There were so many, they were almost blinding. It was difficult to tell just how many vehicles there were up ahead. She could see at least two police cars, an ambulance, and what even looked like a fire truck.
They appeared to be clustered either right in front of her house, or just beyond it. Either way, the street at that point was impassible.
A male officer standing in the middle of the road held up a hand to stop her. She powered down her window.
“Road’s closed, ma’am,” he told her.
“My house is right there.” She pointed. “Can I get that far?”
Her words made an impression on him. “ That house?”
She nodded.
“Okay, go on ahead.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Just go on ahead.”
She put the window back up and crept the rest of the way, edging past a Milford Police cruiser and turning into the driveway behind Paul’s car. As she opened her door she found a uniformed female officer waiting for her.
“You live here?” she asked.
“Yes,” Charlotte said.
“What’s your name?”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Charlotte Davis. Could someone please tell me what’s happening?”
“Please wait here.”
“Can I go inside?”
“Please wait here.”
The cop walked off, threading her way between the emergency vehicles blocking the street. Charlotte saw her conferring with someone. A fortyish black man in plainclothes with what appeared, at least from where Charlotte was standing, a badge of some kind clipped to his belt.
The man looked in Charlotte’s direction and approached.
“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 l
ot 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.
“Were you concerned he might harm himself? That he might take his own life? Could he have received one of these so-called messages telling him to kill himself, to walk out into the sound?”
“I just . . .”
“And I understand you were recently out there? Two nights ago? He’d had an episode?”
“Oh, God, what have I done,” Anna said and began to curl in on herself. “What did I fail to do?”
As the tears came, she grabbed for more tissues. “I suggested to him that he go to the hospital, that he be admitted for a short period so that he could be observed. But he wouldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
Anna shook her head. “His friend talked him out of it.”
“What friend?”
“Bill. I don’t know his last name, but I think he works with Charlotte. She’s a real estate agent.”
Arnwright flipped to an earlier page in his notebook. “Bill Myers?”
“Possibly. Charlotte phoned him when I was there. Bill asked to talk to Paul, and after that Paul said he didn’t want to go to the hospital. He might have come to that decision on his own, though. Paul did not believe there was anything wrong with him mentally, although toward the end, he seemed more open to considering the idea that maybe he was responsible.”
“Responsible?”
“For the strange things that were going on.”
“Do you agree with the wife? He was writing them?”
Anna looked at the detective with red eyes. “Yes.”
Arnwright nodded and closed his notebook. “So it appears what happened is, Mr. Davis was in a very distressed state of mind, walked out into Long Island Sound with the intention of killing himself, and was successful. Is there anything you can tell me, as a professional who was treating Mr. Davis, that would run contrary to that finding?”
Anna struggled. To say no was an admission that she had not done her job, that she had failed him. To say no was to admit responsibility.
To say yes would be to lie.
“No,” she whispered. “No, I can’t think of anything that would contradict that finding.”
Arnwright offered a slow, sympathetic nod. “For what it’s worth, Dr. White, we have all been there. We’re all just trying to do the best we can.”
“I didn’t,” Anna White said. “Not even close.”
Forty-Seven
I killed him,” Bill Myers said. “I killed Paul.”
“I’m sorry?” Detective Arnwright said. “What do you mean?” They were meeting at The Corner Restaurant on River Street, a cup of coffee in front of each of them. Arnwright had suggested Paul’s friend order something to eat, but he’d declined, saying he didn’t have much of an appetite. That was when he made what had sounded to the detective like a confession.
“Mr. Myers, I should tell you, that if you’re about to admit something here, I’m obliged to inform you that—”
“It’s nothing like that,” Bill said, waving his hand in the air. “I didn’t drag him out into the sound and hold his head underwater, for God’s sake, but I might as well have.”
He made two fists, opened his hands, then made them again.
“I just . . . I can’t believe he did that. I can’t. He wasn’t crazy.” He leaned in closer to Arnwright. “He was going through some shit, he really was, but I never, never thought he would do anything like that. Otherwise, I would have told him to take his therapist’s advice, to check into the hospital. But no, I had to talk him out of that.” He grimaced. “I have to live with that for the rest of my life. That’s what I mean when I say I killed him. I talked him out of getting the help he so clearly needed.”
“It’s hard to know what’s going through people’s heads,” Arnwright said. “When did you last see Mr. Davis?”
“We met up for a squash game the other day but didn’t really play that hard. You know he had a head injury, and I didn’t even think he should be playing, but he was sick of treating himself with kid gloves. But after a few minutes, he came to his senses, and we cut our session short.”
“How did he seem to you?”
“Upset. You know about the nightmares? The typewriter thing?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there you go.”
“Were you close friends, you and Paul?”
Bill hesitated. “Friends, for sure. Maybe not super close. We knew each other in university, UConn, and we sort of kept in touch. We both ended up in Milford, and he knew what I did for a living, and when Charlotte was getting into real estate, he asked if there was any way I could help her out. We found a spot for her at the agency.”
“So all three of you were friends.”
“I guess. Sure.”
“Are you married, Mr. Myers?”
“I have been, but not now.” He appeared to be considering whether to tell Arnwright something. “Let me tell you a story.”
“Okay.”
“I had a cousin, she lived in Cleveland. And around the time she was turning twenty, she started believing that she was being pursued by Margaret Thatcher.”
“The British prime minister?”
Bill nodded. “She said she was getting messages from her, telepathically. And here’s the thing. Her parents, they wanted to believe that it was really happening. That somehow, for reasons they could not explain, the prime minister of England was out to get their daughter. You know why?”
“I think so.”
“Because the alternative was even more horrible to imagine. That their daughter was seriously mentally ill. They were in denial about that. But eventually, of course, they had to accept the fact that my cousin Michele was delusional. A delusion became the only rational explanation.”
“And that’s how you feel about Paul and his obsession about that typewriter.”
Bill shrugged.
“What happened to Michele?” Arnwright asked.
“She jumped off the Hope Memorial Bridge into the Cuyahoga River at the age of twenty-four.”
_________________
DETECTIVE ARNWRIGHT HAD TO WAIT NEARLY A MINUTE FOR HIS knock to be answered at Gavin Hitchens’s house.
When the door finally opened, Arnwright’s eyebrows went up a notch. He knew Hitchens had been seriously injured by Paul Da
vis, that he’d suffered a blow to the head, that his elbow had been sprained, that one of his knees had been hurt. So the sling, the bandage on his head, and the wrapped knee were to be expected. Arnwright was just expecting Hitchens to be wearing more than a pair of boxers.
“Yeah?” he said.
Arnwright introduced himself. Hitchens nodded knowingly and smiled.
“Let me guess,” he said. “That son of a bitch wants to charge me with harassment or something.” Hitchens grinned maliciously. “Fucker puts me in the hospital, and I’m supposed to be the dangerous one.”
“You’re talking about Mr. Davis,” Arnwright said cautiously.
“Is that what he did? File a complaint about me? Because if he’s saying I did something, I didn’t do anything.”
“What do you think he might have said?”
“Look, okay, I was on his street. I was looking at his house. But that’s all. I was getting an ice cream.”
“And when was this?”
Hitchens blinked. “Hang on. Is that why you’re here or not?”
“If you think I’m here about Paul Davis, yeah, you’re right about that. So when was this?”
“Yesterday, kind of midday.”
“You had words?”
Hitchens shrugged. “He told me to move on, and I did. End of story.”
“But there’s a lot of bad blood between you.”
“Wow,” said Hitchens. “I can see why you’re a detective.”
“What’s the source of this trouble?”
The young man shrugged. “I’ve been through this. I gave a statement. This Davis guy is some kind of mental case. Thinks I was trying to drive him insane or something, but believe me, his crazy train had already reached the station.”
“Did you speak again with Mr. Davis later yesterday?”
“No, that was it.”
“What was your purpose in standing out in front of his house?”
Gavin Hitchens looked away. “I don’t know. It was a place to be.”
“Were you trying to scare him? Intimidate him? Make him think you were going to get even?”
Slowly, he shook his head. “I mean, he might never even have seen me if he hadn’t come out when he did, so you can’t really scare a guy if he doesn’t know you’re there.”
Arnwright studied the man for several more seconds.