standing by the kitchen table.

  “You can go home,” he told her. “I’ll be okay.”

  Forty-Four

  Charlotte stayed up most of the night with Paul, waiting until he finally fell asleep. Rattled as he was, he eventually lost the fight to exhaustion. Once he’d succumbed, Charlotte slipped into bed next to him.

  Every time he moved or made a sound, she woke up.

  Just after seven, she sensed he was fully awake, and asked, “How are you?”

  He said, “Did all that really happen?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  He quickly turned over and looked at the bedside table. Seeing nothing on it but a lamp and his clock, he said, “I thought it might have come back.”

  Charlotte had nothing to say to that. It wasn’t clear whether Paul was attempting to make a joke. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m sorry I put you through all that.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, raising up on her elbow and turning to face him. “What does it mean, exactly, that you’re saying you’re sorry?”

  He turned his head slightly to look at her. “I don’t know. I guess . . .”

  “You guess what?”

  “I know I may have looked like I was sleeping all night, but I was awake a lot, too. Thinking.”

  “Okay.” Gently, she asked, “And what are you thinking?”

  “That maybe Anna—Dr. White—was right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “That maybe I should be admitted.”

  “You want to go into the hospital?”

  “I don’t want to, but I’m wondering if it’s the only thing that makes sense. But I keep thinking about what Bill said
, that once they have you in there, they’ll never let you out. If I could go in for, I don’t know, a couple of days, maybe that would be long enough to figure things out.”

  “I guess that’s something you could revisit with Dr. White.”

  He managed a nod with the back of his head still buried in the pillow.

  “You seem . . . almost calm,” Charlotte said. “Certainly a lot calmer than in the middle of the night.”

  “There’s only one way to explain this,” he said. “And now that I’ve settled on that, I guess I do feel a little more at peace.”

  “And that way is?”

  “Think of all the small memory lapses I’ve had. Forgetting where I’d driven. Forgotten texts and messages. The dry cleaning. Not remembering seeing that car across the street, nearly blacking out when I saw a car like Kenneth’s. I must have gotten up in the night and brought the typewriter up and put it next to the bed. I had to. And I don’t recall doing it.”

  “So you’ve moved past thinking it . . . did it itself.”

  He gave her a sad smile. “I have.” He chuckled. “I mean, try to picture it. A typewriter opening the door. Coming up the stairs. It’s comical if you think about it.”

  “I guess I haven’t been able to see the humor in all this,” Charlotte said.

  He grimaced. “Yeah, well, I don’t blame you there.”

  Charlotte threw back the covers and got out of bed. “I’m going to call in sick today.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Any big house deals come along, someone else can take them.”

  “No, you don’t have to do that. I’ll be okay. I’ll get in touch with Dr. White and talk to her about whether to go in for, you know, observation or something.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “I think you need to listen to Bill on this one. Why don’t you give it a couple of days. Then, if you still feel that’s what you want to do, then do it.”

  Paul sat up. “Okay.”

  “And you need to call that lawyer back.”

  “Call him back?”

  “I told you. He called yesterday. He thinks he can get you off with a suspended sentence or something, that there are extenuating circumstances up the wazoo that the court will be sympathetic to. But you have to get it sorted out.”

  “When did he call?”

  “I told you all about this last night,” Charlotte said.

  “You see?” he said. He tapped his head with his index finger. “This needs a tune-up.”

  “And I think you need a break from your project. No more talking to grieving husbands and jilted wives. No more holing up in your study, writing about what happened to you. You need to get out. You need to do things.”

  Paul considered her advice. “I don’t even know if I care about it anymore. I’ve met with Kenneth. Maybe my demons have been exorcised. Maybe it’s time to move on. I don’t have to turn my experience into a brilliant work of literature.” He grinned. “Let someone else win the Pulitzer.”

  _________________

  PAUL MANAGED TO TALK CHARLOTTE INTO GOING TO WORK. “HONESTLY,” he told her, “I’ll be fine.”

  And up until the time she left for the real estate office, he thought he would be.

  But once the house was empty, anxiety rushed in to fill the void. He could not stop certain thoughts running through his head: 1. It’s me. I did it.

  2. No. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have done it.

  3. Someone broke in and did it.

  4. No, the locks were changed. No one could get in.

  5. So maybe I did do it.

  6. Or maybe . . . the ghosts of Catherine and Jill are REAL.

  He avoided his study. Even if he’d not been considering abandoning his project, he knew he wouldn’t have been able to write this morning. He couldn’t focus. It would be impossible.

  If he couldn’t accomplish anything on that score, maybe he could do something practical. He could focus on items 3 and 4. He could satisfy himself, once and for all, that the house was secure.

  He checked all the windows, even those up on the third floor that only a human fly could access, for weakness. He found them all properly latched. The main garage door was locked and did not appear to have been tampered with in any way.

  Paul grabbed a ladder from the garage and hauled it up two flights of stairs, chipping paint on the wall with the legs as he made some turns, to allow him to reach the one access panel to the attic. Flashlight in hand, he climbed to the top of the ladder and gave the square panel door enough of a nudge to slide it to one side. Then he went up one more step and poked his head into the space.

  He turned on the flashlight and did a slow 360-degree sweep of the attic. There was nothing up there but rafters and insulation. They’d never used the space for storage. It was too difficult to get anything up there and then, later, bring it back down.

  He returned the ladder to the garage.

  Well. So that was that.

  Now he almost wished the typewriter was not tucked away in the trunk of Charlotte’s car. If it were here, he would place it next to the laptop, look at it, and say, “I’m here. What would you like to talk about?”

  At one point, the phone rang. It was Anna.

  “I wanted to see how you were doing,” she said.

  “Okay. Thanks again for coming out in the middle of the night.”

  “I’ve an opening at two if you’d like to come in.”

  Paul thought for a moment. “No, I’m good.”

  “Are you sure? You weren’t so good a few hours ago.”

  “Don’t worry. I think I’ve come to some sort of . . . realization. An acceptance.”

  “And what’s that, Paul?”

  Paul said nothing.

  “You there?” Anna asked.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “Look, I’m going to leave that two o’clock open. If you change your mind, just come in. You don’t have to call.”

  “Okay. Good to know.”

  Anna said good-bye and Paul put away his phone.

  _________________

  CHARLOTTE WAS RIGHT. HE NEEDED TO GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.

  That didn’t mean he had to jump in the car and drive to Mystic. But some fresh air wouldn’t be a bad idea. Maybe a walk to downtown. Lunch someplace.

  As he came out the front door, he was almost knocked back, as if by a fierce wind, but there was not so much as a breeze.

  It was music that nearly knocked him off his feet.

  Dee dee, diddly-dee, dee dee, dee-da, dee-da, dee da dee.

  It was the Tastee Truck driven by Leonard Hoffman. It was stopped almost directly across the street. Leonard was not behind the wheel. He was more likely at the serving window, but it was on the side of the truck that Paul could not see. Leonard had clearly been stopped by one or more of the neighborhood kids. Paul then noticed one pair of legs, from the knees down, visible through the underside of the truck.

  Paul huddled by his front door. He did not want to engage with Leonard. He did not want to see him. He considered going back in the house but concluded he could wait here until the truck moved on down the street.

  The truck rocked on its springs ever so slightly as someone moved inside it. And then there was Leonard, settling back in behind the wheel, putting the truck into gear, and pulling forward.

  As the truck exited Paul’s field of vision, he saw who Leonard’s customer had been.

  It was a man, holding an ice-cream cone. Late twenties, early thirties. His face was severely bruised and a bandage was wrapped about his forehead. One arm was in a sling.

  Jesus, Paul thought. That guy’s had the shit beat out of him.

  And then he realized who he was looking at.

  Gavin Hitchens gazed across the street, locked eyes with Paul, smiled, and took a lick of his ice-cream cone.

  Paul felt his insides turn to liquid.

  He stared back for several seconds before summoning the strength to approach. Crossing the street, he shout
ed, “What the hell do you want?”

  Hitchens held his spot, had another lick. “I wanted an ice cream,” he said.

  “I’m betting that guy goes through your neighborhood, too,” Paul said, stopping within ten feet of the man. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Hitchens nodded slowly. “Soon as I finish. Can’t drive and eat an ice cream with one hand.”

  Hitchens took one more lick, tossed the unfinished cone at Paul’s feet, then turned and walked slowly up the sidewalk to his car, limping severely. He opened the driver’s door and gingerly got behind the wheel.

  Paul watched until Hitchens had reached the end of the street, turned, and disappeared.

  _________________

  ANNA WHITE SAT AT HER OFFICE DESK AND GLANCED AT THE WALL clock. It was nearly three in the afternoon.

  Two o’clock had come and gone.

  Paul Davis had not shown up.

  Forty-Five

  It was almost the time when Charlotte, on a slow day, might have gone home. But then a couple from Boston came into the office without an appointment. They had been driving around Milford when they spotted a house for sale on Elmwood Street, half a block from the sound. It was a beautiful three-story with a strong Cape Cod influence. Cedar-shingle siding, a balcony on the third floor. Two-car garage. And out front, a FOR SALE sign with the name CHARLOTTE DAVIS on it.

  Charlotte sent Paul a text to tell him she would be home late. He’d gotten plenty of texts like that before.

  Charlotte showed the couple the Elmwood house and drove them around town to check out a few more properties.

  It was nearly nine-thirty by the time they were done.

  Charlotte had a small briefcase with her that was stuffed with various documents and real estate flyers. She decided to toss it in the trunk of her car, where it would be out of sight.

  She got the remote out of her purse and hit the trunk release button. Lights flashed, and the trunk yawned open a few inches. She lifted it up and set the briefcase next to the tarp-shrouded typewriter.

  She pulled the tarp back and stared, briefly, at the exposed Underwood. She then pulled the tarp back over it and slammed the trunk shut. She got into the car, turned on the engine and headlights, and pointed the car toward home.

  She saw the emergency lights as she turned onto her street.