A Noise Downstairs(97)

“I might be hungrier than I am sleepy,” he said.

“Oh shut up,” she said. “I’m exhausted and you should be, too.”

“My dick could sure use a nap,” he said.

“Close your eyes,” she said again.

He did. In less than a minute, he could hear soft breathing from her pillow. And shortly after that, he succumbed.

But it seemed to him that he had been asleep only a few minutes when his eyes reopened. He glanced at the clock. It was only 10:14. He’d been asleep barely fifteen minutes.

Something had woken him up.

A sound.

It had sounded like—

No, no way.

He propped himself up on an elbow and listened. The only thing to be heard was Charlotte’s breathing in and out.

It was nothing, he thought. Whatever he thought he’d heard, it had to have been part of a dream.

He put his head back down on the pillow, closed his eyes.

And then immediately opened them when he heard the sound again.

Chit chit. Chit. Chit chit chit.

From downstairs.





Sixty

Wake up!” Bill whispered to Charlotte.

She grunted, opened her eyes. “What?”

“Shh!” He had a finger to his lips. “Listen.”

Chit. Chit chit chit.

She blinked a couple of times. “It’s nothing,” she said groggily.

“You don’t hear that?”

She nodded. “It’s the phone. You must not have changed the ringtone.”

Bill considered that. “Okay, maybe, yeah. I should have tested it.”

“Fix it in the morning,” she said, putting her head back down onto the pillow.

“But wait,” he said. “Someone has to call it for it to ring.”

Charlotte raised her head again, turned to look at her bedside table. “Where the hell—”

She shifted over to the edge of the bed, looked down to the floor, felt around with her hand. “There it is,” she said.

“What?”

“My phone. I must have knocked it off the table. I guess it called you.”

That placated Bill for only a second. “Your phone’s not going to make a call just by hitting the floor.”

“What about pocket calls? Isn’t that kind of how those happen?”

In the few seconds they’d been whispering, there had been no more sounds of typing.

“Maybe,” Bill said.

“Or,” she said, “someone else called the phone. It didn’t have to be me. You never got a wrong number? Or a telemarketer’s call? Even on your cell? They don’t have to know your actual number. They just keep dialing and sooner or later they hit yours.”

“We planned for that,” he reminded her. “We programmed the phone to only ring when you called it. Otherwise, it was on mute.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “So maybe there was a glitch. It’s accepting other calls now.”

“I’m gonna go down and power it off completely,” he said.

She grabbed onto his arm. “Stay here.”

He allowed her to hold on to him. He dropped his head onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

Chit chit. Chit chit chit. Chit.

“Oh, fuck it,” he said, and threw back the covers.

Charlotte sighed. “I really was asleep, you know.”

“Since I’m going down, you want anything?” he asked, pulling on his boxers.

“You’re still hungry?”

“We didn’t exactly have dinner.”

“I guess not. Bring me up some crackers and cream cheese or something.”

“That’s it?”

“Jesus, just go.”

She flopped back down on the bed and pulled the covers up over her head. Within seconds, she felt herself falling back to sleep.

And then it was her turn to be awakened by a now familiar sound.

Chit chit. Chit. Chit chit chit.

And then:

Ding!

She opened her eyes and sat up in bed. Charlotte reached over for Bill, but her hand hit mattress. She patted around, confirmed that he was not there.

Ding? she thought.

That was the sound a typewriter made when you reached the end of the line. It was the signal to hit the carriage return. That had never been part of the ringtone programmed into the phone.

That sounded like a real typewriter.

Like the typewriter downstairs.

So what the hell was Bill doing playing with that damn thing at—she looked at the clock—10:34 P.M.

Boy, she’d fallen back asleep quickly. But even though Bill had not been gone long, all he had to do was mute a phone and grab something to eat. Why stay downstairs and goof around with the typewriter?

“God,” she said, slipping out from under the covers. As she pulled on an oversize T-shirt, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had traded a man for whom she’d lost all love for a man who was an enormous pain in the ass.

“Hey!” she called out as she headed for the bedroom door. “What the hell are you doing?”

As she approached the top of the stairs she noticed there were no lights on in the kitchen.

“Bill?” she called. “What’s going on?”