Whispers. Part 60

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 d.a.m.ned involved! It was a juggling act. They had to keep a dozen b.a.l.l.s 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 s.e.x 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?"

"d.a.m.n," 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 ma.s.sive 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 b.i.t.c.h. 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 h.e.l.lish 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 rea.s.sure 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.s out their payoff money. They usually don't bother a cla.s.sy 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 embarra.s.s any big shots in a raid. But if I sent Katherine off to a hospital, I knew d.a.m.ned 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 prost.i.tutes. 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 ap.r.o.n 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-cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l. 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 appet.i.tes. 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 G.o.d'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 att.i.tudes--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 circ.u.mstances, 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 d.a.m.ned thing was unusual?"