A Noise Downstairs(77)

“Oh please, no, no. He couldn’t have. He told me he was going to be okay. He promised me.”

“He told you he’d be okay?” the detective asked.

“It’s a mistake,” Charlotte said defiantly. “It can’t be him.”

“Well, I’ll want to address that shortly, Mrs. Davis. But you seem to be suggesting that maybe your husband was going through a difficult time.”

“He . . . he has been. He’s been under a great deal of stress. And . . . other things.”

“What kind of other things?”

Charlotte began to ramble. “Dr. White, she talked about admitting him, but he didn’t want to go to the hospital, he wanted to see if he’d feel better, and now that the typewriter was out of the house and wouldn’t be sending him any more messages he probably thought things really would get better but now if—”

“Mrs. Davis, slow down. What’s this about a typewriter? And you said Dr. White? Anna White?”

Charlotte became angry. “Why are you asking me these questions? Whose ID did you find?”

“We found several items of identification for a Paul Davis in the wallet,” Arnwright said gently. “Some with photos. The reason I ask about your husband’s state of mind is, as I said, he was fully dressed. He wasn’t in a swimsuit or anything like that. It’s the early stages of the investigation, but it appears he may have simply walked out into the water.”

“Oh, God,” Charlotte said again. “No, please, no.” She started shaking her head back and forth.

Arnwright put a hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Davis, I am so very sorry . . .”

“Is that him?” she said, pointing toward the street.

Arnwright spun around. Two male attendants were rolling a gurney to the back of an ambulance. A body was atop it, draped in a sheet.

“Paul!” she screamed, and started running.

“Mrs. Davis, please, wait!” Arnwright said, jogging after her. But Charlotte had a good head start.

“Stop!” she shouted at the attendants. One of the two men looked her way and mouthed shit.

They stopped wheeling the gurney as they opened the back doors of the ambulance, allowing Charlotte a chance to come up alongside it and grip it by the side rails.

“Is it him?” she asked, clearly unable to bring herself to pull down the sheet and reveal the face. “Is it?”

The attendants looked to Arnwright for guidance. Everyone went silent as the detective decided what should be done.

He nodded.

The attendant slowly pulled the sheet far enough back to reveal the dead person’s head.

It was a man, hair wet and matted, the face dirtied with beach sand. But his facial features were undamaged, and even in this condition, he was easy enough to identify as Paul Davis.

“No!” Charlotte said.

As her knees buckled, she collapsed onto the street.





Forty-Six

When Anna White found Detective Joe Arnwright at her front door the next day she thought he must have more news about Gavin Hitchens. He’d made a brief stop at her office a day earlier to confirm that Paul Davis, who’d been arrested for assaulting Hitchens, was also one of her clients.

Anna was between appointments and making some notes when she heard the doorbell to the main house.

“Detective,” she said. “Come in.”

He smiled grimly. She did not like that look.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“You recall we talked the other day about Paul Davis,” he said. “In connection with Mr. Hitchens.”

“Yes,” she said regretfully. “A terrible situation all around. Has something happened?”

“I’m afraid he died last night.”

“Gavin Hitchens?”

“No, Mr. Davis.”

Anna stood stock-still for five seconds. Slowly, she raised both hands and placed them over her mouth.

“Oh, God,” she said, lowering her hands and looking for something for support. She moved to a nearby chair and put one hand on the back of it to steady herself. “This is terrible. This is awful. What happened?”

“A drowning. That’s what everything points to.”

Anna looked dumbstruck. “A drowning? How could he have drowned? I don’t even think he owned a boat.”

Joe Arnwright said, “It appears Mr. Davis took his own life.”

Anna’s body wavered. “I need to sit down,” she said. “Come to my office.” Once they were there, she took the chair she occupied when working with her clients. Joe Arnwright sat across from her.

“This is just . . . I can’t believe it,” Anna said. She bit on the end of her thumb. “This can’t be.” She looked imploringly at the detective. “Are you sure it wasn’t some sort of accident? Did he fall off the pier? Something like that?”

“His wife told us he’d been seeing you for a period of time, that he’d been deeply troubled about a number of things. And, of course, I know now that he was nearly killed by Kenneth Hoffman eight months ago. That there was a lot of fallout from that.”

“Yes,” she said. “We even went up to visit him, this week, in prison.”

Arnwright looked stunned. “You did? Why?”