A Noise Downstairs(99)

Leonard relaxed his grip on Charlotte’s neck. She slid an inch back down to the floor, and as Leonard took his hands away she dropped to her hands and knees, hacking and coughing. As she struggled to get air back in her lungs, Gabriella walked in her direction, stopping in front of her.

Charlotte looked up, her neck already purplish with bruising from Leonard’s grasp.

“What have you done to Bill?” she asked hoarsely.

“Don’t worry about him,” Gabriella said. “Worry about you.”

“I . . . I know you.”

“I think we met at faculty events once or twice,” Kenneth Hoffman’s wife said. “I’m Gabriella. And you are Charlotte.” Her eyes shifted in the direction of Bill’s body. “I don’t know him. Who is he?”

“Bill,” Charlotte said, her voice shaking. “Bill Myers.”

“A West Haven professor? I don’t recognize him.”

“No. We sell real estate together.”

“It looks like you do more than that together,” Gabriella said. “This is my son, Leonard.”

Leonard nodded.

“Most people call me Len,” he said.

Charlotte, fully able to breathe again, asked, “Is . . . is Bill dead?”

“Yes,” Gabriella said. “Leonard snapped his neck.”

Charlotte slowly got to her feet, then took one step back from Gabriella. Leonard hovered to one side like a pet gorilla awaiting instructions.

“What do you want?” Charlotte asked. “Why are you here?”

Gabriella waved her hand toward the Underwood. “That.”

“The typewriter?”

“Yes.”

“What . . . what about it?”

“Your husband went to visit Kenneth in prison with some ridiculous story about those women, the ones my husband was convicted of killing, trying to talk to him through this machine.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, her voice little more than a whisper.

“Paul gave Kenneth quite a scare. Not because of those messages. Those were laughable.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What I needed to see—to get—was that.” Again, she indicated the Underwood. “But when we came before, it wasn’t here.”

Charlotte’s eyes went wide. “You were here before?”

Gabriella smiled. “Your husband said the typewriter was in your car’s trunk, but I didn’t believe him. But I guess he wasn’t lying, because it wasn’t here. So we’ve come back. We were going to ask you for your car keys, but then we saw the typewriter sitting right here.”

“You saw . . . Paul?”

“Leonard and I just wanted to talk to him. About the typewriter, and the letters. We met him outside. He’d been out for an evening stroll.” Gabriella smiled. “Things didn’t quite go right. When he understood my concern, well, he became very agitated. And when Leonard here tried to calm him down, he ran off toward the beach.”

“Oh, my God,” Charlotte said. She looked at Gabriella’s lumbering son. “He didn’t kill himself. You killed him.”

Leonard’s look bordered on sorrowful. “I didn’t really mean to. I guess I held his head under the water a little too long.”

Gabriella sighed. “We took Paul’s keys and searched your house, but he wasn’t lying. The typewriter wasn’t here.”

“I still don’t . . . I don’t understand why . . .”

“As I said, those messages that the typewriter was supposedly spewing out were ridiculous. They gave Kenneth pause, for a moment, he was willing to admit that, but he figured it had to be some kind of joke. A trick. But,” Gabriella said slowly, “it is still possible— however remotely—that this is the real typewriter.”

“I don’t understand,” Charlotte whispered.

“Kenneth got in touch after Paul’s visit. Said I needed to act before Paul did something like ask the police to compare his notes to the ones Catherine and Jill wrote.”

She held some sheets of paper of her own. “So I just was doing a little comparing of my own.”

She waved one of them in front of Charlotte. “These are from some notes I made when I audited a West Haven philosophy class some years ago.” She smiled. “One of the perks of being married to a faculty member.” She looked off almost dreamily at a point in the distance. “I’ve always liked the feel of a real typewriter. So much more satisfying than a computer. Don’t you?”

Gabriella ended her reminiscing with a small shake of the head. She pointed to the Underwood. There was a piece of paper rolled into it, and a line of type.

“Remember ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’?” Gabriella asked.

Charlotte shook her head.

“You’re too young,” Gabriella said. “That’s what they’d always have you write to test a typewriter. A nice, crisp sentence. That’s what I was doing. That’s the noise you heard. I was about to compare my class notes to what I just typed here, but that was when your Mr. Myers came down.”

Charlotte struggled to piece together what was happening, how whatever she had set in motion was now blowing up in her face. Her eyes kept being drawn to Bill’s lifeless body.