He laughed. "You changed bodies, didn't you?"
She stared at him. "What?"
"Somehow you got out of the Thomas woman and took control of this girl, didn't you?"
She wasn't crying any more. Her fear was burning so very brightly that it had seared away her tears.
The bitch.
The rotten bitch.
"Did you really think you could fool me?" he asked. He laughed again, delighted. "After everything you've done to me, how could you think I wouldn't recognize you?"
Terror reverberated in her voice. "I haven't done anything to you. You're not making sense. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God, my God. What do you want from me?"
Bruno leaned toward her, put his face close to hers. He peered into her eyes and said, "You're in there, aren't you? You're in there, deep down in there, hiding from me, aren't you? Aren't you, Mother? I see you, Mother. I see you in there."
***
A few fat droplets of rain splattered on the mullioned window in Joshua Rhinehart's office.
The night wind moaned.
"I still don't understand why Frye chose me," Hilary said. "When I came up here to do research for that screenplay, he was friendly. He answered all my questions about the wine industry. We spent two or three hours together, and I never had a hint that he was anything but an ordinary businessman. Then a few weeks later, he shows up at my house with a knife. And according to that letter in the safe-deposit box, he thinks I'm his mother in a new body. Why me?"
Joshua shifted in his chair. "I've been looking at you and thinking...."
"What?"
"Maybe he chose you because ... well, you look just a bit like Katherine."
"You don't mean we've got another look-alike on our hands," Tony said.
"No," Joshua said. "The resemblance is only slight."
"Good," Tony said. "Another dead ringer would be too much for me to deal with."
Joshua got up, went to Hilary, put one hand under her chin, lifted her face, turned it left, then right. "The hair, the eyes, the dusty complexion," he said thoughtfully. "Yes, all of that's similar. And there are other things about your face that remind me vaguely of Katherine, little things, so minor that I can't really put my finger on them. It's only a passing resemblance. And she wasn't as attractive as you are."
As Joshua took his hand away from her chin, Hilary got up and walked to the attorney's desk. Mulling over what she had learned in the past hour, she stared down at the neatly arranged items on the desk: blotter, stapler, letter opener, paperweight.
"Is something wrong?" Tony asked.
The wind worked up into a brief squall. Another burst of raindrops snapped against the window.
She turned around, faced the men. "Let me summarize the situation. Let me see if I've got this straight."
"I don't think any of us has it straight," Joshua said, returning to his chair. "The whole damned tale is too twisted to be arranged in a nice straight line."
"That's what I'm leading up to," she said. "I think maybe I just found another twist."
"Go ahead," Tony said.
"So far as we can tell," Hilary said, "shortly after his mother's death, Bruno got the idea that she had come back from the grave. For nearly five years, he has been buying books about the living dead from Latham Hawthorne. For five years, he's been living in fear of Katherine. Finally, when he saw me, he decided I was the new body she was using. But why did it take him so long?"
"I'm not sure I follow," Joshua said.
"Why did he take five years to fixate on someone, five long years to select a flesh and blood target for his fears?"
Joshua shrugged, "He's a madman, We can't expect his reasoning to be logical and decipherable."
But Tony was sensitive to the implications of her question. He slid forward on the couch, frowning. "I think I know what you're going to say," he told her, "My God, it gives me goose pimples."
Joshua looked from one to the other and said, "I must be getting slow-witted in my declining years. Will someone explain things to this old codger?"
"Maybe I'm not the first woman he's thought was his mother," Hilary said. "Maybe he killed the others before he came after me."
Joshua gaped at her, "Impossible!"
"Why?"
"We'd have known if he'd been running around killing women for the past five years. He'd have been caught at it!"
"Not necessarily," Tony said. "Homicidal maniacs are often very careful, very clever people. Some of them make meticulous plans--and yet have an uncanny ability to take the right risks when something unexpected throws the plans off the rails. They aren't always easy to catch."
Joshua pushed one hand through his mane of snow-white hair. "But if Bruno killed other women--where are their bodies?"
"Not in St. Helena," Hilary said. "He may have been schizophrenic, but the respectable, Dr. Jekyll-half of his personality was firmly in control when he was around people who knew him. He almost certainly would have gone out of town to kill. Out of the valley."
"San Francisco," Tony said, "He apparently went there regularly."
"Any town in the northern part of the state," Hilary said, "Any place far enough away from the Napa Valley for him to be anonymous."
"Now wait," Joshua said. "Wait a minute. Even if he went somewhere else and found women who bore a vague resemblance to Katherine, even if he killed them in other towns--he'd still have to leave bodies behind. There would have been similarities in the way he murdered them, links that the authorities would have noticed, They'd be looking for a modern-day Jack the Ripper. We'd have heard all about it on the news."
"If the murders were spread over five years and over a lot of towns in several counties, the police probably wouldn't make any connections between them," Tony said. "This is a large state. Hundreds of thousands of square miles. There are hundreds upon hundreds of police organizations, and there's seldom as much information-sharing among them as there ought to be. In fact, there's only one sure-fire way for them to recognize connections between several random killings--that's if at least two, and preferably three, of the murders take place in a relatively short span of time, within a single police jurisdiction, one county or one city."
Hilary walked away from the desk, returned to the couch. "So it's possible," she said, feeling as cold as the October wind sounded. "It's possible that he's been slaughtering women--two, six, ten, fifteen, maybe more--during the past five years, and I'm the first one who ever gave him any trouble."
"It's not only possible, but probable," Tony said. "I'd say we can count on it." The Xerox of the letter that had been found in the safe-deposit box was on the coffee table in front of him; he picked it up and read the first sentence aloud. "'My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies,'"
"Bodies," Hilary said.
"That's the key word," Tony said. "Not body, singular. Bodies, plural. From that, I think we can infer that he killed her several times and that he thought she came back from the grave more than once."
Joshua's face was ash-gray. "But if you're right ... I've been ... all of us in St. Helena have been living beside the most evil, vicious sort of monster. And we weren't even aware of it!"
Tony looked grim. "'The Beast of Hell walks among us in the clothes of a common man.'"
"What's that from?" Joshua asked.
"I've got a dustbin mind," Tony said. "Very little gets thrown away, whether I want to hold on to it or not. I remember the quotation from my Catholic catechism classes a long time ago. It's from the writings of one of the saints, but I don't recall which one. 'The Beast of Hell walks among us in the clothes of a common man. If the demon should reveal its true face to you at a time when you have turned away from Christ, then you will be without protection, and it will gleefully devour your heart and rend you limb from limb and carry your immortal soul into the yawning pit.'"
"You sound like Latham Hawthorne," Joshua said.