Whispers (67 page)

Tony said, “From the tapes we heard in Dr. Rudge’s office this morning, we know Bruno was aware that he and his brother were born with cauls. We know that he was familiar with the superstition connected with that rare phenomenon. From the way he sounded on the tape, I think we can safely assume he believed, as his mother did, that he was marked by a demon. And there’s other evidence that points to the same conclusion. The letter in the safe-deposit box, for instance. Bruno wrote that he couldn’t ask for police protection against his mother because the police would discover what he was and what he’d been hiding all these years. In the letter, he said that if people found out what he was, they would stone him to death. He thought he was the son of a demon. I’m sure of it. He had absorbed Katherine’s psychotic delusions.”

“All right,” Joshua said. “Maybe both twins believed the demon bunk because they’d never had a chance
not
to believe it. But that still doesn’t explain how or why Katherine shaped the two of them into one person, how she got them to . . . melt together psychologically, as you put it.”

“The
why
part of your question is the easiest to answer,” Hilary said. “As long as the twins thought of themselves as individuals, there would be differences between them, even if only very minor differences. And the more differences, the more likely it was that one of them would unintentionally blow the entire masquerade someday. The more she could force them to act and think and talk and move and respond alike, the safer she was.”

“As for the
how
of it,” Tony said, “you shouldn’t forget that Katherine knew the ways and means to break and shape a mind. After all, she had been broken and shaped by a master. Leo. He had used every trick in the book to make her what he wanted her to be, and she couldn’t have helped but learn something from all of that. Techniques of physical and psychological torture. She could probably have written a textbook on the subject.”

“And to make the twins think like one person,” Hilary said, “she’d have to treat them like one person. She’d have to set the tone, in other words. She’d have to offer them the exact same degrees of love, if any. She’d have to punish both for the actions of one, reward both for the actions of one, treat the two bodies as if they were in possession of the same mind. She had to talk to them as if they were only one person, not two.”

“And every time she caught a glimpse of individuality, she’d either have to make them both do it, or she’d have to eradicate the mannerism in the one who displayed it. And pronoun usage would be very important,” Tony said.

“Pronoun usage?” Joshua asked, perplexed.

“Yes,” Tony said. “This is going to sound pretty damned far-out. Maybe even meaningless. But more than anything else, our understanding and use of language shapes us. Language is the way we express every idea, every thought. Sloppy thinking leads to a sloppy use of language. But the opposite is also true: Imprecise language causes imprecise thinking. That’s a basic tenet of semantics. So it seems logical to theorize that the selectively-twisted usage of pronouns would aid in the establishment of the kind of selectively-twisted self-image that Katherine wanted to see the twins adopt. For example, when the twins spoke to each other, they could never be allowed to use the pronoun ‘you.’ Because ‘you’ embodies the concept of another person other than one’s self. If the twins were forced to think of themselves as
one
creature, then the pronoun ‘you’ would have no place between them. One Bruno could never say to the other, ‘Why don’t you and I play a game of Monopoly?’ He’d have to say, instead, something like this: ‘Why don’t me and I play a game of Monopoly?’ He couldn’t use the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ when talking about himself and his brother, for those pronouns indicate at least
two
people. Instead, he’d have to say ‘me and myself’ when he meant ‘we.’ Furthermore, when one of the twins was talking to Katherine about his brother, he couldn’t be permitted to use the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him.’ Again, they embody the concept of another individual in addition to the speaker. Complicated?”

“Insane,” Joshua said.

“That’s the point,” Tony said.

“But it’s too much. It’s too crazy.”

“Of course, it’s crazy,” Tony said. “It was Katherine’s scheme, and Katherine was out of her mind.”

“But how could she possibly enforce all of those bizarre rules about habits and mannerisms and attitudes and pronouns and whatever the hell else?”

“The same way you’d enforce an ordinary set of rules with ordinary children,” Hilary said. “If they do the right thing, you reward them. If they do the wrong thing, however, you punish them.”

“But to make children behave as unnaturally as Katherine wanted the twins to behave, to make them totally surrender their individuality, the punishment would have to be something truly monstrous,” Joshua said.

“And we know it
was
something monstrous,” Tony said. “We all heard Dr. Rudge’s tape of that last session with Bruno, when hypnosis was used. If you remember, Bruno said that she put him into some dark hole in the ground as punishment—and I quote—‘for not thinking and acting like one.’ I believe he meant she put both him and his brother in that dark place when they refused to think and act like a single person.

She locked them in a dark place for long periods of time, and there was something alive in there, something that crawled all over them. Whatever happened to them in that room or hole . . . it was so terrible that they had bad dreams about it every night for decades. If it could leave that strong an impression so many years afterwards, I’d say it was enough of a punishment to be a good brainwashing tool. I’d say Katherine did exactly what she set out to do with the twins: melted them into one.”

Joshua stared at the sky ahead.

At last, he said, “When she came back from Mrs. Yancy’s whorehouse, her problem was to pass off the twins as the one child she’d talked about, thereby salvaging the Mary Gunther lie. But she could have accomplished that by locking up one of the brothers, making him a house son, while the other twin was the only one allowed to go out of the house. That would have been quicker, easier, simpler, safer.”

“But we all know Clemenza’s Law,” Hilary said.

“Right,” Joshua said. “Clemenza’s Law: Damned few people ever do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way.”

“Besides,” Hilary said, “Maybe Katherine just didn’t have the heart to keep one of the boys locked up forever while the other one was permitted to lead at least a little bit of a normal life. After all the suffering she’d been through, maybe there was a limit to the amount of suffering she could force her children to endure.”

“It seems to me she made them endure a whole hell of a lot!” Joshua said. “She drove them mad!”

“Inadvertently, yes,” Hilary said. “She didn’t intend to drive them mad. She thought she was doing what was best for them, but her own state of mind didn’t make it possible for her to
know
what was best.”

Joshua sighed wearily. “It’s a wild theory you’ve got.”

“Not so wild,” Tony said. “It fits the known facts.”

Joshua nodded. “And I guess I believe it, too. At least most of it. I just wish all of the villains in this piece were thoroughly vile and despicable. It seems wrong, somehow, to feel so much sympathy for them.”

 
After they landed in Napa, under rapidly graying skies, they went straight to the county sheriff’s office and told Peter Laurenski everything. At first, he gaped at them as if they had lost their minds, but gradually his disbelief turned into reluctant, astonished acceptance. That was a pattern of reactions, a transformation of emotions that Hilary expected they would all witness a few hundred times in the days ahead.

Laurenski telephoned the Los Angeles Police Department. He discovered that the FBI already had contacted the LAPD in regard to the San Francisco bank fraud case involving a look-alike for Bruno Frye, now believed at large in the LAPD’s jurisdiction. Laurenski’s news, of course, was that the suspect was not merely a look-alike, but the genuine article—even though another genuine article was dead and buried in the Napa County Memorial Park. He informed the LAPD that he had reason to believe the two Brunos had taken turns killing women and had been involved in a series of murders in the northern half of the state over the past five years, although he could not yet provide hard evidence or name specific homicides. The evidence was thus far circumstantial: a grisly but logical interpretation of the safe-deposit box letter in light of recent discoveries about Leo and Katherine and the twins; the fact that both of the twins had made attempts on Hilary’s life; the fact that one of the twins had covered for the other last week when Hilary had first been attacked, which indicated complicity in at least attempted murder; and finally the conviction, shared by Hilary and Tony and Joshua, that Bruno’s hatred for his mother was so powerful and maniacal that he would not hesitate to slaughter any woman who he imagined was his mother come back to life in a new body.

While Hilary and Joshua shared the railback bench that served as an office couch, and while they drank coffee provided by Laurenski’s secretary, Tony took the phone at Laurenski’s request and spoke with two of his own superiors in L.A. His support for Laurenski and the corroboration of facts that he provided were apparently effective, for the call concluded with a promise that L.A. authorities would take immediate action at their end. Operating under the assumption that the psychopath would be keeping a watch on Hilary’s home, the LAPD agreed to establish around-the-clock surveillance on the Westwood house.

With the cooperation of the Los Angeles police assured, the sheriff quickly composed a bulletin, outlining the basic facts of the case, for distribution to all law enforcement agencies in Northern California. The bulletin doubled as an official request for information on any unsolved murders of young, attractive, brown-eyed brunettes, in jurisdictions beyond Laurenski’s, during the past five years—and especially any murders involving decapitation, mutilation, or evidence of blood fetishism.

As Hilary watched the sheriff issuing orders to clerks and deputies, and as she thought about the events of the past twenty-four hours, she had the feeling that everything was moving too fast, like a whirlwind, and that this wind—filled with surprises and ugly secrets, just as a tornado is filled with swirling clods of uprooted earth and chunks of debris—was carrying her toward a precipice that she could not yet see, but over which she might be flung. She wished she could reach out with both hands and seize control of time itself, hold it back, slow it down, take a few days out to rest and to consider what she had learned, so that she would be able to follow the final few twists and turns of the Frye mystery with a clear head. She felt sure that continued haste was foolish, even deadly. But the wheels of the law, now engaged and rolling, could not be blocked. And time could not be reined in as if it were a runaway stallion.

She hoped there was no precipice ahead.

At 5:30, after Laurenski had gotten the law enforcement machinery moving, he and Joshua used the telephone to track down a judge. They found one, Judge Julian Harwey, who was fascinated by the Frye story. Harwey understood the necessity of retrieving the corpse and putting it through an extensive battery of tests for identification purposes. If the second Bruno Frye was apprehended, and if he somehow managed to pass a psychiatric examination, which was highly unlikely but not altogether impossible, then the prosecutor would need physical proof that there had been identical twins. Harwey was willing to sign an exhumation order, and by 6:30, the sheriff had that paper in hand.

“The workmen at the cemetery won’t be able to open the grave in the dark,” Laurenski said. “But I’ll have them out there digging at the crack of dawn.” He made a few more phone calls, one to the director of the Napa County Memorial Park where Frye was buried, another to the county coroner who could conduct the exhumation of the body as soon as it was delivered to him, and one to Avril Tannerton, the mortician, to arrange for him to transport the corpse to and from the coroner’s pathology lab.

When Laurenski finally got off the telephone, Joshua said, “I imagine you’ll want to search the Frye house.”

“Absolutely,” Laurenski said. “We want to find proof that more than one man was living there, if we can. And if Frye really had murdered other women, maybe we’ll turn up some evidence. I think it would be a good idea to go through the house on the cliff, too.”

“We can search the new house as soon as you like,” Joshua said. “But there’s no electricity in the old place. That one will have to wait until daylight.”

“Okay,” Laurenski said. “But I’d like to have a look at the vineyard house tonight.”

“Now?” Joshua asked, getting up from the railback bench.

“None of us has had dinner,” Laurenski said. Earlier, before they had told him even half of what they’d learned from Dr. Rudge and Rita Yancy, the sheriff had called his wife to tell her he wouldn’t be home until very late. “Let’s get a bite to eat at the coffee shop around the corner. Then we can head on out to Frye’s place.”

Before they left for the restaurant, Laurenski told the night receptionist where he would be and asked her to let him know immediately if word came in that the Los Angeles police had arrested the second Bruno Frye.

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Hilary said.

“I suspect she’s right,” Tony said. “Bruno has concealed an incredible secret for forty years. He may be crazy, but he’s also clever. The LAPD isn’t going to lay hands on him that fast. They’ll have to play a lot of cat-and-mouse before they finally nail him.”

 
When night had begun to fall, Bruno had closed the attic shutters again.

Now there were candles on each nightstand. There were two candles on the dresser. The flickering yellow flames made shadows dance on the walls and ceiling.