A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

  What if, Anna wondered, there was no delusion at all?

  The notes were real. But they were not coming from those two dead women.

  “It worked.”

  How would you do it? Anna wondered. How could you make someone believe something so fantastical?

  The crowd was breaking up. Word had quietly spread that Paul was to be cremated, so there would be no trip to a cemetery for burial. Everyone who had wanted to pass on a few comforting words to Charlotte was now heading to the church parking lot. Doors opened and closed, car engines came to life.

  The minister came out to say a few words to Charlotte. Bill had rejoined her, standing alongside, nodding earnestly as the minister spoke.

  And then it was over.

  Charlotte thanked the minister and shook his hand, then turned and headed for the parking lot. Bill walked with her. Maybe he was going to drive her home.

  No. Charlotte took a key from her purse, unlocked her car. Bill opened the driver’s door for her.

  A true gentleman.

  They were talking. Bill said something that prompted Charlotte to shake her head. Then she seemed to cast her eye beyond them, as if checking to see whether anyone was looking their way.

  Anna feigned disinterest. She glanced at her watch. But from the corner of her eye, she observed.

  Before getting behind the wheel, Charlotte rested her hand on the top of the door. Bill Myers placed his over it and held it there for a good ten seconds. Then Charlotte pulled her hand away, sat in the driver’s seat, and closed the door. Bill stepped back as she keyed the engine, and he turned in Anna’s direction.

  Quickly, he drew his suit jacket together in front and buttoned it. He then slipped a hand into the front pocket of his pants and started walking across the parking lot toward another car.

  Anna was almost certain she knew what he had just done. She couldn’t have sworn to it in a court of law. She’d have been laughed at. She’d have been mocked for professing to have astonishing observational skills.

  But she was sure he was struggling to conceal an erection.

  Not the usual response at a funeral, Anna mused.

  Bill got into a car, fired it up, turned left onto Naugatuck. Charlotte had pulled out seconds earlier, heading right.

  Anna rushed to her own car and got behind the wheel. She pondered what, if anything, to do now. To head home, she would have turned left out of the lot but found herself heading right.

  After Charlotte.

  Did she want to talk to Charlotte one more time? Start by telling her again how sorry she was, how she’d failed Paul? And then ask what Bill Myers had meant when he whispered those two words in her ear?

  And if Anna were to do that, what, seriously, did she expect to achieve?

  It was a stupid idea.

  And then it hit her.

  She was following the wrong car. Bill Myers was the one she wanted to talk to.

  Anna checked her mirrors, did a quick U-turn, and went after the other car.

  Fifty-Two

  It would be so much better if he just got hit by a bus,” Bill had said to Charlotte one night a few weeks earlier when Paul believed she was helping a retired couple decide how much their East Broadway beach house was worth. In fact, Bill and Charlotte were sitting naked in the hot tub out back of a nice three-bedroom on Grassy Hill Road that was listed at $376,000.

  “What did you say?” Charlotte asked, trying to hear him over the bubbling of the jets.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It was stupid.”

  “No, tell me.”

  So he repeated it.

  Charlotte said, “It’s stupid because you can’t wait around for something like that to happen. You can’t wait for the bus driver to take his eyes off the road. You can’t wait for a pedestrian to make the mistake of not looking both ways.” She thought a moment. “The only way it would work would be if you could make someone decide to step in front of the bus.”

  Bill rubbed his feet up against hers under the water. “Well, that’s not exactly possible.”

  She moved closer to him, reached below the water, and took him firmly in her hand. As she stroked, she said, “It doesn’t have to be a bus.”

  She told him her idea. How Paul’s current mental state played right into it. She had just about every detail worked out.

  “That’s . . . pretty out there,” Bill said, managing to concentrate despite the distraction.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “But I’m going to need help. A lot of help. Some of it technical.”

  “Like what?”

  “Can you set up a phone’s ring to be anything you want? Like, if I recorded something, could I turn it into a ringtone?”

  Bill, closing his eyes briefly, said he was pretty sure that could be done.

  “And I have to find an old typewriter. In all the stories I read, there was one reference to an Underwood. We need to find one of those. It doesn’t have to be an exact replica, but close. The good thing is, it’s within the realm of possibility it could still be out there. The real one was never found.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Still moving her hand up and down, she smiled. “I called the police. Made up a story about being from some crime museum starting up in New York. Said that typewriter would make an excellent exhibit. Never recovered, they said.”

  Bill said he would start checking antique shops. He even knew a couple of business supply stores that might have something like that, almost as a novelty item. And there was always eBay and Craigslist.

  “Nothing online,” Charlotte cautioned. “No trace.”

  “Hang on,” Bill said. He closed his eyes, shuddered, gasped. Charlotte took her hand away.

  “This is where the creative part comes in,” she said. “Paul has to believe this is the machine used in the murders.”

  They would type up all the messages ahead of time, she said. Bill could feed him the idea of leaving paper in the machine if he didn’t think of it himself. Charlotte could hide them in the house and roll them into the typewriter or scatter them about the house as opportunities presented themselves. She’d make Bill a key, so he could sneak into the house and plant them. Or, she could do it herself.

  Like the morning Paul wanted to find the yard sale where Charlotte had said she’d bought the Underwood. She didn’t call the real estate agency to say she’d be late. She called Bill, signaling that the house would be empty for the next hour or so. He went over and rolled a message into the typewriter. The morning that Paul arose late and found Charlotte in the shower, she’d already been down in his study, putting a message in place.

  Over the next week, they worked out the details. With a new phone, she recorded the sounds of typing by banging away at the keys. She turned that into a ringtone. The muted phone would be left atop one of the kitchen cupboards, programmed to ring only when called from Charlotte’s personal phone. She’d keep that one under her pillow and make the calls once Paul was asleep.

  They did some test runs. Bill held the new phone while Charlotte called it, using her own.

  Chit chit. Chit chit chit. Chit. Chit chit.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “It’s perfect.”

  She’d even be able to do it if Josh were staying with them. He slept with iPhone buds in his ears.

  Bill had some ideas of his own. “Remind him of conversations that never actually happened. Ask him if he picked up things you say you asked him to get, but never did. Reinforce the notion that his memory’s faulty.”

  Charlotte liked that. She said she could tell Paul she’d seen a car parked outside the house, the same one he’d seen days earlier. Except, of course, he’d never mentioned seeing a car. She could send texts from his phone, leaving him baffled when he received the replies.

  “And I can visit his therapist, and Hailey. Tell them all the disturbing things I’ve witnessed. Plant the seed that he’s losing it.” She smiled. “It’s nice to get back to acting. I don’t see winning an Emmy, b
ut I’ll have you.”

  Bill came up with what he called the clincher.

  “One night, we go for broke. You get him drunk, slip something into his drink, show him the best night in bed ever. I sneak in, put that fucking typewriter right next to him. If that doesn’t drive him round the bend, he’s made of stronger stuff than any of us.”

  Charlotte said she’d tell Paul she’d had the locks changed, even when she hadn’t. He’d be even more convinced there were supernatural forces at work.

  They found a suitable typewriter in an antique shop in New Haven. The notes were written.

  Bill identified one huge flaw in the scheme.

  “This is all designed to drive him crazy, push him over the edge, make him step in front of that metaphorical bus.”

  “Right,” Charlotte said.

  “But what if he doesn’t?”

  Charlotte smiled. “Oh, I have that figured out, too.”

  Fifty-Three

  Anna was not an expert at the whole “following cars” thing.

  She’d grown up watching The Rockford Files and Miami Vice and Cagney & Lacey, and it always looked so easy on those shows when the detectives had to tail someone. They didn’t have to worry about traffic or red lights or pedestrians texting at crosswalks. The road was always clear for them.

  The only way she could keep Bill Myers’s car in sight was to practically ride on his bumper.

  She tried to back off when she could but was so afraid of losing him that she stuck too close to him. She was sure he’d notice he was being followed.

  But maybe that wasn’t so bad. Didn’t she want to talk to him? She wasn’t tailing him so much to find out what he was up to as to find a moment to have a few words with him.

  Right.

  Except what was she going to say? What was she going to ask him? Anna was starting to think maybe she hadn’t thought this through.

  Myers led her into a nice area of south Milford. He put on his blinker and turned into a development on Viscount Drive, a few hundred feet from the beach. He lived in a collection of attached townhouses, and turned into the driveway of one of them.

  She kept on driving.

  She had planned to stop, flag down Mr. Myers for a conversation, but then lost her nerve. She carried on to the next stop sign and turned.

  Anna circled the block, came back, and parked out front of Bill’s house. She killed the engine, sat there, frozen by fear and indecision.

  Knock on the door or leave?

  While she considered what to do, she dug her phone out of her purse. She needed a distraction. She decided to check and see whether she had any messages. She’d muted the phone during the funeral. If anyone had texted, emailed, or phoned her, she wouldn’t have known.

  Well, what do you know, there were two emails and one voice mail. She checked the latter first.

  It was Rosie, her neighbor keeping an eye on her father while she was out, asking when she thought Anna would be back. The woman had an eye appointment at four. Anna called her immediately and said she would be home soon, long before the woman had to be at the doctor’s.

  Then she turned her attention to the emails. One was junk, and the other was from someone asking if she was taking on new clients. Anna tapped on the reply arrow and was about to write back when she nearly had a heart attack.

  Someone was rapping hard on her window.

  Anna was so startled she dropped the phone into her lap and put her hand to her chest. Bending over, his nose pressed up to the glass, was Bill Myers.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  _________________

  COMING HOME, BILL MYERS WAS PISSED.

  He wanted to see Charlotte, needed to see Charlotte. Not at the funeral, but privately. She’d been putting him off, and sure, he understood the need for caution. But they hadn’t gone through all this to not spend time with each other. He needed her. He needed her in every way.

  It was this need that made him take her hand as they were leaving the church. To link his fingers with hers. What he wanted to do, right there in the church, was put his mouth on hers, take her in front of everyone.

  See the look on their faces.

  But he wasn’t that stupid. And he’d already let her know a few minutes earlier what was on his mind. Sitting in the front pew, next to her, he had taken her hand and subtly shifted it to his lap so that she could feel how hard he was.

  Charlotte had given him the tiniest squeeze before withdrawing her hand back to her own lap.

  He saw that as a good sign. He’d been hoping for one, given Charlotte’s avoidance since Paul’s death. Not taking his calls, ignoring texts. Yes, she’d told him, weeks earlier, that whenever it was done, they had to be discreet. They did not want to attract any undue attention.

  Fine. He got that. But the thing was, he had questions. Like, how long would they put up with the charade? They did work together, after all. How long before he could stay at her place, or she could sleep over at his? It was nobody else’s business what they did now. Paul was dead. Wasn’t Charlotte entitled to move on with her life?

  But son of a bitch, just like he’d whispered to her, it had worked. Better than he had ever imagined.

  He paced the house. Antsy. Anxious.

  He happened to glance out the window, saw a Lincoln SUV parked across the street. He’d noticed the car in his rearview driving home. He squinted, tried to see who was behind the wheel.

  It was a woman, and she looked familiar. Bill thought he had seen her at the funeral. What the hell did she want?

  There was only one way to find out.

  He went out the front door, crossed the street, and while the woman was engrossed in her phone, went up to the window and knocked on it with his knuckle. Asked if he could help her. Gave her quite a start.

  The woman put down the window.

  Bill, thinking maybe she hadn’t heard him through the glass the first time, asked again, “Can I help you?”

  “Mr. Myers?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Anna White. I was Paul’s—”

  “I know who you are,” he said, nodding. “You were there, the other night, when Paul, you know, when things got really bad.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I’d hoped to talk to you at the service but missed you. And now I’ve been sitting out here, like an idiot, trying to work up the courage to speak to you. I wasn’t sure whether to bother you at a time like this, what with Paul being your friend and all.”

  Bill studied her for a second. “Uh, well—”

  “It wouldn’t take long. I just want to have a few words.”

  Bill shrugged. “Come on in.”

  She got out of the car, locked it, and walked to his front door with him. “I thought your eulogy was very heartfelt.”

  He shrugged. “Thanks.” He opened the door for her and invited her to sit in the living room.

  Anna settled into a soft chair. “How is Charlotte doing?”

  “Well, she’s devastated, of course,” he said.

  “I can imagine. I dropped by to see her, after it happened. But I think it was a mistake. Did she tell you I visited her?”

  “No,” he said. “So, what did you want to talk about?”

  “I suppose I wanted to tell you what I told Charlotte. That I feel terribly sorry. That I feel I failed your friend. It’s all been weighing heavily on me.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one. I mean, I guess we all played a role there.”

  “Did you see the signs?” she asked earnestly.

  He nodded slowly. “Like I said in the church, I guess we all did. Charlotte for sure. And anytime I saw Paul, I could tell he was pretty troubled.”

  “Troubled, yes. But anything that suggested to you he’d take his own life?”

  “Well, come on. Look at everything that was going on. The attempt on his life, the nightmares, thinking his typewriter was somehow possessed or something? That must have been some scene the other night.” />
  “It was.”

  “I don’t know how he did it. Without waking up Charlotte.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “Going down to the garage, bringing up the typewriter, putting it right there by the bed. Shit, I still can’t get my head around it. You’re the expert. Do you think he knew what he was doing? Was it like a split personality or something? One part of him was doing all the typewriter stuff, and another part was scared shitless by it?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said.

  “Well, if you don’t, given your expertise, I guess we’ll never know,” he said.

  “So, looking back, you’re not surprised Paul took his own life?”

  “What’s the phrase?” Bill asked. “Shocked, but not surprised.”

  “I get that. So that’s why I’m a little puzzled.”

  “Puzzled?”

  “The other night.”

  “Yes?”

  “What puzzles me is what you said to Paul when he got on the phone with you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When the subject came up about him going to the hospital, you advised against it.”

  Bill was, briefly, at a loss for words. “I don’t know that I’d go that far.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I mean, I may have pointed out the drawbacks to being admitted to the hospital, but it’s not like I told him not to do it.”

  “I got the sense you were quite adamant. You persuaded him not to go.”

  “I don’t see why you’re laying this on me,” he said defensively. “You’re his therapist, for Christ’s sake. If you thought he should have been put into a psych ward, you should have overruled me.”

  “I couldn’t force Paul into the hospital against his wishes, not if he didn’t present an immediate danger to himself, and I was not sure at that moment he did. But you’ve just told me that you saw indications that Paul might harm himself. That he might take his own life. And you’ve just told me you believed he was writing the messages himself, moving the typewriter around, himself. That one part of his mind was doing all this, while another part was unaware.”