A Noise Downstairs(3)

“Open it,” Paul said.

“What?”

“Open it!” he said, pointing to the tailgate.

Kenneth moved in front of him and reached for the tailgate latch. Another interior light came on, affording an even better look at the two bodies running lengthwise, both wrapped in that plastic, heads to the tailgate, feet up against the back of the front seats. The rear seats had been folded down to accommodate them, as if they were sheets of plywood from Home Depot.

While their facial features were heavily distorted by the opaque wrapping, and the blood, it was clear enough that they were both female.

Adults. Two women.

Paul stared, stunned, his mouth open. His earlier feeling that he would be sick had been displaced by shock.

“I was looking for a place,” Kenneth said calmly.

“A what?”

“I hadn’t found a good spot yet. I’d been thinking in those woods there, before, well, before you came along.”

Paul noticed, at that point, the shovel next to the body of the woman on the left.

“I’m going to turn off the car,” Kenneth said. “It’s not good for the environment.”

Paul suspected Kenneth would hop in and make a run for it. With the tailgate open, if he floored it, the bodies might slide right out onto the shoulder. But Kenneth was true to his word. He leaned into the car, turned the key to the off position. The engine died.

Paul wondered who the two women could be. He felt numb, that this could not be happening.

A name came into his head. He didn’t know why, exactly, but it did.

Charlotte.

Kenneth rejoined him at the back of the car. Did the man seem calmer? Was it relief at being caught? Paul gave him another look, but his eyes were drawn back to the bodies.

“Who are they?” Paul said, his voice shaking. “Tell me who they are.” He couldn’t look at them any longer, and turned away.

“I’m sorry about this,” Kenneth said.

Paul turned. “You’re sorry about—”

He saw the shovel Kenneth wielded, club-like, for no more than a tenth of a second before it connected with his skull.

Then everything went black.





Eight Months Later





One

The old man in the back of the SUV could have been taken for dead. He was slumped down in the leather seat, the top of his nearly bald, liver-spotted head propped up against the window of the driver’s-side back door.

Paul got up close to the Lincoln—it was that model the movie star drove in all those laughably pretentious commercials—and peered through the glass.

He was a small, thin man. As if sensing that he was being watched, he moved his head. The man slowly sat up, turned, blinked several times, and looked out at Paul with a puzzled expression.

“How you doing today?” Paul asked.

The man slowly nodded, then slipped back down in the seat and rested his head once more against the glass.

Paul carried on the rest of the way up the driveway to a door at the side of the two-story, Cape Cod–style, cedar shake–shingled house on Carrington Avenue. There was a separate entrance at the back end of the driveway. There was a small bronze plaque next to it that read, simply, ANNA WHITE, PH.D. He buzzed, then let himself in and took a seat in the waiting room, big enough for only two cushioned chairs.

He sifted through a pile of magazines. He had to hand it to Dr. White. In the three months he’d been coming to see her, the magazines—there were copies of Time and The New Yorker and Golf Digest and Golf Monthly, so maybe his therapist was an avid golfer— were always turning over. If there was a fault to be found, it was that she wasn’t scanning the covers closely enough. Was it a good idea, in a therapist’s office, to offer as reading material a newsmagazine with the headline “Paranoia: Should You Be Scared?”

But that was the one he opened. He was about to turn to the article when the door to Dr. White’s office opened.

“Paul,” she said, smiling. “Come on in.”

“Your dad’s in your car again.”

She sighed. “It’s okay. He thinks we’re going to go visit my mother at the home. He’s comfortable out there. Please, come in.”

Still clutching the magazine, he got up and walked into the doctor’s office. It wasn’t like a regular doctor’s space, of course. No examining table with a sheet of paper on it, no weigh scale, no eye chart, no cutaway illustration of the human body. But there were brown leather chairs, a glass-and-wood desk that looked like something out of the Herman Miller catalog with little on it but an open, silver laptop. There was a wall of bookshelves, restful paintings of the ocean or maybe Long Island Sound, and even a window with a view of one of Milford’s downtown parks.

He dropped into his usual leather chair as the doctor settled into one kitty-corner to him. She was wearing a knee-length skirt, and as she crossed her legs Paul made an effort not to look. Dr. White— early forties, brown hair to her shoulders, eyes to match, well packaged—was an attractive woman, but Paul had read about that so-called transference stuff, where patients fall in love with their therapists. Not only was that not going to happen, he told himself, he wasn’t about to give the impression it might.

He was here to get help. Plain and simple. He didn’t need another relationship to complicate the ones he already had.