He had not showered since last night, at Sally’s house in Culver City, and he felt grimy. He hated being dirty, for being dirty somehow always made him think of the whispers and the awful crawling things and the dark place in the ground. He decided he could risk taking a quick shower before he carried the food back to the clifftop house, even if that meant being naked and defenseless for a few minutes. But as he walked through the living room on his way to the bedroom and master bath, he heard cars approaching along the vineyard road. The engines sounded unnaturally loud in the perfect stillness of the fields.
Bruno ran to a front window and parted the drapes just an inch and looked out.
Two cars. Four headlights. Coming up the slope toward the clearing.
Katherine.
The bitch!
The bitch and her friends. Her dead friends.
Terrified, he ran to the kitchen, grabbed the suitcase, put out the candle that he was carrying, and pocketed it. He let himself out by the back door and dashed across the rear lawn, into the sheltering vineyards, as the cars stopped out front.
Crouching, lugging the suitcase, anxiously aware of every small sound he made, Bruno moved through the vines. He circled the house until he could see the cars. He put down the suitcase and sprawled beside it, hugging the moist earth and the darkest of the night shadows. He watched the people getting out of the cars, and his heart hammered faster each time that he recognized a face.
Sheriff Laurenski and a deputy. So the police were among the living dead! He had never suspected them.
Joshua Rhinehart. The old attorney was a conspirator, too! He was one of Katherine’s hellish friends.
And there she was! The bitch. The bitch in her sleek new body. And that man from Los Angeles.
They all went into the house.
Lights came on in one room after another.
Bruno tried to remember if he’d left any signs of his visit. Maybe some drippings from the candle. But the droplets of wax would be cold and hard already. They would have no way of knowing if the drippings were fresh or weeks old. He’d left the spoon in the ice cream carton, but that might have been done a long time ago, too. Thank God, he hadn’t taken a shower! The water on the floor of the stall and the damp towel would have given him away; finding a recently used towel, they would have known instantly that he was back in St. Helena, and they would have intensified their search for him.
He got to his feet, hefted the suitcase, and hurried as fast as he could through the vineyards. He went north toward the winery, then west toward the cliff.
They would never come to the cliff house looking for him. Not in a million years. He would be safe in the cliff house because they would think he was too afraid to go there.
If he hid in the attic, he would have time to think and plan and organize. He didn’t dare rush into this. He hadn’t been thinking too clearly lately, not since the other half of him had died, and he didn’t dare move against the bitch until he had planned for every possible contingency.
He knew how to find her now. Through Joshua Rhinehart.
He could get his hands on her whenever he wanted.
But first he needed time to formulate a foolproof plan. He could hardly wait to get back to the attic to talk it over with himself.
***
Laurenski, Deputy Tim Larsson, Joshua, Tony, and Hilary spread out through the house. They searched drawers and closets and cupboards and cabinets.
At first, they couldn’t find anything that proved two men had been living in the house instead of one. There seemed to be quite a few more clothes than one man would need. And the house was stocked with more food than one man usually kept on hand. But that wasn’t proof of anything.
Then, as Hilary was going through desk drawers in the study, she came across a stack of recently received bills that hadn’t been paid yet. Two of them were from dentists–one in nearby Napa, the other in San Francisco.