A Noise Downstairs(64)

“Even Charles Manson had his admirers,” she said evenly.

“Ooh, that stings,” he said. He looked down at the envelope on the table, and then to Paul. “So why are you here?”

“Three reasons, I guess,” he said slowly, building up to it. “It’s been a rough eight months. There’s the physical recovery of course. That’s been hard enough. But there’s the mental one, too. You haunt me, Kenneth. You come to me more nights than not. I’ve been looking for ways to deal with that, and believed one way would be to meet with you. To sit down with you. To remind myself that you’re not some, I don’t know, all-powerful evil force, but just a man. Nothing more. And seeing you here has helped me already. You’re a shell of what you used to be. You don’t look like you’d be much of a threat to anyone.” Paul leaned forward. “You’re broken, Kenneth. You’re a sad, broken man who’s tried to take his own life. So tonight, when I go to sleep, that’s the image of you I’ll take with me. Not the man who tried to kill me, but a pitiful, beaten man.”

Kenneth held Paul’s gaze. “Glad to be able to help in that regard. Number two?”

“I wanted to ask why. Why did a man I thought I knew do something so utterly horrible? What happened?” Paul tapped his own temple. “What snapped in here to make you do what you did? Or do you even know?”

Kenneth appeared to take the question seriously. “You don’t think I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times since it happened? You know what I think? I think that inside of all of us—you, me, even you, Dr. White—is a devil just dying to break out. Most of us, we know how to keep him penned up. We lock him away in a personal jail with bars of morality. But sometimes, he’s able to pry those bars apart, just enough to slip out. And if he’s been in there a long time, when he does get out, he wants to make up for lost time.” He smiled. “Does that answer your question?”

“No,” Paul said. “But it’s probably as close as we’re going to get.”

Kenneth smiled. “And number three?”

Anna glanced over at Paul and the envelope under his palm.

Paul said, “Remember yard sales? Driving around the neighborhood, people putting out all their junk to sell.”

“Of course. I haven’t been in here forever.”

“Charlotte picked up something interesting the other day at a sale in Milford.”

“Okay.”

“An old typewriter. An Underwood.”

Kenneth blinked. “So?”

“It was an Underwood that you made Catherine and Jill type their apologies on, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Hoffman said. “It was.”

“I’m going to tell you a story you’re not going to believe, but I don’t care. You may laugh, but I don’t give a shit. The typewriter that’s sitting in my house is, I’m certain, the typewriter you made Catherine and Jill use before you killed them.”

Hoffman leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He looked dumbstruck for several seconds, then chuckled.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “It was never found.”

“Well, someone found it. Not the police, I grant you that. But someone found it.”

“Bullshit. I tossed it into a Dumpster. It would have been picked up the next day. It’s long gone. It’s buried in a landfill.”

“No,” Paul said.

He turned back the flap on the envelope and pulled out the pages. He set them out for display, one at a time, for Hoffman to read. He studied each sheet as it was placed before him.

“What the hell are these?”

“Messages. From the women you killed.”

Kenneth looked up from the pages into Paul’s eyes. “What?”

“They’ve been showing up in that typewriter. All by themselves.”

Kenneth tilted his head to the right, then the left, almost in the manner of a dog that can’t make sense of what it’s seeing.

“This is some kind of joke.”

“Not a joke.”

Kenneth laughed, but it sounded forced. “No, really. This”—he tapped his index finger on one of the pages—“is complete and total bullshit.”

Paul slowly shook his head. He noticed Anna had leaned back some from the table. This was his show.

“I wish it were a joke. I was skeptical at first, too. I heard the typing in the night, when the only ones in the house were Charlotte and me. I’ll admit, I had to consider alternative explanations for a while. One, that someone was breaking in and doing it. Two, that I was losing my mind and writing these myself without even realizing it. But I’ve discounted both those theories. And I believe Dr. White here is with me on that one, am I right?”

Paul looked at Anna, waiting for a reassuring nod that did not come.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I was left with only one possible explanation. That there are powers out there beyond our understanding, and that Catherine and Jill are reaching out. Looking for answers.”

“You haven’t forgotten what I taught, have you, Paul? Math, physics? I dealt in the world of the rational. And what you’re saying is nuts.”

“It would be nuts for messages like these to show up in a typewriter that was not the one you used.”