Whispers (47 page)

“Ordinarily,” Preston said somewhat stiffly, “you would be escorted to one of our private cubicles, so that you could look through the contents without being observed. However, because there’s a strong possibility you’ll claim that some valuables were illegally removed, and because the bank might face a law suit on those charges, I must insist that you open the box in my presence.”

“You haven’t any legal right to insist on any such thing,” Joshua said sourly. “But I have no intention of hitting your bank with a phony law suit, so I’ll satisfy your curiosity right now.”

Joshua lifted the lid of the safe-deposit box. A white envelope lay inside, nothing else, and he plucked it out. He handed the empty metal box to Preston and tore open the envelope. There was a single sheet of white paper bearing a dated, signed, typewritten note.

It was the strangest thing Joshua had ever read. It appeared to have been written by a man in a fever delirium.

 
Below the body of the letter, in ink, there was a fine forgery of Bruno Frye’s signature. It had to be a forgery, of course. Frye was dead already when these lines were written.

The skin tingled on the back of Joshua’s neck, and for some reason he thought of Friday night: walking out of Avril Tannerton’s funeral home, stepping into the pitch-black night, being certain that something dangerous was nearby, sensing an evil presence in the darkness, a thing crouching and waiting.

“What is it?” Preston asked.

Joshua handed over the paper.

Preston read it and was amazed. “What in the world?”

“It must have been put in the box by the imposter who cleaned out the accounts,” Joshua said.

“But why would he do such a thing?”

“Perhaps it’s a hoax,” Joshua said. “Whoever he is, he evidently enjoys a good ghost story. He knew we’d find out that he’d looted the checking and savings, so he decided to have some fun with us.”

“But it’s so . . . strange,” Preston said. “I mean, you might expect a self-congratulatory note, something that would rub our faces in it. But this? It doesn’t seem like the work of a practical joker. Although it’s weird and doesn’t always make sense, it seems so . . .
earnest
.”

“If you think it’s not merely a hoax, then what do you think?” Joshua asked. “Are you telling me Bruno Frye wrote this letter and put it in the safe-deposit box
after
he died?”

“Well . . . no. Of course not.”

“Then what?”

The banker looked down at the letter in his hands. “Then I would say that this imposter, this man who looks so remarkably like Mr. Frye and talks like Mr. Frye, this man who carries a driver’s license in Mr. Frye’s name, this man who knew that Mr. Frye had accounts in First Pacific United—this man isn’t just pretending to be Mr. Frye. He actually thinks he
is
Mr. Frye.” He looked up at Joshua. “I don’t believe that an ordinary thief with a prankster’s turn of mind would compose a letter like this. There’s genuine madness in it.”

Joshua nodded. “I’m afraid I have to agree with you. But where did this doppelganger come from? Who is he? How long has he been around? Was Bruno aware that this man existed? Why would the look-alike share Bruno’s obsessive fear and hatred of Katherine Frye? How could both men suffer from the same delusion—the belief that she had come back from the dead? There are a thousand questions. It truly boggles the mind.”

“It certainly does,” Preston said. “And I don’t have any answers for you. But I do have one suggestion. This Hilary Thomas should be told that she may be in grave danger.”

 
After Frank Howard’s funeral, which was conducted with full police honors, Tony and Hilary caught the 11:55 flight from Los Angeles. On the way north, Hilary worked at being bubbly and amusing, for she could see that the funeral had depressed Tony and had brought back horrible memories of the Monday morning shootout. At first, he slumped in his seat, brooding, barely responding to her. But after a while, he seemed to become aware of her determination to cheer him up, and, perhaps because he didn’t want her to feel that her effort was unappreciated, he found his lost smile and began to come out of his depression. They landed on time at San Francisco International Airport, but the two o’clock shuttle flight to Napa was now rescheduled for three o’clock because of minor mechanical difficulties.

With time to kill, they ate lunch in an airport restaurant that offered a view of the busy runways. The surprisingly good coffee was the only thing to recommend the place; the sandwiches were rubbery, and the french fries were soggy.

As the time approached for their departure for Napa, Hilary began to dread going. Minute by minute, she grew more apprehensive.

Tony noticed the change in her. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know exactly. I just feel like . . . well, maybe this is wrong. Maybe we’re just rushing straight into the lion’s den.”

“Frye is down there in Los Angeles. He doesn’t have any way of knowing that you’re going to St. Helena,” Tony said.

“Doesn’t he?”

“Are you still convinced that it’s supernatural, a matter of ghosts and ghouls and whatnot?”

“I’m not ruling out anything.”

“We’ll find a logical explanation in the end.”

“Whether we do or not, I’ve got this feeling . . . this premonition.”

“A premonition of what?”

“Of worse things to come,” she said.

 
After a hurried but excellent lunch in the First Pacific United Bank’s private executive dining room, Joshua Rhinehart and Ronald Preston met with federal and state banking officials in Preston’s office. The bureaucrats were boring and poorly prepared and obviously ineffectual; but Joshua tolerated them, answered their questions, filled out their forms, for it was his duty to use the federal insurance system to recover the stolen funds for the Frye estate.

As the bureaucrats were leaving, Warren Sackett, an FBI agent, arrived. Because the money had been stolen from a federally-chartered financial institution, the crime was within the Bureau’s jurisdiction.

Sackett—a tall, intense man with chiseled features—sat at the conference table with Joshua and Preston, and he elicited twice as much information as the covey of bureaucrats had done, in only half the time that those paper-pushers had required. He informed Joshua that a very detailed background check on him would be part of the investigation, but Joshua already knew that and had no reason to fear it. Sackett agreed that Hilary Thomas might be in danger, and he took the responsibility for informing the Los Angeles police of the extraordinary situation that had arisen, so that both the LAPD and the Los Angeles office of the FBI would be prepared to look after her.

Although Sackett was polite, efficient, and thorough, Joshua realized that the FBI was not going to solve the case in a few days—not unless the Bruno Frye imposter walked into their office and confessed. This was not an urgent matter to them. In a country plagued by various crackpot terrorist groups, organized crime families, and corrupt politicians, the resources of the FBI could not be brought fully to bear on an eighteen-thousand-dollar case of this sort. More likely than not, Sackett would be the only agent on it full-time. He would begin slowly, with background checks on everyone involved; and then he would conduct an exhaustive survey of banks in northern California, to see if Bruno Frye had any other secret accounts. Sackett wouldn’t get to St. Helena for a day or two. And if he didn’t come up with any leads in the first week or ten days, he might thereafter handle the case only on a part-time basis.

When the agent finished asking questions, Joshua turned to Ronald Preston and said, “Sir, I trust that the missing eighteen thousand will be replaced in short order.”

“Well. . . .” Preston nervously fingered his prim little mustache. “We’ll have to wait until the FDIC approves the claim.”

Joshua looked at Sackett. “Am I correct in assuming the FDIC will wait until you can assure them that neither I nor any beneficiary of the estate conspired to withdraw that eighteen thousand dollars?”

“They might,” Sackett said. “After all, this is a highly unusual case.”

“But quite a lot of time could pass before you’re able to give them such assurances,” Joshua said.

“We wouldn’t make you wait beyond a reasonable length of time,” Sackett said. “At most, three months.”

Joshua sighed. “I had hoped to settle the estate quickly.”

Sackett shrugged. “Maybe I won’t need three months. It could all break fast. You never know. In a day or two, I might even turn up this guy who’s a dead ringer for Frye. Then I’d be able to give the FDIC an all-clear signal.”

“But you don’t expect to solve it that fast.”

“The situation is so bizarre that I can’t commit myself to deadlines,” Sackett said.

“Damnation,” Joshua said wearily.

A few minutes later, as Joshua crossed the cool marble-floored lobby on his way out of the bank, Mrs. Willis called to him. She was on duty at a teller’s cage. He went to her, and she said, “You know what I’d do if I were you?”

“What’s that?” Joshua asked.

“Dig him up. That man you buried. Dig him up.”

“Bruno Frye?”

“You didn’t bury Mr. Frye.” Mrs. Willis was adamant; she pressed her lips together and shook her head back and forth, looking very stern. “No. If there’s a double for Mr. Frye, he’s not the one who’s up walking around. The double is the one who’s six feet under with a slab of granite for a hat. The real Mr. Frye was here last Thursday. I’d swear to that in any court. I’d stake my life on it.”

“But if it wasn’t Frye who was killed down in Los Angeles, then where is the real Frye now? Why did he run away? What in the name of God is going on?”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I only know what I saw. Dig him up, Mr. Rhinehart. I believe you’ll find that you’ve buried the wrong man.”

 
At 3:20 Wednesday afternoon, Joshua landed at the county airport just outside the town of Napa. With a population of forty-five thousand, Napa was far from being a major city, and in fact it partook of the wine country ambience to such an extent that it seemed smaller and cozier than it really was; but to Joshua, who was long accustomed to the rural peace of tiny St. Helena, Napa was as noisy and bothersome as San Francisco had been, and he was anxious to get out of the place.

His car was parked in the public lot by the airfield, where he had left it that morning. He didn’t go home or to his office. He drove straight to Bruno Frye’s house in St. Helena.

Usually, Joshua was acutely aware of the incredible natural beauty of the valley. But not today. Now he drove without seeing anything until the Frye property came into view.

Part of Shade Tree Vineyards, the Frye family business, occupied fertile black flat land, but most of it was spread over the gently rising foothills on the west side of the valley. The winery, the public tasting room, the extensive cellars, and the other company buildings—all fieldstone and redwood and oak structures that seemed to grow out of the earth—were situated on a large piece of level highland, near the western-most end of the Frye property. All the buildings faced east, across the valley, toward vistas of seriated vines, and all of them were constructed with their backs to a one-hundred-sixty-foot cliff, which had been formed in a distant age when earth movement had sheered the side off the last foothill at the base of the more precipitously rising Mayacamas Mountains.

Above the cliff, on the isolated hilltop, stood the house that Leo Frye, Katherine’s father, had built when he’d first come to the wine country in 1918. Leo had been a brooding Prussian type who had valued his privacy more than almost anything else. He looked for a building site that would provide a wide view of the scenic valley plus absolute privacy, and the clifftop property was precisely what he wanted. Although Leo was already a widower in 1918, and although he had only one small child and was not, at that time, contemplating another marriage, he nevertheless constructed a large twelve-room Victorian house on top of the cliff, a place with many bay windows and gables and a lot of architectural gingerbread. It overlooked the winery that he established, later, on the highland below, and there were only two ways to reach it. The first approach was by aerial tramway, a system comprised of cables, pulleys, electric motors, and one four-seat gondola that carried you from the lower station (a second-floor corner of the main winery building) to the upper station (somewhat to the north of the house on the clifftop). The second approach was by way of a double-switchback staircase fixed to the face of the cliff. Those three hundred and twenty steps were meant to be used only if the aerial tramway broke down—and then only if it was not possible to wait until repairs were made. The house was not merely private; it was remote.