Tony thought about what Mrs. Yancy had told him.
Like a witch cuddling a feline familiar, the old woman petted the white cat.
"What if," Tony said. "What if, what if, what if?"
"What if what?" Hilary asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Pieces seem to be falling into place ... but it looks ... so wild. Maybe I'm putting the puzzle together all wrong. I've got to think about it. I'm just not sure yet."
"Well, do you have any more questions for me?" Mrs. Yancy asked.
"No," Tony said, getting up from the footstool. "I can't think of anything else."
"I believe we've gotten what we came for," Joshua agreed.
"More than we bargained for," Hilary said.
Mrs. Yancy lifted the cat off her lap, put it on the floor, and rose from her chair. "I've wasted too much time on this silly damned thing. I should be in the kitchen. I've got work to do. I made four pie shells this morning. Now I've got to mix up the fillings and get everything in the oven. I've got grandchildren coming for dinner, and each one of them has a different kind of favorite pie. Sometimes the little dears can be a tribulation. But on the other hand, I'd sure be lost without them."
The cat leapt abruptly over the footstool, darted along the flowered runner, past Joshua, and under a corner table. Precisely when the animal stopped moving, the house shook. Two miniature glass swans toppled off a shelf, bounced without breaking on the thick carpet. Two embroidered wall hangings fell down. Windows rattled.
"Quake," Mrs. Yancy said.
The floor rolled like the deck of a ship in mild seas.
"Nothing to worry about," Mrs. Yancy said.
The movement decreased.
The rumbling, discontented earth grew quiet.
The house was still again.
"See?" Mrs. Yancy said. "It's over now."
But Tony sensed other oncoming shockwaves--although none of them had anything to do with earthquakes.
***
Bruno finally opened the dead eyes of his other self, and at first he was upset by what he found. They weren't the clear, electrifying, blue-gray eyes that he had known and loved. These were the eyes of a monster. They appeared to be swollen, rotten-soft and protuberant. The whites were stained brownred by half-dried, scummy blood from burst vessels. The irises were cloudy, muddy, less blue than they had been in life, now more the color of an ugly bruise, dark and wounded.
However, the longer Bruno stared into them the less hideous those damaged eyes became. They were, after all, still the eyes of his other self, still part of himself, still eyes that he knew better than any other eyes, still eyes that he loved and trusted, eyes that loved and trusted him. He tried not to look at them but into them, deep down beyond the surface ruin, way down in, where (many times in the past) he had made the blazing, thrilling connection with the other half of his soul. He felt none of the old magic now, for the other Bruno's eyes were not looking back at him. Nevertheless, the very act of peering deeply into the other's dead eyes somehow revitalized his memories of what total unity with his other self had been like; he remembered the pure, sweet pleasure and fulfillment of being with himself, just he and himself against the world, with no fear of being alone.
He clung to that memory, for memory was now all that he had left.
He sat on the bed for a long time, staring down into the eyes of the corpse.
***
Joshua Rhinehart's Cessna Turbo Skylane RG roared north, slicing across the eastward-flowing air front, heading for Napa. Hilary looked down at the scattered clouds below and at the sere autumn hills that lay a few thousand feet below the clouds. Overhead, there was nothing but crystal-blue sky and the distant, stratospheric vapor trail of a military jet.
Far off in the west, a dense bank of blue-gray-black clouds stretched out of sight to the north and the south. The massive thunderheads were rolling in like giant ships from the sea. By nightfall, Napa Valley--in fact, the entire northern third of the state from the Monterey Peninsula to the Oregon border--would lay under threatening skies again.
During the first ten minutes after takeoff, Hilary and Tony and Joshua were silent. Each was preoccupied with his own bleak thoughts--and fears.
Then Joshua said, "The twin has to be the dead ringer we're looking for."
"Obviously," Tony said.
"So Katherine didn't try to solve her problem by killing off the extra baby," Joshua said.
"Evidently not," Tony said.
"But which one did I kill?" Hilary asked. "Bruno or his brother?"
"We'll have the body exhumed and see what we can learn from it," Joshua said.
The plane hit an air pocket. It dropped more than two hundred feet in a roller coaster swoop, then soared up to its proper altitude.
When her stomach crawled back into its familiar niche, Hilary said, "All right, let's talk this thing out and see if we can come up with any answers. We're all sitting here chewing on the same question anyway. If Katherine didn't kill Bruno's twin brother in order to keep the Mary Gunther lie afloat, then what did she do with him? Where the devil has he been all these years?"
"Well, there's always Mrs. Rita Yancy's pet theory," Joshua said, managing to pronounce her name in such a way as to make it clear that even the need to refer to her in passing distressed him and left a bad taste in his mouth. "Perhaps Katherine did leave one of the twins bundled up on the doorstep of a church or an orphanage."
"I don't know...." Hilary said doubtfully. "I don't like it, but I don't exactly know why. It's just too ... clichéd ... too trite ... too romantic. Damn. None of those is the word I want. I can't think how to say it. I just sense that Katherine would not have handled it like that. It's too ..."
"Too smooth," Tony said. "Just like the story about Mary Gunther was too smooth to please me. Abandoning one of the twins like that would have been the quickest, easiest, simplest, safest--although not the most moral--way for her to solve her problem. But people almost never do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way. Especially not when they're under the kind of stress that Katherine was under when she left Rita Yancy's whorehouse."
"Still," Joshua said. "we can't rule it out altogether."
"I think we can," Tony said. "Because if you accept that the brother was abandoned and then adopted by strangers, you've got to explain how he and Bruno got back together again. Since the brother was an unregistered birth, there'd be no way he could trace his blood parentage. The only way he could hook up with Bruno would be by coincidence. Even if you're willing to accept that coincidence, you've still got to explain how the brother could have been raised in another home, in an altogether different environment from Bruno's, without ever knowing Katherine--and yet have such a fierce hatred for the woman, such an overwhelming fear of her."
"That's not easy," Joshua admitted.
"You've got to explain why and how the brother developed a psychopathic personality and paranoid delusions that perfectly match Bruno's in every detail," Tony said.
The Cessna droned northward.
Wind buffeted the small craft.
For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.
Then Joshua said, "You win. I can't explain it. I can't see how the brother could have been raised entirely apart from Bruno yet wind up with the same psychosis. Genetics don't explain it, that's for sure."
"So what are you saying?" Hilary asked Tony. "That Bruno and his brother weren't separated after all?"
"She took them both home to St. Helena," Tony said.
"But where was the other twin all those years?" Joshua asked. "Locked away in a closet or something?"