attempted to kill her. He bore a striking resemblance to Bruno Frye."
"Are you serious?" Goldfield asked.
"Oh, yes," Hilary said. "Very serious."
"And you thought--"
"Yes."
"God, it must have been a shock to see him and think he'd come back!" Goldfield said. "But all I can tell you is that the resemblance must be coincidental. Because Frye is dead. I've never seen a man any deader than he was."
They thanked Goldfield for his time and patience, and he escorted them out to the reception area.
Tony stopped at the desk and asked Agnes, the secretary, for the name of the funeral home that had claimed Frye's body. She looked through the files and said, "It was Angels' Hill Mortuary."
Hilary wrote down the address.
Goldfield said, "You don't still think--"
"No," Tony said. "But on the other hand, we've got to pursue every lead. At least, that's what they taught me at the police academy."
Eyes hooded, frowning, Goldfield watched them as they walked away.

***

At Angels' Hill Mortuary, Hilary waited in the Jeep while Tony went inside to talk to the mortician who had handled the body of Bruno Frye. They had agreed that he would be able to obtain the information faster if he went in alone and used his LAPD identification.
Angels' Hill was a big operation with a fleet of hearses, twelve roomy viewing chapels, and a large staff of morticians and technicians. Even in the business office, the lighting was indirect and relaxing, and the colors were somber yet rich, and the floor was covered with plush wall-to-wall carpet. The decor was meant to convey a hushed appreciation for the mystery of death; but to Tony, all it conveyed was a loud and clear statement about the profitability of the funeral business.
The receptionist was a cute blonde in a gray skirt and maroon blouse. Her voice was soft, smooth, whispery, but it did not contain even a slight hint of sexual suggestiveness or invitation. It was a voice that had been carefully trained to project consolation, heartfelt solace, respect, and low-key but genuine concern. Tony wondered if she used the same cool funeral tone when she cried encouragement to her lover in bed, and that thought chilled him.
She located the file on Bruno Frye and found the name of the technician who had worked on the body. "Sam Hardesty. I believe Sam is in one of the preparation rooms at the moment. We've had a couple of recent admissions," she said, as if she were working in a hospital rather than a mortuary. "I'll see if he can spare you a few minutes. I'm not sure how far along he is in the treatment. If he can get free, he'll meet you in the employees' lounge."
She took Tony to the lounge to wait. The room was small but pleasant. Comfortable chairs were pushed up against the walls. There were ashtrays and all kinds of magazines. A coffee machine. A soda machine. A bulletin board covered with notices about bowling leagues and garage sales and car pools.
Tony was leafing through a four-page mimeographed copy of the Angels' Hill Employee News when Sam Hardesty arrived from one of the preparation rooms. Hardesty looked unnervingly like an automobile mechanic. He was wearing a rumpled white jumpsuit that zipped up the front; there were several small tools (the purpose of which Tony did not want to know) clipped to Hardesty's breast pocket. He was a young man, in his late twenties, with long brown hair and sharp features.
"Detective Clemenza?"
"Yes."
Hardesty held out his hand, and Tony shook it with some reluctance, wondering what it had touched just moments ago.
"Suzy said you wanted to talk to me about one of the accounts." Hardesty had been trained by the same voice coach who had worked with Suzy, the blond receptionist.
Tony said, "I understand you were responsible for preparing Bruno Frye's body for shipment to Santa Rosa last Thursday."
"That's correct. We were cooperating with a mortuary up in St. Helena."
"Would you please tell me exactly what you did with the corpse after you picked it up at the morgue?"
Hardesty looked at him curiously. "Well, we brought the deceased here and treated him."
"You didn't stop anywhere between the morgue and here?"
"No."
"From the moment the body was consigned to you until you relinquished it at the airport, was there ever a time when it was alone?"
"Alone? Only for a minute or two. It was a rush job because we had to put the deceased aboard a Friday afternoon flight. Say, can you tell me what this is all about? What are you after?"
"I'm not sure," Tony said. "But maybe if I ask enough questions I'll find out. Did you embalm him?"
"Certainly," Hardesty said. "We had to because he was being shipped on a public conveyance. The law requires us to hook out the soft organs and embalm the deceased before putting him on a public conveyance."
"Hook out?" Tony asked.
"I'm afraid it's not very pleasant," Hardesty said. "But the intestines and stomach and certain other organs pose a real problem for us. Filled with decaying waste as they are, those parts of the body tend to deteriorate a great deal faster than other tissues. To prevent unpleasant odors and embarrassingly noisy gas accumulations at the viewing, and for ideal preservation of the deceased even after burial, it's necessary to remove as many of those organs as we can. We use a sort of telescoping instrument with a retractable hook on one end. We insert it in the anal passage and--"
Tony felt the blood drain out of his face, and he quickly raised one hand to halt Hardesty. "Thank you. I believe that's all I've got to hear. I get the picture."
"I warned you it wasn't particularly pleasant."
"Not particularly," Tony agreed. Something seemed to be stuck in his throat. He coughed into his hand. It was still down there. It would probably be down there until he got out of this place. "Well," he said to Hardesty, "I think you've told me everything I needed to know."
Frowning thoughtfully, Hardesty said, "I don't know what you're looking for, but there was one peculiar thing connected with the Frye assignment."
"What's that?"
"It happened two days after we shipped the deceased to Santa Rosa," Hardesty said. "It was Sunday afternoon. The day before yesterday. Some guy called up and wanted to talk to the technician who handled Bruno Frye. I was here because my days off are Wednesday and Thursday, so I took the call. He was very, angry. He accused me of doing a quick and sloppy job on the deceased. That wasn't true. I did the best work I could under the circumstances. But the deceased had lain in the hot sun for a few hours, and then he'd been refrigerated. And there were those stab wounds and the coroner's incisions. Let me tell you, Mr. Clemenza, the flesh was not in very good condition when I received the deceased. I mean, you couldn't expect him to look lifelike. Besides, I wasn't responsible for cosmetic work. That was taken care of by the funeral director up there in St. Helena. I tried to tell this guy on the phone that it wasn't my fault, but he wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise."
"Did he give his name?" Tony asked.
"No. He just got angrier and angrier. He was screaming at me and crying, carrying on like a lunatic. He was in real agony. I thought he must be a relative of the deceased, someone half out of his mind with grief. That's why I was so patient with him. But then, when he got really hysterical, he told me that he was Bruno Frye."
"He did what?"
"Yeah. He said he was Bruno Frye and that some day he might just come back down here and tear me apart because of what I'd done to him."
"What else did he say?"
"That was it. As soon as he started with that kind of stuff, I knew he was a nut, so I hung up on him."
Tony felt as if he had just been given a transfusion of icewater; he was cold inside as well as out.
Sam Hardesty saw that he was shocked. "What's wrong?"
"I was just wondering if three people are enough to make it mass hysteria."
"Huh?"
"Was there anything peculiar about this caller's voice?"
"How'd you know that?"
"A very deep voice?"
"He rumbled," Hardesty said.
"And gravelly, coarse?"
"That's right. You know him?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Who is he?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Try me," Hardesty said.
Tony shook his head. "Sorry. This is confidential police business."
Hardesty was disappointed; the tentative smile on his face slipped away.
"Well, Mr. Hardesty, you've been a great help. Thank you for your time and trouble."
Hardesty shrugged. "It wasn't anything."
It was something, Tony thought. Something indeed. But I sure as hell don't know what it means.
In the short hall outside the employees' lounge, they went in different directions, but after a few steps Tony turned and said, "Mr. Hardesty?"
Hardesty stopped, looked back. "Yes?"
"Answer a personal question?"
"What is it?"
"What made you decide to do ... this kind of work?"
"My favorite uncle was a funeral director."
"I see."
"He was a lot of fun. Especially with kids. He loved kids. I wanted to be like him," Hardesty said. "You always had the feeling that Uncle Alex knew some enormous, terribly important secret. He did a lot of magic tricks for us kids, but it was more than that. I always thought that what he did for a living was very magical and mysterious, too, and that it was because of his work that he'd learned something nobody else knew."
"Have you found his secret yet?"
"Yes," Hardesty said. "I think maybe I have."
"Can you tell me?"
"Sure. What Uncle Alex knew, and what I've come to learn, is that you've got to treat the dead with every bit as much concern and respect as you do the living. You can't just put them out of mind, bury them and forget about them. The lessons they taught us when they were alive are still with us. All the things they did to us and for us are still in our minds, still shaping and changing us. And because of how they've affected us, we'll have certain influences on people who will be alive long after we're dead. So in a way, the dead never really die at all. They just go on and on. Uncle Alex's secret was just this: The dead are people, too."
Tony stared at him for a moment, not certain what he should say. But then the question came unbidden: "Are you a religious man, Mr. Hardesty?"
"I wasn't when I started doing this work," he said. "But I am now. I certainly am now."
"Yes, I suppose you are."
Outside, when Tony got behind the wheel of the Jeep and pulled the driver's door shut, Hilary said, "Well? Did he embalm Frye?"
"Worse than that."
"What's worse than that?"
"You don't want to know."
He told her about the telephone call that Hardesty had received from the man claiming to be Bruno Frye.
"Ahhh," she said softly. "Forget what I said about shared psychoses. This is proof!"
"Proof of what? That Frye's alive? He can't be alive. In addition to other things too disgusting to mention, he was embalmed. No one can sustain even a deep coma when his veins and arteries are full of embalming fluid instead of blood."
"But at least that phone call is proof that something out of the ordinary is happening."
"Not really," Tony said.
"Can you take this to your captain?"
"There's no point in doing that. To Harry Lubbock, it'll look like nothing more sinister than a crank call, a hoax."
"But the voice!"
"That won't be enough to convince Harry."
She sighed. "So what's next?"
"We've got to do some heavy thinking," Tony said. "We've got to examine the situation from every angle and see if there's something we've missed."
"Can we think at lunch?" she asked. "I'm starved."
"Where do you want to eat?"
"Since we're both rumpled and wrung out, I suggest some place dark and private."
"A back booth at Casey's Bar?"
"Perfect," she said.
As he drove to Westwood, Tony thought about Hardesty and about how, in one way, the dead were not really dead at all.

***

Bruno Frye stretched out in the back of the Dodge van and tried to get some sleep.
The van was not the one in which he had driven to Los Angeles last week. That vehicle had been impounded by the police. By now it had been claimed by a representative of Joshua Rhinehart, who was executor of the Frye estate and responsible for the proper liquidation of its assets. This van wasn't gray, like the first one, but dark blue with white accent lines. Frye had paid cash for it yesterday morning at a Dodge dealership on the outskirts of San Francisco. It was a handsome machine.
He had spent nearly all of yesterday on the road and had arrived in Los Angeles last night. He'd gone straight to Katherine's house in Westwood.
She was using the name Hilary Thomas this time, but he knew she was Katherine.
Katherine.
Back from the grave again.
The rotten bitch.
He had broken into the house, but she hadn't been there. Then she'd finally come home just before dawn, and he'd almost gotten his hands on her. He still couldn't figure out why the police had shown up.
During the past four hours, he'd driven by her house five times, but he hadn't seen anything important. He didn't know if she was there or not.
He was confused. Mixed up. And frightened. He didn't know what he should do next, didn't know how he should go about locating her. His thoughts were becoming increasingly strange, fragmented, difficult to control. He felt intoxicated, dizzy, disjointed, even though he hadn't drunk anything.
He was tired. So very tired. No sleep since Sunday night. And not much then. If he could just get caught up on his sleep, he would be able to think clearly again.
Then he could go after the bitch again.
Cut off her head.
Cut out her heart. Put a stake through it.
Kill her. Kill her once and for all.
But first, sleep.
He stretched out on the floor of the van, thankful for the sunlight that streamed through the windshield, over the front seats, and into the cargo hold. He was scared to sleep in the dark.
A crucifix lay nearby.
And a pair of sharp wooden stakes.
He had filled small linen bags with garlic and had taped one over each door.
Those things might protect him from Katherine, but he knew they would not ward off the nightmare. It would come to him now as it always did when he slept, as it had all his life, and he would wake with a scream caught in the back of his throat. As always, he would not be able to recall what the dream had been about. But upon waking, he would hear the whispers, the loud but unintelligible whispers, and he would feel something moving on his body, all over his body, on his face, trying to get into his mouth and nose, some horrible thing; and during the minute or two that it would take for those sensations to fade away, he would ardently wish that he were dead.
He dreaded sleep, but he needed it.
He closed his eyes.

***

As usual, the lunchtime din in the main dining room at Casey's Bar was very nearly deafening.
But in the other part of the restaurant, behind the oval bar, there were several sheltered booths, each of which was enclosed on three sides like a big confessional, and in these the distant dining room roar of conversation was tolerable; it acted as a background screen to insure even greater privacy than was afforded by the cozy booths themselves.
Halfway through lunch, Hilary looked up from her food and said, "I've got it."
Tony put down his sandwich. "Got what?"
"Frye must have a brother."
"A brother?"
"It explains everything."
"You think you killed Frye last Thursday--and then his brother came after you last night?"
"Such a likeness could only be found in brothers."
"And the voice?"
"They could have inherited the same voice."
"Maybe a low-pitched voice could be inherited," Tony said. "But that special gravelly quality you described? Could that be inherited, too?"
"Why not?"
"Last night you said the only way a person could get such a voice was to suffer a serious throat injury or be born with a deformed larynx."
"So I was wrong," she said. "Or maybe both brothers were born with the same deformity."
"A million-to-one shot."
"But not impossible."
Tony sipped his beer, then said, "Maybe brothers could share the same body type, the same facial features, the same color eyes, the same voice. But could they also share precisely the same set of psychotic delusions?"
She took a taste of her own beer while she thought about that. Then: "Severe mental illness is a product of environment."
"That's what they used to think. They're not entirely sure of that any more."
"Well, for the sake of my theory, suppose that psychotic behavior is a product of environment. Brothers would have been raised in the same house by the same parents--in exactly the same environment. Isn't it conceivable that they could develop identical psychoses?"
He scratched his chin. "Maybe. I remember...."
"What?"
"I took a university course in abnormal psychology as part of a study program in advanced criminology," Tony said. "They were trying to teach us how to recognize and deal with various kinds of psychopaths. The idea was a good one. If a policeman can identify the specific type of mental illness when he first encounters an irrational person, and if he has at least a little understanding of how that type of psychopath thinks and reacts, then he's got a much better chance of handling him quickly and safely. We saw a lot of films of mental patients. One of them was an incredible study of a mother and daughter who were both paranoid schizophrenics. They suffered from the same delusions."
"So there!" Hilary said excitedly.
"But it was an extremely rare case."
"So is this."
"I'm not sure, but maybe it was the only one of its type they'd ever found."
"But it is possible."
"Worth thinking about, I guess."
"A brother...."
They picked up their sandwiches and began to eat again, each of them staring thoughtfully at his food.
Suddenly, Tony said, "Damn! I just remembered something that shoots a big hole in the brother theory."
"What?"
"I assume you read the newspaper accounts last Friday and Saturday."
"Not all of them," she said. "It's sort of ... I don't know ... sort of embarrassing to read about yourself as victim. I got through one article; that was enough."
"And you don't remember what was in that article?"
She frowned, trying to figure out what he was talking about, and then she knew. "Oh, yeah. Frye didn't have a brother."
"Not a brother or a sister. Not anyone. He was the sole heir to the vineyards when his mother died, the last member of the Frye family, the end of his line."
Hilary didn't want to abandon the brother idea. That explanation was the only one that made sense of the recent bizarre events. But she couldn't think of a way to hold on to the theory.
They finished their food in silence.
At last Tony said, "We can't keep you hidden from him forever. And we can't just sit around and wait for him to find you."
"I don't like the idea of being bait in a trap."
"Anyway, the answer isn't here in L.A."
She nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."
"We've got to go to St. Helena."
"And talk with Sheriff Laurenski."
"Laurenski and anyone else who knew Frye."
"We might need several days," she said.
"Like I told you. I've got a lot of vacation time and sick leave built up. A few weeks of it. And for the first time in my life, I'm not particularly anxious to get back to work."
"Okay," she said. "When do we leave?"
"The sooner the better."
"Not today," she said. "We're both too damned tired. We need sleep. Besides, I want to drop your paintings off with Wyant Stevens. I've got to make arrangements for an insurance adjuster to put a price on the damage at my place, and I want to tell my house cleaning service to straighten up the wreckage while I'm gone. And if I'm not going to talk to the people at Warner Brothers about The Hour of the Wolf this week, then I've at least got to make excuses--or tell Wally Topelis what excuses he should make for me."
"I've got to fill out a final report on the shooting," Tony said. "I was supposed to do that this morning. And they'll want me for the inquest, of course. There's always an inquest when a policeman is killed--or when he kills someone else. But they shouldn't have scheduled the inquest any sooner than next week. If they did, I can probably get them to postpone it."
"So when do we leave for St. Helena?"
"Tomorrow," he said. "Frank's funeral is at nine o'clock. I want to go to that. So let's see if there's a flight leaving around noon."
"Sounds good to me."
"We've got a lot to do. We'd better get moving."
"One other thing," Hilary said. "I don't think we should stay at your place tonight."
He reached across the table and took her hand. "I'm sure he can't get to you there. If he tries. you've got me, and I've got my service revolver. He may be built like Mr. Universe, but a gun is a good equalizer."
She shook her head. "No. Maybe it would be all right. But I wouldn't be able to sleep there, Tony. I'd be awake all night, listening for sounds at the door and windows."
"Where do you want to stay?"
"After we've run our errands this afternoon, let's pack for the trip, leave your apartment, make sure we're not followed, and check in to a room at a hotel near the airport."
He squeezed her hand. "Okay. If that'll make you feel better."
"It will."
"I guess it's better to be safe than sorry."

***

In St. Helena, at 4:10 Tuesday afternoon, Joshua Rhinehart put down his office phone and leaned back in his chair, pleased with himself. He had accomplished quite a lot in the past two days. Now he swiveled around to look out the window at the far mountains and the nearer vineyards.
He had spent nearly all of Monday on the telephone, dealing with Bruno Frye's bankers, stockbrokers, and financial advisers. There had been many lengthy discussions about how the assets ought to be managed until the estate was finally liquidated, and there had been more than a little debate about the most profitable ways to dispose of those assets when the time came for that. It had been a long, dull patch of work, for there had been a large number of savings accounts of various kinds, in several banks, plus bond investments, a rich portfolio of common stocks, real estate holdings, and much more.
Joshua spent Tuesday morning and the better part of the afternoon arranging, by telephone, for some of the most highly-respected art appraisers in California to journey to St. Helena for the purpose of cataloging and evaluating the varied and extensive collections that the Frye family had accumulated over six or seven decades. Leo, the patriarch, Katherine's father, now dead for forty years, had begun simply, with a fascination for elaborately hand-carved wooden spigots of the sort often used on beer and wine barrels in some European countries. Most of them were in the form of heads, the gaping or gasping or laughing or weeping or howling or snarling heads of demons, angels, clowns, wolves, elves, fairies, witches, gnomes, and other creatures. At the time of his death, Leo owned more than two thousand of those spigots. Katherine had shared her father's interest in collecting while he was alive, and after his death she had made collecting the central focus of her life. Her interest in acquiring beautiful things became a passion, and the passion eventually became a mania. (Joshua remembered how her eyes had gleamed and how she had chattered breathlessly each time that she had shown him a new purchase; he knew there had been something unhealthy about her desperate rush to fill every room and closet and drawer with lovely things, but then the rich always had been permitted their eccentricities and manias, so long as they caused no harm to anyone else.) She bought enameled boxes, turn-of-the-century landscape paintings, Lalique crystal, stained glass lamps and windows, antique cameo lockets, and many other items, not so much because they were excellent investments (which they were) but because she wanted them, needed them as a junkie always needed another fix. She stuffed her enormous house with these displays, spent countless hours just cleaning, polishing, and caring for everything. Bruno contained that tradition of almost frantic acquisition, and now both houses--the one Leo built in 1918, and the one Bruno had built five years ago--were crammed full of treasures. On Tuesday, Joshua called art galleries and prestige auction houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and all of them were eager to send their appraisers, for there were many fat commissions to be earned from the disposition of the Frye collections. Two men from San Franisco and two from Los Angeles were arriving Saturday morning; and, certain that they would require several days to catalogue the Frye holdings, Joshua made reservations for them at a local inn.
By 4:10 Tuesday afternoon, he was beginning to feel that he was on top of the situation; and for the first time since he was informed of Bruno's death, he was getting a fix on how long it would take him to fulfill his obligations as executor. Initially, he had worried that the estate would be so complicated that he would be tangled up in it for years, or at least for several months. But now that he had reviewed the will (which he had drawn up five years ago), and now that he had discovered where Bruno's capable financial advisers had led the man, he was confident that the entire matter could be resolved in a few weeks. His job was made easier by three factors that were seldom present in multimillion-dollar estate settlements: First, there were no living relatives to contest the will or make other problems; second, the entire after-tax net was left to a single charity clearly named in the will; third, for a man of such wealth, Bruno Frye had kept his investments simple, presenting his executor with a reasonably neat balance sheet of easily understood debits and credits. Three weeks would see the end of it. Four at most.
Since the death of his wife, Cora, three years ago, Joshua was acutely conscious of the brevity of life, and he jealously guarded this time. He didn't want to waste one precious day, and he felt that every minute he spent bogged down in the Frye estate was definitely a minute wasted. Of course, he would receive an enormous fee for his legal services, but he already had all the money he would ever need. He owned substantial real estate in the valley, including several hundred acres of prime grape-producing land which was managed for him and which supplied grapes to two big wineries that could never get enough of them. He had thought, briefly, of asking the court to relieve him of his duties; one of Frye's banks would have taken on the job with great pleasure. He also considered turning the work over to Ken Gavins and Roy Genelli, the two sharp young attorneys who he had taken on as partners seven years ago. But his strong sense of loyalty had kept him from taking the easy way out. Because Katherine Frye had given him his start in the Napa Valley thirty-five years ago, he felt he owed her the time it would take to personally preside over the orderly and dignified dissolution of the Frye family empire.
Three weeks.
Then he could spend more time on the things he enjoyed: reading good books, swimming, flying the new airplane that he'd bought, learning to cook new dishes, and indulging in an occasional weekend in Reno. Ken and Roy handled most of the law firm's business these days, and they did a damned good job of it. Joshua hadn't plunged into full retirement yet, but he sat on the edge of it a lot, dangling his legs in a big pool of leisure time that he wished he had found and used when Cora was still alive.
At 4:20, content with his progress on the Frye estate and soothed by the magnificent view of the autumn valley beyond his window, he got up from his chair and went out to the reception area. Karen Farr was pounding the hell out of an IBM Selectric II, which would have responded equally well to a feather touch. She was a slip of a girl, pale and blue-eyed and soft-voiced, but she attacked every chore with tremendous energy and strength.
"I am about to treat myself to an early whiskey," Joshua told her. "When people call and ask for me, please tell them I am in a disgraceful drunken condition and cannot come to the phone."
"And they'll all say, 'What? Again?'"
Joshua laughed. "You're a lovely and charming young woman, Miss Farr. Such a delightfully quick mind and tongue for such a mere wisp of a lass."
"And such a lot of malarkey you've got for a man who isn't even Irish. Go and have your whiskey. I'll keep the bothersome hordes away."
In his office again, he opened the corner bar, put ice in a glass, added a generous measure of Jack Daniel's Black Label. He had taken only two sips of the brew when someone knocked on his office door.
"Come in."
Karen opened the door. "There's a call--"
"I thought I was permitted to have my drink in peace."
"Don't be a grouch," she said.
"It's part of my image."
"I told him you weren't in. But then when I heard what he wanted, I thought maybe you should talk to him. It's weird."
"Who is it?"
"A Mr. Preston from the First Pacific United Bank in San Francisco. It's about the Frye estate."
"What's so weird?"
"You better hear it from him," she said.
Joshua sighed. "Very well."
"He's on line two."
Joshua went to his desk, sat down, picked up the phone, and said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Preston."
"Mr. Rhinehart?"
"Speaking. What can I do for you'?"
"The business office at Shade Tree Vineyards informs me that you're the executor of the Frye estate."
"That's correct."
"Are you aware that Mr. Bruno Frye maintained accounts at our main office here in San Francisco?"
"The First Pacific United? No. I wasn't aware of that."
"A savings account, a checking account, and a safe-deposit box," Preston said.
"He had several accounts in several banks. He kept a list of them. But yours wasn't on the list. And I haven't run across any passbooks or canceled checks from your bank."
"I was afraid of that," Preston said.
Joshua frowned. "I don't understand. Are there problems with his accounts at Pacific United?"
Preston hesitated, then said, "Mr. Rhinehart, did Mr. Frye have a brother?"
"No. Why do you ask?"
"Did he ever employ a look-alike?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Did he ever have need for a double, someone who could pass for him on fairly close inspection?"
"Are you pulling my leg, Mr. Preston?"
"I know it's a rather strange question. But Mr. Frye was a wealthy man. These days, what with terrorism on the rise and all sorts of crazies on the loose, wealthy people often have to hire bodyguards, and sometimes--not often; I admit it's rare; but in certain special cases--they even find it necessary to employ look-alikes for security reasons."
"With all due respect for your fair city," Joshua said, "let me point out that Mr. Frye lived here in the Napa Valley, not in San Francisco. We don't have that sort of crime here. We have a much different lifestyle from that which you ... enjoy. Mr. Frye had no need for a double, and I'm certain he did not have one. Mr. Preston, what on earth is this all about?"
"We only just discovered that Mr. Frye was killed last Thursday," Preston said.
"So?"
"It is the opinion of our attorneys that the bank can in no way be held responsible."
"For what?" Joshua asked impatiently.
"As executor of the estate, it was your duty to inform us that our depositor had died. Until we received that notice--or learned of it third-hand, as we did--we had absolutely no reason to consider the account frozen."
"I'm aware of that." Slumped in his chair, staring wistfully at the glass of whiskey on his desk, afraid that Preston was to tell him something that would disturb his rosy complacency, Joshua decided that a bit of curmudgeonly gruffness might speed the conversation along. He said, "Mr. Preston, I know that business is conducted slowly and carefully in a bank, which is fitting for an institution handling other people's hard-earned money. But I wish you could find your way clear to get to the point quickly."
"Last Thursday, half an hour before our closing time, a few hours after Mr. Frye was killed in Los Angeles, a man who resembled Mr. Frye entered our main branch. He had Mr. Frye's personalized checks. He wrote a check to cash, reducing that account to one hundred dollars."
Joshua sat up straight. "How much did he get?"
"Six thousand from checking."
"Ouch."
"Then he presented his passbook and withdrew all but five hundred from the savings account."
"And how much was that?"
"Another twelve thousand."
"Eighteen thousand dollars altogether?"
"Yes. Plus whatever he might have taken from the safe-deposit box."
"He hit that, too?"
"Yes. But of course, we don't know what he might have gotten out of it," Preston said. Then he added hopefully: "Perhaps nothing."
Joshua was amazed. "How could your bank release such a substantial sum in cash without requiring identification?"
"We did require it," Preston said. "And you've got to understand that he looked like Mr. Frye. For the past five years, Mr. Frye has come in two or three times every month; each time he has deposited a couple of thousand dollars in his checking. That made him noticeable. People remembered him. Last Thursday, our teller recognized him and had no reason to be suspicious, especially since he had those personalized checks and his passbook and--"
"That's not identification," Joshua said.
"The teller asked for ID, even though she recognized him. That's our policy on large withdrawals, and she handled it all according to policy. The man showed her a valid California driver's license, complete with photograph, in the name of Bruno Frye. I assure you, Mr. Rhinehart, First Pacific United has not acted irresponsibly in this matter."
"Do you intend to investigate the teller?" Joshua asked.
"An investigation has already begun."
"I'm pleased to hear it."
"But I'm quite sure it won't lead anywhere," Preston said. "She's been with us for more than sixteen years."
"Is she the same woman who let him get to the safe deposit box?" Joshua asked.
"No. That's another employee. We're investigating her as well."
"This is a damned serious matter."
"You don't have to tell me," Preston said miserably. "In all my years in banking, I've never had it happen to me. Before I phoned you, I notified the authorities, the state and federal banking officials, and First Pacific United's attorneys."
"I believe I should come down there tomorrow and have a chat with your people."
"I wish you would."
"Shall we say ten o'clock?"
"Whenever it's convenient for you," Preston said. "I'll be at your disposal all day."
"Then let's make it ten o'clock."
"I'm terribly sorry about this. But of course, the loss is covered by federal insurance."
"Except for the contents of the safe deposit box," Joshua said. "No insurance covers that loss." That was the part of it that was giving Preston a bad case of the jitters, and they both knew it. "The box might have held more of value than the savings and checking accounts combined."
"Or it might very well have been empty before he got to it," Preston said quickly.
"I'll see you in the morning, Mr. Preston."
Joshua hung up and stared at the telephone.
Finally he sipped his whiskey.
A double for Bruno Frye? A dead ringer?
Suddenly, he remembered the light he had thought he'd seen in Bruno's house at three o'clock Monday morning. He'd spotted it on his way back to bed from the bathroom, but when he'd put on his glasses, there had been no light. He'd figured that his eyes had played a trick on him. But perhaps the light had been real. Perhaps the man who had looted those Pacific United accounts had been in Bruno's house, looking for something.
Joshua had been to the house yesterday, had taken a brisk five-minute tour to be certain everything was as it should be, and he had not noticed anything awry.
Why had Bruno kept secret bank accounts in San Francisco?
Was there a dead ringer, a double?
Who? And why?
Damn!
Evidently, overseeing the complete and final settlement of the Frye estate was not going to be as short and easy a job as he had thought.

***

At six o'clock Tuesday evening, as Tony swung the Jeep into the street that ran past his apartment building, Hilary felt more awake than she had all day. She had entered that peculiar second-wind state of grainy-eyed alertness that came after being awake for a day and a half. Suddenly, the body and the mind seemed to decide to made the best of this forced consciousness; and, by some chemical trick, the flesh and the spirit were renewed. She stopped yawning. Her vision, which had been blurry at the edges, grew clear again. The grinding weariness receded. But she knew it would be only a short-lived reprieval from exhaustion. In an hour or two, this surprising high would end in an abrupt and inevitable crash, not unlike the sudden descent from an amphetamine energy peak, and then she would be too drained even to stay on her feet.
She and Tony had successfully dealt with all of their business that needed tending to--the insurance adjuster, the house cleaning service,the police reports, and all the rest. The only thing that hadn't gone smoothly was the stop at the Wyant Stevens Gallery in Beverly Hills. Neither Wyant nor his assistant, Betty, was there, and the plump young woman in charge was reluctant to take possession of Tony's paintings. She didn't want the responsibility, but Hilary finally convinced her that she would not be sued if one of the canvases was marked or torn accidentally. Hilary had written a note to Wyant, explaining the artist's background, and then she and Tony had gone to the offices of Topelis & Associates to ask Wally to make excuses to Warner Brothers. Now the slate was clean. Tomorrow, after Frank Howard's funeral, they would catch the 11:55 PSA flight that would take them to San Francisco in time to board a connecting commuter air shuttle to Napa.
And then a rented car to St. Helena.
And then they would be on Bruno Frye's home ground.
And then--what?
Tony parked the Jeep and switched off the engine.
Hilary said, "I forgot to ask if you managed to find a hotel room."
"Wally's secretary made reservations for me while you and Wally were huddling in his office."
"At the airport."
"Yes."
"Not twin beds, I hope."
"One kingsize."
"Good," she said, "I want you to hold me while I drift off to sleep."
He leaned over and kissed her.
They took twenty minutes to pack a pair of suitcases for him and to carry their four bags down to the Jeep. During that time, Hilary was on edge, fully expecting Frye to leap out of a shadow or step around a corner, grinning.
He didn't.
They drove to the airport by a roundabout route that was full of twists and turns. Hilary watched the cars behind them.
They were not followed.
They reached the hotel at 7:30. With a touch of old-fashioned chivalry that amused Hilary, Tony signed them in as husband and wife.
Their room was on the eighth floor. It was a restful place, done in shades of green and blue.
When the bellhop left, they stood by the bed, just holding each other for a minute, silently sharing their weariness and what strength they had left,
Neither of them felt capable of going out to dinner. Tony ordered from room service, and the operator said service would take about half an hour.
Hilary and Tony showered together. They soaped and rinsed each other with pleasure, but the pleasure wasn't really sexual. They were too tired for passion. The shared bath was merely relaxing, tender, sweet.
They ate club sandwiches and french fries.
They drank half a bottle of Gamay rosé by Robert Mondavi.
They talked only a little while.
They draped a bath towel over a lamp and left the lamp on for a nightlight because, for only the second time in her life, Hilary was afraid to sleep in the dark.
They slept.
Eight hours later, at 5:30 in the morning, she woke from a bad dream in which Earl and Emma had come back to life, just like Bruno Frye. All three of them pursued her down a dark corridor that grew narrower and narrower and narrower....
She couldn't get back to sleep. She lay in the vague amber glow of the makeshift nightlight and watched Tony sleep.
At 6:30 he woke, turned toward her, blinked, touched her face, her breasts, and they made love. For a short while, she forgot about Bruno Frye, but later, as they dressed for Frank's funeral, the fear came back in a rush.
"Do you really think we should go to St. Helena?"
"We have to go," Tony said,
"But what's going to happen to us there?"
"Nothing," he said. "We'll be all right."
"I'm not so sure," she said.
"We'll find out what's going on."
"That's just it," she said uneasily. "I have the feeling we'd be better off not knowing."

***

Katherine was gone.
The bitch was gone.
The bitch was hiding.
Bruno had awakened in the blue Dodge van at 6:30 Tuesday evening, thrown from sleep by the nightmare he could never quite remember, threatened by wordless whispers. Something was crawling all over him, on his arms, on his face, in his hair, even underneath his clothes, trying to get inside his body, trying to scuttle inside through his ears and mouth and nostrils, something unspeakably filthy and evil. He screamed and clawed frantically at himself until he finally realized where he was; then the awful whispers slowly faded, and the imaginary crawling thing crept away. For a few minutes, he curled up on his side, in a tight fetal position, and he wept with relief.
An hour later, after eating at MacDonald's, he had gone to Westwood. He drove by her place half a dozen times, then parked up the street from it, in a pool of shadows between streetlamps. He watched her house all night.
She was gone.
He had the linen bags full of garlic and the sharp wooden stakes and the crucifix and the vial of holy water. He had the two very sharp knives and a small woodman's hatchet with which he could chop off her head. He had the courage and the will and the determination.
But she was gone.
When he first began to realize that she had skipped out and might not be back for days or weeks, he was furious. He cursed her, and he wept with frustration.
Then he gradually regained control of himself. He told himself that all was not lost. He would find her.
He had found her countless times before.





Six



WEDNESDAY MORNING, Joshua Rhinehart made the short flight to San Francisco in his own Cessna Turbo Skylane RG. It was a honey of a plane with a cruising speed of 173 knots and a range of over one thousand miles.
He had begun taking flying lessons three years ago, shortly after Cora died. For most of his life, he had dreamed about being a pilot, but he had never found time to learn until he was fifty-eight years old. When Cora was taken from him so unexpectedly, he saw that he was a fool, a fool who thought that death was a misfortune that only befell other people. He had spent his life as if he possessed an infinite store of it, as if he could spend and spend, live and live, forever. He thought he would have all the time in the world to take those dreamed-about trips to Europe and the Orient, all the time in the world to relax and travel and have fun; therefore, he always put off the cruises and vacations, postponed them until the law practice was built, and then until the mortgages on their large real estate holdings were all paid, and then until the grape-growing business was firmly established, and then.... And then Cora suddenly ran out of time. He missed her terribly, and he still filled up with remorse when he thought of all the things that had been delayed too long. He and Cora had been happy with each other; in many ways, they had enjoyed an extremely good life together, an excellent life by most standards. They'd never wanted for anything--not food or shelter or a fair share of luxuries. There'd always been enough money. But never enough time. He could not help dwelling on what might have been. He could not bring Cora back, but at least he was determined to grab all of the joy he could get his hands on in his remaining years. Because he had never been a gregarious man, and because he felt that nine out of ten people were woefully ignorant and/or malicious, most of his pleasures were solitary pursuits; but, in spite of his preference for solitude, nearly all of those pleasures were less satisfying than they would have been if he'd been able to share them with Cora. Flying was one of the few exceptions to that rule. In his Cessna, high above the earth, he felt as if he'd been freed from all restraints, not just from the bonds of gravity, but from the chains of regret and remorse as well.
Refreshed and renewed by the flight, Joshua landed in San Francisco shortly after nine o'clock. Less than an hour later, he was at the First Pacific United Bank, shaking hands with Mr. Ronald Preston, with whom he had spoken on the phone Tuesday afternoon.
Preston was a vice-president of the bank, and his office was sumptuous. There was a lot of real leather upholstery and well-polished teak. It was a padded, plush, fat office.
Preston, on the other hand, was tall and thin; he looked brittle, breakable. He was darkly tanned and sported a neatly trimmed mustache. He talked too fast, and his hands flung off one quick gesture after another, like a short-circuiting machine casting off sparks. He was nervous.
He was also efficient. He had prepared a detailed file on Bruno Frye's accounts, with pages for each of the five years that Frye had done business with First Pacific United. The file contained a list of savings account deposits and withdrawals, another list of the dates on which Frye had visited his safe-deposit box, clear photocopies of the monthly checking account statements blown up from microfilm records, and similar copies of every check ever written on that account.
"At first glance," Preston said, "it might appear that I haven't given you copies of all the checks Mr. Frye wrote. But let me assure you that I have. There simply weren't many of them. A lot of money moved in and out of that account, but for the first three-and-a-half years, Mr. Frye wrote only two checks a month. For the last year and a half, it's been three checks every month, and always to the same payees."
Joshua didn't bother to open the folder. "I'll look at these things later. Right now, I want to question the teller who paid out on the checking and savings accounts."
A round conference table stood in one corner of the room. Six comfortably padded captain's chairs were arranged around it. That was the place Joshua chose for the interrogations.
Cynthia Willis, the teller, was a self-assured and rather attractive black woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a blue skirt and a crisp white blouse. Her hair was neatly styled, her fingernails well-shaped and brightly polished. She carried herself with pride and grace, and she sat with her back very straight when Joshua directed her into the chair opposite him.
Preston stood by his desk, silently fretting.
Joshua opened the envelope he had brought with him and took from it fifteen snapshots of people who lived or had once lived in St. Helena. He spread them out on the table and said, "Miss Willis--"
"Mrs. Willis," she corrected him.
"I'm sorry. Mrs. Willis, I want you to look at each one of those photographs, and then you tell me which is Bruno Frye. But only after you've looked at them all."
She went through the batch of photos in a minute and picked two of them. "Both of these are him."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive," she said. "That wasn't much of a test. The other thirteen don't look like him at all."
She had done an excellent job, much better than he had expected. Many of the photographs were fuzzy, and some were taken in poor light. Joshua purposefully used bad pictures to make the identification more difficult than it otherwise might have been, but Mrs. Willis did not hesitate. And although she said the other thirteen didn't look like Frye, a few of them actually did, a little. Joshua had chosen a few people who resembled Frye, at least when the camera was slightly out of focus, but that ruse had not fooled Cynthia Willis; and neither had the trick of including two photographs of Frye, two headshots, each much different from the other.
Tapping the two snapshots with her index finger, Mrs. Willis said, "This was the man who came into the bank last Thursday afternoon."
"On Thursday morning," Joshua said, "he was killed in Los Angeles."
"I don't believe it," she said firmly. "There must be some mistake about that."
"I saw his body," Joshua told her. "We buried him up in St. Helena last Sunday."
She shook her head. "Then you must have buried someone else. You must have buried the wrong man."
"I've known Bruno Frye since he was five years old," Joshua said. "I couldn't be mistaken."
"And I know who I saw," Mrs. Willis said politely but stubbornly.
She did not glance at Preston. She had too much pride to tailor her answers to his measurements. She knew she was a good worker, and she had no fear of the boss. Sitting up even straighter than she had been sitting, she said, "Mr. Preston is entitled to his opinion. But, after all, he didn't see the man. I did. It was Mr. Frye. He's been coming in the bank two or three times a month for the past five years. He always makes at least a two-thousand-dollar deposit in checking, sometimes as much as three thousand, and always in cash. Cash. That's unusual. It makes him very memorable. That and the way he looks, all of those muscles and--"
"Surely he didn't always make his deposits at your window."
"Not always," she admitted. "But a lot of the time, he did. And I swear it was him who made those withdrawals last Thursday. If you know him at all, Mr. Rhinehart, you know that I wouldn't even have had to see Mr. Frye to know it was him. I would have recognized him blindfolded because of that strange voice of his."
"A voice can be imitated," Preston said, making his first contribution to the conversation.
"Not this one," Mrs. Willis said.
"It might be imitated," Joshua said, "but not easily."
"And those eyes," Mrs. Willis said. "They were almost as strange as his voice."
Intrigued by that remark, Joshua leaned toward her and said, "What about his eyes?"
"They were cold," she said. "And not just because of the blue-gray color. Very cold, hard eyes. And most of the time he didn't seem to be able to look straight at you. His eyes kept sliding away, as if he was afraid you'd see his thoughts or something. But then, that every great once in a while when he did look straight at you, those eyes gave you the feeling you were looking at ... well ... at somebody who wasn't altogether right in the head."
Ever the diplomatic banker, Preston quickly said, "Mrs. Willis, I'm sure that Mr. Rhinehart wants you to stick to the objective facts of the case. If you interject your personal opinions, that will only cloud the issue and make his job more difficult.
Mrs. Willis shook her head. "All I know is, the man who was here last Thursday had those same eyes."
Joshua was slightly shaken by that observation, for he, too, often thought that Bruno's eyes revealed a soul in torment. There had been a frightened, haunted look in that man's eyes--but also the hard, cold, murderous iciness that Cynthia Willis had noted.
For another thirty minutes, Joshua questioned her about a number of subjects, including: the man who had withdrawn Frye's money, the usual procedures she followed when dispensing large amounts of cash, the procedures she had followed last Thursday, the nature of the ID that the imposter had presented, her home life, her husband, her children, her employment record, her current financial condition, and half a dozen other things. He was tough with her, even gruff when he felt that would help his cause. Unhappy at the prospect of spending extra weeks on the Frye estate because of this new development, anxious to find a quick solution to the mystery, he was searching for a reason to accuse her of complicity in the looting of the Frye accounts, but in the end he found nothing. Indeed, by the time he was finished quizzing her, he had come to like her a great deal and to trust her as well. He even went so far as to apologize to her for his sometimes sharp and quarrelsome manner, and such an apology was extremely rare for him.
After Mrs. Willis returned to her teller's cage, Ronald Preston brought Jane Symmons into the room. She was the woman who had accompanied the Frye look-alike into the vault, to the safe-deposit box. She was a twenty-seven-year-old redhead with green eyes, a pug nose, and a querulous disposition. Her whiny voice and peevish responses brought out the worst in Joshua; but the more curmudgeonly he became, the more querulous she grew. He did not find Jane Symmons to be as articulate as Cynthia Willis, and he did not like her as he did the black woman, and he did not apologize to her; but he was certain that she was as truthful as Mrs. Willis, at least about the matter at hand.
When Jane Symmons left the room, Preston said, "Well, what do you think?"
"It's not likely that either of them was part of any swindle," Joshua said.
Preston was relieved, but tried not to show it. "That's our assessment, too."
"But this man who's posing as Frye must bear an incredible likeness to him."
"Miss Symmons is a most astute young woman," Preston said. "If she said he looked exactly like Frye, the resemblance must, indeed, be remarkable."
"Miss Symmons is a hopeless twit," Joshua said grumpily. "If she were the only witness, I would be lost."
Preston blinked in surprise.
"However," Joshua continued, "your Mrs. Willis is keenly observant. And damned smart. And self-confident without being smug. If I were you, I'd make more of her than just a teller."
Preston cleared his throat. "Well ... uh, what now?"
"I want to see the contents of that safe-deposit box."
"I don't suppose you have Mr. Frye's key?"
"No. He hasn't yet returned from the dead to give it to me."
"I thought perhaps it had turned up among his things since I talked to you yesterday."
"No. If the imposter used the key, I suppose he still has it."
"How did he get it in the first place?" Preston wondered. "If it was given to him by Mr. Frye, then that casts a different light on things. That would alter the bank's position. If Mr. Frye conspired with a look-alike to remove funds--"
"Mr. Frye could not have conspired. He was dead. Now shall we see what's in the box?"
"Without both keys, it'll have to be broken open."
"Please have that done," Joshua said.
Thirty-five minutes later, Joshua and Preston stood in the bank's secondary vault as the building engineer pulled the ruined lock out of the safe-deposit box and, a moment after that, slid the entire box out of the vault wall. He handed it to Ronald Preston, and Preston presented it to Joshua.
"Ordinarily," Preston said somewhat stiffly, "you would be escorted to one of our private cubicles, so that you could look through the contents without being observed. However, because there's a strong possibility you'll claim that some valuables were illegally removed, and because the bank might face a law suit on those charges, I must insist that you open the box in my presence."
"You haven't any legal right to insist on any such thing," Joshua said sourly. "But I have no intention of hitting your bank with a phony law suit, so I'll satisfy your curiosity right now."
Joshua lifted the lid of the safe-deposit box. A white envelope lay inside, nothing else, and he plucked it out. He handed the empty metal box to Preston and tore open the envelope. There was a single sheet of white paper bearing a dated, signed, typewritten note.
It was the strangest thing Joshua had ever read. It appeared to have been written by a man in a fever delirium.

Thursday, September 25

To whom it may concern:
My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies. She has found a way to return from the grave, and she is trying to get me. She is currently living in Los Angeles, under the name Hilary Thomas.
This morning, she stabbed me, and I died in Los Angeles. I intend to go back down there and kill her before she kills me again. Because if she kills me twice, I'll stay dead. I don't have her magic. I can't return from the grave. Not if she kills me twice.
I feel so empty, so incomplete. She killed me, and I'm not whole any more.
I'm leaving this note in case she wins again. Until I'm dead twice, this is my own little war, mine and no one else's. I can't come out in the open and ask for police protection. If I do that, everyone will know what I am, who I am. Everyone will know what I've been hiding all my life, and then they'll stone me to death. But if she gets me again, then it won't matter if everyone finds out what I am, because I'll already be dead twice. If she gets me again, then whoever finds this letter must take the responsibility for stopping her.
You must cut off her head and stuff her mouth full of garlic. Cut out her heart and pound a stake through it. Bury her head and her heart in different church graveyards. She's not a vampire. But I think these things may work. If she is killed this way, she might stay dead.
She comes back from the grave.

Below the body of the letter, in ink, there was a fine forgery of Bruno Frye's signature. It had to be a forgery, of course. Frye was dead already when these lines were written.
The skin tingled on the back of Joshua's neck, and for some reason he thought of Friday night: walking out of Avril Tannerton's funeral home, stepping into the pitch-black night, being certain that something dangerous was nearby, sensing an evil presence in the darkness, a thing crouching and waiting.
"What is it?" Preston asked.
Joshua handed over the paper.
Preston read it and was amazed. "What in the world?"
"It must have been put in the box by the imposter who cleaned out the accounts," Joshua said.
"But why would he do such a thing?"
"Perhaps it's a hoax," Joshua said. "Whoever he is, he evidently enjoys a good ghost story. He knew we'd find out that he'd looted the checking and savings, so he decided to have some fun with us."
"But it's so ... strange," Preston said. "I mean, you might expect a self-congratulatory note, something that would rub our faces in it. But this? It doesn't seem like the work of a practical joker. Although it's weird and doesn't always make tense, it seems so ... earnest."
"If you think it's not merely a hoax, then what do you think?" Joshua asked. "Are you telling me Bruno Frye wrote this letter and put it in the safe-deposit box after he died?"
"Well ... no. Of course not."
"Then what?"
The banker looked down at the letter in his hands. "Then I would say that this imposter, this man who looks so remarkably like Mr. Frye and talks like Mr. Frye, this man who carries a driver's license in Mr. Frye's name, this man who knew that Mr. Frye had accounts in First Pacific United--this man isn't just pretending to be Mr. Frye. He actually thinks he is Mr. Frye." He looked up at Joshua. "I don't believe that an ordinary thief with a prankster's turn of mind would compose a letter like this. There's genuine madness in it."
Joshua nodded. "I'm afraid I have to agree with you. But where did this doppelganger come from? Who is he? How long has he been around? Was Bruno aware that this man existed? Why would the look-alike share Bruno's obsessive fear and hatred of Katherine Frye? How could both men suffer from the same delusion--the belief that she had come back from the dead? There are a thousand questions. It truly boggles the mind."
"It certainly does," Preston said. "And I don't have any answers for you. But I do have one suggestion. This Hilary Thomas should be told that she may be in grave danger."

***

After Frank Howard's funeral, which was conducted with full police honors, Tony and Hilary caught the 11:55 flight from Los Angeles. On the way north, Hilary worked at being bubbly and amusing, for she could see that the funeral had depressed Tony and had brought back horrible memories of the Monday morning shootout. At first, he slumped in his seat, brooding, barely responding to her. But after a while, he seemed to become aware of her determination to cheer him up, and, perhaps because he didn't want her to feel that her effort was unappreciated, he found his lost smile and began to come out of his depression. They landed on time at San Francisco International Airport, but the two o'clock shuttle flight to Napa was now rescheduled for three o'clock because of minor mechanical difficulties.
With time to kill, they ate lunch in an airport restaurant that offered a view of the busy runways. The surprisingly good coffee was the only thing to recommend the place; the sandwiches were rubbery, and the french fries were soggy.
As the time approached for their departure for Napa, Hilary began to dread going. Minute by minute, she grew more apprehensive.
Tony noticed the change in her. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know exactly. I just feel like ... well, maybe this is wrong. Maybe we're just rushing straight into the lion's den."
"Frye is down there in Los Angeles. He doesn't have any way of knowing that you're going to St. Helena," Tony said.
"Doesn't he?"
"Are you still convinced that it's supernatural, a matter of ghosts and ghouls and whatnot?"
"I'm not ruling out anything."
"We'll find a logical explanation in the end."
"Whether we do or not, I've got this feeling ... this premonition."
"A premonition of what?"
"Of worse things to come," she said.

***

After a hurried but excellent lunch in the First Pacific United Bank's private executive dining room, Joshua Rhinehart and Ronald Preston met with federal and state banking officials in Preston's office. The bureaucrats were boring and poorly prepared and obviously ineffectual: but Joshua tolerated them, answered their questions, filled out their forms, for it was his duty to use the federal insurance system to recover the stolen funds for the Frye estate.
As the bureaucrats were leaving, Warren Sackett, an FBI agent, arrived. Because the money had been stolen from a federally-chartered financial institution, the crime was within the Bureau's jurisdiction. Sackett--a tall, intense man with chiseled features--sat at the conference table with Joshua and Preston, and he elicited twice as much information as the covey of bureaucrats had done, in only half the time that those paper-pushers had required. He informed Joshua that a very detailed background check on him would be part of the investigation, but Joshua already knew that and had no reason to fear it. Sackett agreed that Hilary Thomas might be in danger, and he took the responsibility for informing the Los Angeles police of the extraordinary situation that had arisen, so that both the LAPD and the Los Angeles office of the FBI would be prepared to look after her.
Although Sackett was polite, efficient, and thorough, Joshua realized that the FBI was not going to solve the case in a few days--not unless the Bruno Frye imposter walked into their office and confessed. This was not an urgent matter to them. In a country plagued by various crackpot terrorist groups, organized crime families, and corrupt politicians, the resources of the FBI could not be brought fully to bear on an eighteen-thousand-dollar case of this sort. More likely than not, Sackett would be the only agent on it full-time. He would begin slowly, with background checks on everyone involved; and then he would conduct an exhaustive survey of banks in northern California, to see if Bruno Frye had any other secret accounts. Sackett wouldn't get to St. Helena for a day or two. And if he didn't come up with any leads in the first week or ten days, he might thereafter handle the case only on a part-time basis.
When the agent finished asking questions, Joshua turned to Ronald Preston and said, "Sir, I trust that the missing eighteen thousand will be replaced in short order."
"Well...." Preston nervously fingered his prim little mustache. "We'll have to wait until the FDIC approves the claim." Joshua looked at Sackett. "Am I correct in assuming the FDIC will wait until you can assure them that neither I nor any beneficiary of the estate conspired to withdraw that eighteen thousand dollars?"
"They might," Sackett said. "After all, this is a highly unusual case."
"But quite a lot of time could pass before you're able to give them such assurances," Joshua said.
"We wouldn't make you wait beyond a reasonable length of time," Sackett said. "At most, three months."
Joshua sighed. "I had hoped to settle the estate quickly."
Sackett shrugged. "Maybe I won't need three months. It could all break fast. You never know. In a day or two, I might even turn up this guy who's a dead ringer for Frye. Then I'd be able to give the FDIC an all-clear signal."
"But you don't expect to solve it that fast."
"The situation is so bizarre that I can't commit myself to deadlines," Sackett said.
"Damnation," Joshua said wearily.
A few minutes later, as Joshua crossed the cool marble-floored lobby on his way out of the bank, Mrs. Willis called to him. She was on duty at a teller's cage. He went to her, and she said, "You know what I'd do if I were you?"
"What's that?" Joshua asked.
"Dig him up. That man you buried. Dig him up."
"Bruno Frye?"
"You didn't bury Mr. Frye." Mrs. Willis was adamant; she pressed her lips together and shook her head back and forth, looking very stern. "No. If there's a double for Mr. Frye, he's not the one who's up walking around. The double is the one who's six feet under with a slab of granite for a hat. The real Mr. Frye was here last Thursday. I'd swear to that in any court. I'd stake my life on it."
"But if it wasn't Frye who was killed down in Los Angeles, then where is the real Frye now? Why did he run away? What in the name of God is going on?"
"I don't know about that," she said. "I only know what I saw. Dig him up, Mr. Rhinehart. I believe you'll find that you've buried the wrong man."

***

At 3:20 Wednesday afternoon, Joshua landed at the county airport just outside the town of Napa. With a population of forty-five thousand, Napa was far from being a major city, and in fact it partook of the wine country ambiance to such an extent that it seemed smaller and cozier than it really was; but to Joshua, who was long accustomed to the rural peace of tiny St. Helena, Napa was as noisy and bothersome as San Francisco had been, and he was anxious to get out of the place.
His car was parked in the public lot by the airfield, where he had left it that morning. He didn't go home or to his office. He drove straight to Bruno Frye's house in St. Helena.
Usually, Joshua was acutely aware of the incredible natural beauty of the valley. But not today. Now he drove without seeing anything until the Frye property came into view.
Part of Shade Tree Vineyards, the Frye family business, occupied fertile black flat land, but most of it was spread over the gently rising foothills on the west side of the valley. The winery, the public tasting room, the extensive cellars, and the other company buildings--all fieldstone and redwood and oak structures that seemed to grow out of the earth--were situated on a large piece of level highland, near the westernmost end of the Frye property. All the buildings faced east, across the valley, toward vistas of seriated vines, and all of them were constructed with their backs to a one-hundred-sixty-foot cliff, which had been formed in a distant age when earth movement had sheered the side off the last foothill at the base of the more precipitously rising Mayacamas Mountains.
Above the cliff, on the isolated hilltop, stood the house that Leo Frye, Katherine's father, had built when he'd first come to the wine country in 1918. Leo had been a brooding Prussian type who had valued his privacy more than almost anything else. He looked for a building site that would provide a wide view of the scenic valley plus absolute privacy, and the clifftop property was precisely what he wanted. Although Leo was already a widower in 1918, and although he had only one small child and was not, at that time, contemplating another marriage, he nevertheless constructed a large twelve-room Victorian house on top of the cliff, a place with many bay windows and gables and a lot of architectural gingerbread. It overlooked the winery that he established, later, on the highland below, and there were only two ways to reach it. The first approach was by aerial tramway, a system comprised of cables, pulleys, electric motors, and one four-seat gondola that carried you from the lower station (a second-floor corner of the main winery building) to the upper station (somewhat to the north of the house on the clifftop). The second approach was by way of a double-switch back staircase fixed to the face of the cliff. Those three hundred and twenty steps were meant to be used only if the aerial tramway broke down--and then only if it was not possible to wait until repairs were made. The house was not merely private; it was remote.
As Joshua turned from the public road onto a very long private drive that led to the Shade Tree winery, he tried to recall everything he knew about Leo Frye. There was not much. Katherine had seldom spoken of her father, and Leo had not left a great many friends behind.
Because Joshua hadn't come to the valley until 1945, a few years after Leo's death, he'd never met the man, but he'd heard just enough tales about him to form a picture of the sort of mind that hungered for the excessive privacy embodied in that clifftop house. Leo Frye had been cold, stern, somber, self-possessed, obstinate, brilliant, a bit of an egomaniac, and an iron-handed authoritarian. He was not unlike a feudal lord from a distant age, a medieval aristocrat who preferred to live in a well-fortified castle beyond the easy reach of the unwashed rabble.
Katherine had continued to live in the house after her father died. She raised Bruno in those high-ceilinged rooms, a world far removed from that of the child's contemporaries, a Victorian world of waist-high wainscoting and flowered wallpaper and crenelated molding and footstools and mantel clocks and lace tablecloths. Indeed, mother and son lived together until he was thirty-five years old, at which time Katherine died of heart disease.
Now, as Joshua drove up the long macadam lane toward the winery, he looked above the fieldstone and wood buildings. He raised his eyes to the big house that stood like a giant cairn atop the cliff.
It was strange for a grown man to live with his mother as long as Bruno had lived with Katherine. Naturally, there had been rumors, speculations. The consensus of opinion in St. Helena was that Bruno had little or no interest in girls, that his passions and affections were directed secretly toward young men. It was assumed that he satisfied his desires during his occasional visits to San Francisco, out of sight of his wine country neighbors. Bruno's possible homosexuality was not a scandal in the valley. Local people didn't spend a great deal of time talking about it; they didn't really care. Although St. Helena was a small town, it could claim more than a little sophistication; winemaking made it so.
But now Joshua wondered if the consensus of local opinion about Bruno had been wrong. Considering the extraordinary events of the past week, it was beginning to appear as if the man's secret had been much darker and infinitely more terrible than mere homosexuality.
Immediately after Katherine's funeral, deeply shaken by her death, Bruno had moved out of the house on the cliff. He took his clothes, as well as large collections of paintings, metal sculptures, and books, which he had acquired on his own; but he left behind everything that belonged to Katherine. Her clothes were left hanging in closets and folded in drawers. Her antique furniture, paintings, porcelains, crystals, music boxes, enameled boxes--all of those things (and much more) could have been sold at auction for a substantial sum. But Bruno insisted that every item be left exactly where Katherine had put it, undisturbed, untouched. He locked the windows, drew the blinds and drapes, closed and bolt-locked the exterior shutters on both the first and second floors, locked the doors, sealed the place tight, as if it were a vault in which he could preserve forever the memory of his adoptive mother.
When Bruno had rented an apartment and had begun to make plans for the construction of a new house in the vineyards, Joshua had tried to persuade him that it was foolish to leave the contents of the cliff house unattended. Bruno insisted that the house was secure and that its remoteness made it an unlikely target of burglars--especially since burglary was an almost unheard-of crime in the valley. The two approaches to the house--the switchback stairs and the aerial tramway--were deep in Frye property, behind the winery: and the tramway operated only with a key. Besides (Bruno had argued) no one but he and Joshua knew that a great many items of value remained in the old house. Bruno was adamant; Katherine's belongings must not be touched; and finally, reluctantly, unhappily, Joshua surrendered to his client's wishes.
To the best of Joshua's knowledge, no one had been in the cliff house for five years, not since the day that Bruno had moved out. The tramway was well-maintained, even though the only person who rode it was Gilbert Ulman, a mechanic employed to keep Shade Tree Vineyards' trucks and farm equipment in good shape; Gil also had the job of regularly inspecting and repairing the aerial tramway system, which required only a couple of hours a month. Tomorrow, or Friday at the latest, Joshua would have to take the cable car to the top of the cliff and open the house, every door and window, so that it could air out before the art appraisers arrived from Los Angeles and San Francisco on Saturday morning.
At the moment, Joshua was not the least bit interested in Leo Frye's isolated Victorian redoubt; his business was at Bruno's more modern and considerably more accessible house. As he drew near the end of the road that led to the winery's public parking lot, he turned left, onto an extremely narrow driveway that struck south through the sun-splashed vineyards. Vines crowded both sides of the cracked, raggedy-edged blacktop. The pavement led him down one hill, across a shallow glen, up another slope, and ended two hundred yards south of the winery, in a clearing, where Bruno's house stood with vineyards on all sides. It was a large, single-story, ranch-style, redwood and fieldstone structure shaded by one of the nine mammoth oak trees that dotted the huge property and gave the Frye company its name.
Joshua got out of the car and walked to the front door of the house. There were only a few high white clouds against the electric-blue sky. The air flowing down from the piney heights of the Mayacamas was crisp and fresh.
He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and stood in the foyer for a moment, listening. He wasn't sure what he expected to hear.
Maybe footsteps.
Or Bruno Frye's voice.
But there was only silence.
He went from one end of the house to the other in order to get to Frye's study. The decor was proof that Bruno had acquired Katherine's obsessive compulsion to collect and hoard beautiful things. On some walls, so many fine paintings were hung so close together that their frames touched, and no single piece could claim the eye in that exquisite riot of shape and color. Display cases stood everywhere, filled with art glass and bronze sculpture and crystal paperweights and pre-Columbian statuary. Every room contained far too much furniture, but each piece was a matchless example of its period and style. In the huge study, there were five or six hundred rare books, many of them limited editions that had been bound in leather; and there were a few dozen perfect little scrimshaw figures in a display case; and there were six terribly expensive and flawless crystal balls, one as small as an orange, one as large as a basketball, the others in various sizes between.
Joshua pulled back the drapes at the window, letting in a little light, switched on a brass lamp, and sat in a modern spring-backed office chair behind an enormous 18th century English desk. From a jacket pocket he withdrew the strange letter that he had found in the safe-deposit box at the First Pacific United Bank. It was actually just a Xerox; Warren Sackett, the FBI agent, insisted on keeping the original. Joshua unfolded the copy and propped it up where he could see it. He turned to the low typing stand that was beside the desk, pulled it over his lap, rolled a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter, and quickly tapped out the first sentence of the letter.

My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies.

He held the Xerox copy next to the sample and compared them. The type was the same. In both versions, the loop of the lower case "e" was completely filled in with ink because the keys hadn't been properly cleaned in quite a while. In both, the loop of the lower case "a" was partially occluded, and the lower case "d" printed slightly higher than any of the other characters. The letter had been typed in Bruno Frye's study, on Bruno Frye's machine.
The look-alike, the man who had impersonated Frye in that San Francisco bank last Thursday, apparently possessed a key to the house. But how had he gotten it? The most obvious answer was that Bruno had given it to him, which meant that the man was an employee, a hired double.
Joshua leaned back in the chair and stared at the Xerox of the letter, and other questions exploded like fireworks in his mind. Why had Bruno felt it necessary to hire a double? Where had he found such a remarkable look-alike? How long ago did the double start to work for him? Doing what? And how often had he, Joshua, spoken to this doppelganger, thinking the man was really Frye? Probably more than once. Perhaps more often than he'd spoken with the real Bruno. There was no way of knowing. Had the double been here, in the house, Thursday morning, when Bruno had died in Los Angeles? Most likely. After all, this was where he had typed the letter that he'd put in the safe-deposit box, so this must be where he had heard the news. But how had he learned about the death so quickly? Bruno's body had been found next to a public telephone.... Was it possible that Bruno's last act had been to call home and talk to his double? Yes. Possible. Even probable. The telephone company's records would have to be checked. But what had those two men said to each other as the one died? Could they conceivably share the same psychosis, the belief that Katherine had come back from the grave?
Joshua shuddered.
He folded the letter, returned it to his coat pocket.
For the first time, he realized how gloomy these rooms were--overstuffed with furniture and expensive ornaments, windows covered by heavy drapes, floors carpeted in dark colors. Suddenly, the place seemed far more isolated than Leo's clifftop retreat.
A noise. In another room.
Joshua froze as he was walking around the desk. He waited, listened. "Imagination," he said, trying to reassure himself.
He walked swiftly through the house to the front door, and he found that the noise had, indeed, been imaginary. He wasn't attacked. Nevertheless, when he stepped outside, closed the door, and locked it, he sighed with relief.
In the car, on his way to his office in St. Helena, he thought of more questions. Who actually had died in Los Angeles last week--Frye or his look-alike? Which of them had been at the First Pacific United Bank on Thursday--the real man or the imitation? Until he knew the answer to that, how could he settle the estate? He had countless questions but damned few answers.
When he parked behind his office a few minutes later, he realized that he would have to give serious consideration to Mrs. Willis's advice. Bruno Frye's grave might have to be opened to determine exactly who was buried in it.

***

Tony and Hilary landed in Napa, rented a car, and arrived at the headquarters of the Napa County Sheriff's Department by 4:20 Wednesday afternoon. The place was not somnolent like the county sheriff's offices you saw on television. A couple of young deputies and a pair of industrious clerical workers were busy with files and paperwork.
The sheriff's secretary-receptionist sat at a large metal desk, identified by a name plaque in front of her typewriter: MARSHA PELETRINO. She was a starched-looking woman with severe features, but her voice was soft, silky, and sexy. Likewise, her smile was far more pleasant and inviting than Hilary had expected.
When Marsha Peletrino opened the door between the reception area and Peter Laurenski's private office and announced that Tony and Hilary wanted to see him, Laurenski knew immediately who they were, and he didn't attempt to avoid them, as they thought he might. He came out of his office and awkwardly shook their hands. He seemed embarrassed. Clearly, he wasn't looking forward to explaining why he had provided a phony alibi for Bruno Frye last Wednesday night, but in spite of his unconcealed discomfort, he invited Tony and Hilary in for a chat.
Laurenski was somewhat of a disappointment for Hilary. He was not the sloppy, potbellied, cigar-chewing, easy to hate, small town, good old boy type that she had expected, not the sort of countrified power monger who would lie to protect a wealthy local resident like Bruno Frye. Laurenski was in his thirties, tall, blond, clean-cut, articulate, friendly, and apparently dedicated to his job, a good lawman. There was kindness in his eyes and a surprising gentleness in his voice; in some ways he reminded her of Tony. The Sheriff's Department's offices were clean and Spartan rooms where a lot of work got done, and the people who labored there with Laurenski, the deputies and civilians alike, were not patronage cronies but bright and busy public servants. After only one or two minutes with the sheriff, she knew there was not going to be any simple answer to the Frye mystery, no obvious and easily-exposed conspiracy.
In the sheriff's private office, she and Tony sat on a sturdy old railback bench that had been made comfortable with corduroy-covered foam pillows. Laurenski pulled up a chair and sat on it the wrong way, with his arms crossed on the backrest.
He disarmed Hilary and Tony by getting straight to the point and by being hard on himself.
"I'm afraid I've been less than professional about this whole thing," he said. "I've been dodging your department's phone calls."
"That's the reason we're here." Tony said.
"Is this an ... official visit of some kind?" Laurenski asked, a bit puzzled.
"No," Tony said. "I'm here as a private citizen, not a policeman."
"We've had an extremely unusual and unsettling experience in the last couple of days," Hilary said. "Incredible things have happened, and we hope you'll have an explanation for them."
Laurenski raised his eyebrows. "Something more than Frye's attack on you?"
"We'll tell you about it," Tony said. "But first, we'd like to know why you haven't answered the LAPD."
Laurenski nodded. He was blushing. "I just didn't know what to say. I'd made a fool of myself by vouching for Frye. I guess I just hoped it would all blow away."
"And why did you vouch for him?" Hilary asked.
"It's just ... you see ... I really did think he was at home that night."
"You talked with him?" Hilary asked.
"No," Laurenski said. He cleared his throat. "You see, when the call came in that evening, it was taken by a night officer. Tim Larsson. He's one of my best men. Been with me seven years. A real go-getter. Well ... when the Los Angeles police called about Bruno Frye, Tim thought he'd better call me and see if I wanted to handle it, since Frye was one of the county's leading citizens. I was at home that night. It was my daughter's birthday. As far as my family was concerned, that was a pretty special occasion, and for once I was determined not to let my work intrude on my private life. I have so little time for my kids...."
"I understand," Tony said. "I have a hunch you do a good job here. And I'm familiar enough with police work to know that doing a good job requires a hell of a lot more than eight hours a day."
"More like twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week," the sheriff said. "Anyway, Tim called me that night, and I told him to handle it. You see, first of all, it sounded like such a ridiculous inquiry. I mean, Frye was an upstanding businessman, even a millionaire, for God's sake. Why would he throw it all away trying to rape someone? So I told Tim to look into it and get back to me as soon as he had something. As I said, he's a very competent officer. Besides, he knew Frye better than I did. Before he decided on a career in law enforcement, Tim worked for five years in the main office at Shade Tree Vineyards. During that time, he saw Frye just about every day."
"Then it was Officer Larsson who checked on Frye last Wednesday night," Tony said.
"Yes. He called me back at my daughter's birthday party. He said Frye was at home, not in Los Angeles. So I returned the call to the LAPD and proceeded to make a fool of myself."
Hilary frowned. "I don't understand. Are you saying that this Tim Larsson lied to you?"
Laurenski didn't want to have to answer that one. He got up and paced, staring at the floor, scowling. Finally he said, "I trust Tim Larsson. I always have trusted him. He's a good man. One of the best. But I just can't explain this."
"Did he have any reason to cover up for Frye?" Tony asked.
"You mean, were they buddies? No. Nothing like that. They weren't even friends. He'd only worked for Frye. And he didn't like the man."
"Did he claim to have seen Bruno Frye that night?" Hilary asked Laurenski.
"At the time," the sheriff said, "I just assumed he had seen him. But later, Tim said he figured he could identify Frye by phone and that there wasn't any need to run all the way out there in a patrol car to have a look-see. As you must know, Bruno Frye had a very distinct, very odd voice."
"So Larsson might have talked to someone who was covering for Frye, someone who could imitate his voice," Tony said.
Laurenski looked at him. "That's what Tim says. That's his excuse. But it doesn't fit. Who would it have been? Why would he cover for rape and murder? Where is he now? Besides, Frye's voice wasn't something that could be easily mimicked."
"So what do you think?" Hilary asked.
Laurenski shook his head. "I don't know what to think. I've been brooding about it all week. I want to believe my officer. But how can I? Something is going on here--but what? Until I can get a handle on it, I've laid Tim off without pay."
Tony glanced at Hilary, then back at the sheriff. "When you hear what we've got to tell you, I think you'll be able to believe Officer Larsson."
"However," Hilary said, "you still won't be able to make sense out of it. We're in deeper than you are, and we still don't know what's going on."
She told Laurenski about Bruno Frye being in her house Tuesday morning, five days after his death.

***

In his office in St. Helena, Joshua Rhinehart sat at his desk with a glass of Jack Daniel's Black Label and looked through the file that Ronald Preston had given him in San Francisco. It contained, among other things, clear photocopies of the monthly statements that had been blown up from microfilm records, plus similar copies of the front and back of every check Frye had written. Because Frye had kept the account a secret, tucked away in a city bank where he did no other business, Joshua was convinced that an examination of those records would yield clues to the solution of the dead ringer's identity.
During the first three-and-a-half years that the account had been active, Bruno had written two checks each month, never more than that, never fewer. And the checks were always to the same people--Rita Yancy and Latham Hawthorne--names which meant nothing to Joshua.
For reasons not specified, Mrs. Yancy had received five hundred dollars a month. The only thing Joshua could deduce from the photocopies of those checks was that Rita Yancy must live in Hollister, California, for she deposited every one of them in a Hollister bank.
No two of the checks to Latham Hawthorne were for the same amount; they ranged from a couple of hundred dollars to five or six thousand. Apparently, Hawthorne lived in San Francisco, for all of his deposits were made at the same branch of the Wells Fargo Bank in that city. Hawthorne's checks were all endorsed with a rubber stamp that read:


FOR DEPOSIT ONLY
TO THE ACCOUNT OF:
Latham Hawthorne
ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSELLER
&
OCCULTIST


Joshua stared at that last word for a while. Occultist. It was obviously derived from the word "occult" and was intended by Hawthorne to describe his profession, or at least half of it, rare book dealing being the other half. Joshua thought he knew what the word meant, but he was not certain.
Two walls of his office were lined with law books and reference works. He had three dictionaries, and he looked up "occultist" in all of them. The first two did not contain the word, but the third gave him a definition that was pretty much what he had expected. An occultist was someone who believed in the rituals and supernatural powers of various "occult sciences"--including, but not limited to, astrology, palmistry, black magic, white magic, demonolatry, and Satanism. According to the dictionary, an occultist could also be someone who sold the paraphernalia required to engage in any of those odd pursuits--books, costumes, cards, magical instruments, sacred relics, rare herbs, pig-tallow candles, and the like.
In the five years between Katherine's death and his own demise, Bruno Frye had paid more than one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to Latham Hawthorne. There was nothing on any of the checks to indicate what he had received in return for all that money.
Joshua refilled his glass with whiskey and returned to his desk.
The file on Frye's secret bank accounts showed that he had written two checks a month for the first three-and-a-half years, but then three checks a month for the past year and a half. One to Rita Yancy, one to Latham Hawthorne, as before. And now a third check to Dr. Nicholas W. Rudge. All of the checks to the doctor had been deposited in a San Francisco branch of the Bank of America, so Joshua assumed the physician lived in that city.
He placed a call to San Francisco Directory Assistance, then another to Directory Assistance in the 408 area code, which included the town of Hollister. In less than five minutes, he had telephone numbers for Hawthorne, Rudge, and Rita Yancy.
He called the Yancy woman first.
She answered on the second ring. "Hello?"
"Mrs. Yancy?"
"Yes."
"Rita Yancy?"
"That's right." She had a pleasant, gentle, melodic voice. "Who's this?"
"My name's Joshua Rhinehart. I'm calling from St. Helena. I'm the executor for the estate of the late Bruno Frye."
She didn't respond.
"Mrs. Yancy?"
"You mean he's dead?" she asked.
"You didn't know?"
"How would I know?"
"It was in the newspapers."
"I never read the papers," she said. Her voice had changed. It was not pleasant any more; it was hard and cold.
"He died last Thursday," Joshua said.
She was silent.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"What do you want from me?"
"Well, as executor, one of my duties is to see that all of Mr. Frye's debts are paid before the estate is distributed to the heirs."
"So?"
"I discovered that Mr. Frye was paying you five hundred dollars a month, and I thought that might be installments on a debt of some sort."
She didn't answer him.
He could hear her breathing.
"Mrs. Yancy?"
"He doesn't owe me a penny," she said.
"Then he wasn't repaying a debt?"
"No," she said.
"Were you working for him in some capacity?"
She hesitated. Then: click!
"Mrs. Yancy?"
There wasn't any response. Just the hissing of the long distance line, a far-off crackle of static.
Joshua dialed her number again.
"Hello," she said.
"It's me, Mrs. Yancy. Evidently, we were cut off."
Click!
He considered calling her a third time, but he decided she would only hang up again. She wasn't handling herself well. Obviously, she had a secret, a secret she had shared with Bruno, and now she was trying to hide it from Joshua. But all she had done was feed his curiosity. He was more certain than ever that each of the people who were paid through the San Francisco bank account would have something to tell him that would help to explain the existence of a Bruno Frye look-alike. If he could only get them to talk, he might settle the estate relatively quickly after all.
As he put the receiver down, he said. "You can't get away from me that easily, Rita."
Tomorrow, he would fly the Cessna down to Hollister and confront her in person.
Now he called Dr. Nicholas Rudge, got an answering service, and left a message, including both his home and office numbers.
On his third call, he struck paydirt, although not as much of it as he had hoped to find. Latham Hawthorne was at home and willing to talk. The occultist had a nasal voice and a trace of an upper-class British accent.
"I sold him quite a number of books," Hawthorne said in answer to a question from Joshua.
"Just books?"
"That's correct."
"That's a lot of money for books."
"He was an excellent customer."
"But a hundred and thirty thousand dollars?"
"Spread out over almost five years."
"Nevertheless--"
"And most of them were extremely rare books, you understand."
"Would you be willing to buy them back from the estate?" Joshua asked, trying to determine if the man was honest.
"Buy them back? Oh, yes, I'd be happy to do that. Most definitely."
"How much?"
"Well, I can't say exactly until I see them."
"Take a stab in the dark. How much?"
"You see, if the volumes have been abused--tattered and torn and marked and whatnot--then that's quite another story."
"Let's say they're spotless. How much would you offer?"
"If they're in the condition they were when I sold them to Mr. Frye, I'm prepared to offer you quite a bit more than he originally paid for them. A great many of the titles in his collection have appreciated in value."
"How much?" Joshua asked.
"You're a persistent man."
"One of my many virtues. Come on, Mr. Hawthorne. I'm not asking you to commit yourself to a binding offer. Just an estimate."
"Well, if the collection still contains every book that I sold him, and if they're all in prime condition ... I'd say allowing for my margin of profit, of course. .. around two hundred thousand dollars."
"You'd buy back the same books for seventy thousand more than he paid you?"
"As a rough estimate, yes."
"That's quite an increase in value."
"That's because of the area of interest," Hawthorne said. "More and more people come into the field every day."
"And what is the field?" Joshua asked. "What kind of books was he collecting?"
"Haven't you seen them?"
"I believe they're on bookshelves in his study," Joshua said. "Many of them are very old books, and a lot of them have leather bindings. I didn't realize there was anything unusual about them. I haven't taken time to look closely."
"They were occult titles," Hawthorne said. "I only sell books dealing with the occult in all its many manifestations. A high percentage of my wares are forbidden books, those that were banned by church or state in another age, those that have not been brought back into print by our modern and skeptical publishers. Limited edition items, too. I have more than two hundred steady customers. One of them is a San Jose gentleman who collects nothing but books on Hindu mysticism. A woman in Marin County has acquired an enormous library on Satanism, including a dozen obscure titles that have been published in no language but Latin. Another woman in Seattle has bought virtually every word ever printed about out-of-body experiences. I can satisfy any taste. I'm not merely polishing my ego when I say that I'm the most reputable and reliable dealer in occult literature in this country."
"But surely not all of your customers spend as much as Mr. Frye did."
"Oh, of course not. There are only two or three others like him, with his resources. But I've got a few dozen clients who budget approximately ten thousand dollars a year for their purchases."
"That's incredible," Joshua said.
"Not really," Hawthorne said. "These people feel that they are teetering on the edge of a great discovery, on the brink of learning some monumental secret, the riddle of life. Some of them are in pursuit of immortality. And some are searching for spells and rituals that will bring them tremendous wealth or unlimited power over others. Those are persuasive motivations. If they truly believe that just a little more forbidden knowledge will get them what they want, then they will pay virtually any price to obtain it."
Joshua swung around in his swivel chair and looked out the window. Low gray clouds were scudding in from the west, over the tops of the autumn-somber Mayacamas Mountains, bearing down on the valley.
"Exactly what aspect of the occult interested Mr. Frye?" Joshua asked.
"He collected two kinds of books loosely linked to the same general subject," Hawthorne said. "He was fascinated by the possibility of communicating with the dead. Séances, table knockings, spirit voices, ectoplasmic apparitions, amplification of ether recordings, automatic writing, that sort of thing. But his greatest interest, by far, lay in literature about the living dead."
"Vampires?" Joshua asked, thinking about the strange letter in the safe-deposit box.
"Yes," Hawthorne said. "Vampires, zombies, creatures of that sort. He couldn't get enough books on the subject. Of course, I don't mean that he was interested in horror novels and cheap sensationalism. He collected only serious nonfiction studies--and certain select esoterica."
"Such as?"
"Well, for instance ... in the esoterica category ... he paid six thousand dollars for the hand-written journal of Christian Marsden."
"Who is Christian Marsden?" Joshua asked.
"Fourteen years ago, Marsden was arrested for the murders of nine people in and around San Francisco. The press called him the Golden Gate Vampire because he always drank his victim's blood."
"Oh, Yes," Joshua said.
"And he also dismembered his victims."
"Yes."
"Cut off their arms and legs and heads."
"Unfortunately, I remember him now. A gruesome case," Joshua said.
The dirty gray clouds were still rolling across the western mountains, moving steadily toward St. Helena.
"Marsden kept a journal during his year-long killing spree," Hawthorne said. "It's a curious piece of work. He believed that a dead man named Adrian Trench was trying to take over his body and come back to life through him. Marsden genuinely felt that he was in a constant, desperate struggle for control of his own flesh."
"So that when he killed, it wasn't really him killing, but this Adrian Trench."
"That's what he wrote in his journal," Hawthorne said. "For some reason he never explained, Marsden believed that the evil spirit of Adrian Trench required other people's blood to keep control of Marsden's body."
"A sufficiently screwy story to present to a court in a sanity hearing," Joshua said cynically.
"Marsden was sent to an asylum," Hawthorne said. "Six years later, he died there. But he wasn't faking insanity to escape a prison sentence. He actually believed that the spirit of Adrian Trench was trying to cast him out of his own body."
"Schizophrenic."
"Probably," Hawthorne agreed. "But I don't think we should rule out the possibility that Marsden was sane and that he was merely reporting a genuine paranormal phenomenon."
"Say again?"
"I'm suggesting that Christian Marsden might really have been possessed in some way or other."
"You don't mean that," Joshua said.
"To paraphrase Shakespeare--there are a great many things in heaven and earth that we do not and cannot understand."
Beyond the large office window, as the slate-colored bank of clouds continued to press into the valley, the sun sank westward, beyond the Mayacamas, and the autumn dusk came prematurely to St. Helena.
As he watched the light bleed slowly out of day, Joshua said, "Why did Mr. Frye want the Marsden journal so badly?"
"He believed he was living through an experience similar to Marsden's," Hawthorne said.
"You mean, Bruno thought some dead person was trying to take over his body?"
"No," Hawthorne said. "He didn't identify with Marsden, but with Marsden's victims. Mr. Frye believed that his mother--I think her name was Katherine--had come back from the dead in someone else's body and was plotting to kill him. He hoped that the Marsden journal would give him a clue about how to deal with her."
Joshua felt as if a large dose of ice-cold water had been injected into his veins. "Bruno never mentioned such a thing to me."
"Oh, he was quite secretive about it," Hawthorne said. "I'm probably the only person he ever revealed it to. He trusted me because I was sympathetic toward his interest in the occult. Even so, he only mentioned it once. He was quite passionate in his belief that she had returned from the dead, quite terrified of falling prey to her. But later, he was sorry that he had told me."
Joshua sat up straight in his chair, amazed, chilled. "Mr. Hawthorne, last week Mr. Frye attempted to kill a woman in Los Angeles."
"Yes, I know."
"He wanted to kill her because he thought that she was actually his mother hiding in a new body."
"Really? How interesting."
"Good God, sir! You knew what was going on in his mind. Why didn't you do something?"
Hawthorne remained cool and serene. "What would you have had me do?"
"You could have told the police! They could have questioned him, looked into the possibility that he needed medical attention."
"Mr. Frye hadn't committed a crime," Hawthorne said. "And beyond that, you're presuming he was crazy, and I make no such presumption."
"You're joking," Joshua said incredulously.
"Not at all. Perhaps Frye's mother did come back from the grave to get him. Maybe she even succeeded."
"For God's sake, that woman in Los Angeles was not his mother!"
"Maybe," Hawthorne said. "Maybe not."
Although Joshua was still sitting in his big office chair, and although the chair was still resting squarely on a solid floor, he felt curiously off balance. He had pictured Hawthorne as a rather cultured, mild-mannered, bookish fellow who had gotten into his unusual line of business largely because of the profits it offered. Now Joshua began to wonder if that image was altogether wrong. Maybe Latham Hawthorne was as strange as the merchandise he sold.
"Mr. Hawthorne, you're obviously a very efficient and successful businessman. You sound as if you're well-educated. You're far more articulate than most people I meet these days. Considering all of that, I find it difficult to believe that you put much credence in such things as séances and mysticism and the living dead."
"I scoff at nothing," Hawthorne said. "And in fact I think my willingness to believe is less surprising than your stubborn refusal to do so. I don't see how an intelligent man can not realize that there are many worlds beyond our own, realities beyond that in which we live."
"Oh, I believe the world is filled with mysteries and that we only partially perceive the nature of reality," Joshua said. "You'll get no argument from me on that. But I also think, in time, our perceptions will be sharpened and the mysteries all explained by scientists, by rational men working in their laboratories--not by superstitious cultists burning incense and chanting nonsense."
"I have no faith in scientists," Hawthorne said. "I'm a Satanist. I find my answers in that discipline."
"Devil worship?" Joshua asked. The occultist could still surprise him.
"That's a rather crude way of putting it. I believe in the Other God, the Dark Lord. His time is coming, Mr. Rhinehart."
Hawthorne spoke calmly, pleasantly, as if he were discussing nothing more unusual or controversial than the weather. "I look forward to the day when He casts out Christ and all the lesser gods and takes the throne of the earth for His own. What a fine day that will be. All the devout of other religions will be enslaved or slaughtered. Their priests will be decapitated and fed to the dogs. Nuns will be ravished in the streets. Churches and mosques and synagogues and temples will be used for the celebration of black masses, and every person on the face of the earth will worship Him, and babies will be sacrificed on those altars, and Beelzebub will rein until the end of time. Soon, Mr. Rhinehart. There are signs and portents. Quite soon now. I look forward to it."
Joshua was at a loss for words. In spite of the madness that Hawthorne spouted, he sounded like a rational, reasonable man. He was not ranting or screaming. There was not even a vague trace of mania or hysteria in his voice. Joshua was more disturbed by the occultist's outward composure and surface gentleness than he would have been if Hawthorne had snarled and yelped and foamed at the mouth. It was like meeting a stranger at a cocktail party, talking with him for a while, getting to like him, and then suddenly realizing that he was wearing a latex mask, a clever false face, behind which lay the evil and grinning countenance of Death himself. A Halloween costume, but in reverse. The demon disguised as the ordinary man. Poe's nightmare come to life.
Joshua shivered.
Hawthorne said, "Could we arrange a meeting? I'm looking forward to having an opportunity to inspect the collection of books that Mr. Frye purchased from me. I can come up there almost any time. What day would be convenient for you?"
Joshua wasn't looking forward to meeting and doing business with this man. He decided to stall the occultist until the other appraisers had seen the books. Perhaps one of those men would understand the value of the collection and would make an equitable offer to the estate; then it wouldn't be necessary to traffic with Latham Hawthorne.
"I'll have to get back to you on that," Joshua said. "I've got a lot of other things to take care of first. It's a large and rather complex estate. It'll take quite a few weeks to get it all wrapped up."
"I'll be waiting for your call."
"Two more things before you hang up," Joshua said.
"Yes?"
"Did Mr. Frye say why he had such an obsessive fear of his mother?"
"I don't know what she did to him," Hawthorne said, "but he hated her with all his heart. I've never seen such raw, black hatred as when he spoke of her."
"I knew them both," Joshua said. "I never saw anything like that between them. I always thought he worshipped her."
"Then it must have been a secret hatred that he'd nurtured for a long, long time," Hawthorne said.
"But what could she have done to him?"
"As I said, he never told me. But there was something behind it, something so bad that he couldn't even bring himself to discuss it. You said there were two things you wanted to ask about. What's the other one?"
"Did Bruno mention a double?"
"Double?"
"A look-alike. Someone who could pass for him."
"Considering his size and his unusual voice, finding a double wouldn't be easy."
"Apparently, he managed to do it. I'm trying to find out why he thought it was necessary."
"Can't this look-alike tell you? He must know why he was hired."
"I'm having trouble locating him."
"I see," Hawthorne said. "Well, Mr. Frye never said a word about it to me. But it just occurred to me...."
"Yes?"
"One reason he might need a double."
"What's that?" Joshua asked.
"To confuse his mother when she came back from the grave looking for him."
"Of course," Joshua said sarcastically. "How silly of me not to think of that."
"You misunderstand," Hawthorne said. "I know you're a skeptic. I'm not saying that she actually came back. I don't have enough information to make up my mind about that. But Mr. Frye was absolutely convinced that she had come back. He might have thought that hiring a double would provide him with some protection."
Joshua had to admit that Hawthorne's idea made more than a little sense. "What you're saying is that the easiest way to figure this out is to try to put myself in Frye's head, try to think like he did, like a paranoid schizophrenic."
"If he was a paranoid schizophrenic," Hawthorne said. "As I told you, I scoff at nothing."
"And I scoff at everything," Joshua said. "Well ... thank you for your time and trouble, Mr. Hawthorne."
"No trouble. I'll be waiting for your call."
Don't hold your breath, Joshua thought.
After he put down the receiver, Joshua stood up, stepped to the big window, and stared out at the valley. The land was now settling into shadows under the gray clouds and the purple-blue edges of the oncoming darkness. Day seemed to be changing into night much too rapidly, and, as a sudden cold wind rattled the windowpanes, it also seemed to Joshua that autumn was giving way to winter with the same unnatural haste. The evening looked as if it belonged in gloomy, rainy January rather than early October.
In Joshua's mind, Latham Hawthorne's words spun like dark filaments of a black web on some monstrous spider's loom: His time is coming, Mr. Rhinehart. There are signs and portents. Soon now. Quite soon.
For the past fifteen years or so, the world had seemed to be rushing downhill with no brakes, totally out of control. A lot of strange people were out there. Like Hawthorne. And worse. Far worse. Many of them were political leaders, for that was the line of work that jackals often chose, seeking power over others; they had their hands on the controls of the planet, lunatic engineers in every nation, grinning maniacally as they pushed the machine toward derailment.
Are we living in the final days of the earth? Joshua wondered. Is Armageddon drawing near?
Bullshit, he told himself. You're just transferring your own intimations of mortality to your perception of the world, old man. You've lost Cora, and you're all alone, and you're suddenly aware of growing old and running out of time. Now you have the incredible, grand, egomaniacal notion that the entire world will go with you when you die. But the only doomsday drawing nigh is a very personal one, he told himself. The world will be here after you've gone. It'll be here a long, long time, he assured himself.
But he really wasn't certain of that. The air seemed to be full of ominous currents.
Someone knocked on the door. It was Karen Farr, his industrious young secretary.
"I didn't realize you were still here," Joshua said. He glanced at his watch. "Quitting time was almost an hour ago."
"I took a long lunch. I have a few things to catch up on."
"Work is an essential part of life, my dear. But don't spend all your time at it. Go home. You'll catch up tomorrow."
"I'll be finished in ten minutes," she said. "And just now two people came in. They want to see you."
"I don't have any appointments."
"They've come all the way from Los Angeles. His name's Anthony Clemenza, and the woman with him is Hilary Thomas. She's the one who was--"
"I know who she is," Joshua said, startled. "By all means, show them in."
He walked out from behind his desk and met the visitors in the middle of the room. There were awkward introductions, then Joshua saw to it that they were comfortably seated, offered drinks, poured Jack Daniel's for both of them, and pulled up chair opposite the couch where they were seated side by side.
Tony Clemenza had an air about him that appealed to Joshua. He seemed pleasantly self-assured and competent.
Hilary Thomas radiated a brisk self-confidence and quiet competence much as Clemenza did. She was also achingly lovely.
For a moment, no one seemed to know what to say. They looked at one another in silent anticipation and then tentatively sipped their whiskey.
Joshua was the first to speak. "I've never put a lot of faith in such things as clairvoyance, but, by God, I'm having a little premonition right now. You haven't come all this way just to tell me about last Wednesday and Thursday, have you? Something's happened since then."
"A lot has happened," Tony said. "But none of it makes a whole hell of a lot of sense."
"Sheriff Laurenski sent us to see you," Hilary said.
"We hope you'll have some answers for us."
"I'm looking for answers myself," Joshua said.
Hilary tilted her head and looked curiously at Joshua. "I think maybe I'm having a premonition of my own," she said. "Something has happened here, too, hasn't it?"
Joshua took a sip of his whiskey. "If I were a superstitious man, I'd probably tell you that ... somewhere out there ... a dead man is walking around among the living."
Outside, the last light of day was snuffed from the sky. The coal-black night seized the valley beyond the window. A cold wind tried to find a way around the many panes of glass; it hissed and moaned. But a new warmth seemed to fill Joshua's office, for he and Tony and Hilary were drawn together by their shared knowledge of the incredible mystery of Bruno Frye's apparent resurrection.

***

Bruno Frye had slept in the back of the blue Dodge van, in a supermarket parking lot, until eleven o'clock that morning, when he had been awakened by a nightmare that resonated with fierce, threatening, yet meaningless whispers. For a while, he sat in the stuffy, dimly-lit cargo hold of the van, hugging himself, feeling so desperately alone and abandoned and afraid that he whimpered and wept as if he were a child.
I'm dead, he thought. Dead. The bitch killed me. Dead. The rotten, stinking bitch put a knife in my guts.
As his weeping gradually subsided, he had a peculiar and disturbing thought: But if I'm dead ... how can I be sitting here now? How can I be alive and dead at the same time?
He felt his abdomen with both hands. There were no tender spots, no knife wounds, no scars.
Suddenly, his thoughts cleared. A gray fog seemed to lift from his mind, and for a minute everything shone with a multifaceted, crystalline light. He began to wonder if Katherine really had come back from the grave. Was Hilary Thomas only Hilary Thomas and not Katherine Anne Frye? Was he mad to want to kill her? And all the other women he had killed over the past five years--had they actually been new bodies in which Katherine had hidden? Or had they been real people, innocent women who hadn't deserved to die?
Bruno sat on the floor of the van, stunned, overwhelmed by this new perspective.
And the whispers that invaded his sleep every night, the awful whispers that terrified him....
Suddenly, he knew that, if only he concentrated hard enough, if only he searched diligently through his childhood memories, he would discover what the whispers were, what they meant. He remembered two heavy wooden doors that were set in the ground. He remembered Katherine opening those doors, pushing him into darkness beyond. He remembered her slamming and bolting the doors behind him, remembered steps that led down, down into the earth....
No!
He clamped his hands over his ears as if he could block out unwanted memories as easily as he could shut out unpleasant noise.
He was dripping sweat, Shaking, shaking.
"No," he said. "No, no, no!"
For as long as he could remember, he had wanted to find out who was whispering in his nightmares. He had longed to discover what the whispers were trying to tell him, so that, perhaps, he could then banish them from his sleep forever. But now that he was on the verge of knowing, he found the knowledge more horrifying and devastating than the mystery had been, and, panic-stricken, he turned away from the hideous revelation before it could be delivered unto him.
Now the van was full of whispers again, sibilant voices, haunting susurrations.
Bruno cried out in fear and rocked back and forth on the floor.
Strange things were crawling on him again. They were trying to climb up his arms and chest and back. Trying to get to his face. Trying to squeeze between his lips and teeth. Trying to scurry up his nostrils.
Squealing, writhing, Bruno brushed them away, slapped at them, flailed at himself.
But the illusion was fed by darkness, and there was too much light in the van for the grotesque hallucinations to hold their substance. He could see there was nothing on him, and gradually the panic drained away, leaving him limp.
For several minutes, he just sat there, his back against the wall of the van, patting his sweaty face with a handkerchief, listening to his ragged breathing grow softer and softer.
Finally, he decided it was time to start looking for the bitch again. She was out there--waiting, hiding, somewhere in the city. He had to locate her and kill her before she found a way to kill him first.
The brief moment of mental clarity, the lightning flash of lucidity was gone as if it had never existed. He had forgotten the questions, the doubts. Once again, he was absolutely certain that Katherine had come back from the dead and that she must be stopped.
Later, after a quick lunch, he drove to Westwood and parked up the street from Hilary Thomas's house. He climbed into the cargo hold again and watched her place from a small, decorative porthole on the side of the Dodge.
A commercial van was parked in the circular driveway at the Thomas house. It was painted white with blue and gold lettering on the sides:

MAIDS UNLIMITED
WEEKLY CLEANING, SPRING CLEANING
& PARTIES
WE EVEN DO WINDOWS

Three women in white uniforms were at work in the house. They made a number of trips from the house to the van and back, carrying mops and brooms and vacuum sweepers and buckets and bundles of rags, bringing out plastic bags full of trash, taking in a machine for steam-cleaning carpets, bringing out fragments of the furniture that Frye had broken during his rampage in the pre-dawn hours of yesterday morning.
Although he watched all afternoon, he didn't get even one quick glimpse of Hilary Thomas, and he was convinced that she was not in the house. In fact, he figured that she wouldn't come back until she was positive that it was safe, until she knew he was dead.
"But I'm not the one who's going to die," he said aloud as he studied the house. "Do you hear me, bitch? I'll nail you first. I'll get you before you have a chance to get me. I'll cut off your fucking head."
At last, shortly after five o'clock, the maids brought out their equipment and loaded it into the back of their van. They locked up the house and drove away.
He followed them.
They were his only lead to Hilary Thomas. The bitch had hired them. They must know where she was. If he could get one of the maids alone and force her to talk, he would find out where Katherine was hiding.
Maids Unlimited was headquartered in a single-story stucco structure on a grubby side street, half a block off Pico. The van that Frye was following pulled into a lot beside the building and parked in a row of eight other vans that bore the company name in blue and gold lettering.
Frye drove past the line of identical white vans, went to the end of the block, swung around at the deserted intersection, and headed back the way he had come. He got there in time to see the three women going into the stucco building. None of them appeared to notice him or to realize that the Dodge was the same van that had been within sight of the Thomas house all day. He parked at the curb, across the street from the housecleaning service, under the rustling fronds of a windstirred date palm, and he waited for one of those women to reappear.
During the next ten minutes, a lot of maids in white uniforms came out of Maids Unlimited, but none of them had been at Hilary Thomas's house that afternoon. Then he saw a woman he recognized. She came out of the building and went to a bright yellow Datsun. She was young, in her twenties, with straight brown hair that fell almost to her waist. She walked with her shoulders back, her head up, taking brisk, springy steps. The wind pasted the uniform to her hips and thighs and fluttered the hem above her pretty knees. She got in the Datsun and drove out of the lot, turned left, headed toward Pico.
Frye hesitated, trying to make up his mind if she was the best target, wondering if he should wait for one of the other two. But something felt right about this one. He started the Dodge and pulled away from the curb.
In order to camouflage himself, he tried to keep other traffic between the Dodge and the yellow Datsun. He trailed her from street to street as discreetly as possible, and she seemed utterly unaware that she was being followed.
Her home was in Culver City, just a few blocks from the MGM film studios. She lived in an old, beautifully detailed bungalow on a street of old, beautifully detailed bungalows. A few of the houses were shabby, in need of repairs, gray and sagging and mournful; but most of them were maintained with evident pride, freshly painted, with contrasting shutters, trim little verandas, an occasional stained glass window, a leaded glass door here and there, carriage lamps, and tile roofs. This wasn't a wealthy neighborhood, but it was rich in character.
The maid's house was dark when she arrived. She went inside and switched on lights in the front rooms.
Bruno parked the Dodge across the street, in shadows that were darker than the rest of the newly fallen night. He doused the headlamps, turned off the engine, and rolled down the window. The neighborhood was peaceful and nearly silent. The only sounds came from the trees, which responded to the insistent autumn wind, and from an occasional passing car, and from a distant stereo or radio that was playing swing music. It was a Benny Goodman tune from the Forties, but the title eluded Bruno; the brassy melody floated to him in fragments, at the whimsy of the wind. He sat behind the wheel of the van and waited, listened, watched.
By 6:40, Frye decided that the young woman had neither a husband nor a live-in boyfriend. If a man had shared the house with her, he most likely would have been home from work by this time.
Frye gave it another five minutes.
The Benny Goodman music stopped.
That was the only change.
At 6:45, he got out of the Dodge and crossed the street to her house.
The bungalow was on a narrow lot, much too close to its neighbors to suit Bruno's purpose. But at least there were a great many trees and shrubs along the property lines; they helped screen the front porch of the maid's house from the prying eyes of those who lived on both sides of her. Even so, he would have to move fast, get into the bungalow quickly and without causing a commotion, before she had a chance to scream.
He went up two low steps, onto the veranda. The floorboards squeaked a bit. He rang the bell.
She answered the door, smiling uncertainly. "Yes?"
A safety chain was fixed to the door. It was heavier and sturdier than most chains, but it was not one-tenth as effective as she probably thought it was. A man much smaller than Bruno Frye could have torn this one from its mountings with a couple of solid blows against the door. Bruno only needed to ram his massive shoulder into the barrier once, hard, just as she smiled and said, "Yes?" The door exploded inward, and splinters flew into the air, and part of the broken safety chain hit the floor with a sharp ringing sound.
He leaped inside and threw the door shut behind him. He was pretty sure that no one had seen him breaking in.
The woman was on her back, on the floor. The door had knocked her down. She was still wearing her white uniform. The skirt was up around her thighs. She had lovely legs.
He dropped to one knee beside her.
She was dazed. She opened her eyes and tried to look up at him, but she needed a moment to focus.
He put the point of the knife at her throat. "If you scream," he said, "I'll cut you wide open. Do you understand?"
Confusion vanished from her warm brown eyes, and fear replaced it. She began to tremble. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes, shimmered but didn't spill out.
Impatiently, he pricked her throat with the point of the blade, and a tiny bead of blood appeared.
She winced.
"No screaming," he said. "Do you hear me?"
With an effort, she said, "Yes."
"Will you be good?"
"Please. Please, don't hurt me."
"I don't want to hurt you," Frye said. "If you're quiet, if you're nice, if you cooperate with me, then I won't have to hurt you. But if you scream or try to get away from me, I'll cut you to pieces. You understand?"
In a very small voice, she said, "Yes."
"Are you going to be nice?"
"Yes."
"Do you live alone here?"
"Yes."
"No husband?"
"No."
"Boyfriend?"
"He doesn't live here."
"You expecting him tonight?"
"No."
"Are you lying to me?"
"It's the truth. I swear."
She was pale under her dusky complexion.
"If you're lying to me," he said, "I'll cut your pretty face to ribbons."
He raised the blade, put the point against her cheek. She closed her eyes and shuddered.
"Are you expecting anyone at all?"
"No."
"What's your name?"
"Sally."
"Okay, Sally, I want to ask you a few questions, but not here, not like this."
She opened her eyes. Tears on the lashes. One trickling down her face. She swallowed hard. "What do you want?"
"I have some questions about Katherine."
She frowned. "I don't know any Katherine."
"You know her as Hilary Thomas."
Her frown deepened. "The woman in Westwood?"
"You cleaned her house today."
"But ... I don't know her. I've never met her."
"We'll see about that."
"It's the truth. I don't know anything about her."
"Perhaps you know more than you think you do."
"No. Really."
"Come on," he said, working hard to keep a smile on his face and a friendly note in his voice. "Let's go into the bedroom where we can do this more comfortably."
Her shaking became worse, almost epileptic. "You're going to rape me, aren't you?"
"No, no."
"Yes, you are."
Frye was barely able to control his anger. He was angry that she was arguing with him. He was angry that she was so damned reluctant to move. He wished that he could ram the knife into her belly and cut the information out of her, but, of course, he couldn't do that. He wanted to know where Hilary Thomas was hiding. It seemed to him that the best way to get that information was to break this woman the way he might break a length of heavy wire: bend her repeatedly back and forth until she snapped, bend her one way with threats and another way with cajolery, alternate minor violence with friendliness and sympathy. He did not even consider the possibility that she might be willing to tell him everything she knew. To his way of thinking, she was employed by Hilary Thomas, therefore by Katherine, and was consequently part of Katherine's plot to kill him. This woman was not merely an innocent bystander. She was Katherine's handmaiden, a conspirator, perhaps even another of the living dead. He expected her to hide information from him and to give it up only grudgingly.
"I promise that I'm not going to rape you," he said softly, gently. "But while I question you, I want you to be flat on your back, so that it'll be harder for you to try to get up and run. I'll feel safer if you're on your back. So if you're going to have to lay down for a while, you might as well do it on a nice soft mattress rather than on a hard floor. I'm only thinking of your comfort, Sally."
"I'm comfortable here," she said nervously.
"Don't be silly," he said, "Besides, if someone comes up on the front porch to ring the bell ... he might hear us and figure that something's wrong. The bedroom will be more private. Come on now. Come on. Upsy-daisy."
She got to her feet.
He held the knife on her.
They went into the bedroom.

***

Hilary was not much of a drinker, but she was glad that she had a glass of good whiskey as she sat on the couch in Joshua Rhinehart's office and listened to the attorney's story. He told her and Tony about the missing funds in San Francisco, about the dead ringer who had left the bizarre letter in the safe-deposit box--and about his own growing uncertainty as to the identity of the dead man in Bruno Frye's grave.
"Are you going to exhume the body?" Tony asked.
"Not yet," Joshua said. "There are a couple of things I've got to look into first. If they check out, I might get enough answers so that it's not really necessary to open the grave."
He told them about Rita Yancy in Hollister and about Dr. Nicholas Rudge in San Francisco, and he reconstructed his recent conversation with Latham Hawthorne.
In spite of the warm room and the heat of the whiskey, Hilary was chilled to the bone. "This Hawthorne sounds as if he belongs in an institution himself."
Joshua sighed. "Sometimes I think if we put all the crazies into institutions, there'd hardly be anyone left on the outside."
Tony leaned forward on the couch. "Do you believe that Hawthorne really didn't know about the look-alike?"
"Yes," Joshua said. "Curiously enough, I do believe him. He may be something of a nut about Satanism, and he may not be particularly moral in some areas, and he might even be somewhat dangerous, but he didn't strike me as a dissembler, Strange as it might seem, I think he's probably a generally truthful man in most matters, and I can't see that there's anything more to be learned from him. Perhaps Dr. Rudge or Rita Yancy will know something of more value. But enough of that. Now let me hear from the two of you. What's happened? What's brought you all the way to St. Helena?"
Hilary and Tony took turns recounting the events of the past few days.
When they finished, Joshua stared at Hilary for a moment, then shook his head and said, "You've got a hell of a lot of courage, young lady."
"Not me," she said. "I'm a coward. I'm scared to death. I've been scared to death for days."
"Being scared doesn't mean you're a coward," Joshua said. "All bravery is based on fear. Both the coward and the hero act out of terror and necessity. The only difference between them is simply that the coward succumbs to his fear while the person with courage triumphs in spite of it. If you were a coward, you would have run away for a month-long holiday in Europe or Hawaii or some such place, and you'd have counted on time to solve the Frye riddle. But you've come here, to Bruno's hometown, where you might well expect to be in even more danger than you were in Los Angeles. I don't admire much in this world. but I do admire your spunk."
Hilary was blushing. She looked at Tony, then down at her glass of whiskey. "If I was brave," she said, "I'd stay in the city and set up a trap for him, using myself for bait. I'm not really in much danger here. After all, he's busy looking for me down in L.A. And there's no way that he can find out where I've gone."

***

The bedroom.
From the bed Sally watched him with alert and fear-filled eyes.
He walked around the room, looking in drawers. Then he came back to her.
Her throat was slender and taut. The bead of blood had dribbled down the graceful arc of flesh to her collarbone. She saw him looking at the blood, and she reached up with one hand, touched it, stared at her stained fingers.
"Don't worry," he said. "It's only a scratch."
Sally's bedroom, at the rear of the neat little bungalow, was decorated entirely in earth tones. Three walls were painted beige; the fourth was covered with burlap wallpaper. The carpet was chocolate brown. The bedspread and the matching drapes were a coffee and cream abstract pattern, restful swirls of natural shades that soothed the eye. The highly polished mahogany furniture gleamed where it was touched by the soft, shaded, amber glow that came from one of the two copperplated bedside lamps that stood on the nightstands.
She lay on the bed, on her back, legs together, arms at her sides, hands fisted. She was still wearing her white uniform; it was pulled down demurely to her knees. Her long chestnut-brown hair was spread out like a fan around her head. She was quite pretty.
Bruno sat on the edge of the bed beside her. "Where is Katherine?"
She blinked. Tears slid out of the corners of her eyes. She was weeping, but silently, afraid to shriek and wail and groan, afraid that the slightest sound would cause him to stab her.
He repeated the question: "Where is Katherine?"
"I told you, I don't know anyone named Katherine," she said. Her speech was halting, tremulous; each word required a separate struggle. Her sensual lower lip quivered as she spoke.
"You know who I mean," he said sharply. "Don't play games with me. She calls herself Hilary Thomas now."
"Please. Please ... let me go."
He held the knife up to her right eye, the point directed at the widening pupil. "Where is Hilary Thomas?"
"Oh, Jesus," she said shakily. "Look, mister, there's some sort of mix-up. A mistake. You're making a big mistake."
"You want to lose your eye?"
Sweat popped out along her hairline.
"You want to be half blind?" he asked.
"I don't know where she is," Sally said miserably.
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm not lying, I swear I'm not."
He stared at her for a few seconds.
By now there was sweat on her upper lip, too, tiny dots of moisture.
He took the knife away from her eye.
She was visibly relieved.
He surprised her. He slapped her face with his other hand, hit her so hard that her teeth clacked together and her eyes rolled back in her head.
"Bitch."
There were a lot of tears now. She made soft, mewling sounds and shrank back from him.
"You must know where she is," he said. "She hired you."
"We work for her regularly. She just called in and asked for a special clean-up. She didn't say where she was."
"Was she at the house when you got there?"
"No."
"Was anyone at the house when you got there?"
"No."
"Then how'd you get in?"
"Huh?"
"Who gave you the key?"
"Oh. Oh, yeah," she said, brightening a bit as she saw a way out. "Her agent. A literary agent. We had to stop at his office first to get the key."
"Where's that?"
"Beverly Hills. You should go talk to her agent if you want to know where she is. That's who you should see. He'll know where you can find her."
"What's his name?"
She hesitated. "A funny name. I saw it written down ... but I'm not sure I remember it exactly...."
He held the knife up to her eye again.
"Topelis," she said.
"Spell it for me."
She did. "I don't know where Miss Thomas is. But that Mr. Topelis will know. He'll know for sure."
He took the knife away from her eye.
She had been rigid. She sagged a bit.
He stared down at her. Something stirred in the back of his mind, a memory, then an awful realization.
"Your hair," he said. "You've got dark hair. And your eyes. They're so dark."
"What's wrong?" she asked worriedly, suddenly sensing that she was not safe yet.
"You've got the same hair and eyes, the same complexion that she had," Frye said.
"I don't understand, I don't know what's happening here. You're scaring me."
"Did you think you could trick me?" He was grinning at her, pleased with himself for not being fooled by her clever ruse.
He knew. He knew.
"You figured I'd go off to see this Topelis," Bruno said, and then you would have a chance to slip away."
"Topelis knows where she is. He knows. I don't. I really don't know anything."
"I know where she is now," Bruno said.
"If you know, then you can just let me go."
He laughed. "You changed bodies, didn't you?"
She stared at him. "What?"
"Somehow you got out of the Thomas woman and took control of this girl, didn't you?"
She wasn't crying any more. Her fear was burning so very brightly that it had seared away her tears.
The bitch.
The rotten bitch.
"Did you really think you could fool me?" he asked. He laughed again, delighted. "After everything you've done to me, how could you think I wouldn't recognize you?"
Terror reverberated in her voice. "I haven't done anything to you. You're not making sense. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God, my God. What do you want from me?"
Bruno leaned toward her, put his face close to hers. He peered into her eyes and said, "You're in there, aren't you? You're in there, deep down in there, hiding from me, aren't you? Aren't you, Mother? I see you, Mother. I see you in there."

***

A few fat droplets of rain splattered on the mullioned window in Joshua Rhinehart's office.
The night wind moaned.
"I still don't understand why Frye chose me," Hilary said. "When I came up here to do research for that screenplay, he was friendly. He answered all my questions about the wine industry. We spent two or three hours together, and I never had a hint that he was anything but an ordinary businessman. Then a few weeks later, he shows up at my house with a knife. And according to that letter in the safe-deposit box, he thinks I'm his mother in a new body. Why me?"
Joshua shifted in his chair. "I've been looking at you and thinking...."
"What?"
"Maybe he chose you because ... well, you look just a bit like Katherine."
"You don't mean we've got another look-alike on our hands," Tony said.
"No," Joshua said. "The resemblance is only slight."
"Good," Tony said. "Another dead ringer would be too much for me to deal with."
Joshua got up, went to Hilary, put one hand under her chin, lifted her face, turned it left, then right. "The hair, the eyes, the dusty complexion," he said thoughtfully. "Yes, all of that's similar. And there are other things about your face that remind me vaguely of Katherine, little things, so minor that I can't really put my finger on them. It's only a passing resemblance. And she wasn't as attractive as you are."
As Joshua took his hand away from her chin, Hilary got up and walked to the attorney's desk. Mulling over what she had learned in the past hour, she stared down at the neatly arranged items on the desk: blotter, stapler, letter opener, paperweight.
"Is something wrong?" Tony asked.
The wind worked up into a brief squall. Another burst of raindrops snapped against the window.
She turned around, faced the men. "Let me summarize the situation. Let me see if I've got this straight."
"I don't think any of us has it straight," Joshua said, returning to his chair. "The whole damned tale is too twisted to be arranged in a nice straight line."
"That's what I'm leading up to," she said. "I think maybe I just found another twist."
"Go ahead," Tony said.
"So far as we can tell," Hilary said, "shortly after his mother's death, Bruno got the idea that she had come back from the grave. For nearly five years, he has been buying books about the living dead from Latham Hawthorne. For five years, he's been living in fear of Katherine. Finally, when he saw me, he decided I was the new body she was using. But why did it take him so long?"
"I'm not sure I follow," Joshua said.
"Why did he take five years to fixate on someone, five long years to select a flesh and blood target for his fears?"
Joshua shrugged, "He's a madman, We can't expect his reasoning to be logical and decipherable."
But Tony was sensitive to the implications of her question. He slid forward on the couch, frowning. "I think I know what you're going to say," he told her, "My God, it gives me goose pimples."
Joshua looked from one to the other and said, "I must be getting slow-witted in my declining years. Will someone explain things to this old codger?"
"Maybe I'm not the first woman he's thought was his mother," Hilary said. "Maybe he killed the others before he came after me."
Joshua gaped at her, "Impossible!"
"Why?"
"We'd have known if he'd been running around killing women for the past five years. He'd have been caught at it!"
"Not necessarily," Tony said. "Homicidal maniacs are often very careful, very clever people. Some of them make meticulous plans--and yet have an uncanny ability to take the right risks when something unexpected throws the plans off the rails. They aren't always easy to catch."
Joshua pushed one hand through his mane of snow-white hair. "But if Bruno killed other women--where are their bodies?"
"Not in St. Helena," Hilary said. "He may have been schizophrenic, but the respectable, Dr. Jekyll-half of his personality was firmly in control when he was around people who knew him. He almost certainly would have gone out of town to kill. Out of the valley."
"San Francisco," Tony said, "He apparently went there regularly."
"Any town in the northern part of the state," Hilary said, "Any place far enough away from the Napa Valley for him to be anonymous."
"Now wait," Joshua said. "Wait a minute. Even if he went somewhere else and found women who bore a vague resemblance to Katherine, even if he killed them in other towns--he'd still have to leave bodies behind. There would have been similarities in the way he murdered them, links that the authorities would have noticed, They'd be looking for a modern-day Jack the Ripper. We'd have heard all about it on the news."
"If the murders were spread over five years and over a lot of towns in several counties, the police probably wouldn't make any connections between them," Tony said. "This is a large state. Hundreds of thousands of square miles. There are hundreds upon hundreds of police organizations, and there's seldom as much information-sharing among them as there ought to be. In fact, there's only one sure-fire way for them to recognize connections between several random killings--that's if at least two, and preferably three, of the murders take place in a relatively short span of time, within a single police jurisdiction, one county or one city."
Hilary walked away from the desk, returned to the couch. "So it's possible," she said, feeling as cold as the October wind sounded. "It's possible that he's been slaughtering women--two, six, ten, fifteen, maybe more--during the past five years, and I'm the first one who ever gave him any trouble."
"It's not only possible, but probable," Tony said. "I'd say we can count on it." The Xerox of the letter that had been found in the safe-deposit box was on the coffee table in front of him; he picked it up and read the first sentence aloud. "'My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies,'"
"Bodies," Hilary said.
"That's the key word," Tony said. "Not body, singular. Bodies, plural. From that, I think we can infer that he killed her several times and that he thought she came back from the grave more than once."
Joshua's face was ash-gray. "But if you're right ... I've been ... all of us in St. Helena have been living beside the most evil, vicious sort of monster. And we weren't even aware of it!"
Tony looked grim. "'The Beast of Hell walks among us in the clothes of a common man.'"
"What's that from?" Joshua asked.
"I've got a dustbin mind," Tony said. "Very little gets thrown away, whether I want to hold on to it or not. I remember the quotation from my Catholic catechism classes a long time ago. It's from the writings of one of the saints, but I don't recall which one. 'The Beast of Hell walks among us in the clothes of a common man. If the demon should reveal its true face to you at a time when you have turned away from Christ, then you will be without protection, and it will gleefully devour your heart and rend you limb from limb and carry your immortal soul into the yawning pit.'"
"You sound like Latham Hawthorne," Joshua said.
Outside, the wind shrieked.

***

Frye put the knife on the nightstand, well out of Sally's reach. Then he grabbed the lapels of her uniform dress and tore the garment open. Buttons popped.
She was paralyzed by terror. She did not resist him; she could not.
He grinned at her and said, "Now. Now, Mother. Now, I get even."
He ripped the dress all the way down the front and flung it open. She was revealed in bra and panties and pantyhose, a slim, pretty body. He clutched the cups of her bra and jerked them down. The straps bit into her skin and then broke. Fabric tore. Elastic snapped.
Her breasts were large for her size and bone structure, round and full, with very dark, pebbly nipples. He squeezed them roughly.
"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!" In his deep, gravelly voice, that one word acquired the eerie quality of a sinister chant, a Satanic litany.
He wrenched off her shoes, first the right, then the left, and threw them aside. One of them struck the mirror above the dresser and shattered it.
The sound of falling glass roused the woman from her shock-induced catatonic trance, and she tried to pull away from him, but fear sapped her strength; she writhed and fluttered ineffectually against him.
He held her without difficulty, slapped her twice with such force that her mouth sagged open and her eyes swam. A fine thread of blood unraveled from the corner of her mouth, ran down her chin.
"You rotten bitch!" he said, furious. "No sex, huh? I can't have any sex, you said. No sex ever, you said. Can't risk some woman finding out what I am, you said. Well, you already know what I am, Mother. You already know my secret, I don't have to hide anything from you, Mother. You know I'm different from other men. You know my prick isn't like theirs. You know who my father was. You know. You know that my prick is like his. I don't have to hide it from you, Mother. I'm going to shove it into you, Mother. All the way up into you. You hear me? Do you?"
The woman was crying, tossing her head from side to side. "No, no, no! Oh, God!" But then she got control of herself, locked eyes with him, gazed intently at him (and he could see Katherine in there, beyond the brown eyes, glaring out at him), and she said, "Listen to me. Please, listen to me! You're sick. You're a very sick man. You're all mixed up. You need help."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"
He slapped her again, harder than he had done before, swinging his big hand in a long swift arc, into the side of her face.
Each act of violence excited him. He was aroused by the sharp sound of each blow, by her gasps of pain and her birdlike cries, by the way her tender flesh reddened and swelled. The sight of her pain-contorted face and her scared-rabbit eyes stoked his lust to an unbearable white-hot flame.
He was shaking with need, trembling, quivering, quaking. He was breathing like a bull. His eyes were wide. His mouth was watering so excessively that he had to swallow every couple of seconds to avoid drooling on her.
He mauled her lovely breasts, squeezed and stroked them, roughed them up.
She had retreated from the terror, had slipped back into that semi-trance, motionless and rigid.
On the one hand, Bruno hated her and did not care how badly he hurt her. He wanted to cause her pain. He wanted her to suffer for all the things she had done to him--for even bringing him into the world in the first place.
But on the other hand, he was ashamed of touching his mother's breasts and ashamed of wanting to stick his penis into her. Therefore, as he pawed at her, he tried to explain himself and justify his actions: "You told me that if I ever tried to make love to a woman, she'd know right away that I'm not human. You said she'd see the difference, and she'd know. She'd call the police, and they'd take me away, and they'd burn me at the stake because they'd know who my father was. But you already know. It's no surprise to you, Mother. So I can use my prick on you. I can stick it right up in you, Mother, and no one will burn me alive."
He had never thought of putting it into her while she was alive. He'd been hopelessly cowed by her. But by the time she had come back from the dead in her first new body, Bruno had tasted freedom, and he had been full of daring and new ideas. He realized at once that he must kill her to prevent her from taking over his life again--or dragging him back to the grave with her. But he also realized that he could screw her and be safe, since she already knew his secret. She was the one who had told him the truth about himself; she'd told him ten thousand times. She knew that his father was a demon, a foul and hideous thing, for she had been raped by that inhuman creature, impregnated by it against her will. During her pregnancy, she had worn overlapping girdles to conceal her condition. When her time drew near, she went away to give birth under the care of a close-mouthed midwife in San Francisco. Later, she told people in St. Helena that Bruno was the illegitimate son of an old college friend who had gotten in trouble, that his real mother died shortly after his birth, and that her last wish was for Katherine to raise the boy. She brought the baby home and pretended he had been legally placed in her care and custody. She lived in constant, numbing fear that someone would discover Bruno was hers, and that his father was not human. One of the things that marked him as the progeny of a demon was his penis. He had the penis of a demon, different from that of a man. He must always hide it, she said, or he would be uncovered and burned at the stake. She had told him all about those things, had been telling him about them since he was too young to know what a penis was for. So, in a peculiar way, she had become both his blessing and his curse. She was a curse because she kept returning from the grave to regain control of him or to kill him. But she was also a blessing because, if she didn't keep coming back again and again and again, he wouldn't have anyone into whom he could empty the great, hot quantities of semen that built up like boiling lava in him. Without her, he was doomed to a life of celibacy. Therefore, while he regarded her resurrections with horror and outrage, a part of him also eagerly looked forward to each new encounter with each new body that she inhabited.
Now, as he knelt on the bed beside her, looking down at her breasts and at the dark pubic bush that was visible through her pale yellow panties, his erection grew so hard that it hurt. He was aware of the demon-half of his personality asserting itself; he felt the beast surging toward the surface of his mind.
He clawed at Sally's (Katherine's) pantyhose, shredding the nylon as he pulled it down her slim legs. He gripped her thighs in his large hands and forced them apart, and he moved around clumsily on the mattress until he was kneeling between her legs.
She snapped out of her trance again. Suddenly bucking, trashing, kicking, she tried to rise, but he shoved her back with ease. She pummeled him with her fists, but her punches were without force. Seeing that he was unaffected by her blows, she opened her hands, made claws of them, struck at his face, raked his left cheek with her nails, then went for his eyes.
He jerked back, raised one arm to protect himself, winced as she gouged the back of his hand. Then he fell full-length upon her, crushing her with his big, strong body. He got one arm across her throat and pressed down, choking her.

***

Joshua Rhinehart washed the three whiskey glasses in the sink at the wet bar. To Tony and Hilary, he said, "The two of you have more at stake in this thing than I do, so why don't you come with me tomorrow when I fly down to see Rita Yancy in Hollister?"
"I was hoping you'd ask us," Hilary said.
"There's nothing we can do here right now," Tony said.
Joshua dried his hands on a dishtowel. "Good. That's settled. Now have you gotten a hotel room for the night?"
"Not yet," Tony said.
"You're welcome to stay at my place," Joshua said.
Hilary smiled prettily. "That's very kind. But we don't want to impose on you."
"You wouldn't be imposing."
"But you weren't expecting us, and we--"
"Young lady," Joshua said impatiently, "do you know how long it's been since I've had house guests? More than three years. And do you know why I haven't had any house guests in three years? Because I didn't invite anyone to stay with me, that's why. I am not a particularly gregarious man. I don't issue invitations lightly. If I felt that you and Tony would be a burden--or, worst of all, boring--I wouldn't have invited you, either. Now let's not waste a lot of time being overly polite. You need a room. I have a room. Are you going to stay at my place or not?"
Tony laughed, and Hilary grinned at Joshua. She said, "Thank you for asking us. We'd be delighted."
"Good," Joshua said.
"I like your style," she told him.
"Most people think I'm a grump."
"But a nice grump."
Joshua found a smile of his own. "Thank you. I think I'll have that engraved on my tombstone. 'Here lies Joshua Rhinehart, a nice grump.'"
As they were leaving the office, the telephone rang, and Joshua went back to his desk. Dr. Nicholas Rudge was calling from San Francisco.

***

Bruno Frye was still on top of the woman, pinning her to the mattress, one muscular arm across her throat.
She gagged and fought for breath. Her face was red, dark, twisted in agony.
She excited him.
"Don't fight me, Mother. Don't fight me like this. You know it's useless. You know I'll win in the end."
She writhed under his superior weight and strength. She tried to arch her back and roll to one side, and when she failed to throw him off, she was shaken by violent involuntary muscle spasms as her body reacted to the growing interruption in her air supply and in the supply of blood to her brain. At last, she seemed to realize she would never be able to get free of him, that she had absolutely no hope of escape, and so she went limp in defeat.
Convinced that the woman had surrendered spiritually as well as physically, Frye lifted his arm from her bruised throat. He raised up on his knees, taking his weight off her.
She put her hands to her neck. She gagged and coughed uncontrollably.
In a frenzy now, his heart pounding, blood roaring in his ears, aching with need, Frye got up, stood beside the bed, stripped off his clothes, threw them on top of the dresser, out of the way.
He looked down at his erection. The sight of it thrilled him. The steeliness of it. The size of it. The angry color.
He climbed onto the bed again.
She was docile now. Her eyes had a vacant look.
He ripped off her pale yellow panties and positioned himself between her slim legs. Saliva drooled out of his mouth. Dripped on her breasts.
He thrust into her. He thrust his demon staff all the way into her. Growling like an animal. Stabbed her with his demonic penis. He stabbed and stabbed her, until his semen flowered within her.
He pictured the milky fluid. Pictured it flowering from him, deep inside of her.
He thought of blood blossoming from a wound. Red petals spreading from a deep knife wound.
Both thoughts wildly excited him: semen and blood.
He didn't go soft.
Sweating, grunting, slobbering, he made thrust after thrust after thrust. Into her. Into. In.
Later, he would use the knife.

***

Joshua Rhinehart flipped a switch on his desk phone, putting the call from Dr. Nicholas Rudge on the conference speaker, so that Tony and Hilary could hear the conversation.
"I tried your home number first," Rudge said. "I didn't expect you to be at the office at this hour."
"I'm a workaholic, doctor."
"You should try to do something about it," Rudge said with what sounded like genuine concern. "That's no way to live. I've treated more than a few overly-ambitious men for whom work had become the only interest in their lives. An obsessive attitude toward work can destroy you."
"Dr. Rudge, what is your medical specialty?"
"Psychiatry."
"I suspected as much."
"You're the executor?"
"That's right. I presume you heard all about his death."
"Just what the newspaper had to say."
"While handling some estate matters, I discovered that Mr. Frye had been seeing you regularly during the year and a half prior to his death."
"He came in once a month," Rudge said.
"Were you aware that he was homicidal?"
"Of course not," Rudge said.
"You treated him all that time and weren't aware that he was capable of violence?"
"I knew he was deeply disturbed," Rudge said. "But I didn't think he was a danger to anyone. However, you must understand that he didn't really give me a chance to spot the violent side of him. I mean, as I said, he only came in once a month, I wanted to see him at least once every week, and preferably twice, but he refused. On the one hand, he wanted me to help him. But at the same time, he was afraid of what he might learn about himself. After a while, I decided not to press him too hard about making weekly visits because I was afraid that he might back off altogether and even cancel his monthly appointment. I figured a little therapy was better than none, you see."
"What brought him to you?"
"Are you asking what was wrong with him, what he was complaining of?"
"That's what I'm asking, all right."
"As an attorney, Mr. Rhinehart, you ought to be aware that I can't give out that sort of information indiscriminately. I have a doctor-patient privilege to protect."
"The patient is dead, Dr. Rudge."
"That doesn't make any difference."
"It sure as hell makes a difference to the patient."
"He placed his trust in me."
"When the patient is dead, the concept of doctor-patient privilege has little or no legal validity."
"Perhaps it has no legal validity," Rudge said. "But the oral validity remains. I still have certain responsibilities. I wouldn't do anything to damage the reputation of a patient, regardless of whether he's dead or alive."
"Commendable," Joshua said. "But in this case, nothing you could tell me would damage his reputation one whit more than he damaged it himself."
"That, too, makes no difference."
"Doctor, this is an extraordinary situation. This very day, I have come into possession of information which indicates that Bruno Frye murdered a number of women over the past five years, a large number of women, and got away with it."
"You're joking."
"I don't know what sort of thing strikes you as funny, Dr. Rudge. But I don't make jokes about mass murder."
Rudge was silent.
Joshua said, "Furthermore, I have reason to believe that Frye didn't act alone. He may have had a partner in homicide. And that partner may still be walking around, alive and free."
"This is extraordinary."
"That's what I said."
"Have you given this information of yours to the police?"
"No," Joshua said. "For one thing, it's probably not enough to get their attention. What I've discovered convinces me--and two other people who are involved in this. But the police will probably say it's only circumstantial evidence. And for another thing--I'm not sure which police agency has primary jurisdiction in the case. The murders might have been committed in several counties, in a number of cities. Now it seems to me that Frye might have told you something that doesn't appear all that important by itself, but which fits in with the facts that I've uncovered. If, during those eighteen months of therapy, you acquired a bit of knowledge that complements my information, then perhaps I'll have enough to decide which police agency to approach--and enough to convince them of the seriousness of the situation."
"Well...."
"Dr. Rudge, if you persist in protecting this particular patient, yet more murders may occur. Other women. Do you want their deaths on your conscience?"
"All right," Rudge said. "But this can't be done on the telephone."
"I'll come to San Francisco tomorrow, at your earliest convenience."
"My morning is free," Rudge said.
"Shall my associates and I meet you at your offices at ten o'clock?"
"That'll be fine," Rudge said. "But I warn you--before I discuss Mr. Frye's therapy, I'll want to hear this evidence of yours in more detail."
"Naturally."
"And if I'm not convinced that there's a clear and present danger, I'll keep his file sealed."
"Oh, I have no doubt that we can convince you," Joshua said. "I'm quite sure we can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. We'll see you in the morning, doctor."
Joshua hung up. He looked at Tony and Hilary. "Tomorrow's going to be a busy day, First San Francisco and Dr. Rudge, then Hollister and the mysterious Rita Yancy."
Hilary got up from the couch where she had sat through the call. "I don't care if we have to fly halfway around the world. At least things seem to be breaking. For the first time, I feel that we're actually going to find out what's behind all of this."
"I feel the same way," Tony said. He smiled at Joshua. "You know ... the way you handled Rudge ... you've got a real talent for interrogation. You'd make a good detective."
"I'll add that to my tombstone," Joshua said, "'Here lies Joshua Rhinehart, a nice grump who would have made a good detective.'" He stood up. "I'm starved. At home I've got steaks in the freezer and a lot of bottles of Robert Mondavi's Cabernet Sauvignon. What are we waiting for?"

***

Frye turned away from the blood-drenched bed and from the blood-splashed wall behind the bed.
He put the bloody knife on the dresser and walked out of the room.
The house was filled with an unearthly quiet.
His demonic energy was gone. He was heavy-lidded, heavy-limbed, lethargic, sated.
In the bathroom, he adjusted the water in the shower until it was as hot as he could stand it. He stepped into the stall and soaped himself, washed the blood out of his hair, washed it off his face and body. He rinsed, then lathered up again, rinsed a second time.
His mind was a blank. He thought of nothing except the details of cleaning up. The sight of the blood swirling down the drain did not make him think of the dead woman in the next room; it was only dirt being sluiced away.
All he wanted to do was make himself presentable and then go sleep in the van for several hours. He was exhausted. His arms felt as if they were made of lead; his legs were rubber.
He got out of the shower and dried himself on a big towel. The cloth smelled like the woman, but it had neither pleasant nor unpleasant associations for him.
He spent a lot of time at the sink, working on his hands with a brush that he found beside the soap dish, getting every trace of blood out of his knuckle creases, taking special care with his caked fingernails.
On his way out of the bathroom, intending to fetch his clothes from the bedroom, he noticed a full-length mirror on the door, which he hadn't seen on his way to the shower. He stopped to examine himself, looking for smears of blood that he might have missed. He was as spotless and fresh and pink as a well-scrubbed baby.
He stared at the reflection of his flaccid penis and the drooping testicles beneath it, and he tried very hard to see the mark of the demon. He knew that he was not like other men; he had no doubt whatsoever about that. His mother had been terrified that someone would find out about him and that the world would learn that he was half-demon, the child of an ordinary woman and a scaly, fanged, sulphurous beast. Her fear of exposure was transmitted to Bruno at an early age, and he still dreaded being found out and subsequently burned alive. He had never been naked in front of another person. In school, he had not gone out for sports, and he had been excused from gymnasium for supposed religious objections to taking showers in the nude with other boys. He had never even completely stripped for a physician. His mother had been positive that anyone who saw his sex organs would know at once that his manhood was the genetic legacy of a demon father; and he had been impressed and deeply affected by her fearful, unwavering certainty.
But as he looked at himself in the mirror, he couldn't see anything that made his sex organs different from those of other men. Shortly after his mother's fatal heart attack, he had gone to a pornographic movie in San Francisco, eager to learn how a normal man's penis looked. He'd been surprised and baffled to discover that the men in the film were all very much like him. He'd gone to other pictures of the same sort, but he hadn't seen even one man who was strikingly different from him. Some of them had bigger penises than his; some of them had smaller organs; some were thicker, some thinner; some were curved slightly; some of them were circumcised, and some were not. But those were all just minor variations, not the awful, shocking, fundamental differences which he had expected.
Puzzled, worried, he had gone back to St. Helena to sit with himself and discuss his discovery. His first thought was that his mother had lied to him. But that was very nearly inconceivable. She had recounted the story of his conception several times every week, for years and years, and each time that she had described the hateful demon and the violent rape, she had shuddered and wailed and wept. The experience had been real for her, not some imaginary tale that she had created to mislead him. And yet.... Sitting with himself that afternoon five years ago, discussing it with himself, he had been unable to think of any explanation other than that his mother was a liar; and himself agreed with him.
The following day, he had returned to San Francisco, wildly excited, fevered, having decided to risk sex with a woman for the first time in his thirty-five years. He had gone to a massage parlor, a thinly disguised brothel, where he had chosen a slim, attractive blonde as his masseuse. She called herself Tammy, and except for slightly protruding upper teeth and a neck that was just a bit too long, she was as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen; or at least that's how she seemed to him as he struggled to keep from ejaculating in his trousers. In one of the cubicles that smelled of pine disinfectant and stale semen, he agreed to Tammy's price, paid her, and watched as she took off her sweater and slacks. Her body was smooth and sleek and so desirable that he stood like a post, unable to move, awe-stricken as he considered all of the things he could do with her. She sat on the edge of the narrow bed and smiled at him and suggested he undress. He stripped down to his underpants, but when the time came for him to show her his rigid penis, he was unable to take the risk, for he could see himself in a pillar of flame, put to death because of his demonic blood. He froze. He stared at Tammy's slender legs and at her wiry pubic hair and at her round breasts, wanting her, needing her, but afraid to take her. Sensing his reluctance to reveal himself, she reached out and put one hand on his crotch, felt his penis through his shorts. She slowly rubbed him through the thin cloth and said, "Oh, I want that. It's so big. I've never had one like this before. Show me. I want to see it. I've never had anything like it." And as she spoke those words he knew that somehow he was different, in spite of the fact that he could not see the difference. Tammy tried to pull off his shorts, and he slapped her face, knocked her backwards, flat on the bed; she bumped her head against the wall, threw her hands up to ward him off, screamed and screamed. Bruno wondered if he should kill her. Even though she had not seen his demonic prick, she might have recognized the inhuman quality of it merely by feeling it through his underwear. Before he could make up his mind what to do, the door of the cubicle flew open in answer to the girl's screams, and a man with a blackjack stepped in from the corridor. The bouncer was as big as Bruno, and the weapon gave him a substantial advantage. Bruno was certain that they were going to overpower him, revile him, curse and spit upon him, torture him, and then burn him at the stake; but to his utter amazement, they only made him put on his clothes and get out. Tammy didn't say another word about Bruno's unusual penis. Apparently, while she knew it was different, she was not aware of exactly how different it was: she didn't know that it was a sign of the demon that had fathered him, proof of his hellish origins. Relieved, he had dressed hurriedly and had scurried out of the massage parlor, blushing, embarrassed, but thankful that his secret had not been uncovered. He had gone back to St. Helena and had told himself about the close call he'd had, and both he and himself had agreed that Katherine had been right, and that he would have to furnish his own sex, without benefit of a woman.
Then, of course, Katherine had started coming back from the grave, and Bruno had been able to satisfy himself with her, expending copious quantities of sperm in the many lovely bodies that she had inhabited. He still had most of his sex alone, with himself, with his other self, his other half--but it was wildly exciting to thrust into the warm, tight, moist center of a woman every once in a while.
Now he stood in front of the mirror that was fixed to the door of Sally's bathroom, and he stared with fascination at the reflection of his penis, wondering what difference Tammy had sensed when she'd felt his pulsating erection in that massage parlor cubicle, five years ago.
After a while, he let his gaze travel upward from his sex organs to his flat, hard, muscular belly, then up to his huge chest, and farther up until he met the gaze of the other Bruno in the looking glass. When he stared into his own eyes, everything at the periphery of his vision faded away, and the very foundations of reality turned molten and assumed new forms; without drugs or alcohol, he was swept into an hallucinogenic experience. He reached out and touched the mirror, and the fingers of the other Bruno touched his fingers from the far side of the glass. As if in a dream, he drifted closer to the mirror, pressed his nose to the other Bruno's nose. He looked deep into the other's eyes, and those eyes peered deep into his. For a moment, he forgot that he was only confronting a reflection; the other Bruno was real. He kissed the other, and the kiss was cold. He pulled back a few inches. So did the other Bruno. He licked his lips. So did the other Bruno. Then they kissed again. He licked the other Bruno's open mouth, and gradually the kiss became warm, but it never grew as soft and pleasant as he had expected. In spite of the three powerful orgasms that Sally-Katherine had drawn from him, his penis stiffened yet again, and when it was very hard he pressed it against the other Bruno's penis and slowly rotated his hips, rubbing their erect organs together, still kissing, still gazing rapturously into the eyes that stared out of the mirror. For a minute or two, he was happier than he had been in days.
But then the hallucination abruptly dissolved, and reality came back like a hammer striking iron. He became aware that he really was not holding his other self and that he was trying to have sex with nothing more than a flat reflection. A strong electric current of emotion seemed to jump across the synapse between the eyes in the looking glass and his own eyes, and a tremendous shock blasted through his body; it was an emotional shock, but it also affected him physically, making him twitch and shake. His lethargy burned away in an instant. Suddenly he was re-energized; his mind was spinning, sparking.
He remembered that he was dead. Half of him was dead. The bitch had stabbed him last week, in Los Angeles. Now he was both dead and alive.
A profound sorrow welled up in him.
Tears came to his eyes.
He realized that he couldn't hold himself as he once had done. Not ever again.
He couldn't fondle himself or be fondled by himself as he once had done. Not ever again.
He now had only two hands, not four; only one penis, not two; only one mouth, not two.
He could never kiss himself again, never feel his two tongues caressing each other. Not ever again.
Half of him was dead. He wept.
He never again would have sex with himself as he'd had it thousands of times in the past. Now he would have no lover but his hand, the limited pleasure of masturbation.
He was alone.
Forever.
For a while, he stood in front of the mirror, crying, his broad shoulders bent under the terrible weight of abject despair. But slowly his unbearable grief and self-pity gave way to rising anger. She had done this to him. Katherine. The bitch. She had killed half of him, had left him feeling incomplete and wretchedly empty, hollow. The selfish, hateful, vicious bitch! As his fury mounted, he was possessed by an urge to break things. Naked, he stormed through the bungalow--living room and kitchen and bathroom--smashing furniture, ripping upholstery, breaking dishes, cursing his mother, cursing his demon father, cursing a world that he sometimes couldn't understand at all.

***

In Joshua Rhinehart's kitchen, Hilary scrubbed three large baking potatoes and lined them up on the counter, so that they were ready to be popped into the microwave oven as soon as the thick steaks were approaching perfection on the broiler. The menial labor was relaxing. She watched her hands as she worked, and she thought about little more than the food that had to be prepared, and her worries receded to the back of her mind.
Tony was making the salad. He stood at the sink beside her, his shirt sleeves rolled up, washing and chopping fresh vegetables.
While they prepared dinner, Joshua called the sheriff from the kitchen phone. He told Laurenski about the withdrawal of funds from Frye's accounts in San Francisco and about the look-alike who was down in Los Angeles somewhere, searching for Hilary. He also passed along the mass murder theory that he and Tony and Hilary had arrived at in his office a short while ago. There was really not much that Laurenski could do, for (so far as they knew) no crimes had been committed in his jurisdiction. But Frye was most likely guilty of local crimes of which they were, for the moment, unaware. And it was even more likely that crimes might yet be committed in the county before the mystery of the look-alike was solved. Because of that, and because Laurenski's reputation had been stained slightly when he had vouched for Frye to the Los Angeles Police Department last Wednesday night, Joshua thought (and Hilary agreed) that the sheriff was entitled to know everything that they knew. Even though Hilary could hear only one end of the telephone conversation, she could tell that Peter Laurenski was fascinated, and she knew, from Joshua's responses, that the sheriff twice suggested that they exhume the body in Frye's grave to determine whether or not it actually was Bruno Frye. Joshua preferred to wait until Dr. Rudge and Rita Yancy had been heard from, but he assured Laurenski that an exhumation would take place if Rudge and Yancy were unable to answer all of the questions he intended to ask.
When he finished talking with the sheriff, Joshua checked on Tony's salad, debated with himself about whether the lettuce was sufficiently crisp, fretted about whether the radishes were too hot or possibly not hot enough, examined the sizzling steaks as if looking for flaws in three diamonds, told Hilary to put the potatoes in the microwave oven, quickly chopped some fresh chives to go with the sour cream, and opened two bottles of California Cabernet Sauvignon, a very dry red wine from the Robert Mondavi winery just down the road. He was rather a fussbudget in the kitchen; his worrying and nitpicking amused Hilary.
She was surprised at how quickly she had developed a liking for the attorney. She seldom felt so comfortable with a person she had known only a couple of hours. But his fatherly appearance, his gruff honesty, his wit, his intelligence, and his curiously off-handed courtliness made her feel welcome and safe in his company.
They ate in the dining room, a cozy, rustic chamber with three white plaster walls, one used-brick wall, a pegged-oak floor, and an open-beam ceiling. Now and then, squalls of big raindrops burst against the charming leaded windows.
As they sat down to the meal, Joshua said, "One rule. No one talks about Bruno Frye until we've put away the last bite of our steak, the last swallow of this excellent wine, the last mouthful of coffee, and the very last sip of brandy."
"Agreed," Hilary said.
"Definitely," Tony said. "I think my mind overloaded on the subject quite some time ago. There are other things in the world worth talking about."
"Yes," Joshua said. "But unfortunately, many of them are just as thoroughly depressing as Frye's story. War and terrorism and inflation and the return of the Luddites and know-nothing politicians and--"
"--art and music and movies and the latest developments in medicine and the coming technological revolution that will vastly improve our lives in spite of the new Luddites," Hilary added.
Joshua squinted across the table at her. "Is your name Hilary or Pollyanna?"
"And is yours Joshua or Cassandra?" she asked.
"Cassandra was correct when she made her prophecies of doom and destruction," Joshua said, "but time after time everyone refused to believe her."
"If no one believes you," Hilary said, "then what good is it to be right?"
"Oh, I've given up trying to convince other people that the government is the only enemy and that Big Brother will get us all. I've stopped trying to convince them of a hundred other things that seem to be obvious truths to me but which they don't get at all. Too many of them are fools who'll never understand. But it gives me enormous satisfaction just to know I'm right and to see the ever-increasing proof of it in the daily papers. I know. And that's enough."
"Ah," Hilary said. "In other words, you don't care if the world falls apart beneath us, just so you can have the selfish pleasure of saying, 'I told you so.'"
"Ouch," Joshua said.
Tony laughed. "Beware of her, Joshua. Remember, she makes her living being clever with words."
For three-quarters of an hour, they spoke of many things, but then, somehow, in spite of their pledge, they found themselves talking about Bruno Frye once more, long before they were finished with the wine or ready for coffee and brandy.
At one point, Hilary said, "What could Katherine have done to him to make him fear her and hate her as much as he apparently does?"
"That's the same question I asked Latham Hawthorne," Joshua said.
"What'd he say?"
"He had no idea," Joshua said. "I still find it difficult to believe that there could have been such black hatred between them without it being visible even once in all the years I knew them. Katherine always seemed to dote on him. And Bruno seemed to worship her. Of course, everyone in town thought she was something of a saint for having taken in the boy in the first place, but now it looks as if she might have been less saint than devil."
"Wait a minute," Tony said. "She took him in? What do you mean by that?"
"Just what I said. She could have let the child go to an orphanage, but she didn't. She opened her heart and her home to him."
"But," Hilary said, "we thought he was her son."
"Adopted," Joshua said.
"That wasn't in the newspapers," Tony said.
"It was done a long, long time ago," Joshua said. "Bruno had lived all but a few months of his life as a Frye. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was more like a Frye than Katherine's own child might have been if she'd had one. His eyes were the same color as Katherine's. And he certainly had the same cold, introverted, brooding personality that Katherine had--and that people say Leo had, too."
"If he was adopted," Hilary said, "there's a chance he does have a brother."
"No," Joshua said. "He didn't."
"How can you be so sure? Maybe he even has a twin!" Hilary said, excited by the thought.
Joshua frowned, "You think Katherine adopted one of a pair of twins without being aware of it?"
"That would explain the sudden appearance of a dead ringer," Tony said.
Joshua's frown grew deeper, "But where has this mysterious twin brother been all these years?"
"He was probably raised by another family," Hilary said, eagerly fleshing out her theory. "In another town, another part of the state."
"Or maybe even another part of the country," Tony said.
"Are you trying to tell me that, somehow, Bruno and his long-lost brother eventually found each other?"
"It could happen," Hilary said.
Joshua shook his head. "Perhaps it could, but in this case it didn't. Bruno was an only child."
"You're positive?"
"There's no doubt about it," Joshua said. "The circumstances of his birth aren't secret."
"But twins.... It's such a lovely theory," Hilary said.
Joshua nodded. "I know. It's an easy answer, and I'd like to find an easy answer so we can wrap this thing up fast. Believe me, I hate to punch holes in your theory."
"Maybe you can't," Hilary said.
"I can."
"Try," Tony said. "Tell us where Bruno came from, who his real mother was. Maybe we'll punch holes in your story. Maybe it's not as open and shut as you think it is."

***

Eventually, after he had broken and torn and smashed nearly everything in the bungalow, Bruno got control of himself; his fiery, bestial rage cooled into a less destructive, more human anger. For a while, after his temper fell below the boiling point, he stood in the middle of the rubble he had made, breathing hard, sweat dripping off his brow and gleaming on his naked body. Then he went into the bedroom and put on his clothes.
When he was dressed, he stood at the foot of the bloody bed and stared at the brutally butchered body of the woman he had known only as Sally. Now, too late, he realized that she hadn't been Katherine. She hadn't been another reincarnation of his mother. The old bitch han't switched bodies from Hilary Thomas to Sally; she couldn't do that until Hilary was dead. Bruno couldn't imagine why he had ever thought otherwise; he was surprised that he could have been so confused.
However, he felt no remorse for what he had done to Sally. Even if she hadn't been Katherine, she had been one of Katherine's handmaidens, a woman sent from Hell to serve Katherine. Sally had been one of the enemy, a conspirator in the plot to kill him. He was sure of that. Maybe she had even been one of the living dead. Yes. Of course. He was positive of that, too. Yes. Sally had been exactly like Katherine, a dead woman in a new body, one of those monsters who refused to stay in the grave where she belonged. She was one of them. He shuddered. He was certain that she had known all along where Hilary-Katherine was hiding. But she kept that secret, and she deserved to die for her unshakable allegiance to his mother.
Besides, he hadn't actually killed her, for she would come back to life in some other body, pushing out the person whose rightful flesh it was.
Now he must forget about Sally and find Hilary-Katherine. She was still out there somewhere, waiting for him.
He must locate her and kill her before she found a way to kill him first.
At least Sally had given him one small lead. A name. This Topelis fellow. Hilary Thomas's agent. Topelis would probably know where she was hiding.

***

They cleared away the dinner dishes, and Joshua poured more wine for everyone before telling the story of Bruno's rise from orphan to sole heir of the Frye estate. He had gotten his facts over the years, a few at a time, from Katherine and from other people who had lived in St. Helena long before he had come to the valley to practice law.
In 1940, the year Bruno was born, Katherine was twenty-six years old and still living with her father, Leo, in the isolated clifftop house, behind and above the winery, where they had resided together since 1918, the year after Katherine's mother died. Katherine had been away from home only for part of one year that she had spent at college in San Francisco; she had dropped out of school because she hadn't wanted to be away from St. Helena just to acquire a lot of stale knowledge that she would never use. She loved the valley and the big old Victorian house on the cliff. Katherine was a handsome, shapely woman who could have had as many suitors as she wished, but she seemed to find romance of no interest whatsoever. Although she was still young, her introverted personality and her cool attitude toward all men convinced most of the people who knew her that she would be an old maid and, furthermore, that she would be perfectly happy in that role. Then, in January of 1940, Katherine received a call from a friend, Mary Gunther, whom she'd known at college a few years earlier. Mary needed help; a man had gotten her into trouble. He had promised to marry her, had strung her along with excuse after excuse, and then had skipped out when she was six months pregnant. Mary was nearly broke, and she had no family to turn to for help, no friend half so close as Katherine. She asked Katherine to come to San Francisco a few months hence, as soon as the baby arrived; Mary didn't want to be alone at that trying time. She also asked Katherine to care for the baby until she, Mary, could find a job and build up a nest egg and provide a proper home for the child. Katherine agreed to help and began telling people in St. Helena that she would be a temporary surrogate mother. She seemed so happy, so excited by the prospect, that her neighbors said she would be a wonderful mother to her own children if she could just find a man to marry her and father them.
Six weeks after Mary Gunther's telephone call, and six weeks before Katherine was scheduled to go to San Francisco to be with her friend, Leo suffered a massive cerebral hemmorhage and dropped dead among the high stacks of oak barrels in one of the winery's huge aging cellars. Although Katherine was stunned and grief-stricken, and although she had to start learning to run the family business, she did not back out of her promise to Mary Gunther. In April, when Mary sent a message that the baby had arrived, Katherine went off to San Francisco. She was gone more than two weeks, and when she returned, she had a tiny baby, Bruno Gunther, Mary's alarmingly small and fragile child.
Katherine expected to have Bruno for a year, at which time Mary would be firmly on her feet and ready to assume complete responsibility for the tyke. But after six months, word came that Mary had more trouble, much worse this time--a virulent form of cancer. Mary was dying. She had only a few weeks to live, a month at most. Katherine took the baby to San Francisco, so that the mother could spend what little time she had left in the company of her child. During Mary's last days, she made all of the necessary legal arrangements for Katherine to be granted permanent custody of the baby. Mary's own parents were dead; she had no other close relatives with whom Bruno could live. If Katherine had not taken him in, he would have wound up in an orphanage or in the care of foster parents who might or might not have been good to him. Mary died, and Katherine paid for the funeral, then returned to St. Helena with Bruno.
She raised the boy as if he were her own, acting not just like a guardian but like a concerned and loving mother. She could have afforded nursemaids and other household help, but she didn't hire them; she refused to let anyone else tend to the child. Leo had not employed domestic help, and Katherine had her father's spirit of independence. She got along well on her own, and when Bruno was four years old, she returned to San Francisco, to the judge who had awarded her custody at Mary's request, and she formally adopted Bruno, giving him the Frye family name.
Hoping to get a clue from Joshua's story, alert for any inconsistencies or absurdities, Hilary and Tony had been leaning forward, arms on the dining room table, while they listened. Now they leaned back in their chairs and picked up their wine glasses.
Joshua said, "There are still people in St. Helena who remember Katherine Frye primarily as the saintly woman who took in a poor foundling and gave him love and more than a little wealth, too."
"So there wasn't a twin," Tony said.
"Definitely not," Joshua said.
Hilary sighed. "Which means we're back at square one."
"There are a couple of things in that story that bother me," Tony said.
Joshua raised his eyebrows. "Like what?"
"Well, even these days, with our more liberal attitudes, we still make it damned hard for a single woman to adopt a child," Tony said. "And in 1940, it must have been very nearly impossible."
"I think I can explain that," Joshua said. "If memory serves me well, Katherine once told me that she and Mary had anticipated the court's reluctance to sanction the arrangement. So they told the judge what they felt was just a little white lie. They said that Katherine was Mary's cousin and her closest living relative. In those days, if a close relative wanted to take the child in, the court almost automatically approved."
"And the judge just accepted their claim of a blood relationship without checking into it?" Tony asked.
"You have to remember that, in 1940, judges had a lot less interest in involving themselves in family matters than they seem to have now. It was a time when Americans viewed government's role as a relatively minor one. Generally, it was a saner time than ours."
To Tony, Hilary said, "You said there were a couple of things that bothered you. What's the other one?"
Tony wearily wiped his face with one hand. "The other's not something that can easily be put into words. It's just a hunch. But the story sounds ... too smooth."
"You mean fabricated?" Joshua asked.
"I don't know," Tony said. "I don't really know what I mean. But when you've been a policeman as long as I have, you develop a nose for these things."
"And something smells?" Hilary asked.
"I think so."
"What?" Joshua asked.
"Nothing particular. Like I said, the story just sounds too smooth, too pat." Tony drank the last of his wine and then said, "Could Bruno actually be Katherine's child?"
Joshua stared at him, dumbfounded. When he could speak, he said, "Are you serious?"
"Yes."
"You're asking me if it's possible that she made up the whole thing about Mary Gunther and merely went away to San Francisco to have her own illegitimate baby?"
"That's what I'm asking," Tony said.
"No," Joshua said. "She wasn't pregnant."
"Are you sure?"
"Well," Joshua said, "I didn't personally take her urine sample and perform a rabbit test with it. I wasn't even living in the valley in 1940. I didn't get here until '45, after the war. But I've heard her story repeated, sometimes in part and sometimes in its entirety, by people who were here in '40. Now you'll say that they were probably just repeating what she had told them. But if she was pregnant, she couldn't have hidden the fact. Not in a town as small as St. Helena. Everyone would have known."
"There's a small percentage of women who don't swell up a great deal when they're carrying a child," Hilary said. "You could look at them and never know."
"You're forgetting that she had no interest in men," Joshua said. "She didn't date anyone. How could she possibly have gotten pregnant?"
"Perhaps she didn't date any locals," Tony said. "But at harvest time, toward the end of summer, aren't there a lot of migrant workers in the vineyards? And aren't a lot of them young, handsome, virile men?"
"Wait, wait, wait," Joshua said. "You're reaching way out in left field again. You're trying to tell me that Katherine, whose lack of interest in men was widely remarked upon, suddenly fell for a field hand."
"It's been known to happen."
"But then you're also trying to tell me that this unlikely pair of lovers carried out at least a brief affair in a virtual fish bowl without being caught or even causing gossip. And then you're trying to tell me that she was a unique woman, one in a thousand, a woman who didn't look pregnant when she was. No." Joshua shook his white-maned head. "It's too much for me. Too many coincidences. You think Katherine's story sounds too neat, too smooth, but next to your wild suppositions, her tale has the gritty sound of reality."
"You're right," Hilary said. "So another promising theory bites the dust." She finished her wine.
Tony scratched his chin and sighed. "Yeah. I guess I'm too damned tired to make a whole lot of sense. But I still don't think Katherine's story makes perfect sense, either. There's something more to it. Something she was hiding. Something strange."

***

In Sally's kitchen, standing on broken dishes, Bruno Frye opened the telephone book and looked up the number of Topelis & Associates. Their offices were in Beverly Hills. He dialed and got an answering service, which was what he had expected.
"I've got an emergency here," he told the answering service operator, "and I thought maybe you could help me."
"Emergency?" she asked.
"Yes. You see, my sister is one of Mr. Topelis's clients. There's been a death in the family, and I've got to get hold of her right away."
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said.
"The thing of it is, my sister's apparently off on a short holiday, and I don't know where she's gone."
"I see."
"It's urgent that I get in touch with her."
"Well, ordinarily, I'd pass your message right on to Mr. Topelis. But he's out tonight, and he didn't leave a number where he could be reached."
"I wouldn't want to bother him anyway," Bruno said. "I thought, with all the calls you take for him, maybe you might know where my sister is. I mean, maybe she called in and left word for Mr. Topelis, something that would indicate where she was."
"What's your sister's name?"
"Hilary Thomas."
"Oh, yes! I do know where she is."
"That's wonderful. Where?"
"I didn't take a message from her. But someone called in just a while ago and left a message for Mr. Topelis to pass on to her. Hold the line just a sec. Okay?"
"Sure."
"I've got it written down here somewhere."
Bruno waited patiently while she sorted through her memos.
Then she said, "Here it is. A Mr. Wyant Stevens called. He wanted Mr.Topelis to tell Miss Thomas that he, Mr. Stevens, was eager to handle the paintings. Mr. Stevens said he wanted her to know he wouldn't be able to sleep until she got back from St. Helena and gave him a chance to strike a deal. So she must be in St. Helena."
Bruno was shocked.
He couldn't speak.
"I don't know what hotel or motel," the operator said apologetically. "But there aren't really many places to stay in all of Napa Valley, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding her."
"No trouble," Bruno said shakily.
"Does she know anyone in St. Helena?"
"Huh?"
"I just thought maybe she's staying with friends," the operator suggested.
"Yes," Bruno said. "I think I know just where she is."
"I'm really sorry about the death."
"What?"
"The death in the family."
"Oh," Bruno said. He licked his lips nervously. "Yes. There have been quite a few deaths in the family the past five years. Thank you for your help."
"No trouble."
He hung up.
She was in St. Helena.
The brazen bitch had gone back.
Why? My God, what was she doing? What was she after? What was she up to?
Whatever she had in mind, it would not do him any good. That was for damned sure.
Frantic, afraid that she was planning some trick that would be the death of him, he began to call the airlines at Los Angeles International, trying to get a seat on a flight north. There were no commuter planes until morning, and all of the early flights were already booked solid. He wouldn't be able to get out of L.A. until tomorrow afternoon.
That would be too late.
He knew it. Sensed it.
He had to move fast.
He decided to drive. The night was still young. If he stayed behind the wheel all night and kept the accelerator to the floor, he could reach St. Helena by dawn.
He had a feeling his life depended on it.
He hurried out of the bungalow, stumbling through ruined furniture and other rubble, leaving the front door wide open, not bothering to be careful, not taking time to see if anyone was nearby. He sprinted across the lawn, into the dark and deserted street toward his van.

***

After they enjoyed coffee with brandy in the den, Joshua showed Tony and Hilary to the guest room and connecting bath at the far end of the house from his own sleeping quarters. The chamber was large and pleasant, with deep window sills and leaded glass windows like those in the dining room. The bed was an enormous fourposter that delighted Hilary.
After they said goodnight to Joshua and closed the bedroom door, and after they drew the drapes over the windows to prevent the eyeless night from gazing blindly in at them, they took a shower together to soothe their aching muscles. They were quite exhausted, and they intended only to try to recapture the sweet, relaxing, childlike, asexual pleasure of the bath that they had shared the previous night at the airport hotel in L.A. Neither of them expected passion to raise its lovely head. However, as he lathered her breasts, the gentle, rhythmic, circular movements of his hands made her skin tingle and sent wonderful shivers through her. He cupped her breasts, filled his large hands with them, and her nipples hardened and rose through the soapy foam that sheathed them. He went to his knees and washed her belly, her long slim legs, her buttocks. For Hilary, the world shrank to a small sphere, to just a few sights and sounds and exquisite sensations: the odor of lilac-scented soap, the hiss and patter of falling water, the swirling patterns in the steam, his lean and supple body glistening as water cascaded over his well-defined muscles, the eager and incredible growth of his manhood as she took her turn lathering him. By the time they finished showering, they had forgotten how tired they were, they had forgotten their aching muscles; only desire remained.
On the fourposter bed, in the soft glow of a single lamp, he held her and kissed her eyes, her nose, her lips. He kissed her chin, her neck, her turgid nipples.
"Please," she said. "Now."
"Yes," he said against the hollow of her throat.
She opened her legs to him, and he entered her.
"Hilary," he said. "My sweet, sweet Hilary."
He drove into her with great strength and yet with tenderness, filled her up.
She rocked in time with him. Her hands moved over his broad back, tracing the outlines of his muscles. She had never felt so alive, so energized. In only a minute, she began to come, and she thought she might never stop, just rise from peak to peak, on and on, forever and ever, without end.
As he moved within her, they became one body and soul in a way she had never been with any other man. And she knew Tony felt it, too, this unique and astonishingly deep bonding. They were physically, emotionally, intellectually, and psychically joined, molded into a single being that was far superior to the sum of its two halves, and in that moment of phenomenal synergism--which neither of them had experienced with other lovers--Hilary knew that what they had was so special, so important, so rare, so powerful, that it would last as long as they lived. As she called his name and lifted up to meet his thrusts and climaxed yet again. and as he began to spurt within the deep darkness of her, she knew, as she had known the first time they'd made love, that she could trust him and rely on him as she'd never been able to trust or rely upon another human being; and, best of all, she knew that she would never be alone again.
Afterwards, as they lay together beneath the covers, he said, "Will you tell me about the scar on your side?"
"Yes. Now I will."
"It looks like a bullet wound."
"It is. I was nineteen, living in Chicago. I'd been out of high school for a year. I was working as a typist, trying to save enough money so I could get a place of my own. I was paying Earl and Emma rent for my room."
"Earl and Emma?"
"My parents."
"You called them by their first names?"
"I never thought of them as my father and mother."
"They must have hurt you a lot," he said sympathetically.
"Every chance they got."
"If you don't want to talk about it now--"
"I do," she said. "Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I want to talk about it. It doesn't hurt to talk about it. Because now I've got you, and that makes up for all the bad days."
"My family was poor," Tony said. "But there was love in our house."
"You were lucky."
"I'm sorry for you, Hilary."
"It's over," she said. "They've been dead a long time, and I should have exorcised them years ago."
"Tell me."
"I was paying them a few dollars rent each week, which they used to buy a little more booze, but I was socking away everything else I earned as a typist. Every penny. Not much, but it grew in the bank. I didn't even spend anything for lunch; I went without. I was determined to get an apartment of my own. I didn't even care if it was another shabby place with dark little rooms and bad plumbing and cockroaches just so Earl and Emma didn't come with it."
Tony kissed her cheek, the corner of her mouth.
She said, "Finally, I saved up enough. I was ready to move out. One more day, one more paycheck, and I was going to be on my way."
She trembled.
Tony held her close.
"I came home from work that day," Hilary said, "and I went into the kitchen--and there was Earl holding Emma against the refrigerator. He had a gun. The barrel was jammed into her teeth."
"My God."
"He was going through a very bad siege of.... Do you know what delirium tremens are?"
"Sure. They're hallucinations. Spells of mindless fear. It's something that happens to really chronic alcoholics. I've dealt with people who've been having delirium tremens. They can be violent and unpredictable."
"Earl had that gun against her teeth, which she kept clenched, and he started screaming crazy stuff about giant worms that he thought were coming out of the walls. He accused Emma of letting the worms out of the walls, and he wanted her to stop them. I tried to talk to him, but he wasn't listening. And then the worms kept coming out of the walls and started slithering around his feet; he got furious with Emma, and he pulled the trigger."
"Jesus."
"I saw her face blown away."
"Hilary--"
"I need to talk about it."
"All right."
"I've never talked about it before."
"I'm listening."
"I ran out of the kitchen when he shot her," Hilary said.
"I knew I couldn't make it out of the apartment and down the hall before he shot me in the back, so I ducked the other way, into my room. I closed and locked the door, but he shot the lock off. By then, he was convinced that I was the one causing the worms to come out of the walls. He shot me. It wasn't anywhere close to being a fatal wound, but it hurt like hell, like a white-hot poker in my side, and it bled a lot."
"Why didn't he shoot you again? What saved you?"
"I stabbed him," she said.
"Stabbed? Where'd you get the knife?"
"I kept one in my room. I'd had it since I was eight. I'd never used it until then. But I'd always thought that if one of their beatings got out of hand and it looked like they were going to finish me, I'd cut them to save myself. So I cut Earl about the same instant he pulled the trigger. I didn't hurt him any worse than he hurt me, but he was shocked, terrified at the sight of his own blood. He ran out of the room, back to the kitchen. He started shouting at Emma again, telling her to make the worms go away before they smelled his blood and came after him. Then he emptied his gun into her because she wouldn't send the worms away. I was hurting something terrible from the wound in my side, and I was scared, but I tried to count the shots. When I thought he'd used up his ammunition, I hobbled out of my room and tried to make it to the front door. But he had several boxes of bullets. He had reloaded. He saw me and shot at me from the kitchen, and I ran back to my room. I barricaded the door with a dresser and hoped help would come before I bled to death. Out in the kitchen, Earl kept screaming about the worms, and then about giant crabs at the windows, and he kept emptying the gun into Emma. He put almost a hundred and fifty rounds into her before it was all over. She was torn to pieces. The kitchen was a charnel house."
Tony cleared his throat. "What happened to him?"
"He killed himself when the SWAT team finally broke in."
"And you?"
"A week in the hospital. A scar to remind me."
They were silent for a while.
Beyond the drapes, beyond the leaded windows, the night wind coughed.
"I don't know what to say," Tony said.
"Tell me you love me."
"I do."
"Tell me."
"I love you."
"I love you, Tony."
He kissed her.
"I love you more than I ever thought I could love anyone," she said. "In just a week, you've changed me forever."
"You're damned strong," he said admiringly.
"You give me strength."
"You had plenty of that before I came along."
"Not enough. You give me more, Usually ... just thinking about that day he shot me ... I get upset, scared all over again, as if it just happened yesterday. But I didn't get scared this time. I told you all about it, and I was hardly affected. You know why?"
"Why?"
"Because all the terrible things that happened in Chicago, the shooting and everything that came before it, all of that is ancient history now. None of it matters any more. I have you, and you make up for all the bad times. You balance the scales. In fact, you tip the scales in my favor."
"It works both ways, you know, I need you as much as you need me."
"I know. That's what makes it so perfect."
They were silent again.
Then she said, "There's another reason that those memories of Chicago don't scare me any more. I mean, besides the fact that I've got you now."
"What's that?"
"Well, it has to do with Bruno Frye. Tonight I began to realize that he and I have a lot in common. It looks like he endured the same sort of torture from Katherine that I got from Earl and Emma. But he cracked, and I didn't. That big strong man cracked, but I held on. That means something to me. It means a lot. It tells me that I shouldn't worry so much, that I should not be afraid of opening myself to people, that I can take just about anything the world throws at me."
"That's what I told you. You're strong, tough, hard as nails," Tony said.
"I'm not hard. Feel me. Do I feel hard?"
"Not here," he said.
"What about here?"
"Firm," he said.
"Firm isn't the same as hard."
"You feel nice."
"Nice isn't the same as hard either."
"Nice and firm and warm," he said.
She squeezed him.
"This is hard," she said, grinning.
"But it's not hard to make it soft again. Want me to show you?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes. Show me."
They made love again.
As Tony filled her up and explored her with long silken strokes, as waves of pleasure crashed through her, she was sure that everything would be all right. The act of love reassured her, gave her tremendous confidence in the future. Bruno Frye had not come back from the grave. She wasn't being stalked by a walking corpse. There was a logical explanation. Tomorrow they would talk to Dr. Rudge and Rita Yancy, and they would learn what lay behind the mystery of the Frye look-alike. They would uncover enough information and proof to help the police, and the double would be found, arrested. The danger would pass. Then she would always be with Tony, and Tony with her, and then nothing really bad could happen. Nothing could hurt her. Neither Bruno Frye nor anyone else could hurt her. She was happy and safe at last.
Later, as she lay on the edge of sleep, a sharp crash of thunder filled the sky, rolled down the mountains, into the valley, and over the house.
A strange thought flashed through her mind: The thunder is a warning. It's an omen. It's telling me to be careful and not to be so damned sure of myself.
But before she could explore that thought further, she fell off the edge of sleep, all the way down into it.

***

Frye drove north from Los Angeles, traveling near the sea at first, then swinging inland with the freeway.
California had just come out of one of its periodic gasoline shortages. Service stations were open. Fuel was available. The freeway was a concrete artery running through the flesh of the state. The twin scalpels of his headlights laid it bare for his examination.
As he drove, he thought about Katherine. The bitch! What was she doing in St. Helena? Had she moved back into the house on the cliff? If she had done that, had she also taken over control of the winery again? And would she try to force him to move in with her? Would he have to live with her and obey her as before? All of those questions were of vital importance to him, even though most of them didn't make any sense whatsoever and could not be sensibly answered.
He was aware that his mind was not clear. He wasn't able to think straight regardless of how hard he tried, and that inability frightened him.
He wondered if he should pull over at the next rest area and get some sleep. When he woke he might have control of himself again.
But then he remembered that Hilary-Katherine was already in St. Helena, and the possibility that she was setting a trap for him in his own house was far more unsettling than his temporary inability to order his thoughts.
He wondered, briefly, whether the house was actually his any longer. After all, he was dead. (Or half dead.) And they had buried him. (Or they thought they had.) Eventually, the estate would be liquidated.
As Bruno considered the extent of his losses, he got very angry with Katherine for taking so much from him and leaving so little. She had killed him, had taken himself from him, leaving him alone, without himself to touch and talk to, and now she had even moved into his house.
He pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator until the speedometer registered ninety miles an hour.
If a cop stopped him for speeding, Bruno intended to kill him. Use the knife. Cut him open. Rip him up. No one was going to stop Bruno from getting to St. Helena before sunrise.






Seven



AFRAID THAT HE would be seen by men on the night crew at the winery, men who knew him to be dead, Bruno Frye did not drive the van onto the property. Instead, he parked almost a mile away, on the main road, and walked overland, through the vineyards, to the house that he had built five years ago.
Shining indirectly through ragged tears in the cloud cover, the cold white moon cast just enough light for him to make his way between the vines.
The rolling hills were silent. The air smelled vaguely of copper sulphate which had been sprayed during the summer to prevent mildew, and overlaying that was the fresh, ozone odor of the rain that had stirred up the copper sulphate. There was no rain falling now. There couldn't have been much of a storm earlier, just sprinkles, squalls. The land was only soft and damp, not muddy.
The night sky was one shade brighter than it had been half an hour ago. Dawn had not yet arrived from its bed in the east, but it would be rising soon.
When he reached the clearing, Bruno hunkered down beside a line of shrubbery and studied the shadows around the house. The windows were dark and blank. Nothing moved. There was not a sound except the soft, whispery whistle of the wind.
Bruno crouched by the shrubs for a few minutes. He was afraid to move, afraid that she was waiting for him inside. But at last, heart pounding, he forced himself to forsake the cover and relative safety of the shrubbery; he got up and walked to the front door.
His left hand held a flashlight that wasn't switched on, and his right hand held a knife. He was prepared to lunge and thrust at the slightest movement, but there was no movement other than his own.
At the doorstep, he put the flashlight down, fished a key out of his jacket pocket, unlocked the door. He picked up the flash, pushed the door open with one foot, snapped on the light that he carried, and went into the house fast and low, the knife held straight out in front of him.
She wasn't waiting in the foyer.
Bruno went slowly from one gloomy, overfurnished room to another gloomy, overfurnished room. He looked in closets and behind sofas and behind large display cases.
She wasn't in the house.
Perhaps he had gotten back in time to stop whatever plot she was hatching.
He stood in the middle of the living room, the knife and the flashlight still in his hands, both of them directed at the floor. He swayed, exhausted, dizzy, confused.
It was one of those times when he desperately needed to talk to himself, to share his feelings with himself, to work out his confusion with himself and get his mind back on the track. But he would never again be able to consult with himself because himself was dead.
Dead.
Bruno began to shake. He wept.
He was alone and frightened and very mixed-up.
For forty years, he had posed as an ordinary man, and he had passed for normal with considerable success. But he could not do that any more. Half of him was dead. The loss was too great for him to recover. He had no self-confidence. Without himself to turn to, without his other self to give advice and offer suggestions, he did not have the resources to maintain the charade.
But the bitch was in St. Helena. Somewhere. He couldn't sort out his thoughts, couldn't get a grip on himself, but he knew one thing: He had to find her and kill her. He had to get rid of her once and for all.

***

The small travel alarm was set to go off at seven o'clock Thursday morning.
Tony woke an hour before it was time to get up. He woke with a start, began to sit up in bed, realized where he was, and eased back down to the pillow. He lay on his back, in the dark, staring at the shadowy ceiling, listening to Hilary's rhythmic breathing.
He had bolted from sleep to escape a nightmare. It was a brutal, grisly dream filled with mortuaries and tombs and graves and coffins, a dream that was somber and heavy and dark with death. Knives. Bullets. Blood. Worms coming out of the walls and wriggling from the staring eyes of corpses. Walking dead men who spoke of crocodiles. In the dream, Tony's life had been threatened half a dozen times, but on each occasion, Hilary had stepped between him and the killer, and every time she had died for him.
It was a damned disturbing dream.
He was afraid of losing her. He loved her. He loved her more than he could ever tell her. He was an articulate man, and he was not the least bit reluctant to express his emotions, but he simply did not have the words to properly describe the depth and quality of his feeling for her. He didn't think such words existed; all of the ones he knew were crude, leaden, hopelessly inadequate. If she were taken from him, life would go on, of course--but not easily, not happily, not without a great deal of pain and grief.
He stared at the dark ceiling and told himself that the dream had not been anything to worry about. It had not been an omen. It had not been a prophecy. It was only a dream. Just a bad dream. Nothing more than a dream.
In the distance, a train whistle blew two long blasts. It was a cold, lonely, mournful sound that made him pull the covers up to his chin.

***

Bruno decided that Katherine might be waiting for him in the house that Leo had built.
He left his own house and crossed the vineyards. He took the knife and flashlight with him.
In the first pale light of dawn, while most of the sky was still blue-black, while the valley lay in the fading penumbra of the night, he went to the clifftop house. He did not go up by way of the cable car because, in order to board it, he would have to go into the winery and climb to the second floor, where the lower tramway station occupied a corner of the building. He dared not be seen in there, for he figured the place was now crawling with Katherine's spies. He wanted to sneak up on the house, and the only route by which he could do that was the stairs on the face of the cliff.
He started climbing rapidly, two steps at a time, but before he went very far, he discovered that caution was essential. The staircase was crumbling. It had not been kept in good repair, as the tramway had been. Decades of rain and wind and summer heat had leeched away much of the mortar that bound the old structure together. Small stones, pieces of virtually every one of the three hundred and twenty steps, broke off under his feet and clattered to the base of the cliff. Several times, he almost lost his balance, almost fell backwards, or almost pitched sideways into space. The safety railing was decayed, dilapidated, missing whole sections; it would not save him if he stumbled against it. But slowly, cautiously, he followed the switchback path of the staircase, and in time he reached the top of the cliff.
He crossed the lawn, which had gone to weeds. Dozens of rose bushes, once carefully tended and manicured, had sent thorny tentacles in all directions and now sprawled in tangled, flowerless heaps.
Bruno let himself into the rambling Victorian mansion and searched the musty, dust-filmed, spider-webbed rooms which stank of mildew that thrived on the drapes and carpets. The house was crammed full of antique furniture and art glass and statuary and many other things, but it did not hold anything sinister. The woman was not here, either.
He didn't know whether that was good or bad. On the one hand, she hadn't moved in, hadn't taken over in his absence. That was good. He was relieved about that. But on the other hand--where the hell was she?
His confusion was rapidly getting worse. His powers of reasoning began to fail him hours ago, but now he couldn't trust his five senses, either. Sometimes he thought he heard voices, and he pursued them through the house, only to realize it was his own mumbling that he heard. Sometimes the mildew didn't smell like mildew at all, but like his mother's favorite perfume; but then a moment later it smelled like mildew again. And when he looked at familiar paintings that had hung on these walls since his childhood, he was unable to perceive what they were depicting; the shapes and colors would not resolve themselves, and his eyes were baffled by even the most simple pictures. He stood before one painting that he knew to be a landscape with trees and wildflowers, but he was not able to see those objects in it; he could only remember that they were there; all he saw now were smears, disjointed lines, blobs, meaningless forms.
He tried not to panic. He told himself that his bizarre confusion and disorientation were merely the results of his not having slept all night. He'd driven a long way in a short time, and he was understandably weary. His eyes were heavy, gritty, red and burning. He ached all over. His neck was stiff. All he needed was sleep. When he woke, he would be clear-headed. That was what he told himself. That was what he had to believe.
Because he had searched the house from bottom to top, he was now in the finished attic, the big room with the sloped ceiling, where he had spent so much of his life. In the chalky glow of his flashlight, he could see the bed in which he had slept during the years he'd lived in the mansion.
Himself was already on the bed. Himself was lying down, eyes closed, as if sleeping. Of course, the eyes were sewn shut. And the white nightgown was not a nightgown; it was a burial gown that Avril Tannerton had put on him. Because himself was dead. The bitch had stabbed and killed him. Himself had been stone-cold dead since last week.
Bruno was too enervated to vent his grief and rage. He went to the king-size bed and stretched out on his half of it, beside himself.
Himself stank. It was a pungent, chemical smell.
The bedclothes around himself were stained and damp with dark fluids that were slowly leaking out of the body.
Bruno didn't care about the mess. His side of the bed was dry. And although himself was dead and would never speak again or laugh again, Bruno felt good just being near himself.
Bruno reached out and touched himself. He touched the cold, hard, rigid hand and held it.
Some of the painful loneliness abated.
Bruno did not feel whole, of course. He would never feel whole again, for half of him was dead. But lying there beside his corpse, he did not feel all alone either.
Leaving the flashlight on to dispel the darkness in the shuttered attic bedroom, Bruno fell asleep.

***

Dr. Nicholas Rudge's office was on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco. Apparently, Hilary thought, the architect either had never heard of the unpleasant term "earthquake country," or he had made a very good deal with the devil. One wall of Rudge's office was glass from floor to ceiling, divided into three enormous panels by only two narrow, vertical, steel struts; beyond the window lay the terraced city, the bay, the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, and the lingering tendrils of last night's fog. A quickening Pacific wind was tearing the gray clouds to tatters, and blue sky was becoming more dominant by the minute. The view was spectacular.
At the far end of the big room from the window-wall, six comfortable chairs were arranged around a circular teak coffee table. Obviously, group therapy sessions were held in that corner. Hilary, Tony, Joshua, and the doctor sat down there.
Rudge was an affable man with the ability to make you feel as if you were the most interesting and charming individual he had encountered in ages. He was as bald as all the clichés (a billiard ball, a baby's bottom, an eagle), but he had a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. He wore a three-piece suit with a tie and display handkerchief that matched, but there was nothing of the banker or of the dandy in his appearance. He looked distinguished, reliable, yet as relaxed as if he'd been wearing tennis whites.
Joshua summed up the evidence that the doctor had said he would need to hear, and he delivered a short lecture (which seemed to entertain Rudge) about a psychiatrist's obligation to protect society from a patient who appeared to have homicidal tendencies. In a quarter of an hour, Rudge heard enough to be convinced that a claim of doctor-patient privilege was neither wise nor justified in this case. He was willing to open the Frye file to them.
"Although I must admit," Rudge said, "if only one of you had come in here with this incredible story, I'd have put very little credence in it. I'd have thought you were in need of my professional services."
"We've considered the possibility that all three of us are out of our minds," Joshua said.
"And rejected it," Tony said.
"Well, if you are unbalanced," Rudge said, "then you'd better make it 'the four of us' because you've made a believer out of me, too."
During the past eighteen months (Rudge explained), he had seen Frye eighteen times in private, fifty-minute sessions. After the first appointment, when he realized the patient was deeply disturbed about something, he encouraged Frye to come in at least once every week, for he believed that the problem was too serious to respond to once-a-month sessions. But Frye had resisted the idea of more frequent treatments.
"As I told you on the phone," Rudge said, "Mr. Frye was torn between two desires. He wanted my help. He wanted to get to the root of his problem. But at the same time, he was afraid of revealing things to me--and afraid of what he might learn about himself."
"What was his problem?" Tony asked.
"Well, of course, the problem itself--the psychological knot that was causing his anxiety and tension and stress--was hidden in his subconscious mind. That's why he needed me. Eventually, we'd have been able to uncover that knot, and we might even have untied it, if the therapy had been successful. But we never got that far. So I can't tell you what was wrong with him because I don't really know. But I think what you're actually asking me is--what brought Frye to me in the first place? What made him realize that he needed help?"
"Yes," Hilary said. "At least that's a place to start. What were his symptoms?"
"The most disturbing thing, at least from Mr. Frye's point of view, was a recurring nightmare that terrified him."
A tape recorder stood on the circular coffee table, and two piles of cassettes lay beside it, fourteen in one pile, four in the other. Rudge leaned forward in his chair and picked up one of the four.
"All of my consultations are recorded and stored in a safe," the doctor said. "These are tapes of Mr. Frye's sessions. Last night, after I spoke with Mr. Rhinehart on the phone, I listened to portions of these recordings to see if I could find a few representative selections. I had a hunch you might convince me to open the file, and I thought it might be better if you could hear Bruno Frye's complaints in his own voice."
"Excellent," Joshua said.
"This first one is from the very first session," Dr. Rudge said. "For the first forty minutes, Frye would say almost nothing at all. It was very strange. He seemed outwardly calm and self-possessed, but I saw that he was frightened and trying to conceal his true feelings. He was afraid to talk to me. He almost got up and left. But I kept working at him gently, very gently. In the last ten minutes, he told me what he'd come to see me about, but even then it was like pulling teeth to get it out of him. Here's part of it."
Rudge pushed the cassette into the recorder and snapped on the machine.
When Hilary heard the familiar, deep, gravelly voice, she felt a chill race down her spine.
Frye spoke first:

"I have this trouble."
"What sort of trouble?"
"At night."
"Yes?"
"Every night."
"You mean you have trouble sleeping?"
"That's part of it."
"Can you be more specific?"
"I have this dream."
"What sort of dream?"
"A nightmare."
"The same one every night?"
"Yes."
"How long has this been going on?"
"As long as I can remember."
"A year? Two years?"
"No, no. Much longer than that."
"Five Years? Ten?"
"At least thirty. Maybe longer."
"You've been having the same bad dream every night for at least thirty years?"
"That's right."
"Surely not every night."
"Yes. There's never a reprieve."
"What's this dream about?"
"I don't know."
"Don't hold back."
"I'm not."
"You want to tell me."
"Yes."
"That's why you're here. So tell me."
"I want to. But I just don't know what the dream is."
"How can you have had it every night for thirty years or more and not know what it's about?"
"I wake up screaming. I always know a dream woke me. But I'm never able to remember it."
"Then how do you know it's always the same dream?"
"I just know."
"That's not good enough."
"Good enough for what?"
"Good enough to convince me that it's always the same dream. If you're so sure it's just one recurring nightmare, then you must have better reasons than that for thinking so."
"If I tell you ..."
"Yes?"
"You'll think I'm crazy."
"I never use the word 'crazy.'"
"You don't?"
"No."
"Well... every time the dream wakes me, I feel as if there's something crawling on me."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. I can never remember. But I feel as if something's trying to crawl in my nose and in my mouth. Something disgusting. It's trying to get into me. It pushes at the corners of my eyes, trying to make me open my eyes. I feel it moving under my clothes. It's in my hair. It's everywhere. Crawling, creeping..."

In Nicholas Rudge's office, everyone was watching the tape recorder.
Frye's voice was still gravelly, but there was raw terror in it now.
Hilary almost could see the big man's fear-twisted face--the shock-wide eyes, the pale skin, the cold sweat along his hairline.
The tape continued:

"Is it just one thing crawling on you?"
"I don't know."
"Or is it many things?"
"I don't know."
"What does it feel like?"
"Just ... awful... sickening."
"Why does this thing want to get inside you?"
"I don't know."
"And you say you always feel like this after a dream."
"Yeah. For a minute or two."
"Is there anything else that you feel in addition to this crawling sensation?"
"Yeah. But it's not a feeling. It's a sound."
"What sort of sound?"
"Whispers."
"You mean that you wake up and imagine that you hear people whispering?"
"That's right. Whispering, whispering, whispering. All around me."
"Who are these people?"
"I don't know."
"What are they whispering?"
"I don't know."
"Do you have the feeling they're trying to tell you something?"
"Yes. But I can't make it out."
"Do you have a theory, a hunch? Can you make a guess?"
"I can't hear the words exactly, but I know they're saying bad things."
"Bad things? In what way?"
"They're threatening me. They hate me."
"Threatening whispers."
"Yes."
"How long do they last?"
"About as long as the ... creeping ... crawling."
"A minute or so?"
"Yes. Do I sound crazy?"
"Not at all."
"Come on. I sound a little crazy."
"Believe me, Mr. Frye, I've heard stories much stranger than yours."
"I keep thinking that if I knew what the whispers were saying, and if I knew what was crawling on me, I'd be able to figure out what the dream is. And once I know what it is, maybe I won't have it any more."
"That's almost exactly how we're going to approach the problem."
"Can you help me?"
"Well, to a great extent that depends on how much you want to help yourself."
"Oh, I want to beat this thing. I sure do."
"Then you probably will."
"I've been living with it so long ... but I never get used to it. I dread going to sleep. Every night, I just dread it."
"Have you undergone therapy before?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I was afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of what ... you might find out."
"Why should you be afraid?"
"It might be something ... embarrassing."
"You can't embarrass me."
"I might embarrass myself."
"Don't worry about that. I'm your doctor. I'm here to listen and help. If you--"

Dr. Rudge popped the cassette out of the tape recorder and said, "A recurring nightmare. That's not particularly unusual. But a nightmare followed by tactile and audial hallucinations--that's not a common complaint."
"And in spite of that," Joshua said, "he didn't strike you as dangerous?"
"Oh, heavens, no," Rudge said. "He was just frightened of a dream, and understandably so. And the fact that some dream sensations lingered even after he was awake meant that the nightmare probably represented some especially horrible, repressed experience buried way down in his subconscious. But nightmares are generally a healthy way to let off psychological steam. He exhibited no signs of psychosis. He didn't seem to confuse components of his dream with reality. He drew a clear line when he talked about it. In his mind, there appeared to be a sharp distinction between the nightmare and the real world."
Tony slid forward on his chair. "Could he have been less sure of reality than he let you know?"
"You mean ... could he have fooled me?"
"Could he?"
Rudge nodded. "Psychology isn't an exact science. And by comparison, psychiatry is even less exact. Yes, he could have fooled me, especially since I only saw him once a month and didn't have a chance to observe the mood swings and personality changes that would have been more evident if we'd had weekly contact."
"In light of what Joshua told you a while ago," Hilary said, do you feel you were fooled?"
Rudge smiled ruefully. "It looks as if I was, doesn't it?"
He picked up a second cassette that had been wound to a pre-selected point in another conversation between him and Frye, and he slipped it into the recorder.

"You've never mentioned your mother."
"What about her?"
"That's what I'm asking you."
"You're full of questions, aren't you?"
"With some patients, I hardly ever have to ask anything. They just open up and start talking."
"Yeah? What do they talk about?"
"Quite often they talk about their mothers."
"Must get boring for you."
"Very seldom. Tell me about your mother."
"Her name was Katherine."
"And?"
"I don't have anything to say about her."
"Everyone has something to say about his mother--and his father."

For almost a minute, there was silence. The tape wound from spool to spool, producing only a hissing sound.
"I'm just waiting him out," Rudge said, interpreting the silence for them. "He'll speak in a moment."

"Doctor Rudge?"
"Yes?"
"Do you think...?"
"What is it?"
"Do you think the dead stay dead?"
"Are you asking if I'm religious?"
"No. I mean ... do you think that a person can die ... and then come back from the grave?"
"Like a ghost?"
"Yes. Do you believe in ghosts?"
"Do you?"
"I asked you first."
"No. I don't believe in them, Bruno. Do you?"
"I haven't made up my mind."
"Have you ever seen a ghost?"
"I'm not sure."
"What does this have to do with your mother?"
"She told me that she would ... come back from the grave."
"When did she tell you this?"
"Oh, thousands of times. She was always saying it. She said she knew how it was done. She said that she would watch over me after she died. She said that if she saw I was misbehaving and not living like she wanted me to, then she's come back and make me sorry."
"Did you believe her?"
"..."
"Did you believe her?"
"..."
"Bruno?"
"Let's talk about something else."

"Jesus!" Tony said. "That's where he got the notion that Katherine had come back. The woman planted the idea in him before she died!"
To Rudge, Joshua said, "What in the name of God was the woman trying to do? What sort of relationship did those two have?"
"That was the root of his problem," Rudge said. "But we never got around to exposing it. I kept hoping I could get him to come in every week, but he kept resisting--and then he was dead."
"Did you pursue the subject of ghosts with him in later sessions?" Hilary asked.
"Yes," the doctor said. "The very next time he came in, he started off on it again. He said that the dead stayed dead and that only children and fools believed differently. He said there weren't such things as ghosts and zombies.He wanted me to know that he had never believed Katherine when she'd told him that she would come back."
"But he was lying," Hilary said. "he did believe her."
"Apparently, he did," Rudge said. He put the third tape in the machine.

"Doctor, what religion are you?"
"I was raised a Catholic."
"Do you still believe?"
"Yes."
"Do you go to church?"
"Yes. Do you?"
"No. Do you go to mass every week?"
"Nearly every week."
"Do you believe in heaven?"
"Yes. Do you?"
"Yeah. What about hell?"
"What do you think about it, Bruno?"
"Well, if there's a heaven, there must be a hell."
"Some people would argue that earth is hell."
"No. There's another place with fire and everything. And if there are angels..."
"Yes?"
"There must be demons. The Bible says there are."
"You can be a good Christian without taking all of the Bible literally."
"Do you know how to spot the various marks of the demons?"
"Marks?"
"Yeah. Like when a man or a woman makes a deal with the devil, he puts a mark on them. Or if he owns them for some other reason, he marks them, sort of like we brand cattle."
"Do you believe you can really make a deal with the devil?"
"Huh? Oh, no. No, that's just bunk. It's crap. But some people do believe in it. A lot of people do. And I find them interesting. Their psychology fascinates me. I read a lot about the occult, just trying to figure out the kind of people who put a lot of faith in it. I want to understand the way their minds work. You know?"
"You were talking about the marks that demons leave on people."
"Yeah. It's just something I read recently. Nothing important."
"Tell me about it."
"Well, see, there are supposed to be hundreds and hundreds of demons in hell. Maybe thousands. And each one of them is supposed to have his own mark that he puts on people whose souls he claims. Like, for instance, in the middle ages, they believed that a strawberry birthmark on the face was the mark of a demon. And another one was crossed eyes. A third breast. Some people are born with a third breast. It's really not so rare. And there are those who say it's a mark of a demon. The number 666. That's the mark of the chief of all demons, Satan. His people have the number 666 burned into their skin, under their hair, where it can't be seen. I mean, that's what the True Believers think. And twins.... That's another sign of a demon at work."
"Twins are the handiwork of demons?"
"You understand, I'm not saying I believe any of this. I don't. It's junk. I'm just telling you what some nuts out there believe."
"I understand."
"If I'm boring you--"
"No. I find it as fascinating as you do."

Rudge switched off the recorder. "One comment before I let him go on. I encouraged him to talk about the occult because i thought it was just an intellectual exercise for him, a way for him to strengthen his mind to deal with his own problem. I am sorry to say that I believed him when he said he didn't take it seriously."
"But he did," Hilary said. "He took it very seriously."
"So it seems. But at the time I thought he was exercising his mind, preparing to solve his own problem. If he could find a way to explain the apparently irrational thought processes of far-out people like die-hard occultists, then he would feel ready to find an explanation for the tiny piece of irrational behavior in his own personality. If he could explain occultists, it would be an easier matter to explain the dream that he could not remember. That's what I thought he was doing. But I was wrong. Damn! If only he'd been coming in more frequently."
Rudge started the tape recorder again.

"You said twins are the handiwork of demons."
"Yeah. Not all twins, of course. Just certain special kinds of twins."
"Such as?"
"Siamese twins. Some people think that's the mark of a demon."
"Yes. I can see how that superstition might develop."
"And sometimes identical twins are born with both heads covered by cauls. That's rare. Maybe one. But not two. It's very rare for both twins to be born with cauls. When that happens, you can be pretty sure those twins were marked by a demon. At least, that's what some people think."

Rudge took the tape out of the player. "I'm not sure how that one fits in with what's been happening to the three of you. But since there seems to be a dead ringer for Bruno Frye, the subject of twins seemed like something you'd want to hear about."
Joshua looked at Tony, then at Hilary, "But if Mary Gunther did have two children, why did Katherine bring home only one? Why would she lie and say there was just one baby? It doesn't make any sense."
"I don't know," Tony said doubtfully. "I told you that story sounded too smooth."
Hilary said, "Have you found a birth certificate for Bruno?"
"Not yet," Joshua said. "There wasn't one in any of his safe-deposit boxes."
Rudge picked up the fourth of the four cassettes that had been separated from the main pile of tapes. "This was the last session I had with Frye. Just three weeks ago. He finally agreed to let me try hypnosis to help him recall the dream. But he was wary. He made me promise to limit the range of questions. I wasn't permitted to ask him about anything except the dream. The excerpt I've chosen for you begins after he was in a trance. I regressed him in time, not far, just to the previous night. I put him back into his dream again.

"What do you see, Bruno?"
"My mother. And me."
"Go on."
"She's pulling me along."
"Where are you?"
"I don't know. But I'm just little."
"Little?"
"A little boy."
"And your mother is forcing you to go somewhere?"
"Yeah. She's dragging me by the hand."
"Where does she drag you?"
"To ... the ... the door. The door. Don't let her open it. Don't. Don't!"
"Easy. Easy now. Tell me about this door. Where does it go?"
"To hell."
"How do you know that?"
"It's in the ground."
"The door is in the ground?"
"For God's sake, don't let her open it! Don't let her put me down there again. No! No! I won't go down there again!"
"Relax. Be calm. There's no reason to be afraid. Just relax, Bruno. Relax. Are you relaxed?"
"Y-Yes."
"All right. Now slowly and calmly and without any emotion, tell me what happens next. You and your mother are standing in front of a door in the ground. What happens now?"
"She ... she ... opens the door."
"Go on."
"She pushes me."
"Go on."
"Pushes me... through the door."
"Go on, Bruno."
"She slams it ... locks it."
"She locks you inside?"
"Yeah."
"What's it like in there?"
"Dark."
"What else?"
"Just dark. Black."
"You must be able to see something."
"No. Nothing."
"What happens next?"
"I try to get out."
"And?"
"The door's too heavy, too strong."
"Bruno, is this really just a dream?"
"..."
"Is it really just a dream, Bruno?"
"It's what I dream."
"But is it also a memory?"
"..."
"Did your mother actually lock you in a dark room when you were a child?"
"Y-Yes."
"In the cellar?"
"In the ground. In that room in the ground."
"How often did she do that?"
"All the time."
"Once a week?"
"More often."
"Was it a punishment?"
"Yeah."
"For what?"
"For ... for not acting ... and thinking ... like one."
"What do you mean?"
"It was punishment for not being one."
"One what?"
"One. One. Just one. That's all. Just one."
"All right. We'll come back to that later. Now we're going to go on and find out what happens next. You're locked in that room. You can't get out the door. What happens next, Bruno?"
"I'm s-s-scared."
"No. You're not scared. You feel very calm, relaxed, not scared at all. Isn't that right? Don't you feel calm?"
"I ... guess so."
"Okay. What happens after you try to open the door?"
"I can't get it open. So I just stand on the top step and look down into the dark."
"There are steps?"
"Yes."
"Where do they lead?"
"Hell."
"Do you go down?"
"No! I just ... stand there. And ... listen."
"What do you hear?"
"Voices."
"What are they saying?"
"They're just ... whispers. I can't make them out. But they're ... coming ... getting louder. They're coming closer. They're coming up the steps. They're so loud now!"
"What are they saying?"
"Whispers. All around me."
"What are they saying?"
"Nothing. It means nothing."
"Listen closely."
"They don't speak in words."
"Who are they? Who's whispering?"
"Oh, Jesus. Listen. Jesus."
"Who are they?"
"Not people. No. No! Not people!"
"It isn't people whispering?"
"Get them off! Get them off me!"
"Why are you brushing at yourself?"
"They're all over me!"
"There's nothing on you."
"All over me!"
"Don't get up, Bruno. Wait--"
"Oh, my God!"
"Bruno, lie down on the couch."
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."
"I'm ordering you to lie down on the couch."
"Jesus, help me! Help me!"
"Listen to me, Bruno. You--"
"Gotta get 'em off, gotta get 'em off!"
"Bruno, it's all right. Relax. They're going away."
"No! There's even more of them! Ah! Ah! No!"
"They're going away. The whispers are getting softer, fainter. They're--"
"Louder! Getting louder! A roar of whispers!"
"Be calm. Lie down and be--"
"They're getting in my nose! Oh, Jesus! My mouth!"
"Bruno!"

On the tape, there was a strange, strangled sound. It went on and on.
Hilary hugged herself. The room suddenly seemed frigid.
Rudge said, "He jumped up from the couch and ran into the corner, over there. He crouched down in the corner and put his hands over his face."
The eerie, wheezing, gagging sound continued to come from the tape.
"But you snapped him out of the trance," Tony said.
Rudge was pale, remembering. "At first, I thought he was going to stay there, in the dream. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I'm very good at hypnotic therapy. Very good. But I thought I'd lost him. It took a while, but finally he began to respond to me."
On the tape: rasping, gagging, wheezing.
"What you hear," Rudge said, "is Frye screaming. He's so frightened that his throat has seized up on him, so terrified that he's lost his voice. He's trying to scream, but he can't get much sound out."
Joshua stood up, bent over, switched off the recorder. His hand was shaking. "You think his mother really locked him in a dark room."
"Yes," Rudge said.
"And there was something else in there with him."
"Yes."
Joshua pushed one hand through his thick white hair. "But for God's sake, what could it have been? What was in that room?"
"I don't know," Rudge said. "I expected to find out in a later session. But that was the last time I saw him."

***

In Joshua's Cessna Skylane, as they flew south and slightly east toward Hollister, Tony said, "My view of this thing is going through changes."
"How?" Joshua asked.
"Well, at first, I looked at it in simple black and white. Hilary was the victim. Frye was the bad guy. But now ... in a way ... maybe Frye's a victim, too."
"I know what you mean," Hilary said. "Listening to those tapes ... I felt so sorry for him."
"It's all right to feel sorry for him," Joshua said, "so long as you don't forget that he's damned dangerous."
"Isn't he dead?"
"Is he?"

***

Hilary had written a screenplay that contained two scenes set in Hollister, so she knew something about the place.
On the surface, Hollister resembled a hundred other small towns in California. There were some pretty streets and some ugly streets. New houses and old houses. Palm trees and oaks. Oleander bushes. Because this was one of the drier parts of the state, there was more dust than elsewhere, but that was not particularly noticeable until the wind blew really hard.
The thing that made Hollister different from other towns was what lay under it. Fault lines. Most communities in California were built on or near geological faults that now and then slipped, causing earthquakes. But Hollister was not built on just one fault; it rested on a rare confluence of faults, a dozen or more, both major and minor, including the San Andreas Fault.
Hollister was a town on the move; at least one earthquake struck it every day of the year. Most of those shocks were in the middle or lower range of the Richter Scale, of course. The town had never been leveled. But the sidewalks were cracked and canted. A walk could be level on Monday, a bit hoved up on Tuesday, and almost level again on Wednesday. Some days there were chains of tremors that rattled the town gently, with only brief pauses, for an hour or two at a time; but people who lived there were seldom aware of these very minor tremors, just as those who lived in the High Sierra ski country paid scant attention to any storm that put down only an inch of snow. Over the decades, the courses of some streets in Hollister were altered by the evermoving earth; avenues that had once been straight were now a bit curved or occasionally doglegged. The grocery stores had shelves that were slanted toward the back or covered with wire screens to prevent bottles and cans from crashing to the floor every time the ground shook. Some people lived in houses that were gradually slipping down into unstable land, but the sinkage was so slow that there was no alarm, no urgency about finding another place to live; they just repaired the cracks in the walls and planed the bottoms off doors and made adjustments as they could. Once in a while, a man in Hollister would add a room to his house without realizing that the addition was on one side of a fault line and the house on the other side; and as a result, over a period of years, the new room would move with stately, turtlelike determination--north or south or east or west, depending on the fault--while the rest of the house stood still or inched in the opposite direction, a subtle but powerful process that eventually tore the addition from the main structure. The basements of a few buildings contained sinkholes, bottomless pits; these pits were spreading unstoppably under the buildings and would one day swallow them, but in the meantime, the citizens of Hollister lived and worked above. A lot of people would be terrified to live in a town where (as some residents put it) you could "go to sleep at night listening to the earth whisper to itself." But for generations the good people of Hollister had gone about their business with a positive attitude that was wondrous to behold.
Here was the ultimate California optimism.
Rita Yancy lived in a corner house on a quiet street. It was a small home with a big front porch. There were autumn-blooming white and yellow flowers in a border along the walkway.
Joshua rang the bell. Hilary and Tony stood behind him.
An elderly woman came to the door. Her gray hair was done up in a bun. Her face was wrinkled, and her blue eyes were quick, bright. She had a friendly smile. She was wearing a blue housedress and a white apron and sensible old-lady shoes. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she said, "Yes?"
"Mrs. Yancy?" Joshua asked.
"That's me."
"My name's Joshua Rhinehart."
She nodded. "I figured you'd show up."
"I'm determined to talk to you," he said.
"You strike me as a man who either doesn't give up easily or never gives up at all."
"I'll camp out right here on your porch until I get what I've come for."
She sighed. "That won't be necessary. I've given the situation a great deal of thought since you called yesterday. What I decided was--you can't do anything to me. Not a thing. I'm seventy-five years old, and they don't just throw women my age into jail. So I might as well tell you what it was all about, because, if I don't, you'll just keep pestering me."
She stepped back, opened the door wide, and they went inside.

***

In the attic of the clifftop house, in the king-size bed, Bruno woke, screaming.
The room was dark. The flashlight batteries had gone dead while he'd slept.
Whispers.
All around him.
Soft, sibilant, evil whispers.
Slapping at his face and neck and chest and arms, trying to brush away the hideous things that crawled on him, Bruno fell off the bed. There seemed to be even a greater number of bustling, skittering things on the floor than there had been on the bed, thousands of them, all whispering, whispering. He wailed and gibbered, then clamped a hand over his nose and mouth to prevent the things from slithering inside of him.
Light.
Threads of light.
Thin lines of light like loose, luminescent threads hanging from the otherwise tenebrous fabric of the room. Not many threads, not much light, but some. It was a whole lot better than nothing.
He scrambled as fast as he could toward those faint filaments of light, flinging the things from him, and what he found was a window. The far side of it was covered by shutters. Light was seeping through the narrow chinks in the shutters.
Bruno stood, swaying, fumbling in the dark for the window latch. When he found the lock, it would not turn; it was badly corroded.
Screaming, brushing frantically at himself, he stumbled back toward the bed, found it in the seamless blackness, got hold of the lamp that stood on the nightstand, carried the lamp back to the window, used it as a club, and glass shattered. He threw the lamp aside, felt for the bolt on the inside of the shutters, put his hand on it, jerked on it, skinned a knuckle as he forced the bolt out of its catch, threw open the shutters, and wept with relief as light flooded into the attic.
The whispers faded.

***

Rita Yancy's parlor--that was what she called it, a parlor, rather than using a more modern and less colorful word--almost was a parody of the stereotypical parlor in which sweet little old ladies like her were supposed to spend their twilight years. Chintz drapes. Handmade, embroidered wall hangings--most of them inspirational sayings framed by penny-sized flowers and cute birds--were everywhere, a relentless display of good will and good humor and bad taste. Tasseled upholstery. Wingback chairs. Copies of Reader's Digest on a dainty occasional table. A basket filled with balls of yarn and knitting needles. A flowered carpet that was protected by matching flowered runners. Handmade afghans were draped across the seat and the back of the sofa. A mantel clock ticked hollowly.
Hilary and Tony sat on the sofa, on the edge of it, as if afraid to lean back and risk rumpling the covering. Hilary noticed that each of the many knickknacks and curios was dustfree and highly polished. She had the feeling that Rita Yancy would jump up and run for a dust cloth the instant anyone tried to touch and admire those prized possessions.
Joshua sat in an armchair. The back of his head and his arms rested on antimacassars.
Mrs. Yancy settled into what was obviously her favorite chair; she seemed to have acquired part of her character from it, and it from her. It was possible, Hilary thought, to picture Mrs. Yancy and the chair growing together into a single organic-inorganic creature with six legs and brushed velvet skin.
The old woman picked up a blue and green afghan that was folded on her footstool. She opened the blanket and covered her lap with it.
There was a moment of absolute silence, where even the mantel clock seemed to pause, as if time had stopped, as if they had been quick-frozen and magically transported, along with the room, to a distant planet to be put on exhibition in an extraterrestrial museum's Department of Earth Anthropology.
Then Rita Yancy spoke, and what she said totally shattered Hilary's homey image of her. "Well, there's sure as hell no point in beating around the bush. I don't want to waste my whole day on this damn silly thing. Let's get straight to it. You want to know why Bruno Frye was paying me five hundred bucks a month. It was hush money. He was paying me to keep my mouth shut. His mother paid me the same amount every month for almost thirty-five years, and when she died, Bruno started sending checks. I must admit that surprised the hell out of me. These days it's an unusual son who would pay that kind of money to protect his mother's reputation--and especially after she's already kicked the bucket. But he paid."
"Are you saying you were blackmailing Mr. Frye and his mother before him?" Tony asked, astonished.
"Call it whatever you want. Hush money or blackmail or anything you want."
"From what you've told us so far," Tony said, "I believe the law would call it blackmail and nothing else."
Rita Yancy smiled at him. "Do you think the word bothers me? Do you think I'm afraid of it? All quivery inside? Sonny, let me tell you, I've been accused of worse than that in my time. Is blackmail the word you want to use? Well, it's all right by me. Blackmail. That's what it is. We won't put a prettier face on it. But of course, if you're stupid enough to drag an old lady into court, I won't use the same word then. I'll just say that I did a great favor for Katherine Frye a long time ago, and that she insisted on repaying me with a monthly check. You don't really have any proof otherwise, do you? That's one reason I set it up on a monthly basis in the first place. I mean, blackmailers are supposed to strike and run, take it in one big bite, which is easy for the prosecutor to trace. But who's going to believe that a blackmailer would agree to a modest monthly payment on account?"
"We don't have any intention of bringing criminal charges against you," Joshua assured her. "And we haven't the slightest interest in attempting to recover the money that was paid to you. We realize that would be futile."
"Good," Mrs. Yancy said. "Because I'd make a bloody battle of it if you tried."
She straightened her afghan.
I've got to remember this one, everything about her, Hilary thought. She'd make a great little character role in a movie some day: Grandma with spice and acid and a touch of rot.
"All we want is some information," Joshua said. "There's a problem with the estate, and it's holding up the disbursement of funds. I need to get answers to some questions in order to expedite the final settlement. You say you don't want to waste your whole day on this 'damn silly thing.' Well, I don't want to waste months on the Frye estate either. My only motivation in coming here is to get the information I need to wrap up this damn silly thing of mine."
Mrs. Yancy stared hard at him, then at Hilary and Tony. Her eyes were shrewd, appraising. Finally, she nodded with evident satisfaction, as if she had read their minds and had approved of what she'd seen in them. "I think I believe you. All right. Ask your questions."
"Obviously," Joshua said, "the first thing we want to know is what you had on Katherine Frye that made her and her son pay you nearly a quarter of a million dollars over the past forty years."
"To understand about that," Mrs. Yancy said, "you'll need a bit of background on me. You see, when I was a young woman, at the height of the Great Depression, I looked around at all the kinds of work I could do to make ends meet, and I decided that none of them offered more than mere survival and a life of drudgery. All but one. I realized that the only profession that offered me a chance at real money was the oldest profession of them all. When I was eighteen, I became a working girl. In those days, in mixed company like this, a woman like me was referred to as a 'lady of easy virtue.' Today, you don't have to tiptoe around it. You can use any damn word you want these days." A strand of gray hair had slipped out of her bun. She pushed it away from her face, tucked it behind her ear. "When it comes to sex--the old slap-and-tickle, as it was sometimes called in my day--I'm amazed at how times have changed."
"You mean you were a ... prostitute?" Tony asked, expressing the surprise that Hilary felt.
"I was an exceptionally good-looking girl," Mrs. Yancy said proudly. "I never worked the streets or bars or hotels or anything like that. I was on the staff of one of the finest, most elegant houses in San Francisco. We catered exclusively to the carriage trade. Only the very best sort of men. There were never fewer than ten girls and often as many as fifteen, but every one of us was striking and refined. I made good money, as I had expected I would. But by the time I was twenty-four, I realized that there was a great deal more money to be made operating my own house than there was in working in someone else's establishment. So I found a house with a lot of charm and spent nearly all of my savings redecorating it. Then I lined up a stable of lovely and polished young ladies. For the next thirty-six years, I worked as a madam, and I ran a damned classy place. I retired fifteen years ago, when I was sixty, because I wanted to come here to Hollister where my daughter and her husband lived; I wanted to be close to my grandchildren, you know. Grandchildren make old age a lot more rewarding than I'd ever thought it would be."
Hilary leaned back on the couch, no longer worried about rumpling the afghans that were draped across it.
Joshua said, "This is all quite fascinating, but what does it have to do with Katherine Frye?"
"Her father regularly visited my place in San Francisco," Rita Yancy said.
"Leo Frye?"
"Yes. A very strange man. I was never with him myself. I never serviced him. After I became a madam, I did very little bedwork; I was busy with the management details. But I heard all the stories that my girls told about him. He sounded like a first-class bastard. He liked his women docile, subservient. He liked to insult them and call them dirty names while he was using them. He was a strong disciplinarian, if you know what I mean. He had some nasty things he liked to do, and he paid a high price for the right to do them with my girls. Anyway, in April of 1940, Leo's daughter, Katherine, showed up on my doorstep. I'd never met her, I didn't even know he had a child. But he'd told her about me. He'd sent her to me so that she could have her baby in total secrecy."
Joshua blinked, "Her baby?"
"She was pregnant."
"Bruno was her baby?"
"What about Mary Gunther?" Hilary asked.
"There never was such a person as Mary Gunther," the old woman said. "That was just a cover story that Katherine and Leo made up."
"I knew it!" Tony said. "Too smooth. It was just too damn smooth."
"Nobody in St. Helena knew she was pregnant," Rita Yancy said. "She was wearing several girdles. You wouldn't believe how that poor girl had bound herself up. It was horrible. From the time she missed her first period, long before she ever began to swell up, she started wearing tighter and tighter and tighter girdles, then one girdle on top of another. And she starved herself, trying to keep off all the weight she could. It's a miracle she didn't either have a miscarriage or kill herself."
"And you took her in?" Tony asked.
"I'm not going to claim I did it out of the goodness of my heart," Mrs. Yancy said. "I can't stand old women when they're smug and self-righteous, like a lot of the ones I see when I go to the bridge games at the church. Katherine didn't touch my heart or anything like that. And I didn't take her in because I felt I had an obligation to her father. I didn't owe him a thing. Because of what I'd heard about him from my girls, I didn't even like him. And he'd been dead six weeks when Katherine showed up. I took her in for one reason, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. She had three thousand bucks with her to cover room and board and the doctor's fee. That was a good deal more money then than it is today."
Joshua shook his head. "I can't understand it. She had a reputation as a cold fish. She didn't care for men. She didn't have a lover that anyone knew about. Who was the father?"
"Leo," Mrs. Yancy said.
"Oh, my God," Hilary said softly.
"Are you sure?" Joshua asked Rita Yancy.
"Positive," the old woman said. "He'd been fooling around with his own daughter since she was four years old. He forced her to perform oral sex when she was a small child. Later, as she grew up, he did everything to her. Everything."

***

Bruno had hoped that a good night's sleep would clear his befuddled mind, wash away the confusion and the disorientation that had plagued him last night and early this morning. But now, as he stood in front of the broken attic window, basking in the gray October light, he was no more in command of himself than he had been six hours ago. His mind was writhing with chaotic thoughts and doubts and questions and fears; pleasant and ugly memories tangled like worms; mental images shifted and changed like puddles of quicksilver.
He knew what was wrong with him. He was alone. All alone. He was only half a man. Torn in half. That's what was wrong with him. Ever since the other half of him had been killed, he'd been increasingly nervous, increasingly unsure of himself. He no longer had the resources that he'd had when both halves of him had been alive. And now, trying to stumble along as only half a person, he was unable to cope; even the smallest problems were beginning to seem insoluble.
He turned away from the window and staggered heavily to the bed. He knelt on the floor beside the bed and put his head on the corpse, on its chest.
"Say something. Say something to me. Help me figure out what to do. Please. Please, help me."
But the dead Bruno had nothing to say to the one who was still alive.

***

Mrs. Yancy's parlor.
The ticking clock.
A white cat strolled in from the dining room and jumped up on the old woman's lap.
"How do you know that Leo molested Katherine?" Joshua asked. "Surely he didn't tell you about it."
"He didn't," Mrs. Yancy said. "But Katherine did. She was in a terrible state. Half out of her mind. She'd expected her father to bring her to me when her time drew near, but then he died. She was alone and terrified. Because of what she'd done to herself--the girdles and the dieting--her labor was damned difficult. I called in the doctor who gave my girls their weekly health examinations because I knew he would be discreet and willing to handle the case. He was sure the baby would be born dead. He thought there was a pretty good chance Katherine would die, too. She was in hard, agonizing labor for fourteen hours. I've never seen anyone endure the kind of pain that she went through. She was delirious a lot of the time, and when she had her wits about her, she was desperate to tell me what her father had done to her. I think she was trying to patch up her soul. She seemed to be afraid to die with the secret, and so she sort of treated me as if I was a priest listening to her confession. Her father forced her to provide oral sex shortly after her mother died. When they moved into the cliff house, which I gather is fairly isolated, he virtually set about training her to be a sex slave to him. When she was old enough for intercourse, he took precautions, but eventually, after years and years of it, they made a mistake; she got pregnant."
Hilary had the urge to lift the afghan that was draped on the couch and curl up in it to ward off the chills that swept over her. In spite of the frequent beatings, the emotional intimidation, the physical and mental torture that she suffered while living with Earl and Emma, she knew she was lucky to have escaped sexual abuse. She believed Earl had been impotent; only his inability to perform had saved her from that ultimate degradation. At least she had been spared that nightmare. But Katherine Frye had been plunged into it, and Hilary unexpectedly felt a kinship with the woman.
Tony seemed to sense what was going through her mind. He took her hand, squeezed it gently, reassuringly.
Mrs. Yancy stroked the white cat, and it made a low, rough, purring sound.
"There's something I don't understand," Joshua said. "Why didn't Leo send Katherine to you as soon as he knew she was going to have a baby? Why didn't he ask you to set up an abortion for her? Surely you had the contacts for that."
"Oh, yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "In my line of work, you had to know doctors who would handle that sort of thing. Leo could have arranged it through me. I don't know for sure why he didn't. But I suspect it was because he hoped Katherine would have a pretty baby girl."
"I'm not sure I follow," Joshua said.
"Isn't it obvious?" Mrs. Yancy asked, scratching the white cat under its fat chin. "If he had a granddaughter, then in a few years, he'd be able to start breaking her in, just like he did Katherine. Then he'd have two of them. A little harem of his own."

***

Unable to get a response out of his other self, Bruno got up and walked aimlessly around the huge room, stirring the dust on the floor; hundreds of whirling motes spun in the milky shaft of light from the window.
Eventually, he noticed a pair of dumbbells, each weighing about fifty pounds. They were part of the elaborate set of weights he had used six days a week, every week, between the ages of twelve and thirty-five. Most of his equipment--the barbells, heavier weights, the press bench--was down in the basement. But he had always kept a spare set of dumbbells in his room for use in those idle moments when a few extra sets of bicep curls or wrist flexes was just the thing to drive away boredom.
Now he picked up the weights and started working out with them. His enormous shoulders and powerful arms quickly got into the familiar rhythm, and he began to work up a sweat.
Twenty-eight years ago, when he'd first expressed a desire to lift weights and become a body builder, his mother had thought it was an excellent idea. Long, brutal workouts with weights helped burn up the sexual energy that he was just then beginning to generate, caught as he was in the throes of puberty. Because he didn't dare expose his demonic penis to a girl, vigorous weight training preoccupied him, seized his imagination and his emotions as sex might otherwise have done. Katherine had approved.
Later, as he packed on muscle tissue and became a formidable specimen, she had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting him grow so strong. Afraid that he might develop his body only so he could successfully turn on her, she had tried to take his weights away from him. But when he broke into tears and begged her to reconsider, she realized that she would never have anything to fear from him.
How could she ever have thought differently? Bruno wondered as he curled the dumbbells to his shoulders and then slowly let them down again. Hadn't she realized that she would always be stronger than he was? After all, she had the key to the door in the ground. She had the power to unlock that door and make him go into that dark hole. No matter how big his biceps and triceps became, as long as she possessed that key, she would always be stronger than he was.
It was around that time, when his body began to develop, that she first told him that she knew how to come back from the dead. She'd wanted him to know that, after she died, she'd watch over him from the other side; and she'd sworn that she would come back to punish him if she saw him misbehaving or if he started getting careless about hiding his demonic heritage from other people. She had warned him a thousand times or more that, if he was bad and forced her to come back from the grave, she would throw him into the hole in the ground, lock the door, and leave him there forever.
But now, as he worked out in the dusty attic, Bruno suddenly wondered if Katherine's threat had been empty. Had she really possessed supernatural powers? Could she really come back from the dead? Or was she lying to him? Was she lying because she was afraid of him? Was she afraid he would get big and strong--and then break her neck? Was her story about coming back from the grave nothing more than feeble insurance against his getting the idea that he could kill her and then be free of her forever?
Those questions came to him, but he was not capable of holding on to them long enough to explore each one and answer it. Disconnected thoughts surged like bursts of electric current through his short-circuiting brain. Each doubt was forgotten an instant after it occurred to him.
Contrarily, each fear that rose up did not fade away but remained, sparking and sputtering, in the dark corners of his mind. He thought of Hilary-Katherine, the latest resurrection, and he remembered that he had to find her.
Before she found him.
He began to shake.
He dropped one dumbbell with a crash. Then the other one. The floorboards rattled.
"The bitch," he said fearfully, angrily.

***

The white cat licked Mrs. Yancy's hand as she said, "Leo and Katherine worked up a complex story to explain the baby. They didn't want to admit it was hers. If they did that, they had to point a finger at the man responsible, at some young suitor. But she didn't have any suitors. The old man didn't want anyone else touching her. Just him. Gives me the creeps. What kind of man would force himself on his own little girl? And the bastard started on her when she was only four! She wasn't even old enough to understand what was happening." Mrs. Yancy shook her gray head in shock and sorrow, "How could a grown man be aroused by a baby like that? If I made the laws, any man who did that sort of thing would be castrated--or worse. Worse, I think, I tell you, it disgusts me."
Joshua said, "Why didn't they just claim Katherine was raped by a migrant farm worker or some stranger passing through? She wouldn't have had to send an innocent man to jail to support a story like that. She could have given the police a totally phony description. And even if, by some wild chance, they'd found a guy who fit that description, some poor son of a bitch who didn't have an alibi ... well, then she could have said he wasn't the right man. She wouldn't have been forced to railroad anyone."
"That's right," Tony said. "Most rape cases of that sort are never solved. The police would probably have been surprised if Katherine had made a positive identification of anybody they rounded up."
"I can understand why she wouldn't have been eager to cry rape," Hilary said. "She would have had to endure endless humiliation and embarrassment. A lot of people think every woman who's raped was just asking for it."
"I'm aware of that," Joshua said. "I'm the one who keeps saying that most of my fellow human beings are idiots, asses and buffoons. Remember? But St. Helena has always been a relatively openminded town. The people there wouldn't have blamed Katherine for being raped. At least most of them wouldn't have. She would have had to deal with a few crude characters and a measure of embarrassment, naturally, but in the long run she would have had everyone's sympathy. And it seems to me that it would have been a lot easier taking that route than trying to make everyone believe an elaborate lie about Mary Gunther--and then having to worry about maintaining that lie for the rest of her life."
The cat turned over on Mrs. Yancy's lap. She rubbed its belly.
"Leo didn't want to blame the pregnancy on a rapist because that would have brought in the cops," Mrs. Yancy said. "Leo had great respect for the cops. He was an authoritarian type. He believed the cops were better at their jobs than they really were, and he was afraid they would smell something fishy about any rape story that he and Katherine could concoct. He didn't want to draw attention to himself, not attention like that. He was scared to death the cops would sniff out the truth. He wasn't about to risk going to jail for child molestation and incest."
"Katherine told you that?" Hilary asked.
"That's right. As I said before, she'd been living with the shame of Leo's abuse all her life, and when she thought maybe she was going to die in childbirth, she wanted to tell someone, anyone, what she'd been through. Anyway, Leo was sure he'd be safe if Katherine could conceal her pregnancy, hide it completely, and fool everyone in St. Helena. Then it would be possible to pass the child off as the illegitimate baby of an unfortunate friend from Katherine's college days."
"So her father forced her to wear the girdles," Hilary said, feeling sorrier for Katherine Frye than she would have thought possible when she first walked into Mrs. Yancy's parlor. "He put her through that agony to protect himself. It was his idea."
"Yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "She'd never been able to stand up to him. She'd always done what he'd told her to do. It wasn't any different this time. She did this thing with the girdles and the dieting, even though it caused her a hell of a lot of pain. She did it because she was afraid to disobey him. Which isn't surprising when you consider that he'd spent twenty-some years breaking her spirit."
"She went away to college," Tony said. "Wasn't that an attempt to gain independence?"
"No," Mrs. Yancy said. "College was Leo's idea. In 1937, he went to Europe for seven or eight months to sell off the last of his holdings in the old country. He saw World War Two coming, and he didn't want to have any assets frozen over there. He didn't want to take Katherine on the trip with him. I suspect he intended to combine business with pleasure. He was a highly-sexed man. And I hear tell some of those European brothels offer all kinds of kinky thrills, just the sort of things to appeal to him. The dirty old goat. Katherine would have been in his way. He decided she should go to college while he was out of the country, and he arranged for her to stay with a family he knew in San Francisco. They owned a company that distributed wine, beer, and liquor in the Bay Area, and one of the things they handled was Shade Tree products."
Joshua said, "He was taking quite a chance, letting her out from under his thumb for so long."
"Apparently, he didn't think so," Mrs. Yancy said. "And he was proved right. In all those months without him around, she never began to come out of his thrall. She never told anyone about the things he'd been doing to her. She never even considered telling anyone. She was a broken spirit, I tell you. Enslaved. That's really the word for it. She was enslaved, not like a plantation worker or anything like that. Mentally and emotionally enslaved. And when he came back from Europe, he made her drop out of college. He took her back to St. Helena with him, and she didn't resist. She couldn't resist. She didn't know how."
The mantel clock chimed the hour. Two measured tones. The notes echoed softly from the parlor ceiling.
Joshua had been sitting on the edge of his chair. Now he slid back until his head touched the antimacassar again. He was pale, and dark rings circled his eyes. His white hair was no longer fluffy; it was lank, lifeless. In the short time that Hilary had known him, he appeared to her to have aged. He looked wrung-out.
She knew how he felt. The Frye family history was an unrelievedly grim tale of man's inhumanity to man. The more they poked around in that mess, the more depressed they became. The heart could not help but respond, and the spirit sagged as one awful discovery followed another.
As if talking to himself, getting it straight in his own mind, Joshua said, "So they went back to St. Helena, and they picked up their sick relationship where they'd left off, and eventually they made a mistake, and she got pregnant--and no one up there in St. Helena ever suspected a thing."
Tony said. "Incredible. Usually a simple lie is the best because it's the only kind that won't trip you up. The story about Mary Gunther was so damned involved! It was a juggling act. They had to keep a dozen balls in the air at once. Yet they brought it off without a hitch."
"Oh, hardly without a hitch," Mrs. Yancy said. "There was certainly a hitch or two."
"Such as?"
"Such as--the day she left St. Helena to come to my place to have her baby, she told people up there that this imaginary Mary Gunther had sent word that the baby had arrived. Now that was stupid. It really was. Katherine said she was going to San Francisco to pick up the child. She told them Mary's message mentioned a lovely baby, but neglected to say whether it was a boy or a girl. That was Katherine's pathetic way of covering for herself, since she couldn't know what her baby's sex was until it was born. Dumb. She should have known better. That was her only mistake--saying that the child was born before she left St. Helena. Ah, I know she was a complete nervous wreck. I know she wasn't thinking straight. She couldn't have been a very well-balanced woman after all that Leo had done to her over the years. And being pregnant, having to hide it under all those girdles, then Leo's death coming at a time when she needed him most--that was bound to drive her even further over the edge. She was out of her head, and she didn't think it out well enough."
"I don't understand," Joshua said. "Why was it a mistake for her to say Mary's baby had already been born? Where's the hitch?"
Stroking the cat, Mrs. Yancy said, "What she should have told the people in St. Helena was that the Gunther baby was about to arrive, that it hadn't been born yet, but that she was going to San Francisco to be with Mary. That way she wouldn't have been committed to the story that there was one baby. But she didn't think of that. She didn't realize what might happen. She told everyone that it was just one baby, already in hand. Then she came to my place and gave birth to twins."
Hilary said, "Twins?"
"Damn," Tony said.
The surprise brought Joshua to his feet.
The white cat sensed the tension. It lifted its head out of Rita Yancy's lap and peered curiously at each person in the parlor, one after the other. Its yellow eyes appeared to shine with inner light.

***

The attic bedroom was large, but not nearly large enough to keep Bruno from feeling that it was gradually closing in on him. He looked for things to do because idleness made his claustrophobia worse.
He got bored with the dumbbells even before his massive arms began to ache from the exercise.
He took a book from one of the shelves and tried to read, but he wasn't able to concentrate.
His mind still hadn't settled down; it flitted from one thought to another, like a quietly desperate jeweler looking for a misplaced bag of diamonds.
He talked to his dead self.
He searched the dusty corners for spiders and squashed them.
He sang to himself.
He laughed at times without really knowing what had struck him funny.
He wept, too.
He cursed Katherine.
He made plans.
He paced, paced, paced.
He was eager to leave the house and begin searching for Hilary-Katherine, but he knew he would be a fool if he went out in daylight. He was certain that Katherine's conspirators were everywhere in St. Helena. Her friends from the grave. Other walking dead, men and women from the Other Side, hiding in new bodies. All of them would be on the lookout for him. Yes. Yes. Maybe dozens of them. He would be too conspicuous during the day. He would have to wait until sunset before he went looking for the bitch. Although night was the favorite time of the day for the undead, the time when they prowled in especially large numbers, and although he would be in terrible danger while he stalked Hilary-Katherine in the night, he would also benefit from the darkness. A night-shadow would hide him from the walking dead every bit as well as it would conceal them from him. With the scales thus balanced, the success of the hunt would depend only on who was smarter--he or Katherine--and if that was the only criterion, he might have a better than even chance of winning; for Katherine was clever and infinitely wicked and cunning, but she was not as smart as he was.
He believed that he would be safe if he stayed in the house during the day, and that was ironic, really, because he hadn't felt safe for one minute during the thirty-five years he'd lived there with Katherine. Now the house was a reliable haven because it was the last place Katherine or her conspirators would look for him. She wanted to catch him and bring him to this very place. He knew that. He knew it! She had come back from the grave for only one reason: to bring him to the top of the cliff, around the house, to the doors in the ground at the end of the rear lawn. She wanted to put him in that hole in the ground, lock him in there forever. That's what she had told him she would do if she ever had to come back to punish him. He had not forgotten. And now she would expect him to avoid the top of the cliff and the old house at all costs. She would never think to look for him in his long-abandoned attic bedroom, not in a million years.
He was so pleased with his excellent strategy that he laughed aloud.
But then he had a horrible thought. If she did think to look for him here, and if she came with a few of her friends, others of the living dead, enough of them to overpower him, then they wouldn't have far to drag him. The doors in the ground were right behind the house. If Katherine and her hellish friends caught him here, they would be able to carry him to those doors and throw him into that dark room, into the whispers, in little more than a minute.
Frightened, he ran back to the bed and sat down beside himself and tried to get himself to reassure him that everything would be all right.

***

Joshua couldn't sit still. He walked back and forth on one of the flowered runners in Mrs. Yancy's parlor.
The old woman said, "When Katherine gave birth to twins, she realized that the elaborate lie about Mary Gunther would no longer hold up. The people in St. Helena had been prepared for one child. No matter how she explained the second baby, she'd plant suspicion. The idea that everyone she knew would find out what she'd been doing with her own father.... Well, I guess it was too much for her on top of everything else that had happened in her life. She just snapped. For three days, she carried on like someone in a fever delirium, gabbling like a madwoman. The doctor gave her sedatives, but they didn't always work. She ranted and raved and babbled. I thought I'd have to call the cops and let them put her away in a little padded room. But I didn't want to do that. I sure as hell didn't."
"But she needed psychiatric help," Hilary said. "Just letting her scream and carry on for three days--that wasn't good. That wasn't good at all."
"Maybe not," Mrs. Yancy said. "But I couldn't do anything else. I mean, when you're running a fancy bordello, you don't want to see the cops except when you pass out their payoff money. They usually don't bother a classy operation like the one I had going. After all, some of my clients were influential politicians and wealthy businessmen, and the cops didn't want to embarrass any big shots in a raid. But if I sent Katherine off to a hospital, I knew damned well the newspapers would pick up on the story, and then the cops would have to shut me down. They couldn't just let me go on doing business after I'd gotten all that publicity. No way. Absolutely impossible. I'd have lost everything. And my doctor was worried that his career would be ruined if his regular patients found out he was secretly treating prostitutes. These days it wouldn't damage a doctor's practice even if everyone knew he gave vasectomies to alligators with the same instruments he used in his office. But in 1940, people were more ... squeamish. So you see, I had to think about myself, and I had to protect my doctor, my girls..."
Joshua walked up to the old woman's chair. He looked down at her, taking in the plain dress and the apron and the dark brown support stockings and the stodgy black shoes and the silky white cat, trying to see through the grandmotherly image to the real woman underneath. "When you accepted Katherine's three thousand dollars, didn't you also take on certain responsibilities for her?"
"I didn't ask her to come to my place to have her baby," Mrs. Yancy said. "My business was worth a whole lot more than three thousand dollars. I wasn't going to throw it all away just for principle. Is that what you think I should have done?" She shook her gray head in disbelief. "If that's what you really think I should have done, then you're living in a dream world, my dear sir."
Joshua stared down at the woman, unable to speak for fear he would scream at her. He didn't want to be thrown out of her house until he was certain she had told him absolutely everything she knew about Katherine Anne Frye's pregnancy and about the twins. Twins!
Tony said, "Look, Mrs. Yancy, shortly after you took Katherine in, when you discovered that she had wrapped herself up in girdles, you knew she was likely to lose the baby. You admit the doctor told you that might happen."
"Yes."
"He told you Katherine might die, too."
"So?"
"A child's death or the death of a pregnant woman in labor--something like that would have closed up your place every bit as fast as having to call in the cops to deal with a woman who was suffering a nervous breakdown. Yet you didn't turn Katherine away when there was still time to do that. Even after you knew it was a risky proposition, you kept her three thousand dollars, and you allowed her to stay. Now surely you realized that if someone died, you'd have to report it to the police and risk getting shut down."
"No problem," Mrs. Yancy said. "If the babies had died, we'd have taken them away in a suitcase. We'd have buried them quietly in the hills up in Marin County. Or maybe we'd have weighted the suitcase and dropped it off the Golden Gate Bridge."
Joshua had an almost irresistible urge to grab the old woman by her bun of gray hair and yank her out of her chair, jerk her out of her smug complacency. Instead, he turned away and took a deep breath and began to pace along the flower-patterned runner once more, glowering at the floor.
"And what about Katherine?" Hilary asked Rita Yancy. "What would you have done if she had died?"
"The same as I'd done if the twins had been born dead," Mrs. Yancy said blithely. "Except, of course, we wouldn't have been able to fit Katherine into a suitcase."
Joshua stopped at the far end of the runner and looked back at the woman, aghast. She wasn't trying to be funny. She was utterly unaware of the gruesome humor in that gross remark; she was merely stating a fact.
"If anything had gone wrong, we'd have dumped the body," Mrs. Yancy said, still answering Hilary's question. "And we'd have handled it so that no one would have known that Katherine had ever come to my place. Now don't you look so shocked and disapproving, young lady. I'm no killer. We're talking about what I'd have done--what any sensible person in my position would have done--if she or the baby had died a natural death. Natural death. For heaven's sake, if I were a killer, I'd have done away with poor Katherine when she was out of her head, when I didn't know if she'd ever recover. She was a threat to me then. I didn't know whether or not she was going to cost me my house, my business, everything. But I didn't strangle her, you know. My goodness, such a thought never crossed my mind! I nursed the poor girl through her fits. I nursed her out of her hysteria, and then everything was all right."
Tony said, "You told us Katherine ranted and raved and babbled. That sounds as if--"
"Only for three days," Mrs. Yancy said. "We even had to tie her down to the bed to keep her from hurting herself. But she was only sick for three days. So maybe it wasn't a nervous breakdown. Just a sort of temporary collapse. Because after three days she was as good as new."
"The twins," Joshua said. "Let's get back to the twins. That's what we really want to know about."
"I think I've told you just about everything," Mrs. Yancy said.
"Were they identical twins?" Joshua asked.
"How can you tell when they're just born? They're all wrinkled and red. There's no way to tell that early if they're fraternal or identical."
"Couldn't the doctor have run a test--"
"We were in a first-class bordello, Mr. Rhinehart, not a hospital." She chucked the white cat under the chin, and it playfully waved a paw at her. "The doctor didn't have the time or the facilities for what you're suggesting. Besides, why should we have cared whether the boys were identical or not?"
Hilary said, "Katherine named one of them Bruno."
"Yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "I found that out when he started sending me checks after Katherine's death."
"What did she call the other boy?"
"I haven't the foggiest. By the time she left my place, she hadn't given names to either of them yet."
"But weren't their names on their birth certificates?" Tony asked.
"There weren't any certificates," Mrs. Yancy said.
"How could that be?"
"The births weren't recorded."
"But the law--"
"Katherine insisted that the births not be recorded. She was paying good money for what she wanted, and we made sure she got it."
"And the doctor went along with this?" Tony asked.
"He got a thousand bucks for delivering the twins and for keeping his mouth shut," the old woman said. "A thousand was worth several times more in those days than it is now. He was well paid for bending a few rules."
"Were both of the babies healthy?" Joshua asked.
"They were thin," Mrs. Yancy said. "Scrawny as hell. Two pathetic little things. Probably because Katherine had been on a diet for months. And because of the girdles. But they could cry just as good and loud as any other babies. And there wasn't a thing wrong with their appetites. They seemed healthy enough, just small."
"How long did Katherine stay at your place?" Hilary asked.
"Almost two weeks. She needed that long to get her strength back after such a hard delivery. And the babies needed time to put a little flesh on their bones."
"When she left, did she take both children with her?"
"Of course. I wasn't running a nursery. I was glad to see her leave."
"Did you know that she was going to take only one of the twins to St. Helena?" Hilary asked.
"I understood that to be her intention. Yes."
"Did she say what she was going to do with the other boy?" Joshua asked, taking over the questioning from Hilary.
"I believe she intended to put it up for adoption," Mrs. Yancy said.
"You believe?" Joshua asked exasperatedly. "Weren't you even the least bit concerned about what might happen to those two helpless babies in the hands of a woman who was obviously mentally unbalanced?"
"She had recovered."
"Baloney."
"I tell you, if you'd met her on the street, you wouldn't have thought she had any problems."
"But for God's sake, underneath that facade--"
"She was their mother," Mrs. Yancy said primly. "She wouldn't have done them any harm."
"You couldn't have been sure of that," Joshua said.
"I certainly was sure of it," Mrs. Yancy declared. "I've always had the highest respect for motherhood and a mother's love. A mother's love can work wonders."
Again, Joshua had to restrain himself from reaching for the bun of hair on top of her head.
Tony said, "Katherine couldn't have put the baby up for adoption. Not without a birth certificate to prove that it was hers."
"Which leaves us with a number of unpleasant possibilities to consider," Joshua said.
"Honestly, you people amaze me," Mrs. Yancy said, shaking her head and scratching her cat. "You always want to believe the worst. I've never seen three bigger pessimists. Did you ever stop to think she might have left the little boy on a doorstep? She probably abandoned him at an orphanage or maybe a church, some place where he would be found right away and given proper care. I imagine he was adopted by an upstanding young couple, raised in an excellent home, given lots of love, a good education, all sorts of advantages."

***

In the attic, waiting for nightfall, bored, nervous, lonely, apprehensive, sometimes stuporous, more often frenetic, Bruno Frye spent much of Thursday afternoon talking to his dead self. He hoped to soothe his roiling mind and regain a sense of purpose, but he made little or no progress along those lines. He decided that he would be calmer, happier, and less lonely if he could at least look into his other self's eyes, like in the old days, when they had often sat and stared longingly into each other for an hour or more at a time, communicating so much without benefit of words, sharing, being one, just one together. He recalled that moment in Sally's bathroom, only yesterday, when he had stopped in front of a mirror and had mistaken his reflection for his other self. Looking into eyes that he had thought were the eyes of his other self, he had felt wonderful, blissful, at peace. Now he desperately wanted to recapture that state of mind. And how much better to look into the real eyes of his other self, even if they were flat and sightless now. But himself lay on the bed, eyes firmly closed. Bruno touched the eyes of the other Bruno, the dead one, and they were cold orbs; the lids would not lift under his gently prodding fingertips. He explored the curves of those shuttered eyes, and he felt hidden sutures at the corners, tiny knots of thread holding the lids down. Excited by the prospect of seeing the other's eyes again, Bruno got up and hurried downstairs, looking for razor blades and delicate cuticle scissors and needles and a crocheting hook and other makeshift surgical instruments that might be of use in the reopening of the other Bruno's eyes.

***

If Rita Yancy had any more information about the Frye twins, neither Hilary nor Joshua would get it out of her. Tony could see that much even if Hilary and Joshua could not. Any second now, one of them was going to say something so sharp, so angry, so biting and bitter, that the old woman would take offense and order all of them out of the house.
Tony was aware that Hilary was deeply shaken by the similarities between her own childhood ordeal and Katherine's agony. She was bristling at all three of Rita Yancy's attitudes--the bursts of phony moralizing, the brief moments of equally unfelt and syrupy sentimentality, and the far more genuine and constant and stunning callousness.
Joshua was suffering from a loss of self-esteem because he had worked for Katherine for twenty-five years without spotting the quiet madness that surely must have been bubbling just below her carefully-controlled surface placidity. He was disgusted with himself; therefore, he was even more irritable than usual. And because Mrs. Yancy was, even in ordinary circumstances, the kind of person Joshua despised, the attorney's patience with her could fit into a thimble with room left over for one of Charo's stage costumes plus the collected wisdom of the last four U.S. Presidents.
Tony got up from the sofa and went to the footstool that was in front of Rita Yancy's chair. He sat down, explaining his move by pretending that he just wanted to pet the cat; but in switching seats, he was placing himself between the old woman and Hilary, and he was effectively blocking Joshua, who looked as if he might seize Mrs. Yancy and shake her. The footstool was a good position from which to continue the interrogation in a casual fashion. As Tony stroked the white cat, he kept up a constant stream of chatter with the woman, ingratiating himself with her, charming her, using the old Clemenza soft-sell which always had done well for him in his police work.
Eventually, he asked her it there had been anything unusual about the birth of the twins.
"Unusual?" Mrs. Yancy asked, perplexed. "Don't you think the whole damned thing was unusual?"
"You're right," he said. "I didn't put my question very well. What I meant to ask was whether there was anything peculiar about the birth itself, anything odd about her labor pains or her contractions, anything remarkable about the initial state of the babies when they came out of her, any abnormality, any strangeness."
He saw the surprise enter her eyes as his question tripped a switch in her memory.
"In fact," she said, "there was something unusual."
"Let me guess," he said. "Both of the babies were born with cauls."
"That's right! How did you know?"
"Just a lucky guess."
"The hell it was." She wagged a finger at him. "You're smarter than you pretend to be."
He forced himself to smile at her. He had to force it, for there was nothing about Rita Yancy that could elicit a genuine smile from him.
"Both of them were born with cauls," she said. "Their little heads were almost entirely covered. The doctor had seen and dealt with that sort of thing before, of course. But he thought the chances of both twins having cauls was something like a million to one."
"Was Katherine aware of this?"
"Aware of the cauls? Not at the time. She was delirious with pain. And then for three days she was completely out of her mind."
"But later?"
"I'm sure she was told about it," Mrs. Yancy said. "It's not the sort of thing you forget to tell a mother. In fact ... I remember telling her myself. Yes. Yes, I do. I recall it very clearly now. She was fascinated. You know, some people think that a child born with a caul has the gift of second sight."
"Is that what Katherine believed?"
Rita Yancy frowned. "No. She said it was a bad sign, not a good one. Leo had been interested in the supernatural, and Katherine had read a few books in his occult collection. In one of those books, it said that when twins were born with cauls, that was ... I can't recall exactly what she said it meant, but it wasn't good. An evil omen or something."
"The mark of the demon?" Tony asked.
"Yes! That's it!"
"So she believed that her babies were marked by a demon, their souls already damned?"
"I'd almost forgotten about that," Mrs. Yancy said.
She stared beyond Tony, not seeing anything in the parlor, looking into the past, striving to remember....
Hilary and Joshua stayed back, out of the way, silent; and Tony was relieved that they recognized his authority.
Eventually, Mrs. Yancy said, "After Katherine told me about it being the mark of a demon, she just clammed up. She didn't want to talk any more. For a couple of days, she was as quiet as a mouse. She stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, hardly moving at all. She looked like she was thinking real hard about something. Then suddenly, she started acting so damned weird that I had to start wondering if I still might have to send her away to the booby hatch."
"Was she ranting and raving and violent like before?" Tony asked.
"No, no. It was all talk this time. Very wild, intense, crazy talk. She told me that the twins were the children of a demon. She said she'd been raped by a thing from hell, a green and scaly thing with huge eyes and a forked tongue and long claws. She said it had come from hell to force her to carry its children. Crazy, huh? She swore up and down that it was true. She even described this demon. A damned good description, too. Full of detail, very well done. And when she told me about how it raped her, she managed to give me the chills, even though I knew it was all a bunch of crap. The story was colorful, very imaginative. At first, I thought it was a joke, something she was doing just for laughs, except she wasn't laughing, and I couldn't see anything funny in it. I reminded her that she'd told me all about Leo, and she screamed at me. Did she scream! I thought the windows would break. She denied ever having said such things. She pretended to be insulted. She was so angry with me for suggesting incest, so self-righteous, a regular little prig, so determined to make me apologize--well, I couldn't help laughing at her. And that made her even angrier. She kept saying it hadn't been Leo, though we both knew damned well it had. She did everything she could to make me believe it was a demon that had fathered the twins. And I tell you, her act was good! I didn't believe it for a minute, of course. All that silly stuff about a creature from hell sticking his thing in her. What a bunch of hogwash. But I started to wonder if maybe she had convinced herself. She sure looked convinced. She was so fanatical about it. She said she was afraid that she and her babies would be burned alive if any religious people found out that she'd consorted with a demon. She begged me to help her keep the secret. She didn't want me to tell anyone about the two cauls. Then she said she knew that both twins carried the mark of the demon between their legs. She pleaded with me to keep that a secret, too."
"Between their legs?" Tony asked.
"Oh, she was carrying on like a full-fledged looney," Rita Yancy said. "She insisted that both of her babies had their father's sex organs. She said they weren't human between the legs, and she said she knew I'd noticed that, and she begged me not to tell anyone about it. Well, that was purely ridiculous. Both those little boys had perfectly ordinary pee-pees. But Katherine jabbered on and on about demons for almost two days. Sometimes she seemed truly hysterical. She wanted to know how much money I'd take to keep the secret about the demon. I told her I wouldn't take a penny for that, but I said I'd settle for five hundred a month to keep mum about Leo and all the rest of it, the rest of the real story. That calmed her down a little, but she still had this demon thing stuck in her head. I was just about decided that she really believed what she was saying, and I was going to call my doctor and have him examine her--and then she shut up about it. She seemed to regain her senses. Or she got tired of her joke, I guess. Anyway, she didn't say one more word about demons. She behaved herself from then on until she took her babies and left a week or so later."
Tony thought about what Mrs. Yancy had told him.
Like a witch cuddling a feline familiar, the old woman petted the white cat.
"What if," Tony said. "What if, what if, what if?"
"What if what?" Hilary asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Pieces seem to be falling into place ... but it looks ... so wild. Maybe I'm putting the puzzle together all wrong. I've got to think about it. I'm just not sure yet."
"Well, do you have any more questions for me?" Mrs. Yancy asked.
"No," Tony said, getting up from the footstool. "I can't think of anything else."
"I believe we've gotten what we came for," Joshua agreed.
"More than we bargained for," Hilary said.
Mrs. Yancy lifted the cat off her lap, put it on the floor, and rose from her chair. "I've wasted too much time on this silly damned thing. I should be in the kitchen. I've got work to do. I made four pie shells this morning. Now I've got to mix up the fillings and get everything in the oven. I've got grandchildren coming for dinner, and each one of them has a different kind of favorite pie. Sometimes the little dears can be a tribulation. But on the other hand, I'd sure be lost without them."
The cat leapt abruptly over the footstool, darted along the flowered runner, past Joshua, and under a corner table. Precisely when the animal stopped moving, the house shook. Two miniature glass swans toppled off a shelf, bounced without breaking on the thick carpet. Two embroidered wall hangings fell down. Windows rattled.
"Quake," Mrs. Yancy said.
The floor rolled like the deck of a ship in mild seas.
"Nothing to worry about," Mrs. Yancy said.
The movement decreased.
The rumbling, discontented earth grew quiet.
The house was still again.
"See?" Mrs. Yancy said. "It's over now."
But Tony sensed other oncoming shockwaves--although none of them had anything to do with earthquakes.

***

Bruno finally opened the dead eyes of his other self, and at first he was upset by what he found. They weren't the clear, electrifying, blue-gray eyes that he had known and loved. These were the eyes of a monster. They appeared to be swollen, rotten-soft and protuberant. The whites were stained brownred by half-dried, scummy blood from burst vessels. The irises were cloudy, muddy, less blue than they had been in life, now more the color of an ugly bruise, dark and wounded.
However, the longer Bruno stared into them the less hideous those damaged eyes became. They were, after all, still the eyes of his other self, still part of himself, still eyes that he knew better than any other eyes, still eyes that he loved and trusted, eyes that loved and trusted him. He tried not to look at them but into them, deep down beyond the surface ruin, way down in, where (many times in the past) he had made the blazing, thrilling connection with the other half of his soul. He felt none of the old magic now, for the other Bruno's eyes were not looking back at him. Nevertheless, the very act of peering deeply into the other's dead eyes somehow revitalized his memories of what total unity with his other self had been like; he remembered the pure, sweet pleasure and fulfillment of being with himself, just he and himself against the world, with no fear of being alone.
He clung to that memory, for memory was now all that he had left.
He sat on the bed for a long time, staring down into the eyes of the corpse.

***

Joshua Rhinehart's Cessna Turbo Skylane RG roared north, slicing across the eastward-flowing air front, heading for Napa. Hilary looked down at the scattered clouds below and at the sere autumn hills that lay a few thousand feet below the clouds. Overhead, there was nothing but crystal-blue sky and the distant, stratospheric vapor trail of a military jet.
Far off in the west, a dense bank of blue-gray-black clouds stretched out of sight to the north and the south. The massive thunderheads were rolling in like giant ships from the sea. By nightfall, Napa Valley--in fact, the entire northern third of the state from the Monterey Peninsula to the Oregon border--would lay under threatening skies again.
During the first ten minutes after takeoff, Hilary and Tony and Joshua were silent. Each was preoccupied with his own bleak thoughts--and fears.
Then Joshua said, "The twin has to be the dead ringer we're looking for."
"Obviously," Tony said.
"So Katherine didn't try to solve her problem by killing off the extra baby," Joshua said.
"Evidently not," Tony said.
"But which one did I kill?" Hilary asked. "Bruno or his brother?"
"We'll have the body exhumed and see what we can learn from it," Joshua said.
The plane hit an air pocket. It dropped more than two hundred feet in a roller coaster swoop, then soared up to its proper altitude.
When her stomach crawled back into its familiar niche, Hilary said, "All right, let's talk this thing out and see if we can come up with any answers. We're all sitting here chewing on the same question anyway. If Katherine didn't kill Bruno's twin brother in order to keep the Mary Gunther lie afloat, then what did she do with him? Where the devil has he been all these years?"
"Well, there's always Mrs. Rita Yancy's pet theory," Joshua said, managing to pronounce her name in such a way as to make it clear that even the need to refer to her in passing distressed him and left a bad taste in his mouth. "Perhaps Katherine did leave one of the twins bundled up on the doorstep of a church or an orphanage."
"I don't know...." Hilary said doubtfully. "I don't like it, but I don't exactly know why. It's just too ... clichéd ... too trite ... too romantic. Damn. None of those is the word I want. I can't think how to say it. I just sense that Katherine would not have handled it like that. It's too ..."
"Too smooth," Tony said. "Just like the story about Mary Gunther was too smooth to please me. Abandoning one of the twins like that would have been the quickest, easiest, simplest, safest--although not the most moral--way for her to solve her problem. But people almost never do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way. Especially not when they're under the kind of stress that Katherine was under when she left Rita Yancy's whorehouse."
"Still," Joshua said. "we can't rule it out altogether."
"I think we can," Tony said. "Because if you accept that the brother was abandoned and then adopted by strangers, you've got to explain how he and Bruno got back together again. Since the brother was an unregistered birth, there'd be no way he could trace his blood parentage. The only way he could hook up with Bruno would be by coincidence. Even if you're willing to accept that coincidence, you've still got to explain how the brother could have been raised in another home, in an altogether different environment from Bruno's, without ever knowing Katherine--and yet have such a fierce hatred for the woman, such an overwhelming fear of her."
"That's not easy," Joshua admitted.
"You've got to explain why and how the brother developed a psychopathic personality and paranoid delusions that perfectly match Bruno's in every detail," Tony said.
The Cessna droned northward.
Wind buffeted the small craft.
For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.
Then Joshua said, "You win. I can't explain it. I can't see how the brother could have been raised entirely apart from Bruno yet wind up with the same psychosis. Genetics don't explain it, that's for sure."
"So what are you saying?" Hilary asked Tony. "That Bruno and his brother weren't separated after all?"
"She took them both home to St. Helena," Tony said.
"But where was the other twin all those years?" Joshua asked. "Locked away in a closet or something?"
"No," Tony said. "You probably met him many times."
"What? Me? No. Never. Just Bruno."
"What if.... What if both of them were living as Bruno? What if they ... took turns?"
Joshua looked away from the open sky ahead, stared at Tony, blinked. "Are you trying to tell me they played some sort of childish game for forty years?" he asked skeptically.
"Not a game," Tony said. "At least it wouldn't have been a game to them. They would have thought of it as a desperate, dangerous necessity."
"You've lost me," Joshua said.
To Tony, Hilary said, "I knew you were working on an idea when you started asking Mrs. Yancy about the babies having cauls and about how Katherine reacted to that."
"Yes," Tony said. "Katherine carrying on about a demon--that bit of news gave me a big piece of the puzzle."
"For God's sake," Joshua said impatiently, gruffly, "stop being so damned mysterious. Put it together for Hilary and me in a way we can understand."
"Sorry. I was more or less still thinking aloud." Tony shifted in his seat. "Okay, look. This will take a while. I'll have to go back to the beginning.... To understand what I'm going to say about Bruno, you have to understand Katherine, or at least understand the way I see her. What I'm theorizing is ... a family in which madness has been ... sort of handed down like a legacy for at least three generations. The insanity steadily grows bigger and bigger, like a trust fund earning interest." Tony shifted in his seat again. "Let's start with Leo. An extreme authoritarian type. To be happy he needed to totally control other people. That was one of the reasons he did so well in business, but it was also the reason he didn't have many friends. He knew how to get his way every time, and he never gave an inch. A lot of aggressive men like Leo have a different approach to sex from the one they have toward everything else; they like to be relieved of all responsibility when they're in bed; they like to be ordered around and dominated for a change--but only in bed. Not Leo. Not even in bed. He insisted on being the dominant one even in his sex life. He enjoyed hurting and humiliating women, calling them names, forcing them to do unpleasant things, being a little rough, a little sadistic. We know that from Mrs. Yancy."
"It's a hell of a big step from paying prostitutes so they'll satisfy some perverse desire--to molesting your own child," Joshua said.
"But we know he did molest Katherine repeatedly, over many years," Tony said. "So it mustn't have been a big step in Leo's eyes. He probably would have said that his abuse of Mrs. Yancy's girls was all right because he was paying them and therefore owned them, at least for a while. He would have been a man with a strong sense of property rights--and with an extremely liberal definition of the word 'property.' He'd have used that argument, that same point of view, to justify what he did to Katherine. A man like that thinks of a child as just another of his possessions--'my child' instead of 'my child.' To him, Katherine was a thing, an object, wasted if not used."
"I'm glad I never met the son of a bitch," Joshua said. "If I'd ever shaken hands with him, I think I'd still feel dirty."
"My point," Tony said, "is that Katherine, as a child, was trapped in a house, in a brutalizing relationship, with a man who was capable of anything, and there was virtually no chance that she could maintain a firm grip on her sanity under those awful conditions. Leo was a very cold fish, a loner's loner, more than a little bit selfish, with a very strong and very twisted sex drive. It's possible, even likely, that he wasn't just emotionally disturbed. He might have been all the way gone, over the edge, psychotic, detached from reality but able to conceal his detachment. There's a kind of psychopath who has iron control over his delusions, the ability to channel a lot of his lunatic energy into socially-acceptable pursuits, the ability to pass for normal. That kind of psycho vents his madness in one narrow, generally private, area. In Leo's case, he let off a little steam with prostitutes--and a lot of it with Katherine. We've got to figure that he didn't merely abuse her physically. His desire went beyond sex. He lusted after absolute control. Once he'd broken her physically, he wouldn't have been satisfied until he'd broken her emotionally, spiritually, and then mentally. By the time Katherine arrived at Mrs. Yancy's place to have her father's baby, she was every bit as mad as Leo had been. But she apparently also had acquired his control, his ability to pass among normal people. She lost that control for three days when the twins arrived, but then she pulled herself together again."
"She lost control a second time," Hilary said as the plane bobbled through a patch of turbulent air.
"Yeah," Joshua said. "When she told Mrs. Yancy that she'd been raped by a demon."
"If my theory's correct," Tony said, "Katherine was going through incredible changes after the birth of the twins. She was moving from one severe psychotic state to an even more severe psychotic state. A new set of delusions was pushing out the old set. She had been able to maintain a surface calm in spite of her father's sexual abuse, in spite of the emotional and physical torture he put her through, in spite of becoming pregnant with his child, and even in spite of the agony of being girdled in day and night during all those months when nature was insisting that she grow. Somehow she maintained an air of normalcy through all of that. But when the twins were born, when she realized her story about Mary Gunther's baby had come crashing down around her, that was too much to bear. She flipped out--until she conceived the notion that she'd been raped by a demon. We know from Mrs. Yancy that Leo was interested in the occult. Katherine had read some of Leo's books. Somewhere she had picked up the fact that some people believe twins born with cauls are marked by a demon. Because her twins were born with cauls ... well, she began to fantasize. And the idea that she had been the innocent victim of a demonic creature that had forced itself on her--well, that was very appealing. It exonerated her of the shame and guilt of bearing her own father's babies. It was still something she had to hide from the world, but it wasn't something she had to hide from herself. It wasn't something shameful for which she had to make constant excuses to herself. No one could expect an ordinary woman to resist a demon that had supernatural strength. If she could make herself believe that she'd really been raped by a monster, then she could start thinking of herself as nothing worse than an unfortunate, innocent victim."
"But that's what she was anyway," Hilary said. "She was her father's victim. He forced himself on her, not the other way around."
True," Tony said "But he had probably spent a lot of time and energy brainwashing her, trying to make her think she was the one at fault, the one responsible for their twisted relationship. Transferring the guilt to the daughter--that's a fairly common way for a sick man to escape his own sense of guilt. And that sort of behavior would fit Leo's authoritarian personality."
"All right," Joshua said as they fled northward into the yielding sky. "I'll go along with what you've said so far. It may not be right, but it makes sense, and that's a welcome change in the situation. So Katherine gave birth to twins, lost herself for three days, and then got control again by resorting to a new fantasy, a new delusion. By believing that a demon had raped her, she was able to forget that her father was the one who had actually done it. She was able to forget