A Noise Downstairs

by Linwood Barclay

  “I might be hungrier than I am sleepy,” he said.

  “Oh shut up,” she said. “I’m exhausted and you should be, too.”

  “My dick could sure use a nap,” he said.

  “Close your eyes,” she said again.

  He did. In less than a minute, he could hear soft breathing from her pillow. And shortly after that, he succumbed.

  But it seemed to him that he had been asleep only a few minutes when his eyes reopened. He glanced at the clock. It was only 10:14. He’d been asleep barely fifteen minutes.

  Something had woken him up.

  A sound.

  It had sounded like—

  No, no way.

  He propped himself up on an elbow and listened. The only thing to be heard was Charlotte’s breathing in and out.

  It was nothing, he thought. Whatever he thought he’d heard, it had to have been part of a dream.

  He put his head back down on the pillow, closed his eyes.

  And then immediately opened them when he heard the sound again.

  Chit chit. Chit. Chit chit chit.

  From downstairs.

  Sixty

  Wake up!” Bill whispered to Charlotte.

  She grunted, opened her eyes. “What?”

  “Shh!” He had a finger to his lips. “Listen.”

  Chit. Chit chit chit.

  She blinked a couple of times. “It’s nothing,” she said groggily.

  “You don’t hear that?”

  She nodded. “It’s the phone. You must not have changed the ringtone.”

  Bill considered that. “Okay, maybe, yeah. I should have tested it.”

  “Fix it in the morning,” she said, putting her head back down onto the pillow.

  “But wait,” he said. “Someone has to call it for it to ring.”

  Charlotte raised her head again, turned to look at her bedside table. “Where the hell—”

  She shifted over to the edge of the bed, looked down to the floor, felt around with her hand. “There it is,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My phone. I must have knocked it off the table. I guess it called you.”

  That placated Bill for only a second. “Your phone’s not going to make a call just by hitting the floor.”

  “What about pocket calls? Isn’t that kind of how those happen?”

  In the few seconds they’d been whispering, there had been no more sounds of typing.

  “Maybe,” Bill said.

  “Or,” she said, “someone else called the phone. It didn’t have to be me. You never got a wrong number? Or a telemarketer’s call? Even on your cell? They don’t have to know your actual number. They just keep dialing and sooner or later they hit yours.”

  “We planned for that,” he reminded her. “We programmed the phone to only ring when you called it. Otherwise, it was on mute.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “So maybe there was a glitch. It’s accepting other calls now.”

  “I’m gonna go down and power it off completely,” he said.

  She grabbed onto his arm. “Stay here.”

  He allowed her to hold on to him. He dropped his head onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

  Chit chit. Chit chit chit. Chit.

  “Oh, fuck it,” he said, and threw back the covers.

  Charlotte sighed. “I really was asleep, you know.”

  “Since I’m going down, you want anything?” he asked, pulling on his boxers.

  “You’re still hungry?”

  “We didn’t exactly have dinner.”

  “I guess not. Bring me up some crackers and cream cheese or something.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Jesus, just go.”

  She flopped back down on the bed and pulled the covers up over her head. Within seconds, she felt herself falling back to sleep.

  And then it was her turn to be awakened by a now familiar sound.

  Chit chit. Chit. Chit chit chit.

  And then:

  Ding!

  She opened her eyes and sat up in bed. Charlotte reached over for Bill, but her hand hit mattress. She patted around, confirmed that he was not there.

  Ding? she thought.

  That was the sound a typewriter made when you reached the end of the line. It was the signal to hit the carriage return. That had never been part of the ringtone programmed into the phone.

  That sounded like a real typewriter.

  Like the typewriter downstairs.

  So what the hell was Bill doing playing with that damn thing at—she looked at the clock—10:34 P.M.

  Boy, she’d fallen back asleep quickly. But even though Bill had not been gone long, all he had to do was mute a phone and grab something to eat. Why stay downstairs and goof around with the typewriter?

  “God,” she said, slipping out from under the covers. As she pulled on an oversize T-shirt, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had traded a man for whom she’d lost all love for a man who was an enormous pain in the ass.

  “Hey!” she called out as she headed for the bedroom door. “What the hell are you doing?”

  As she approached the top of the stairs she noticed there were no lights on in the kitchen.

  “Bill?” she called. “What’s going on?”

  No reply.

  “You’re freaking me out. Talk to me, for Christ’s sake.”

  She slowly descended the stairs, step by step. Listening.

  There wasn’t any sound coming from the kitchen. Even the typewriter had gone silent.

  “Bill?”

  As she went to step onto the kitchen floor, her hand reached for the light switch.

  Standing there, directly in front of her, was a very tall, heavy-set man. Definitely not Bill. The first clue was that he was fully clothed.

  The second was that he was wearing a name tag. It read: LEN.

  “Hi,” he said, and then closed his meaty hands around her neck.

  Charlotte barely had a moment to scream.

  Sixty-One

  It took three cups of tea—followed by two glasses of wine—before Anna was ready to do what she knew she had to do.

  But now that she’d worked up her courage for a showdown with Charlotte Davis, Anna worried that she had left it too late.

  It was dark out. It was after ten.

  Chances were Charlotte was already in bed. With, or without, Bill Myers.

  Whoa, Anna thought.

  Why hadn’t she considered that possibility? That when and if she went to see Charlotte, Myers would be there.

  She had to stop thinking that way. She was looking for excuses not to go.

  I am going to do this.

  And catching Charlotte off guard, possibly waking her up, well, so what? That might work to Anna’s advantage. The thing was, Anna knew she wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep tonight. So what if she kept someone else up, too?

  As for Myers, she’d look for his car. If she drove over there and saw it in Charlotte’s driveway, she’d reassess at that point.

  Charlotte might not even be home. She could be at Myers’s house. Would she go back there? She’d make that decision if and when she had to.

  Anna went upstairs and rapped lightly on her father’s door.

  “Hello?”

  She pushed the door open. Frank was under the covers, in his pajamas.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m going to go do this thing I was telling you about. I’ll be back soon.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s late. Go back to sleep.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning. Rosie won’t be here. It’s too late for her to come over. You’ll be fine for a while, okay?”

  Her father said sure.

  Back downstairs, she pulled on a light jacket, turned off a few lights, and decided she would exit the house from the office wing. As she was passing through, she heard the familiar ding of an incoming email. She slipped in b
ehind her desk and discovered not one new email, but five, from patients about rescheduled appointments.

  Anna opened the datebook beside her computer, made a note of the new times for her clients, then wrote quick replies to confirm the changes. Then she slipped out the side door, locked it, jumped into her SUV, and headed out.

  She rehearsed in her head the questions she was going to ask Charlotte. Were there ways she could trip the woman up? Get her to say things she didn’t want to say? While she’d been having her tea—not so much when she was drinking the wine—she’d scribbled some thoughts down on a paper napkin.

  Not so much questions, but things to watch for, like the things people do when they lie.

  Stalling by repeating a question. Excessive blinking. Long pauses. Coming up with overly complicated responses. Impersonal language—fewer references to I or other people by their actual names, so more use of him and her.

  Of course, one of the other possible reactions from a liar would be to attack.

  Anna was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

  Sixty-Two

  Charlotte took a moment to place the large man who had her pinned to the wall with his hands around her neck.

  She didn’t recognize him at first. She wasn’t used to seeing him outside his ice cream truck. But it took only a few seconds to remember him from the times she’d bought a cone from him. She also remembered this was Kenneth Hoffman’s son.

  Leonard.

  What was he doing here? Why was he in her house? Why was he trying to kill her? And where was Bill? What had happened to—

  Oh God.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him. He lay on the floor to the right of the kitchen island. He was not moving, and his head seemed positioned at an odd angle to his shoulders, as though his neck had been twisted.

  If he was breathing, Charlotte could see no sign.

  She struggled to do any breathing of her own. She wanted to scream, but nothing would come out, so she tried to mouth some words.

  “Stop,” she croaked. “Please stop . . . can’t breathe . . .”

  She flailed pitifully against the man, trying to slap him with her hands, but it was like trying to repel a bear with a flyswatter. When Leonard pushed her up against the wall, he lifted her slightly, so her feet were only barely touching the floor. She couldn’t get any leverage to kick him.

  Charlotte felt herself starting to pass out. Her brain was being starved of oxygen. Her eyes darted about the room, catching movement in the doorway to Paul’s small office.

  There was someone standing there.

  A woman.

  “Not her, too, Leonard,” said Gabriella Hoffman. “We need to talk to her.”

  Leonard relaxed his grip on Charlotte’s neck. She slid an inch back down to the floor, and as Leonard took his hands away she dropped to her hands and knees, hacking and coughing. As she struggled to get air back in her lungs, Gabriella walked in her direction, stopping in front of her.

  Charlotte looked up, her neck already purplish with bruising from Leonard’s grasp.

  “What have you done to Bill?” she asked hoarsely.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Gabriella said. “Worry about you.”

  “I . . . I know you.”

  “I think we met at faculty events once or twice,” Kenneth Hoffman’s wife said. “I’m Gabriella. And you are Charlotte.” Her eyes shifted in the direction of Bill’s body. “I don’t know him. Who is he?”

  “Bill,” Charlotte said, her voice shaking. “Bill Myers.”

  “A West Haven professor? I don’t recognize him.”

  “No. We sell real estate together.”

  “It looks like you do more than that together,” Gabriella said. “This is my son, Leonard.”

  Leonard nodded.

  “Most people call me Len,” he said.

  Charlotte, fully able to breathe again, asked, “Is . . . is Bill dead?”

  “Yes,” Gabriella said. “Leonard snapped his neck.”

  Charlotte slowly got to her feet, then took one step back from Gabriella. Leonard hovered to one side like a pet gorilla awaiting instructions.

  “What do you want?” Charlotte asked. “Why are you here?”

  Gabriella waved her hand toward the Underwood. “That.”

  “The typewriter?”

  “Yes.”

  “What . . . what about it?”

  “Your husband went to visit Kenneth in prison with some ridiculous story about those women, the ones my husband was convicted of killing, trying to talk to him through this machine.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said, her voice little more than a whisper.

  “Paul gave Kenneth quite a scare. Not because of those messages. Those were laughable.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What I needed to see—to get—was that.” Again, she indicated the Underwood. “But when we came before, it wasn’t here.”

  Charlotte’s eyes went wide. “You were here before?”

  Gabriella smiled. “Your husband said the typewriter was in your car’s trunk, but I didn’t believe him. But I guess he wasn’t lying, because it wasn’t here. So we’ve come back. We were going to ask you for your car keys, but then we saw the typewriter sitting right here.”

  “You saw . . . Paul?”

  “Leonard and I just wanted to talk to him. About the typewriter, and the letters. We met him outside. He’d been out for an evening stroll.” Gabriella smiled. “Things didn’t quite go right. When he understood my concern, well, he became very agitated. And when Leonard here tried to calm him down, he ran off toward the beach.”

  “Oh, my God,” Charlotte said. She looked at Gabriella’s lumbering son. “He didn’t kill himself. You killed him.”

  Leonard’s look bordered on sorrowful. “I didn’t really mean to. I guess I held his head under the water a little too long.”

  Gabriella sighed. “We took Paul’s keys and searched your house, but he wasn’t lying. The typewriter wasn’t here.”

  “I still don’t . . . I don’t understand why . . .”

  “As I said, those messages that the typewriter was supposedly spewing out were ridiculous. They gave Kenneth pause, for a moment, he was willing to admit that, but he figured it had to be some kind of joke. A trick. But,” Gabriella said slowly, “it is still possible— however remotely—that this is the real typewriter.”

  “I don’t understand,” Charlotte whispered.

  “Kenneth got in touch after Paul’s visit. Said I needed to act before Paul did something like ask the police to compare his notes to the ones Catherine and Jill wrote.”

  She held some sheets of paper of her own. “So I just was doing a little comparing of my own.”

  She waved one of them in front of Charlotte. “These are from some notes I made when I audited a West Haven philosophy class some years ago.” She smiled. “One of the perks of being married to a faculty member.” She looked off almost dreamily at a point in the distance. “I’ve always liked the feel of a real typewriter. So much more satisfying than a computer. Don’t you?”

  Gabriella ended her reminiscing with a small shake of the head. She pointed to the Underwood. There was a piece of paper rolled into it, and a line of type.

  “Remember ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’?” Gabriella asked.

  Charlotte shook her head.

  “You’re too young,” Gabriella said. “That’s what they’d always have you write to test a typewriter. A nice, crisp sentence. That’s what I was doing. That’s the noise you heard. I was about to compare my class notes to what I just typed here, but that was when your Mr. Myers came down.”

  Charlotte struggled to piece together what was happening, how whatever she had set in motion was now blowing up in her face. Her eyes kept being drawn to Bill’s lifeless body.

  Her mind was able to cut through the panic and confusion to ask, “So what if it’s the actual typewriter? What difference does i
t make?”

  “Oh, a great deal,” Gabriella said.

  Gabriella leaned over and peered into the inner workings of the Underwood. “And it looks as though Kenneth was right to be concerned.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Charlotte asked.

  Gabriella raised her head. “Blood. There’s dried blood in the keys.” She looked at Charlotte. “It’s nothing short of amazing that you found it. At a yard sale, yes? What are the odds? Someone must have found it in the garbage before the Dumpster was emptied, or maybe it was found at the dump. Then it ended up for sale in someone’s driveway, and of all the people in the world who could buy it, it was you.”

  “I didn’t buy it at a yard sale! And that blood is Josh’s!”

  “Josh?”

  “Paul’s son. He got his fingers caught in it. You’re right, it would be amazing if this were that typewriter. But it isn’t.”

  Gabriella frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t buy it at a yard sale. I bought it at an antique store. We—me and Bill—were trying to find a typewriter like the one Kenneth made those women write their apologies on.”

  Gabriella’s expression was one of genuine puzzlement. “Why?”

  A tear escaped Charlotte’s right eye and ran down her cheek. “We did a terrible thing. A terrible, terrible thing.”

  Gabriella, intrigued, smiled and said, “They say confession is good for the soul.” The smile twisted into something jagged. “Although Kenneth might not entirely agree with that.”

  Charlotte gave her the broad strokes of what she and Bill had done.

  “Why ever would you do that?” Gabriella asked, her face full of wonder.

  Charlotte swallowed hard. “We wanted to make it look like he was losing his mind. And, then, when we . . . when we killed him . . . everyone would think it was suicide. Except we thought he’d actually done it. Killed himself. But it was you.”

  Gabriella’s wonder morphed into one of irritation. “So all our worries have been for nothing?” She ran her fingers along the Underwood’s space bar. “This was all something you and your lover cooked up?”