Whispers

Page 65

"Twenty-three women who vaguely resemble Katherine," Joshua said. "My God. Twenty-three."
"A gallery of death," Hilary said, shivering.
"At least they're not all unidentified snapshots," Tony said. "With the licenses, we've got names and addresses."
"We'll get them out on the wire right away," Laurenski said, sending Larsson out to the car to radio the information to HQ. "But I think we all know what we'll find."
"Twenty-three unsolved murders spread over the past five years," Tony said.
"Or twenty-three disappearances," the sheriff said.
They spent two more hours in the house, but they didn't find anything else as important as the photographs and driver's licenses. Hilary's nerves were frayed, and her imagination was stimulated by the disturbing realization that her own driver's license had nearly wound up in that shoe box.
Each time she opened a drawer or a cupboard door, she expected to find a shriveled heart with a stake through it or a dead woman's rotting head. She was relieved when the search was finally completed.
Outside, in the chilly night air, Laurenski said, "Will the three of you be coming to the coroner's office in the morning?"
"Count me out," Hilary said.
"No thanks," Tony said.
Joshua said, "There's really nothing we can do there."
"What time should we meet at the cliff house?" Laurenski asked.
Joshua said, "Hilary and Tony and I will go up first thing in the morning and open all the shutters and windows. The place has been closed up for five years. It'll need to be aired out before any of us will want to spend hours poking through it. Why don't you just come on up and join us whenever you're finished at the coroner's?"
"All right," Laurenski said. "See you tomorrow. Maybe the Los Angeles police will get the bastard during the night."
"Maybe," Hilary said hopefully.
Up in the Mayacamas Mountains, soft thunder roared.
***
Bruno Frye spent half the night talking to himself, carefully planning Hilary-Katherine's death.
The other half, he slept while the candles flickered. Thin streams of smoke rose from the burning wicks. The dancing flames cast jiggling, macabre shadows on the walls, and they were reflected in the staring eyes of the corpse.
***
Joshua Rhinehart had trouble sleeping. He tossed and turned, getting increasingly tangled in the sheets. At three o'clock in the morning, he went out to the bar and poured himself a double shot of bourbon, drank it fast. Even that didn't settle him down a whole lot.
He had never missed Cora so much as he did that night.
Hilary woke repeatedly from bad dreams, but the night did not go by slowly. It swept past at rocket speeds. She still had the feeling that she was hurtling toward a precipice, and she could do nothing to stop her forward rush.
***
Near dawn, as Tony lay awake, Hilary turned to him, came against him, and said, "Make love to me."
For half an hour, they lost themselves in each other, and although it was not better than before, it was not one degree worse either. A sweet, silken, hushed togetherness.
Afterwards, she said, "I love you."
"I love you, too."
"No matter what happens," she said, "we've had these few days together."
"Now don't get fatalistic on me."
"Well... you never know."
"We've got years ahead of us. Years and years and years together. Nobody's going to take them away from us."
"You're so positive, so optimistic. I wish I'd found you a long time ago."
"We're through the worst of this thing," he said. "We know the truth now."
"They haven't caught Frye yet."
"They will," Tony said reassuringly. "He thinks you're Katherine, so he's not going to stray too far from Westwood. He'll keep checking back at your house to see if you've shown up, and sooner or later the surveillance team will spot him, and it'll all be over."
"Hold me," she said.
"Sure."
"Mmmm. That's nice."
"Yeah."
"Just being held."
"Yeah."
"I feel better already."
"Everything's going to be fine."
"As long as I have you," she said.
"Forever, then."
***
The sky was dark and low and ominous. The peaks of the Mayacamas were shrouded in mist.
Peter Laurenski stood in the graveyard, hands in his pants pockets, shoulders hunched against the chill morning air. Using a backhoe for most of the way, then tossing out the last eight or ten inches of dirt with shovels, workmen at Napa County Memorial Park gouged into the soft earth, tearing open Bruno Frye's grave. As they labored, they complained to the sheriff that they were not being paid extra for getting up at dawn and missing breakfast and coming in early, but they got very little sympathy from him; he just urged them to work faster.
At 7:45, Avril Tannerton and Gary Olmstead arrived in the Forever View hearse. As they walked across the green hillside toward Laurenski, Olmstead looked properly somber, but Tannerton was smiling, taking in great lungfuls of the nippy air, as if he were merely out for his morning constitutional.
"Morning, Peter."
"Morning, Avril. Gary."
"How long till they have it open?" Tannerton asked.
"They say fifteen minutes."
At 8:05, one of the workmen climbed up from the hole and said, "Ready to yank him out?"
"Let's get on with it," Laurenski said.
Chains were attached to the casket, and it was brought out of the ground by the same device that had lowered it in just last Sunday. The bronze coffin was caked with earth around the handles and in the frill work, but overall it was still shiny.
By 8:40, Tannerton and Olmstead had loaded the big box into the hearse.
"I'll follow you to the coroner's office," the sheriff said.
Tannerton grinned at him. "I assure you, Peter, we aren't going to run off with Mr. Frye's remains."
***
At 8:20, in Joshua Rhinehart's kitchen, while the casket was being exhumed at the cemetery a few miles away, Tony and Hilary stacked the breakfast dishes in the sink.
"I'll wash them later," Joshua said. "Let's get up to the cliff and open that house. It must smell like hell in there after all these years. I just hope the mildew and mold haven't done too much damage to Katherine's collections. I warned Bruno about that a thousand times, but he didn't seem to care if--" Joshua stopped, blinked. "Will you listen to me babble on? Of course he didn't care if the whole lot of it rotted away. Those were Katherine's collections, and he wouldn't have cared a damn about anything she treasured."
They went to Shade Tree Vineyards in Joshua's car. The day was dreary; the light was dirty gray.
Joshua parked in the employees' lot.
Gilbert Ulman hadn't come to work yet. He was the mechanic who maintained the aerial tramway in addition to caring for all of Shade Tree Vineyards' trucks and farm equipment.
The key that operated the tramway was hanging on a pegboard in the garage, and the winery's night manager, a portly man named Iannucci, was happy to get it for Joshua.
Key in hand, Joshua led Hilary and Tony up to the second floor of the huge main winery, through an area of administrative offices, through a viniculture lab, and then onto a broad catwalk. Half the building was open from the first floor to the ceiling, and in that huge chamber there were enormous three-story fermentation tanks. Cold, cold air flowed off the tanks, and there was a yeasty odor in the place. At the end of the long catwalk, at the southwest corner of the building, they went through a heavy pine door with black iron hinges, into a small room that was open at the end opposite from where they entered. An overhanging roof extended twelve feet out from the missing wall, to keep rain from slanting into the open chamber. The four-seat cable car--a fire-engine-red number with lots of glass--was nestled under the overhang, at the brink of the room.
***
The pathology laboratory had a vague, unpleasant chemical odor. So did the coroner, Dr. Amos Garnet, who sucked vigorously on a breath mint.
There were five people in the room. Laurenski, Larsson, Garnet, Tannerton, and Olmstead. No one, with the possible exception of the perennially good-natured Tannerton, seemed happy to be there.
"Open it," Laurenski said. "I've got an appointment to keep with Joshua Rhinehart."
Tannerton and Olmstead threw back the latches on the bronze casket. A few remaining chunks of dirt fell to the floor, onto the plastic dropcloth that Garnet had put down. They pushed the lid up and back.
The body was gone.
The velvet- and silk-lined box held nothing but the three fifty-pound bags of dry mortar mix that had been stolen from Avril Tannerton's basement last weekend.
***
Hilary and Tony sat on one side of the cable car, and Joshua sat on the other. The attorney's knees brushed Tony's. Hilary held Tony's hand as the red gondola moved slowly, slowly up the line toward the top of the cliff. She wasn't afraid of heights, but the tramway seemed so fragile that she could not help gritting her teeth.
Joshua saw the tension on her face and smiled. "Don't worry. The car seems small, but it's sturdy.
And Gilbert does a fine job with maintenance."
As it ground gradually upward, the car swung slightly in the stiff morning wind.
The view of the valley became increasingly spectacular. Hilary tried to concentrate on that and not on the creaking and clattering of the machinery.
The gondola finally reached the top of the cable. It locked in place, and Joshua opened the door.
When they walked out of the upper station of the tramway system, a fiercely-white arc of lightning and a violent peal of thunder broke open the lowering sky. Rain began to fall. It was a thin, cold, slanting rain.
Joshua, Hilary, and Tony ran for shelter. They stomped up the front steps and across the porch to the door.
"And you say there's no heat up here?" Hilary asked.
"The furnace has been shut down for five years," Joshua said. "That's why I told both of you to wear sweaters under your coats. It's not a cold day, really. But once you've been up here awhile in this damp, the air will cut through to your bones."
Joshua unlocked the door, and they went inside, switching on the three flashlights they'd brought with them.
"It stinks in here," Hilary said.
"Mildew," Joshua said. "That's what I was afraid of."
They walked from the foyer into the hall, then into the big drawing room. The beams of their flashlights fell on what looked to be a warehouse full of antique furniture.
"My God," Tony said, "it's worse than Bruno's house. There's hardly room to walk."
"She was obsessed with collecting beautiful things," Joshua said. "Not for investment. Not just because she liked to look at them, either. A lot of things are crammed into closets, hidden away.
Paintings stacked on paintings. And as you can see, even in the main rooms, there's just too damned much stuff; it's jammed too close together to please the eye."
"If every room has antiques of this quality," Hilary said, "then there's a fortune here."
"Yeah," Joshua said. "If it hasn't been eaten up by worms and termites and whatnot." He let his flashlight beam travel from one end of the room to the other. "This mania for collecting was something I never understood about her. Until this minute. Now I wonder if.... As I look at all of this, and as I think about what we learned from Mrs. Yancy...."
Hilary said, "You think collecting beautiful things was a reaction to all the ugliness in her life before her father died?"
"Yeah," Joshua said. "Leo broke her. Shattered her soul, smashed her spirit flat and left her with a rotten self-image. She must have hated herself for all the years she let him use her--even though she'd had no choice but to let him. So maybe ... feeling low and worthless, she thought she could make her soul beautiful by living among lots of beautiful things."
They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the overfurnished drawing room.
"It's so sad," Tony said.
Joshua shook himself from his reverie. "Let's get these shutters open and let in some light."
"I can't stand this smell," Hilary said, cupping one hand over her nose. "But if we raise the windows, the rain will get in and ruin things."
"Not much if we raise them only five or six inches," Joshua said. "And a few drops of water aren't going to hurt anything in this mold colony."
"It's a wonder there aren't mushrooms growing out of the carpet," Tony said.
They moved through the downstairs, raising windows, unbolting the inward-facing latches on the shutters, letting in the gray storm light and the fresh rain-scented air.
When most of the downstairs rooms had been opened, Joshua said, "Hilary, all that's left down here is the dining room and the kitchen. Why don't you take care of those windows while Tony and I tend to the upstairs."
"Okay," she said. "I'll be up in a minute to help out."
She followed her flashlight beam into the pitch-black dining room as the men went down the hall toward the stairs.
 
When he and Joshua came into the upstairs hallway. Tony said, "Phew! It stinks even worse up here."
A blast of thunder shook the old house. Windows rattled icily. Doors stuttered in their frames.
"You take the rooms on the right," Joshua said. "I'll take the ones on the left."
Tony went through the first door on his side and found a sewing room. An ancient treadle-powered sewing machine stood in one corner, and a more modern electric model rested on a table in another corner; both were bearded with cobwebs. There was a work table and two dressmaker's forms and one window.
He went to the window, put his flashlight on the floor, and tried to twist open the lock lever. It was rusted shut. He struggled with it as rain drummed noisily on the shutters beyond the glass.
 
Joshua shone his flashlight into the first room on the left and saw a bed, a dresser, a highboy.
There were two windows in the far wall.
He crossed the threshold, took two more steps, sensed movement behind him, and he started to turn, felt a sudden cold thrill go through his back, and then it became a very hot thrill, a burning lance, a line of pain drawn through his flesh, and he knew he had been stabbed. He felt the knife being jerked out of him. He turned. His flashlight revealed Bruno Frye. The madman's face was wild, demoniacal. The knife came up, came down, and the cold thrill shivered through Joshua again, and this time the blade tore his right shoulder, from front to back, all the way through, and Bruno had to twist and jerk the weapon savagely, several times, to get it out. Joshua raised his left arm to protect himself. The blade punctured his forearm. His legs buckled. He went down. He fell against the bed, slid to the floor, slick with his own blood, and Bruno turned away from him and went out to the second-floor hall, out of the flashlight's glow, into the darkness. Joshua realized he hadn't even screamed, had not warned Tony, and he tried to shout, really tried, but the first wound seemed to be very serious, for when he attempted to make any sound at all, pain blossomed in his chest, and he could do no better than hiss like a goddamned goose.