“Put him on,” Bill said.
Charlotte held out the phone to Paul. “Bill wants to talk to you.”
Paul held the phone to his ear. “Sorry. Charlotte shouldn’t have gotten you up.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bill said. “What’s this about the hospital?”
“I’m talking about it with Anna.”
“You do not want to go into the hospital. There’s no way you want to do that.”
“But they might be—”
“No, you listen to Bill here. Going into a place like that, it’ll only mess you up further. Those places are filled with crazy people, and you are not crazy. You hear me? Once you let them lock you up, they’ll never let you out.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Look,” Bill said, “how do you feel right now? Right this second?”
“Shaky.”
“But shaky enough to go into a hospital?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right.”
“You bet I’m right. Whaddya say you give it a couple of days. I have to go out of town tomorrow — shit, it’s already tomorrow — but when I get back, you and me, we’ll get together, do something to take your mind off all these things. But not squash. We’re not putting that head of yours at risk. How does that sound?”
Paul nodded slowly.
“Are you there?” Bill asked.
“Yeah,” Paul said. “Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll give it a couple of days and see how it goes. Charlotte’s taken the typewriter away.”
“There ya go,” Bill said. “You hang in there, pal.”
Paul handed the phone back to Charlotte and turned to face Anna, who was now standing by the kitchen table.
“You can go home,” he told her. “I’ll be okay.”
Forty-Four
Charlotte stayed up most of the night with Paul, waiting until he finally fell asleep. Rattled as he was, he eventually lost the fight to exhaustion. Once he’d succumbed, Charlotte slipped into bed next to him.
Every time he moved or made a sound, she woke up.
Just after seven, she sensed he was fully awake, and asked, “How are you?”
He said, “Did all that really happen?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He quickly turned over and looked at the bedside table. Seeing nothing on it but a lamp and his clock, he said, “I thought it might have come back.”
Charlotte had nothing to say to that. It wasn’t clear whether Paul was attempting to make a joke. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m sorry I put you through all that.”
“It’s okay,” she said, raising up on her elbow and turning to face him. “What does it mean, exactly, that you’re saying you’re sorry?”
He turned his head slightly to look at her. “I don’t know. I guess...”
“You guess what?”
“I know I may have looked like I was sleeping all night, but I was awake a lot, too. Thinking.”
“Okay.” Gently, she asked, “And what are you thinking?”
“That maybe Anna — Dr. White — was right.”
“Right about what?”
“That maybe I should be admitted.”
“You want to go into the hospital?”
“I don’t want to, but I’m wondering if it’s the only thing that makes sense. But I keep thinking about what Bill said, that once they have you in there, they’ll never let you out. If I could go in for, I don’t know, a couple of days, maybe that would be long enough to figure things out.”
“I guess that’s something you could revisit with Dr. White.”
He managed a nod with the back of his head still buried in the pillow.
“You seem... almost calm,” Charlotte said. “Certainly a lot calmer than in the middle of the night.”
“There’s only one way to explain this,” he said. “And now that I’ve settled on that, I guess I do feel a little more at peace.”
“And that way is?”
“Think of all the small memory lapses I’ve had. Forgetting where I’d driven. Forgotten texts and messages. The dry cleaning. Not remembering seeing that car across the street, nearly blacking out when I saw a car like Kenneth’s. I must have gotten up in the night and brought the typewriter up and put it next to the bed. I had to. And I don’t recall doing it.”
“So you’ve moved past thinking it... did it itself.”
He gave her a sad smile. “I have.” He chuckled. “I mean, try to picture it. A typewriter opening the door. Coming up the stairs. It’s comical if you think about it.”
“I guess I haven’t been able to see the humor in all this,” Charlotte said.
He grimaced. “Yeah, well, I don’t blame you there.”
Charlotte threw back the covers and got out of bed. “I’m going to call in sick today.”
“No.”
“Yes. Any big house deals come along, someone else can take them.”
“No, you don’t have to do that. I’ll be okay. I’ll get in touch with Dr. White and talk to her about whether to go in for, you know, observation or something.”
Charlotte shook her head. “I think you need to listen to Bill on this one. Why don’t you give it a couple of days. Then, if you still feel that’s what you want to do, then do it.”
Paul sat up. “Okay.”
“And you need to call that lawyer back.”
“Call him back?”
“I told you. He called yesterday. He thinks he can get you off with a suspended sentence or something, that there are extenuating circumstances up the wazoo that the court will be sympathetic to. But you have to get it sorted out.”
“When did he call?”
“I told you all about this last night,” Charlotte said.
“You see?” he said. He tapped his head with his index finger. “This needs a tune-up.”
“And I think you need a break from your project. No more talking to grieving husbands and jilted wives. No more holing up in your study, writing about what happened to you. You need to get out. You need to do things.”
Paul considered her advice. “I don’t even know if I care about it anymore. I’ve met with Kenneth. Maybe my demons have been exorcised. Maybe it’s time to move on. I don’t have to turn my experience into a brilliant work of literature.” He grinned. “Let someone else win the Pulitzer.”
Paul managed to talk Charlotte into going to work. “Honestly,” he told her, “I’ll be fine.”
And up until the time she left for the real estate office, he thought he would be.
But once the house was empty, anxiety rushed in to fill the void. He could not stop certain thoughts running through his head:
1. It’s me. I did it.
2. No. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have done it.
3. Someone broke in and did it.
4. No, the locks were changed. No one could get in.
5. So maybe I did do it.
6. Or maybe... the ghosts of Catherine and Jill are REAL.
He avoided his study. Even if he’d not been considering abandoning his project, he knew he wouldn’t have been able to write this morning. He couldn’t focus. It would be impossible.
If he couldn’t accomplish anything on that score, maybe he could do something practical. He could focus on items 3 and 4. He could satisfy himself, once and for all, that the house was secure.
He checked all the windows, even those up on the third floor that only a human fly could access, for weakness. He found them all properly latched. The main garage door was locked and did not appear to have been tampered with in any way.
Paul grabbed a ladder from the garage and hauled it up two flights of stairs, chipping paint on the wall with the legs as he made some turns, to allow him to reach the one access panel to the attic. Flashlight in hand, he climbed to the top of the ladder and gave the square panel door enough of a nudge to slide it to one side. Then he went up one more step and poked his head into the space.