Hilary said, "Twins?"
"Damn," Tony said.
The surprise brought Joshua to his feet.
The white cat sensed the tension. It lifted its head out of Rita Yancy's lap and peered curiously at each person in the parlor, one after the other. Its yellow eyes appeared to shine with inner light.
***
The attic bedroom was large, but not nearly large enough to keep Bruno from feeling that it was gradually closing in on him. He looked for things to do because idleness made his claustrophobia worse.
He got bored with the dumbbells even before his massive arms began to ache from the exercise.
He took a book from one of the shelves and tried to read, but he wasn't able to concentrate.
His mind still hadn't settled down; it flitted from one thought to another, like a quietly desperate jeweler looking for a misplaced bag of diamonds.
He talked to his dead self.
He searched the dusty corners for spiders and squashed them.
He sang to himself.
He laughed at times without really knowing what had struck him funny.
He wept, too.
He cursed Katherine.
He made plans.
He paced, paced, paced.
He was eager to leave the house and begin searching for Hilary-Katherine, but he knew he would be a fool if he went out in daylight. He was certain that Katherine's conspirators were everywhere in St. Helena. Her friends from the grave. Other walking dead, men and women from the Other Side, hiding in new bodies. All of them would be on the lookout for him. Yes. Yes. Maybe dozens of them. He would be too conspicuous during the day. He would have to wait until sunset before he went looking for the bitch. Although night was the favorite time of the day for the undead, the time when they prowled in especially large numbers, and although he would be in terrible danger while he stalked Hilary-Katherine in the night, he would also benefit from the darkness. A night-shadow would hide him from the walking dead every bit as well as it would conceal them from him. With the scales thus balanced, the success of the hunt would depend only on who was smarter--he or Katherine--and if that was the only criterion, he might have a better than even chance of winning; for Katherine was clever and infinitely wicked and cunning, but she was not as smart as he was.
He believed that he would be safe if he stayed in the house during the day, and that was ironic, really, because he hadn't felt safe for one minute during the thirty-five years he'd lived there with Katherine. Now the house was a reliable haven because it was the last place Katherine or her conspirators would look for him. She wanted to catch him and bring him to this very place. He knew that. He knew it! She had come back from the grave for only one reason: to bring him to the top of the cliff, around the house, to the doors in the ground at the end of the rear lawn. She wanted to put him in that hole in the ground, lock him in there forever. That's what she had told him she would do if she ever had to come back to punish him. He had not forgotten. And now she would expect him to avoid the top of the cliff and the old house at all costs. She would never think to look for him in his long-abandoned attic bedroom, not in a million years.
He was so pleased with his excellent strategy that he laughed aloud.
But then he had a horrible thought. If she did think to look for him here, and if she came with a few of her friends, others of the living dead, enough of them to overpower him, then they wouldn't have far to drag him. The doors in the ground were right behind the house. If Katherine and her hellish friends caught him here, they would be able to carry him to those doors and throw him into that dark room, into the whispers, in little more than a minute.
Frightened, he ran back to the bed and sat down beside himself and tried to get himself to reassure him that everything would be all right.
***
Joshua couldn't sit still. He walked back and forth on one of the flowered runners in Mrs. Yancy's parlor.
The old woman said, "When Katherine gave birth to twins, she realized that the elaborate lie about Mary Gunther would no longer hold up. The people in St. Helena had been prepared for one child. No matter how she explained the second baby, she'd plant suspicion. The idea that everyone she knew would find out what she'd been doing with her own father.... Well, I guess it was too much for her on top of everything else that had happened in her life. She just snapped. For three days, she carried on like someone in a fever delirium, gabbling like a madwoman. The doctor gave her sedatives, but they didn't always work. She ranted and raved and babbled. I thought I'd have to call the cops and let them put her away in a little padded room. But I didn't want to do that. I sure as hell didn't."
"But she needed psychiatric help," Hilary said. "Just letting her scream and carry on for three days--that wasn't good. That wasn't good at all."
"Maybe not," Mrs. Yancy said. "But I couldn't do anything else. I mean, when you're running a fancy bordello, you don't want to see the cops except when you pass out their payoff money. They usually don't bother a classy operation like the one I had going. After all, some of my clients were influential politicians and wealthy businessmen, and the cops didn't want to embarrass any big shots in a raid. But if I sent Katherine off to a hospital, I knew damned well the newspapers would pick up on the story, and then the cops would have to shut me down. They couldn't just let me go on doing business after I'd gotten all that publicity. No way. Absolutely impossible. I'd have lost everything. And my doctor was worried that his career would be ruined if his regular patients found out he was secretly treating prostitutes. These days it wouldn't damage a doctor's practice even if everyone knew he gave vasectomies to alligators with the same instruments he used in his office. But in 1940, people were more ... squeamish. So you see, I had to think about myself, and I had to protect my doctor, my girls..."
Joshua walked up to the old woman's chair. He looked down at her, taking in the plain dress and the apron and the dark brown support stockings and the stodgy black shoes and the silky white cat, trying to see through the grandmotherly image to the real woman underneath. "When you accepted Katherine's three thousand dollars, didn't you also take on certain responsibilities for her?"
"I didn't ask her to come to my place to have her baby," Mrs. Yancy said. "My business was worth a whole lot more than three thousand dollars. I wasn't going to throw it all away just for principle. Is that what you think I should have done?" She shook her gray head in disbelief. "If that's what you really think I should have done, then you're living in a dream world, my dear sir."
Joshua stared down at the woman, unable to speak for fear he would scream at her. He didn't want to be thrown out of her house until he was certain she had told him absolutely everything she knew about Katherine Anne Frye's pregnancy and about the twins. Twins!
Tony said, "Look, Mrs. Yancy, shortly after you took Katherine in, when you discovered that she had wrapped herself up in girdles, you knew she was likely to lose the baby. You admit the doctor told you that might happen."
"Yes."
"He told you Katherine might die, too."
"So?"
"A child's death or the death of a pregnant woman in labor--something like that would have closed up your place every bit as fast as having to call in the cops to deal with a woman who was suffering a nervous breakdown. Yet you didn't turn Katherine away when there was still time to do that. Even after you knew it was a risky proposition, you kept her three thousand dollars, and you allowed her to stay. Now surely you realized that if someone died, you'd have to report it to the police and risk getting shut down."