“You’re Mrs. Davis?” he asked.
“Yes. What’s going on?”
“My name is Detective Arnwright. Milford Police.”
“No one will tell me what this is all about. Give me a second. I want to let my husband know I’m home.”
“What’s your husband’s name, ma’am?”
“What? It’s Paul. Paul Davis.”
Charlotte had reached her front door, tried opening it first without a key, and when that did not work, started fiddling with the set of keys still in her hand.
But before she could insert it into the lock, Arnwright said, “Mrs. Davis, I have some difficult news for you. There’s been an incident.”
Charlotte turned to look at the detective. “What are you talking about? What kind of an incident?”
“There was... a drowning,” Arnwright said.
“What?”
The detective nodded solemnly. “A man was found on the beach. His body had been washed up.”
“Why are you — what are you saying?”
“The man was fully clothed, and his wallet was still tucked down in the pocket of his jeans. We found a driver’s license and some other ID in there.”
“Oh please, no, no. He couldn’t have. He told me he was going to be okay. He promised me.”
“He told you he’d be okay?” the detective asked.
“It’s a mistake,” Charlotte said defiantly. “It can’t be him.”
“Well, I’ll want to address that shortly, Mrs. Davis. But you seem to be suggesting that maybe your husband was going through a difficult time.”
“He... he has been. He’s been under a great deal of stress. And... other things.”
“What kind of other things?”
Charlotte began to ramble. “Dr. White, she talked about admitting him, but he didn’t want to go to the hospital, he wanted to see if he’d feel better, and now that the typewriter was out of the house and wouldn’t be sending him any more messages he probably thought things really would get better but now if—”
“Mrs. Davis, slow down. What’s this about a typewriter? And you said Dr. White? Anna White?”
Charlotte became angry. “Why are you asking me these questions? Whose ID did you find?”
“We found several items of identification for a Paul Davis in the wallet,” Arnwright said gently. “Some with photos. The reason I ask about your husband’s state of mind is, as I said, he was fully dressed. He wasn’t in a swimsuit or anything like that. It’s the early stages of the investigation, but it appears he may have simply walked out into the water.”
“Oh, God,” Charlotte said again. “No, please, no.” She started shaking her head back and forth.
Arnwright put a hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Davis, I am so very sorry...”
“Is that him?” she said, pointing toward the street.
Arnwright spun around. Two male attendants were rolling a gurney to the back of an ambulance. A body was atop it, draped in a sheet.
“Paul!” she screamed, and started running.
“Mrs. Davis, please, wait!” Arnwright said, jogging after her. But Charlotte had a good head start.
“Stop!” she shouted at the attendants. One of the two men looked her way and mouthed shit.
They stopped wheeling the gurney as they opened the back doors of the ambulance, allowing Charlotte a chance to come up alongside it and grip it by the side rails.
“Is it him?” she asked, clearly unable to bring herself to pull down the sheet and reveal the face. “Is it?”
The attendants looked to Arnwright for guidance. Everyone went silent as the detective decided what should be done.
He nodded.
The attendant slowly pulled the sheet far enough back to reveal the dead person’s head.
It was a man, hair wet and matted, the face dirtied with beach sand. But his facial features were undamaged, and even in this condition, he was easy enough to identify as Paul Davis.
“No!” Charlotte said.
As her knees buckled, she collapsed onto the street.
Forty-Six
When Anna White found Detective Joe Arnwright at her front door the next day she thought he must have more news about Gavin Hitchens. He’d made a brief stop at her office a day earlier to confirm that Paul Davis, who’d been arrested for assaulting Hitchens, was also one of her clients.
Anna was between appointments and making some notes when she heard the doorbell to the main house.
“Detective,” she said. “Come in.”
He smiled grimly. She did not like that look.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“You recall we talked the other day about Paul Davis,” he said. “In connection with Mr. Hitchens.”
“Yes,” she said regretfully. “A terrible situation all around. Has something happened?”
“I’m afraid he died last night.”
“Gavin Hitchens?”
“No, Mr. Davis.”
Anna stood stock-still for five seconds. Slowly, she raised both hands and placed them over her mouth.
“Oh, God,” she said, lowering her hands and looking for something for support. She moved to a nearby chair and put one hand on the back of it to steady herself. “This is terrible. This is awful. What happened?”
“A drowning. That’s what everything points to.”
Anna looked dumbstruck. “A drowning? How could he have drowned? I don’t even think he owned a boat.”
Joe Arnwright said, “It appears Mr. Davis took his own life.”
Anna’s body wavered. “I need to sit down,” she said. “Come to my office.” Once they were there, she took the chair she occupied when working with her clients. Joe Arnwright sat across from her.
“This is just... I can’t believe it,” Anna said. She bit on the end of her thumb. “This can’t be.” She looked imploringly at the detective. “Are you sure it wasn’t some sort of accident? Did he fall off the pier? Something like that?”
“His wife told us he’d been seeing you for a period of time, that he’d been deeply troubled about a number of things. And, of course, I know now that he was nearly killed by Kenneth Hoffman eight months ago. That there was a lot of fallout from that.”
“Yes,” she said. “We even went up to visit him, this week, in prison.”
Arnwright looked stunned. “You did? Why?”
Anna explained it as best she could. Arnwright had a small notebook in his hand and was scribbling things down.
“Would that explain why he might be inclined to take his own life?”
“If anything,” she said, “I would have thought that the visit helped. I can’t... this is horrible. How is his wife? How’s Charlotte?”
“Extremely distraught, as you can imagine. She was telling me that Mr. Davis was suffering from a delusion of some sort.”
Anna reached for a tissue from a nearby box. She dabbed her eyes and wadded the tissue in her fingers.
“I don’t quite know how to respond to that,” she said. “I suppose the short answer is yes.”
“Something about a possessed typewriter,” Arnwright said, without a hint of derision or skepticism.
“Yes.”
“He believed it was the typewriter Kenneth Hoffman made his victims write notes of apologies on.”
“That’s correct,” Anna said.
“I’m not a mental health expert, but that makes me wonder, had he been diagnosed with schizophrenia?”
“No.”
“Was he depressed?”
“He was certainly down, but I did not believe he was clinically depressed.”
“But doesn’t getting messages from dead people count as hearing voices? Isn’t that a symptom of schizophrenia? His wife said he was writing the notes himself, but unaware that he was doing it.”
Anna sighed. “I know how that sounds. And now, in retrospect...” She could not finish the sentence.