Hardesty was disappointed; the tentative smile on his face slipped away.
"Well, Mr. Hardesty, you've been a great help. Thank you for your time and trouble."
Hardesty shrugged. "It wasn't anything."
It was something, Tony thought. Something indeed. But I sure as hell don't know what it means.
In the short hall outside the employees' lounge, they went in different directions, but after a few steps Tony turned and said, "Mr. Hardesty?"
Hardesty stopped, looked back. "Yes?"
"Answer a personal question?"
"What is it?"
"What made you decide to do ... this kind of work?"
"My favorite uncle was a funeral director."
"I see."
"He was a lot of fun. Especially with kids. He loved kids. I wanted to be like him," Hardesty said. "You always had the feeling that Uncle Alex knew some enormous, terribly important secret. He did a lot of magic tricks for us kids, but it was more than that. I always thought that what he did for a living was very magical and mysterious, too, and that it was because of his work that he'd learned something nobody else knew."
"Have you found his secret yet?"
"Yes," Hardesty said. "I think maybe I have."
"Can you tell me?"
"Sure. What Uncle Alex knew, and what I've come to learn, is that you've got to treat the dead with every bit as much concern and respect as you do the living. You can't just put them out of mind, bury them and forget about them. The lessons they taught us when they were alive are still with us. All the things they did to us and for us are still in our minds, still shaping and changing us. And because of how they've affected us, we'll have certain influences on people who will be alive long after we're dead. So in a way, the dead never really die at all. They just go on and on. Uncle Alex's secret was just this: The dead are people, too."
Tony stared at him for a moment, not certain what he should say. But then the question came unbidden: "Are you a religious man, Mr. Hardesty?"
"I wasn't when I started doing this work," he said. "But I am now. I certainly am now."
"Yes, I suppose you are."
Outside, when Tony got behind the wheel of the Jeep and pulled the driver's door shut, Hilary said, "Well? Did he embalm Frye?"
"Worse than that."
"What's worse than that?"
"You don't want to know."
He told her about the telephone call that Hardesty had received from the man claiming to be Bruno Frye.
"Ahhh," she said softly. "Forget what I said about shared psychoses. This is proof!"
"Proof of what? That Frye's alive? He can't be alive. In addition to other things too disgusting to mention, he was embalmed. No one can sustain even a deep coma when his veins and arteries are full of embalming fluid instead of blood."
"But at least that phone call is proof that something out of the ordinary is happening."
"Not really," Tony said.
"Can you take this to your captain?"
"There's no point in doing that. To Harry Lubbock, it'll look like nothing more sinister than a crank call, a hoax."
"But the voice!"
"That won't be enough to convince Harry."
She sighed. "So what's next?"
"We've got to do some heavy thinking," Tony said. "We've got to examine the situation from every angle and see if there's something we've missed."
"Can we think at lunch?" she asked. "I'm starved."
"Where do you want to eat?"
"Since we're both rumpled and wrung out, I suggest some place dark and private."
"A back booth at Casey's Bar?"
"Perfect," she said.
As he drove to Westwood, Tony thought about Hardesty and about how, in one way, the dead were not really dead at all.
***
Bruno Frye stretched out in the back of the Dodge van and tried to get some sleep.
The van was not the one in which he had driven to Los Angeles last week. That vehicle had been impounded by the police. By now it had been claimed by a representative of Joshua Rhinehart, who was executor of the Frye estate and responsible for the proper liquidation of its assets. This van wasn't gray, like the first one, but dark blue with white accent lines. Frye had paid cash for it yesterday morning at a Dodge dealership on the outskirts of San Francisco. It was a handsome machine.
He had spent nearly all of yesterday on the road and had arrived in Los Angeles last night. He'd gone straight to Katherine's house in Westwood.
She was using the name Hilary Thomas this time, but he knew she was Katherine.
Katherine.
Back from the grave again.
The rotten bitch.
He had broken into the house, but she hadn't been there. Then she'd finally come home just before dawn, and he'd almost gotten his hands on her. He still couldn't figure out why the police had shown up.
During the past four hours, he'd driven by her house five times, but he hadn't seen anything important. He didn't know if she was there or not.
He was confused. Mixed up. And frightened. He didn't know what he should do next, didn't know how he should go about locating her. His thoughts were becoming increasingly strange, fragmented, difficult to control. He felt intoxicated, dizzy, disjointed, even though he hadn't drunk anything.
He was tired. So very tired. No sleep since Sunday night. And not much then. If he could just get caught up on his sleep, he would be able to think clearly again.
Then he could go after the bitch again.
Cut off her head.
Cut out her heart. Put a stake through it.
Kill her. Kill her once and for all.
But first, sleep.
He stretched out on the floor of the van, thankful for the sunlight that streamed through the windshield, over the front seats, and into the cargo hold. He was scared to sleep in the dark.
A crucifix lay nearby.
And a pair of sharp wooden stakes.
He had filled small linen bags with garlic and had taped one over each door.
Those things might protect him from Katherine, but he knew they would not ward off the nightmare. It would come to him now as it always did when he slept, as it had all his life, and he would wake with a scream caught in the back of his throat. As always, he would not be able to recall what the dream had been about. But upon waking, he would hear the whispers, the loud but unintelligible whispers, and he would feel something moving on his body, all over his body, on his face, trying to get into his mouth and nose, some horrible thing; and during the minute or two that it would take for those sensations to fade away, he would ardently wish that he were dead.
He dreaded sleep, but he needed it.
He closed his eyes.
***
As usual, the lunchtime din in the main dining room at Casey's Bar was very nearly deafening.
But in the other part of the restaurant, behind the oval bar, there were several sheltered booths, each of which was enclosed on three sides like a big confessional, and in these the distant dining room roar of conversation was tolerable; it acted as a background screen to insure even greater privacy than was afforded by the cozy booths themselves.
Halfway through lunch, Hilary looked up from her food and said, "I've got it."
Tony put down his sandwich. "Got what?"
"Frye must have a brother."
"A brother?"
"It explains everything."
"You think you killed Frye last Thursday--and then his brother came after you last night?"
"Such a likeness could only be found in brothers."
"And the voice?"
"They could have inherited the same voice."
"Maybe a low-pitched voice could be inherited," Tony said. "But that special gravelly quality you described? Could that be inherited, too?"
"Why not?"
"Last night you said the only way a person could get such a voice was to suffer a serious throat injury or be born with a deformed larynx."
"So I was wrong," she said. "Or maybe both brothers were born with the same deformity."
"A million-to-one shot."
"But not impossible."
Tony sipped his beer, then said, "Maybe brothers could share the same body type, the same facial features, the same color eyes, the same voice. But could they also share precisely the same set of psychotic delusions?"