A Noise Downstairs(84)

This was when they had to be the most on their guard.

Charlotte was already worried that she’d made a mistake, going out and getting all those empty boxes at the liquor store. The way Dr. White looked at them had made Charlotte nervous. She hoped she’d explained herself well. The truth was, she’d been itching to start packing up Paul’s stuff from the moment she and Bill had decided what they were going to do.

But they had to be careful.

Which was exactly why she had been declining Bill’s calls since Paul’s death. It didn’t look good for them to be talking. Sure, the occasional phone conversation could be explained, should they ever be asked. But the smarter course was to not talk on the phone at all. That was also how Charlotte had wanted it in the months leading up to Paul’s so-called death by misadventure. Even though Bill and Charlotte worked together, only so many calls could be attributed to real estate.

There were plenty of opportunities for them to talk at work. In person. Those kinds of interactions didn’t leave a trail.

And, of course, there were all those empty houses.

Not every home that went on the market was occupied. Many people who’d put their places up for sale had already moved. Some were homes that developers had built on spec, awaiting a first buyer.

When you slipped into a house like that for a fuck, you didn’t have to worry about the homeowner coming back early.

Most of these empty houses had been “staged.” Furniture was moved in to make the place look lived-in. Books were put on shelves. Magazines fanned out on coffee tables. Pictures hung on the walls. A bowl of fruit—preferably plastic—on the kitchen table. Maybe one bedroom was done up as a nursery, another as a teenager’s room, with sports posters on the wall. And they’d dress up a master bedroom, too, with a king-size bed and fancy linens and assorted throw pillows.

Charlotte and Bill had access to many such places.

Not only was it a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a hotel—and to play it safe they’d have had to go to one well outside Milford—you didn’t have to use a credit card. Nor did you have to worry about why your car was parked out front of your coworker’s house.

They often joked about how much more convenient it was to have an affair when you worked in real estate.

The other thing they joked about, at least up until Kenneth Hoffman had nearly killed him, was how nice it had been of Paul to bring them together. Putting in a call to his old college friend, now working in real estate, to see if he had any advice for his wife, new to the whole business of buying and selling houses.

“Send her around,” Bill said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Charlotte went to the agency for a visit. Bill took an instant liking to her and was very interested to learn that she had been, at one time, an aspiring actress.

“That’ll serve you well here,” he told her. “You’ll find yourself working for a seller and a buyer, working both sides, and they both have to believe all you care about is getting the very best deal you can for them. Some performance skills will come in very handy.”

She saw something she liked in Bill, too.

She liked all the things he was that Paul was not. More self-assured, more handsome, in better shape. And even though he had one failed marriage behind him, there were no kids, and his former wife was remarried and living in France. Paul, Charlotte soon came to understand, had enough baggage to fill a 747’s cargo hold. There was always something with Paul’s ex. Working out the visits with Josh, the plans that were always changing. Having to listen to Paul complain about Walter’s superficiality and name-dropping. Paul’s real complaint, Charlotte knew, was that Hailey had traded up. She’d found a go-getter, a man with ambitions, a man who did not spend his evenings grading essays and writing next week’s lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson but was out meeting with company bigwigs and sports team owners about how to raise their profiles.

It was Charlotte who now had the guy who spent his evening grading essays and writing next week’s lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson.

And was there anything wrong with that? she sometimes asked herself. Maybe not. Unless you’d suddenly woken up to the fact that you wanted more.

It was Bill who’d reawakened her, who had shaken her out of her complacency.

There was an energy about him. When he wasn’t working deals, he was taking a long weekend to London with some woman he’d just met. Or driving up to Quebec to ski and returning with a bad back, and it hadn’t been on the slopes where he’d damaged it. Another weekend, with another woman, it was hot air ballooning.

He seemed . . . electric.

God, and the man even owned more than one suit.

Bill was always looking to try something new.

I could be something new, Charlotte thought.

One time, she said to Paul, “Have you ever thought about packing a bag full of Agent Provocateur lingerie and just heading into New York and booking into The Plaza and fucking our brains out?”

And Paul had said, “Agent Who?”

So one day, hosting an open house with Bill where no one had shown up for the better part of an hour, she tried the same question.

He looked at her and said, “Tonight works.”

They didn’t make it to The Plaza. At least, not that night.

There was the ritual of self-recrimination the first few times. Maybe they thought it was expected of them.