“When?” he asked again.
“When what?”
“When did you discover them together?”
“Last month sometime.”
“November?”
“November.”
“What happened?”
“Little nympho bitch,” Hillary said.
“What happened? What did you do?”
“Told her if she ever came near that apartment again…” She shook her head. “My own sister. Said it was a joke, said she wanted to see if Greg could tell us apart.”
“Could he?”
“He said he thought she was me. He said she fooled him completely.”
“What did you think?”
“I think he knew.”
“But you’re here with her now.”
“What?”
“You’re staying with her. Even after what happened.”
“I didn’t talk to her for weeks. Then she called one day in tears and…She’s my sister. We’re closer than any two people in the world. We’re twins. What could I do?”
He understood this completely. Despite their constant bickering, his own twins were inseparable. Listening to their running dialogues was like listening to one person talking out loud to himself. When both of them were engaged in make-believe together, it was sometimes impossible to break in on what amounted to a tandem stream of consciousness. He had read someplace that twins were a gang in miniature; he had understood the writer’s allusion at once. He had once scolded Mark for carelessly breaking an expensive vase and had punished him by sending him to his room. Ten minutes later he had found April in her room. When he’d mentioned to her that she wasn’t the one being punished, April had said, “Well, I just thought I’d help him out.” If there was any truth to the adage that blood ran thicker than water, it ran doubly thick between twins. Hillary had found her sister in bed with Gregory Craig, but Craig was the stranger, and Denise was her twin. And now Craig was dead.
“How’d that affect your relationship with him?” Carella asked.
“I trusted him less. But I still loved him. If you love somebody, you’re willing to forgive a lapse or two.”
Carella nodded. He supposed she was telling the truth, but he wondered at the same time how he’d have felt if he’d found Teddy in bed with his twin brother, if he had a twin brother or any brother at all, which he didn’t have.
“What’s this about water?” he said. “You told me on the phone…”
“Someone mentioned water to you, am I right?”
“Yes, someone did.”
“Something about water. And biting.”
She drowned in the Bight, Abigail Craig had told him, two miles from where my father was renting his famous haunted house.
“What else?” Carella asked.
“Bite,” she said.
“Yes, what about it?”
“Give me your hands.”
He held out his hands to her. They stood two feet apart from each other, facing each other, their hands clasped. She closed her eyes.
“Someone swimming,” she said. “A woman. Tape. So strong. I feel it pulsing in your hands. Tape. No, I’m losing it,” she said abruptly, and opened her eyes wide. “Concentrate! You’re the source!” She squeezed his hands tightly and closed her eyes again. “Yes,” she said, the word coming out like a hiss. She was breathing harshly now; her hands in his own were trembling. “Drowning. Tape. Drowning, drowning,” she said, and suddenly released his hands and threw her arms around him, her eyes still closed, her own hands clasping him behind the neck. He tried to back away from her, but her lips found his, and her mouth drew at him as though trying to suck the breath from his body. Hissing, she clamped her teeth onto his lower lip, and he pushed her away at once. She stood there with her eyes closed, her entire body shaking. She seemed unaware of him now. She began to sway, and then suddenly she began talking in a voice quite unlike her own, a hollow sepulchral voice that seemed to rumble up from the depths of some forgotten bog, trailing tatters of mist and a wind as cold as the grave.
“You stole,” she said. “I know, I heard, you stole, I know, I’ll tell,” she said, “you stole, you stole…”
Her voice trailed. The room was silent except for the ticking of the clock. She stood there swaying, her eyes still closed, but the trembling was gone now, and at last the swaying stopped, too, and she was utterly motionless for several moments. She opened her eyes then and seemed surprised to find him there.
“I…have to rest,” she said. “Please go.”
She left him alone in the room. The door to the bedroom eased shut behind her. He stood there watching the closed door for a moment, and then he put on his coat and left the apartment.
The Carella house in Riverhead was a huge white elephant they’d picked up for a song—well, more accurately a five-act opera—shortly after the twins were born. Teddy’s father had presented them with a registered nurse as a month-long gift while Teddy was recuperating after the birth, and Fanny Knowles had elected to stay on with them later at a salary they could afford, telling them she was tired of taking care of sick old men all the time. Without her, they’d never have been able to manage the big old house—or the twins either, for that matter. Fanny was “fiftyish,” as she put it, and she had blue hair, and she wore pince-nez, and she weighed 150 pounds, and she ran the Carella household with the same sort of Irish bullheadedness the gang foremen must have displayed when immigrants were digging the city’s subway system at the turn of the century. It was Fanny who absolutely refused to take into the house a stray Labrador retriever Carella had adopted while investigating the murders of a blind man and his wife. She told him simply and flatly that there was enough to do around here without having to clean up after a big old hound. She was fond of saying, prophetically in this case, “I take no shit from man nor beast,” an expression the ten-year-old twins had picked up when they were still learning to talk and that Mark now used with more frequency than April. The twins’ speech patterns, in fact—much to Carella’s consternation—were more closely modeled after Fanny’s than anyone else’s; it was her voice they heard around the house whenever Carella wasn’t home.
There seemed to be no one at all home when he unlocked the front door. It had taken him an hour and a half to make the trip from Stewart City to Riverhead in blinding snow over treacherous roads; it normally would have taken him forty minutes. He had struggled to get the car up his driveway, had given up after six runs at it, and had finally parked it at the curb, behind Mr. Henderson’s car next door, already partially covered with drifts. He stood outside the front door now and stamped the snow from his shoes before entering. The house was silent. He turned on the entrance-hall lights, hung his coat on the pear wood coatrack just inside the door, and shouted, “Hi, anybody home?” There was no answer.
The grandfather clock that had also been a gift from Teddy’s father chimed the half hour. It was 6:30. He knew Teddy and Fanny had taken the twins to see Santa—as he was supposed to have done today—but they should have been home by now, even with the storm. He switched on the floor lamp near the piano and the Tiffany-style lamp on the end table near the sofa and then walked through the living room into the kitchen. He took a tray of ice cubes from the freezer compartment, went back into the living room, and was mixing himself a drink at the bar unit when the telephone rang. He snatched the receiver from the cradle at once.
“Hello?” he said.
“Steve, it’s Fanny.”