“Better,” she said, holding up her bandaged finger and offering a crooked smile. “You’re my new hero.”
Twenty-One
“I gave Bill shit today,” Charlotte said over dinner.
“What for?”
“Seriously? Letting you get into a squash court with him?”
“Oh, that.”
“I don’t know who’s the bigger idiot, you or him.”
Paul smiled. “Tough call.”
She gave him a sharp look. “It’s not funny.”
They moved on to other things. She asked if he had the ticket for the dry cleaning. She’d be going by there tomorrow and could pick it up.
“What dry cleaning?” he asked.
“The dry cleaning I asked you to drop off.”
“You didn’t ask me to drop off any dry cleaning.”
“This morning, I said to you, please drop off the dry cleaning. I pointed to the bag on the chair in our room. And you said, no problem, you’d do it on the way to your session.”
Paul stared at her. “No, you didn’t.”
Charlotte said, “Maybe this will help you remember. I said, tell them to be careful with that black dress. And you said, the one that looks like it’s painted on? And I said, why, you got some paint remover? Does that help?”
Paul’s face fell. “I don’t remember any of that.”
Charlotte tried to look upbeat. “It’s no big deal. I’ll drop it off tomorrow.”
To his surprise, Paul slept well. Maybe tackling the Hoffman business was having an impact, Volvo incident aside.
When he woke up at five minutes after seven, he heard water running. He threw back the covers and traipsed into the bathroom. Charlotte stood naked behind the frosted shower door, her head arched back to allow the water to splash across her face.
“Hey,” he said loudly to be heard over the water.
She turned the taps off and opened the door far enough to retrieve a towel hanging on a hook.
“When did you come to bed?” she asked. “I waited for you for about twenty minutes before I finally went to sleep.”
“I stayed up for a while, that’s all,” he said. “I was doing some writing.”
Paul studied his face in the mirror, examined his eyes. Charlotte dried off behind the glass, then opened the door and stepped out, the towel wrapped around her.
“But you slept through the rest of the night?” she asked.
“I did,” he said. “I feel kind of logy, but I slept pretty good.”
Paul knew what she was really asking. Had he heard anything in the night? He ran his hand over his bristly chin and neck. He opened a drawer, brought out a razor and shaving cream.
“You want to start the coffee while I get dressed?” she asked when he was done shaving.
He nodded wearily and, after another look at himself in the mirror, said, “It’s gonna take more than coffee to fix this.”
He slipped out of the bathroom and headed to the floor below. Charlotte took off her towel, dried her hair as best she could, and retrieved a handheld dryer from the cabinet below the sink. She plugged it in, flipped the switch, the small room suddenly sounding like the inside of a jet engine. She aimed the device at her head and let her hair fly.
Less than a minute later, Paul stood at the bathroom door, his face drained of color. She turned the machine off.
“For Christ’s sake, didn’t you hear me?” he said.
She waved the dryer in front of him. “With this on?”
“Come downstairs.”
“What is it?”
“Just come.”
She ducked into the bedroom to grab her robe, threw it on, and quickly knotted the sash. She ran after her husband, who was already halfway down the stairs.
“What’s going on?” Charlotte asked.
He led her straight to the small office, stood just outside the door, and pointed to the typewriter.
“Look,” he said.
“Look at what?”
“The paper,” he said. “Look at the paper.”
From where she stood, she could make out the letters. A partial line of them on the sheet of paper Paul had rolled into the machine a few days earlier.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
She slowly stepped into the room, bent over in front of the black metal typewriter, close enough to read the words that had somehow appeared between the time they’d gone to bed and now: We typed our apologies like we were asked but it didn’t make any difference.
Twenty-Two
“I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s possible someone got into the house without our knowing it, so we need to be on our guard. I debated whether to even tell you, because I didn’t want to upset you.”
Frank White looked at his daughter with weary eyes. “Someone broke in?”
Anna reached across the kitchen table and put both hands over his. “I don’t know. He might have been just trying to rattle me.”
“Who is this?”
“One of my patients. Well, a former one,” she said. “It was something he said yesterday.”
“Is he the one you think sent the police here?”
“I don’t have any proof, but yes, that’s what I think. The police have already talked to him about the other incident. But they don’t have any real proof for that one, either. But some things you just know. I’ve been through the whole house. I’ve checked the windows, the sliding glass doors, everything, and they all look secure.”
Frank nodded slowly, then said, “We need to tell Joanie all this.”
“Of course,” Anna said.
“But don’t make too big a deal of it. I don’t want to worry her needlessly.”
“I’ll look after it.”
Her father smiled. “Or I could tell her when we go see her.”
She smiled. “Sure.”
“What did you do to your finger?” he asked, looking down at the Band-Aid and lightly touching it.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I broke a glass yesterday.” Anna paused. “There’s something else on my mind.”
Frank waited.
“It’s a bit of a professional dilemma,” she said. “I have a feeling that this one patient might be a threat to my others. I’m wondering whether I need to warn them.”
Frank’s eyes seemed to grow vacant. Anna knew he was unlikely to solve her problem, but airing her concerns out loud might help just the same. “I’ve already reported this man to the police, and some of what he’s done is a matter of public record. So I think the ethical concerns are minimal.”
Frank nodded, then pushed himself back from the table and stood. “I’m gonna hit a few balls. Let me know when it’s time to go.”
She gave him a sad smile. “Okay, Dad.”
Twenty-Three
“Oh, my God,” Charlotte said, staring at the page in the typewriter, then whirling around to look back into the kitchen. “Someone really is here.”
“No,” Paul said, gripping her shoulders. “No one’s here now, and I don’t see any evidence that anyone’s been here at all. I’ve checked doors and windows. I’ve been through the whole place. I’m certain no one got in here after we went back upstairs.”
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“Come with me,” he said. He walked her over to the stairs that led down to the front door. “Look.”
“What am I looking at?”
“That shoe.”
There was a single dark blue running shoe on the floor by the door.
“I’ve been doing that the last few nights. One shoe, up against the door. If someone opened it, the shoe would have moved.”
Charlotte stared, dumbfounded, at the shoe, then at Paul. “So what’s going on? I don’t understand.”