Charlotte was home. It wasn’t unusual for her to pop by through the day, especially if her evening was going to be taken up with showings.
“Up here!” he shouted. “In the think tank!”
He heard her walking up the steps. No, not walking. More like running.
“Paul?” she said again, her voice on edge.
Paul got up out of the computer chair and went back into the kitchen in time to see his wife reach the top of the stairs.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
“Who’s that guy parked across the street, watching the house?” she asked.
Five
After lunch, Anna White sat at her desk, opened her laptop, and made some notes from her three Friday morning sessions.
Her first visitor was a retired X-ray technician who was having a hard time getting over the death of her dog. It had darted out into traffic, and the woman blamed herself. Anna understood why that was making it difficult for the woman to move on. Anna’s second client of the day, Paul Davis, was making some headway. Anna was not yet entirely sold on his idea of writing about Kenneth Hoffman, but he might be onto something. She wasn’t going to tell him not to do it. If Paul believed the exercise would help his recovery, she wasn’t going to discourage him.
And then there was Gavin Hitchens.
She had her work cut out for her where he was concerned.
He said he wanted to get better, and she wanted to believe that was true, but she had her doubts. She knew the young man was not being entirely open with her. She didn’t know that he was outright lying to her, but he was definitely holding things back.
At least he wasn’t denying the basic facts about what had gotten him into trouble.
Sitting in a coffee shop, he’d taken from the table next to him the unwatched cell phone of a distracted babysitter and used it to call the father of a soldier who’d died in Iraq. Gavin claimed to be the dead son. Told the dad he’d faked his death so he wouldn’t have to return and face the father he hated so much.
Gavin didn’t even know the man. He’d seen his name in a newspaper story. He thought it would be fun.
What he hadn’t counted on was the surveillance camera.
When the call was traced back to the woman who owned the phone, she swore she hadn’t made it. Besides, the caller had been male. She knew she’d been at the coffee shop at the time. Police recovered security camera footage that showed Gavin grabbing the woman’s phone when she wasn’t looking, then tucking it back under her purse when he was done with the call.
Gavin had tried to dismiss his actions as a “prank,” but the authorities didn’t see it that way. A look into Gavin’s history revealed other, possible “pranks.” Sneaking into an elderly woman’s home and hiding her cat in the attic was one.
Anna had been trying to get Gavin to search within himself to understand why he perpetrated such cruel hoaxes. He’d been quick to blame a sadistic, unloving father.
Gavin had spun a pretty good tale of abuse and belittling. His father had mocked him for things he was good at (high school theater, sketching, playing the flute) and ridiculed him for things he was not (football, baseball, pretty much anything sports related). His nicknames for Gavin included “flower fucker” and “Janice.” Gavin’s dad figured if you didn’t know how to rebuild an engine block or throw a left hook at somebody in a bar, you were some kind of cocksucking faggot. (Putting that flute in his mouth, Gavin’s father maintained, was a clue.)
“I don’t know why he hated me so much,” Gavin had said in one of their earlier sessions. “Maybe he had low self-esteem. He could have been haunted by how he was mistreated by his own father.”
When patients started tossing around phrases like “low self-esteem,” Anna suspected them of trying a little too hard.
But Gavin’s story didn’t end with his childhood.
At nineteen, he left home. Four years later, his mother killed herself after downing a bottle of sleeping pills. Three years after that, Gavin’s father was diagnosed with liver cancer, and leaned on his son to move back home and look after him.
Gavin conceded to Anna that he saw it as an opportunity to exact some revenge.
He’d hide his father’s reading glasses. Put his pills in a different medicine cabinet. Leave his slippers out on the deck when it rained. Change appliance settings so that when his father made toast it came out burned. Unplug the heating pad Dad sat on as he watched TV.
One time, he added laxative to the old man’s soup, and removed the toilet paper from his father’s bathroom.
“I know it was wrong,” Gavin told her sheepishly. “I think maybe, after he died, I couldn’t stop. I had to find others to torment.”
Maybe there was something to all this business with his father, Anna thought, assuming the story he told was true. She had checked some of the details—the mother’s suicide, the father’s liver cancer— and they’d turned out to be true. But the story seemed a little too pat, Gavin’s excuse too convenient.
It was also possible Gavin had perpetrated those “pranks”—the ones she knew about and the ones she didn’t—not because of a miserable father but because at his core, there was something just not right with him.
It was entirely possible Gavin wasn’t wired right. Maybe taking pleasure in the pain of others was part of his DNA. It could be that he just got off on finding people’s weaknesses and exploiting them.
Sometimes, the reasons were elusive. People were who they were.
She wondered if there might be a way to find out more about his teenage years, if there were things he might have done that no one had—
Hang on, Anna thought.
When she’d sat down to make these notes, she’d had to open her laptop.
But I left my laptop open.
And then she remembered that she’d found Gavin behind her desk, supposedly looking at the books on the shelves, when she’d come into her office.
Six
Paul went immediately to the window that looked down onto the street. He peered through the blinds.
“Where?” he asked. “What car?”
Charlotte dumped her purse onto a chair and rushed over to join him. She looked between the slats.
“It was right—”
“There’s no car there,” Paul said. “Where was it exactly?”
“Right there. Right across the street. It’s gone. It must have taken off.”
“Who was he?”
Charlotte stepped back from the window “I don’t know. Just some guy. I didn’t get much of a look. The windows were tinted.”
“What kind of car was it?”
Charlotte sighed. “It was kind of boxy. It was like the car you said you saw out there the other day.”
Paul looked at her. “What are you talking about?”
Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “What was it? Saturday? When you said there was someone on the street watching us?”
“I . . . don’t . . . Saturday?”
She nodded. “I was sitting right there.” She pointed to one of four stools tucked under the kitchen island. “You were looking out the window wondering about a car. A station wagon. You said some guy got out, stood there for a second, and pointed right at you. Shouted your name.”
Paul moved slowly back into the kitchen, turned, and leaned against the counter. He ran a hand over his chin. “I don’t have any memory of that.”
Charlotte approached him slowly. “Okay.”
“When I told you this, did you see him?”
She shook her head. “I got to the window fast as I could, but there was no car there. But I couldn’t help but remember that when I saw that car, right now.”
“But that guy didn’t get out?”
“No.”
“Was he looking at the house?”
“Actually, not so much.” She shrugged. “It could have been anybody. I shouldn’t even have mentioned it.” She shook her head. “God, you’re starting to make me paranoid.”
Paul visibly winced.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “I totally take it back. It was—”
“Don’t worry about it, really.”
They said nothing for several moments. It was Charlotte who broke the silence with a tentative question. “How did it go today with Dr. White?”
Paul nodded slowly. “It was okay.”