A Noise Downstairs(24)

Face-to-face.

He thought he was up to it. His reaction to unexpectedly seeing Kenneth’s son, Leonard, was not, Paul believed, an indicator of how he’d react to sitting down with the killer of two women, if that could be arranged. For one thing, he’d be prepared.

He was about to do a search on how one arranged a visit with an inmate when his thoughts turned to Josh.

He’d really botched things with his son that morning. There really was no reason for Josh to lie about tapping away at the typewriter in the middle of the night. And it didn’t make much sense for him to have done it in the first place. He hadn’t gone near the thing since catching his finger in it.

He had to accept that there was only one logical explanation: he’d dreamed it.

Yes, he’d told Charlotte he’d continued to hear the chit chit chit as he went down the hallway, but maybe he hadn’t shaken the dream by that point. Maybe he was half sleepwalking.

What pained him was that he and Josh had had such a nice— albeit short—time together, aside from the troubling aspects of the Batman movie. And Paul had sabotaged it at the end.

Damn it.

But Paul was pretty sure he could fix things with Josh. He’d make this right. The next time Josh came out from the city, they’d do something really special. Maybe go for a drive to Mystic, check out the aquarium.

Maybe Charlotte would even want to come.

Things definitely seemed better with her. They’d hit a few bumps in the road, but if there was any upside to his nearly getting killed, it was that it had made Charlotte reassess not just their marriage, but also the expectations she had for herself. As she’d told him more than once since the incident, she’d been questioning where she was in her life. Was she where she’d hoped she’d be ten years ago?

While she was doing respectably as a real estate agent, it had never been her goal. She’d entertained, at one time, the idea of a career in, well, entertainment. Living in New York, she’d done off-off-Broadway, even had three lines one time as a day care operator in a Law & Order episode. (Paul suspected Charlotte had actually gone on a date or two with one of the stars, on the Law side, but she would never confirm nor deny.) Sadly, she never got the big break she’d strived for and reached the point where she had to make an actual living. She’d held sales jobs, worked hotel reception. When Paul met her, she was the early-morning manager of a Days Inn. So, where her career was concerned, she had settled.

If there was little glamour in being a real estate agent, there was even less in being married to a West Haven College professor. Yes, it was a decent place to teach, but it wasn’t Harvard, and it lived in the shadows of nearby Yale and University of New Haven. If Charlotte had ever viewed what he did as a noble calling— molding young minds into leaders of tomorrow, ha!—Paul doubted she did anymore. Before the attempt on his life, she’d rarely asked him about his work, and why would she? It was boring. What was there for him to aspire to now? Where did one go next? The dizzying heights of department head?

So this was what Charlotte’s life had become. Selling houses in a drab Connecticut town, married to a man of limited ambition.

And then there was the baby thing.

Paul had not brought up the subject in a long time, but he’d hoped he and Charlotte would one day have a child. Had he stayed with Hailey, he was sure Josh would have ended up with a baby brother or sister. Hailey had as much as said she and Walter were trying. But Charlotte had not warmed to the idea of becoming a mother herself.

Well, fuck all that.

This was a new day, Paul told himself. This was the day when he took control. This was the day when he stood up to the demons. This was the day when he would start rebuilding himself and his marriage.

He was going to tackle this Hoffman thing. He was going to write something. He was going to write something beyond the notes he’d already made. He was going to write something good. He didn’t yet know what shape it would take. Maybe it would be a memoir. Maybe a novel. Maybe he’d turn his experience into a magazine piece.

It had everything.

Sex. Murder. Mystery.

Coming back from the brink of death.

The fucking thing would write itself, once he decided which direction to take it in. This was the key to putting his life and marriage back together. He wasn’t doing this just for himself. He was doing it for Charlotte. He wanted her to see that he could be strong, that he could get his life back.

Enough of this sad-sack bullshit.

Maybe he could even be the man she’d want to have a child with.

But hey, let’s take things one step at a time.

Paul reflected on how he’d come across these last few months. Christ, even Bill seemed worried he might kill himself. Yes, he’d been depressed. He’d been traumatized not just by the event itself—the nightmares, the anxiety—but also by physical manifestations. Headaches, memory lapses, insomnia. Who wouldn’t be depressed?

But suicidal?

Had he come across as that desperate? Maybe.

“See how you are when you’ve got Kenneth Hoffman visiting your sleep every night,” he said to himself.

Shit.

Of course.

The typing he’d thought he’d heard was clearly part of a Hoffman nightmare. Paul must have been dreaming about those two women typing out their apologies. Charlotte’s gift of that antique Underwood had triggered a Hoffman dream that zeroed in on that aspect of his crime.