A Noise Downstairs(28)

As he reached the second step from the bottom, he heard it again.

Chit chit. Chit chit chit.

He looked across the kitchen to the closed door of his study. There was no light bleeding out from below it. Just like the other night. How was someone supposed to mess around with that Underwood in total darkness?

A miniflashlight. Sure. Whoever was in there wasn’t going to want to attract attention by turning on the lights.

Yeah, like that made sense. They were already attracting attention with the typing.

Paul moved barefoot across the floor. As he closed the distance between himself and the door, he wondered whether he needed some kind of weapon. As he sidled past the kitchen island, he carefully extracted a long wooden spoon from a piece of pottery filled with kitchen utensils.

He had a pretty good idea how ridiculous he looked, but the spoon would have to do. You went into battle with what was at hand.

Paul reached the door, gripped the handle. With one swift motion, he turned and pushed.

“Surprise!” he shouted, reaching with his other hand to flick the light switch up.

And just as it was when he thought Josh had been fooling around in here, the room was empty.

The typewriter sat where it had been since Charlotte bought it for him, seemingly untouched. No paper rolled into it.

Paul stood there, blinked several times. “What the fuck,” he said to himself. He scanned the room, as if someone could hide in a place that wasn’t any bigger than a closet.

Suddenly, struck by an idea, he ran to the steps that led down to the front door. Someone could be making a run for it. Quietly, for sure, but did anything else make sense?

Paul ran his hand along the wall, hunting for the switch. He flipped it up, illuminating the stairs and the door at the bottom.

There was no one there. From where he stood, he could see the dead bolt on the door turned to the locked position.

In his rush, his left foot slipped over the top step and dropped to the next, throwing him off balance. He canted to the right, reaching frantically for the railing to break his fall, but missing it altogether. His butt hit the top step, then bumped down two more, hard, before he came to a shuddering stop.

“Fuck!” he shouted. He suddenly hurt in more places than he could count. Butt, thigh, foot, arm.

Pride.

Upstairs, Charlotte shouted. “Paul! Paul!”

Wincing, he yelled back, “Down here!” He grabbed his right elbow, ran his hand over it delicately. “Jesus!”

He heard running on the upper floor, then thumping down the stairs. “Where are you?”

Charlotte sounded panicked.

“Down here,” he said, struggling to his feet. His boxers had slid halfway down his ass, and he gave them a tug up, hoping to preserve what little dignity he had left. She arrived in the kitchen, her white nightgown swirling around her like a heroine in a romance novel.

“What’s happened? Did you fall? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

Instead of telling her, Paul wondered whether there was something worse than nightmares and memory loss.

Going batshit crazy.





Fifteen

The sun wasn’t even up, and her dad was at it already.

Anna White, dressed in an oversize T-shirt that hung to her knees, was awakened not by her alarm but by the sound of the rowing machine. She tossed back the covers and padded down the hall to her father’s room. She gently pushed open the door. Frank, in his pajamas, was stroking away on the machine, watching the cartoon channel.

“Dad,” she said softly, “it’s five-thirty.”

Anna believed the cartoons put her father into a kind of trance, keeping him from any awareness of how long he had been on the machine. She was convinced he was going to have a heart attack at this rate.

He either didn’t hear her, or had chosen to ignore her. He laughed as Daffy Duck took a shotgun blast to the face, spinning his bill to the other side of his head.

“Dad,” Anna said, stepping forward, putting a hand on his upper arm. She was amazed at how hard it felt. Her father’s head jerked in her direction.

“What?”

“You should go back to bed. It’s too early to be up. It’s sure too early to be up doing this.”

“This one’s not over.”

The remote was on the floor. She knelt down to reach it, hit the POWER button. The screen went black.

“Why’d you do that?”

“Dad, please. Go back to bed.”

“Not tired. Gotta take a whiz,” he said, getting off the machine and walking down the hall. Anna sat on the edge of his bed, waiting for him to return. He wandered back in after a couple of minutes, a dark coaster-size stain on the crotch of his pajama pants.

Always hard to get that last drop, Anna thought.

She stood, allowing her father to get into the bed. Then she plopped herself back down on the edge once he had his head on the pillow.

“You going to read me a story?” he asked.

She felt a twinge of fear. Was he joking, or did he think he was five years old?

“Something raunchy’d be nice,” he said, grinning.

Okay, a joke.

“No, I am not going to read you a story,” she said. He hadn’t called her Joanie, so maybe this was one of his moments of clarity. She hoped so.

“I’m not going to get back to sleep, you know,” he said. “I’m usually up by six, anyways.”