Hilary Thomas radiated a brisk self-confidence and quiet competence much as Clemenza did. She was also achingly lovely.
For a moment, no one seemed to know what to say. They looked at one another in silent anticipation and then tentatively sipped their whiskey.
Joshua was the first to speak. “I’ve never put a lot of faith in such things as clairvoyance, but, by God, I’m having a little premonition right now. You haven’t come all this way just to tell me about last Wednesday and Thursday, have you? Something’s happened since then.”
“A lot has happened,” Tony said. “But none of it makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.”
“Sheriff Laurenski sent us to see you,” Hilary said.
“We hope you’ll have some answers for us.”
“I’m looking for answers myself,” Joshua said.
Hilary tilted her head and looked curiously at Joshua. “I think maybe I’m having a premonition of my own,” she said. “Something has happened here, too, hasn’t it?”
Joshua took a sip of his whiskey. “If I were a superstitious man, I’d probably tell you that … somewhere out there … a dead man is walking around among the living.”
Outside, the last light of day was snuffed from the sky. The coal-black night seized the valley beyond the window. A cold wind tried to find a way around the many panes of glass; it hissed and moaned. But a new warmth seemed to fill Joshua’s office, for he and Tony and Hilary were drawn together by their shared knowledge of the incredible mystery of Bruno Frye’s apparent resurrection.
***
Bruno Frye had slept in the back of the blue Dodge van, in a supermarket parking lot, until eleven o’clock that morning, when he had been awakened by a nightmare that resonated with fierce, threatening, yet meaningless whispers. For a while, he sat in the stuffy, dimly-lit cargo hold of the van, hugging himself, feeling so desperately alone and abandoned and afraid that he whimpered and wept as if he were a child.
I’m dead, he thought. Dead. The bitch killed me. Dead. The rotten, stinking bitch put a knife in my guts.
As his weeping gradually subsided, he had a peculiar and disturbing thought: But if I’m dead … how can I be sitting here now? How can I be alive and dead at the same time?
He felt his abdomen with both hands. There were no tender spots, no knife wounds, no scars.
Suddenly, his thoughts cleared. A gray fog seemed to lift from his mind, and for a minute everything shone with a multifaceted, crystalline light. He began to wonder if Katherine really had come back from the grave. Was Hilary Thomas only Hilary Thomas and not Katherine Anne Frye? Was he mad to want to kill her? And all the other women he had killed over the past five years–had they actually been new bodies in which Katherine had hidden? Or had they been real people, innocent women who hadn’t deserved to die?
Bruno sat on the floor of the van, stunned, overwhelmed by this new perspective.
And the whispers that invaded his sleep every night, the awful whispers that terrified him….
Suddenly, he knew that, if only he concentrated hard enough, if only he searched diligently through his childhood memories, he would discover what the whispers were, what they meant. He remembered two heavy wooden doors that were set in the ground. He remembered Katherine opening those doors, pushing him into darkness beyond. He remembered her slamming and bolting the doors behind him, remembered steps that led down, down into the earth….
No!
He clamped his hands over his ears as if he could block out unwanted memories as easily as he could shut out unpleasant noise.
He was dripping sweat, Shaking, shaking.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no!”
For as long as he could remember, he had wanted to find out who was whispering in his nightmares. He had longed to discover what the whispers were trying to tell him, so that, perhaps, he could then banish them from his sleep forever. But now that he was on the verge of knowing, he found the knowledge more horrifying and devastating than the mystery had been, and, panic-stricken, he turned away from the hideous revelation before it could be delivered unto him.