Whispers. Part 48

"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?

Bulls.h.i.t, 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 a.s.sured 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-a.s.sured 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l 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 superst.i.tious 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 gla.s.s; 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 b.i.t.c.h killed me. Dead. The rotten, stinking b.i.t.c.h 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 b.i.t.c.h 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, b.i.t.c.h? I'll nail you first. I'll get you before you have a chance to get me. I'll cut off your f.u.c.king 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 gla.s.s window, a leaded gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing car, and from a distant stereo or radio that was playing swing music. It was a Benny Goodman tune from the Forties, but the t.i.tle eluded Bruno; the bra.s.sy 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 st.u.r.dier 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 ma.s.sive 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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."