A Noise Downstairs(48)
“Someone named Hitchens.”
Anna’s face fell. “Oh my God no.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have—I wanted to warn him but I never thought—”
“Warn Paul about what?”
“Please, tell me what happened.”
Charlotte told Anna what she’d been able to learn from Paul and the police. “He has this crazy idea this total stranger got into our house. Or at least, he did, until he got some call from you.”
“I’d found Paul’s keys, in my office. He must have thought Hitchens had them.”
Charlotte wiped a tear from her cheek. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Lately, Paul’s been so . . . I was going to try and make an appointment with you anyway, to talk about him. But then, when this happened . . .”
“I can’t discuss my patients,” Anna explained. “Not even with their spouses.”
Charlotte nodded quickly. “Of course, I understand that. But I have to tell you what’s been going on.”
“I really don’t know that—”
“Please. I thought Paul was getting better, but these last few days, he’s getting worse. He’s losing it.”
Anna hesitated, then said, “Go on.”
“He’s hearing things in the middle of the night. Things that I’m not hearing. Like someone tapping away on an old typewriter I bought him. And now he’s finding”—she put air quotes around the word—“messages in the typewriter he thinks are coming from these two women Kenneth Hoffman murdered. And he’s already told you about the nightmares, right?”
She replied with a cautious, “He has.”
“I don’t know what to think. Messages from the dead?” She shook her head, reached into her purse for a tissue, and blotted up more tears from her cheeks, then her eyes. “Unless you believe in ghosts, which I don’t, the only possible explanation is that he’s writing these messages himself.”
Charlotte’s chin quivered. “What should I do? I’m so worried about him. He’s had such a tough year. The nightmares, the physical recovery. I thought maybe his idea of diving right into what happened to him, writing about it, might help, but it’s having the opposite effect. I think writing about it is . . . it’s like he’s being dragged into some black hole.”
“I’ll talk to him. I’ll bring him in for some extra sessions.”
“I’m so worried that he—you don’t think there’s any chance he’d do anything, you know, to harm himself, do you?”
Anna’s brow furrowed. “What have you observed?”
Charlotte hesitated. “I don’t know. Nothing I can put my finger on exactly. But he’s been down so long, and now, he’s having . . . are they delusions? I don’t know what else to call them. What’s next? That message in the typewriter, it’s like a text version of hearing voices. What if the next message tells him to kill himself?”
“If I see anything that leads me to think your husband would harm himself I’ll take the appropriate steps.”
“I mean,” Charlotte continued, “they are delusions, right? I mean, are they delusions if he’s doing it deliberately?”
“What are you getting at?”
“The noises he claims to be hearing, the typed message, at first I was thinking it was all in his head, that even if he’s writing the messages, he’s doing it unconsciously, he doesn’t know he’s doing it. But what if he does know? What am I dealing with then? Why would he put on an act like that? Is he trying to make me crazy?”
“I can’t think of any reason why he would do that,” Anna said.
“So then is it a hallucination?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has he been prescribed something that would be messing with his head? Some kind of weird side effect?”
“No.”
Charlotte was shredding the tissue in her hand. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help him.”
Anna asked her to wait a moment. She went to her office, grabbed the keys she had been holding for Paul, and gave them to Charlotte when she returned to the front of the house.
“You don’t have to take all this on yourself,” Anna told her. “That’s what I’m here for. To help Paul through this period. We need to give him some time.”
“Please don’t tell him I was here.”
“Why don’t you tell him? It might actually mean a lot to him, to know that you’re this concerned.”
“I don’t know,” she said, more to herself than Anna. “I just don’t know.”
Charlotte turned for the door, then stopped. “When I said I didn’t believe in ghosts, you didn’t respond to that. I’m guessing, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen everything in your line of work. Have you ever encountered anything that would suggest there’s anything to, you know, messages from the . . .” Her cheeks went red, as though she were too embarrassed to complete the sentence. “What I’m trying to say is, you’ve never seen anyone actually get a message from the beyond.”
Anna offered a smile. “Not in my experience.”