Whispers (43 page)

But she was gone.

When he first began to realize that she had skipped out and might not be back for days or weeks, he was furious. He cursed her, and he wept with frustration.

Then he gradually regained control of himself. He told himself that all was not lost. He would find her.

He had found her countless times before.

Six

WEDNESDAY MORNING, Joshua Rhinehart made the short flight to San Francisco in his own Cessna Turbo Skylane RG. It was a honey of a plane with a cruising speed of 173 knots and a range of over one thousand miles.

He had begun taking flying lessons three years ago, shortly after Cora died. For most of his life, he had dreamed about being a pilot, but he had never found time to learn until he was fifty-eight years old. When Cora was taken from him so unexpectedly, he saw that he was a fool, a fool who thought that death was a misfortune that only befell other people. He had spent his life as if he possessed an infinite store of it, as if he could spend and spend, live and live, forever. He thought he would have all the time in the world to take those dreamed-about trips to Europe and the Orient, all the time in the world to relax and travel and have fun; therefore, he always put off the cruises and vacations, postponed them until the law practice was built, and then until the mortgages on their large real estate holdings were all paid, and then until the grape-growing business was firmly established, and then.... And then Cora suddenly ran out of time. He missed her terribly, and he still filled up with remorse when he thought of all the things that had been delayed too long. He and Cora had been happy with each other; in many ways, they had enjoyed an extremely good life together, an excellent life by most standards. They'd never wanted for anything--not food or shelter or a fair share of luxuries. There'd always been enough money. But never enough time. He could not help dwelling on what might have been. He could not bring Cora back, but at least he was determined to grab all of the joy he could get his hands on in his remaining years. Because he had never been a gregarious man, and because he felt that nine out of ten people were woefully ignorant and/or malicious, most of his pleasures were solitary pursuits; but, in spite of his preference for solitude, nearly all of those pleasures were less satisfying than they would have been if he'd been able to share them with Cora. Flying was one of the few exceptions to that rule. In his Cessna, high above the earth, he felt as if he'd been freed from all restraints, not just from the bonds of gravity, but from the chains of regret and remorse as well.

Refreshed and renewed by the flight, Joshua landed in San Francisco shortly after nine o'clock. Less than an hour later, he was at the First Pacific United Bank, shaking hands with Mr. Ronald Preston, with whom he had spoken on the phone Tuesday afternoon.

Preston was a vice-president of the bank, and his office was sumptuous. There was a lot of real leather upholstery and well-polished teak. It was a padded, plush, fat office.

Preston, on the other hand, was tall and thin; he looked brittle, breakable. He was darkly tanned and sported a neatly trimmed mustache. He talked too fast, and his hands flung off one quick gesture after another, like a short-circuiting machine casting off sparks. He was nervous.

He was also efficient. He had prepared a detailed file on Bruno Frye's accounts, with pages for each of the five years that Frye had done business with First Pacific United. The file contained a list of savings account deposits and withdrawals, another list of the dates on which Frye had visited his safe-deposit box, clear photocopies of the monthly checking account statements blown up from microfilm records, and similar copies of every check ever written on that account.

"At first glance," Preston said, "it might appear that I haven't given you copies of all the checks Mr. Frye wrote. But let me assure you that I have. There simply weren't many of them. A lot of money moved in and out of that account, but for the first three-and-a-half years, Mr. Frye wrote only two checks a month. For the last year and a half, it's been three checks every month, and always to the same payees."

Joshua didn't bother to open the folder. "I'll look at these things later. Right now, I want to question the teller who paid out on the checking and savings accounts."

A round conference table stood in one corner of the room. Six comfortably padded captain's chairs were arranged around it. That was the place Joshua chose for the interrogations.

Cynthia Willis, the teller, was a self-assured and rather attractive black woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a blue skirt and a crisp white blouse. Her hair was neatly styled, her fingernails well-shaped and brightly polished. She carried herself with pride and grace, and she sat with her back very straight when Joshua directed her into the chair opposite him.

Preston stood by his desk, silently fretting.

Joshua opened the envelope he had brought with him and took from it fifteen snapshots of people who lived or had once lived in St. Helena. He spread them out on the table and said, "Miss Willis--"

"Mrs. Willis," she corrected him.

"I'm sorry. Mrs. Willis, I want you to look at each one of those photographs, and then you tell me which is Bruno Frye. But only after you've looked at them all."

She went through the batch of photos in a minute and picked two of them. "Both of these are him."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive," she said. "That wasn't much of a test. The other thirteen don't look like him at all."

She had done an excellent job, much better than he had expected. Many of the photographs were fuzzy, and some were taken in poor light. Joshua purposefully used bad pictures to make the identification more difficult than it otherwise might have been, but Mrs. Willis did not hesitate. And although she said the other thirteen didn't look like Frye, a few of them actually did, a little. Joshua had chosen a few people who resembled Frye, at least when the camera was slightly out of focus, but that ruse had not fooled Cynthia Willis; and neither had the trick of including two photographs of Frye, two headshots, each much different from the other.

Tapping the two snapshots with her index finger, Mrs. Willis said, "This was the man who came into the bank last Thursday afternoon."

"On Thursday morning," Joshua said, "he was killed in Los Angeles."

"I don't believe it," she said firmly. "There must be some mistake about that."

"I saw his body," Joshua told her. "We buried him up in St. Helena last Sunday."

She shook her head. "Then you must have buried someone else. You must have buried the wrong man."

"I've known Bruno Frye since he was five years old," Joshua said. "I couldn't be mistaken."

"And I know who I saw," Mrs. Willis said politely but stubbornly.

She did not glance at Preston. She had too much pride to tailor her answers to his measurements. She knew she was a good worker, and she had no fear of the boss. Sitting up even straighter than she had been sitting, she said, "Mr. Preston is entitled to his opinion. But, after all, he didn't see the man. I did. It was Mr. Frye. He's been coming in the bank two or three times a month for the past five years. He always makes at least a two-thousand-dollar deposit in checking, sometimes as much as three thousand, and always in cash. Cash. That's unusual. It makes him very memorable. That and the way he looks, all of those muscles and--"

"Surely he didn't always make his deposits at your window."

"Not always," she admitted. "But a lot of the time, he did. And I swear it was him who made those withdrawals last Thursday. If you know him at all, Mr. Rhinehart, you know that I wouldn't even have had to see Mr. Frye to know it was him. I would have recognized him blindfolded because of that strange voice of his."

"A voice can be imitated," Preston said, making his first contribution to the conversation.

"Not this one," Mrs. Willis said.

"It might be imitated," Joshua said, "but not easily."

"And those eyes," Mrs. Willis said. "They were almost as strange as his voice."

Intrigued by that remark, Joshua leaned toward her and said, "What about his eyes?"

"They were cold," she said. "And not just because of the blue-gray color. Very cold, hard eyes. And most of the time he didn't seem to be able to look straight at you. His eyes kept sliding away, as if he was afraid you'd see his thoughts or something. But then, that every great once in a while when he did look straight at you, those eyes gave you the feeling you were looking at ... well ... at somebody who wasn't altogether right in the head."

Ever the diplomatic banker, Preston quickly said, "Mrs. Willis, I'm sure that Mr. Rhinehart wants you to stick to the objective facts of the case. If you interject your personal opinions, that will only cloud the issue and make his job more difficult.

Mrs. Willis shook her head. "All I know is, the man who was here last Thursday had those same eyes."

Joshua was slightly shaken by that observation, for he, too, often thought that Bruno's eyes revealed a soul in torment. There had been a frightened, haunted look in that man's eyes--but also the hard, cold, murderous iciness that Cynthia Willis had noted.

For another thirty minutes, Joshua questioned her about a number of subjects, including: the man who had withdrawn Frye's money, the usual procedures she followed when dispensing large amounts of cash, the procedures she had followed last Thursday, the nature of the ID that the imposter had presented, her home life, her husband, her children, her employment record, her current financial condition, and half a dozen other things. He was tough with her, even gruff when he felt that would help his cause. Unhappy at the prospect of spending extra weeks on the Frye estate because of this new development, anxious to find a quick solution to the mystery, he was searching for a reason to accuse her of complicity in the looting of the Frye accounts, but in the end he found nothing. Indeed, by the time he was finished quizzing her, he had come to like her a great deal and to trust her as well. He even went so far as to apologize to her for his sometimes sharp and quarrelsome manner, and such an apology was extremely rare for him.

After Mrs. Willis returned to her teller's cage, Ronald Preston brought Jane Symmons into the room. She was the woman who had accompanied the Frye look-alike into the vault, to the safe-deposit box. She was a twenty-seven-year-old redhead with green eyes, a pug nose, and a querulous disposition. Her whiny voice and peevish responses brought out the worst in Joshua; but the more curmudgeonly he became, the more querulous she grew. He did not find Jane Symmons to be as articulate as Cynthia Willis, and he did not like her as he did the black woman, and he did not apologize to her; but he was certain that she was as truthful as Mrs. Willis, at least about the matter at hand.

When Jane Symmons left the room, Preston said, "Well, what do you think?"

"It's not likely that either of them was part of any swindle," Joshua said.

Preston was relieved, but tried not to show it. "That's our assessment, too."

"But this man who's posing as Frye must bear an incredible likeness to him."

"Miss Symmons is a most astute young woman," Preston said. "If she said he looked exactly like Frye, the resemblance must, indeed, be remarkable."

"Miss Symmons is a hopeless twit," Joshua said grumpily. "If she were the only witness, I would be lost."

Preston blinked in surprise.

"However," Joshua continued, "your Mrs. Willis is keenly observant. And damned smart. And self-confident without being smug. If I were you, I'd make more of her than just a teller."

Preston cleared his throat. "Well ... uh, what now?"

"I want to see the contents of that safe-deposit box."

"I don't suppose you have Mr. Frye's key?"

"No. He hasn't yet returned from the dead to give it to me."

"I thought perhaps it had turned up among his things since I talked to you yesterday."

"No. If the imposter used the key, I suppose he still has it."

"How did he get it in the first place?" Preston wondered. "If it was given to him by Mr. Frye, then that casts a different light on things. That would alter the bank's position. If Mr. Frye conspired with a look-alike to remove funds--"

"Mr. Frye could not have conspired. He was dead. Now shall we see what's in the box?"

"Without both keys, it'll have to be broken open."

"Please have that done," Joshua said.

Thirty-five minutes later, Joshua and Preston stood in the bank's secondary vault as the building engineer pulled the ruined lock out of the safe-deposit box and, a moment after that, slid the entire box out of the vault wall. He handed it to Ronald Preston, and Preston presented it to Joshua.

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

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

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

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

Thursday, September 25

To whom it may concern:

My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies. She has found a way to return from the grave, and she is trying to get me. She is currently living in Los Angeles, under the name Hilary Thomas.

This morning, she stabbed me, and I died in Los Angeles. I intend to go back down there and kill her before she kills me again. Because if she kills me twice, I'll stay dead. I don't have her magic. I can't return from the grave. Not if she kills me twice.