Paul, between sobs, managed to say, “It’s not your fault. There was no way you could know.”
“I shouldn’t have... I never should have... it was a bad idea,” she said, weeping. “At the time... it seemed...”
“Stop,” Paul said. His breaths had turned rapid and shallow. “I feel, I feel like I’m going to pass out.”
“Come in. Get in the house.”
She got him to the door. Once inside, she locked it, checked that the door to the garage was also secure, and the two of them trudged upstairs. She managed to keep him on his feet until they reached the kitchen table, at which point he dropped into a chair.
He was still crying. He put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands.
“Maybe it’s some kind of nervous breakdown,” he said. “I’m willing to admit that. I don’t know what else it could be. I must be... I must be doing these things. I have to be.”
Charlotte had grabbed his phone, which had been recharging from an outlet by the kitchen sink.
“Dr. White,” she said, handing it to him.
He nodded, surrendering. He looked at his hand, which was shaking. “You call her. I can’t do it. I don’t even know if I could hold the phone.”
Charlotte found the number in his contacts, and tapped. “It’s gone to message after three rings,” she said.
“That’ll be her office phone. Keep calling it. She’ll hear it eventually from the other part of the house.”
She ended the call, entered the number again. The fourth time, it worked.
A frantic Anna White answered, “Yes, who is this? Paul, is this you?”
“I’m so sorry,” Charlotte said after identifying herself. “Paul’s in a bad way. A really bad way.”
Calmly, Anna asked, “Tell me what’s happening.”
“He’s shaking, he can’t stop crying. You need to come over. He needs to talk to you, he—”
“Charlotte, if he’s in a psychotic state, then—”
“What the hell is that? How am I supposed—”
“Let me speak to him.”
Charlotte said to Paul, “She wants to talk to you.”
He nodded weakly, steadied his hand as he took the phone, and pressed it to his ear.
“Yes?”
“Paul?”
“Yes.”
“Talk to me.”
Paul didn’t say anything. He seemed to be struggling to find the words.
“Paul?”
Finally, with great effort, he said two words before handing the phone back to Charlotte.
“Help me.”
Forty-Three
By the time Anna White arrived nearly an hour later, Paul had calmed down some. He’d never been a fan of hard liquor, but he’d knocked back a couple of shots of vodka to calm his nerves.
“I hope that wasn’t a bad thing,” Charlotte said once Anna was sitting at the kitchen table, talking to Paul. For someone who’d been in bed less than an hour earlier, Anna was alert and attentive. She’d come over in a jogging suit, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her face devoid of lipstick or other makeup.
“That’s okay,” she said. “How are you now, Paul?”
“Better,” he said.
“Tell me everything that happened.”
He told her, even the parts about he and Charlotte killing off a couple of bottles of wine and having sex. But the story really started with the discovery of the typewriter next to his bed.
“Is it still up there?” Anna asked.
Paul shook his head. “We got it out of the house. It’s in Charlotte’s car.” He gave his head a slow, deliberate shake. “It’s not coming back in here unless it knows how to get out of a locked trunk.”
Anna didn’t say anything to that.
Paul leaned in closer to Anna and whispered, “Either that thing got up here on its own tonight, guided through the house by the spirits of those two women, or I brought it up here and have no memory of it.” He sighed. “Which would be worse? And if I did bring it up here, if I wrote all those notes, if I did all that, does it mean I’m crazy, or that I’m somehow possessed by the ghosts of Jill and Catherine? Anna, Jesus, there’s no good answer here.”
“Sitting here, talking to you, you do not strike me as someone who’s detached from reality, Paul.”
“Something’s crazy. It’s either me, or the situation.”
Anna took out her phone. “I have to make a quick call to my father. I had to wake him before I left. I didn’t want him waking up and not finding me at home.”
“Of course.”
“Dad?” she said into the phone. “I’m just checking in. Okay. I’ll call you again in half an hour, unless you really think you can get back to sleep.” She nodded. “Okay. Love you, Dad.”
As she put her phone away, Charlotte was getting out hers. “Who are you calling?” Paul asked.
She glanced his way. “Bill.”
“Bill? Why are you—”
“He’s your friend. Maybe it would help if he came — Bill?”
She turned away, walked toward the stairs where she wouldn’t be disturbed by Paul and Anna.
“It might be good to talk to him,” Anna said.
“I hate her waking him up in the middle of the night.”
Anna managed a smile. “But it was okay for me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Kidding. What would you like to do, Paul? If you want, I could have you admitted.”
“Admitted?”
She put a hand on his arm. “For observation. For a day or two. And I know you’ve resisted in the past, but once we have you seen by a psychiatrist, and there are a couple of very good ones I can recommend, there might be a pharmacological approach to treatment that we—”
“Drugs,” he said.
Anna nodded. “Yes.”
“I don’t want to be on drugs.”
“You want to just stick with vodka?”
He frowned. “Your point?”
“I’m saying that if you drink, you’re self-medicating. There may be other, more productive approaches. But as a psychologist, I can’t prescribe for you. That’s where an assessment by a psychiatrist could be very helpful.”
“That’s your answer? Go into the loony bin and get doped up.”
“We don’t have to do that,” she said, her voice steady and measured. “As long as you’re not a danger to yourself or anyone else, no one’s going to force you to do that.”
“I wonder what Charlotte thinks,” he said.
“Why don’t we ask her?”
Although still within earshot of the others, Charlotte had moved over to the stairs and taken a seat on the top step. She said into her phone, “I hate to call you in the middle of the night, but I thought you’d want to know about Paul.”
“What’s going — hang on, I’m just turning on the light here — what’s happening over there?” Bill asked.
“His therapist just came over. He had a full-blown meltdown.” Charlotte sniffed, then said, “He’s really messed up.”
“Are you crying?”
“Of course I’m crying.”
“Okay, okay,” Bill said. “What do you want me—”
“Hang on, Paul wants to ask me something.”
Paul said, “Do you think I should go into the hospital?”
“The hospital?” she said. “Like, what do you mean?”
“The psych ward,” Paul said. “It’s an option. They could keep an eye on me and they might give me something. You know, to mellow me out, I guess.”
“Shit, no,” said Bill, who could hear them both talking.
“Hang on,” Charlotte said to Paul. Into the phone, she said, “I’m trying to talk to Paul here.”