Whispers

Page 61

***
If Rita Yancy had any more information about the Frye twins, neither Hilary nor Joshua would get it out of her. Tony could see that much even if Hilary and Joshua could not. Any second now, one of them was going to say something so sharp, so angry, so biting and bitter, that the old woman would take offense and order all of them out of the house.
Tony was aware that Hilary was deeply shaken by the similarities between her own childhood ordeal and Katherine's agony. She was bristling at all three of Rita Yancy's attitudes--the bursts of phony moralizing, the brief moments of equally unfelt and syrupy sentimentality, and the far more genuine and constant and stunning callousness.
Joshua was suffering from a loss of self-esteem because he had worked for Katherine for twenty-five years without spotting the quiet madness that surely must have been bubbling just below her carefully-controlled surface placidity. He was disgusted with himself; therefore, he was even more irritable than usual. And because Mrs. Yancy was, even in ordinary circumstances, the kind of person Joshua despised, the attorney's patience with her could fit into a thimble with room left over for one of Charo's stage costumes plus the collected wisdom of the last four U.S. Presidents.
Tony got up from the sofa and went to the footstool that was in front of Rita Yancy's chair. He sat down, explaining his move by pretending that he just wanted to pet the cat; but in switching seats, he was placing himself between the old woman and Hilary, and he was effectively blocking Joshua, who looked as if he might seize Mrs. Yancy and shake her. The footstool was a good position from which to continue the interrogation in a casual fashion. As Tony stroked the white cat, he kept up a constant stream of chatter with the woman, ingratiating himself with her, charming her, using the old Clemenza soft-sell which always had done well for him in his police work.
Eventually, he asked her it there had been anything unusual about the birth of the twins.
"Unusual?" Mrs. Yancy asked, perplexed. "Don't you think the whole damned thing was unusual?"
"You're right," he said. "I didn't put my question very well. What I meant to ask was whether there was anything peculiar about the birth itself, anything odd about her labor pains or her contractions, anything remarkable about the initial state of the babies when they came out of her, any abnormality, any strangeness."
He saw the surprise enter her eyes as his question tripped a switch in her memory.
"In fact," she said, "there was something unusual."
"Let me guess," he said. "Both of the babies were born with cauls."
"That's right! How did you know?"
"Just a lucky guess."
"The hell it was." She wagged a finger at him. "You're smarter than you pretend to be."
He forced himself to smile at her. He had to force it, for there was nothing about Rita Yancy that could elicit a genuine smile from him.
"Both of them were born with cauls," she said. "Their little heads were almost entirely covered.
The doctor had seen and dealt with that sort of thing before, of course. But he thought the chances of both twins having cauls was something like a million to one."
"Was Katherine aware of this?"
"Aware of the cauls? Not at the time. She was delirious with pain. And then for three days she was completely out of her mind."
"But later?"
"I'm sure she was told about it," Mrs. Yancy said. "It's not the sort of thing you forget to tell a mother. In fact ... I remember telling her myself. Yes. Yes, I do. I recall it very clearly now.
She was fascinated. You know, some people think that a child born with a caul has the gift of second sight."
"Is that what Katherine believed?"
Rita Yancy frowned. "No. She said it was a bad sign, not a good one. Leo had been interested in the supernatural, and Katherine had read a few books in his occult collection. In one of those books, it said that when twins were born with cauls, that was ... I can't recall exactly what she said it meant, but it wasn't good. An evil omen or something."
"The mark of the demon?" Tony asked.
"Yes! That's it!"
"So she believed that her babies were marked by a demon, their souls already damned?"
"I'd almost forgotten about that," Mrs. Yancy said.
She stared beyond Tony, not seeing anything in the parlor, looking into the past, striving to remember....
Hilary and Joshua stayed back, out of the way, silent; and Tony was relieved that they recognized his authority.
Eventually, Mrs. Yancy said, "After Katherine told me about it being the mark of a demon, she just clammed up. She didn't want to talk any more. For a couple of days, she was as quiet as a mouse.
She stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, hardly moving at all. She looked like she was thinking real hard about something. Then suddenly, she started acting so damned weird that I had to start wondering if I still might have to send her away to the booby hatch."
"Was she ranting and raving and violent like before?" Tony asked.
"No, no. It was all talk this time. Very wild, intense, crazy talk. She told me that the twins were the children of a demon. She said she'd been raped by a thing from hell, a green and scaly thing with huge eyes and a forked tongue and long claws. She said it had come from hell to force her to carry its children. Crazy, huh? She swore up and down that it was true. She even described this demon. A damned good description, too. Full of detail, very well done. And when she told me about how it raped her, she managed to give me the chills, even though I knew it was all a bunch of crap. The story was colorful, very imaginative. At first, I thought it was a joke, something she was doing just for laughs, except she wasn't laughing, and I couldn't see anything funny in it. I reminded her that she'd told me all about Leo, and she screamed at me. Did she scream! I thought the windows would break. She denied ever having said such things. She pretended to be insulted. She was so angry with me for suggesting incest, so self-righteous, a regular little prig, so determined to make me apologize--well, I couldn't help laughing at her. And that made her even angrier. She kept saying it hadn't been Leo, though we both knew damned well it had. She did everything she could to make me believe it was a demon that had fathered the twins. And I tell you, her act was good! I didn't believe it for a minute, of course. All that silly stuff about a creature from hell sticking his thing in her. What a bunch of hogwash. But I started to wonder if maybe she had convinced herself. She sure looked convinced. She was so fanatical about it. She said she was afraid that she and her babies would be burned alive if any religious people found out that she'd consorted with a demon. She begged me to help her keep the secret. She didn't want me to tell anyone about the two cauls. Then she said she knew that both twins carried the mark of the demon between their legs. She pleaded with me to keep that a secret, too."
"Between their legs?" Tony asked.
"Oh, she was carrying on like a full-fledged looney," Rita Yancy said. "She insisted that both of her babies had their father's s*x org*ns. She said they weren't human between the legs, and she said she knew I'd noticed that, and she begged me not to tell anyone about it. Well, that was purely ridiculous. Both those little boys had perfectly ordinary pee-pees. But Katherine jabbered on and on about demons for almost two days. Sometimes she seemed truly hysterical. She wanted to know how much money I'd take to keep the secret about the demon. I told her I wouldn't take a penny for that, but I said I'd settle for five hundred a month to keep mum about Leo and all the rest of it, the rest of the real story. That calmed her down a little, but she still had this demon thing stuck in her head. I was just about decided that she really believed what she was saying, and I was going to call my doctor and have him examine her--and then she shut up about it.
She seemed to regain her senses. Or she got tired of her joke, I guess. Anyway, she didn't say one more word about demons. She behaved herself from then on until she took her babies and left a week or so later."
Tony thought about what Mrs. Yancy had told him.
Like a witch cuddling a feline familiar, the old woman petted the white cat.
"What if," Tony said. "What if, what if, what if?"
"What if what?" Hilary asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Pieces seem to be falling into place ... but it looks ... so wild. Maybe I'm putting the puzzle together all wrong. I've got to think about it. I'm just not sure yet."
"Well, do you have any more questions for me?" Mrs. Yancy asked.
"No," Tony said, getting up from the footstool. "I can't think of anything else."
"I believe we've gotten what we came for," Joshua agreed.
"More than we bargained for," Hilary said.
Mrs. Yancy lifted the cat off her lap, put it on the floor, and rose from her chair. "I've wasted too much time on this silly damned thing. I should be in the kitchen. I've got work to do. I made four pie shells this morning. Now I've got to mix up the fillings and get everything in the oven.
I've got grandchildren coming for dinner, and each one of them has a different kind of favorite pie. Sometimes the little dears can be a tribulation. But on the other hand, I'd sure be lost without them."
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 brownred 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."