Whispers (69 page)

Tannerton grinned at him. “I assure you, Peter, we aren’t going to run off with Mr. Frye’s remains.”

 
At 8:20, in Joshua Rhinehart’s kitchen, while the casket was being exhumed at the cemetery a few miles away, Tony and Hilary stacked the breakfast dishes in the sink.

“I’ll wash them later,” Joshua said. “Let’s get up to the cliff and open that house. It must smell like hell in there after all these years. I just hope the mildew and mold haven’t done too much damage to Katherine’s collections. I warned Bruno about that a thousand times, but he didn’t seem to care if—” Joshua stopped, blinked. “Will you listen to me babble on? Of
course
he didn’t care if the whole lot of it rotted away. Those were Katherine’s collections, and he wouldn’t have cared a damn about anything she treasured.”

They went to Shade Tree Vineyards in Joshua’s car. The day was dreary; the light was dirty gray. Joshua parked in the employees’ lot.

Gilbert Ulman hadn’t come to work yet. He was the mechanic who maintained the aerial tramway in addition to caring for all of Shade Tree Vineyards’ trucks and farm equipment.

The key that operated the tramway was hanging on a pegboard in the garage, and the winery’s night manager, a portly man named Iannucci, was happy to get it for Joshua.

Key in hand, Joshua led Hilary and Tony up to the second floor of the huge main winery, through an area of administrative offices, through a viniculture lab, and then onto a broad catwalk. Half the building was open from the first floor to the ceiling, and in that huge chamber there were enormous three-story fermentation tanks. Cold, cold air flowed off the tanks, and there was a yeasty odor in the place. At the end of the long catwalk, at the southwest corner of the building, they went through a heavy pine door with black iron hinges, into a small room that was open at the end opposite from where they entered. An overhanging roof extended twelve feet out from the missing wall, to keep rain from slanting into the open chamber. The four-seat cable car—a fire-engine-red number with lots of glass—was nestled under the overhang, at the brink of the room.

 
The pathology laboratory had a vague, unpleasant chemical odor. So did the coroner, Dr. Amos Garnet, who sucked vigorously on a breath mint.

There were five people in the room. Laurenski, Larsson, Garnet, Tannerton, and Olmstead. No one, with the possible exception of the perennially good-natured Tannerton, seemed happy to be there.

“Open it,” Laurenski said. “I’ve got an appointment to keep with Joshua Rhinehart.”

Tannerton and Olmstead threw back the latches on the bronze casket. A few remaining chunks of dirt fell to the floor, onto the plastic dropcloth that Garnet had put down. They pushed the lid up and back.

The body was gone.

The velvet- and silk-lined box held nothing but the three fifty-pound bags of dry mortar mix that had been stolen from Avril Tannerton’s basement last weekend.

 
Hilary and Tony sat on one side of the cable car, and Joshua sat on the other. The attorney’s knees brushed Tony’s.

Hilary held Tony’s hand as the red gondola moved slowly, slowly up the line toward the top of the cliff. She wasn’t afraid of heights, but the tramway seemed so fragile that she could not help gritting her teeth.

Joshua saw the tension on her face and smiled. “Don’t worry. The car seems small, but it’s sturdy. And Gilbert does a fine job with maintenance.”

As it ground gradually upward, the car swung slightly in the stiff morning wind.

The view of the valley became increasingly spectacular. Hilary tried to concentrate on that and not on the creaking and clattering of the machinery.

The gondola finally reached the top of the cable. It locked in place, and Joshua opened the door.

When they walked out of the upper station of the tramway system, a fiercely-white arc of lightning and a violent peal of thunder broke open the lowering sky. Rain began to fall. It was a thin, cold, slanting rain.

Joshua, Hilary, and Tony ran for shelter. They stomped up the front steps and across the porch to the door.

“And you say there’s no heat up here?” Hilary asked.

“The furnace has been shut down for five years,” Joshua said. “That’s why I told both of you to wear sweaters under your coats. It’s not a cold day, really. But once you’ve been up here awhile in this damp, the air will cut through to your bones.”

Joshua unlocked the door, and they went inside, switching on the three flashlights they’d brought with them.

“It stinks in here,” Hilary said.

“Mildew,” Joshua said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

They walked from the foyer into the hall, then into the big drawing room. The beams of their flashlights fell on what looked to be a warehouse full of antique furniture.

“My God,” Tony said, “it’s worse than Bruno’s house. There’s hardly room to walk.”

“She was obsessed with collecting beautiful things,” Joshua said. “Not for investment. Not just because she liked to look at them, either. A lot of things are crammed into closets, hidden away. Paintings stacked on paintings. And as you can see, even in the main rooms, there’s just too damned much stuff; it’s jammed too close together to please the eye.”

“If every room has antiques of this quality,” Hilary said, “then there’s a fortune here.”

“Yeah,” Joshua said. “If it hasn’t been eaten up by worms and termites and whatnot.” He let his flashlight beam travel from one end of the room to the other. “This mania for collecting was something I never understood about her. Until this minute. Now I wonder if. . . . As I look at all of this, and as I think about what we learned from Mrs. Yancy. . . .”

Hilary said, “You think collecting beautiful things was a reaction to all the ugliness in her life before her father died?”

“Yeah,” Joshua said. “Leo broke her. Shattered her soul, smashed her spirit flat and left her with a rotten self-image. She must have hated herself for all the years she let him use her—even though she’d had no choice but to let him. So maybe . . . feeling low and worthless, she thought she could make her soul beautiful by living among lots of beautiful things.”

They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the overfurnished drawing room.

“It’s so sad,” Tony said.

Joshua shook himself from his reverie. “Let’s get these shutters open and let in some light.”

“I can’t stand this smell,” Hilary said, cupping one hand over her nose. “But if we raise the windows, the rain will get in and ruin things.”

“Not much if we raise them only five or six inches,” Joshua said. “And a few drops of water aren’t going to hurt anything in this mold colony.”

“It’s a wonder there aren’t mushrooms growing out of the carpet,” Tony said.

They moved through the downstairs, raising windows, unbolting the inward-facing latches on the shutters, letting in the gray storm light and the fresh rain-scented air.

When most of the downstairs rooms had been opened, Joshua said, “Hilary, all that’s left down here is the dining room and the kitchen. Why don’t you take care of those windows while Tony and I tend to the upstairs.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be up in a minute to help out.”

She followed her flashlight beam into the pitch-black dining room as the men went down the hall toward the stairs.

 
When he and Joshua came into the upstairs hallway, Tony said,
“Phew!
It stinks even worse up here.”

A blast of thunder shook the old house. Windows rattled icily. Doors stuttered in their frames.

“You take the rooms on the right,” Joshua said. “I’ll take the ones on the left.”

Tony went through the first door on his side and found a sewing room. An ancient treadle-powered sewing machine stood in one corner, and a more modern electric model rested on a table in another corner; both were bearded with cobwebs. There was a work table and two dress-maker’s forms and one window.

He went to the window, put his flashlight on the floor, and tried to twist open the lock lever. It was rusted shut. He struggled with it as rain drummed noisily on the shutters beyond the glass.

 
Joshua shone his flashlight into the first room on the left and saw a bed, a dresser, a highboy. There were two windows in the far wall.

He crossed the threshold, took two more steps, sensed movement behind him, and he started to turn, felt a sudden cold thrill go through his back, and then it became a very hot thrill, a burning lance, a line of pain drawn through his flesh, and he knew he had been stabbed. He felt the knife being jerked out of him. He turned. His flashlight revealed Bruno Frye. The madman’s face was wild, demoniacal. The knife came up, came down, and the cold thrill shivered through Joshua again, and this time the blade tore his right shoulder, from front to back, all the way through, and Bruno had to twist and jerk the weapon savagely, several times, to get it out. Joshua raised his left arm to protect himself. The blade punctured his forearm. His legs buckled. He went down. He fell against the bed, slid to the floor, slick with his own blood, and Bruno turned away from him and went out to the second-floor hall, out of the flashlight’s glow, into the darkness. Joshua realized he hadn’t even screamed, had not warned Tony, and he tried to shout, really tried, but the first wound seemed to be very serious, for when he attempted to make any sound at all, pain blossomed in his chest, and he could do no better than hiss like a goddamned goose.

 
Grunting, Tony put all of his strength against the stubborn window latch, and abruptly the rusted metal gave—
sweeek
—and popped open. He raised the windows, and the sound of the rain swelled. A fine spray of water misted through a few narrow chinks in the shutters and dampened his face.

The inward-facing bolt on the shutters also was corroded, but Tony finally freed it, pushed the shutters open, leaned out in the rain, and fixed them in their braces so they wouldn’t bang about in the wind.

He was wet and cold. He was anxious to get on with the search of the house, hoping the activity would warm him.

As another volley of thunder cannonaded down from the Mayacamas, into the valley, over the house, Tony walked out of the sewing room and into Bruno Frye’s knife.

 
In the kitchen, Hilary opened the shutters on the window that looked onto the back porch. She fixed them in place and paused for a moment to stare out at the rain-swept grass and the wind-whipped trees. At the end of the lawn, twenty yards away, there were doors in the ground.

She was so surprised to see those doors that, for a moment, she thought she was imagining them. She squinted through the sheeting rain, but the doors didn’t dissolve miragelike, as she half expected.

At the end of the lawn, the land rose up in one of its last steps to the vertical ramparts of the mountains. The doors were set into that hillside. They were framed with timbers and mortared stones.

Hilary turned away from the window and hurried across the filthy kitchen, anxious to tell Joshua and Tony about her discovery.

 
Tony knew how to protect himself against a man with a knife. He was trained in self-defense, and he’d been in situations like this one on two other occasions. But this time he was caught off guard by the suddenness and total unexpectedness of the attack.

Glaring, his broad countenance split by a hideous rictus grin, Frye swung the knife at Tony’s face. Tony managed to turn partly out of the blow, but the blade still tore along the side of his head, ripping scalp, drawing blood.

The pain was like an acid burn.

Tony dropped his flashlight; it rolled away, causing the shadows to leap and sway.

Frye was fast, damned fast. He struck again as Tony was just going into a defensive posture. This time the knife scored solidly if peculiarly, coming down point-first on the top of his left shoulder, driving through jacket and sweater, through muscle and gristle, between bones, instantly taking all the strength out of that arm and forcing Tony to his knees.

Somehow Tony found the energy to swing his right fist up from the floor, into Frye’s testicles. The big man gasped and staggered backwards, pulling the knife out of Tony as he went.

Unaware of what was happening above her, Hilary called up from the foot of the stairs. “Tony! Joshua! Come down here and see what I’ve found.”

Frye whirled at the sound of Hilary’s voice. He headed for the steps, apparently forgetting that he was leaving a wounded but living man behind him.

Tony got up, but a napalm explosion of pain set fire to his arm, and he swayed dizzily. His stomach flopped over. He had to lean against the wall.

All he could do was warn her. “Hilary, run! Run! Frye’s coming!”

 
Hilary was about to call up to them again when she heard Tony shouting to her. For an instant, she couldn’t believe what he was saying, but then she heard heavy footsteps on the first flight, thumping down. He was still out of sight above the landing, but she knew he couldn’t be anyone but Bruno Frye.

Then Frye’s gravelly voice boomed:
“Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!”

Stunned, but not frozen with shock, Hilary backed away from the foot of the stairs, and then she ran as she saw Frye reach the landing. Too late, she realized she should have gone toward the front of the house, outside, to the cable car; but she was streaking toward the kitchen instead, and there was no turning back now.

She pushed through the swinging door, into the kitchen, as Frye jumped down the last few steps and into the hallway behind her.

She thought of searching the kitchen drawers for a knife.

Couldn’t. No time.

She ran to the outside door, unlocked it, and bolted from the kitchen as Frye entered it through the swinging door.

The only weapon she had was the flashlight she had been carrying, and that was no weapon at all.

She crossed the porch, went down the steps. Rain and wind battered her.