Whispers

"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."