Whispers. Part 59

Light.

Threads of light.

Thin lines of light like loose, luminescent threads hanging from the otherwise tenebrous fabric of the room. Not many threads, not much light, but some. It was a whole lot better than nothing.

He scrambled as fast as he could toward those faint filaments of light, flinging the things from him, and what he found was a window. The far side of it was covered by shutters. Light was seeping through the narrow c.h.i.n.ks in the shutters.

Bruno stood, swaying, fumbling in the dark for the window latch. When he found the lock, it would not turn; it was badly corroded.

Screaming, brus.h.i.+ng frantically at himself, he stumbled back toward the bed, found it in the seamless blackness, got hold of the lamp that stood on the nightstand, carried the lamp back to the window, used it as a club, and gla.s.s shattered. He threw the lamp aside, felt for the bolt on the inside of the shutters, put his hand on it, jerked on it, skinned a knuckle as he forced the bolt out of its catch, threw open the shutters, and wept with relief as light flooded into the attic.

The whispers faded.

Rita Yancy's parlor--that was what she called it, a parlor, rather than using a more modern and less colorful word--almost was a parody of the stereotypical parlor in which sweet little old ladies like her were supposed to spend their twilight years. Chintz drapes. Handmade, embroidered wall hangings--most of them inspirational sayings framed by penny-sized flowers and cute birds--were everywhere, a relentless display of good will and good humor and bad taste. Ta.s.seled upholstery. Wingback chairs. Copies of Reader's Digest on a dainty occasional table. A basket filled with b.a.l.l.s of yarn and knitting needles. A flowered carpet that was protected by matching flowered runners. Handmade afghans were draped across the seat and the back of the sofa. A mantel clock ticked hollowly.

Hilary and Tony sat on the sofa, on the edge of it, as if afraid to lean back and risk rumpling the covering. Hilary noticed that each of the many knickknacks and curios was dustfree and highly polished. She had the feeling that Rita Yancy would jump up and run for a dust cloth the instant anyone tried to touch and admire those prized possessions.

Joshua sat in an armchair. The back of his head and his arms rested on antimaca.s.sars.

Mrs. Yancy settled into what was obviously her favorite chair; she seemed to have acquired part of her character from it, and it from her. It was possible, Hilary thought, to picture Mrs. Yancy and the chair growing together into a single organic-inorganic creature with six legs and brushed velvet skin.

The old woman picked up a blue and green afghan that was folded on her footstool. She opened the blanket and covered her lap with it.

There was a moment of absolute silence, where even the mantel clock seemed to pause, as if time had stopped, as if they had been quick-frozen and magically transported, along with the room, to a distant planet to be put on exhibition in an extraterrestrial museum's Department of Earth Anthropology.

Then Rita Yancy spoke, and what she said totally shattered Hilary's homey image of her. "Well, there's sure as h.e.l.l no point in beating around the bush. I don't want to waste my whole day on this d.a.m.n silly thing. Let's get straight to it. You want to know why Bruno Frye was paying me five hundred bucks a month. It was hush money. He was paying me to keep my mouth shut. His mother paid me the same amount every month for almost thirty-five years, and when she died, Bruno started sending checks. I must admit that surprised the h.e.l.l out of me. These days it's an unusual son who would pay that kind of money to protect his mother's reputation--and especially after she's already kicked the bucket. But he paid."

"Are you saying you were blackmailing Mr. Frye and his mother before him?" Tony asked, astonished.

"Call it whatever you want. Hush money or blackmail or anything you want."

"From what you've told us so far," Tony said, "I believe the law would call it blackmail and nothing else."

Rita Yancy smiled at him. "Do you think the word bothers me? Do you think I'm afraid of it? All quivery inside? Sonny, let me tell you, I've been accused of worse than that in my time. Is blackmail the word you want to use? Well, it's all right by me. Blackmail. That's what it is. We won't put a prettier face on it. But of course, if you're stupid enough to drag an old lady into court, I won't use the same word then. I'll just say that I did a great favor for Katherine Frye a long time ago, and that she insisted on repaying me with a monthly check. You don't really have any proof otherwise, do you? That's one reason I set it up on a monthly basis in the first place. I mean, blackmailers are supposed to strike and run, take it in one big bite, which is easy for the prosecutor to trace. But who's going to believe that a blackmailer would agree to a modest monthly payment on account?"

"We don't have any intention of bringing criminal charges against you," Joshua a.s.sured her. "And we haven't the slightest interest in attempting to recover the money that was paid to you. We realize that would be futile."

"Good," Mrs. Yancy said. "Because I'd make a b.l.o.o.d.y battle of it if you tried."

She straightened her afghan.

I've got to remember this one, everything about her, Hilary thought. She'd make a great little character role in a movie some day: Grandma with spice and acid and a touch of rot.

"All we want is some information," Joshua said. "There's a problem with the estate, and it's holding up the disburs.e.m.e.nt of funds. I need to get answers to some questions in order to expedite the final settlement. You say you don't want to waste your whole day on this 'd.a.m.n silly thing.' Well, I don't want to waste months on the Frye estate either. My only motivation in coming here is to get the information I need to wrap up this d.a.m.n silly thing of mine."

Mrs. Yancy stared hard at him, then at Hilary and Tony. Her eyes were shrewd, appraising. Finally, she nodded with evident satisfaction, as if she had read their minds and had approved of what she'd seen in them. "I think I believe you. All right. Ask your questions."

"Obviously," Joshua said, "the first thing we want to know is what you had on Katherine Frye that made her and her son pay you nearly a quarter of a million dollars over the past forty years."

"To understand about that," Mrs. Yancy said, "you'll need a bit of background on me. You see, when I was a young woman, at the height of the Great Depression, I looked around at all the kinds of work I could do to make ends meet, and I decided that none of them offered more than mere survival and a life of drudgery. All but one. I realized that the only profession that offered me a chance at real money was the oldest profession of them all. When I was eighteen, I became a working girl. In those days, in mixed company like this, a woman like me was referred to as a 'lady of easy virtue.' Today, you don't have to tiptoe around it. You can use any d.a.m.n word you want these days." A strand of gray hair had slipped out of her bun. She pushed it away from her face, tucked it behind her ear. "When it comes to s.e.x--the old slap-and-tickle, as it was sometimes called in my day--I'm amazed at how times have changed."

"You mean you were a ... prost.i.tute?" Tony asked, expressing the surprise that Hilary felt.

"I was an exceptionally good-looking girl," Mrs. Yancy said proudly. "I never worked the streets or bars or hotels or anything like that. I was on the staff of one of the finest, most elegant houses in San Francisco. We catered exclusively to the carriage trade. Only the very best sort of men. There were never fewer than ten girls and often as many as fifteen, but every one of us was striking and refined. I made good money, as I had expected I would. But by the time I was twenty-four, I realized that there was a great deal more money to be made operating my own house than there was in working in someone else's establishment. So I found a house with a lot of charm and spent nearly all of my savings redecorating it. Then I lined up a stable of lovely and polished young ladies. For the next thirty-six years, I worked as a madam, and I ran a d.a.m.ned cla.s.sy place. I retired fifteen years ago, when I was sixty, because I wanted to come here to Hollister where my daughter and her husband lived; I wanted to be close to my grandchildren, you know. Grandchildren make old age a lot more rewarding than I'd ever thought it would be."

Hilary leaned back on the couch, no longer worried about rumpling the afghans that were draped across it.

Joshua said, "This is all quite fascinating, but what does it have to do with Katherine Frye?"

"Her father regularly visited my place in San Francisco," Rita Yancy said.

"Leo Frye?"

"Yes. A very strange man. I was never with him myself. I never serviced him. After I became a madam, I did very little bedwork; I was busy with the management details. But I heard all the stories that my girls told about him. He sounded like a first-cla.s.s b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He liked his women docile, subservient. He liked to insult them and call them dirty names while he was using them. He was a strong disciplinarian, if you know what I mean. He had some nasty things he liked to do, and he paid a high price for the right to do them with my girls. Anyway, in April of 1940, Leo's daughter, Katherine, showed up on my doorstep. I'd never met her, I didn't even know he had a child. But he'd told her about me. He'd sent her to me so that she could have her baby in total secrecy."

Joshua blinked, "Her baby?"

"She was pregnant."

"Bruno was her baby?"

"What about Mary Gunther?" Hilary asked.

"There never was such a person as Mary Gunther," the old woman said. "That was just a cover story that Katherine and Leo made up."

"I knew it!" Tony said. "Too smooth. It was just too d.a.m.n smooth."

"n.o.body in St. Helena knew she was pregnant," Rita Yancy said. "She was wearing several girdles. You wouldn't believe how that poor girl had bound herself up. It was horrible. From the time she missed her first period, long before she ever began to swell up, she started wearing tighter and tighter and tighter girdles, then one girdle on top of another. And she starved herself, trying to keep off all the weight she could. It's a miracle she didn't either have a miscarriage or kill herself."

"And you took her in?" Tony asked.

"I'm not going to claim I did it out of the goodness of my heart," Mrs. Yancy said. "I can't stand old women when they're smug and self-righteous, like a lot of the ones I see when I go to the bridge games at the church. Katherine didn't touch my heart or anything like that. And I didn't take her in because I felt I had an obligation to her father. I didn't owe him a thing. Because of what I'd heard about him from my girls, I didn't even like him. And he'd been dead six weeks when Katherine showed up. I took her in for one reason, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. She had three thousand bucks with her to cover room and board and the doctor's fee. That was a good deal more money then than it is today."

Joshua shook his head. "I can't understand it. She had a reputation as a cold fish. She didn't care for men. She didn't have a lover that anyone knew about. Who was the father?"

"Leo," Mrs. Yancy said.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Hilary said softly.

"Are you sure?" Joshua asked Rita Yancy.

"Positive," the old woman said. "He'd been fooling around with his own daughter since she was four years old. He forced her to perform oral s.e.x when she was a small child. Later, as she grew up, he did everything to her. Everything."

Bruno had hoped that a good night's sleep would clear his befuddled mind, wash away the confusion and the disorientation that had plagued him last night and early this morning. But now, as he stood in front of the broken attic window, basking in the gray October light, he was no more in command of himself than he had been six hours ago. His mind was writhing with chaotic thoughts and doubts and questions and fears; pleasant and ugly memories tangled like worms; mental images s.h.i.+fted and changed like puddles of quicksilver.

He knew what was wrong with him. He was alone. All alone. He was only half a man. Torn in half. That's what was wrong with him. Ever since the other half of him had been killed, he'd been increasingly nervous, increasingly unsure of himself. He no longer had the resources that he'd had when both halves of him had been alive. And now, trying to stumble along as only half a person, he was unable to cope; even the smallest problems were beginning to seem insoluble.

He turned away from the window and staggered heavily to the bed. He knelt on the floor beside the bed and put his head on the corpse, on its chest.

"Say something. Say something to me. Help me figure out what to do. Please. Please, help me."

But the dead Bruno had nothing to say to the one who was still alive.

Mrs. Yancy's parlor.

The ticking clock.

A white cat strolled in from the dining room and jumped up on the old woman's lap.

"How do you know that Leo molested Katherine?" Joshua asked. "Surely he didn't tell you about it."

"He didn't," Mrs. Yancy said. "But Katherine did. She was in a terrible state. Half out of her mind. She'd expected her father to bring her to me when her time drew near, but then he died. She was alone and terrified. Because of what she'd done to herself--the girdles and the dieting--her labor was d.a.m.ned difficult. I called in the doctor who gave my girls their weekly health examinations because I knew he would be discreet and willing to handle the case. He was sure the baby would be born dead. He thought there was a pretty good chance Katherine would die, too. She was in hard, agonizing labor for fourteen hours. I've never seen anyone endure the kind of pain that she went through. She was delirious a lot of the time, and when she had her wits about her, she was desperate to tell me what her father had done to her. I think she was trying to patch up her soul. She seemed to be afraid to die with the secret, and so she sort of treated me as if I was a priest listening to her confession. Her father forced her to provide oral s.e.x shortly after her mother died. When they moved into the cliff house, which I gather is fairly isolated, he virtually set about training her to be a s.e.x slave to him. When she was old enough for intercourse, he took precautions, but eventually, after years and years of it, they made a mistake; she got pregnant."

Hilary had the urge to lift the afghan that was draped on the couch and curl up in it to ward off the chills that swept over her. In spite of the frequent beatings, the emotional intimidation, the physical and mental torture that she suffered while living with Earl and Emma, she knew she was lucky to have escaped s.e.xual abuse. She believed Earl had been impotent; only his inability to perform had saved her from that ultimate degradation. At least she had been spared that nightmare. But Katherine Frye had been plunged into it, and Hilary unexpectedly felt a kins.h.i.+p with the woman.

Tony seemed to sense what was going through her mind. He took her hand, squeezed it gently, rea.s.suringly.

Mrs. Yancy stroked the white cat, and it made a low, rough, purring sound.

"There's something I don't understand," Joshua said. "Why didn't Leo send Katherine to you as soon as he knew she was going to have a baby? Why didn't he ask you to set up an abortion for her? Surely you had the contacts for that."

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "In my line of work, you had to know doctors who would handle that sort of thing. Leo could have arranged it through me. I don't know for sure why he didn't. But I suspect it was because he hoped Katherine would have a pretty baby girl."

"I'm not sure I follow," Joshua said.

"Isn't it obvious?" Mrs. Yancy asked, scratching the white cat under its fat chin. "If he had a granddaughter, then in a few years, he'd be able to start breaking her in, just like he did Katherine. Then he'd have two of them. A little harem of his own."

Unable to get a response out of his other self, Bruno got up and walked aimlessly around the huge room, stirring the dust on the floor; hundreds of whirling motes spun in the milky shaft of light from the window.

Eventually, he noticed a pair of dumbbells, each weighing about fifty pounds. They were part of the elaborate set of weights he had used six days a week, every week, between the ages of twelve and thirty-five. Most of his equipment--the barbells, heavier weights, the press bench--was down in the bas.e.m.e.nt. But he had always kept a spare set of dumbbells in his room for use in those idle moments when a few extra sets of bicep curls or wrist flexes was just the thing to drive away boredom.

Now he picked up the weights and started working out with them. His enormous shoulders and powerful arms quickly got into the familiar rhythm, and he began to work up a sweat.

Twenty-eight years ago, when he'd first expressed a desire to lift weights and become a body builder, his mother had thought it was an excellent idea. Long, brutal workouts with weights helped burn up the s.e.xual energy that he was just then beginning to generate, caught as he was in the throes of p.u.b.erty. Because he didn't dare expose his demonic p.e.n.i.s to a girl, vigorous weight training preoccupied him, seized his imagination and his emotions as s.e.x might otherwise have done. Katherine had approved.

Later, as he packed on muscle tissue and became a formidable specimen, she had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting him grow so strong. Afraid that he might develop his body only so he could successfully turn on her, she had tried to take his weights away from him. But when he broke into tears and begged her to reconsider, she realized that she would never have anything to fear from him.

How could she ever have thought differently? Bruno wondered as he curled the dumbbells to his shoulders and then slowly let them down again. Hadn't she realized that she would always be stronger than he was? After all, she had the key to the door in the ground. She had the power to unlock that door and make him go into that dark hole. No matter how big his biceps and triceps became, as long as she possessed that key, she would always be stronger than he was.

It was around that time, when his body began to develop, that she first told him that she knew how to come back from the dead. She'd wanted him to know that, after she died, she'd watch over him from the other side; and she'd sworn that she would come back to punish him if she saw him misbehaving or if he started getting careless about hiding his demonic heritage from other people. She had warned him a thousand times or more that, if he was bad and forced her to come back from the grave, she would throw him into the hole in the ground, lock the door, and leave him there forever.

But now, as he worked out in the dusty attic, Bruno suddenly wondered if Katherine's threat had been empty. Had she really possessed supernatural powers? Could she really come back from the dead? Or was she lying to him? Was she lying because she was afraid of him? Was she afraid he would get big and strong--and then break her neck? Was her story about coming back from the grave nothing more than feeble insurance against his getting the idea that he could kill her and then be free of her forever?

Those questions came to him, but he was not capable of holding on to them long enough to explore each one and answer it. Disconnected thoughts surged like bursts of electric current through his short-circuiting brain. Each doubt was forgotten an instant after it occurred to him.

Contrarily, each fear that rose up did not fade away but remained, sparking and sputtering, in the dark corners of his mind. He thought of Hilary-Katherine, the latest resurrection, and he remembered that he had to find her.

Before she found him.

He began to shake.

He dropped one dumbbell with a crash. Then the other one. The floorboards rattled.

"The b.i.t.c.h," he said fearfully, angrily.

The white cat licked Mrs. Yancy's hand as she said, "Leo and Katherine worked up a complex story to explain the baby. They didn't want to admit it was hers. If they did that, they had to point a finger at the man responsible, at some young suitor. But she didn't have any suitors. The old man didn't want anyone else touching her. Just him. Gives me the creeps. What kind of man would force himself on his own little girl? And the b.a.s.t.a.r.d started on her when she was only four! She wasn't even old enough to understand what was happening." Mrs. Yancy shook her gray head in shock and sorrow, "How could a grown man be aroused by a baby like that? If I made the laws, any man who did that sort of thing would be castrated--or worse. Worse, I think, I tell you, it disgusts me."

Joshua said, "Why didn't they just claim Katherine was raped by a migrant farm worker or some stranger pa.s.sing through? She wouldn't have had to send an innocent man to jail to support a story like that. She could have given the police a totally phony description. And even if, by some wild chance, they'd found a guy who fit that description, some poor son of a b.i.t.c.h who didn't have an alibi ... well, then she could have said he wasn't the right man. She wouldn't have been forced to railroad anyone."

"That's right," Tony said. "Most rape cases of that sort are never solved. The police would probably have been surprised if Katherine had made a positive identification of anybody they rounded up."

"I can understand why she wouldn't have been eager to cry rape," Hilary said. "She would have had to endure endless humiliation and embarra.s.sment. A lot of people think every woman who's raped was just asking for it."

"I'm aware of that," Joshua said. "I'm the one who keeps saying that most of my fellow human beings are idiots, a.s.ses and buffoons. Remember? But St. Helena has always been a relatively openminded town. The people there wouldn't have blamed Katherine for being raped. At least most of them wouldn't have. She would have had to deal with a few crude characters and a measure of embarra.s.sment, naturally, but in the long run she would have had everyone's sympathy. And it seems to me that it would have been a lot easier taking that route than trying to make everyone believe an elaborate lie about Mary Gunther--and then having to worry about maintaining that lie for the rest of her life."

The cat turned over on Mrs. Yancy's lap. She rubbed its belly.

"Leo didn't want to blame the pregnancy on a rapist because that would have brought in the cops," Mrs. Yancy said. "Leo had great respect for the cops. He was an authoritarian type. He believed the cops were better at their jobs than they really were, and he was afraid they would smell something fishy about any rape story that he and Katherine could concoct. He didn't want to draw attention to himself, not attention like that. He was scared to death the cops would sniff out the truth. He wasn't about to risk going to jail for child molestation and incest."

"Katherine told you that?" Hilary asked.

"That's right. As I said before, she'd been living with the shame of Leo's abuse all her life, and when she thought maybe she was going to die in childbirth, she wanted to tell someone, anyone, what she'd been through. Anyway, Leo was sure he'd be safe if Katherine could conceal her pregnancy, hide it completely, and fool everyone in St. Helena. Then it would be possible to pa.s.s the child off as the illegitimate baby of an unfortunate friend from Katherine's college days."

"So her father forced her to wear the girdles," Hilary said, feeling sorrier for Katherine Frye than she would have thought possible when she first walked into Mrs. Yancy's parlor. "He put her through that agony to protect himself. It was his idea."

"Yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "She'd never been able to stand up to him. She'd always done what he'd told her to do. It wasn't any different this time. She did this thing with the girdles and the dieting, even though it caused her a h.e.l.l of a lot of pain. She did it because she was afraid to disobey him. Which isn't surprising when you consider that he'd spent twenty-some years breaking her spirit."

"She went away to college," Tony said. "Wasn't that an attempt to gain independence?"

"No," Mrs. Yancy said. "College was Leo's idea. In 1937, he went to Europe for seven or eight months to sell off the last of his holdings in the old country. He saw World War Two coming, and he didn't want to have any a.s.sets frozen over there. He didn't want to take Katherine on the trip with him. I suspect he intended to combine business with pleasure. He was a highly-s.e.xed man. And I hear tell some of those European brothels offer all kinds of kinky thrills, just the sort of things to appeal to him. The dirty old goat. Katherine would have been in his way. He decided she should go to college while he was out of the country, and he arranged for her to stay with a family he knew in San Francisco. They owned a company that distributed wine, beer, and liquor in the Bay Area, and one of the things they handled was Shade Tree products."

Joshua said, "He was taking quite a chance, letting her out from under his thumb for so long."

"Apparently, he didn't think so," Mrs. Yancy said. "And he was proved right. In all those months without him around, she never began to come out of his thrall. She never told anyone about the things he'd been doing to her. She never even considered telling anyone. She was a broken spirit, I tell you. Enslaved. That's really the word for it. She was enslaved, not like a plantation worker or anything like that. Mentally and emotionally enslaved. And when he came back from Europe, he made her drop out of college. He took her back to St. Helena with him, and she didn't resist. She couldn't resist. She didn't know how."

The mantel clock chimed the hour. Two measured tones. The notes echoed softly from the parlor ceiling.

Joshua had been sitting on the edge of his chair. Now he slid back until his head touched the antimaca.s.sar again. He was pale, and dark rings circled his eyes. His white hair was no longer fluffy; it was lank, lifeless. In the short time that Hilary had known him, he appeared to her to have aged. He looked wrung-out.