Whispers

"I'm comfortable here," she said nervously.

"Don't be silly," he said, "Besides, if someone comes up on the front porch to ring the bell ... he might hear us and figure that something's wrong. The bedroom will be more private. Come on now. Come on. Upsy-daisy."

She got to her feet.

He held the knife on her.

They went into the bedroom.

***

Hilary was not much of a drinker, but she was glad that she had a glass of good whiskey as she sat on the couch in Joshua Rhinehart's office and listened to the attorney's story. He told her and Tony about the missing funds in San Francisco, about the dead ringer who had left the bizarre letter in the safe-deposit box--and about his own growing uncertainty as to the identity of the dead man in Bruno Frye's grave.

"Are you going to exhume the body?" Tony asked.

"Not yet," Joshua said. "There are a couple of things I've got to look into first. If they check out, I might get enough answers so that it's not really necessary to open the grave."

He told them about Rita Yancy in Hollister and about Dr. Nicholas Rudge in San Francisco, and he reconstructed his recent conversation with Latham Hawthorne.

In spite of the warm room and the heat of the whiskey, Hilary was chilled to the bone. "This Hawthorne sounds as if he belongs in an institution himself."

Joshua sighed. "Sometimes I think if we put all the crazies into institutions, there'd hardly be anyone left on the outside."

Tony leaned forward on the couch. "Do you believe that Hawthorne really didn't know about the look-alike?"

"Yes," Joshua said. "Curiously enough, I do believe him. He may be something of a nut about Satanism, and he may not be particularly moral in some areas, and he might even be somewhat dangerous, but he didn't strike me as a dissembler, Strange as it might seem, I think he's probably a generally truthful man in most matters, and I can't see that there's anything more to be learned from him. Perhaps Dr. Rudge or Rita Yancy will know something of more value. But enough of that. Now let me hear from the two of you. What's happened? What's brought you all the way to St. Helena?"

Hilary and Tony took turns recounting the events of the past few days.

When they finished, Joshua stared at Hilary for a moment, then shook his head and said, "You've got a hell of a lot of courage, young lady."

"Not me," she said. "I'm a coward. I'm scared to death. I've been scared to death for days."

"Being scared doesn't mean you're a coward," Joshua said. "All bravery is based on fear. Both the coward and the hero act out of terror and necessity. The only difference between them is simply that the coward succumbs to his fear while the person with courage triumphs in spite of it. If you were a coward, you would have run away for a month-long holiday in Europe or Hawaii or some such place, and you'd have counted on time to solve the Frye riddle. But you've come here, to Bruno's hometown, where you might well expect to be in even more danger than you were in Los Angeles. I don't admire much in this world. but I do admire your spunk."

Hilary was blushing. She looked at Tony, then down at her glass of whiskey. "If I was brave," she said, "I'd stay in the city and set up a trap for him, using myself for bait. I'm not really in much danger here. After all, he's busy looking for me down in L.A. And there's no way that he can find out where I've gone."

***

The bedroom.

From the bed Sally watched him with alert and fear-filled eyes.

He walked around the room, looking in drawers. Then he came back to her.

Her throat was slender and taut. The bead of blood had dribbled down the graceful arc of flesh to her collarbone. She saw him looking at the blood, and she reached up with one hand, touched it, stared at her stained fingers.

"Don't worry," he said. "It's only a scratch."

Sally's bedroom, at the rear of the neat little bungalow, was decorated entirely in earth tones. Three walls were painted beige; the fourth was covered with burlap wallpaper. The carpet was chocolate brown. The bedspread and the matching drapes were a coffee and cream abstract pattern, restful swirls of natural shades that soothed the eye. The highly polished mahogany furniture gleamed where it was touched by the soft, shaded, amber glow that came from one of the two copperplated bedside lamps that stood on the nightstands.

She lay on the bed, on her back, legs together, arms at her sides, hands fisted. She was still wearing her white uniform; it was pulled down demurely to her knees. Her long chestnut-brown hair was spread out like a fan around her head. She was quite pretty.

Bruno sat on the edge of the bed beside her. "Where is Katherine?"

She blinked. Tears slid out of the corners of her eyes. She was weeping, but silently, afraid to shriek and wail and groan, afraid that the slightest sound would cause him to stab her.

He repeated the question: "Where is Katherine?"

"I told you, I don't know anyone named Katherine," she said. Her speech was halting, tremulous; each word required a separate struggle. Her sensual lower lip quivered as she spoke.

"You know who I mean," he said sharply. "Don't play games with me. She calls herself Hilary Thomas now."

"Please. Please ... let me go."

He held the knife up to her right eye, the point directed at the widening pupil. "Where is Hilary Thomas?"

"Oh, Jesus," she said shakily. "Look, mister, there's some sort of mix-up. A mistake. You're making a big mistake."

"You want to lose your eye?"

Sweat popped out along her hairline.

"You want to be half blind?" he asked.

"I don't know where she is," Sally said miserably.

"Don't lie to me."

"I'm not lying, I swear I'm not."

He stared at her for a few seconds.

By now there was sweat on her upper lip, too, tiny dots of moisture.

He took the knife away from her eye.

She was visibly relieved.

He surprised her. He slapped her face with his other hand, hit her so hard that her teeth clacked together and her eyes rolled back in her head.

"Bitch."

There were a lot of tears now. She made soft, mewling sounds and shrank back from him.

"You must know where she is," he said. "She hired you."

"We work for her regularly. She just called in and asked for a special clean-up. She didn't say where she was."

"Was she at the house when you got there?"

"No."

"Was anyone at the house when you got there?"

"No."

"Then how'd you get in?"

"Huh?"

"Who gave you the key?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah," she said, brightening a bit as she saw a way out. "Her agent. A literary agent. We had to stop at his office first to get the key."

"Where's that?"

"Beverly Hills. You should go talk to her agent if you want to know where she is. That's who you should see. He'll know where you can find her."

"What's his name?"

She hesitated. "A funny name. I saw it written down ... but I'm not sure I remember it exactly...."

He held the knife up to her eye again.

"Topelis," she said.

"Spell it for me."

She did. "I don't know where Miss Thomas is. But that Mr. Topelis will know. He'll know for sure."

He took the knife away from her eye.

She had been rigid. She sagged a bit.

He stared down at her. Something stirred in the back of his mind, a memory, then an awful realization.

"Your hair," he said. "You've got dark hair. And your eyes. They're so dark."

"What's wrong?" she asked worriedly, suddenly sensing that she was not safe yet.

"You've got the same hair and eyes, the same complexion that she had," Frye said.

"I don't understand, I don't know what's happening here. You're scaring me."

"Did you think you could trick me?" He was grinning at her, pleased with himself for not being fooled by her clever ruse.

He knew. He knew.

"You figured I'd go off to see this Topelis," Bruno said, and then you would have a chance to slip away."

"Topelis knows where she is. He knows. I don't. I really don't know anything."

"I know where she is now," Bruno said.

"If you know, then you can just let me go."

He laughed. "You changed bodies, didn't you?"

She stared at him. "What?"

"Somehow you got out of the Thomas woman and took control of this girl, didn't you?"

She wasn't crying any more. Her fear was burning so very brightly that it had seared away her tears.

The bitch.

The rotten bitch.

"Did you really think you could fool me?" he asked. He laughed again, delighted. "After everything you've done to me, how could you think I wouldn't recognize you?"

Terror reverberated in her voice. "I haven't done anything to you. You're not making sense. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God, my God. What do you want from me?"

Bruno leaned toward her, put his face close to hers. He peered into her eyes and said, "You're in there, aren't you? You're in there, deep down in there, hiding from me, aren't you? Aren't you, Mother? I see you, Mother. I see you in there."

***

A few fat droplets of rain splattered on the mullioned window in Joshua Rhinehart's office.

The night wind moaned.

"I still don't understand why Frye chose me," Hilary said. "When I came up here to do research for that screenplay, he was friendly. He answered all my questions about the wine industry. We spent two or three hours together, and I never had a hint that he was anything but an ordinary businessman. Then a few weeks later, he shows up at my house with a knife. And according to that letter in the safe-deposit box, he thinks I'm his mother in a new body. Why me?"

Joshua shifted in his chair. "I've been looking at you and thinking...."

"What?"

"Maybe he chose you because ... well, you look just a bit like Katherine."

"You don't mean we've got another look-alike on our hands," Tony said.

"No," Joshua said. "The resemblance is only slight."

"Good," Tony said. "Another dead ringer would be too much for me to deal with."

Joshua got up, went to Hilary, put one hand under her chin, lifted her face, turned it left, then right. "The hair, the eyes, the dusty complexion," he said thoughtfully. "Yes, all of that's similar. And there are other things about your face that remind me vaguely of Katherine, little things, so minor that I can't really put my finger on them. It's only a passing resemblance. And she wasn't as attractive as you are."

As Joshua took his hand away from her chin, Hilary got up and walked to the attorney's desk. Mulling over what she had learned in the past hour, she stared down at the neatly arranged items on the desk: blotter, stapler, letter opener, paperweight.

"Is something wrong?" Tony asked.

The wind worked up into a brief squall. Another burst of raindrops snapped against the window.

She turned around, faced the men. "Let me summarize the situation. Let me see if I've got this straight."

"I don't think any of us has it straight," Joshua said, returning to his chair. "The whole damned tale is too twisted to be arranged in a nice straight line."

"That's what I'm leading up to," she said. "I think maybe I just found another twist."

"Go ahead," Tony said.

"So far as we can tell," Hilary said, "shortly after his mother's death, Bruno got the idea that she had come back from the grave. For nearly five years, he has been buying books about the living dead from Latham Hawthorne. For five years, he's been living in fear of Katherine. Finally, when he saw me, he decided I was the new body she was using. But why did it take him so long?"

"I'm not sure I follow," Joshua said.

"Why did he take five years to fixate on someone, five long years to select a flesh and blood target for his fears?"

Joshua shrugged, "He's a madman, We can't expect his reasoning to be logical and decipherable."

But Tony was sensitive to the implications of her question. He slid forward on the couch, frowning. "I think I know what you're going to say," he told her, "My God, it gives me goose pimples."

Joshua looked from one to the other and said, "I must be getting slow-witted in my declining years. Will someone explain things to this old codger?"

"Maybe I'm not the first woman he's thought was his mother," Hilary said. "Maybe he killed the others before he came after me."

Joshua gaped at her, "Impossible!"

"Why?"

"We'd have known if he'd been running around killing women for the past five years. He'd have been caught at it!"

"Not necessarily," Tony said. "Homicidal maniacs are often very careful, very clever people. Some of them make meticulous plans--and yet have an uncanny ability to take the right risks when something unexpected throws the plans off the rails. They aren't always easy to catch."

Joshua pushed one hand through his mane of snow-white hair. "But if Bruno killed other women--where are their bodies?"

"Not in St. Helena," Hilary said. "He may have been schizophrenic, but the respectable, Dr. Jekyll-half of his personality was firmly in control when he was around people who knew him. He almost certainly would have gone out of town to kill. Out of the valley."

"San Francisco," Tony said, "He apparently went there regularly."

"Any town in the northern part of the state," Hilary said, "Any place far enough away from the Napa Valley for him to be anonymous."

"Now wait," Joshua said. "Wait a minute. Even if he went somewhere else and found women who bore a vague resemblance to Katherine, even if he killed them in other towns--he'd still have to leave bodies behind. There would have been similarities in the way he murdered them, links that the authorities would have noticed, They'd be looking for a modern-day Jack the Ripper. We'd have heard all about it on the news."

"If the murders were spread over five years and over a lot of towns in several counties, the police probably wouldn't make any connections between them," Tony said. "This is a large state. Hundreds of thousands of square miles. There are hundreds upon hundreds of police organizations, and there's seldom as much information-sharing among them as there ought to be. In fact, there's only one sure-fire way for them to recognize connections between several random killings--that's if at least two, and preferably three, of the murders take place in a relatively short span of time, within a single police jurisdiction, one county or one city."

Hilary walked away from the desk, returned to the couch. "So it's possible," she said, feeling as cold as the October wind sounded. "It's possible that he's been slaughtering women--two, six, ten, fifteen, maybe more--during the past five years, and I'm the first one who ever gave him any trouble."

"It's not only possible, but probable," Tony said. "I'd say we can count on it." The Xerox of the letter that had been found in the safe-deposit box was on the coffee table in front of him; he picked it up and read the first sentence aloud. "'My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies,'"

"Bodies," Hilary said.

"That's the key word," Tony said. "Not body, singular. Bodies, plural. From that, I think we can infer that he killed her several times and that he thought she came back from the grave more than once."

Joshua's face was ash-gray. "But if you're right ... I've been ... all of us in St. Helena have been living beside the most evil, vicious sort of monster. And we weren't even aware of it!"

Tony looked grim. "'The Beast of Hell walks among us in the clothes of a common man.'"

"What's that from?" Joshua asked.

"I've got a dustbin mind," Tony said. "Very little gets thrown away, whether I want to hold on to it or not. I remember the quotation from my Catholic catechism classes a long time ago. It's from the writings of one of the saints, but I don't recall which one. 'The Beast of Hell walks among us in the clothes of a common man. If the demon should reveal its true face to you at a time when you have turned away from Christ, then you will be without protection, and it will gleefully devour your heart and rend you limb from limb and carry your immortal soul into the yawning pit.'"

"You sound like Latham Hawthorne," Joshua said.

Outside, the wind shrieked.

***

Frye put the knife on the nightstand, well out of Sally's reach. Then he grabbed the lapels of her uniform dress and tore the garment open. Buttons popped.

She was paralyzed by terror. She did not resist him; she could not.

He grinned at her and said, "Now. Now, Mother. Now, I get even."

He ripped the dress all the way down the front and flung it open. She was revealed in bra and panties and pantyhose, a slim, pretty body. He clutched the cups of her bra and jerked them down. The straps bit into her skin and then broke. Fabric tore. Elastic snapped.

Her breasts were large for her size and bone structure, round and full, with very dark, pebbly nipples. He squeezed them roughly.

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!" In his deep, gravelly voice, that one word acquired the eerie quality of a sinister chant, a Satanic litany.

He wrenched off her shoes, first the right, then the left, and threw them aside. One of them struck the mirror above the dresser and shattered it.

The sound of falling glass roused the woman from her shock-induced catatonic trance, and she tried to pull away from him, but fear sapped her strength; she writhed and fluttered ineffectually against him.

He held her without difficulty, slapped her twice with such force that her mouth sagged open and her eyes swam. A fine thread of blood unraveled from the corner of her mouth, ran down her chin.

"You rotten bitch!" he said, furious. "No sex, huh? I can't have any sex, you said. No sex ever, you said. Can't risk some woman finding out what I am, you said. Well, you already know what I am, Mother. You already know my secret, I don't have to hide anything from you, Mother. You know I'm different from other men. You know my prick isn't like theirs. You know who my father was. You know. You know that my prick is like his. I don't have to hide it from you, Mother. I'm going to shove it into you, Mother. All the way up into you. You hear me? Do you?"

The woman was crying, tossing her head from side to side. "No, no, no! Oh, God!" But then she got control of herself, locked eyes with him, gazed intently at him (and he could see Katherine in there, beyond the brown eyes, glaring out at him), and she said, "Listen to me. Please, listen to me! You're sick. You're a very sick man. You're all mixed up. You need help."

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

He slapped her again, harder than he had done before, swinging his big hand in a long swift arc, into the side of her face.

Each act of violence excited him. He was aroused by the sharp sound of each blow, by her gasps of pain and her birdlike cries, by the way her tender flesh reddened and swelled. The sight of her pain-contorted face and her scared-rabbit eyes stoked his lust to an unbearable white-hot flame.

He was shaking with need, trembling, quivering, quaking. He was breathing like a bull. His eyes were wide. His mouth was watering so excessively that he had to swallow every couple of seconds to avoid drooling on her.

He mauled her lovely breasts, squeezed and stroked them, roughed them up.

She had retreated from the terror, had slipped back into that semi-trance, motionless and rigid.

On the one hand, Bruno hated her and did not care how badly he hurt her. He wanted to cause her pain. He wanted her to suffer for all the things she had done to him--for even bringing him into the world in the first place.

But on the other hand, he was ashamed of touching his mother's breasts and ashamed of wanting to stick his penis into her. Therefore, as he pawed at her, he tried to explain himself and justify his actions: "You told me that if I ever tried to make love to a woman, she'd know right away that I'm not human. You said she'd see the difference, and she'd know. She'd call the police, and they'd take me away, and they'd burn me at the stake because they'd know who my father was. But you already know. It's no surprise to you, Mother. So I can use my prick on you. I can stick it right up in you, Mother, and no one will burn me alive."

He had never thought of putting it into her while she was alive. He'd been hopelessly cowed by her. But by the time she had come back from the dead in her first new body, Bruno had tasted freedom, and he had been full of daring and new ideas. He realized at once that he must kill her to prevent her from taking over his life again--or dragging him back to the grave with her. But he also realized that he could screw her and be safe, since she already knew his secret. She was the one who had told him the truth about himself; she'd told him ten thousand times. She knew that his father was a demon, a foul and hideous thing, for she had been raped by that inhuman creature, impregnated by it against her will. During her pregnancy, she had worn overlapping girdles to conceal her condition. When her time drew near, she went away to give birth under the care of a close-mouthed midwife in San Francisco. Later, she told people in St. Helena that Bruno was the illegitimate son of an old college friend who had gotten in trouble, that his real mother died shortly after his birth, and that her last wish was for Katherine to raise the boy. She brought the baby home and pretended he had been legally placed in her care and custody. She lived in constant, numbing fear that someone would discover Bruno was hers, and that his father was not human. One of the things that marked him as the progeny of a demon was his penis. He had the penis of a demon, different from that of a man. He must always hide it, she said, or he would be uncovered and burned at the stake. She had told him all about those things, had been telling him about them since he was too young to know what a penis was for. So, in a peculiar way, she had become both his blessing and his curse. She was a curse because she kept returning from the grave to regain control of him or to kill him. But she was also a blessing because, if she didn't keep coming back again and again and again, he wouldn't have anyone into whom he could empty the great, hot quantities of semen that built up like boiling lava in him. Without her, he was doomed to a life of celibacy. Therefore, while he regarded her resurrections with horror and outrage, a part of him also eagerly looked forward to each new encounter with each new body that she inhabited.

Now, as he knelt on the bed beside her, looking down at her breasts and at the dark pubic bush that was visible through her pale yellow panties, his erection grew so hard that it hurt. He was aware of the demon-half of his personality asserting itself; he felt the beast surging toward the surface of his mind.

He clawed at Sally's (Katherine's) pantyhose, shredding the nylon as he pulled it down her slim legs. He gripped her thighs in his large hands and forced them apart, and he moved around clumsily on the mattress until he was kneeling between her legs.

She snapped out of her trance again. Suddenly bucking, trashing, kicking, she tried to rise, but he shoved her back with ease. She pummeled him with her fists, but her punches were without force. Seeing that he was unaffected by her blows, she opened her hands, made claws of them, struck at his face, raked his left cheek with her nails, then went for his eyes.

He jerked back, raised one arm to protect himself, winced as she gouged the back of his hand. Then he fell full-length upon her, crushing her with his big, strong body. He got one arm across her throat and pressed down, choking her.

***

Joshua Rhinehart washed the three whiskey glasses in the sink at the wet bar. To Tony and Hilary, he said, "The two of you have more at stake in this thing than I do, so why don't you come with me tomorrow when I fly down to see Rita Yancy in Hollister?"

"I was hoping you'd ask us," Hilary said.

"There's nothing we can do here right now," Tony said.

Joshua dried his hands on a dishtowel. "Good. That's settled. Now have you gotten a hotel room for the night?"

"Not yet," Tony said.

"You're welcome to stay at my place," Joshua said.

Hilary smiled prettily. "That's very kind. But we don't want to impose on you."

"You wouldn't be imposing."

"But you weren't expecting us, and we--"

"Young lady," Joshua said impatiently, "do you know how long it's been since I've had house guests? More than three years. And do you know why I haven't had any house guests in three years? Because I didn't invite anyone to stay with me, that's why. I am not a particularly gregarious man. I don't issue invitations lightly. If I felt that you and Tony would be a burden--or, worst of all, boring--I wouldn't have invited you, either. Now let's not waste a lot of time being overly polite. You need a room. I have a room. Are you going to stay at my place or not?"

Tony laughed, and Hilary grinned at Joshua. She said, "Thank you for asking us. We'd be delighted."

"Good," Joshua said.

"I like your style," she told him.

"Most people think I'm a grump."

"But a nice grump."

Joshua found a smile of his own. "Thank you. I think I'll have that engraved on my tombstone. 'Here lies Joshua Rhinehart, a nice grump.'"

As they were leaving the office, the telephone rang, and Joshua went back to his desk. Dr. Nicholas Rudge was calling from San Francisco.

***

Bruno Frye was still on top of the woman, pinning her to the mattress, one muscular arm across her throat.

She gagged and fought for breath. Her face was red, dark, twisted in agony.

She excited him.

"Don't fight me, Mother. Don't fight me like this. You know it's useless. You know I'll win in the end."

She writhed under his superior weight and strength. She tried to arch her back and roll to one side, and when she failed to throw him off, she was shaken by violent involuntary muscle spasms as her body reacted to the growing interruption in her air supply and in the supply of blood to her brain. At last, she seemed to realize she would never be able to get free of him, that she had absolutely no hope of escape, and so she went limp in defeat.

Convinced that the woman had surrendered spiritually as well as physically, Frye lifted his arm from her bruised throat. He raised up on his knees, taking his weight off her.

She put her hands to her neck. She gagged and coughed uncontrollably.

In a frenzy now, his heart pounding, blood roaring in his ears, aching with need, Frye got up, stood beside the bed, stripped off his clothes, threw them on top of the dresser, out of the way.

He looked down at his erection. The sight of it thrilled him. The steeliness of it. The size of it. The angry color.

He climbed onto the bed again.

She was docile now. Her eyes had a vacant look.

He ripped off her pale yellow panties and positioned himself between her slim legs. Saliva drooled out of his mouth. Dripped on her breasts.

He thrust into her. He thrust his demon staff all the way into her. Growling like an animal. Stabbed her with his demonic penis. He stabbed and stabbed her, until his semen flowered within her.

He pictured the milky fluid. Pictured it flowering from him, deep inside of her.

He thought of blood blossoming from a wound. Red petals spreading from a deep knife wound.

Both thoughts wildly excited him: semen and blood.

He didn't go soft.

Sweating, grunting, slobbering, he made thrust after thrust after thrust. Into her. Into. In.

Later, he would use the knife.

***

Joshua Rhinehart flipped a switch on his desk phone, putting the call from Dr. Nicholas Rudge on the conference speaker, so that Tony and Hilary could hear the conversation.

"I tried your home number first," Rudge said. "I didn't expect you to be at the office at this hour."

"I'm a workaholic, doctor."

"You should try to do something about it," Rudge said with what sounded like genuine concern. "That's no way to live. I've treated more than a few overly-ambitious men for whom work had become the only interest in their lives. An obsessive attitude toward work can destroy you."

"Dr. Rudge, what is your medical specialty?"

"Psychiatry."

"I suspected as much."

"You're the executor?"

"That's right. I presume you heard all about his death."

"Just what the newspaper had to say."

"While handling some estate matters, I discovered that Mr. Frye had been seeing you regularly during the year and a half prior to his death."

"He came in once a month," Rudge said.

"Were you aware that he was homicidal?"

"Of course not," Rudge said.

"You treated him all that time and weren't aware that he was capable of violence?"

"I knew he was deeply disturbed," Rudge said. "But I didn't think he was a danger to anyone. However, you must understand that he didn't really give me a chance to spot the violent side of him. I mean, as I said, he only came in once a month, I wanted to see him at least once every week, and preferably twice, but he refused. On the one hand, he wanted me to help him. But at the same time, he was afraid of what he might learn about himself. After a while, I decided not to press him too hard about making weekly visits because I was afraid that he might back off altogether and even cancel his monthly appointment. I figured a little therapy was better than none, you see."

"What brought him to you?"

"Are you asking what was wrong with him, what he was complaining of?"

"That's what I'm asking, all right."

"As an attorney, Mr. Rhinehart, you ought to be aware that I can't give out that sort of information indiscriminately. I have a doctor-patient privilege to protect."

"The patient is dead, Dr. Rudge."

"That doesn't make any difference."

"It sure as hell makes a difference to the patient."

"He placed his trust in me."

"When the patient is dead, the concept of doctor-patient privilege has little or no legal validity."

"Perhaps it has no legal validity," Rudge said. "But the oral validity remains. I still have certain responsibilities. I wouldn't do anything to damage the reputation of a patient, regardless of whether he's dead or alive."

"Commendable," Joshua said. "But in this case, nothing you could tell me would damage his reputation one whit more than he damaged it himself."

"That, too, makes no difference."

"Doctor, this is an extraordinary situation. This very day, I have come into possession of information which indicates that Bruno Frye murdered a number of women over the past five years, a large number of women, and got away with it."

"You're joking."

"I don't know what sort of thing strikes you as funny, Dr. Rudge. But I don't make jokes about mass murder."

Rudge was silent.

Joshua said, "Furthermore, I have reason to believe that Frye didn't act alone. He may have had a partner in homicide. And that partner may still be walking around, alive and free."

"This is extraordinary."

"That's what I said."

"Have you given this information of yours to the police?"

"No," Joshua said. "For one thing, it's probably not enough to get their attention. What I've discovered convinces me--and two other people who are involved in this. But the police will probably say it's only circumstantial evidence. And for another thing--I'm not sure which police agency has primary jurisdiction in the case. The murders might have been committed in several counties, in a number of cities. Now it seems to me that Frye might have told you something that doesn't appear all that important by itself, but which fits in with the facts that I've uncovered. If, during those eighteen months of therapy, you acquired a bit of knowledge that complements my information, then perhaps I'll have enough to decide which police agency to approach--and enough to convince them of the seriousness of the situation."

"Well...."

"Dr. Rudge, if you persist in protecting this particular patient, yet more murders may occur. Other women. Do you want their deaths on your conscience?"

"All right," Rudge said. "But this can't be done on the telephone."

"I'll come to San Francisco tomorrow, at your earliest convenience."

"My morning is free," Rudge said.

"Shall my associates and I meet you at your offices at ten o'clock?"

"That'll be fine," Rudge said. "But I warn you--before I discuss Mr. Frye's therapy, I'll want to hear this evidence of yours in more detail."

"Naturally."

"And if I'm not convinced that there's a clear and present danger, I'll keep his file sealed."

"Oh, I have no doubt that we can convince you," Joshua said. "I'm quite sure we can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. We'll see you in the morning, doctor."

Joshua hung up. He looked at Tony and Hilary. "Tomorrow's going to be a busy day, First San Francisco and Dr. Rudge, then Hollister and the mysterious Rita Yancy."

Hilary got up from the couch where she had sat through the call. "I don't care if we have to fly halfway around the world. At least things seem to be breaking. For the first time, I feel that we're actually going to find out what's behind all of this."

"I feel the same way," Tony said. He smiled at Joshua. "You know ... the way you handled Rudge ... you've got a real talent for interrogation. You'd make a good detective."

"I'll add that to my tombstone," Joshua said, "'Here lies Joshua Rhinehart, a nice grump who would have made a good detective.'" He stood up. "I'm starved. At home I've got steaks in the freezer and a lot of bottles of Robert Mondavi's Cabernet Sauvignon. What are we waiting for?"

***

Frye turned away from the blood-drenched bed and from the blood-splashed wall behind the bed.

He put the bloody knife on the dresser and walked out of the room.

The house was filled with an unearthly quiet.

His demonic energy was gone. He was heavy-lidded, heavy-limbed, lethargic, sated.

In the bathroom, he adjusted the water in the shower until it was as hot as he could stand it. He stepped into the stall and soaped himself, washed the blood out of his hair, washed it off his face and body. He rinsed, then lathered up again, rinsed a second time.

His mind was a blank. He thought of nothing except the details of cleaning up. The sight of the blood swirling down the drain did not make him think of the dead woman in the next room; it was only dirt being sluiced away.

All he wanted to do was make himself presentable and then go sleep in the van for several hours. He was exhausted. His arms felt as if they were made of lead; his legs were rubber.

He got out of the shower and dried himself on a big towel. The cloth smelled like the woman, but it had neither pleasant nor unpleasant associations for him.

He spent a lot of time at the sink, working on his hands with a brush that he found beside the soap dish, getting every trace of blood out of his knuckle creases, taking special care with his caked fingernails.

On his way out of the bathroom, intending to fetch his clothes from the bedroom, he noticed a full-length mirror on the door, which he hadn't seen on his way to the shower. He stopped to examine himself, looking for smears of blood that he might have missed. He was as spotless and fresh and pink as a well-scrubbed baby.

He stared at the reflection of his flaccid penis and the drooping testicles beneath it, and he tried very hard to see the mark of the demon. He knew that he was not like other men; he had no doubt whatsoever about that. His mother had been terrified that someone would find out about him and that the world would learn that he was half-demon, the child of an ordinary woman and a scaly, fanged, sulphurous beast. Her fear of exposure was transmitted to Bruno at an early age, and he still dreaded being found out and subsequently burned alive. He had never been naked in front of another person. In school, he had not gone out for sports, and he had been excused from gymnasium for supposed religious objections to taking showers in the nude with other boys. He had never even completely stripped for a physician. His mother had been positive that anyone who saw his sex organs would know at once that his manhood was the genetic legacy of a demon father; and he had been impressed and deeply affected by her fearful, unwavering certainty.

But as he looked at himself in the mirror, he couldn't see anything that made his sex organs different from those of other men. Shortly after his mother's fatal heart attack, he had gone to a pornographic movie in San Francisco, eager to learn how a normal man's penis looked. He'd been surprised and baffled to discover that the men in the film were all very much like him. He'd gone to other pictures of the same sort, but he hadn't seen even one man who was strikingly different from him. Some of them had bigger penises than his; some of them had smaller organs; some were thicker, some thinner; some were curved slightly; some of them were circumcised, and some were not. But those were all just minor variations, not the awful, shocking, fundamental differences which he had expected.

Puzzled, worried, he had gone back to St. Helena to sit with himself and discuss his discovery. His first thought was that his mother had lied to him. But that was very nearly inconceivable. She had recounted the story of his conception several times every week, for years and years, and each time that she had described the hateful demon and the violent rape, she had shuddered and wailed and wept. The experience had been real for her, not some imaginary tale that she had created to mislead him. And yet.... Sitting with himself that afternoon five years ago, discussing it with himself, he had been unable to think of any explanation other than that his mother was a liar; and himself agreed with him.

The following day, he had returned to San Francisco, wildly excited, fevered, having decided to risk sex with a woman for the first time in his thirty-five years. He had gone to a massage parlor, a thinly disguised brothel, where he had chosen a slim, attractive blonde as his masseuse. She called herself Tammy, and except for slightly protruding upper teeth and a neck that was just a bit too long, she was as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen; or at least that's how she seemed to him as he struggled to keep from ejaculating in his trousers. In one of the cubicles that smelled of pine disinfectant and stale semen, he agreed to Tammy's price, paid her, and watched as she took off her sweater and slacks. Her body was smooth and sleek and so desirable that he stood like a post, unable to move, awe-stricken as he considered all of the things he could do with her. She sat on the edge of the narrow bed and smiled at him and suggested he undress. He stripped down to his underpants, but when the time came for him to show her his rigid penis, he was unable to take the risk, for he could see himself in a pillar of flame, put to death because of his demonic blood. He froze. He stared at Tammy's slender legs and at her wiry pubic hair and at her round breasts, wanting her, needing her, but afraid to take her. Sensing his reluctance to reveal himself, she reached out and put one hand on his crotch, felt his penis through his shorts. She slowly rubbed him through the thin cloth and said, "Oh, I want that. It's so big. I've never had one like this before. Show me. I want to see it. I've never had anything like it." And as she spoke those words he knew that somehow he was different, in spite of the fact that he could not see the difference. Tammy tried to pull off his shorts, and he slapped her face, knocked her backwards, flat on the bed; she bumped her head against the wall, threw her hands up to ward him off, screamed and screamed. Bruno wondered if he should kill her. Even though she had not seen his demonic prick, she might have recognized the inhuman quality of it merely by feeling it through his underwear. Before he could make up his mind what to do, the door of the cubicle flew open in answer to the girl's screams, and a man with a blackjack stepped in from the corridor. The bouncer was as big as Bruno, and the weapon gave him a substantial advantage. Bruno was certain that they were going to overpower him, revile him, curse and spit upon him, torture him, and then burn him at the stake; but to his utter amazement, they only made him put on his clothes and get out. Tammy didn't say another word about Bruno's unusual penis. Apparently, while she knew it was different, she was not aware of exactly how different it was: she didn't know that it was a sign of the demon that had fathered him, proof of his hellish origins. Relieved, he had dressed hurriedly and had scurried out of the massage parlor, blushing, embarrassed, but thankful that his secret had not been uncovered. He had gone back to St. Helena and had told himself about the close call he'd had, and both he and himself had agreed that Katherine had been right, and that he would have to furnish his own sex, without benefit of a woman.

Then, of course, Katherine had started coming back from the grave, and Bruno had been able to satisfy himself with her, expending copious quantities of sperm in the many lovely bodies that she had inhabited. He still had most of his sex alone, with himself, with his other self, his other half--but it was wildly exciting to thrust into the warm, tight, moist center of a woman every once in a while.

Now he stood in front of the mirror that was fixed to the door of Sally's bathroom, and he stared with fascination at the reflection of his penis, wondering what difference Tammy had sensed when she'd felt his pulsating erection in that massage parlor cubicle, five years ago.

After a while, he let his gaze travel upward from his sex organs to his flat, hard, muscular belly, then up to his huge chest, and farther up until he met the gaze of the other Bruno in the looking glass. When he stared into his own eyes, everything at the periphery of his vision faded away, and the very foundations of reality turned molten and assumed new forms; without drugs or alcohol, he was swept into an hallucinogenic experience. He reached out and touched the mirror, and the fingers of the other Bruno touched his fingers from the far side of the glass. As if in a dream, he drifted closer to the mirror, pressed his nose to the other Bruno's nose. He looked deep into the other's eyes, and those eyes peered deep into his. For a moment, he forgot that he was only confronting a reflection; the other Bruno was real. He kissed the other, and the kiss was cold. He pulled back a few inches. So did the other Bruno. He licked his lips. So did the other Bruno. Then they kissed again. He licked the other Bruno's open mouth, and gradually the kiss became warm, but it never grew as soft and pleasant as he had expected. In spite of the three powerful orgasms that Sally-Katherine had drawn from him, his penis stiffened yet again, and when it was very hard he pressed it against the other Bruno's penis and slowly rotated his hips, rubbing their erect organs together, still kissing, still gazing rapturously into the eyes that stared out of the mirror. For a minute or two, he was happier than he had been in days.

But then the hallucination abruptly dissolved, and reality came back like a hammer striking iron. He became aware that he really was not holding his other self and that he was trying to have sex with nothing more than a flat reflection. A strong electric current of emotion seemed to jump across the synapse between the eyes in the looking glass and his own eyes, and a tremendous shock blasted through his body; it was an emotional shock, but it also affected him physically, making him twitch and shake. His lethargy burned away in an instant. Suddenly he was re-energized; his mind was spinning, sparking.

He remembered that he was dead. Half of him was dead. The bitch had stabbed him last week, in Los Angeles. Now he was both dead and alive.

A profound sorrow welled up in him.

Tears came to his eyes.

He realized that he couldn't hold himself as he once had done. Not ever again.

He couldn't fondle himself or be fondled by himself as he once had done. Not ever again.

He now had only two hands, not four; only one penis, not two; only one mouth, not two.

He could never kiss himself again, never feel his two tongues caressing each other. Not ever again.

Half of him was dead. He wept.

He never again would have sex with himself as he'd had it thousands of times in the past. Now he would have no lover but his hand, the limited pleasure of masturbation.

He was alone.

Forever.

For a while, he stood in front of the mirror, crying, his broad shoulders bent under the terrible weight of abject despair. But slowly his unbearable grief and self-pity gave way to rising anger. She had done this to him. Katherine. The bitch. She had killed half of him, had left him feeling incomplete and wretchedly empty, hollow. The selfish, hateful, vicious bitch! As his fury mounted, he was possessed by an urge to break things. Naked, he stormed through the bungalow--living room and kitchen and bathroom--smashing furniture, ripping upholstery, breaking dishes, cursing his mother, cursing his demon father, cursing a world that he sometimes couldn't understand at all.

***

In Joshua Rhinehart's kitchen, Hilary scrubbed three large baking potatoes and lined them up on the counter, so that they were ready to be popped into the microwave oven as soon as the thick steaks were approaching perfection on the broiler. The menial labor was relaxing. She watched her hands as she worked, and she thought about little more than the food that had to be prepared, and her worries receded to the back of her mind.

Tony was making the salad. He stood at the sink beside her, his shirt sleeves rolled up, washing and chopping fresh vegetables.

While they prepared dinner, Joshua called the sheriff from the kitchen phone. He told Laurenski about the withdrawal of funds from Frye's accounts in San Francisco and about the look-alike who was down in Los Angeles somewhere, searching for Hilary. He also passed along the mass murder theory that he and Tony and Hilary had arrived at in his office a short while ago. There was really not much that Laurenski could do, for (so far as they knew) no crimes had been committed in his jurisdiction. But Frye was most likely guilty of local crimes of which they were, for the moment, unaware. And it was even more likely that crimes might yet be committed in the county before the mystery of the look-alike was solved. Because of that, and because Laurenski's reputation had been stained slightly when he had vouched for Frye to the Los Angeles Police Department last Wednesday night, Joshua thought (and Hilary agreed) that the sheriff was entitled to know everything that they knew. Even though Hilary could hear only one end of the telephone conversation, she could tell that Peter Laurenski was fascinated, and she knew, from Joshua's responses, that the sheriff twice suggested that they exhume the body in Frye's grave to determine whether or not it actually was Bruno Frye. Joshua preferred to wait until Dr. Rudge and Rita Yancy had been heard from, but he assured Laurenski that an exhumation would take place if Rudge and Yancy were unable to answer all of the questions he intended to ask.

When he finished talking with the sheriff, Joshua checked on Tony's salad, debated with himself about whether the lettuce was sufficiently crisp, fretted about whether the radishes were too hot or possibly not hot enough, examined the sizzling steaks as if looking for flaws in three diamonds, told Hilary to put the potatoes in the microwave oven, quickly chopped some fresh chives to go with the sour cream, and opened two bottles of California Cabernet Sauvignon, a very dry red wine from the Robert Mondavi winery just down the road. He was rather a fussbudget in the kitchen; his worrying and nitpicking amused Hilary.

She was surprised at how quickly she had developed a liking for the attorney. She seldom felt so comfortable with a person she had known only a couple of hours. But his fatherly appearance, his gruff honesty, his wit, his intelligence, and his curiously off-handed courtliness made her feel welcome and safe in his company.

They ate in the dining room, a cozy, rustic chamber with three white plaster walls, one used-brick wall, a pegged-oak floor, and an open-beam ceiling. Now and then, squalls of big raindrops burst against the charming leaded windows.

As they sat down to the meal, Joshua said, "One rule. No one talks about Bruno Frye until we've put away the last bite of our steak, the last swallow of this excellent wine, the last mouthful of coffee, and the very last sip of brandy."

"Agreed," Hilary said.

"Definitely," Tony said. "I think my mind overloaded on the subject quite some time ago. There are other things in the world worth talking about."

"Yes," Joshua said. "But unfortunately, many of them are just as thoroughly depressing as Frye's story. War and terrorism and inflation and the return of the Luddites and know-nothing politicians and--"

"--art and music and movies and the latest developments in medicine and the coming technological revolution that will vastly improve our lives in spite of the new Luddites," Hilary added.

Joshua squinted across the table at her. "Is your name Hilary or Pollyanna?"

"And is yours Joshua or Cassandra?" she asked.

"Cassandra was correct when she made her prophecies of doom and destruction," Joshua said, "but time after time everyone refused to believe her."

"If no one believes you," Hilary said, "then what good is it to be right?"

"Oh, I've given up trying to convince other people that the government is the only enemy and that Big Brother will get us all. I've stopped trying to convince them of a hundred other things that seem to be obvious truths to me but which they don't get at all. Too many of them are fools who'll never understand. But it gives me enormous satisfaction just to know I'm right and to see the ever-increasing proof of it in the daily papers. I know. And that's enough."

"Ah," Hilary said. "In other words, you don't care if the world falls apart beneath us, just so you can have the selfish pleasure of saying, 'I told you so.'"

"Ouch," Joshua said.

Tony laughed. "Beware of her, Joshua. Remember, she makes her living being clever with words."

For three-quarters of an hour, they spoke of many things, but then, somehow, in spite of their pledge, they found themselves talking about Bruno Frye once more, long before they were finished with the wine or ready for coffee and brandy.

At one point, Hilary said, "What could Katherine have done to him to make him fear her and hate her as much as he apparently does?"

"That's the same question I asked Latham Hawthorne," Joshua said.

"What'd he say?"

"He had no idea," Joshua said. "I still find it difficult to believe that there could have been such black hatred between them without it being visible even once in all the years I knew them. Katherine always seemed to dote on him. And Bruno seemed to worship her. Of course, everyone in town thought she was something of a saint for having taken in the boy in the first place, but now it looks as if she might have been less saint than devil."

"Wait a minute," Tony said. "She took him in? What do you mean by that?"

"Just what I said. She could have let the child go to an orphanage, but she didn't. She opened her heart and her home to him."

"But," Hilary said, "we thought he was her son."

"Adopted," Joshua said.

"That wasn't in the newspapers," Tony said.

"It was done a long, long time ago," Joshua said. "Bruno had lived all but a few months of his life as a Frye. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was more like a Frye than Katherine's own child might have been if she'd had one. His eyes were the same color as Katherine's. And he certainly had the same cold, introverted, brooding personality that Katherine had--and that people say Leo had, too."

"If he was adopted," Hilary said, "there's a chance he does have a brother."

"No," Joshua said. "He didn't."

"How can you be so sure? Maybe he even has a twin!" Hilary said, excited by the thought.

Joshua frowned, "You think Katherine adopted one of a pair of twins without being aware of it?"

"That would explain the sudden appearance of a dead ringer," Tony said.

Joshua's frown grew deeper, "But where has this mysterious twin brother been all these years?"

"He was probably raised by another family," Hilary said, eagerly fleshing out her theory. "In another town, another part of the state."

"Or maybe even another part of the country," Tony said.

"Are you trying to tell me that, somehow, Bruno and his long-lost brother eventually found each other?"

"It could happen," Hilary said.

Joshua shook his head. "Perhaps it could, but in this case it didn't. Bruno was an only child."

"You're positive?"

"There's no doubt about it," Joshua said. "The circumstances of his birth aren't secret."

"But twins.... It's such a lovely theory," Hilary said.

Joshua nodded. "I know. It's an easy answer, and I'd like to find an easy answer so we can wrap this thing up fast. Believe me, I hate to punch holes in your theory."

"Maybe you can't," Hilary said.

"I can."

"Try," Tony said. "Tell us where Bruno came from, who his real mother was. Maybe we'll punch holes in your story. Maybe it's not as open and shut as you think it is."

***

Eventually, after he had broken and torn and smashed nearly everything in the bungalow, Bruno got control of himself; his fiery, bestial rage cooled into a less destructive, more human anger. For a while, after his temper fell below the boiling point, he stood in the middle of the rubble he had made, breathing hard, sweat dripping off his brow and gleaming on his naked body. Then he went into the bedroom and put on his clothes.

When he was dressed, he stood at the foot of the bloody bed and stared at the brutally butchered body of the woman he had known only as Sally. Now, too late, he realized that she hadn't been Katherine. She hadn't been another reincarnation of his mother. The old bitch han't switched bodies from Hilary Thomas to Sally; she couldn't do that until Hilary was dead. Bruno couldn't imagine why he had ever thought otherwise; he was surprised that he could have been so confused.

However, he felt no remorse for what he had done to Sally. Even if she hadn't been Katherine, she had been one of Katherine's handmaidens, a woman sent from Hell to serve Katherine. Sally had been one of the enemy, a conspirator in the plot to kill him. He was sure of that. Maybe she had even been one of the living dead. Yes. Of course. He was positive of that, too. Yes. Sally had been exactly like Katherine, a dead woman in a new body, one of those monsters who refused to stay in the grave where she belonged. She was one of them. He shuddered. He was certain that she had known all along where Hilary-Katherine was hiding. But she kept that secret, and she deserved to die for her unshakable allegiance to his mother.

Besides, he hadn't actually killed her, for she would come back to life in some other body, pushing out the person whose rightful flesh it was.

Now he must forget about Sally and find Hilary-Katherine. She was still out there somewhere, waiting for him.

He must locate her and kill her before she found a way to kill him first.

At least Sally had given him one small lead. A name. This Topelis fellow. Hilary Thomas's agent. Topelis would probably know where she was hiding.

***

They cleared away the dinner dishes, and Joshua poured more wine for everyone before telling the story of Bruno's rise from orphan to sole heir of the Frye estate. He had gotten his facts over the years, a few at a time, from Katherine and from other people who had lived in St. Helena long before he had come to the valley to practice law.

In 1940, the year Bruno was born, Katherine was twenty-six years old and still living with her father, Leo, in the isolated clifftop house, behind and above the winery, where they had resided together since 1918, the year after Katherine's mother died. Katherine had been away from home only for part of one year that she had spent at college in San Francisco; she had dropped out of school because she hadn't wanted to be away from St. Helena just to acquire a lot of stale knowledge that she would never use. She loved the valley and the big old Victorian house on the cliff. Katherine was a handsome, shapely woman who could have had as many suitors as she wished, but she seemed to find romance of no interest whatsoever. Although she was still young, her introverted personality and her cool attitude toward all men convinced most of the people who knew her that she would be an old maid and, furthermore, that she would be perfectly happy in that role. Then, in January of 1940, Katherine received a call from a friend, Mary Gunther, whom she'd known at college a few years earlier. Mary needed help; a man had gotten her into trouble. He had promised to marry her, had strung her along with excuse after excuse, and then had skipped out when she was six months pregnant. Mary was nearly broke, and she had no family to turn to for help, no friend half so close as Katherine. She asked Katherine to come to San Francisco a few months hence, as soon as the baby arrived; Mary didn't want to be alone at that trying time. She also asked Katherine to care for the baby until she, Mary, could find a job and build up a nest egg and provide a proper home for the child. Katherine agreed to help and began telling people in St. Helena that she would be a temporary surrogate mother. She seemed so happy, so excited by the prospect, that her neighbors said she would be a wonderful mother to her own children if she could just find a man to marry her and father them.

Six weeks after Mary Gunther's telephone call, and six weeks before Katherine was scheduled to go to San Francisco to be with her friend, Leo suffered a massive cerebral hemmorhage and dropped dead among the high stacks of oak barrels in one of the winery's huge aging cellars. Although Katherine was stunned and grief-stricken, and although she had to start learning to run the family business, she did not back out of her promise to Mary Gunther. In April, when Mary sent a message that the baby had arrived, Katherine went off to San Francisco. She was gone more than two weeks, and when she returned, she had a tiny baby, Bruno Gunther, Mary's alarmingly small and fragile child.

Katherine expected to have Bruno for a year, at which time Mary would be firmly on her feet and ready to assume complete responsibility for the tyke. But after six months, word came that Mary had more trouble, much worse this time--a virulent form of cancer. Mary was dying. She had only a few weeks to live, a month at most. Katherine took the baby to San Francisco, so that the mother could spend what little time she had left in the company of her child. During Mary's last days, she made all of the necessary legal arrangements for Katherine to be granted permanent custody of the baby. Mary's own parents were dead; she had no other close relatives with whom Bruno could live. If Katherine had not taken him in, he would have wound up in an orphanage or in the care of foster parents who might or might not have been good to him. Mary died, and Katherine paid for the funeral, then returned to St. Helena with Bruno.

She raised the boy as if he were her own, acting not just like a guardian but like a concerned and loving mother. She could have afforded nursemaids and other household help, but she didn't hire them; she refused to let anyone else tend to the child. Leo had not employed domestic help, and Katherine had her father's spirit of independence. She got along well on her own, and when Bruno was four years old, she returned to San Francisco, to the judge who had awarded her custody at Mary's request, and she formally adopted Bruno, giving him the Frye family name.

Hoping to get a clue from Joshua's story, alert for any inconsistencies or absurdities, Hilary and Tony had been leaning forward, arms on the dining room table, while they listened. Now they leaned back in their chairs and picked up their wine glasses.

Joshua said, "There are still people in St. Helena who remember Katherine Frye primarily as the saintly woman who took in a poor foundling and gave him love and more than a little wealth, too."

"So there wasn't a twin," Tony said.

"Definitely not," Joshua said.

Hilary sighed. "Which means we're back at square one."

"There are a couple of things in that story that bother me," Tony said.

Joshua raised his eyebrows. "Like what?"

"Well, even these days, with our more liberal attitudes, we still make it damned hard for a single woman to adopt a child," Tony said. "And in 1940, it must have been very nearly impossible."

"I think I can explain that," Joshua said. "If memory serves me well, Katherine once told me that she and Mary had anticipated the court's reluctance to sanction the arrangement. So they told the judge what they felt was just a little white lie. They said that Katherine was Mary's cousin and her closest living relative. In those days, if a close relative wanted to take the child in, the court almost automatically approved."

"And the judge just accepted their claim of a blood relationship without checking into it?" Tony asked.

"You have to remember that, in 1940, judges had a lot less interest in involving themselves in family matters than they seem to have now. It was a time when Americans viewed government's role as a relatively minor one. Generally, it was a saner time than ours."

To Tony, Hilary said, "You said there were a couple of things that bothered you. What's the other one?"

Tony wearily wiped his face with one hand. "The other's not something that can easily be put into words. It's just a hunch. But the story sounds ... too smooth."

"You mean fabricated?" Joshua asked.

"I don't know," Tony said. "I don't really know what I mean. But when you've been a policeman as long as I have, you develop a nose for these things."

"And something smells?" Hilary asked.

"I think so."

"What?" Joshua asked.

"Nothing particular. Like I said, the story just sounds too smooth, too pat." Tony drank the last of his wine and then said, "Could Bruno actually be Katherine's child?"

Joshua stared at him, dumbfounded. When he could speak, he said, "Are you serious?"

"Yes."

"You're asking me if it's possible that she made up the whole thing about Mary Gunther and merely went away to San Francisco to have her own illegitimate baby?"

"That's what I'm asking," Tony said.

"No," Joshua said. "She wasn't pregnant."

"Are you sure?"

"Well," Joshua said, "I didn't personally take her urine sample and perform a rabbit test with it. I wasn't even living in the valley in 1940. I didn't get here until '45, after the war. But I've heard her story repeated, sometimes in part and sometimes in its entirety, by people who were here in '40. Now you'll say that they were probably just repeating what she had told them. But if she was pregnant, she couldn't have hidden the fact. Not in a town as small as St. Helena. Everyone would have known."

"There's a small percentage of women who don't swell up a great deal when they're carrying a child," Hilary said. "You could look at them and never know."

"You're forgetting that she had no interest in men," Joshua said. "She didn't date anyone. How could she possibly have gotten pregnant?"

"Perhaps she didn't date any locals," Tony said. "But at harvest time, toward the end of summer, aren't there a lot of migrant workers in the vineyards? And aren't a lot of them young, handsome, virile men?"

"Wait, wait, wait," Joshua said. "You're reaching way out in left field again. You're trying to tell me that Katherine, whose lack of interest in men was widely remarked upon, suddenly fell for a field hand."

"It's been known to happen."

"But then you're also trying to tell me that this unlikely pair of lovers carried out at least a brief affair in a virtual fish bowl without being caught or even causing gossip. And then you're trying to tell me that she was a unique woman, one in a thousand, a woman who didn't look pregnant when she was. No." Joshua shook his white-maned head. "It's too much for me. Too many coincidences. You think Katherine's story sounds too neat, too smooth, but next to your wild suppositions, her tale has the gritty sound of reality."

"You're right," Hilary said. "So another promising theory bites the dust." She finished her wine.

Tony scratched his chin and sighed. "Yeah. I guess I'm too damned tired to make a whole lot of sense. But I still don't think Katherine's story makes perfect sense, either. There's something more to it. Something she was hiding. Something strange."

***

In Sally's kitchen, standing on broken dishes, Bruno Frye opened the telephone book and looked up the number of Topelis & Associates. Their offices were in Beverly Hills. He dialed and got an answering service, which was what he had expected.

"I've got an emergency here," he told the answering service operator, "and I thought maybe you could help me."

"Emergency?" she asked.

"Yes. You see, my sister is one of Mr. Topelis's clients. There's been a death in the family, and I've got to get hold of her right away."

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said.

"The thing of it is, my sister's apparently off on a short holiday, and I don't know where she's gone."

"I see."

"It's urgent that I get in touch with her."

"Well, ordinarily, I'd pass your message right on to Mr. Topelis. But he's out tonight, and he didn't leave a number where he could be reached."

"I wouldn't want to bother him anyway," Bruno said. "I thought, with all the calls you take for him, maybe you might know where my sister is. I mean, maybe she called in and left word for Mr. Topelis, something that would indicate where she was."

"What's your sister's name?"

"Hilary Thomas."

"Oh, yes! I do know where she is."

"That's wonderful. Where?"

"I didn't take a message from her. But someone called in just a while ago and left a message for Mr. Topelis to pass on to her. Hold the line just a sec. Okay?"

"Sure."

"I've got it written down here somewhere."

Bruno waited patiently while she sorted through her memos.

Then she said, "Here it is. A Mr. Wyant Stevens called. He wanted Mr.Topelis to tell Miss Thomas that he, Mr. Stevens, was eager to handle the paintings. Mr. Stevens said he wanted her to know he wouldn't be able to sleep until she got back from St. Helena and gave him a chance to strike a deal. So she must be in St. Helena."

Bruno was shocked.

He couldn't speak.

"I don't know what hotel or motel," the operator said apologetically. "But there aren't really many places to stay in all of Napa Valley, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding her."

"No trouble," Bruno said shakily.

"Does she know anyone in St. Helena?"

"Huh?"

"I just thought maybe she's staying with friends," the operator suggested.

"Yes," Bruno said. "I think I know just where she is."

"I'm really sorry about the death."

"What?"

"The death in the family."

"Oh," Bruno said. He licked his lips nervously. "Yes. There have been quite a few deaths in the family the past five years. Thank you for your help."

"No trouble."

He hung up.

She was in St. Helena.

The brazen bitch had gone back.

Why? My God, what was she doing? What was she after? What was she up to?

Whatever she had in mind, it would not do him any good. That was for damned sure.

Frantic, afraid that she was planning some trick that would be the death of him, he began to call the airlines at Los Angeles International, trying to get a seat on a flight north. There were no commuter planes until morning, and all of the early flights were already booked solid. He wouldn't be able to get out of L.A. until tomorrow afternoon.

That would be too late.

He knew it. Sensed it.

He had to move fast.

He decided to drive. The night was still young. If he stayed behind the wheel all night and kept the accelerator to the floor, he could reach St. Helena by dawn.

He had a feeling his life depended on it.

He hurried out of the bungalow, stumbling through ruined furniture and other rubble, leaving the front door wide open, not bothering to be careful, not taking time to see if anyone was nearby. He sprinted across the lawn, into the dark and deserted street toward his van.

***

After they enjoyed coffee with brandy in the den, Joshua showed Tony and Hilary to the guest room and connecting bath at the far end of the house from his own sleeping quarters. The chamber was large and pleasant, with deep window sills and leaded glass windows like those in the dining room. The bed was an enormous fourposter that delighted Hilary.

After they said goodnight to Joshua and closed the bedroom door, and after they drew the drapes over the windows to prevent the eyeless night from gazing blindly in at them, they took a shower together to soothe their aching muscles. They were quite exhausted, and they intended only to try to recapture the sweet, relaxing, childlike, asexual pleasure of the bath that they had shared the previous night at the airport hotel in L.A. Neither of them expected passion to raise its lovely head. However, as he lathered her breasts, the gentle, rhythmic, circular movements of his hands made her skin tingle and sent wonderful shivers through her. He cupped her breasts, filled his large hands with them, and her nipples hardened and rose through the soapy foam that sheathed them. He went to his knees and washed her belly, her long slim legs, her buttocks. For Hilary, the world shrank to a small sphere, to just a few sights and sounds and exquisite sensations: the odor of lilac-scented soap, the hiss and patter of falling water, the swirling patterns in the steam, his lean and supple body glistening as water cascaded over his well-defined muscles, the eager and incredible growth of his manhood as she took her turn lathering him. By the time they finished showering, they had forgotten how tired they were, they had forgotten their aching muscles; only desire remained.

On the fourposter bed, in the soft glow of a single lamp, he held her and kissed her eyes, her nose, her lips. He kissed her chin, her neck, her turgid nipples.

"Please," she said. "Now."

"Yes," he said against the hollow of her throat.

She opened her legs to him, and he entered her.

"Hilary," he said. "My sweet, sweet Hilary."

He drove into her with great strength and yet with tenderness, filled her up.

She rocked in time with him. Her hands moved over his broad back, tracing the outlines of his muscles. She had never felt so alive, so energized. In only a minute, she began to come, and she thought she might never stop, just rise from peak to peak, on and on, forever and ever, without end.

As he moved within her, they became one body and soul in a way she had never been with any other man. And she knew Tony felt it, too, this unique and astonishingly deep bonding. They were physically, emotionally, intellectually, and psychically joined, molded into a single being that was far superior to the sum of its two halves, and in that moment of phenomenal synergism--which neither of them had experienced with other lovers--Hilary knew that what they had was so special, so important, so rare, so powerful, that it would last as long as they lived. As she called his name and lifted up to meet his thrusts and climaxed yet again. and as he began to spurt within the deep darkness of her, she knew, as she had known the first time they'd made love, that she could trust him and rely on him as she'd never been able to trust or rely upon another human being; and, best of all, she knew that she would never be alone again.

Afterwards, as they lay together beneath the covers, he said, "Will you tell me about the scar on your side?"

"Yes. Now I will."

"It looks like a bullet wound."

"It is. I was nineteen, living in Chicago. I'd been out of high school for a year. I was working as a typist, trying to save enough money so I could get a place of my own. I was paying Earl and Emma rent for my room."

"Earl and Emma?"

"My parents."

"You called them by their first names?"

"I never thought of them as my father and mother."

"They must have hurt you a lot," he said sympathetically.

"Every chance they got."

"If you don't want to talk about it now--"

"I do," she said. "Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I want to talk about it. It doesn't hurt to talk about it. Because now I've got you, and that makes up for all the bad days."

"My family was poor," Tony said. "But there was love in our house."

"You were lucky."

"I'm sorry for you, Hilary."

"It's over," she said. "They've been dead a long time, and I should have exorcised them years ago."

"Tell me."

"I was paying them a few dollars rent each week, which they used to buy a little more booze, but I was socking away everything else I earned as a typist. Every penny. Not much, but it grew in the bank. I didn't even spend anything for lunch; I went without. I was determined to get an apartment of my own. I didn't even care if it was another shabby place with dark little rooms and bad plumbing and cockroaches just so Earl and Emma didn't come with it."

Tony kissed her cheek, the corner of her mouth.

She said, "Finally, I saved up enough. I was ready to move out. One more day, one more paycheck, and I was going to be on my way."

She trembled.

Tony held her close.

"I came home from work that day," Hilary said, "and I went into the kitchen--and there was Earl holding Emma against the refrigerator. He had a gun. The barrel was jammed into her teeth."

"My God."

"He was going through a very bad siege of.... Do you know what delirium tremens are?"

"Sure. They're hallucinations. Spells of mindless fear. It's something that happens to really chronic alcoholics. I've dealt with people who've been having delirium tremens. They can be violent and unpredictable."

"Earl had that gun against her teeth, which she kept clenched, and he started screaming crazy stuff about giant worms that he thought were coming out of the walls. He accused Emma of letting the worms out of the walls, and he wanted her to stop them. I tried to talk to him, but he wasn't listening. And then the worms kept coming out of the walls and started slithering around his feet; he got furious with Emma, and he pulled the trigger."

"Jesus."

"I saw her face blown away."

"Hilary--"

"I need to talk about it."

"All right."

"I've never talked about it before."

"I'm listening."

"I ran out of the kitchen when he shot her," Hilary said.

"I knew I couldn't make it out of the apartment and down the hall before he shot me in the back, so I ducked the other way, into my room. I closed and locked the door, but he shot the lock off. By then, he was convinced that I was the one causing the worms to come out of the walls. He shot me. It wasn't anywhere close to being a fatal wound, but it hurt like hell, like a white-hot poker in my side, and it bled a lot."

"Why didn't he shoot you again? What saved you?"

"I stabbed him," she said.

"Stabbed? Where'd you get the knife?"

"I kept one in my room. I'd had it since I was eight. I'd never used it until then. But I'd always thought that if one of their beatings got out of hand and it looked like they were going to finish me, I'd cut them to save myself. So I cut Earl about the same instant he pulled the trigger. I didn't hurt him any worse than he hurt me, but he was shocked, terrified at the sight of his own blood. He ran out of the room, back to the kitchen. He started shouting at Emma again, telling her to make the worms go away before they smelled his blood and came after him. Then he emptied his gun into her because she wouldn't send the worms away. I was hurting something terrible from the wound in my side, and I was scared, but I tried to count the shots. When I thought he'd used up his ammunition, I hobbled out of my room and tried to make it to the front door. But he had several boxes of bullets. He had reloaded. He saw me and shot at me from the kitchen, and I ran back to my room. I barricaded the door with a dresser and hoped help would come before I bled to death. Out in the kitchen, Earl kept screaming about the worms, and then about giant crabs at the windows, and he kept emptying the gun into Emma. He put almost a hundred and fifty rounds into her before it was all over. She was torn to pieces. The kitchen was a charnel house."

Tony cleared his throat. "What happened to him?"

"He killed himself when the SWAT team finally broke in."

"And you?"

"A week in the hospital. A scar to remind me."

They were silent for a while.

Beyond the drapes, beyond the leaded windows, the night wind coughed.

"I don't know what to say," Tony said.

"Tell me you love me."

"I do."

"Tell me."

"I love you."

"I love you, Tony."

He kissed her.

"I love you more than I ever thought I could love anyone," she said. "In just a week, you've changed me forever."

"You're damned strong," he said admiringly.

"You give me strength."

"You had plenty of that before I came along."

"Not enough. You give me more, Usually ... just thinking about that day he shot me ... I get upset, scared all over again, as if it just happened yesterday. But I didn't get scared this time. I told you all about it, and I was hardly affected. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because all the terrible things that happened in Chicago, the shooting and everything that came before it, all of that is ancient history now. None of it matters any more. I have you, and you make up for all the bad times. You balance the scales. In fact, you tip the scales in my favor."

"It works both ways, you know, I need you as much as you need me."

"I know. That's what makes it so perfect."

They were silent again.

Then she said, "There's another reason that those memories of Chicago don't scare me any more. I mean, besides the fact that I've got you now."

"What's that?"

"Well, it has to do with Bruno Frye. Tonight I began to realize that he and I have a lot in common. It looks like he endured the same sort of torture from Katherine that I got from Earl and Emma. But he cracked, and I didn't. That big strong man cracked, but I held on. That means something to me. It means a lot. It tells me that I shouldn't worry so much, that I should not be afraid of opening myself to people, that I can take just about anything the world throws at me."

"That's what I told you. You're strong, tough, hard as nails," Tony said.

"I'm not hard. Feel me. Do I feel hard?"

"Not here," he said.

"What about here?"

"Firm," he said.

"Firm isn't the same as hard."

"You feel nice."

"Nice isn't the same as hard either."

"Nice and firm and warm," he said.

She squeezed him.

"This is hard," she said, grinning.

"But it's not hard to make it soft again. Want me to show you?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes. Show me."

They made love again.

As Tony filled her up and explored her with long silken strokes, as waves of pleasure crashed through her, she was sure that everything would be all right. The act of love reassured her, gave her tremendous confidence in the future. Bruno Frye had not come back from the grave. She wasn't being stalked by a walking corpse. There was a logical explanation. Tomorrow they would talk to Dr. Rudge and Rita Yancy, and they would learn what lay behind the mystery of the Frye look-alike. They would uncover enough information and proof to help the police, and the double would be found, arrested. The danger would pass. Then she would always be with Tony, and Tony with her, and then nothing really bad could happen. Nothing could hurt her. Neither Bruno Frye nor anyone else could hurt her. She was happy and safe at last.

Later, as she lay on the edge of sleep, a sharp crash of thunder filled the sky, rolled down the mountains, into the valley, and over the house.

A strange thought flashed through her mind: The thunder is a warning. It's an omen. It's telling me to be careful and not to be so damned sure of myself.

But before she could explore that thought further, she fell off the edge of sleep, all the way down into it.

***

Frye drove north from Los Angeles, traveling near the sea at first, then swinging inland with the freeway.

California had just come out of one of its periodic gasoline shortages. Service stations were open. Fuel was available. The freeway was a concrete artery running through the flesh of the state. The twin scalpels of his headlights laid it bare for his examination.

As he drove, he thought about Katherine. The bitch! What was she doing in St. Helena? Had she moved back into the house on the cliff? If she had done that, had she also taken over control of the winery again? And would she try to force him to move in with her? Would he have to live with her and obey her as before? All of those questions were of vital importance to him, even though most of them didn't make any sense whatsoever and could not be sensibly answered.

He was aware that his mind was not clear. He wasn't able to think straight regardless of how hard he tried, and that inability frightened him.

He wondered if he should pull over at the next rest area and get some sleep. When he woke he might have control of himself again.

But then he remembered that Hilary-Katherine was already in St. Helena, and the possibility that she was setting a trap for him in his own house was far more unsettling than his temporary inability to order his thoughts.

He wondered, briefly, whether the house was actually his any longer. After all, he was dead. (Or half dead.) And they had buried him. (Or they thought they had.) Eventually, the estate would be liquidated.

As Bruno considered the extent of his losses, he got very angry with Katherine for taking so much from him and leaving so little. She had killed him, had taken himself from him, leaving him alone, without himself to touch and talk to, and now she had even moved into his house.

He pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator until the speedometer registered ninety miles an hour.

If a cop stopped him for speeding, Bruno intended to kill him. Use the knife. Cut him open. Rip him up. No one was going to stop Bruno from getting to St. Helena before sunrise.

Seven

AFRAID THAT HE would be seen by men on the night crew at the winery, men who knew him to be dead, Bruno Frye did not drive the van onto the property. Instead, he parked almost a mile away, on the main road, and walked overland, through the vineyards, to the house that he had built five years ago.

Shining indirectly through ragged tears in the cloud cover, the cold white moon cast just enough light for him to make his way between the vines.

The rolling hills were silent. The air smelled vaguely of copper sulphate which had been sprayed during the summer to prevent mildew, and overlaying that was the fresh, ozone odor of the rain that had stirred up the copper sulphate. There was no rain falling now. There couldn't have been much of a storm earlier, just sprinkles, squalls. The land was only soft and damp, not muddy.

The night sky was one shade brighter than it had been half an hour ago. Dawn had not yet arrived from its bed in the east, but it would be rising soon.

When he reached the clearing, Bruno hunkered down beside a line of shrubbery and studied the shadows around the house. The windows were dark and blank. Nothing moved. There was not a sound except the soft, whispery whistle of the wind.

Bruno crouched by the shrubs for a few minutes. He was afraid to move, afraid that she was waiting for him inside. But at last, heart pounding, he forced himself to forsake the cover and relative safety of the shrubbery; he got up and walked to the front door.

His left hand held a flashlight that wasn't switched on, and his right hand held a knife. He was prepared to lunge and thrust at the slightest movement, but there was no movement other than his own.

At the doorstep, he put the flashlight down, fished a key out of his jacket pocket, unlocked the door. He picked up the flash, pushed the door open with one foot, snapped on the light that he carried, and went into the house fast and low, the knife held straight out in front of him.

She wasn't waiting in the foyer.

Bruno went slowly from one gloomy, overfurnished room to another gloomy, overfurnished room. He looked in closets and behind sofas and behind large display cases.

She wasn't in the house.

Perhaps he had gotten back in time to stop whatever plot she was hatching.

He stood in the middle of the living room, the knife and the flashlight still in his hands, both of them directed at the floor. He swayed, exhausted, dizzy, confused.

It was one of those times when he desperately needed to talk to himself, to share his feelings with himself, to work out his confusion with himself and get his mind back on the track. But he would never again be able to consult with himself because himself was dead.

Dead.

Bruno began to shake. He wept.

He was alone and frightened and very mixed-up.

For forty years, he had posed as an ordinary man, and he had passed for normal with considerable success. But he could not do that any more. Half of him was dead. The loss was too great for him to recover. He had no self-confidence. Without himself to turn to, without his other self to give advice and offer suggestions, he did not have the resources to maintain the charade.

But the bitch was in St. Helena. Somewhere. He couldn't sort out his thoughts, couldn't get a grip on himself, but he knew one thing: He had to find her and kill her. He had to get rid of her once and for all.

***

The small travel alarm was set to go off at seven o'clock Thursday morning.

Tony woke an hour before it was time to get up. He woke with a start, began to sit up in bed, realized where he was, and eased back down to the pillow. He lay on his back, in the dark, staring at the shadowy ceiling, listening to Hilary's rhythmic breathing.

He had bolted from sleep to escape a nightmare. It was a brutal, grisly dream filled with mortuaries and tombs and graves and coffins, a dream that was somber and heavy and dark with death. Knives. Bullets. Blood. Worms coming out of the walls and wriggling from the staring eyes of corpses. Walking dead men who spoke of crocodiles. In the dream, Tony's life had been threatened half a dozen times, but on each occasion, Hilary had stepped between him and the killer, and every time she had died for him.

It was a damned disturbing dream.

He was afraid of losing her. He loved her. He loved her more than he could ever tell her. He was an articulate man, and he was not the least bit reluctant to express his emotions, but he simply did not have the words to properly describe the depth and quality of his feeling for her. He didn't think such words existed; all of the ones he knew were crude, leaden, hopelessly inadequate. If she were taken from him, life would go on, of course--but not easily, not happily, not without a great deal of pain and grief.

He stared at the dark ceiling and told himself that the dream had not been anything to worry about. It had not been an omen. It had not been a prophecy. It was only a dream. Just a bad dream. Nothing more than a dream.

In the distance, a train whistle blew two long blasts. It was a cold, lonely, mournful sound that made him pull the covers up to his chin.

***

Bruno decided that Katherine might be waiting for him in the house that Leo had built.

He left his own house and crossed the vineyards. He took the knife and flashlight with him.

In the first pale light of dawn, while most of the sky was still blue-black, while the valley lay in the fading penumbra of the night, he went to the clifftop house. He did not go up by way of the cable car because, in order to board it, he would have to go into the winery and climb to the second floor, where the lower tramway station occupied a corner of the building. He dared not be seen in there, for he figured the place was now crawling with Katherine's spies. He wanted to sneak up on the house, and the only route by which he could do that was the stairs on the face of the cliff.

He started climbing rapidly, two steps at a time, but before he went very far, he discovered that caution was essential. The staircase was crumbling. It had not been kept in good repair, as the tramway had been. Decades of rain and wind and summer heat had leeched away much of the mortar that bound the old structure together. Small stones, pieces of virtually every one of the three hundred and twenty steps, broke off under his feet and clattered to the base of the cliff. Several times, he almost lost his balance, almost fell backwards, or almost pitched sideways into space. The safety railing was decayed, dilapidated, missing whole sections; it would not save him if he stumbled against it. But slowly, cautiously, he followed the switchback path of the staircase, and in time he reached the top of the cliff.

He crossed the lawn, which had gone to weeds. Dozens of rose bushes, once carefully tended and manicured, had sent thorny tentacles in all directions and now sprawled in tangled, flowerless heaps.

Bruno let himself into the rambling Victorian mansion and searched the musty, dust-filmed, spider-webbed rooms which stank of mildew that thrived on the drapes and carpets. The house was crammed full of antique furniture and art glass and statuary and many other things, but it did not hold anything sinister. The woman was not here, either.

He didn't know whether that was good or bad. On the one hand, she hadn't moved in, hadn't taken over in his absence. That was good. He was relieved about that. But on the other hand--where the hell was she?

His confusion was rapidly getting worse. His powers of reasoning began to fail him hours ago, but now he couldn't trust his five senses, either. Sometimes he thought he heard voices, and he pursued them through the house, only to realize it was his own mumbling that he heard. Sometimes the mildew didn't smell like mildew at all, but like his mother's favorite perfume; but then a moment later it smelled like mildew again. And when he looked at familiar paintings that had hung on these walls since his childhood, he was unable to perceive what they were depicting; the shapes and colors would not resolve themselves, and his eyes were baffled by even the most simple pictures. He stood before one painting that he knew to be a landscape with trees and wildflowers, but he was not able to see those objects in it; he could only remember that they were there; all he saw now were smears, disjointed lines, blobs, meaningless forms.

He tried not to panic. He told himself that his bizarre confusion and disorientation were merely the results of his not having slept all night. He'd driven a long way in a short time, and he was understandably weary. His eyes were heavy, gritty, red and burning. He ached all over. His neck was stiff. All he needed was sleep. When he woke, he would be clear-headed. That was what he told himself. That was what he had to believe.

Because he had searched the house from bottom to top, he was now in the finished attic, the big room with the sloped ceiling, where he had spent so much of his life. In the chalky glow of his flashlight, he could see the bed in which he had slept during the years he'd lived in the mansion.

Himself was already on the bed. Himself was lying down, eyes closed, as if sleeping. Of course, the eyes were sewn shut. And the white nightgown was not a nightgown; it was a burial gown that Avril Tannerton had put on him. Because himself was dead. The bitch had stabbed and killed him. Himself had been stone-cold dead since last week.

Bruno was too enervated to vent his grief and rage. He went to the king-size bed and stretched out on his half of it, beside himself.

Himself stank. It was a pungent, chemical smell.

The bedclothes around himself were stained and damp with dark fluids that were slowly leaking out of the body.

Bruno didn't care about the mess. His side of the bed was dry. And although himself was dead and would never speak again or laugh again, Bruno felt good just being near himself.

Bruno reached out and touched himself. He touched the cold, hard, rigid hand and held it.

Some of the painful loneliness abated.

Bruno did not feel whole, of course. He would never feel whole again, for half of him was dead. But lying there beside his corpse, he did not feel all alone either.

Leaving the flashlight on to dispel the darkness in the shuttered attic bedroom, Bruno fell asleep.

***

Dr. Nicholas Rudge's office was on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco. Apparently, Hilary thought, the architect either had never heard of the unpleasant term "earthquake country," or he had made a very good deal with the devil. One wall of Rudge's office was glass from floor to ceiling, divided into three enormous panels by only two narrow, vertical, steel struts; beyond the window lay the terraced city, the bay, the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, and the lingering tendrils of last night's fog. A quickening Pacific wind was tearing the gray clouds to tatters, and blue sky was becoming more dominant by the minute. The view was spectacular.

At the far end of the big room from the window-wall, six comfortable chairs were arranged around a circular teak coffee table. Obviously, group therapy sessions were held in that corner. Hilary, Tony, Joshua, and the doctor sat down there.

Rudge was an affable man with the ability to make you feel as if you were the most interesting and charming individual he had encountered in ages. He was as bald as all the clichés (a billiard ball, a baby's bottom, an eagle), but he had a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. He wore a three-piece suit with a tie and display handkerchief that matched, but there was nothing of the banker or of the dandy in his appearance. He looked distinguished, reliable, yet as relaxed as if he'd been wearing tennis whites.

Joshua summed up the evidence that the doctor had said he would need to hear, and he delivered a short lecture (which seemed to entertain Rudge) about a psychiatrist's obligation to protect society from a patient who appeared to have homicidal tendencies. In a quarter of an hour, Rudge heard enough to be convinced that a claim of doctor-patient privilege was neither wise nor justified in this case. He was willing to open the Frye file to them.

"Although I must admit," Rudge said, "if only one of you had come in here with this incredible story, I'd have put very little credence in it. I'd have thought you were in need of my professional services."

"We've considered the possibility that all three of us are out of our minds," Joshua said.

"And rejected it," Tony said.

"Well, if you are unbalanced," Rudge said, "then you'd better make it 'the four of us' because you've made a believer out of me, too."

During the past eighteen months (Rudge explained), he had seen Frye eighteen times in private, fifty-minute sessions. After the first appointment, when he realized the patient was deeply disturbed about something, he encouraged Frye to come in at least once every week, for he believed that the problem was too serious to respond to once-a-month sessions. But Frye had resisted the idea of more frequent treatments.

"As I told you on the phone," Rudge said, "Mr. Frye was torn between two desires. He wanted my help. He wanted to get to the root of his problem. But at the same time, he was afraid of revealing things to me--and afraid of what he might learn about himself."

"What was his problem?" Tony asked.

"Well, of course, the problem itself--the psychological knot that was causing his anxiety and tension and stress--was hidden in his subconscious mind. That's why he needed me. Eventually, we'd have been able to uncover that knot, and we might even have untied it, if the therapy had been successful. But we never got that far. So I can't tell you what was wrong with him because I don't really know. But I think what you're actually asking me is--what brought Frye to me in the first place? What made him realize that he needed help?"

"Yes," Hilary said. "At least that's a place to start. What were his symptoms?"

"The most disturbing thing, at least from Mr. Frye's point of view, was a recurring nightmare that terrified him."

A tape recorder stood on the circular coffee table, and two piles of cassettes lay beside it, fourteen in one pile, four in the other. Rudge leaned forward in his chair and picked up one of the four.

"All of my consultations are recorded and stored in a safe," the doctor said. "These are tapes of Mr. Frye's sessions. Last night, after I spoke with Mr. Rhinehart on the phone, I listened to portions of these recordings to see if I could find a few representative selections. I had a hunch you might convince me to open the file, and I thought it might be better if you could hear Bruno Frye's complaints in his own voice."

"Excellent," Joshua said.

"This first one is from the very first session," Dr. Rudge said. "For the first forty minutes, Frye would say almost nothing at all. It was very strange. He seemed outwardly calm and self-possessed, but I saw that he was frightened and trying to conceal his true feelings. He was afraid to talk to me. He almost got up and left. But I kept working at him gently, very gently. In the last ten minutes, he told me what he'd come to see me about, but even then it was like pulling teeth to get it out of him. Here's part of it."

Rudge pushed the cassette into the recorder and snapped on the machine.

When Hilary heard the familiar, deep, gravelly voice, she felt a chill race down her spine.

Frye spoke first:

"I have this trouble."

"What sort of trouble?"

"At night."

"Yes?"

"Every night."

"You mean you have trouble sleeping?"

"That's part of it."

"Can you be more specific?"

"I have this dream."

"What sort of dream?"

"A nightmare."

"The same one every night?"

"Yes."

"How long has this been going on?"

"As long as I can remember."

"A year? Two years?"

"No, no. Much longer than that."

"Five Years? Ten?"

"At least thirty. Maybe longer."

"You've been having the same bad dream every night for at least thirty years?"

"That's right."

"Surely not every night."

"Yes. There's never a reprieve."

"What's this dream about?"

"I don't know."

"Don't hold back."

"I'm not."

"You want to tell me."

"Yes."

"That's why you're here. So tell me."

"I want to. But I just don't know what the dream is."

"How can you have had it every night for thirty years or more and not know what it's about?"

"I wake up screaming. I always know a dream woke me. But I'm never able to remember it."

"Then how do you know it's always the same dream?"

"I just know."

"That's not good enough."

"Good enough for what?"

"Good enough to convince me that it's always the same dream. If you're so sure it's just one recurring nightmare, then you must have better reasons than that for thinking so."

"If I tell you ..."

"Yes?"

"You'll think I'm crazy."

"I never use the word 'crazy.'"

"You don't?"

"No."

"Well... every time the dream wakes me, I feel as if there's something crawling on me."

"What is it?"

"I don't know. I can never remember. But I feel as if something's trying to crawl in my nose and in my mouth. Something disgusting. It's trying to get into me. It pushes at the corners of my eyes, trying to make me open my eyes. I feel it moving under my clothes. It's in my hair. It's everywhere. Crawling, creeping..."

In Nicholas Rudge's office, everyone was watching the tape recorder.

Frye's voice was still gravelly, but there was raw terror in it now.

Hilary almost could see the big man's fear-twisted face--the shock-wide eyes, the pale skin, the cold sweat along his hairline.

The tape continued:

"Is it just one thing crawling on you?"

"I don't know."

"Or is it many things?"

"I don't know."

"What does it feel like?"

"Just ... awful... sickening."

"Why does this thing want to get inside you?"

"I don't know."

"And you say you always feel like this after a dream."

"Yeah. For a minute or two."

"Is there anything else that you feel in addition to this crawling sensation?"

"Yeah. But it's not a feeling. It's a sound."

"What sort of sound?"

"Whispers."

"You mean that you wake up and imagine that you hear people whispering?"

"That's right. Whispering, whispering, whispering. All around me."

"Who are these people?"

"I don't know."

"What are they whispering?"

"I don't know."

"Do you have the feeling they're trying to tell you something?"

"Yes. But I can't make it out."

"Do you have a theory, a hunch? Can you make a guess?"

"I can't hear the words exactly, but I know they're saying bad things."

"Bad things? In what way?"

"They're threatening me. They hate me."

"Threatening whispers."

"Yes."

"How long do they last?"

"About as long as the ... creeping ... crawling."

"A minute or so?"

"Yes. Do I sound crazy?"

"Not at all."

"Come on. I sound a little crazy."

"Believe me, Mr. Frye, I've heard stories much stranger than yours."

"I keep thinking that if I knew what the whispers were saying, and if I knew what was crawling on me, I'd be able to figure out what the dream is. And once I know what it is, maybe I won't have it any more."

"That's almost exactly how we're going to approach the problem."

"Can you help me?"

"Well, to a great extent that depends on how much you want to help yourself."

"Oh, I want to beat this thing. I sure do."

"Then you probably will."

"I've been living with it so long ... but I never get used to it. I dread going to sleep. Every night, I just dread it."

"Have you undergone therapy before?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I was afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of what ... you might find out."

"Why should you be afraid?"

"It might be something ... embarrassing."

"You can't embarrass me."

"I might embarrass myself."

"Don't worry about that. I'm your doctor. I'm here to listen and help. If you--"

Dr. Rudge popped the cassette out of the tape recorder and said, "A recurring nightmare. That's not particularly unusual. But a nightmare followed by tactile and audial hallucinations--that's not a common complaint."

"And in spite of that," Joshua said, "he didn't strike you as dangerous?"

"Oh, heavens, no," Rudge said. "He was just frightened of a dream, and understandably so. And the fact that some dream sensations lingered even after he was awake meant that the nightmare probably represented some especially horrible, repressed experience buried way down in his subconscious. But nightmares are generally a healthy way to let off psychological steam. He exhibited no signs of psychosis. He didn't seem to confuse components of his dream with reality. He drew a clear line when he talked about it. In his mind, there appeared to be a sharp distinction between the nightmare and the real world."

Tony slid forward on his chair. "Could he have been less sure of reality than he let you know?"

"You mean ... could he have fooled me?"

"Could he?"

Rudge nodded. "Psychology isn't an exact science. And by comparison, psychiatry is even less exact. Yes, he could have fooled me, especially since I only saw him once a month and didn't have a chance to observe the mood swings and personality changes that would have been more evident if we'd had weekly contact."

"In light of what Joshua told you a while ago," Hilary said, do you feel you were fooled?"

Rudge smiled ruefully. "It looks as if I was, doesn't it?"

He picked up a second cassette that had been wound to a pre-selected point in another conversation between him and Frye, and he slipped it into the recorder.

"You've never mentioned your mother."

"What about her?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

"You're full of questions, aren't you?"

"With some patients, I hardly ever have to ask anything. They just open up and start talking."

"Yeah? What do they talk about?"

"Quite often they talk about their mothers."

"Must get boring for you."

"Very seldom. Tell me about your mother."

"Her name was Katherine."

"And?"

"I don't have anything to say about her."

"Everyone has something to say about his mother--and his father."

For almost a minute, there was silence. The tape wound from spool to spool, producing only a hissing sound.

"I'm just waiting him out," Rudge said, interpreting the silence for them. "He'll speak in a moment."

"Doctor Rudge?"

"Yes?"

"Do you think...?"

"What is it?"

"Do you think the dead stay dead?"

"Are you asking if I'm religious?"

"No. I mean ... do you think that a person can die ... and then come back from the grave?"

"Like a ghost?"

"Yes. Do you believe in ghosts?"

"Do you?"

"I asked you first."

"No. I don't believe in them, Bruno. Do you?"

"I haven't made up my mind."

"Have you ever seen a ghost?"

"I'm not sure."

"What does this have to do with your mother?"

"She told me that she would ... come back from the grave."

"When did she tell you this?"

"Oh, thousands of times. She was always saying it. She said she knew how it was done. She said that she would watch over me after she died. She said that if she saw I was misbehaving and not living like she wanted me to, then she's come back and make me sorry."

"Did you believe her?"

"..."

"Did you believe her?"

"..."

"Bruno?"

"Let's talk about something else."

"Jesus!" Tony said. "That's where he got the notion that Katherine had come back. The woman planted the idea in him before she died!"

To Rudge, Joshua said, "What in the name of God was the woman trying to do? What sort of relationship did those two have?"

"That was the root of his problem," Rudge said. "But we never got around to exposing it. I kept hoping I could get him to come in every week, but he kept resisting--and then he was dead."

"Did you pursue the subject of ghosts with him in later sessions?" Hilary asked.

"Yes," the doctor said. "The very next time he came in, he started off on it again. He said that the dead stayed dead and that only children and fools believed differently. He said there weren't such things as ghosts and zombies.He wanted me to know that he had never believed Katherine when she'd told him that she would come back."

"But he was lying," Hilary said. "he did believe her."

"Apparently, he did," Rudge said. He put the third tape in the machine.

"Doctor, what religion are you?"

"I was raised a Catholic."

"Do you still believe?"

"Yes."

"Do you go to church?"

"Yes. Do you?"

"No. Do you go to mass every week?"

"Nearly every week."

"Do you believe in heaven?"

"Yes. Do you?"

"Yeah. What about hell?"

"What do you think about it, Bruno?"

"Well, if there's a heaven, there must be a hell."

"Some people would argue that earth is hell."

"No. There's another place with fire and everything. And if there are angels..."

"Yes?"

"There must be demons. The Bible says there are."

"You can be a good Christian without taking all of the Bible literally."

"Do you know how to spot the various marks of the demons?"

"Marks?"

"Yeah. Like when a man or a woman makes a deal with the devil, he puts a mark on them. Or if he owns them for some other reason, he marks them, sort of like we brand cattle."

"Do you believe you can really make a deal with the devil?"

"Huh? Oh, no. No, that's just bunk. It's crap. But some people do believe in it. A lot of people do. And I find them interesting. Their psychology fascinates me. I read a lot about the occult, just trying to figure out the kind of people who put a lot of faith in it. I want to understand the way their minds work. You know?"

"You were talking about the marks that demons leave on people."

"Yeah. It's just something I read recently. Nothing important."

"Tell me about it."

"Well, see, there are supposed to be hundreds and hundreds of demons in hell. Maybe thousands. And each one of them is supposed to have his own mark that he puts on people whose souls he claims. Like, for instance, in the middle ages, they believed that a strawberry birthmark on the face was the mark of a demon. And another one was crossed eyes. A third breast. Some people are born with a third breast. It's really not so rare. And there are those who say it's a mark of a demon. The number 666. That's the mark of the chief of all demons, Satan. His people have the number 666 burned into their skin, under their hair, where it can't be seen. I mean, that's what the True Believers think. And twins.... That's another sign of a demon at work."

"Twins are the handiwork of demons?"

"You understand, I'm not saying I believe any of this. I don't. It's junk. I'm just telling you what some nuts out there believe."

"I understand."

"If I'm boring you--"

"No. I find it as fascinating as you do."

Rudge switched off the recorder. "One comment before I let him go on. I encouraged him to talk about the occult because i thought it was just an intellectual exercise for him, a way for him to strengthen his mind to deal with his own problem. I am sorry to say that I believed him when he said he didn't take it seriously."

"But he did," Hilary said. "He took it very seriously."

"So it seems. But at the time I thought he was exercising his mind, preparing to solve his own problem. If he could find a way to explain the apparently irrational thought processes of far-out people like die-hard occultists, then he would feel ready to find an explanation for the tiny piece of irrational behavior in his own personality. If he could explain occultists, it would be an easier matter to explain the dream that he could not remember. That's what I thought he was doing. But I was wrong. Damn! If only he'd been coming in more frequently."

Rudge started the tape recorder again.

"You said twins are the handiwork of demons."

"Yeah. Not all twins, of course. Just certain special kinds of twins."

"Such as?"

"Siamese twins. Some people think that's the mark of a demon."

"Yes. I can see how that superstition might develop."

"And sometimes identical twins are born with both heads covered by cauls. That's rare. Maybe one. But not two. It's very rare for both twins to be born with cauls. When that happens, you can be pretty sure those twins were marked by a demon. At least, that's what some people think."

Rudge took the tape out of the player. "I'm not sure how that one fits in with what's been happening to the three of you. But since there seems to be a dead ringer for Bruno Frye, the subject of twins seemed like something you'd want to hear about."

Joshua looked at Tony, then at Hilary, "But if Mary Gunther did have two children, why did Katherine bring home only one? Why would she lie and say there was just one baby? It doesn't make any sense."

"I don't know," Tony said doubtfully. "I told you that story sounded too smooth."

Hilary said, "Have you found a birth certificate for Bruno?"

"Not yet," Joshua said. "There wasn't one in any of his safe-deposit boxes."

Rudge picked up the fourth of the four cassettes that had been separated from the main pile of tapes. "This was the last session I had with Frye. Just three weeks ago. He finally agreed to let me try hypnosis to help him recall the dream. But he was wary. He made me promise to limit the range of questions. I wasn't permitted to ask him about anything except the dream. The excerpt I've chosen for you begins after he was in a trance. I regressed him in time, not far, just to the previous night. I put him back into his dream again.

"What do you see, Bruno?"

"My mother. And me."

"Go on."

"She's pulling me along."

"Where are you?"

"I don't know. But I'm just little."

"Little?"

"A little boy."

"And your mother is forcing you to go somewhere?"

"Yeah. She's dragging me by the hand."

"Where does she drag you?"

"To ... the ... the door. The door. Don't let her open it. Don't. Don't!"

"Easy. Easy now. Tell me about this door. Where does it go?"

"To hell."

"How do you know that?"

"It's in the ground."

"The door is in the ground?"

"For God's sake, don't let her open it! Don't let her put me down there again. No! No! I won't go down there again!"

"Relax. Be calm. There's no reason to be afraid. Just relax, Bruno. Relax. Are you relaxed?"

"Y-Yes."

"All right. Now slowly and calmly and without any emotion, tell me what happens next. You and your mother are standing in front of a door in the ground. What happens now?"

"She ... she ... opens the door."

"Go on."