Climbing the steps, refusing to look at Tony or answer his questions, Hilary said, “Isn’t this some swell story I’ve got to tell? I was assaulted by a walking dead man who thought I was a vampire. Oh, wow! Now you’re absolutely positive that I’ve lost my mind. Call the little white chuckle wagon! Get this poor lady into a straitjacket before she hurts herself! Put her in a nice padded room real quick! Lock the door and throw away the key!”
In the second-floor hallway, a few feet from the top of the stairs, as Hilary was heading toward a bedroom door, Tony caught up with her. He grabbed her arm again.
“Let go, dammit!”
“Tell me what he said.”
“I’m going to a hotel, and then I’m going to work this thing out on my own.”
“I want to know every word he said.”
“There’s nothing you can do to stop me,” she told him. “Now let me go.”
He shouted in order to get through to her. “I have to know what he said about vampires, dammit!”
Her eyes met his. Apparently she recognized the fear and confusion in him, for she stopped trying to pull away. “What’s so damned important?”
“The vampire thing.”
“Why?”
“Frye apparently was obsessed with the occult.”
“How do you know that?”
“We found some things in that van of his.”
“What things?”
“I don’t remember all of it. A deck of tarot cards, a Ouija board, more than a dozen crucifixes–”
“I didn’t see anything about that in the newspapers.”
“We didn’t make a formal press release out of it,” Tony said. “Besides, by the time we searched the van and inventoried its contents and were prepared to consider a release, all of the papers had published their first-day stories, and the reporters had filed their follow-ups. The case just didn’t have enough juice to warrant squeezing third-day coverage out of it. But let me tell you what else was in that van. Little linen bags of garlic taped above all the doors. Two wooden stakes with very sharp points. Half a dozen books about vampires and zombies and other varieties of the so-called ‘living dead.'”
Hilary shuddered. “He told me he was going to cut out my heart and pound a stake through it.”
“Jesus.”
“He was going to cut out my eyes, too, so I wouldn’t be able to find my way back from hell. That’s how he put it. Those were his words. He was afraid that I was going to return from the dead after he killed me. He was raving like a lunatic. But then again, he returned from the grave, didn’t he?” She laughed harshly, without a note of humor, but with a trace of hysteria. “He was going to cut off my hands, so I couldn’t feel my way back.”
Tony felt sick when he thought of how close that man had come to fulfilling those threats.
“It was him,” Hilary said. “You see? It was Frye.”
“Could it have been make-up?”
“What?”
“Could it have been someone made-up to look like Frye?”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What would he have to gain?”
“I don’t know.”
“You accused me of grabbing at straws. Well, this isn’t even a straw you’re grabbing at. It’s just a mirage. It’s nothing.”
“But could it have been another man in make-up?” Tony persisted.
“Impossible. There isn’t any make-up that convincing at close range. And the body was the same as Frye’s. The same height and weight. The same bone structure. The same muscles.”
“But if it was someone in make-up, imitating Frye’s voice–”
“That would make it easy for you,” she said coldly. “A clever impersonation, no matter how bizarre and unexplainable, is easier to accept than my story about a dead man walking. But you mentioned his voice, and that’s another hole in your theory. No one could mimic that voice. Oh, an excellent impressionist might get the low pitch and the phrasing and the accent just right, but he wouldn’t be able to recreate that awful rasping, crackling quality. You could only talk like that if you had an abnormal larynx or screwed-up vocal cords. Frye was born with a malformed voice box. Or he suffered a serious throat injury when he was a child. Maybe both. Anyway, that was Bruno Frye who spoke to me tonight, not a clever imitation. I’d bet every cent I have on it.”