Whispers. Part 45

"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.

I feel so empty, so incomplete. She killed me, and I'm not whole any more.

I'm leaving this note in case she wins again. Until I'm dead twice, this is my own little war, mine and no one else's. I can't come out in the open and ask for police protection. If I do that, everyone will know what I am, who I am. Everyone will know what I've been hiding all my life, and then they'll stone me to death. But if she gets me again, then it won't matter if everyone finds out what I am, because I'll already be dead twice. If she gets me again, then whoever finds this letter must take the responsibility for stopping her.

You must cut off her head and stuff her mouth full of garlic. Cut out her heart and pound a stake through it. Bury her head and her heart in different church graveyards. She's not a vampire. But I think these things may work. If she is killed this way, she might stay dead.

She comes back from the grave.

Below the body of the letter, in ink, there was a fine forgery of Bruno Frye's signature. It had to be a forgery, of course. Frye was dead already when these lines were written.

The skin tingled on the back of Joshua's neck, and for some reason he thought of Friday night: walking out of Avril Tannerton's funeral home, stepping into the pitch-black night, being certain that something dangerous was nearby, sensing an evil presence in the darkness, a thing crouching and waiting.

"What is it?" Preston asked.

Joshua handed over the paper.

Preston read it and was amazed. "What in the world?"

"It must have been put in the box by the imposter who cleaned out the accounts," Joshua said.

"But why would he do such a thing?"

"Perhaps it's a hoax," Joshua said. "Whoever he is, he evidently enjoys a good ghost story. He knew we'd find out that he'd looted the checking and savings, so he decided to have some fun with us."

"But it's so ... strange," Preston said. "I mean, you might expect a self-congratulatory note, something that would rub our faces in it. But this? It doesn't seem like the work of a practical joker. Although it's weird and doesn't always make tense, it seems so ... earnest."

"If you think it's not merely a hoax, then what do you think?" Joshua asked. "Are you telling me Bruno Frye wrote this letter and put it in the safe-deposit box after he died?"

"Well ... no. Of course not."

"Then what?"

The banker looked down at the letter in his hands. "Then I would say that this imposter, this man who looks so remarkably like Mr. Frye and talks like Mr. Frye, this man who carries a driver's license in Mr. Frye's name, this man who knew that Mr. Frye had accounts in First Pacific United--this man isn't just pretending to be Mr. Frye. He actually thinks he is Mr. Frye." He looked up at Joshua. "I don't believe that an ordinary thief with a prankster's turn of mind would compose a letter like this. There's genuine madness in it."

Joshua nodded. "I'm afraid I have to agree with you. But where did this doppelganger come from? Who is he? How long has he been around? Was Bruno aware that this man existed? Why would the look-alike share Bruno's obsessive fear and hatred of Katherine Frye? How could both men suffer from the same delusion--the belief that she had come back from the dead? There are a thousand questions. It truly boggles the mind."

"It certainly does," Preston said. "And I don't have any answers for you. But I do have one suggestion. This Hilary Thomas should be told that she may be in grave danger."

After Frank Howard's funeral, which was conducted with full police honors, Tony and Hilary caught the 11:55 flight from Los Angeles. On the way north, Hilary worked at being bubbly and amusing, for she could see that the funeral had depressed Tony and had brought back horrible memories of the Monday morning shootout. At first, he slumped in his seat, brooding, barely responding to her. But after a while, he seemed to become aware of her determination to cheer him up, and, perhaps because he didn't want her to feel that her effort was unappreciated, he found his lost smile and began to come out of his depression. They landed on time at San Francisco International Airport, but the two o'clock shuttle flight to Napa was now rescheduled for three o'clock because of minor mechanical difficulties.

With time to kill, they ate lunch in an airport restaurant that offered a view of the busy runways. The surprisingly good coffee was the only thing to recommend the place; the sandwiches were rubbery, and the french fries were soggy.

As the time approached for their departure for Napa, Hilary began to dread going. Minute by minute, she grew more apprehensive.

Tony noticed the change in her. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know exactly. I just feel like ... well, maybe this is wrong. Maybe we're just rus.h.i.+ng straight into the lion's den."

"Frye is down there in Los Angeles. He doesn't have any way of knowing that you're going to St. Helena," Tony said.

"Doesn't he?"

"Are you still convinced that it's supernatural, a matter of ghosts and ghouls and whatnot?"

"I'm not ruling out anything."

"We'll find a logical explanation in the end."

"Whether we do or not, I've got this feeling ... this premonition."

"A premonition of what?"

"Of worse things to come," she said.

After a hurried but excellent lunch in the First Pacific United Bank's private executive dining room, Joshua Rhinehart and Ronald Preston met with federal and state banking officials in Preston's office. The bureaucrats were boring and poorly prepared and obviously ineffectual: but Joshua tolerated them, answered their questions, filled out their forms, for it was his duty to use the federal insurance system to recover the stolen funds for the Frye estate.

As the bureaucrats were leaving, Warren Sackett, an FBI agent, arrived. Because the money had been stolen from a federally-chartered financial inst.i.tution, the crime was within the Bureau's jurisdiction. Sackett--a tall, intense man with chiseled features--sat at the conference table with Joshua and Preston, and he elicited twice as much information as the covey of bureaucrats had done, in only half the time that those paper-pushers had required. He informed Joshua that a very detailed background check on him would be part of the investigation, but Joshua already knew that and had no reason to fear it. Sackett agreed that Hilary Thomas might be in danger, and he took the responsibility for informing the Los Angeles police of the extraordinary situation that had arisen, so that both the LAPD and the Los Angeles office of the FBI would be prepared to look after her.

Although Sackett was polite, efficient, and thorough, Joshua realized that the FBI was not going to solve the case in a few days--not unless the Bruno Frye imposter walked into their office and confessed. This was not an urgent matter to them. In a country plagued by various crackpot terrorist groups, organized crime families, and corrupt politicians, the resources of the FBI could not be brought fully to bear on an eighteen-thousand-dollar case of this sort. More likely than not, Sackett would be the only agent on it full-time. He would begin slowly, with background checks on everyone involved; and then he would conduct an exhaustive survey of banks in northern California, to see if Bruno Frye had any other secret accounts. Sackett wouldn't get to St. Helena for a day or two. And if he didn't come up with any leads in the first week or ten days, he might thereafter handle the case only on a part-time basis.

When the agent finished asking questions, Joshua turned to Ronald Preston and said, "Sir, I trust that the missing eighteen thousand will be replaced in short order."

"Well...." Preston nervously fingered his prim little mustache. "We'll have to wait until the FDIC approves the claim." Joshua looked at Sackett. "Am I correct in a.s.suming the FDIC will wait until you can a.s.sure them that neither I nor any beneficiary of the estate conspired to withdraw that eighteen thousand dollars?"

"They might," Sackett said. "After all, this is a highly unusual case."

"But quite a lot of time could pa.s.s before you're able to give them such a.s.surances," Joshua said.

"We wouldn't make you wait beyond a reasonable length of time," Sackett said. "At most, three months."

Joshua sighed. "I had hoped to settle the estate quickly."

Sackett shrugged. "Maybe I won't need three months. It could all break fast. You never know. In a day or two, I might even turn up this guy who's a dead ringer for Frye. Then I'd be able to give the FDIC an all-clear signal."

"But you don't expect to solve it that fast."

"The situation is so bizarre that I can't commit myself to deadlines," Sackett said.

"d.a.m.nation," Joshua said wearily.

A few minutes later, as Joshua crossed the cool marble-floored lobby on his way out of the bank, Mrs. Willis called to him. She was on duty at a teller's cage. He went to her, and she said, "You know what I'd do if I were you?"

"What's that?" Joshua asked.

"Dig him up. That man you buried. Dig him up."

"Bruno Frye?"

"You didn't bury Mr. Frye." Mrs. Willis was adamant; she pressed her lips together and shook her head back and forth, looking very stern. "No. If there's a double for Mr. Frye, he's not the one who's up walking around. The double is the one who's six feet under with a slab of granite for a hat. The real Mr. Frye was here last Thursday. I'd swear to that in any court. I'd stake my life on it."

"But if it wasn't Frye who was killed down in Los Angeles, then where is the real Frye now? Why did he run away? What in the name of G.o.d is going on?"

"I don't know about that," she said. "I only know what I saw. Dig him up, Mr. Rhinehart. I believe you'll find that you've buried the wrong man."

At 3:20 Wednesday afternoon, Joshua landed at the county airport just outside the town of Napa. With a population of forty-five thousand, Napa was far from being a major city, and in fact it partook of the wine country ambiance to such an extent that it seemed smaller and cozier than it really was; but to Joshua, who was long accustomed to the rural peace of tiny St. Helena, Napa was as noisy and bothersome as San Francisco had been, and he was anxious to get out of the place.

His car was parked in the public lot by the airfield, where he had left it that morning. He didn't go home or to his office. He drove straight to Bruno Frye's house in St. Helena.

Usually, Joshua was acutely aware of the incredible natural beauty of the valley. But not today. Now he drove without seeing anything until the Frye property came into view.

Part of Shade Tree Vineyards, the Frye family business, occupied fertile black flat land, but most of it was spread over the gently rising foothills on the west side of the valley. The winery, the public tasting room, the extensive cellars, and the other company buildings--all fieldstone and redwood and oak structures that seemed to grow out of the earth--were situated on a large piece of level highland, near the westernmost end of the Frye property. All the buildings faced east, across the valley, toward vistas of seriated vines, and all of them were constructed with their backs to a one-hundred-sixty-foot cliff, which had been formed in a distant age when earth movement had sheered the side off the last foothill at the base of the more precipitously rising Mayacamas Mountains.

Above the cliff, on the isolated hilltop, stood the house that Leo Frye, Katherine's father, had built when he'd first come to the wine country in 1918. Leo had been a brooding Prussian type who had valued his privacy more than almost anything else. He looked for a building site that would provide a wide view of the scenic valley plus absolute privacy, and the clifftop property was precisely what he wanted. Although Leo was already a widower in 1918, and although he had only one small child and was not, at that time, contemplating another marriage, he nevertheless constructed a large twelve-room Victorian house on top of the cliff, a place with many bay windows and gables and a lot of architectural gingerbread. It overlooked the winery that he established, later, on the highland below, and there were only two ways to reach it. The first approach was by aerial tramway, a system comprised of cables, pulleys, electric motors, and one four-seat gondola that carried you from the lower station (a second-floor corner of the main winery building) to the upper station (somewhat to the north of the house on the clifftop). The second approach was by way of a double-switch back staircase fixed to the face of the cliff. Those three hundred and twenty steps were meant to be used only if the aerial tramway broke down--and then only if it was not possible to wait until repairs were made. The house was not merely private; it was remote.

As Joshua turned from the public road onto a very long private drive that led to the Shade Tree winery, he tried to recall everything he knew about Leo Frye. There was not much. Katherine had seldom spoken of her father, and Leo had not left a great many friends behind.

Because Joshua hadn't come to the valley until 1945, a few years after Leo's death, he'd never met the man, but he'd heard just enough tales about him to form a picture of the sort of mind that hungered for the excessive privacy embodied in that clifftop house. Leo Frye had been cold, stern, somber, self-possessed, obstinate, brilliant, a bit of an egomaniac, and an iron-handed authoritarian. He was not unlike a feudal lord from a distant age, a medieval aristocrat who preferred to live in a well-fortified castle beyond the easy reach of the unwashed rabble.

Katherine had continued to live in the house after her father died. She raised Bruno in those high-ceilinged rooms, a world far removed from that of the child's contemporaries, a Victorian world of waist-high wainscoting and flowered wallpaper and crenelated molding and footstools and mantel clocks and lace tablecloths. Indeed, mother and son lived together until he was thirty-five years old, at which time Katherine died of heart disease.

Now, as Joshua drove up the long macadam lane toward the winery, he looked above the fieldstone and wood buildings. He raised his eyes to the big house that stood like a giant cairn atop the cliff.

It was strange for a grown man to live with his mother as long as Bruno had lived with Katherine. Naturally, there had been rumors, speculations. The consensus of opinion in St. Helena was that Bruno had little or no interest in girls, that his pa.s.sions and affections were directed secretly toward young men. It was a.s.sumed that he satisfied his desires during his occasional visits to San Francisco, out of sight of his wine country neighbors. Bruno's possible h.o.m.os.e.xuality was not a scandal in the valley. Local people didn't spend a great deal of time talking about it; they didn't really care. Although St. Helena was a small town, it could claim more than a little sophistication; winemaking made it so.

But now Joshua wondered if the consensus of local opinion about Bruno had been wrong. Considering the extraordinary events of the past week, it was beginning to appear as if the man's secret had been much darker and infinitely more terrible than mere h.o.m.os.e.xuality.

Immediately after Katherine's funeral, deeply shaken by her death, Bruno had moved out of the house on the cliff. He took his clothes, as well as large collections of paintings, metal sculptures, and books, which he had acquired on his own; but he left behind everything that belonged to Katherine. Her clothes were left hanging in closets and folded in drawers. Her antique furniture, paintings, porcelains, crystals, music boxes, enameled boxes--all of those things (and much more) could have been sold at auction for a substantial sum. But Bruno insisted that every item be left exactly where Katherine had put it, undisturbed, untouched. He locked the windows, drew the blinds and drapes, closed and bolt-locked the exterior shutters on both the first and second floors, locked the doors, sealed the place tight, as if it were a vault in which he could preserve forever the memory of his adoptive mother.

When Bruno had rented an apartment and had begun to make plans for the construction of a new house in the vineyards, Joshua had tried to persuade him that it was foolish to leave the contents of the cliff house unattended. Bruno insisted that the house was secure and that its remoteness made it an unlikely target of burglars--especially since burglary was an almost unheard-of crime in the valley. The two approaches to the house--the switchback stairs and the aerial tramway--were deep in Frye property, behind the winery: and the tramway operated only with a key. Besides (Bruno had argued) no one but he and Joshua knew that a great many items of value remained in the old house. Bruno was adamant; Katherine's belongings must not be touched; and finally, reluctantly, unhappily, Joshua surrendered to his client's wishes.

To the best of Joshua's knowledge, no one had been in the cliff house for five years, not since the day that Bruno had moved out. The tramway was well-maintained, even though the only person who rode it was Gilbert Ulman, a mechanic employed to keep Shade Tree Vineyards' trucks and farm equipment in good shape; Gil also had the job of regularly inspecting and repairing the aerial tramway system, which required only a couple of hours a month. Tomorrow, or Friday at the latest, Joshua would have to take the cable car to the top of the cliff and open the house, every door and window, so that it could air out before the art appraisers arrived from Los Angeles and San Francisco on Sat.u.r.day morning.

At the moment, Joshua was not the least bit interested in Leo Frye's isolated Victorian redoubt; his business was at Bruno's more modern and considerably more accessible house. As he drew near the end of the road that led to the winery's public parking lot, he turned left, onto an extremely narrow driveway that struck south through the sun-splashed vineyards. Vines crowded both sides of the cracked, raggedy-edged blacktop. The pavement led him down one hill, across a shallow glen, up another slope, and ended two hundred yards south of the winery, in a clearing, where Bruno's house stood with vineyards on all sides. It was a large, single-story, ranch-style, redwood and fieldstone structure shaded by one of the nine mammoth oak trees that dotted the huge property and gave the Frye company its name.

Joshua got out of the car and walked to the front door of the house. There were only a few high white clouds against the electric-blue sky. The air flowing down from the piney heights of the Mayacamas was crisp and fresh.

He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and stood in the foyer for a moment, listening. He wasn't sure what he expected to hear.

Maybe footsteps.

Or Bruno Frye's voice.

But there was only silence.

He went from one end of the house to the other in order to get to Frye's study. The decor was proof that Bruno had acquired Katherine's obsessive compulsion to collect and h.o.a.rd beautiful things. On some walls, so many fine paintings were hung so close together that their frames touched, and no single piece could claim the eye in that exquisite riot of shape and color. Display cases stood everywhere, filled with art gla.s.s and bronze sculpture and crystal paperweights and pre-Columbian statuary. Every room contained far too much furniture, but each piece was a matchless example of its period and style. In the huge study, there were five or six hundred rare books, many of them limited editions that had been bound in leather; and there were a few dozen perfect little scrimshaw figures in a display case; and there were six terribly expensive and flawless crystal b.a.l.l.s, one as small as an orange, one as large as a basketball, the others in various sizes between.

Joshua pulled back the drapes at the window, letting in a little light, switched on a bra.s.s lamp, and sat in a modern spring-backed office chair behind an enormous 18th century English desk. From a jacket pocket he withdrew the strange letter that he had found in the safe-deposit box at the First Pacific United Bank. It was actually just a Xerox; Warren Sackett, the FBI agent, insisted on keeping the original. Joshua unfolded the copy and propped it up where he could see it. He turned to the low typing stand that was beside the desk, pulled it over his lap, rolled a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter, and quickly tapped out the first sentence of the letter.

My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies.

He held the Xerox copy next to the sample and compared them. The type was the same. In both versions, the loop of the lower case "e" was completely filled in with ink because the keys hadn't been properly cleaned in quite a while. In both, the loop of the lower case "a" was partially occluded, and the lower case "d" printed slightly higher than any of the other characters. The letter had been typed in Bruno Frye's study, on Bruno Frye's machine.

The look-alike, the man who had impersonated Frye in that San Francis...o...b..nk last Thursday, apparently possessed a key to the house. But how had he gotten it? The most obvious answer was that Bruno had given it to him, which meant that the man was an employee, a hired double.

Joshua leaned back in the chair and stared at the Xerox of the letter, and other questions exploded like fireworks in his mind. Why had Bruno felt it necessary to hire a double? Where had he found such a remarkable look-alike? How long ago did the double start to work for him? Doing what? And how often had he, Joshua, spoken to this doppelganger, thinking the man was really Frye? Probably more than once. Perhaps more often than he'd spoken with the real Bruno. There was no way of knowing. Had the double been here, in the house, Thursday morning, when Bruno had died in Los Angeles? Most likely. After all, this was where he had typed the letter that he'd put in the safe-deposit box, so this must be where he had heard the news. But how had he learned about the death so quickly? Bruno's body had been found next to a public telephone.... Was it possible that Bruno's last act had been to call home and talk to his double? Yes. Possible. Even probable. The telephone company's records would have to be checked. But what had those two men said to each other as the one died? Could they conceivably share the same psychosis, the belief that Katherine had come back from the grave?

Joshua shuddered.

He folded the letter, returned it to his coat pocket.

For the first time, he realized how gloomy these rooms were--overstuffed with furniture and expensive ornaments, windows covered by heavy drapes, floors carpeted in dark colors. Suddenly, the place seemed far more isolated than Leo's clifftop retreat.

A noise. In another room.

Joshua froze as he was walking around the desk. He waited, listened. "Imagination," he said, trying to rea.s.sure himself.

He walked swiftly through the house to the front door, and he found that the noise had, indeed, been imaginary. He wasn't attacked. Nevertheless, when he stepped outside, closed the door, and locked it, he sighed with relief.

In the car, on his way to his office in St. Helena, he thought of more questions. Who actually had died in Los Angeles last week--Frye or his look-alike? Which of them had been at the First Pacific United Bank on Thursday--the real man or the imitation? Until he knew the answer to that, how could he settle the estate? He had countless questions but d.a.m.ned few answers.

When he parked behind his office a few minutes later, he realized that he would have to give serious consideration to Mrs. Willis's advice. Bruno Frye's grave might have to be opened to determine exactly who was buried in it.