Charlotte turned for the door, then stopped. “When I said I didn’t believe in ghosts, you didn’t respond to that. I’m guessing, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen everything in your line of work. Have you ever encountered anything that would suggest there’s anything to, you know, messages from the...” Her cheeks went red, as though she were too embarrassed to complete the sentence. “What I’m trying to say is, you’ve never seen anyone actually get a message from the beyond.”
Anna offered a smile. “Not in my experience.”
“I don’t even know if that’s a comfort. If those two dead women really were trying to communicate with my husband, well, at least that would prove Paul wasn’t crazy, right?”
Thirty-One
Once he’d recovered from his encounter with Harold Foster, Paul found himself at the Connecticut Post Mall.
He needed to walk around, gather his thoughts before he did anything else. So he wandered the shopping concourse from one end to the other, not going into a single store, but finally ending up in the food court, where he bought himself a cup of coffee and sat down to drink it.
He’d had, when he’d left the house, the roughest idea of a plan. Talk to Jill Foster’s husband, then Gilford Lamb, spouse of Hoffman’s other victim, Catherine. He was also thinking of getting in touch with Angelique Rogers, the West Haven political science professor who’d also had a fling with Hoffman, and had been interviewed in that story by Gwen Stainton.
The meeting with Foster’s husband hadn’t gone well, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to press on. He knew there was no reason to think that any of these discussions would go well. He might be the only one seeking a greater insight into Hoffman’s soul. Maybe everyone else just wanted to put the whole nasty business behind them. Foster wouldn’t even allow Hoffman’s name to be spoken in his presence. Kenneth’s wife, Gabriella, Paul feared, might be the hardest to talk to of all of them. If there was anyone who might want to be moving on with her life, it could be Gabriella. And yet, she might, more than anyone else, be the one who held the key to the secrets of Hoffman’s personality.
But for now, Paul needed to clear his head. The mall’s food court wasn’t quite as isolating as a jail cell, but it would do.
As he sat there, watching mothers pushing strollers, teenagers hanging out and laughing, an elderly couple sitting across from each other saying nothing, he wondered whether this quest for understanding was a worthy pursuit.
What guarantee was there that no matter how many people he talked to, no matter how many questions he asked, he’d ever get his answers?
Sometimes people did bad things. End of story.
But now there was more to it.
Something was not right.
That fucking typewriter.
Paul had exhausted all rational explanations for those messages. As unsettling as it would have been to learn Gavin Hitchens had been sneaking into his house to plant them, it would have been a relief to find out he was responsible.
The only other “real world” explanation? Paul was doing it himself. But he wasn’t ready to accept that yet. Sleepwalking was one thing. But inventing messages from the dead and having no memory of it? That was a bridge too far.
That was crazy.
The problem was, the only explanation left to him wasn’t any less insane.
Was it possible the typewriter was some sort of conduit for Jill Foster and Catherine Lamb? Were those two women actually trying to talk to him?
No.
Possibly.
Did Paul believe things happened for a reason? If the answer was yes, then some unseen hand had guided Charlotte to that yard sale. Some force he could not possibly understand told her to get out of the car and check out the junk these people were trying to sell.
And that force knew that when she saw that old Underwood, she’d immediately think it would be the perfect gift for her husband.
The mystical heavy lifting was done.
Once the typewriter was in the house, Jill and Catherine could begin their communication with him.
“God, it’s fucking nuts,” Paul said.
“You talking to me?”
Paul turned. Sitting at the table next to him was a woman he guessed to be in her eighties, blowing on a paper cup of tea, bag still in, the string hanging over the side.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “Excuse my language. I... I was just thinking out loud.”
The woman’s weathered, wrinkled face broke into a smile. “That’s one of the first signs.”
That brought a smile to his face for the first time that day. “In my case, you might be right.”
“Are you okay?” she asked, grabbing the string and bobbing the tea bag up and down.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you.”
“You look like a troubled young man.”
He forced another smile. “I’ve had better days.”
The woman nodded. After what seemed a moment of reflection, she said, “I come here every day and have a cup of tea. I look forward to it. It’s the high point.”
“That’s nice,” he said, although he wasn’t sure whether that was nice, or sad.
“And I watch the people, and I think about their lives, and what they’re going through. I used to read books, but I find it harder to concentrate on them now. So I make up stories about the people I see.”
Paul thought it was time to move on.
“A lot of times, when I see a man sitting here having a coffee, it’s because he’s waiting for his wife to finish shopping. But I don’t think that’s the case with you.”
“And why’s that?”
“You don’t keep looking at your watch, or your phone. So you’re not waiting on someone. You’re here on your own.”
“You’re good,” Paul said.
The woman nodded with satisfaction. “Thank you.” She cocked her head at an angle and asked, “What’s fucking nuts?”
It jarred him, his words coming back to him, from this sweet old lady.
What the hell, he thought. It might be easier to ask a stranger this question than someone he knew well.
“Do you think,” he asked hesitantly, “that the dead can speak to us?”
The woman reacted as though this were the easiest question she’d ever been asked. “Of course,” she said, taking out the tea bag and setting it on a napkin. “I hear from my husband all the time. Do you know what he did?”
Paul waited.
“He died in October. This’d be in 1997. He’d been sick a long time and knew what was coming. So, four months later, a dozen roses arrive at the door. He figured he wouldn’t make it to February, so he had ordered my Valentine’s Day flowers back in September.” She smiled. “How about that?”
“Well,” Paul said. “He must have been something.”
She took a sip of her tea. “He had his moments.”
Paul stood. He tucked his napkin into the empty coffee cup. “You have a nice day,” he said.
He dropped the cup into the trash and headed for the escalator that would take him from the food court down to the main part of the mall. He glanced back for one last look at that woman, thinking he would give her a friendly farewell wave.
She was gone.
Thirty-Two
He decided his next stop would be Gilford Lamb.
The one-time director of human resources at West Haven had not returned to work after his wife’s murder. His initial time off for bereavement leave had turned into an extended sick leave. From what Paul had heard, he had never recovered emotionally from the loss.