Because Joshua hadn’t come to the valley until 1945, a few years after Leo’s death, he’d never met the man, but he’d heard just enough tales about him to form a picture of the sort of mind that hungered for the excessive privacy embodied in that clifftop house. Leo Frye had been cold, stern, somber, self-possessed, obstinate, brilliant, a bit of an egomaniac, and an iron-handed authoritarian. He was not unlike a feudal lord from a distant age, a medieval aristocrat who preferred to live in a well-fortified castle beyond the easy reach of the unwashed rabble.
Katherine had continued to live in the house after her father died. She raised Bruno in those high-ceilinged rooms, a world far removed from that of the child’s contemporaries, a Victorian world of waist-high wainscoting and flowered wallpaper and crenelated molding and footstools and mantel clocks and lace tablecloths. Indeed, mother and son lived together until he was thirty-five years old, at which time Katherine died of heart disease.
Now, as Joshua drove up the long macadam lane toward the winery, he looked above the fieldstone and wood 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.