“Saying a prayer to Vincent van Gogh?” Sissy asked her.
“Asking for his blessing,” said Molly. “If anybody knew what madness and fear and disappointment were all about, he did.”
They left the study and went back into the living room. Trevor filled up their glasses and they sat down and looked at each other, almost as if they had done something for which they should all feel guilty.
“Do you want to smoke, Momma?” Trevor asked her.
Sissy blinked at him in surprise. “You don’t mean that, do you?”
“What the hell. What difference is it going to make?”
“Well, thank you for your consideration,” said Sissy. “But your father’s coming back, and you know what he felt about my smoking.”
They sat in silence for five minutes longer. Then the phone warbled, making Sissy jump.
Molly picked it up and said, “Sawyer residence. Oh, Mike. How are you? I know, terrible. Victoria’s really upset. Well, and Trevor is, too. I know.”
She covered the receiver with her hand and said, “Mike Kunzel. He wants to know if I can draw him another composite.”
“Not if you’re wearing that necklace, you can’t.”
“Of course I won’t. And I don’t have to go downtown. Trevor saw the perpetrators as clear as anybody. I can do it here.”
She took her hand away from the receiver. “For sure, Mike. I can do that. Give me an hour, and I’ll e-mail it to you.”
She said, “Yes,” and then, “yes,” and then she held out the receiver for Sissy. “He’d like a word with you, too.”
“Me?”
Detective Kunzel said, “Hi, Mrs. Sawyer. How’s it going?”
“Well, we’re all very upset, naturally.”
“Last time that Red Mask called me on my cell phone, you said that he had given us a clue. But I never had the chance to ask you what it was.”
“No, you didn’t, and I have to say that I was kind of relieved. I didn’t think that you’d believe me, even if I told you.”
“Try me, Mrs. Sawyer. You never know. I’m supposed to be the most skeptical guy in the unit, but there are times when even us skeptical guys find ourselves clutching at straws. We’ve raided three addresses this afternoon, looking for red-faced men — one in Betts-Longworth and two in Over-the-Rhine. But the only red faces were ours.”
Sissy tried to choose her words with care. “Let me put it this way, Detective. You’ve heard about people having doppelgängers, exact doubles of themselves?”
“Go on.”
“I think that the two Red Masks who killed those people at the Giley Building and the Four Days Mall, and the two Red Masks who killed those people on the skywalk this morning — I think they could be doppelgängers, of a kind.”
“I don’t get it. You mean, like identical twins?”
“In a way. But identical twins are two separate people. These are the same person, twice. Like two copies of the same picture.”
There was a very long pause. Then Detective Kunzel said, “I’m sorry, Mrs Sawyer. You got me there. I don’t really understand what you’re saying.”
“It doesn’t really matter if you understand it or not, Detective. The most important thing is to be aware of it. When you send your men out looking for these Red Masks, tell them to watch their backs. My cards have given me a very strong warning: the hunters could end up becoming the hunted.”
“Well. I’m a whole lot more confused than I was a minute ago,” said Detective Kunzel. “But I’ll take your word for it. I’ll tell my men to look out for one guy who could be two guys.”
“He may be no guys at all,” Sissy told him.
Another pause. “Let’s just stick to your doppelgängers for now,” said Detective Kunzel. “But if you do have any more theories — ”
Sissy hung up and handed the phone back to Molly. “I have a very bad feeling about this,” she said.
Mr. Boots, who had been sleeping on the carpet next to the couch, suddenly lifted his head and let out a whuff.
“See? Mr. Boots can feel it, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A Painting of Frank
Eleven o’clock chimed. Molly felt too tired to stay up any longer, and so she went to bed — “Although if anything happens, you have to wake me!”
After another twenty minutes, Trevor followed her, and then there were only Sissy and Mr. Boots in the living room, with the cicadas busy singing outside, and the weary ticking of the wall clock.
Sissy went into Molly’s study to see if the painting of Frank was still there. She looked down at it sadly and touched his lips with her fingertips as if she expected to feel him kissing her. One fall day, when they were kicking their way through the leaves, he had said to her, “You were so easy to fall in love with. And so easy to stay in love with.”
“Frank,” she whispered. Then she went back into the living room and sat on the couch so that she could stroke Mr. Boots’s ears while he dreamed of whatever he dreamed of. Not giants, that was for sure. Nor red-faced men with butcher knives and slits instead of eyes.
Sissy slept, and snored without realizing that she was snoring.
She dreamed that she was walking through an underground parking lot, all echoes and shouts and squealing tires, and that she didn’t know which way to get out of it.
“Watch your backs!” she called out, but her voice was thin and strangulated, and she wasn’t sure if anybody could hear her. “There are two of them! Watch your backs!”
She woke up with a jolt. The living room was dark, but the desk lamp in the study was still shining. Mr. Boots stirred in his sleep but didn’t wake up. The wall clock told her that it was ten after two in the morning.
She eased up herself up from the couch and went through to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of ice water from the fridge and drank it all in one, so that she gasped. Outside, the yard was in shadow, although the sky was stained with orange from the city lights. She opened the back door and stood there for a while, listening to the sounds of the night.
As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw somebody underneath the vine trellis. A man, sitting quite still. She slowly lifted her hand to her mouth and bit her knuckle, partly out of fear and partly to make sure that she was really awake. She had never felt a sensation like this before: such a mixture of elation and terror. She didn’t know whether to call out for Trevor and Molly, or to go back into the kitchen and lock the door behind her, or to challenge the man to his face.
But it was the man who spoke first. “Excuse me,” he asked her. “Where is this?” — as if he had fallen asleep on a train journey and just woken up.
Sissy approached him. His face was hidden in the shadows, but she recognized the wave of gray hair.
“Frank?” she said. “Frank — is that you?”
“Where am I? I don’t know how the hell I got here. Is this a dream?”
She sat down beside him. Now she could see that he really was Frank. That lean, angular face. That diamond-shaped scar. He even smelled like Frank, of Boss aftershave, which she had given him for Christmas twenty-four years ago.
“This isn’t a dream, Frank. We’ve called you back.”
“Called me back? Called me back from where?”
“It isn’t easy to explain. But this is Trevor’s house, in Cincinnati.”
“Trevor’s house? What do you mean? You mean Trevor doesn’t live at home anymore? Why?”
“Trevor’s all grown up now, Frank. He’s married, and he has a nine-year-old daughter.”