Tony could see that she was still angry, but he was no longer so sure that she was hysterical or even mildly confused. Her dark eyes were sharply focused. She spoke in clipped and precise sentences. She looked like a woman in complete control of herself.
“But Frye is dead,” Tony said weakly.
“He was here.”
“How could he have been?”
“As I said, that’s what I intend to find out.”
Tony had walked into a strange room, a room of the mind, which was constructed of impossibilities. He half-remembered something from a Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes had expressed the view to Watson that, in detection, once you had eliminated all the possibilities except one, that which was left, no matter how unlikely or absurd, must be the truth.
Was the impossible possible?
Could a dead man walk?
He thought of the inexplicable tie between the threats the assailant had made and the items found in Bruno Frye’s van. He thought of Sherlock Holmes, and finally he said, “All right.”
“All right what?” she asked.
“All right, maybe it was Frye.”
“It was.”
“Somehow … some way … God knows how … but maybe he did survive the stabbing. It seems utterly impossible, but I guess I’ve got to consider it.”
“How wonderfully open-minded of you,” she said. Her feathers were still ruffled. She was not going to forgive him easily.
She pulled away from him again and entered the master bedroom.
He followed her.
He felt slightly numb. Sherlock Holmes hadn’t said anything about the effects of living with the disturbing thought that nothing was impossible.
She got a suitcase out of the closet, put it on the bed, and started filling it with clothes.
Tony went to the bedside phone and picked up the receiver. “Line’s dead. He must have cut the wires outside. We’ll have to use a neighbor’s phone to report this.”
“I’m not reporting it.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “All that’s changed. I’ll support your story now.”
“It’s too late for that,” she said sharply.
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t answer. She took a blouse off a hanger with such a sudden tug that the hanger clattered to the closet floor.
He said, “You’re not still planning to hide out in a hotel and hire private investigators.”
“Oh, yes. That’s exactly what I’m planning to do,” she said, folding the blouse.
“But I’ve said I believe you.”
“And I said it’s too late for that. Too late to make any difference.”
“Why are you being so difficult?”
Hilary didn’t respond. She placed the folded blouse in the suitcase and returned to the closet for other pieces of clothing.
“Listen,” Tony said, “all I did was express a few quite reasonable doubts. The same doubts that anyone would have in a situation like this. In fact, the same doubts that you would have expressed if I’d been the one who’d said he’d seen a dead man walking. If our roles were reversed, I’d expect you to be skeptical. I wouldn’t be furious with you. Why are you so damned touchy?”
She came back from the closet with two more blouses and started to fold one of them. She wouldn’t look at Tony. “I trusted you … with everything,” she said.
“I haven’t violated any trust.”
“You’re like everyone else.”
“What happened at my apartment earlier–wasn’t that kind of special?”
She didn’t answer him.
“Are you going to tell me that what you felt tonight–not just with your body, but with your heart, your mind–are you going to tell me that was no different from what you feel with every man?”
Hilary tried to freeze him out. She kept her eyes on her work, put the second blouse in the suitcase, began to fold the third. Her hands were trembling.
“Well, it was special for me,” Tony said, determined to thaw her. “It was perfect. Better than I ever thought it could he. Not just the sex. The being together. The sharing. You got inside me like no woman ever has before. You took away a piece of me when you left my place last night, a piece of my soul, a piece of my heart, a piece of something vital. For the rest of my life, I’m not going to feel like a whole man except when I’m with you. So if you think I’m going to just let you walk away, you’re in for a big surprise. I’ll put up one hell of a fight to hold on to you, lady.”