Anna feigned disinterest. She glanced at her watch. But from the corner of her eye, she observed.
Before getting behind the wheel, Charlotte rested her hand on the top of the door. Bill Myers placed his over it and held it there for a good ten seconds. Then Charlotte pulled her hand away, sat in the driver’s seat, and closed the door. Bill stepped back as she keyed the engine, and he turned in Anna’s direction.
Quickly, he drew his suit jacket together in front and buttoned it. He then slipped a hand into the front pocket of his pants and started walking across the parking lot toward another car.
Anna was almost certain she knew what he had just done. She couldn’t have sworn to it in a court of law. She’d have been laughed at. She’d have been mocked for professing to have astonishing observational skills.
But she was sure he was struggling to conceal an erection.
Not the usual response at a funeral, Anna mused.
Bill got into a car, fired it up, turned left onto Naugatuck. Charlotte had pulled out seconds earlier, heading right.
Anna rushed to her own car and got behind the wheel. She pondered what, if anything, to do now. To head home, she would have turned left out of the lot but found herself heading right.
After Charlotte.
Did she want to talk to Charlotte one more time? Start by telling her again how sorry she was, how she’d failed Paul? And then ask what Bill Myers had meant when he whispered those two words in her ear?
And if Anna were to do that, what, seriously, did she expect to achieve?
It was a stupid idea.
And then it hit her.
She was following the wrong car. Bill Myers was the one she wanted to talk to.
Anna checked her mirrors, did a quick U-turn, and went after the other car.
Fifty-Two
“It would be so much better if he just got hit by a bus,” Bill had said to Charlotte one night a few weeks earlier when Paul believed she was helping a retired couple decide how much their East Broadway beach house was worth. In fact, Bill and Charlotte were sitting naked in the hot tub out back of a nice three-bedroom on Grassy Hill Road that was listed at $376,000.
“What did you say?” Charlotte asked, trying to hear him over the bubbling of the jets.
“Nothing,” he said. “It was stupid.”
“No, tell me.”
So he repeated it.
Charlotte said, “It’s stupid because you can’t wait around for something like that to happen. You can’t wait for the bus driver to take his eyes off the road. You can’t wait for a pedestrian to make the mistake of not looking both ways.” She thought a moment. “The only way it would work would be if you could make someone decide to step in front of the bus.”
Bill rubbed his feet up against hers under the water. “Well, that’s not exactly possible.”
She moved closer to him, reached below the water, and took him firmly in her hand. As she stroked, she said, “It doesn’t have to be a bus.”
She told him her idea. How Paul’s current mental state played right into it. She had just about every detail worked out.
“That’s... pretty out there,” Bill said, managing to concentrate despite the distraction.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I’m going to need help. A lot of help. Some of it technical.”
“Like what?”
“Can you set up a phone’s ring to be anything you want? Like, if I recorded something, could I turn it into a ringtone?”
Bill, closing his eyes briefly, said he was pretty sure that could be done.
“And I have to find an old typewriter. In all the stories I read, there was one reference to an Underwood. We need to find one of those. It doesn’t have to be an exact replica, but close. The good thing is, it’s within the realm of possibility it could still be out there. The real one was never found.”
“You’re sure?”
Still moving her hand up and down, she smiled. “I called the police. Made up a story about being from some crime museum starting up in New York. Said that typewriter would make an excellent exhibit. Never recovered, they said.”
Bill said he would start checking antique shops. He even knew a couple of business supply stores that might have something like that, almost as a novelty item. And there was always eBay and Craigslist.
“Nothing online,” Charlotte cautioned. “No trace.”
“Hang on,” Bill said. He closed his eyes, shuddered, gasped. Charlotte took her hand away.
“This is where the creative part comes in,” she said. “Paul has to believe this is the machine used in the murders.”
They would type up all the messages ahead of time, she said. Bill could feed him the idea of leaving paper in the machine if he didn’t think of it himself. Charlotte could hide them in the house and roll them into the typewriter or scatter them about the house as opportunities presented themselves. She’d make Bill a key, so he could sneak into the house and plant them. Or, she could do it herself.
Like the morning Paul wanted to find the yard sale where Charlotte had said she’d bought the Underwood. She didn’t call the real estate agency to say she’d be late. She called Bill, signaling that the house would be empty for the next hour or so. He went over and rolled a message into the typewriter. The morning that Paul arose late and found Charlotte in the shower, she’d already been down in his study, putting a message in place.
Over the next week, they worked out the details. With a new phone, she recorded the sounds of typing by banging away at the keys. She turned that into a ringtone. The muted phone would be left atop one of the kitchen cupboards, programmed to ring only when called from Charlotte’s personal phone. She’d keep that one under her pillow and make the calls once Paul was asleep.
They did some test runs. Bill held the new phone while Charlotte called it, using her own.
Chit chit. Chit chit chit. Chit. Chit chit.
“Oh my God,” he said. “It’s perfect.”
She’d even be able to do it if Josh were staying with them. He slept with iPhone buds in his ears.
Bill had some ideas of his own. “Remind him of conversations that never actually happened. Ask him if he picked up things you say you asked him to get, but never did. Reinforce the notion that his memory’s faulty.”
Charlotte liked that. She said she could tell Paul she’d seen a car parked outside the house, the same one he’d seen days earlier. Except, of course, he’d never mentioned seeing a car. She could send texts from his phone, leaving him baffled when he received the replies.
“And I can visit his therapist, and Hailey. Tell them all the disturbing things I’ve witnessed. Plant the seed that he’s losing it.” She smiled. “It’s nice to get back to acting. I don’t see winning an Emmy, but I’ll have you.”
Bill came up with what he called the clincher.
“One night, we go for broke. You get him drunk, slip something into his drink, show him the best night in bed ever. I sneak in, put that fucking typewriter right next to him. If that doesn’t drive him round the bend, he’s made of stronger stuff than any of us.”
Charlotte said she’d tell Paul she’d had the locks changed, even when she hadn’t. He’d be even more convinced there were supernatural forces at work.
They found a suitable typewriter in an antique shop in New Haven. The notes were written.
Bill identified one huge flaw in the scheme.
“This is all designed to drive him crazy, push him over the edge, make him step in front of that metaphorical bus.”