Whispers (66 page)

“Were both of the babies healthy?” Joshua asked.

“They were thin,” Mrs. Yancy said. “Scrawny as hell. Two pathetic little things. Probably because Katherine had been on a diet for months.

And because of the girdles. But they could cry just as good and loud as any other babies. And there wasn't a thing wrong with their appetites. They seemed healthy enough, just small.”

“How long did Katherine stay at your place?” Hilary asked.

“Almost two weeks. She needed that long to get her strength back after such a hard delivery. And the babies needed time to put a little flesh on their bones.”

“When she left, did she take both children with her?”

“Of course. I wasn't running a nursery. I was glad to see her leave.”

“Did you know that she was going to take only one of the twins to St. Helena?” Hilary asked.

“I understood that to be her intention, yes.”

“Did she say what she was going to do with the other boy?” Joshua asked, taking over the questioning from Hilary.

“I believe she intended to put it up for adoption,” Mrs. Yancy said.

“You
believe?
” Joshua asked exasperatedly. “Weren't you even the least bit concerned about what might happen to those two helpless babies in the hands of a woman who was obviously mentally unbalanced?”

“She had recovered.”

“Baloney.”

“I tell you, if you'd met her on the street, you wouldn't have thought she had any problems.”

“But for God's sake, underneath that facade—”

“She was their mother,” Mrs. Yancy said primly. “She wouldn't have done them any harm.”

“You couldn't have been sure of that,” Joshua said.

“I certainly
was
sure of it,” Mrs. Yancy declared. “I've always had the highest respect for motherhood and a mother's love. A mother's love can work wonders.”

Again, Joshua had to restrain himself from reaching for the bun of hair on top of her head.

Tony said, “Katherine couldn't have put the baby up for adoption. Not without a birth certificate to prove that it was hers.”

“Which leaves us with a number of unpleasant possibilities to consider,” Joshua said.

“Honestly, you people amaze me,” Mrs. Yancy said, shaking her head and scratching her cat. “You always want to believe the worst. I've never seen three bigger pessimists. Did you ever stop to think she might have left the little boy on a doorstep? She probably abandoned him at an orphanage or maybe a church, some place where he would be found right away and given proper care. I imagine he was adopted by an upstanding young couple, raised in an excellent home, given lots of love, a good education, all sorts of advantages.”

 

In the attic, waiting for nightfall, bored, nervous, lonely, apprehensive, sometimes stuporous, more often frenetic, Bruno Frye spent much of Thursday afternoon talking to his dead self. He hoped to soothe his roiling mind and regain a sense of purpose, but he made little or no progress along those lines. He decided that he would be calmer, happier, and less lonely if he could at least look into his other self's eyes, like in the old days, when they had often sat and stared longingly into each other for an hour or more at a time, communicating so much without benefit of words, sharing, being one, just one together. He recalled that moment in Sally's bathroom, only yesterday, when he had stopped in front of a mirror and had mistaken his reflection for his other self. Looking into eyes that he had thought were the eyes of his other self, he had felt wonderful, blissful, at peace. Now he desperately wanted to recapture that state of mind. And how much better to look into the
real
eyes of his other self, even if they were flat and sightless now. But himself lay on the bed, eyes firmly closed. Bruno touched the eyes of the other Bruno, the dead one, and they were cold orbs; the lids would not lift under his gently prodding fingertips. He explored the curves of those shuttered eyes, and he felt hidden sutures at the corners, tiny knots of thread holding the lids down. Excited by the prospect of seeing the other's eyes again, Bruno got up and hurried downstairs, looking for razor blades and delicate cuticle scissors and needles and a crocheting hook and other makeshift surgical instruments that might be of use in the reopening of the other Bruno's eyes.

 

If Rita Yancy had any more information about the Frye twins, neither Hilary nor Joshua would get it out of her. Tony could see that much even if Hilary and Joshua could not. Any second now, one of them was going to say something so sharp, so angry, so biting and bitter, that the old woman would take offense and order all of them out of the house.

Tony was aware that Hilary was deeply shaken by the similarities between her own childhood ordeal and Katherine's agony. She was bristling at all three of Rita Yancy's attitudes—the bursts of phony moralizing, the brief moments of equally unfelt and syrupy sentimentality, and the far more genuine and constant and stunning callousness.

Joshua was suffering from a loss of self-esteem because he had worked for Katherine for twenty-five years without spotting the quiet madness that surely must have been bubbling just below her carefully-controlled surface placidity. He was disgusted with himself; therefore, he was even more irritable than usual. And because Mrs. Yancy was, even in ordinary circumstances, the kind of person Joshua despised, the attorney's patience with her could fit into a thimble with room left over for one of Charo's stage costumes plus the collected wisdom of the last four U.S. Presidents.

Tony got up from the sofa and went to the footstool that was in front of Rita Yancy's chair. He sat down, explaining his move by pretending that he just wanted to pet the cat; but in switching seats, he was placing himself between the old woman and Hilary, and he was effectively blocking Joshua, who looked as if he might seize Mrs. Yancy and shake her. The footstool was a good position from which to continue the interrogation in a casual fashion. As Tony stroked the white cat, he kept up a constant stream of chatter with the woman, ingratiating himself with her, charming her, using the old Clemenza soft-sell which always had done well for him in his police work.

Eventually, he asked her if there had been anything unusual about the birth of the twins.

“Unusual?” Mrs. Yancy asked, perplexed. “Don't you think the whole damned thing was unusual?”

“You're right,” he said. “I didn't put my question very well. What I meant to ask was whether there was anything peculiar about the birth itself, anything odd about her labor pains or her contractions, anything remarkable about the initial state of the babies when they came out of her, any abnormality, any strangeness.”

He saw the surprise enter her eyes as his question tripped a switch in her memory.

“In fact,” she said, “there
was
something unusual.”

“Let me guess,” he said. “Both of the babies were born with cauls.”

“That's right! How did you know?”

“Just a lucky guess.”

“The hell it was.” She wagged a finger at him. “You're smarter than you pretend to be.”

He forced himself to smile at her. He had to force it, for there was nothing about Rita Yancy that could elicit a genuine smile from him.

“Both of them were born with cauls,” she said. “Their little heads were almost entirely covered. The doctor had seen and dealt with that sort of thing before, of course. But he thought the chances of both twins having cauls was something like a million to one.”

“Was Katherine aware of this?”

“Aware of the cauls? Not at the time. She was delirious with pain. And then for three days she was completely out of her mind.”

“But later?”

“I'm sure she was told about it,” Mrs. Yancy said. “It's not the sort of thing you forget to tell a mother. In fact . . . I remember telling her myself. Yes. Yes, I do. I recall it very clearly now. She was fascinated. You know, some people think that a child born with a caul has the gift of second sight.”

“Is that what Katherine believed?”

Rita Yancy frowned. “No. She said it was a bad sign, not a good one. Leo had been interested in the supernatural, and Katherine had read a few books in his occult collection. In one of those books, it said that when twins were born with cauls, that was . . . I can't recall exactly what she said it meant, but it wasn't good. An evil omen or something.”

“The mark of the demon?” Tony asked.

“Yes! That's it!”

“So she believed that her babies were marked by a demon, their souls already damned?”

“I'd almost forgotten about that,” Mrs. Yancy said.

She stared beyond Tony, not seeing anything in the parlor, looking into the past, striving to remember. . . .

Hilary and Joshua stayed back, out of the way, silent; and Tony was relieved that they recognized his authority.

Eventually, Mrs. Yancy said, “After Katherine told me about it being the mark of a demon, she just clammed up. She didn't want to talk any more. For a couple of days, she was as quiet as a mouse. She stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, hardly moving at all. She looked like she was thinking real hard about something. Then suddenly, she started acting so damned weird that I had to start wondering if I still might have to send her away to the booby hatch.”

“Was she ranting and raving and violent like before?” Tony asked.

“No, no. It was all talk this time. Very wild, intense, crazy talk. She told me that the twins were the children of a demon. She said she'd been raped by a thing from hell, a green and scaly thing with huge eyes and a forked tongue and long claws. She said it had come from hell to force her to carry its children. Crazy, huh? She swore up and down that it was true. She even described this demon. A damned good description, too. Full of detail, very well done. And when she told me about how it raped her, she managed to give me the chills, even though I knew it was all a bunch of crap. The story was colorful, very imaginative. At first, I thought it was a joke, something she was doing just for laughs, except she wasn't laughing, and I couldn't see anything funny in it. I reminded her that she'd told me all about Leo, and she screamed at me. Did she scream! I thought the windows would break. She denied ever having said such things. She pretended to be insulted. She was so angry with me for suggesting incest, so self-righteous, a regular little prig, so determined to make me apologize—well, I couldn't help laughing at her. And that made her even angrier. She kept saying it hadn't been Leo, though we both knew damned well it had. She did everything she could to make me believe it was a demon that had fathered the twins. And I tell you, her act was
good!
I didn't believe it for a minute, of course. All that silly stuff about a creature from hell sticking his thing in her. What a bunch of hogwash. But I started to wonder if maybe she had convinced herself. She sure looked convinced. She was so fanatical about it. She said she was afraid that she and her babies would be burned alive if any religious people found out that she'd consorted with a demon. She begged me to help her keep the secret. She didn't want me to tell anyone about the two cauls. Then she said she knew that both twins carried the mark of the demon between their legs. She pleaded with me to keep that a secret, too.”

“Between their legs?” Tony asked.

“Oh, she was carrying on like a full-fledged looney,” Rita Yancy said. “She insisted that both of her babies had their father's sex organs. She said they weren't human between the legs, and she said she knew I'd noticed that, and she begged me not to tell anyone about it. Well, that was purely ridiculous. Both those little boys had perfectly ordinary pee-pees. But Katherine jabbered on and on about demons for almost two days. Sometimes she seemed truly hysterical. She wanted to know how much money I'd take to keep the secret about the demon. I told her I wouldn't take a penny for that, but I said I'd settle for five hundred a month to keep mum about Leo and all the rest of it, the rest of the
real
story. That calmed her down a little, but she still had this demon thing stuck in her head. I was just about decided that she really believed what she was saying, and I was going to call my doctor and have him examine her—and then she shut up about it. She seemed to regain her senses. Or she got tired of her joke, I guess. Anyway, she didn't say one more word about demons. She behaved herself from then on until she took her babies and left a week or so later.”

Tony thought about what Mrs. Yancy had told him.

Like a witch cuddling a feline familiar, the old woman petted the white cat.

“What if,” Tony said. “What if, what if, what if?”

“What if what?” Hilary asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “Pieces seem to be falling into place . . . but it looks . . . so wild. Maybe I'm putting the puzzle together all wrong. I've got to think about it. I'm just not sure yet.”

“Well, do you have any more questions for me?” Mrs. Yancy asked.

“No,” Tony said, getting up from the footstool. “I can't think of anything else.”

“I believe we've gotten what we came for,” Joshua agreed.

“More than we bargained for,” Hilary said.

Mrs. Yancy lifted the cat off her lap, put it on the floor, and rose from her chair. “I've wasted too much time on this silly damned thing. I should be in the kitchen. I've got work to do. I made four pie shells this morning. Now I've got to mix up the fillings and get everything in the oven. I've got grandchildren coming for dinner, and each one of them has a different kind of favorite pie. Sometimes the little dears can be a tribulation. But on the other hand, I'd sure be lost without them.”