Her father said sure.
Back downstairs, she pulled on a light jacket, turned off a few lights, and decided she would exit the house from the office wing. As she was passing through, she heard the familiar ding of an incoming email. She slipped in behind her desk and discovered not one new email, but five, from patients about rescheduled appointments.
Anna opened the datebook beside her computer, made a note of the new times for her clients, then wrote quick replies to confirm the changes. Then she slipped out the side door, locked it, jumped into her SUV, and headed out.
She rehearsed in her head the questions she was going to ask Charlotte. Were there ways she could trip the woman up? Get her to say things she didn’t want to say? While she’d been having her tea — not so much when she was drinking the wine — she’d scribbled some thoughts down on a paper napkin.
Not so much questions, but things to watch for, like the things people do when they lie.
Stalling by repeating a question. Excessive blinking. Long pauses. Coming up with overly complicated responses. Impersonal language — fewer references to I or other people by their actual names, so more use of him and her.
Of course, one of the other possible reactions from a liar would be to attack.
Anna was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.
Sixty-Two
Charlotte took a moment to place the large man who had her pinned to the wall with his hands around her neck.
She didn’t recognize him at first. She wasn’t used to seeing him outside his ice cream truck. But it took only a few seconds to remember him from the times she’d bought a cone from him. She also remembered this was Kenneth Hoffman’s son.
Leonard.
What was he doing here? Why was he in her house? Why was he trying to kill her? And where was Bill? What had happened to—
Oh God.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him. He lay on the floor to the right of the kitchen island. He was not moving, and his head seemed positioned at an odd angle to his shoulders, as though his neck had been twisted.
If he was breathing, Charlotte could see no sign.
She struggled to do any breathing of her own. She wanted to scream, but nothing would come out, so she tried to mouth some words.
“Stop,” she croaked. “Please stop... can’t breathe...”
She flailed pitifully against the man, trying to slap him with her hands, but it was like trying to repel a bear with a flyswatter. When Leonard pushed her up against the wall, he lifted her slightly, so her feet were only barely touching the floor. She couldn’t get any leverage to kick him.
Charlotte felt herself starting to pass out. Her brain was being starved of oxygen. Her eyes darted about the room, catching movement in the doorway to Paul’s small office.
There was someone standing there.
A woman.
“Not her, too, Leonard,” said Gabriella Hoffman. “We need to talk to her.”
Leonard relaxed his grip on Charlotte’s neck. She slid an inch back down to the floor, and as Leonard took his hands away she dropped to her hands and knees, hacking and coughing. As she struggled to get air back in her lungs, Gabriella walked in her direction, stopping in front of her.
Charlotte looked up, her neck already purplish with bruising from Leonard’s grasp.
“What have you done to Bill?” she asked hoarsely.
“Don’t worry about him,” Gabriella said. “Worry about you.”
“I... I know you.”
“I think we met at faculty events once or twice,” Kenneth Hoffman’s wife said. “I’m Gabriella. And you are Charlotte.” Her eyes shifted in the direction of Bill’s body. “I don’t know him. Who is he?”
“Bill,” Charlotte said, her voice shaking. “Bill Myers.”
“A West Haven professor? I don’t recognize him.”
“No. We sell real estate together.”
“It looks like you do more than that together,” Gabriella said. “This is my son, Leonard.”
Leonard nodded.
“Most people call me Len,” he said.
Charlotte, fully able to breathe again, asked, “Is... is Bill dead?”
“Yes,” Gabriella said. “Leonard snapped his neck.”
Charlotte slowly got to her feet, then took one step back from Gabriella. Leonard hovered to one side like a pet gorilla awaiting instructions.
“What do you want?” Charlotte asked. “Why are you here?”
Gabriella waved her hand toward the Underwood. “That.”
“The typewriter?”
“Yes.”
“What... what about it?”
“Your husband went to visit Kenneth in prison with some ridiculous story about those women, the ones my husband was convicted of killing, trying to talk to him through this machine.”
“Yes,” Charlotte said, her voice little more than a whisper.
“Paul gave Kenneth quite a scare. Not because of those messages. Those were laughable.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What I needed to see — to get — was that.” Again, she indicated the Underwood. “But when we came before, it wasn’t here.”
Charlotte’s eyes went wide. “You were here before?”
Gabriella smiled. “Your husband said the typewriter was in your car’s trunk, but I didn’t believe him. But I guess he wasn’t lying, because it wasn’t here. So we’ve come back. We were going to ask you for your car keys, but then we saw the typewriter sitting right here.”
“You saw... Paul?”
“Leonard and I just wanted to talk to him. About the typewriter, and the letters. We met him outside. He’d been out for an evening stroll.” Gabriella smiled. “Things didn’t quite go right. When he understood my concern, well, he became very agitated. And when Leonard here tried to calm him down, he ran off toward the beach.”
“Oh, my God,” Charlotte said. She looked at Gabriella’s lumbering son. “He didn’t kill himself. You killed him.”
Leonard’s look bordered on sorrowful. “I didn’t really mean to. I guess I held his head under the water a little too long.”
Gabriella sighed. “We took Paul’s keys and searched your house, but he wasn’t lying. The typewriter wasn’t here.”
“I still don’t... I don’t understand why...”
“As I said, those messages that the typewriter was supposedly spewing out were ridiculous. They gave Kenneth pause, for a moment, he was willing to admit that, but he figured it had to be some kind of joke. A trick. But,” Gabriella said slowly, “it is still possible — however remotely — that this is the real typewriter.”
“I don’t understand,” Charlotte whispered.
“Kenneth got in touch after Paul’s visit. Said I needed to act before Paul did something like ask the police to compare his notes to the ones Catherine and Jill wrote.”
She held some sheets of paper of her own. “So I just was doing a little comparing of my own.”
She waved one of them in front of Charlotte. “These are from some notes I made when I audited a West Haven philosophy class some years ago.” She smiled. “One of the perks of being married to a faculty member.” She looked off almost dreamily at a point in the distance. “I’ve always liked the feel of a real typewriter. So much more satisfying than a computer. Don’t you?”
Gabriella ended her reminiscing with a small shake of the head. She pointed to the Underwood. There was a piece of paper rolled into it, and a line of type.
“Remember ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’?” Gabriella asked.
Charlotte shook her head.
“You’re too young,” Gabriella said. “That’s what they’d always have you write to test a typewriter. A nice, crisp sentence. That’s what I was doing. That’s the noise you heard. I was about to compare my class notes to what I just typed here, but that was when your Mr. Myers came down.”