“What the fuck are you looking at?” Paul said, and went back to his coffee.
Seventeen
The following morning, more than twenty-four hours after it had all happened, Frank White still found himself trembling at the memory of it.
Anna, who had canceled all her appointments for the previous day but expected to return to work today, was sitting with her father at the kitchen table, stroking his hand. He’d hardly touched the scrambled eggs she had made for him.
“It’s okay, Dad.”
He nodded, slipped his hand away from hers and picked up his fork. “This looks good,” he said.
“There’s ketchup there if you want it.”
The doorbell rang. Frank’s entire body stiffened.
“It’s okay. It’s someone from the police.” She did half an eye roll. “Someone I’m expecting from the police. Who can maybe answer a few questions for us. Would you be okay here on your own for a few minutes?”
“Of course,” he said, a tiny bit of egg stuck to his lower lip. “I’m not a child.”
Anna smiled and, considering what he had just said, resisted the temptation to pick up his napkin and wipe his mouth.
Frank said, “I thought they were going to shoot me. I thought they were going to shoot you.”
“I know. But it didn’t happen. You’re okay and I’m okay.”
The doorbell rang again.
“Neither of us has a scratch on us.” She gave him another smile, hoping she could coax one out of him. “Never a dull moment around here, right?”
He nodded.
“And there’s more coffee if you want it.”
Finally, a smile from her father. “I could probably use something a bit stronger.”
She got up and left the kitchen. She opened the front door and found a short, heavyset black man in his forties standing there. His bushy black mustache made up for the few strands of hair he had on his head. He wore a sport jacket, dark blue shirt and tie, and jeans. He was ready with a badge to display for Anna.
“Hi,” he said. “Detective Joe Arnwright. Milford Police.”
“Come in,” she said.
“How are you today?” he asked, taking a seat in the living room. It wasn’t a polite greeting. He was clearly asking how she was compared to the day before.
“My father’s still very upset. I’m still very upset.”
Arnwright nodded sympathetically. “Of course.”
“They stormed in here,” she said. “We were asleep.”
“To be fair, they managed to open a window and came into the house very quietly in an effort—”
“Don’t you people do something to confirm that what someone’s telling you is true?”
“Dr. White, we’ve—”
“My father gets up to take a pee and finds men with guns in the hallway. It’s a wonder you didn’t give him a heart attack, let alone shoot him.”
Arnwright nodded patiently. “Their information, as you know, was that a man had already shot his wife and was going to shoot his daughter next. That’s what our officers believed they were coming into. They needed to assess the situation as quickly as possible to eliminate any threat. And that threat, they would have presumed, was against you. The daughter.”
“You were conned,” Anna said.
“I’m not disputing that.”
“They made my father lie on the floor and pointed guns at his head!” Anna said through gritted teeth. She managed to convey her anger without raising her voice. She did not want her father to hear all this. “An old man! With dementia!”
“I understand that you’re—”
“You understand? That’s encouraging. My father and I came this close to getting killed.”
“I don’t believe that’s the case. The members of that team are very professional.”
Anna took a second to compose herself, to go in another direction. “Have you arrested him?”
“Mr. Hitchens, you mean.”
“Who else would I mean?”
“We have interviewed him, yes.”
Anna eyed him warily. “And?”
“We’ve interviewed him and we are investigating,” he said. “We believe the 9-1-1 call was placed from a cell phone, a kind of throwaway one they call a burner that—”
“I know what a burner is. I watch TV.”
“We’re going to try and find out where that burner was purchased, then see if we can determine who the buyer was.”
“He didn’t have the phone on him? Did you search him?”
“As I said, we are investigating,” Arnwright said.
“What did the caller sound like? The one who called 9-1-1?”
“It sounded like an elderly man. But there are all sorts of voice changer apps out there. Did Mr. Hitchens ever threaten to do something like this to you? A crank call of this nature.”
“No. But it’s his style. My father’s suffering from dementia. Hitchens would just love to scare a confused, old man.”
“We need a little more than that,” Arnwright said.
Anna sighed. “I think he might have killed a dog, too.”
Arnwright, pen in hand, looked ready to take down details. “Go on.”
She bit her lip. “I can’t... I don’t have any proof of anything.”
Arnwright put the pen away and stood. “Again, I’m sorry about what happened here. I’ll let you know if there are any developments.”
Anna showed him to the door. She went into the kitchen to see how her father was, but he was not there.
“Dad?” she called out.
She went upstairs to his room, expecting to find him on his rowing machine. But he wasn’t there either.
She thought she heard a muted whack.
Anna went to her father’s bedroom window, which looked out onto the backyard. There he was, golf club in hand — it looked like a driver — swinging at half a dozen balls he had dropped onto the well-manicured lawn, except for those spots where he had done some serious divots.
It was him, she told herself. I know it was him.
Eighteen
Paul was ready to begin.
He’d typed up plenty of notes, copied and pasted paragraphs from online news accounts of the double murder, but now he was ready to take that leap. To write the first sentence of whatever it was he was going to write. Memoir? Novel? A true-crime story? Who knew?
What Paul did know was that however the story came together, one thing was certain: it was his story.
And so he typed his first sentence:
Kenneth Hoffman was my friend.
Paul looked at the five words on his laptop screen. He hit the ENTER key to bring the cursor down a line. And he wrote: Kenneth Hoffman tried to murder me.
That seemed as good a place to start as any. From that springboard, he jumped straight into the story of that night. How, while returning from a student theatrical presentation at West Haven, he’d spotted Hoffman’s Volvo station wagon driving erratically down the Post Road.
About a thousand words in, Paul started finding the process therapeutic. The words flowed from his fingertips as quickly as he could type them. At one point he glanced at the bulky Underwood beside the laptop and said, “Like to see you crank out this shit this fast.”
When he got to the part where he saw the two dead women in the back of Kenneth’s car, Paul paused only briefly, took a deep mental breath, and kept on writing. He took himself to the point where the shovel crashed into his skull.
And then he stopped.
He felt simultaneously drained and elated. He had done it. He had jumped into the deep end of the cold pool, gotten used to it, and kept on swimming.