“Why?”
He couldn’t bring up the typewriter, but he could tell this man about how he was attempting to deal with his post-traumatic stress.
“I’m... writing something. I’m writing about what I went through, about my recovery.”
“A book?”
“I don’t even know yet. The immediate goal is to get it all out, to face what happened to me. Maybe, at some later date, it’ll be a book, or a magazine piece. I don’t know what shape it’s going to take.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, that’s why I’m here. To ask you—”
The hand went up again. “Enough,” he said.
“I just wanted to—”
“Stop. I’m sorry for what happened to you, Mr. Davis. And I suppose I owe you some thanks. You probably, inadvertently of course, helped bring... that man to justice by coming upon him when you did. But I don’t want to talk about this. Not with you, not with anyone else. I’ve no doubt these last eight months have been hell for you. Well, they’ve been hell for me, too. And your way to deal with it may be to turn it into some creative writing exercise, but I have no interest in baring my soul to you or answering your prurient questions about my wife.”
“Prurient? Who said anything—”
Foster pointed to the door.
“Get out or I’ll call security.”
Paul nodded, stood, and left. Foster trailed him, a good five paces behind, until Paul had left the building.
Thirty
Anna White heard the doorbell ring.
It was the front door this time, not her office door. It was after five, and her last appointment had just left. She met weekly with an obsessive-compulsive man who associated leftward movements with evil. When driving, he would go around a block, making three right turns, so as not to make a left. He tried to use his left hand so little that muscle tone in that arm had degenerated. If he meant to walk left, he would rotate his body three-quarters of a turn, then head off in the direction he had to go. It was all rooted in the Latin word sinister, which means “to the left” or “left-handed.” Not surprisingly, his politics were right-wing.
Anna was making very little progress with him. She hoped that if Gavin Hitchens had actually managed to download many of her files, that he didn’t get hold of that one. A psychopath like Hitchens would have far too much fun with him.
She was about to make some postsession notes when she heard the doorbell. She hurried through the house, wanting to get to the door before her father, should he choose to come downstairs to answer it. But a glance through a window revealed that he was outside, chipping away at the lawn with a nine-iron.
Anna opened the door to a woman she did not recognize.
“Hello?”
“Paul’s gone over the edge,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m Charlotte. Charlotte Davis? Paul’s wife?”
“Yes, okay. What’s happened?”
“May I come in?”
Anna opened the door wide to admit her.
“They arrested him,” Charlotte said.
“They what? Who? The police?”
“He attacked some man.”
“What man?”
“Someone named Hitchens.”
Anna’s face fell. “Oh my God no.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have — I wanted to warn him but I never thought—”
“Warn Paul about what?”
“Please, tell me what happened.”
Charlotte told Anna what she’d been able to learn from Paul and the police. “He has this crazy idea this total stranger got into our house. Or at least, he did, until he got some call from you.”
“I’d found Paul’s keys, in my office. He must have thought Hitchens had them.”
Charlotte wiped a tear from her cheek. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Lately, Paul’s been so... I was going to try and make an appointment with you anyway, to talk about him. But then, when this happened...”
“I can’t discuss my patients,” Anna explained. “Not even with their spouses.”
Charlotte nodded quickly. “Of course, I understand that. But I have to tell you what’s been going on.”
“I really don’t know that—”
“Please. I thought Paul was getting better, but these last few days, he’s getting worse. He’s losing it.”
Anna hesitated, then said, “Go on.”
“He’s hearing things in the middle of the night. Things that I’m not hearing. Like someone tapping away on an old typewriter I bought him. And now he’s finding” — she put air quotes around the word — “messages in the typewriter he thinks are coming from these two women Kenneth Hoffman murdered. And he’s already told you about the nightmares, right?”
She replied with a cautious, “He has.”
“I don’t know what to think. Messages from the dead?” She shook her head, reached into her purse for a tissue, and blotted up more tears from her cheeks, then her eyes. “Unless you believe in ghosts, which I don’t, the only possible explanation is that he’s writing these messages himself.”
Charlotte’s chin quivered. “What should I do? I’m so worried about him. He’s had such a tough year. The nightmares, the physical recovery. I thought maybe his idea of diving right into what happened to him, writing about it, might help, but it’s having the opposite effect. I think writing about it is... it’s like he’s being dragged into some black hole.”
“I’ll talk to him. I’ll bring him in for some extra sessions.”
“I’m so worried that he — you don’t think there’s any chance he’d do anything, you know, to harm himself, do you?”
Anna’s brow furrowed. “What have you observed?”
Charlotte hesitated. “I don’t know. Nothing I can put my finger on exactly. But he’s been down so long, and now, he’s having... are they delusions? I don’t know what else to call them. What’s next? That message in the typewriter, it’s like a text version of hearing voices. What if the next message tells him to kill himself?”
“If I see anything that leads me to think your husband would harm himself I’ll take the appropriate steps.”
“I mean,” Charlotte continued, “they are delusions, right? I mean, are they delusions if he’s doing it deliberately?”
“What are you getting at?”
“The noises he claims to be hearing, the typed message, at first I was thinking it was all in his head, that even if he’s writing the messages, he’s doing it unconsciously, he doesn’t know he’s doing it. But what if he does know? What am I dealing with then? Why would he put on an act like that? Is he trying to make me crazy?”
“I can’t think of any reason why he would do that,” Anna said.
“So then is it a hallucination?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has he been prescribed something that would be messing with his head? Some kind of weird side effect?”
“No.”
Charlotte was shredding the tissue in her hand. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help him.”
Anna asked her to wait a moment. She went to her office, grabbed the keys she had been holding for Paul, and gave them to Charlotte when she returned to the front of the house.
“You don’t have to take all this on yourself,” Anna told her. “That’s what I’m here for. To help Paul through this period. We need to give him some time.”
“Please don’t tell him I was here.”
“Why don’t you tell him? It might actually mean a lot to him, to know that you’re this concerned.”
“I don’t know,” she said, more to herself than Anna. “I just don’t know.”