A Noise Downstairs(98)

No reply.

“You’re freaking me out. Talk to me, for Christ’s sake.”

She slowly descended the stairs, step by step. Listening.

There wasn’t any sound coming from the kitchen. Even the typewriter had gone silent.

“Bill?”

As she went to step onto the kitchen floor, her hand reached for the light switch.

Standing there, directly in front of her, was a very tall, heavy-set man. Definitely not Bill. The first clue was that he was fully clothed.

The second was that he was wearing a name tag. It read: LEN.

“Hi,” he said, and then closed his meaty hands around her neck.

Charlotte barely had a moment to scream.





Sixty-One

It took three cups of tea—followed by two glasses of wine—before Anna was ready to do what she knew she had to do.

But now that she’d worked up her courage for a showdown with Charlotte Davis, Anna worried that she had left it too late.

It was dark out. It was after ten.

Chances were Charlotte was already in bed. With, or without, Bill Myers.

Whoa, Anna thought.

Why hadn’t she considered that possibility? That when and if she went to see Charlotte, Myers would be there.

She had to stop thinking that way. She was looking for excuses not to go.

I am going to do this.

And catching Charlotte off guard, possibly waking her up, well, so what? That might work to Anna’s advantage. The thing was, Anna knew she wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep tonight. So what if she kept someone else up, too?

As for Myers, she’d look for his car. If she drove over there and saw it in Charlotte’s driveway, she’d reassess at that point.

Charlotte might not even be home. She could be at Myers’s house. Would she go back there? She’d make that decision if and when she had to.

Anna went upstairs and rapped lightly on her father’s door.

“Hello?”

She pushed the door open. Frank was under the covers, in his pajamas.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m going to go do this thing I was telling you about. I’ll be back soon.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s late. Go back to sleep.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll tell you all about it in the morning. Rosie won’t be here. It’s too late for her to come over. You’ll be fine for a while, okay?”

Her father said sure.

Back downstairs, she pulled on a light jacket, turned off a few lights, and decided she would exit the house from the office wing. As she was passing through, she heard the familiar ding of an incoming email. She slipped in behind her desk and discovered not one new email, but five, from patients about rescheduled appointments.

Anna opened the datebook beside her computer, made a note of the new times for her clients, then wrote quick replies to confirm the changes. Then she slipped out the side door, locked it, jumped into her SUV, and headed out.

She rehearsed in her head the questions she was going to ask Charlotte. Were there ways she could trip the woman up? Get her to say things she didn’t want to say? While she’d been having her tea—not so much when she was drinking the wine—she’d scribbled some thoughts down on a paper napkin.

Not so much questions, but things to watch for, like the things people do when they lie.

Stalling by repeating a question. Excessive blinking. Long pauses. Coming up with overly complicated responses. Impersonal language—fewer references to I or other people by their actual names, so more use of him and her.

Of course, one of the other possible reactions from a liar would be to attack.

Anna was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.





Sixty-Two

Charlotte took a moment to place the large man who had her pinned to the wall with his hands around her neck.

She didn’t recognize him at first. She wasn’t used to seeing him outside his ice cream truck. But it took only a few seconds to remember him from the times she’d bought a cone from him. She also remembered this was Kenneth Hoffman’s son.

Leonard.

What was he doing here? Why was he in her house? Why was he trying to kill her? And where was Bill? What had happened to—

Oh God.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him. He lay on the floor to the right of the kitchen island. He was not moving, and his head seemed positioned at an odd angle to his shoulders, as though his neck had been twisted.

If he was breathing, Charlotte could see no sign.

She struggled to do any breathing of her own. She wanted to scream, but nothing would come out, so she tried to mouth some words.

“Stop,” she croaked. “Please stop . . . can’t breathe . . .”

She flailed pitifully against the man, trying to slap him with her hands, but it was like trying to repel a bear with a flyswatter. When Leonard pushed her up against the wall, he lifted her slightly, so her feet were only barely touching the floor. She couldn’t get any leverage to kick him.

Charlotte felt herself starting to pass out. Her brain was being starved of oxygen. Her eyes darted about the room, catching movement in the doorway to Paul’s small office.

There was someone standing there.

A woman.

“Not her, too, Leonard,” said Gabriella Hoffman. “We need to talk to her.”