Sheriff Laurenski and a deputy. So the police were among the living dead! He had never suspected them.
Joshua Rhinehart. The old attorney was a conspirator, too! He was one of Katherine's hellish friends.
And there she was! The bitch. The bitch in her sleek new body. And that man from Los Angeles.
They all went into the house.
Lights came on in one room after another.
Bruno tried to remember if he'd left any signs of his visit. Maybe some drippings from the candle. But the droplets of wax would be cold and hard already. They would have no way of knowing if the drippings were fresh or weeks old. He'd left the spoon in the ice cream carton, but that might have been done a long time ago, too. Thank God, he hadn't taken a shower! The water on the floor of the stall and the damp towel would have given him away; finding a recently used towel, they would have known instantly that he was back in St. Helena, and they would have intensified their search for him.
He got to his feet, hefted the suitcase, and hurried as fast as he could through the vineyards. He went north toward the winery, then west toward the cliff.
They would never come to the cliff house looking for him. Not in a million years. He would be safe in the cliff house because they would think he was too afraid to go there.
If he hid in the attic, he would have time to think and plan and organize. He didn't dare rush into this. He hadn't been thinking too clearly lately, not since the other half of him had died, and he didn't dare move against the bitch until he had planned for every possible contingency.
He knew how to find her now. Through Joshua Rhinehart.
He could get his hands on her whenever he wanted.
But first he needed time to formulate a foolproof plan. He could hardly wait to get back to the attic to talk it over with himself.
***
Laurenski, Deputy Tim Larsson, Joshua, Tony, and Hilary spread out through the house. They searched drawers and closets and cupboards and cabinets.
At first, they couldn't find anything that proved two men had been living in the house instead of one. There seemed to be quite a few more clothes than one man would need. And the house was stocked with more food than one man usually kept on hand. But that wasn't proof of anything.
Then, as Hilary was going through desk drawers in the study, she came across a stack of recently received bills that hadn't been paid yet. Two of them were from dentists--one in nearby Napa, the other in San Francisco.
"Of course!" Tony said as everyone gathered around to have a look at the bills. "The twins would have had to go to different doctors and, especially, different dentists. Bruno Number Two couldn't walk into a dentist's office to have a tooth filled when that same dentist had filled the same tooth in Bruno Number One just the week before."
"This helps," Laurenski said. "Even identical twins don't get the same cavities in the same places on the same teeth. Two sets of dental records will prove there were two Bruno Fryes."
A while later, while searching a bedroom closet, Deputy Larsson made an unsettling discovery. One of the shoe boxes did not have shoes in it. Instead, the box contained a dozen wallet-size snapshots of a dozen young women, driver's licenses for six of them, and another eleven licenses belonging to eleven other women. In each snapshot and in each license photo, the woman looking out at the camera had things in common with all the other women in the collection: a pretty face, dark eyes, dark hair, and an indefinable something in the lines and angles of the facial structure.
"Twenty-three women who vaguely resemble Katherine," Joshua said. "My God. Twenty-three."
"A gallery of death," Hilary said, shivering.
"At least they're not all unidentified snapshots," Tony said. "With the licenses, we've got names and addresses."
"We'll get them out on the wire right away," Laurenski said, sending Larsson out to the car to radio the information to HQ. "But I think we all know what we'll find."
"Twenty-three unsolved murders spread over the past five years," Tony said.
"Or twenty-three disappearances," the sheriff said.
They spent two more hours in the house, but they didn't find anything else as important as the photographs and driver's licenses. Hilary's nerves were frayed, and her imagination was stimulated by the disturbing realization that her own driver's license had nearly wound up in that shoe box. Each time she opened a drawer or a cupboard door, she expected to find a shriveled heart with a stake through it or a dead woman's rotting head. She was relieved when the search was finally completed.
Outside, in the chilly night air, Laurenski said, "Will the three of you be coming to the coroner's office in the morning?"
"Count me out," Hilary said.
"No thanks," Tony said.
Joshua said, "There's really nothing we can do there."
"What time should we meet at the cliff house?" Laurenski asked.
Joshua said, "Hilary and Tony and I will go up first thing in the morning and open all the shutters and windows. The place has been closed up for five years. It'll need to be aired out before any of us will want to spend hours poking through it. Why don't you just come on up and join us whenever you're finished at the coroner's?"
"All right," Laurenski said. "See you tomorrow. Maybe the Los Angeles police will get the bastard during the night."
"Maybe," Hilary said hopefully.
Up in the Mayacamas Mountains, soft thunder roared.
***
Bruno Frye spent half the night talking to himself, carefully planning Hilary-Katherine's death.
The other half, he slept while the candles flickered. Thin streams of smoke rose from the burning wicks. The dancing flames cast jiggling, macabre shadows on the walls, and they were reflected in the staring eyes of the corpse.
***
Joshua Rhinehart had trouble sleeping. He tossed and turned, getting increasingly tangled in the sheets. At three o'clock in the morning, he went out to the bar and poured himself a double shot of bourbon, drank it fast. Even that didn't settle him down a whole lot.
He had never missed Cora so much as he did that night.
Hilary woke repeatedly from bad dreams, but the night did not go by slowly. It swept past at rocket speeds. She still had the feeling that she was hurtling toward a precipice, and she could do nothing to stop her forward rush.
***
Near dawn, as Tony lay awake, Hilary turned to him, came against him, and said, "Make love to me."
For half an hour, they lost themselves in each other, and although it was not better than before, it was not one degree worse either. A sweet, silken, hushed togetherness.
Afterwards, she said, "I love you."
"I love you, too."
"No matter what happens," she said, "we've had these few days together."
"Now don't get fatalistic on me."
"Well... you never know."
"We've got years ahead of us. Years and years and years together. Nobody's going to take them away from us."
"You're so positive, so optimistic. I wish I'd found you a long time ago."
"We're through the worst of this thing," he said. "We know the truth now."
"They haven't caught Frye yet."
"They will," Tony said reassuringly. "He thinks you're Katherine, so he's not going to stray too far from Westwood. He'll keep checking back at your house to see if you've shown up, and sooner or later the surveillance team will spot him, and it'll all be over."
"Hold me," she said.
"Sure."
"Mmmm. That's nice."
"Yeah."
"Just being held."
"Yeah."
"I feel better already."
"Everything's going to be fine."
"As long as I have you," she said.
"Forever, then."
***