A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

  Fifty-Seven

  Charlotte wasn’t surprised to see her phone light up with Bill’s name on the screen. Not two hours since the funeral and already he was calling her. So much for discretion. But then again, a guy who puts your hand on his dick in the middle of a funeral service clearly has a problem with delayed gratification, not to mention subtlety.

  She figured if she ignored the call, he’d just keep trying. So she accepted it.

  “Hello?”

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “Why, Bill,” she said, feigning a casual tone. “It’s good of you to call. I know I already told you, but I thought what you said about Paul was lovely. Straight from the heart. He’d have been touched to know how you felt.”

  Bill paused. It took him a second to catch on. There was either someone in the room with her, or Charlotte thought someone was listening to her calls. She had no reason to believe that was happening, but why risk it? She’d actually gone online, looked up bugging devices and where they were most commonly hidden, and then had searched the house to make sure it was clean.

  No fool, she. You didn’t hear her whispering “It worked” in the middle of a crowded church.

  “Yeah, well, thanks for that,” Bill said. “Like you said, it was from the heart.”

  “The house feels so empty with him gone.”

  “Yeah, right. Uh, like I said, there was something I needed to talk to you about. In person.”

  Charlotte sighed. Maybe it was time. Besides, there were some things she wanted to discuss with him.

  “Fine, then,” she said. “I’m here.”

  “See you in a few minutes,” he said, and ended the call.

  Did he want to tell her how he did it? Was he overwhelmed with guilt and needed to talk about it? Did she even want to know every detail? As long as it was done, that was all that mattered.

  Charlotte figured it would take Bill the better part of twenty minutes to come over, but the doorbell was ringing in fifteen. She glanced out a second-floor window before running down the stairs, and while she could not see him at the door, she spotted his car parked half a block up the street.

  At least that was smart. She wasn’t ready for people to see his car parked at her house yet.

  She went down the stairs and opened the door. Bill charged into the house and blew straight past her. As he mounted the steps to the kitchen, he said without glancing back, “We’ve got a problem.”

  She hurried up the stairs after him. “What are you talking about?”

  He went straight to the fridge, took out a bottle of beer, twisted off the cap, and took a long drink.

  “Is there anybody else here?” he asked warily.

  “No.”

  “The way you were talking on the phone, I thought maybe—”

  “I was being careful. But the house is safe. Say what you have to say.”

  He leaned up against the island. “Okay, you’re gonna be pissed, because this is my fault, but you’re going to have to move past that so we can deal with the situation.”

  “Just tell me, for Christ’s sake!”

  His eyes looked upward. He couldn’t face her. “Someone heard me. What I whispered.”

  “Whispered when?”

  “In the church. What I said when we were walking out. That what we did, that it worked.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Bill! Jesus! Who? Who heard you?”

  “The therapist. Anna White.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She came and saw me. She came to my fucking house. Started talking about this and that, worked her way around to the fact I talked Paul out of going to the hospital. Asked if that was what I was referring to when I told you it worked.”

  Charlotte shook her head disbelievingly. “You’re an idiot.”

  “All right, all right, I’m an idiot.”

  “And putting my hand on your cock in the middle of—”

  “Okay!” he bellowed. “I get it! I’m a fucking moron. Can we get past that and deal with what’s happening right now?” As he shook his head in frustration, his eyes landed on the typewriter. “Jesus, you brought that back into the house?”

  “I needed trunk space,” she said, waving her hand at the boxes that still covered up much of the island. “Look, let’s think about this.” Her voice was calmer. “What does Dr. White really have? She heard you say two words, and she’s suspicious that you didn’t want Paul to go to the hospital. It’s nothing. It’s absolutely nothing. What did you tell her when she asked what you meant?”

  “I said it was about getting the office printer to work.”

  “What?”

  “If she asks, I called you about that. That I was trying to print out the eulogy.”

  Charlotte looked exasperated. “She’s supposed to believe that the first thing you told me after the funeral for my dead husband is that you got a printer to work.”

  “I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with something. Important thing is, I think she bought it. I’m more worried about the other thing, about talking Paul out of going to the hospital.”

  Charlotte was thinking. “No, that’s okay. What you said made perfect sense at the time. Why would you want your friend to be locked up in a psych ward? Those places are horrible. You had a natural reaction. You’re worrying about nothing. Let it go.”

  “She said she came to see you, too.”

  “Yeah. But she came by to say she was sorry, that she misread the signals. She was feeling all guilty. That’s probably why she came to see you. She wants to lay this off on you so she doesn’t feel responsible.”

  He took another long pull on the bottle. “I guess. But I didn’t like the way she was asking questions. I had a bad feeling about it.”

  “Well, get over it. Even if she went to the police, what does she have, really? You think Detective Arnwright is going to give a shit about something like that? The medical examiner’s report, all the statements from us and the doctor and Hailey? It all points to suicide.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It does. Okay.” He grinned. “And wonder of wonders, that’s what actually happened.”

  Charlotte took a step closer. “What?”

  “Well, unless you dragged Paul into the water yourself and drowned him, he really did it. What’d you think I meant when I said it worked? He actually fucking offed himself.”

  Charlotte stared at him, open-mouthed.

  “All this time,” she said, “I wondered why you didn’t give me any warning that you were going to do it that night. We’d talked about that. So I’d be ready.”

  “Why do you think I was calling you so often before the funeral?” Bill asked. “I was as stunned as you.”

  “Oh my God,” Charlotte said softly. “You didn’t kill Paul. We didn’t kill Paul.”

  Bill grinned. “Sometimes things just have a way of working out.”

  Fifty-Eight

  Anna White walked out of the Milford Police headquarters feeling like a fool.

  “Idiot,” she said under her breath as she got into her SUV.

  She headed home. She’d canceled so many appointments over the last week that there were still clients she’d been unable to reschedule. It was already late afternoon—God, she had to get home so Rosie could make her eye appointment—so she wasn’t going to be able to see any of them today. But she could start sorting out the next few days.

  Despite being dismissed by Detective Arnwright, Anna still believed something was very wrong. She’d spent her professional lifetime reading people, and the story she believed she’d seen developing between Charlotte and Bill was one of deception.

  Paul was not, Anna believed, the only one who’d been deceived.

  The number one dupe was herself. Anna now could not help but wonder if Charlotte had been putting on an act when she showed up unexpectedly at the office to tell her how worried she was about Paul.

  I was played, Anna thought. I’m their corroborating evidence.

  If Ch
arlotte and Bill were having an affair, as Anna suspected, and were plotting against Paul, who better to back up their story that Paul was unstable than the dead man’s therapist?

  But if what Anna suspected was true, what could she do about it? She’d gone to Arnwright with nothing more than a hunch, and it was just as well she didn’t mention what Bill was trying to conceal after he saw Charlotte to her car.

  Hey, Detective, he had a hard-on. That’s proof, right?

  It would have been the last thing Arnwright needed to be convinced that she was a nutcase. And sex-obsessed.

  So what was there to do? If she couldn’t get the police interested in taking another look at Paul’s death, was she going to conduct an investigation herself?

  I am not Nancy Drew.

  She was not going to snoop about like some amateur sleuth in a hackneyed mystery novel. That wasn’t the real world. She had no idea how to go about such a thing. She was not going to try tailing someone again. She was not about to hide microphones in Charlotte’s house or Bill’s townhouse.

  All she knew how to do was talk to people. And more than that, to listen. And to watch. That was how you got below the surface, to where the truth was buried.

  She wanted to talk to Charlotte again. When she’d last spoken to her, Anna had not held the suspicions she did now. Anna wanted to look her in the eye when she asked her some of the same things she’d asked Bill Myers.

  And for sure, she’d ask about his call to her about the printer. What a crock of shit that was.

  Anna believed she would come away from a meeting like that knowing, in her heart, whether her suspicions were warranted. If she found they were, she might not have enough for the police to open an investigation, but at least she’d have a good idea what really had happened.

  I have to know.

  Paul’s death would always weigh on her. She would always feel responsible. But there were degrees of responsibility.

  When she returned home and gave the neighbor her freedom, she checked on Frank, whom she found in the backyard knocking some more chip shots with a nine-iron. The woods behind the house, Anna imagined, were littered with hundreds of golf balls.

  Then she went about rescheduling. Once she was done with that, it was nearly seven, and time to pull something together for her father and herself for dinner.

  “Dad,” she said, finding him back in his bedroom on the rowing machine, “are you okay with a frozen pizza? I know it’s pretty sad, but it’s been that kind of day.”

  “Okay by me, Joanie,” he said, sliding back on the machine.

  Knowing he’d be okay with it, but still feeling she needed to apologize for it, she had already preset the oven. By the time she got back to the kitchen, it was time to slide the pizza into it.

  Half an hour later, sitting at the table with her father, he studied her and said, “What’s on your mind, pumpkin?”

  His pet name for her since she was a child. So at least for the moment, he knew she was his daughter.

  “I have to confront somebody about something,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to it.”

  Frank smiled sadly. “It’s okay. I can handle it.”

  “Oh, God, Dad, it’s not you,” she said, laying a hand on his.

  “If there’s something you gotta tell me, I can take it.”

  “It’s something else entirely. Really.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “I might have to go out tonight.”

  He nodded. “Sure thing.”

  “And I need to know you’ll be okay if I do. I can’t impose on Rosie again.”

  “Not a problem.”

  She was relieved that her father no longer seemed traumatized by their visit from the SWAT team. He seemed to have forgotten all about it.

  “What is it you have to do?” he asked.

  “I kind of have to work myself up to it.”

  Another nod. “If you decide not to, I was thinking we could go visit your mother tonight.”

  It never ceased to amaze her how he could drift in and out this way. Be perceptive enough to tell there was something on her mind, and then propose an outing based on a fantasy.

  “We’ll see,” Anna said.

  He offered to do the dishes—there was little more than a baking sheet, two plates, and two glasses—so Anna told him that would be great. She wanted him to feel useful whenever possible.

  When he was finished and had retreated upstairs to his bedroom to watch the cartoon channel, Anna made some tea. When it was ready, she poured herself a cup and sat at the kitchen table to drink it.

  She spent the better part of an hour on it.

  “Sooner or later,” she said under her breath, “you’re gonna have to do this thing.”

  But that didn’t have to mean she couldn’t have another cup of tea first while she thought about it.

  Fifty-Nine

  They felt a celebration was in order.

  And why not? Bill and Charlotte never had to be worried about being arrested for murder because—Breaking News, folks!— they had not murdered anyone.

  Sure, they might have driven Paul to take his own life, but how was anyone ever going to prove that? There was no so-called smoking gun. No fingerprints, no DNA, no incriminating hairs or fibers. None of that stuff you saw on TV.

  The pages of faked messages from Catherine and Jill weren’t evidence. They’d been written on that typewriter, and so far as anyone knew, Paul had written them. About the only thing Bill thought they needed to address was that extra smartphone with the typewriter ringtone.

  He grabbed a chair from the kitchen table and brought it over to the cupboards, stood on it, and retrieved the device that had been sitting up there since they’d put their plan into action. It had been plugged into an outlet near the ceiling that had originally been installed to power accent lighting.

  He stepped down off the chair, phone in hand.

  “No need to throw this out,” he said. “All I have to do is change this ringtone.”

  He fiddled with the phone’s settings for several seconds, then placed it screen down on the island.

  “Done,” he said. “Consider our tracks covered.”

  Charlotte had apologized for being so angry about the overheard whisper. “Who cares what Anna White heard? I could have gone down on you in the middle of the church and there wouldn’t be a damn thing they could do about it.”

  “We got what we wanted, but son of a bitch, our hands are clean,” Bill said. “I have to admit, I didn’t see that coming.”

  “You,” Charlotte said, “are a lot smarter than you look.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But you were the one who really had to pull it off. You had to be here. You had to play along. You deserve an Oscar.”

  She’d brought out a bottle of wine from the fridge and was already on her third glass. Bill was into his fourth beer. No more meeting in empty houses. If anyone came by, his presence here was totally legitimate. He was consoling the widow.

  He had some very serious consoling in mind for later.

  “It’s really—shit, you know—it really was the so-called perfect crime,” she said. “You know why? Because there was no crime.”

  “Are there even laws for what we did?” Bill asked. “Even if someone could prove we used that thing”—he pointed to the typewriter— “to mess with someone’s head, was it even illegal? We could say it was like a practical joke that got out of hand. Or even better, we were helping Paul.”

  “Helping?”

  “No, not helping. Inspiring. The same thing you told him when you gave it to him. He wanted to write about what Kenneth had done to him, and what we did was designed to inspire him with that effort. Really get him into it. That’s all. We couldn’t have known he’d take it the way he did.”

  “ That’s a bit of a stretch,” Charlotte said.

  “Anyway, it’s a moot point. It’s never going to get to that.” He became reflective. “I still can’t believe he did it. Walked r
ight out into the water. I mean, how would you do that? If you fall out of a boat or something like that, and you can’t make it to shore, sure, you drown. There’s nothing you can do. But walking in? You’d think, once your lungs started filling up, your natural instincts would take over, you’d try to save yourself, turn around and run back for shore.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “No, it could happen. I’ve seen stuff like that on the news.” Her face went dark. “God, it must have been awful.” She looked at Bill and her eyes misted. “The water is so cold.” She mimed shivering, but the chill was real.

  It was a rare moment for her. She almost felt sorry for what they’d set into motion.

  “Listen,” he said. “It’s done. We don’t look back. We look forward.” He pulled her into his arms. “It’s all over now. We made our decisions and now we live with them.” He tightened his squeeze on her. “We got what we wanted.”

  “I was worried about you for a while,” she said. “I thought you were getting cold feet at one point. That you were having some crisis of conscience.”

  “Not anymore.”

  He bent his head down and put his mouth on hers. She placed her hand at the back of his neck and latched onto him.

  “That’s the spirit,” Bill said, breaking free long enough to take a breath. He grasped her around the waist and lifted her onto the island so that her face was level with his. She wrapped her legs around his torso, locked her ankles, trapping him. They explored each other that way for another minute before Charlotte put her hands on his chest and gently pushed back.

  “Upstairs,” she said.

  Seconds later, they were in the same bed where Charlotte and Paul had spent their last night together. If she had any qualms about that, she did not show it. The sex with Bill was fast and animalistic. The second time was slower but no less passionate.

  By that time, night had fallen. They lay together in the bed, weary and lethargic. Moonlight coming through the blinds cast prison-stripe shadows across their nakedness.

  “This is probably the wrong thing to say,” Bill said, glancing at the bedside clock, which read 9:57 P.M., “but I could use something to eat.”

  “Don’t give me straight lines,” Charlotte said. “Is this where I say you’ve been doing that for the last two hours?” She turned onto her side, threw a leg over his, pinning him to the mattress. “Just stay where you are. Close your eyes.”