“Insane,” Joshua said.
“That’s the point,” Tony said.
“But it’s too much. It’s too crazy.”
“Of course, it’s crazy,” Tony said. “It was Katherine’s scheme, and Katherine was out of her mind.”
“But how could she possibly enforce all of those bizarre rules about habits and mannerisms and attitudes and pronouns and whatever the hell else?”
“The same way you’d enforce an ordinary set of rules with ordinary children,” Hilary said. “If they do the right thing, you reward them. If they do the wrong thing, however, you punish them.”
“But to make children behave as unnaturally as Katherine wanted the twins to behave, to make them totally surrender their individuality, the punishment would have to be something truly monstrous,” Joshua said.
“And we know it was something monstrous,” Tony said. “We all heard Dr. Rudge’s tape of that last session with Bruno, when hypnosis was used. If you remember, Bruno said that she put him into some dark hole in the ground as punishment–and I quote–‘for not thinking and acting like one.’ I believe he meant she put both him and his brother in that dark place when they refused to think and act like a single person. She locked them in a dark place for long periods of time, and there was something alive in there, something that crawled all over them. Whatever happened to them in that room or hole … it was so terrible that they had bad dreams about it every night for decades. If it could leave that strong an impression so many years afterwards, I’d say it was enough of a punishment to be a good brainwashing tool. I’d say Katherine did exactly what she set out to do with the twins: melted them into one.”
Joshua stared at the sky ahead.
At last, he said, “When she came back from Mrs. Yancy’s whorehouse, her problem was to pass off the twins as the one child she’d talked about, thereby salvaging the Mary Gunther lie. But she could have accomplished that by locking up one of the brothers, making him a house son, while the other twin was the only one allowed to go out of the house. That would have been quicker, easier, simpler, safer.”
“But we all know Clemenza’s Law,” Hilary said.
“Right,” Joshua said. “Clemenza’s Law: Damned few people ever do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way.”
“Besides,” Hilary said, “Maybe Katherine just didn’t have the heart to keep one of the boys locked up forever while the other one was permitted to lead at least a little bit of a normal life. After all the suffering she’d been through, maybe there was a limit to the amount of suffering she could force her children to endure.”
“It seems to me she made them endure a whole hell of a lot!” Joshua said. “She drove them mad!”
“Inadvertently, yes,” Hilary said. “She didn’t intend to drive them mad. She thought she was doing what was best for them, but her own state of mind didn’t make it possible for her to know what was best.”
Joshua sighed wearily. “It’s a wild theory you’ve got.”
“Not so wild,” Tony said. “It fits the known facts.”
Joshua nodded. “And I guess I believe it, too. At least most of it. I just wish all of the villains in this piece were thoroughly vile and despicable. It seems wrong, somehow, to feel so much sympathy for them.”
***
After they landed in Napa, under rapidly graying skies, they went straight to the county sheriff’s office and told Peter Laurenski everything. At first, he gaped at them as if they had lost their minds, but gradually his disbelief turned into reluctant, astonished acceptance. That was a pattern of reactions, a transformation of emotions that Hilary expected they would all witness a few hundred times in the days ahead.
Laurenski telephoned the Los Angeles Police Department. He discovered that the FBI already had contacted the LAPD in regard to the San Francisco bank fraud case involving a look-alike for Bruno Frye, now believed at large in the LAPD’s jurisdiction. Laurenski’s news, of course, was that the suspect was not merely a look-alike, but the genuine article–even though another genuine article was dead and buried in the Napa County Memorial Park. He informed the LAPD that he had reason to believe the two Brunos had taken turns killing women and had been involved in a series of murders in the northern half of the state over the past five years, although he could not yet provide hard evidence or name specific homicides. The evidence was thus far circumstantial: a grisly but logical interpretation of the safe-deposit box letter in light of recent discoveries about Leo and Katherine and the twins; the fact that both of the twins had made attempts on Hilary’s life; the fact that one of the twins had covered for the other last week when Hilary had first been attacked, which indicated complicity in at least attempted murder; and finally the conviction, shared by Hilary and Tony and Joshua, that Bruno’s hatred for his mother was so powerful and maniacal that he would not hesitate to slaughter any woman who he imagined was his mother come back to life in a new body.