Whispers (67 page)

The cat leapt abruptly over the footstool, darted along the flowered runner, past Joshua, and under a corner table.

Precisely when the animal stopped moving, the house shook. Two miniature glass swans toppled off a shelf, bounced without breaking on the thick carpet. Two embroidered wall hangings fell down. Windows rattled.

“Quake,” Mrs. Yancy said.

The floor rolled like the deck of a ship in mild seas.

“Nothing to worry about,” Mrs. Yancy said.

The movement decreased.

The rumbling, discontented earth grew quiet.

The house was still again.

“See?” Mrs. Yancy said. “It's over now.”

But Tony sensed other oncoming shockwaves—although none of them had anything to do with earthquakes.

 

Bruno finally opened the dead eyes of his other self, and at first he was upset by what he found. They weren't the clear, electrifying, blue-gray eyes that he had known and loved. These were the eyes of a monster. They appeared to be swollen, rotten-soft and protuberant. The whites were stained brown-red by half-dried, scummy blood from burst vessels. The irises were cloudy, muddy, less blue than they had been in life, now more the color of an ugly bruise, dark and wounded.

However, the longer Bruno stared into them the less hideous those damaged eyes became. They were, after all, still the eyes of his other self, still part of himself, still eyes that he knew better than any other eyes, still eyes that he loved and trusted, eyes that loved and trusted him. He tried not to look
at
them but
into
them, deep down beyond the surface ruin, way down in, where (many times in the past) he had made the blazing, thrilling connection with the other half of his soul. He felt none of the old magic now, for the other Bruno's eyes were not looking back at him. Nevertheless, the very act of peering deeply into the other's dead eyes somehow revitalized his memories of what total unity with his other self had been like; he remembered the pure, sweet pleasure and fulfillment of being with himself, just he and himself against the world, with no fear of being alone.

He clung to that memory, for memory was now all that he had left.

He sat on the bed for a long time, staring down into the eyes of the corpse.

 

Joshua Rhinehart's Cessna Turbo Skylane RG roared north, slicing across the eastward-flowing air front, heading for Napa.

Hilary looked down at the scattered clouds below and at the sere autumn hills that lay a few thousand feet below the clouds. Overhead, there was nothing but crystal-blue sky and the distant, stratospheric vapor trail of a military jet.

Far off in the west, a dense bank of blue-gray-black clouds stretched out of sight to the north and the south. The massive thunderheads were rolling in like giant ships from the sea. By nightfall, Napa Valley—in fact, the entire northern third of the state from the Monterey Peninsula to the Oregon border—would lay under threatening skies again.

During the first ten minutes after takeoff, Hilary and Tony and Joshua were silent. Each was preoccupied with his own bleak thoughts—and fears.

Then Joshua said, “The twin has to be the dead ringer we're looking for.”

“Obviously,” Tony said.

“So Katherine didn't try to solve her problem by killing off the extra baby,” Joshua said.

“Evidently not,” Tony said.

“But which one did
I
kill?” Hilary asked. “Bruno or his brother?”

“We'll have the body exhumed and see what we can learn from it,” Joshua said.

The plane hit an air pocket. It dropped more than two hundred feet in a roller coaster swoop, then soared up to its proper altitude.

When her stomach crawled back into its familiar niche, Hilary said, “All right, let's talk this thing out and see if we can come up with any answers. We're all sitting here chewing on the same question anyway. If Katherine didn't kill Bruno's twin brother in order to keep the Mary Gunther lie afloat, then what
did
she do with him? Where the devil has he been all these years?”

“Well, there's always Mrs. Rita Yancy's pet theory,” Joshua said, managing to pronounce her name in such a way as to make it clear that even the need to refer to her in passing distressed him and left a bad taste in his mouth. “Perhaps Katherine did leave one of the twins bundled up on the doorstep of a church or an orphanage.”

“I don't know. . . .” Hilary said doubtfully. “I don't like it, but I don't exactly know why. It's just too . . . clichéd . . . too trite . . . too romantic. Damn. None of those is the word I want. I can't think how to say it. I just sense that Katherine would not have handled it like that. It's too . . .”

“Too smooth,” Tony said. “Just like the story about Mary Gunther was too smooth to please me. Abandoning one of the twins like that would have been the quickest, easiest, simplest, safest—although not the most moral—way for her to solve her problem. But people almost never do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way. Especially not when they're under the kind of stress that Katherine was under when she left Rita Yancy's whorehouse.”

“Still,” Joshua said, “we can't rule it out altogether.”

“I think we can,” Tony said. “Because if you accept that the brother was abandoned and then adopted by strangers, you've got to explain how he and Bruno got back together again. Since the brother was an unregistered birth, there'd be no way he could trace his blood parentage. The only way he could hook up with Bruno would be by coincidence. Even if you're willing to accept that coincidence, you've still got to explain how the brother could have been raised in another home, in an altogether different environment from Bruno's, without ever knowing Katherine—and yet have such a fierce hatred for the woman, such an overwhelming fear of her.”

“That's not easy,” Joshua admitted.

“You've got to explain why and how the brother developed a psychopathic personality and paranoid delusions that perfectly match Bruno's in every detail,” Tony said.

The Cessna droned northward.

Wind buffeted the small craft.

For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.

Then Joshua said, “You win. I can't explain it. I can't see how the brother could have been raised entirely apart from Bruno yet wind up with the same psychosis. Genetics don't explain it, that's for sure.”

“So what are you saying?” Hilary asked Tony. “That Bruno and his brother weren't separated after all?”

“She took them both home to St. Helena,” Tony said.

“But where was the other twin all those years?” Joshua asked. “Locked away in a closet or something?”

“No,” Tony said. “You probably met him many times.”

“What? Me? No. Never. Just Bruno.”

“What if. . . . What if both of them were living as Bruno? What if they . . . took turns?”

Joshua looked away from the open sky ahead, stared at Tony, blinked. “Are you trying to tell me they played some sort of childish game for forty years?” he asked skeptically.

“Not a game,” Tony said. “At least it wouldn't have been a game to them. They would have thought of it as a desperate, dangerous necessity.”

“You've lost me,” Joshua said.

To Tony, Hilary said, “I knew you were working on an idea when you started asking Mrs. Yancy about the babies having cauls and about how Katherine reacted to that.”

“Yes,” Tony said. “Katherine carrying on about a demon—that bit of news gave me a big piece of the puzzle.”

“For God's sake,” Joshua said impatiently, gruffly, “stop being so damned mysterious. Put it together for Hilary and me in a way we can understand.”

“Sorry. I was more or less still thinking aloud.” Tony shifted in his seat. “Okay, look. This will take a while. I'll have to go back to the beginning. . . . To understand what I'm going to say about Bruno, you have to understand Katherine, or at least understand the way I see her. What I'm theorizing is . . . a family in which madness has been . . . sort of handed down like a legacy for at least three generations. The insanity steadily grows bigger and bigger, like a trust fund earning interest.” Tony shifted in his seat again. “Let's start with Leo. An extreme authoritarian type. To be happy he needed to totally control other people. That was one of the reasons he did so well in business, but it was also the reason he didn't have many friends. He knew how to get his way every time, and he never gave an inch. A lot of aggressive men like Leo have a different approach to sex from the one they have toward everything else; they like to be relieved of all responsibility when they're in bed; they like to be ordered around and dominated for a change—but only in bed. Not Leo. Not even in bed. He insisted on being the dominant one even in his sex life. He enjoyed hurting and humiliating women, calling them names, forcing them to do unpleasant things, being a little rough, a little sadistic. We know that from Mrs. Yancy.”

“It's a hell of a big step from paying prostitutes so they'll satisfy some perverse desire—to molesting your own child,” Joshua said.

“But we know he did molest Katherine repeatedly, over many years,” Tony said. “So it mustn't have been a big step in Leo's eyes. He probably would have said that his abuse of Mrs. Yancy's girls was all right because he was paying them and therefore owned them, at least for a while. He would have been a man with a strong sense of property rights—and with an extremely liberal definition of the word ‘property.' He'd have used that argument, that same point of view, to justify what he did to Katherine. A man like that thinks of a child as just another of his possessions—‘
my
child' instead of ‘my
child
.' To him, Katherine was a thing, an object, wasted if not used.”

“I'm glad I never met the son of a bitch,” Joshua said. “If I'd ever shaken hands with him, I think I'd still feel dirty.”

“My point,” Tony said, “is that Katherine, as a child, was trapped in a house, in a brutalizing relationship, with a man who was capable of
anything
, and there was virtually no chance that she could maintain a firm grip on her sanity under those awful conditions. Leo was a very cold fish, a loner's loner, more than a little bit selfish, with a very strong and very twisted sex drive. It's possible, even likely, that he wasn't just emotionally disturbed. He might have been all the way gone, over the edge, psychotic, detached from reality but able to conceal his detachment. There's a kind of psychopath who has iron control over his delusions, the ability to channel a lot of his lunatic energy into socially-acceptable pursuits, the ability to pass for normal. That kind of psycho vents his madness in one narrow, generally private, area. In Leo's case, he let off a little steam with prostitutes—and a lot of it with Katherine. We've got to figure that he didn't merely abuse her physically. His desire went beyond sex. He lusted after
absolute
control. Once he'd broken her physically, he wouldn't have been satisfied until he'd broken her emotionally, spiritually, and then mentally. By the time Katherine arrived at Mrs. Yancy's place to have her father's baby, she was every bit as mad as Leo had been. But she apparently also had acquired his control, his ability to pass among normal people. She lost that control for three days when the twins arrived, but then she pulled herself together again.”

“She lost control a second time,” Hilary said as the plane bobbled through a patch of turbulent air.

“Yeah,” Joshua said. “When she told Mrs. Yancy that she'd been raped by a demon.”

“If my theory's correct,” Tony said, “Katherine was going through incredible changes after the birth of the twins. She was moving from one severe psychotic state to an even
more
severe psychotic state. A new set of delusions was pushing out the old set. She had been able to maintain a surface calm in spite of her father's sexual abuse, in spite of the emotional and physical torture he put her through, in spite of becoming pregnant with his child, and even in spite of the agony of being girdled in day and night during all those months when nature was insisting that she grow. Somehow she maintained an air of normalcy through all of that. But when the twins were born, when she realized her story about Mary Gunther's baby had come crashing down around her, that was too much to bear. She flipped out—until she conceived the notion that she'd been raped by a demon. We know from Mrs. Yancy that Leo was interested in the occult. Katherine had read some of Leo's books. Somewhere she had picked up the fact that some people believe twins born with cauls are marked by a demon. Because her twins were born with cauls . . . well, she began to fantasize. And the idea that she had been the innocent victim of a demonic creature that had forced itself on her—well, that was very appealing. It exonerated her of the shame and guilt of bearing her own father's babies. It was still something she had to hide from the world, but it wasn't something she had to hide from herself. It wasn't something shameful for which she had to make constant excuses to herself. No one could expect an ordinary woman to resist a demon that had supernatural strength. If she could make herself believe that she'd really been raped by a monster, then she could start thinking of herself as nothing worse than an unfortunate, innocent victim.”

“But that's what she was anyway,” Hilary said. “She was her father's victim. He forced himself on her, not the other way around.”

“True,” Tony said. “But he had probably spent a lot of time and energy brainwashing her, trying to make her think she was the one at fault, the one responsible for their twisted relationship. Transferring the guilt to the daughter—that's a fairly common way for a sick man to escape his own sense of guilt. And that sort of behavior would fit Leo's authoritarian personality.”