buildings. He raised his eyes to the big house that stood like a giant cairn atop the cliff.
It was strange for a grown man to live with his mother as long as Bruno had lived with Katherine. Naturally, there had been rumors, speculations. The consensus of opinion in St. Helena was that Bruno had little or no interest in girls, that his passions and affections were directed secretly toward young men. It was assumed that he satisfied his desires during his occasional visits to San Francisco, out of sight of his wine country neighbors. Bruno's possible homosexuality was not a scandal in the valley. Local people didn't spend a great deal of time talking about it; they didn't really care. Although St. Helena was a small town, it could claim more than a little sophistication; winemaking made it so.
But now Joshua wondered if the consensus of local opinion about Bruno had been wrong. Considering the extraordinary events of the past week, it was beginning to appear as if the man's secret had been much darker and infinitely more terrible than mere homosexuality.
Immediately after Katherine's funeral, deeply shaken by her death, Bruno had moved out of the house on the cliff. He took his clothes, as well as large collections of paintings, metal sculptures, and books, which he had acquired on his own; but he left behind everything that belonged to Katherine. Her clothes were left hanging in closets and folded in drawers. Her antique furniture, paintings, porcelains, crystals, music boxes, enameled boxes--all of those things (and much more) could have been sold at auction for a substantial sum. But Bruno insisted that every item be left exactly where Katherine had put it, undisturbed, untouched. He locked the windows, drew the blinds and drapes, closed and bolt-locked the exterior shutters on both the first and second floors, locked the doors, sealed the place tight, as if it were a vault in which he could preserve forever the memory of his adoptive mother.
When Bruno had rented an apartment and had begun to make plans for the construction of a new house in the vineyards, Joshua had tried to persuade him that it was foolish to leave the contents of the cliff house unattended. Bruno insisted that the house was secure and that its remoteness made it an unlikely target of burglars--especially since burglary was an almost unheard-of crime in the valley. The two approaches to the house--the switchback stairs and the aerial tramway--were deep in Frye property, behind the winery: and the tramway operated only with a key. Besides (Bruno had argued) no one but he and Joshua knew that a great many items of value remained in the old house. Bruno was adamant; Katherine's belongings must not be touched; and finally, reluctantly, unhappily, Joshua surrendered to his client's wishes.
To the best of Joshua's knowledge, no one had been in the cliff house for five years, not since the day that Bruno had moved out. The tramway was well-maintained, even though the only person who rode it was Gilbert Ulman, a mechanic employed to keep Shade Tree Vineyards' trucks and farm equipment in good shape; Gil also had the job of regularly inspecting and repairing the aerial tramway system, which required only a couple of hours a month. Tomorrow, or Friday at the latest, Joshua would have to take the cable car to the top of the cliff and open the house, every door and window, so that it could air out before the art appraisers arrived from Los Angeles and San Francisco on Saturday morning.
At the moment, Joshua was not the least bit interested in Leo Frye's isolated Victorian redoubt; his business was at Bruno's more modern and considerably more accessible house. As he drew near the end of the road that led to the winery's public parking lot, he turned left, onto an extremely narrow driveway that struck south through the sun-splashed vineyards. Vines crowded both sides of the cracked, raggedy-edged blacktop. The pavement led him down one hill, across a shallow glen, up another slope, and ended two hundred yards south of the winery, in a clearing, where Bruno's house stood with vineyards on all sides. It was a large, single-story, ranch-style, redwood and fieldstone structure shaded by one of the nine mammoth oak trees that dotted the huge property and gave the Frye company its name.
Joshua got out of the car and walked to the front door of the house. There were only a few high white clouds against the electric-blue sky. The air flowing down from the piney heights of the Mayacamas was crisp and fresh.
He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and stood in the foyer for a moment, listening. He wasn't sure what he expected to hear.
Maybe footsteps.
Or Bruno Frye's voice.
But there was only silence.
He went from one end of the house to the other in order to get to Frye's study. The decor was proof that Bruno had acquired Katherine's obsessive compulsion to collect and hoard beautiful things. On some walls, so many fine paintings were hung so close together that their frames touched, and no single piece could claim the eye in that exquisite riot of shape and color. Display cases stood everywhere, filled with art glass and bronze sculpture and crystal paperweights and pre-Columbian statuary. Every room contained far too much furniture, but each piece was a matchless example of its period and style. In the huge study, there were five or six hundred rare books, many of them limited editions that had been bound in leather; and there were a few dozen perfect little scrimshaw figures in a display case; and there were six terribly expensive and flawless crystal balls, one as small as an orange, one as large as a basketball, the others in various sizes between.
Joshua pulled back the drapes at the window, letting in a little light, switched on a brass lamp, and sat in a modern spring-backed office chair behind an enormous 18th century English desk. From a jacket pocket he withdrew the strange letter that he had found in the safe-deposit box at the First Pacific United Bank. It was actually just a Xerox; Warren Sackett, the FBI agent, insisted on keeping the original. Joshua unfolded the copy and propped it up where he could see it. He turned to the low typing stand that was beside the desk, pulled it over his lap, rolled a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter, and quickly tapped out the first sentence of the letter.
My mother, Katherine Anne Frye, died five years ago, but she keeps coming back to life in new bodies.
He held the Xerox copy next to the sample and compared them. The type was the same. In both versions, the loop of the lower case 'e' was completely filled in with ink because the keys hadn't been properly cleaned in quite a while. In both, the loop of the lower case 'a' was partially occluded, and the lower case 'd' printed slightly higher than any of the other characters. The letter had been typed in Bruno Frye's study, on Bruno Frye's machine.
The look-alike, the man who had impersonated Frye in that San Francisco bank last Thursday, apparently possessed a key to the house. But how had he gotten it? The most obvious answer was that Bruno had given it to him, which meant that the man was an employee, a hired double.
Joshua leaned back in the chair and stared at the Xerox of the letter, and other questions exploded like fireworks in his mind. Why had Bruno felt it necessary to hire a double? Where had he found such a remarkable look-alike? How long ago did the double start to work for him? Doing what? And how often had he, Joshua, spoken to this doppelganger, thinking the man was really Frye? Probably more than once. Perhaps more often than he'd spoken with the real Bruno. There was no way of knowing. Had the double been here, in the house, Thursday morning, when Bruno had died in Los Angeles? Most likely. After all, this was where he had typed the letter that he'd put in the safe-deposit box, so this must be where he had heard the news. But how had he learned about the death so quickly? Bruno's body had been found next to a public telephone.... Was it possible that Bruno's last act had been to call home and talk to his double? Yes. Possible. Even probable. The telephone company's records
