Whispers

During the first ten minutes after takeoff, Hilary and Tony and Joshua were silent. Each was preoccupied with his own bleak thoughts–and fears.

Then Joshua said, “The twin has to be the dead ringer we’re looking for.”

“Obviously,” Tony said.

“So Katherine didn’t try to solve her problem by killing off the extra baby,” Joshua said.

“Evidently not,” Tony said.

“But which one did I kill?” Hilary asked. “Bruno or his brother?”

“We’ll have the body exhumed and see what we can learn from it,” Joshua said.

The plane hit an air pocket. It dropped more than two hundred feet in a roller coaster swoop, then soared up to its proper altitude.

When her stomach crawled back into its familiar niche, Hilary said, “All right, let’s talk this thing out and see if we can come up with any answers. We’re all sitting here chewing on the same question anyway. If Katherine didn’t kill Bruno’s twin brother in order to keep the Mary Gunther lie afloat, then what did she do with him? Where the devil has he been all these years?”

“Well, there’s always Mrs. Rita Yancy’s pet theory,” Joshua said, managing to pronounce her name in such a way as to make it clear that even the need to refer to her in passing distressed him and left a bad taste in his mouth. “Perhaps Katherine did leave one of the twins bundled up on the doorstep of a church or an orphanage.”

“I don’t know….” Hilary said doubtfully. “I don’t like it, but I don’t exactly know why. It’s just too … clichéd … too trite … too romantic. Damn. None of those is the word I want. I can’t think how to say it. I just sense that Katherine would not have handled it like that. It’s too …”

“Too smooth,” Tony said. “Just like the story about Mary Gunther was too smooth to please me. Abandoning one of the twins like that would have been the quickest, easiest, simplest, safest–although not the most moral–way for her to solve her problem. But people almost never do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way. Especially not when they’re under the kind of stress that Katherine was under when she left Rita Yancy’s whorehouse.”

“Still,” Joshua said. “we can’t rule it out altogether.”

“I think we can,” Tony said. “Because if you accept that the brother was abandoned and then adopted by strangers, you’ve got to explain how he and Bruno got back together again. Since the brother was an unregistered birth, there’d be no way he could trace his blood parentage. The only way he could hook up with Bruno would be by coincidence. Even if you’re willing to accept that coincidence, you’ve still got to explain how the brother could have been raised in another home, in an altogether different environment from Bruno’s, without ever knowing Katherine–and yet have such a fierce hatred for the woman, such an overwhelming fear of her.”

“That’s not easy,” Joshua admitted.

“You’ve got to explain why and how the brother developed a psychopathic personality and paranoid delusions that perfectly match Bruno’s in every detail,” Tony said.

The Cessna droned northward.

Wind buffeted the small craft.

For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.

Then Joshua said, “You win. I can’t explain it. I can’t see how the brother could have been raised entirely apart from Bruno yet wind up with the same psychosis. Genetics don’t explain it, that’s for sure.”

“So what are you saying?” Hilary asked Tony. “That Bruno and his brother weren’t separated after all?”

“She took them both home to St. Helena,” Tony said.

“But where was the other twin all those years?” Joshua asked. “Locked away in a closet or something?”

“No,” Tony said. “You probably met him many times.”

“What? Me? No. Never. Just Bruno.”

“What if…. What if both of them were living as Bruno? What if they … took turns?”

Joshua looked away from the open sky ahead, stared at Tony, blinked. “Are you trying to tell me they played some sort of childish game for forty years?” he asked skeptically.

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