Twisted

by Steve Cavanagh

  Notes for Untitled Book Six. Hitchcock plot. Woman sees what may be a murder in an apartment window as she’s stationary at a stop light. No. Been done. Theme?

  There were more notes like this on the other pages discussing character motivation, plot, timelines. She put these pages to one side and picked up the newspaper clippings. Some were fairly new, some yellowed with age. They were from the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Time magazine. They all had a similar headline or theme.

  Who is J. T. LeBeau?

  Standing behind her, Daryl read over her shoulder. He said, ‘It’s him, isn’t it? Jesus H. I was right. Maria, it’s Paul. This is huge …’

  Maria got up fast and said, ‘Don’t say a word to anyone. We can’t let this get out. Promise me.’

  Her words calmed him, brought him back down to reality. Daryl was like a ten-year-old kid on Christmas Eve. His excitement threatened to get the better of him.

  ‘We could use this. This could be our way out. We could be together,’ she said.

  Now she had a chance for a better life. The life she knew she desperately wanted. She just needed to figure out how to best use this lie against him.

  And somehow explain what happened to the drawer. Even if she got it repaired, he would notice it. Paul noticed little things. This wouldn’t escape him. Maria paused, looked down at the broken drawer. This was a big problem. She didn’t want to let him know that she had been in the drawer or seen any of the documents. Not until she could figure out the best way to deal with the situation.

  If she confronted him, what was he capable of? She thought about it, and decided that with what she’d learned in the last few hours she didn’t know her husband at all. He could leave her, take the money with him and never be seen again. Or worse, tell her that it was his money and she wouldn’t see a single dime of it. He could disappear. He had half disappeared already. She didn’t know this man. This man who left her on her own for weeks at a time. His cold stare, his pain. And then there was Daryl. Open, loving and devoted to her and she to him.

  Whatever else she realized, she knew she was in no fit state to confront Paul tonight. And yet she couldn’t let it lie. Resentment and anger at the betrayal were all hitting her at once.

  She walked out of the study, through the kitchen and out the back door to the porch. She looked over the dunes to the sea. The wind had picked up, and the surf boiled white. No one on the beach. The sky had begun to darken. A black cloud swollen with rain was rolling in from the coast. She heard Daryl’s footsteps on the porch before he came around the corner of the house.

  She ignored him. Fixed her eyes to the horizon and knew then exactly how she would handle this.

  ‘You okay? Maybe I should let you process this. He’s still your husband, and maybe I’m making things too complicated.’

  ‘No,’ said Maria. ‘You’re not making things complicated. You’re all I have now. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too,’ said Daryl.

  It was the first time he’d said it out loud.

  ‘I’m going to talk to him. Tonight. I can’t leave it any longer. I need him to come home, and explain this to me. I have to get him to open up. That’s the only way he’ll do it. If I confront him he’ll just shut down.’

  ‘Okay, do you want me to stay?’

  ‘That would be too much for him to deal with. I have to do it alone,’ she said, glancing back at the house, the broken drawer set in her mind. She needed an innocent explanation for the drawer. Something to get her off the hook, and get Paul talking about what was in the drawer.

  ‘Whatever you say. You need anything before I go?’ he said.

  Maria took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ she said and turned to him, her features set in grim determination. ‘Before you go I want you to hit me.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Paul Cooper’s fingers buzzed across the laptop. He hit the keys confidently. Each stroke had power. This pace always seemed to come when he was approaching the end of a novel. When he was starting out, staring at a blank screen, his keystrokes were slow, light and tentative. His fingers had to feel their way into a story.

  He paused, lifted his hands from the keyboard and took a sip of green tea. He brewed it in his little apartment on the east side of Port Lonely where he kept an office. For two days he’d been out on the sea. No WiFi, no internet, barely any phone signal. Just his laptop and a mug of green tea beside him on the boat. As soon as his GPS system had blurted out the storm warning, Paul had saved and backed up his work, closed the laptop and brought the boat back to the marina. Thank God he had his office across the street. He could continue writing in relative peace.

  When he was close to finishing a book he required nothing less than total concentration. No distractions of any kind.

  At this point it all rested on the final twist.

  Endings are a bitch, he thought.

  No two writers work the same way. Paul wrote by the seat of his pants. Somehow, he always came up with a twist.

  For this book, the final twist had yet to reveal itself. But it would, soon. He just had to be patient.

  He put down the mug of tea, returning his fingers to the laptop to dole out more punishment to the keys.

  He stopped typing mid-sentence. A buzzing sound in the room distracted him. He reached into his pockets, felt nothing. There it was again, the same sound. He got up and retrieved his cell phone from his jacket. A missed call from Maria.

  She rarely left voicemail messages. Not long after they started dating she made him dinner in her apartment in New York. A proper date, Maria had called it. Wine, a roast chicken salad and then finishing the bottle on the couch. Paul had gotten up to use the bathroom and passed her telephone, which sat on a small table. It was an old vintage phone. With a cylinder dial. Beneath it was what looked like a tape deck, but Paul then recognized it as a cassette answering machine. To the side of the machine was a box of tapes. Some were blank, some were clearly labeled. They were all labeled with some variation of Mom. Like Mom, Christmas 1985 or Mom, VCR reminders.

  When he returned to the couch he asked her about the phone and the answering machine.

  ‘I saw your phone set-up. Pretty vintage. You know we have digital voicemail now? And the internet?’ he said, jokingly.

  She smiled, but there was more behind it.

  ‘It was my mom’s. We got the answering machine with some of the money from my father’s life insurance. She loved that answering machine. It was kind of like a rite of passage for her – being able to afford our own phone and the answering machine blew her mind. She would call from work a lot, while I was at home alone doing homework. She would make sure I was okay and remind me to set the VCR for Columbo or Star Trek. That kind of thing. Whenever I felt lonely or scared at home while she was at work, I would play one of the answer phone tapes. No one ever called but her. When she passed I kept the tapes and the machine. I play them now and again to remind me. Just to hear her voice.’

  Paul smiled at the memory. Maria was terribly sentimental. When they’d moved to Port Lonely, she had insisted on bringing the damn phone and the answering machine with them. It was all set up, but no one called the house and she never used the old phone, she always called him from her cell.

  Paul’s eyes fell back to the laptop. The call had distracted him, sent him down memory lane. He tutted – he had work to do.

  The phone clock read eleven-thirty. Paul thought it was only around six. He hadn’t eaten dinner, and with the blackout blinds pulled on the apartment windows he often lost track of time. In a way, this was a good sign. His head was in the book, not in the real world. Placing the phone on his desk, he returned to the laptop.

  This time the phone lit up and vibrated noisily on the table. The jackhammer vibration turning the phone around on the desk. Another call from Maria.

  It was unusual for her to call so late.

  Reluctantly, he picked up.

  ‘Hi, everything okay?’ he said.
/>   He heard her breath first. Hard, panting.

  ‘Jesus, Paul, no! I tried calling you, there’s been a break-in at the house. I was attacked.’

  ‘Oh my God! Are you alright?’

  ‘He hit me and I fell. I’m okay. He’s gone. I’m scared,’ she said, her voice breaking with fear.

  ‘I’ll be right home. I just got the boat back in. Lock all the doors. My gun is in a lock box in the study. Get it in case he comes back. Did you call the police?’ he said.

  She hesitated, and then said, ‘No, I called you first. I’ll call them right now.’

  Before Paul could say anything else she hung up.

  He swore under his breath. The thought of some two-bit burglar hurting Maria made him feel sick.

  He saved the file, closed the laptop and stuffed it angrily into his bag. He shut off the lights, locked the apartment and ran down the stairs onto the street. The Maserati waited for him in the marina lot. The boat and the car were his toys, his little gifts to himself. The sports car didn’t look out of place in a town like Port Lonely. Maria’s car was a lot cheaper, but she wasn’t into cars. Times like these he was glad he had a lot of power under the hood of that car, although he had bought it for a wholly different reason – you never know when you might need to get away, fast.

  He blipped open the car, got in, threw his bag onto the passenger seat and fired up the engine. Five minutes later he was on the coast road, pushing eighty miles an hour, and wishing he’d thought faster when Maria had called him.

  Last thing Paul wanted was the police snooping round his house. He called Maria from the car system, but the line was engaged. She was probably still on the phone to the cops.

  He pushed the accelerator as hard as he dared. His headlights were the only guide, and the road twisted sharply around rocky outcrops. A glint of flashing lights popped into his rear-view mirror. Red and blue rotating on the roof of a car. He slowed down to sixty, just in time. The police cruiser flew past him in a blur of noise and swirling reds and blues.

  Paul swore and thumped the steering wheel.

  Ten minutes later he pulled up at the house beside the cop car. Light spilled from every window of the house and the front door lay open. He saw a large man wearing a ball cap, silhouetted in his bedroom window. He was watching Paul.

  By the time Paul got out of the car and made it to the front door, he saw the man in the cap standing in the hallway. The cop. He was in his fifties, with a cop-mustache and a little extra weight that made his stomach peek over his gun belt.

  ‘You’re Mr. Cooper?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Paul, entering the house.

  ‘I figured it was you on the road. Recognized that beast of a car. Sheriff Abraham Dole,’ he said, tipping his cap. ‘Your wife is in the kitchen. She’s pretty shook up, but she’ll be okay. The intruder’s gone. I’ll have another look-see around the house, if you don’t mind?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Paul.

  While the cop went upstairs, Paul made his way through the living room, down the hallway toward the kitchen. A chill washed over his spine when he saw the door to his study lying open. He glanced inside as he passed. He would check more thoroughly in a moment, but at first sight the study didn’t look as though it had been disturbed. Maria must have opened it up, either to get the gun or to let the sheriff check the room.

  Sitting on a tall stool at the kitchen counter, he saw Maria holding a bag of ice to her cheek. She’d wrapped the ice in a kitchen towel, but the ice had seeped through, wetting her hair and the left side of her face. When she saw him, she put down the ice and ran into his arms. Paul held her close, kissed her hair.

  He whispered to her that everything was alright now. She was safe. Placing a hand on each shoulder he gently eased her back, so he could look at her face. She tilted her head to the left as if she didn’t want him to see. Delicately, Paul touched her chin and raised her head.

  A red welt on the side of her face. A swollen, angry cheek. Her eyes were red and puffy from the tears. She dipped her head, placed it on his chest and hugged him close, saying nothing, but he felt the gentle rocking from her body as she sobbed. Paul smoothed her hair, then wrapped his arms around her and gave the kitchen the once-over. Nothing disturbed in here. Nothing out of place apart from the ice pack on the counter and Maria’s cell phone sitting beside it.

  ‘What happened?’ he said.

  She held onto him, her voice thick with tears as she spoke. ‘I was watching TV when I heard a noise. Like glass breaking. I got up and went to the kitchen. I thought maybe a glass had fallen. There was nothing. I thought maybe I’d imagined it and I was going back to the couch when I thought I heard something in your study. I used your key, opened the door. And that’s when I saw him.’

  His hold on Maria tightened.

  ‘Who did you see?’ he said.

  ‘A man. In black. He wore a hood. I couldn’t see his face. He was trying to jimmy open your desk. He saw me. I ran for the phone in the kitchen and he grabbed me by my hair in the hallway. I turned around, screamed. That’s when he hit me. I fell and he must’ve got scared and ran out the front door.’

  The desk, thought Paul.

  ‘Did he say anything?’ said Paul.

  ‘No,’ she said, then, ‘Paul, you’re hurting me.’

  He let go. He’d been holding her too tightly: his fingers had been digging into her flesh.

  She stood back and he looked at her face again. Then he turned and ran into his study. The books, ornaments and keepsakes were all where they should be. A laptop lay undisturbed on the desk which faced the door. As he came around the other side of the desk he saw that the window had been broken. Shards of glass lay on the rug behind his office chair. The intruder had gotten in this way. Broke the glass to get at the window lock, then opened it and climbed in. He spun around and checked the desk. The top left-hand drawer had been forced open. Its contents spilled. Kneeling down, he rapidly flicked through the notes, press cuttings and reviews. This was his private desk, in his private study. He looked behind him at the busted window. It was too dark to see the beach beyond the tall grasses. Someone must have been watching him. Someone knew what was in that drawer. The only things in the house that could expose him were in that desk.

  The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

  Maria stood on the other side of the desk. She looked confused, and hurt. It wasn’t the welt on her cheek that pained her. Something else was wrong, something deeper. He could tell.

  ‘The man didn’t take anything that I can see. He didn’t go for my jewelry, or my car keys or the laptop. What did he want?’ she said.

  Paul felt the lie come easy. Even now. Even to someone he loved.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  The words fell lightly from his lips. No guilt. His conscience had long given up the fight. He loved Maria, as much as he could love anyone. The lies were part of it, and always had been.

  ‘Why did he bust open that drawer? If there’s something going on, I have a right to know,’ she said.

  ‘He must’ve been looking for cash, or credit cards. I don’t know what he was searching for,’ he said.

  For a second, he could’ve sworn he saw a flash of disgust on her face, as if something unpleasant had appeared before her eyes; her lip curled, she looked him over and then burst into tears.

  He moved toward her, but she held up her hand and left the room, bumping into the sheriff in the doorway.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ said Sheriff Dole. He tipped his cap again then joined Paul in the study. The big man moved slow, but his eyes worked fast – taking in the room.

  ‘Nothing seems to be disturbed in any of the rooms, ’cept this one,’ he said.

  He came around the desk, knelt down to take a look at the window while Paul stood back and watched. The sheriff looked at the glass fragments on the rug, switched his attention to the window and stood. He examined the handle of the window, stuck his head out throug
h the broken pane and drew a flashlight from his belt. Paul noticed that the sheriff didn’t need to look at his belt to find his light. There were no fumbling fingers either, his hand drew that flashlight in one fluid movement. He imagined the sheriff had done this a thousand times.

  ‘I’ll take a look out back in the morning, if you don’t mind? This guy didn’t land on your porch. He walked there. Might be some tracks in the dirt. Too easy to miss ’em in the dark,’ said the sheriff, knocking off the light beam.

  ‘Right, good call,’ said Paul.

  Sheriff Dole turned his attention to the desk. A messy pile of pages lay on the floor. Above them, the drawer was open.

  ‘Anything missing, sir?’ said Sheriff Dole.

  Paul shook his head, said, ‘Not that I can tell. Looks like Maria disturbed the guy before he had much of a chance.’

  ‘Anyone who would want to hurt you, or your wife?’ asked Dole. Paul shook his head.

  The law man nodded, looked at the broken lock on the desk drawer. None of the other drawers had been touched. Paul folded his arms, watched the sheriff take another look around the room.

  ‘Aren’t you going to take fingerprints or something?’ said Paul.

  ‘No need. Burglars wear gloves. Never got a print off a burglar in thirty-five years.’

  ‘What if this one didn’t wear gloves? Shouldn’t you at least try?’ said Paul.

  Sheriff Dole’s mustache twitched, once, and he said, ‘Maybe on this one we will. I’ll send a deputy tomorrow. You sure there ain’t nothin’ been taken?’

  ‘I’ll double check tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure.’

  ‘Okay then,’ said the sheriff. ‘I’ll send a car a little later on, just to swing by the property and make sure everything’s fine. We won’t disturb you. We’ll get a statement then, too. Okay then, you folks have yourselves a pleasant evening.’