The latest message read:
Blood was everywhere. What makes someone do something so horrible?
He stumbled back out of the room.
I did not do this, he told himself. I did not do this. I have no memory of doing this. I wasn’t even here. There’s no way I— A loud ping rang out from inside his jacket, startling him. He took out his phone, brought the screen to life.
He’d received an email. He opened it, saw that it was from Gwen Stainton of the New Haven Star.
It read:
Dear Mr. Davis:
I thought I recognized your name as soon as I saw your email address. I covered the Hoffman double homicide from the very beginning and can tell you that the typewriter used in the case was never recovered. What makes you ask?
Sincerely,
Twenty-Six
Paul’s mind raced.
If he had not written this note and left it for himself — as Charlotte would probably theorize if she were here — and if those two dead women really were not trying to connect with him, then there remained only one possible explanation.
Someone really was getting into the house.
But the house had been locked when he got back here. He clearly remembered sliding the key in, turning back the dead bolt.
Could someone have come in through the garage, then entered the house through the interior door that connected the two?
Paul ran downstairs, went out the front door, and tried the handle on the garage door. He couldn’t turn it. It was locked as well.
He went back into the house, checked the balcony doors off the living room and the bedroom, in case somehow someone had scaled the wall. But those doors were not only locked, they were also prevented from being slid open by wood sticks in the tracks.
No one could have gotten into this house.
He was sure of it.
He returned to the kitchen, then went back into his study long enough to grab the laptop that was sitting next to the typewriter, which he brought out to the kitchen island. He pulled up a chair. He could not bring himself to remain in his tiny office. He was, at this moment, too freaked-out to be in there with that relic. The very thought of going back into that closet-size space made him feel short of breath.
He thought of that movie, the one with paranormal in the title, where they set up the camera in the bedroom. In the morning, the couple living in the house saw all these freaky things happening while they’d been asleep. Covers being pulled off them, doors opening and closing.
Except, Paul reminded himself, that had been a movie.
This was for real.
He thought back to the moments before he and Charlotte had left to find the house where she had bought the Underwood. Was it possible he’d written this line on the typewriter seconds before they left? But he wasn’t even remotely asleep at that point. He’d been up for hours.
“I didn’t do it,” he said under his breath. “I’m sure I didn’t do it.”
He opened the mail program on his laptop to take another read of the message he’d first seen on his phone, the one from Gwen Stainton, saying that the Hoffman typewriter had never been recovered.
“What makes you ask?” she’d written before signing her name.
He found the New Haven Star page he’d looked at earlier and called the main phone number.
“New Haven Star,” a recording said. “If you know the extension you’re calling, please enter it now. If you had a problem this morning with the delivery of your paper, please press one. If you would like to register a vacation, suspend delivery, or cancel your paper, press two. If you would like to place an ad, please press three.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Paul said.
“If you would like to be connected to the newsroom, press four. If—”
Paul pressed four, thinking that anyone calling in with a hot tip would probably have given up by now.
“Newsroom,” a man said.
“Gwen Stainton.”
“Hang on.”
The line went dead for nearly ten seconds, then, “Stainton.”
“Ms. Stainton, it’s Paul Davis. I emailed you this morning about Kenneth—”
“Yeah, the typewriter question. We talked, right? Back when I wrote a feature on the case, after Hoffman pleaded guilty.”
“That’s right.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m okay.”
“I know you got hurt pretty bad, but in a lot of ways, you were pretty lucky.”
“I guess you’re right about that. So, about the typewriter. I don’t think this ever even came up — it wasn’t in your story — but the night I saw Kenneth, he tossed something into a Dumpster. I think it had to be the typewriter he made the women write those notes on. But because of my head injury, I didn’t even recall that for a few days. I suppose, by then, that the Dumpster could have been emptied.”
“Possibly,” Gwen said. “Like I said in my email, Mr. Davis, what makes you ask?”
He paused. “Is this off the record?”
A pause at the other end. “Yeah, sure.”
“I’ve been seeing a therapist since the incident. To, you know, deal with the trauma. As a way of confronting it, I’ve decided to write about what happened to me. A kind of therapy, I guess you’d call it. But reviewing everything about what occurred that night, there’s this one, well, kind of a loose end. About the typewriter.”
“You sound like a modern-day Columbo,” Gwen said.
“Maybe so,” Paul conceded.
“You probably know as much or more than I do. After he killed those two women, Hoffman wanted to get rid of the evidence. That being their bodies, and the typewriter, which would have had a lot of blood on it. I imagine it would have been impossible to get the blood out of all the little nooks and crannies in an old machine like that.”
From where he was sitting, Paul looked at the Underwood. If this was that typewriter, someone had cleaned it up. Or maybe it had rained after Hoffman dumped it. Nature gave it a good rinsing.
“Sure,” he said.
“So, yeah, he tossed it. And it wasn’t found. But the police didn’t need it to make their case, since Hoffman confessed. I’m sure the police did try to find it, but like you said, it probably was in a dump somewhere, buried under tons of trash, by that time.”
Paul couldn’t take his eyes off the typewriter. He was unable to shake the feeling that it was looking at him. Except, typewriters didn’t have eyes. The old ones, like this Underwood, were nothing more than hunks of metal. They were machines, plain and simple. They could neither see, nor hear, nor talk, or— Maybe talk.
“Mr. Davis?” Gwen said.
“I’m here,” he said. “In your story, you said the typewriter was an Underwood. How would you know that, if it was never found?”
Gwen hesitated. “I’m pretty sure one of the detectives told me. He said Hoffman had called it an Underwood.”
Paul continued to stare at the machine.
“Mr. Davis? Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No,” he said. “I mean, maybe.”
“What?”
“Have you ever spoken with him? With Kenneth Hoffman?”
“Briefly,” she said. “It wasn’t an interview. But there was an opportunity to have a few words with him one day when he was being brought from the jail to the courthouse.”