Kenneth took another look at the pages. He ran his index finger over the typing. “The h,” he said, little more than a whisper.
“It’s slightly off center,” Paul said. “And the o is a bit faint. Do you remember that from your Underwood?”
Kenneth seemed to be struggling to recall.
“I think I know what’s going on,” he said.
Paul and Anna waited.
“You and your shrink here are running some kind of game on me. I don’t know what it is, exactly, and I have no idea why, but that’d be the theory I’d go with, because I am telling you, one hundred percent, that this is a crock of shit.”
“Why?” Paul asked. “Why isn’t it just possible something’s going on here that’s beyond our understanding?”
Kenneth flattened his palms on the table and weighed his response. “I told you. The typewriter. I threw it away.”
“Someone must have spotted it in the garbage,” Paul said. “Before the trash was picked up. Had no idea how it got there, didn’t care. And then it wound up in someone’s house, and they put it out one day to sell before they moved away from Milford. Tell me it couldn’t have happened that way.”
For the first time, Kenneth’s face registered doubt. “Maybe, just maybe, that’s possible. But these notes? That’s nuts.” He looked down at them one last time.
“What are you looking at?” Paul asked.
“The e’s,” he said. “They’re a bit filled in...” Hoffman seemed to be drifting for a moment, then looked up. “The police don’t have the typewriter, but they have the notes...”
“The notes you made Catherine and Jill write,” Paul said, getting ahead of Kenneth’s thinking. “Of course. They could compare these pages to the ones they have in evidence. Back in the day, samples of typing were like fingerprints. They could match them to specific machines.”
Paul brightened and looked at Anna. “Why did I never think of that? Do you think the police would let us see that evidence?”
“I don’t know,” Anna said. “They might.”
Kenneth did not share Paul’s excitement. He asked, “Is there blood on it? Is there blood on the typewriter?”
Paul thought a moment and said, “Not that I’ve noticed.” There was Josh’s blood, of course, from when he caught his finger in the machine, but Paul knew that was not worth mentioning. “But there could be traces, I suppose, down between the keys. I guess whoever was selling it did their best to clean it up. I mean, who’d buy a used typewriter that was covered in dried blood?”
Hoffman’s forehead wrinkled. His eyes went slowly around the room, then settled back on Paul.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked. “The Underwood.”
“Why?”
Hoffman shook his head angrily. “I just want to know.”
Paul shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about that. For the time being, it’s going to stay in my house.”
“Are you going to give it to the police?”
Paul turned to Anna again. “Should I, if it’s evidence?”
She shrugged. Before she could answer, Kenneth said, “What’s the point? You want to get my fingerprints off it?” Kenneth laughed. “They’ve got me. You think they want to convict me again? Instead of getting out in a hundred years, it’ll be two hundred.”
Forty
Neither Paul nor Anna said a word until they were out of the prison and back in the car. Once the doors were closed they let out a collective breath, as though they hadn’t taken one for the last couple of hours.
Anna turned to Paul and asked, “How are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m a little shaky,” he said, “but yeah, I’m okay. How about you?”
“I’m fine.” She found herself smiling, almost against her will. “It was actually kind of exhilarating. Creepy, but exhilarating.”
“Is creepy a psychological term?”
She laughed. “Pretty much.”
“I don’t feel... scared of him anymore.”
“You made that pretty clear.”
Paul was quiet for a moment as Anna started the engine and steered the car out of the prison parking lot. “I almost, for a second there, I almost felt sorry for him. When he was talking about how we all have this devil hiding inside us. I thought that almost made sense, in a way.”
“Or else it was just an excuse,” Anna said. “Listen, I want to apologize for something in there. When you said I’d come to the same conclusion as you had about the source of those notes, I wasn’t exactly supportive.”
“I noticed.”
“I should have said something.”
“Maybe I’m the one who should apologize. I presumed when I shouldn’t have.”
She hesitated. “I don’t think Hoffman was convinced those letters were actually written by Catherine and Jill, that two dead women are speaking to you through that typewriter.” Another pause. “I’m having a hard time with that, too.”
“You aren’t willing to consider that there might — just might — be forces at work in the world that are beyond our understanding? You think it’s impossible that something like this could happen? Because, for me, I’ve pretty much exhausted all other options.”
Anna kept staring ahead through the windshield. “It’ll be almost dark by the time we get home.”
“Isn’t that what you call avoidance?”
She glanced his way for a second. “I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t.”
“Okay.”
“Twelve years ago, well, going back even further, my mother was not well. It was a long decline. Life’s so unfair that way, you know? Sometimes I think it would be so much better if we went just like that.” She took a hand off the wheel and snapped her fingers. “None of this lingering. It can be so hard on everyone.”
“Sure,” Paul said.
“This is something I’ve never told anyone. Not my father, not any of my friends, not my ex-husband, although we’d split by this time.”
Paul nodded. “Okay.”
They were back on the main road, picking up speed.
“It was a Tuesday night, just after three in the morning.” She stopped, breathed in through her nose, steeling herself. “I was sound asleep. And I heard my mother speak to me. As clearly as you talking to me now. She said, and I’ll never forget this, she said, ‘It’s time to come and say good-bye.’ I woke up, and I could still hear her in my head, saying that. I looked at the clock, and it was eleven minutes after three. I don’t want to make too much of this, but my mother was born on the eleventh of March.”
Paul nodded slowly.
“She was in a hospital chronic care wing at the time. I knew it was irrational, I knew she couldn’t actually speak to me like that, but I felt I had to go to the hospital. I threw on some clothes and drove there as quickly as I could and I went to her room.”
The car went over a bump and the golf clubs in the back rattled like old bones.
Paul realized he was barely breathing. “What happened?”
“She was awake. She was looking at the door. It was like she was waiting for me to arrive. She smiled and reached out a hand.”
Anna put her own hand to her mouth. Paul could see a tear running down her cheek. She needed a moment before she could continue.
“It was so small. Her hand. Just skin and bone. I took it, and she said to me, I swear, she said, ‘I’m glad you got my message.’ I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what happened.” She glanced with moist eyes at her passenger. “Pretty nuts, right?”
Paul slowly shook his head. “No. It’s not nuts at all.”
“And I sat with her, and twenty minutes later, she was gone.”
Paul didn’t know what to say.