A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

  “Jesus. Who would do something like that?”

  “He seems to get off on exploiting people’s weaknesses.”

  “Do you think—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “But I only mention it so that you’ll be on your guard. A kind of heightened alert. If you should see him around your house or anything like that, call me, or call the police, even.”

  _________________

  PAUL DIDN’T WANT TO GO STRAIGHT HOME FROM ANNA’S OFFICE. HE thought he’d drive around for a while and think.

  Just what kind of tricks could your mind play on you? he wondered. Sure, he’d been under plenty of stress, but he’d not had any actual delusions. Okay, once in a while, he heard Hoffman’s voice in his head, and for a second, maybe he thought the Volvo that had pulled out in front of him was his former colleague’s car.

  But those were fleeting illusions, nothing more.

  Was it wrong to wonder, even briefly, if the message in his typewriter was actually from the people it purported to be? Were Catherine Lamb and Jill Foster trying to communicate with him?

  Don’t go there.

  That led him to speculate whether he was dealing with something worse than the fallout from a blow to the head. Was he suffering some form of mental illness? Paul had known, over the years, two individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had believed, with absolute certainty, they were the victims of elaborate conspiracies. One was convinced the U.S. government was after him, that the president himself was overseeing a scheme to remove his brain. The second, a mature student at West Haven College who’d attended for only a single semester, was convinced her entire body was being devoured by lesions, yet she had skin as beautiful as a newborn baby’s.

  I’m not like that, he told himself. I am aware of my reality.

  And yet, didn’t those two people believe they were, too?

  After driving around Milford for the better part of an hour, he decided to head for home.

  He pulled into the driveway, got out of the car, and stood there for a moment. He took out his cell phone, brought up the number of Charlotte’s cell, tapped on it, and put the phone to his ear.

  “Pick up, pick up, pick—”

  “Hello?”

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” Charlotte said.

  “I’m sorry. I really lost my shit this morning.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I went by Dr. White’s,” Paul said. “Kind of barged in. The thing is, I’m willing to consider all the options, even the one you were getting at.”

  “I never really said—”

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

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “What’s that noise?”

  Paul glanced down the street at the approaching vehicle. It was the same ice cream truck he and Josh had run out to on Saturday night. The one that had been driven by Kenneth Hoffman’s son.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “I’ve got a call in to find out who sold that house. When I—”

  “Later,” he said, tucking his phone away.

  Stick with the program. Don’t be distracted. You set out to confront this shit, and confront this shit you shall. So there’ve been some strange bumps in the road. Keep on going.

  The truck slowed as two kids from a house half a block away ran out, waving their arms. The truck slowed to a stop.

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

  Paul strode down the street. He waited for the two kids to get their orders, then stood up to the window. The heavyset young man with the LEN name tag pinned to his chest said, “What do you want?”

  Paul said, “Medium cone, just plain.”

  No more fear. No more turning away.

  As Len began to prepare it, Paul said, “You’re Leonard Hoffman, right?”

  Leonard turned and looked at Paul. “Yeah.”

  “Do you know who I am? Do you recognize me?”

  Leonard stopped swirling the cone under the soft ice cream dispenser, set it on the counter. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “I’m Paul Davis.”

  Realization slowly dawned behind Leonard’s dim eyes. “You . . . I know that name.”

  “Your dad . . . I was the witness. Your father was charged with attacking me, that night. I wondered—I know this may sound odd— but I wonder if I might be able to talk to you about your father.”

  Leonard’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “I just . . . it’s hard to explain. These last few months have been difficult for me, and I’ve been trying to—how do I put this— confront the things—”

  “You’re a bad man,” Leonard said.

  “What?”

  “It’s all your fault.”

  “My fault?”

  “That my dad went to prison.”

  “Uh, no, I don’t think so, Leonard. It was your dad’s fault, because he killed those two—”

  “You stopped. If you hadn’t stopped, he wouldn’t have been arrested.”

  So maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all.

  “Because you stopped, it made my dad stay there too long. And then the police came.”

  Paul blinked. “If the police hadn’t come, I’d be dead. Your father would have finished me off.”

  “He should’ve,” Leonard said, flicking the ice-cream cone off the counter with the back of his hand. It bounced off Paul’s chest, leaving a dripping, white mess on his shirt.

  “No charge, asshole,” Leonard said. He went back to the front of the truck, put it in gear, and drove off.

  _________________

  HE WENT BACK INTO THE HOUSE FOR A CLEAN SHIRT AND STUFFED the other one into that bag of clothes that he was supposed to have taken to the dry cleaners. It was still up in the bedroom. He’d grab a fresh shirt from the closet.

  Mockingly, he said to himself, “Hey there, Leonard. Wanna talk about your killer dad? Sit down, really get into it about your homicidal father?”

  He passed through the kitchen on the way upstairs.

  Glanced in the direction of his office.

  Saw the typewriter on the desk.

  Something caught his eye.

  “No,” he said under his breath.

  From where he stood, there appeared to be a black line on the new sheet of paper he had rolled into the machine that morning.

  A line of type.

  Slowly, he approached the door to the small office and stepped in, as though a tiger might be hiding behind the door. His pulse quickened and his mouth went dry. Paul blinked several times to make sure that what he was seeing was real.

  The latest message read:

  Blood was everywhere. What makes someone do something so horrible?

  He stumbled back out of the room.

  I did not do this, he told himself. I did not do this. I have no memory of doing this. I wasn’t even here. There’s no way I— A loud ping rang out from inside his jacket, startling him. He took out his phone, brought the screen to life.

  He’d received an email. He opened it, saw that it was from Gwen Stainton of the New Haven Star.

  It read:

  Dear Mr. Davis:

  I thought I recognized your name as soon as I saw your email address. I covered the Hoffman double homicide from the very beginning and can tell you that the typewriter used in the case was never recovered. What makes you ask?

  Sincerely,

  Gwen Stainton

  Twenty-Six

  Paul’s mind raced.

  If he had not written this note and left it for himself—as Charlotte would probably theorize if she were here—and if those two dead women really were not trying to connect with him, then there remained only one possible explanation.

  Someone really was getting into the house.

  But the house had been locked when he got back here. He clearly remembered sliding the key in, turning back the dead bolt.

  Could someone have co
me in through the garage, then entered the house through the interior door that connected the two?

  Paul ran downstairs, went out the front door, and tried the handle on the garage door. He couldn’t turn it. It was locked as well.

  He went back into the house, checked the balcony doors off the living room and the bedroom, in case somehow someone had scaled the wall. But those doors were not only locked, they were also prevented from being slid open by wood sticks in the tracks.

  No one could have gotten into this house.

  He was sure of it.

  He returned to the kitchen, then went back into his study long enough to grab the laptop that was sitting next to the typewriter, which he brought out to the kitchen island. He pulled up a chair. He could not bring himself to remain in his tiny office. He was, at this moment, too freaked-out to be in there with that relic. The very thought of going back into that closet-size space made him feel short of breath.

  He thought of that movie, the one with paranormal in the title, where they set up the camera in the bedroom. In the morning, the couple living in the house saw all these freaky things happening while they’d been asleep. Covers being pulled off them, doors opening and closing.

  Except, Paul reminded himself, that had been a movie.

  This was for real.

  He thought back to the moments before he and Charlotte had left to find the house where she had bought the Underwood. Was it possible he’d written this line on the typewriter seconds before they left? But he wasn’t even remotely asleep at that point. He’d been up for hours.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said under his breath. “I’m sure I didn’t do it.”

  He opened the mail program on his laptop to take another read of the message he’d first seen on his phone, the one from Gwen Stainton, saying that the Hoffman typewriter had never been recovered.

  “What makes you ask?” she’d written before signing her name.

  He found the New Haven Star page he’d looked at earlier and called the main phone number.

  “New Haven Star,” a recording said. “If you know the extension you’re calling, please enter it now. If you had a problem this morning with the delivery of your paper, please press one. If you would like to register a vacation, suspend delivery, or cancel your paper, press two. If you would like to place an ad, please press three.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Paul said.

  “If you would like to be connected to the newsroom, press four. If—”

  Paul pressed four, thinking that anyone calling in with a hot tip would probably have given up by now.

  “Newsroom,” a man said.

  “Gwen Stainton.”

  “Hang on.”

  The line went dead for nearly ten seconds, then, “Stainton.”

  “Ms. Stainton, it’s Paul Davis. I emailed you this morning about Kenneth—”

  “Yeah, the typewriter question. We talked, right? Back when I wrote a feature on the case, after Hoffman pleaded guilty.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I know you got hurt pretty bad, but in a lot of ways, you were pretty lucky.”

  “I guess you’re right about that. So, about the typewriter. I don’t think this ever even came up—it wasn’t in your story—but the night I saw Kenneth, he tossed something into a Dumpster. I think it had to be the typewriter he made the women write those notes on. But because of my head injury, I didn’t even recall that for a few days. I suppose, by then, that the Dumpster could have been emptied.”

  “Possibly,” Gwen said. “Like I said in my email, Mr. Davis, what makes you ask?”

  He paused. “Is this off the record?”

  A pause at the other end. “Yeah, sure.”

  “I’ve been seeing a therapist since the incident. To, you know, deal with the trauma. As a way of confronting it, I’ve decided to write about what happened to me. A kind of therapy, I guess you’d call it. But reviewing everything about what occurred that night, there’s this one, well, kind of a loose end. About the typewriter.”

  “You sound like a modern-day Columbo,” Gwen said.

  “Maybe so,” Paul conceded.

  “You probably know as much or more than I do. After he killed those two women, Hoffman wanted to get rid of the evidence. That being their bodies, and the typewriter, which would have had a lot of blood on it. I imagine it would have been impossible to get the blood out of all the little nooks and crannies in an old machine like that.”

  From where he was sitting, Paul looked at the Underwood. If this was that typewriter, someone had cleaned it up. Or maybe it had rained after Hoffman dumped it. Nature gave it a good rinsing.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “So, yeah, he tossed it. And it wasn’t found. But the police didn’t need it to make their case, since Hoffman confessed. I’m sure the police did try to find it, but like you said, it probably was in a dump somewhere, buried under tons of trash, by that time.”

  Paul couldn’t take his eyes off the typewriter. He was unable to shake the feeling that it was looking at him. Except, typewriters didn’t have eyes. The old ones, like this Underwood, were nothing more than hunks of metal. They were machines, plain and simple. They could neither see, nor hear, nor talk, or— Maybe talk.

  “Mr. Davis?” Gwen said.

  “I’m here,” he said. “In your story, you said the typewriter was an Underwood. How would you know that, if it was never found?”

  Gwen hesitated. “I’m pretty sure one of the detectives told me. He said Hoffman had called it an Underwood.”

  Paul continued to stare at the machine.

  “Mr. Davis? Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever spoken with him? With Kenneth Hoffman?”

  “Briefly,” she said. “It wasn’t an interview. But there was an opportunity to have a few words with him one day when he was being brought from the jail to the courthouse.”

  “What was your impression?”

  “He was charming,” Gwen said. “Positively charming.”

  _________________

  PAUL HAD PUT THE PHONE DOWN FOR ONLY A SECOND WHEN HE thought to call back Charlotte.

  “Why’d you cut me off before?” she asked.

  “It was the ice cream truck.”

  “You cut me off to get an ice cream?”

  “You said you were going to ask around about some home security companies?”

  “Yeah, it’s on my list,” she said with a hint of weariness. “That, and finding the former owners of that house. Why? Has something else happened?”

  Did he want to tell her that he’d found another note? While he considered how to respond, Charlotte said, “Paul?”

  “No, nothing’s happened,” he said. “I just wanted to remind you, that’s all.”

  “I’ll ask around. Listen, there’s a call I have to take.”

  “Go.”

  He put the phone down on the counter and sat there, thinking.

  And then it hit him.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  He got back onto the laptop, opened a browser, and went to Google. He entered several key words. Gavin and dead and pretend and son and father and Hitchcock.

  Paul found the news story, even though he had the last name wrong. It was Hitchens, not Hitchcock. It was as Anna had described. The sick bastard tormented a man by pretending to be his son who had been killed in Iraq.

  Paul remembered Gavin Hitchens bumping into him as he stormed out of Anna’s office. The brief tussle they’d had.

  And then Paul couldn’t find his keys.

  Twenty-Seven

  It all made sense.

  If this psycho had gotten into Anna White’s files, as she feared, then he knew all about Paul’s history. If Hitchens had googled Paul just as Paul had googled Hitchens, he’d know all about what had happened wit
h Hoffman. He’d know Paul had nearly died. He’d know about the notes Hoffman had made the women write.

  He’d know about the typewriter.

  Hitchens would know more than enough to fuck with him.

  Paul called up the online phone directory and entered Hitchens’s name. A phone number and a Milford address popped up. The guy lived on Constance Drive.

  “You son of a bitch,” Paul said.

  He felt rage growing within him like a high-grade fever. He wanted to do something about this bastard.

  Right fucking now.

  He got out his cell and phoned Anna White’s office. The first, logical course of action was to get in touch with her.

  Voice mail.

  “Shit,” he said, and ended the call.

  He looked at the screen again, focusing on Gavin Hitchens’s address. He closed the computer, grabbed the extra set of keys he’d been using the last few days, and headed for the stairs to the front door.

  But wait.

  What about the shoe Paul had sometimes been leaving just inside the door? If Hitchens had been in the house, how had he left the shoe there on his way out?

  Paul ran down to the front door. He picked up a shoe, opened the door, and stepped outside. He got down on his knees, and with the door open no more than four inches, he snaked his arm in, up to the elbow, then crooked it around and set it up against the back of the door.

  It could be done, he thought. He had to admit he’d not checked exactly how close the shoe had been to the door. If it had been sitting out an inch or two, would he have noticed?

  But wait.

  How would Hitchens even know he needed to set that shoe back in that position? If he’d snuck into the house in the middle of the night, he might have heard the shoe move. The sole might have squeaked as it was pushed across the tile.

  Minor details, Paul thought. Somehow, this Gavin asshole had figured it out.

  While his rage continued to grow, Paul felt something else. There was relief. He’d come up with an answer to what had been going on, and it wasn’t that he was crazy.

  That was good news.

  But he was going to deliver some bad news to Gavin Hitchens.

  Paul grinned. “I’m comin’ for ya, you motherfucker.”

  _________________