Paul ran down to the front door. He picked up a shoe, opened the door, and stepped outside. He got down on his knees, and with the door open no more than four inches, he snaked his arm in, up to the elbow, then crooked it around and set it up against the back of the door.
It could be done, he thought. He had to admit he’d not checked exactly how close the shoe had been to the door. If it had been sitting out an inch or two, would he have noticed?
But wait.
How would Hitchens even know he needed to set that shoe back in that position? If he’d snuck into the house in the middle of the night, he might have heard the shoe move. The sole might have squeaked as it was pushed across the tile.
Minor details, Paul thought. Somehow, this Gavin asshole had figured it out.
While his rage continued to grow, Paul felt something else. There was relief. He’d come up with an answer to what had been going on, and it wasn’t that he was crazy.
That was good news.
But he was going to deliver some bad news to Gavin Hitchens.
Paul grinned. “I’m comin’ for ya, you motherfucker.”
_________________
THE HOUSE WAS EASY ENOUGH TO FIND. IT WAS A WHITE, TWO-STORY house with a double garage. A blue Toyota Corolla sat in the driveway. Paul parked two houses down and started walking back.
He had no plan.
Well, he wanted his goddamn keys back. He had that much of a plan.
Paul was still one lot away when he saw him. Gavin Hitchens came out the front door, heading for the Corolla.
Paul picked up his pace. He cut across the lawn, the grass underfoot silencing his approach.
Hitchens reached the driver’s door and was about to open it when Paul came up behind him, grabbed the back of his head with his outstretched palm, quickly gripped Hitchens’s hair, and drove his skull forward into the roof of the car.
Hitchens let out a cry.
Paul pulled his head back, barely noticing that he’d put a small dent into the roof of the Corolla.
“You bastard!” Paul said, driving Hitchens’s head into the car a second time. But he wasn’t able to do it with as much force this time. Hitchens was resisting. He managed to do half a turn, wanting to see who his attacker was.
“Fucker!” Paul said, spittle flying off his lip. “You sick fuck!”
Hitchens twisted, freed himself from Paul’s grasp. He made a halfhearted attempt to take a swing at Paul, but the blow to the head had disoriented him, and he slid halfway down the side of the car.
Paul brought one leg back and kicked Hitchens in the knee. Hitchens screamed and slid the rest of the way to the driveway.
Paul stood over Hitchens, who was now bleeding profusely from the forehead. “I know it was you,” Paul said. “I know what you did, and I know how you did it.”
Hitchens moaned. He looked up blearily and said, “Police . . .”
“Good idea,” Paul said. “You can tell them about breaking into my house, trying to drive me out of my fucking mind. Where are my keys? I want my goddamn keys.”
Hitchens managed to sit upright, his back against the front tire. “You’re in such deep shit,” he said.
“Nothing compared to what you’re in,” Paul said.
His phone started to ring inside his jacket.
“Breaking and entering, that’s what they’ll get you for,” Paul said. “And if there’s a charge for trying to drive someone out of his fucking mind, they’ll add that to the list.”
He felt a pounding in his chest. He wondered if he might give himself a heart attack. The thing was, though, it felt good. Paul hadn’t felt this good, this empowered, in a very long time.
When he looked down at Hitchens, he saw Hoffman, too.
The phone in his jacket continued to ring.
Paul finally dug it out of his pocket and saw that it was Anna. He put the phone to his ear.
“Yeah?”
“Paul?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Anna. You called. But listen, I found them.”
Paul blinked. “What?”
“Your keys. They’d fallen behind a chair. I just found them. Drop by anytime to pick them up.”
Twenty-Eight
A neighbor saw the whole thing and called the police.
Paul didn’t see the point in running. He was hardly going to lead the cops on a high-speed chase throughout Fairfield County. He sat on the curb in front of Hitchens’s home and waited for them to arrive. They got there about a minute after the ambulance.
The neighbor, a woman in her seventies, knelt next to Gavin, trying to comfort him.
“What kind of monster are you?” she shrieked at Paul. She stayed with Hitchens until the paramedics assessed him. When the police arrived, she pointed to Paul.
“He did it!”
Paul sat, arms resting on his knees, doing his best impression of someone who did not present a threat.
The officers approached. “Sir, would you stand up please?”
Not long after that, he was cuffed, thrown into the back of the cruiser, and on his way to the station.
_________________
HE WAS ALLOWED TO CALL CHARLOTTE WHEN HE GOT THERE.
“Do you know any lawyers?” he asked.
“Tons,” she said. “I’m in real estate.”
“It’s not a real estate lawyer I need.”
When Charlotte recovered from his news, she said she would find someone and meet him at the station.
Paul was placed in a cell to wait, which gave him plenty of time to think about a great many things.
Anyone else in his predicament might have been thinking about what charge awaited him. Would it be assault? Would it be something more serious, like attempted murder? Would his afternoon behind bars turn into six months or a year? Or more?
But Paul wasn’t thinking about any of that.
He was thinking about the typewriter.
Gavin Hitchens had not taken his keys. Gavin Hitchens had not broken into his house. And Gavin Hitchens had definitely not typed that message.
Which presented what one might call a bit of a mind fuck.
Hoffman’s typewriter had not been found. It was within the realm of possibility that the machine Charlotte had picked up at that yard sale was that typewriter.
And if it was . . .
Paul examined the tiny cell. A bench to sit on, a toilet bolted to the wall. It seemed so . . . restful in here. Charlotte and whatever lawyer she could find could take their time as far as he was concerned.
It was nice to have a place to contemplate things, uninterrupted.
So, if it was the same typewriter, Paul had to decide whether to think the unthinkable.
Were Catherine Lamb and Jill Foster trying to communicate with him through that typewriter? If so, what were they trying to say? What was the message?
What did they want from him?
This is crazy. They’ ll lock me up, but it won’t be in a place like this. It’ ll be a psych ward.
Why contact him? Maybe they’d have reached out to anyone who possessed this typewriter. (Paul made a mental note: when Charlotte found the previous owners, he’d ask if they’d noticed anything spooky about the Underwood. Maybe that was why they’d sold it.) But making a connection with Paul, who was directly linked to the women through Kenneth Hoffman, had to mean something.
Sitting in the cell, Paul had something of an epiphany. He needed to talk to more people. He needed to talk to everyone connected to this case, or at least try.
The dead women’s spouses. Other women Hoffman had affairs with. His wife, Gabriella. The more he learned, the more he might understand why messages were appearing in that typewriter.
_________________
CHARLOTTE SHOWED UP WITH A LAWYER NAMED ANDREW KILGORE, who didn’t look as though he’d seen his twenty-fifth birthday yet.
“Mr. Davis, I’ve arranged for your release but you’re going to have to appear for a hearing—”
“Sure, whatever, that’s fine,” Paul said as the cell door was opened and he was led, along with the lawyer, toward the exit.
“Mr. Davis, I’m going to need to sit down with you to discuss our options. Your wife tells me you’ve been under considerable strain and that you suffered a head injury eight months ago, which could be very useful to us—”
“I want to get out of here,” he said.
He found Charlotte waiting out front of the station. She threw her arms around him. Her smeared eye makeup suggested she’d been crying.
“Are you okay?” she asked.