Six weeks after Mary Gunther's telephone call, and six weeks before Katherine was scheduled to go to San Francisco to be with her friend, Leo suffered a massive cerebral hemmorhage and dropped dead among the high stacks of oak barrels in one of the winery's huge aging cellars. Although Katherine was stunned and grief-stricken, and although she had to start learning to run the family business, she did not back out of her promise to Mary Gunther. In April, when Mary sent a message that the baby had arrived, Katherine went off to San Francisco. She was gone more than two weeks, and when she returned, she had a tiny baby, Bruno Gunther, Mary's alarmingly small and fragile child.
Katherine expected to have Bruno for a year, at which time Mary would be firmly on her feet and ready to assume complete responsibility for the tyke. But after six months, word came that Mary had more trouble, much worse this time--a virulent form of cancer. Mary was dying. She had only a few weeks to live, a month at most. Katherine took the baby to San Francisco, so that the mother could spend what little time she had left in the company of her child. During Mary's last days, she made all of the necessary legal arrangements for Katherine to be granted permanent custody of the baby. Mary's own parents were dead; she had no other close relatives with whom Bruno could live. If Katherine had not taken him in, he would have wound up in an orphanage or in the care of foster parents who might or might not have been good to him. Mary died, and Katherine paid for the funeral, then returned to St. Helena with Bruno.
She raised the boy as if he were her own, acting not just like a guardian but like a concerned and loving mother. She could have afforded nursemaids and other household help, but she didn't hire them; she refused to let anyone else tend to the child. Leo had not employed domestic help, and Katherine had her father's spirit of independence. She got along well on her own, and when Bruno was four years old, she returned to San Francisco, to the judge who had awarded her custody at Mary's request, and she formally adopted Bruno, giving him the Frye family name.
Hoping to get a clue from Joshua's story, alert for any inconsistencies or absurdities, Hilary and Tony had been leaning forward, arms on the dining room table, while they listened. Now they leaned back in their chairs and picked up their wine glasses.
Joshua said, "There are still people in St. Helena who remember Katherine Frye primarily as the saintly woman who took in a poor foundling and gave him love and more than a little wealth, too."
"So there wasn't a twin," Tony said.
"Definitely not," Joshua said.
Hilary sighed. "Which means we're back at square one."
"There are a couple of things in that story that bother me," Tony said.
Joshua raised his eyebrows. "Like what?"
"Well, even these days, with our more liberal attitudes, we still make it damned hard for a single woman to adopt a child," Tony said. "And in 1940, it must have been very nearly impossible."
"I think I can explain that," Joshua said. "If memory serves me well, Katherine once told me that she and Mary had anticipated the court's reluctance to sanction the arrangement. So they told the judge what they felt was just a little white lie. They said that Katherine was Mary's cousin and her closest living relative. In those days, if a close relative wanted to take the child in, the court almost automatically approved."
"And the judge just accepted their claim of a blood relationship without checking into it?" Tony asked.
"You have to remember that, in 1940, judges had a lot less interest in involving themselves in family matters than they seem to have now. It was a time when Americans viewed government's role as a relatively minor one. Generally, it was a saner time than ours."
To Tony, Hilary said, "You said there were a couple of things that bothered you. What's the other one?"
Tony wearily wiped his face with one hand. "The other's not something that can easily be put into words. It's just a hunch. But the story sounds ... too smooth."
"You mean fabricated?" Joshua asked.
"I don't know," Tony said. "I don't really know what I mean. But when you've been a policeman as long as I have, you develop a nose for these things."
"And something smells?" Hilary asked.
"I think so."
"What?" Joshua asked.
"Nothing particular. Like I said, the story just sounds too smooth, too pat." Tony drank the last of his wine and then said, "Could Bruno actually be Katherine's child?"
Joshua stared at him, dumbfounded. When he could speak, he said, "Are you serious?"
"Yes."
"You're asking me if it's possible that she made up the whole thing about Mary Gunther and merely went away to San Francisco to have her own illegitimate baby?"
"That's what I'm asking," Tony said.
"No," Joshua said. "She wasn't pregnant."
"Are you sure?"
"Well," Joshua said, "I didn't personally take her urine sample and perform a rabbit test with it. I wasn't even living in the valley in 1940. I didn't get here until '45, after the war. But I've heard her story repeated, sometimes in part and sometimes in its entirety, by people who were here in '40. Now you'll say that they were probably just repeating what she had told them. But if she was pregnant, she couldn't have hidden the fact. Not in a town as small as St. Helena. Everyone would have known."
"There's a small percentage of women who don't swell up a great deal when they're carrying a child," Hilary said. "You could look at them and never know."
"You're forgetting that she had no interest in men," Joshua said. "She didn't date anyone. How could she possibly have gotten pregnant?"
"Perhaps she didn't date any locals," Tony said. "But at harvest time, toward the end of summer, aren't there a lot of migrant workers in the vineyards? And aren't a lot of them young, handsome, virile men?"
"Wait, wait, wait," Joshua said. "You're reaching way out in left field again. You're trying to tell me that Katherine, whose lack of interest in men was widely remarked upon, suddenly fell for a field hand."
"It's been known to happen."
"But then you're also trying to tell me that this unlikely pair of lovers carried out at least a brief affair in a virtual fish bowl without being caught or even causing gossip. And then you're trying to tell me that she was a unique woman, one in a thousand, a woman who didn't look pregnant when she was. No." Joshua shook his white-maned head. "It's too much for me. Too many coincidences. You think Katherine's story sounds too neat, too smooth, but next to your wild suppositions, her tale has the gritty sound of reality."
"You're right," Hilary said. "So another promising theory bites the dust." She finished her wine.