***
If Rita Yancy had any more information about the Frye twins, neither Hilary nor Joshua would get it out of her. Tony could see that much even if Hilary and Joshua could not. Any second now, one of them was going to say something so sharp, so angry, so biting and bitter, that the old woman would take offense and order all of them out of the house.
Tony was aware that Hilary was deeply shaken by the similarities between her own childhood ordeal and Katherine’s agony. She was bristling at all three of Rita Yancy’s attitudes–the bursts of phony moralizing, the brief moments of equally unfelt and syrupy sentimentality, and the far more genuine and constant and stunning callousness.
Joshua was suffering from a loss of self-esteem because he had worked for Katherine for twenty-five years without spotting the quiet madness that surely must have been bubbling just below her carefully-controlled surface placidity. He was disgusted with himself; therefore, he was even more irritable than usual. And because Mrs. Yancy was, even in ordinary circumstances, the kind of person Joshua despised, the attorney’s patience with her could fit into a thimble with room left over for one of Charo’s stage costumes plus the collected wisdom of the last four U.S. Presidents.
Tony got up from the sofa and went to the footstool that was in front of Rita Yancy’s chair. He sat down, explaining his move by pretending that he just wanted to pet the cat; but in switching seats, he was placing himself between the old woman and Hilary, and he was effectively blocking Joshua, who looked as if he might seize Mrs. Yancy and shake her. The footstool was a good position from which to continue the interrogation in a casual fashion. As Tony stroked the white cat, he kept up a constant stream of chatter with the woman, ingratiating himself with her, charming her, using the old Clemenza soft-sell which always had done well for him in his police work.
Eventually, he asked her it there had been anything unusual about the birth of the twins.
“Unusual?” Mrs. Yancy asked, perplexed. “Don’t you think the whole damned thing was unusual?”
“You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t put my question very well. What I meant to ask was whether there was anything peculiar about the birth itself, anything odd about her labor pains or her contractions, anything remarkable about the initial state of the babies when they came out of her, any abnormality, any strangeness.”
He saw the surprise enter her eyes as his question tripped a switch in her memory.
“In fact,” she said, “there was something unusual.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Both of the babies were born with cauls.”
“That’s right! How did you know?”
“Just a lucky guess.”
“The hell it was.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’re smarter than you pretend to be.”
He forced himself to smile at her. He had to force it, for there was nothing about Rita Yancy that could elicit a genuine smile from him.
“Both of them were born with cauls,” she said. “Their little heads were almost entirely covered. The doctor had seen and dealt with that sort of thing before, of course. But he thought the chances of both twins having cauls was something like a million to one.”
“Was Katherine aware of this?”
“Aware of the cauls? Not at the time. She was delirious with pain. And then for three days she was completely out of her mind.”
“But later?”
“I’m sure she was told about it,” Mrs. Yancy said. “It’s not the sort of thing you forget to tell a mother. In fact … I remember telling her myself. Yes. Yes, I do. I recall it very clearly now. She was fascinated. You know, some people think that a child born with a caul has the gift of second sight.”
“Is that what Katherine believed?”
Rita Yancy frowned. “No. She said it was a bad sign, not a good one. Leo had been interested in the supernatural, and Katherine had read a few books in his occult collection. In one of those books, it said that when twins were born with cauls, that was … I can’t recall exactly what she said it meant, but it wasn’t good. An evil omen or something.”