Whispers (38 page)

"I love you," he said.

Still looking at the blouse, she responded to him in a tremulous voice. "Are commitments ever kept? Are promises between two people ever kept? Promises like this? When someone says, 'I love you,' does he ever really mean it? If my parents could gush about love one minute, then beat me black and blue a minute later, who the hell can I trust? You? Why should I? Isn't it going to end in disappointment and pain? Doesn't it always end that way? I'm better off alone. I can take good care of myself. I'll be all right. I just don't want to be hurt any more. I'm sick of being hurt. Sick to death of it! I'm not going to make commitments and take risks. I can't. I just can't."

Tony went to her, gripped her by the shoulders, forced her to look at him. Her lower lip quivered. Tears gathered in the corners of her beautiful eyes, but she held them back.

"You feel the same thing for me that I feel for you," he said. "I know it. I feel it. I'm sure of it. You're not turning your back on me because I had some doubts about your story. That doesn't really have anything to do with it. You're turning your back on me because you're falling in love, and you are absolutely terrified of that. Terrified because of your parents. Because of what they did to you. Because of all the beatings you took. Because of a lot of other things you haven't even told me about yet. You're running from your feelings for me because your rotten childhood left you emotionally crippled. But you love me. You do. And you know it."

She couldn't speak. She shook her head: no, no, no.

"Don't tell me it isn't true," he said. "We need each other, Hilary. I need you because all my life I've been afraid to take risks with things--money, my career, my art. I've always been open to people, to changing relationships, but never to changing circumstances. With you, because of you, for the very first time, I'm willing to take a few tentative steps away from the security of being on the public payroll. And now, when I think seriously about painting for a living, I don't start feeling guilty and lazy, like I used to. I don't always hear Papa's lectures about money and responsibility and the cruelty of fate, like I used to. When I dream of a life as an artist, I no longer automatically start reliving all the financial crises our family endured, the times we were without enough food, the times we were almost without a roof over our heads. I'm finally able to put that behind me. I'm not yet strong enough to quit my job and take the plunge. God, no. Not yet. But because of you, I can now envision myself as a full-time painter, seriously anticipate it, which is something I couldn't do a week ago."

Tears were streaming down her face now. "You're so good," she said. "You're a wonderful, sensitive artist."

"And you need me every bit as much as I need you," he said. "Without me, you're going to build that shell a little thicker, a little harder. You're going to wind up alone and bitter. You have always been able to take risks with things--money, your career. But you haven't been able to take chances with people. You see? We're opposites in that respect. We complement each other. We can teach each other so much. We can help each other grow. It's like we were each only half a person--and now we've found our missing halves. I'm yours. You're mine. We've been knocking around all our lives, groping in the dark, trying to find each other."

Hilary dropped the yellow blouse that she had intended to pack in the suitcase, and she threw her arms around him.

Tony hugged her, kissed her salty lips.

For a minute or two they just held each other. Neither of them could speak.

At last he said, "Look in my eyes."

She raised her head.

"You've got such dark eyes."

"Tell me," he said.

"Tell you what?"

"What I want to hear."

She kissed the corners of his mouth.

"Tell me," he said.

"I ... love you."

"Again."

"I love you, Tony. I do. I really do."

"Was that so difficult?"

"Yeah. For me it was."

"It'll get easier the more often you say it."

"I'll make sure to practice a lot," she said.

She was smiling and weeping at the same time.

Tony was aware of a growing tightness, like a rapidly expanding bubble, in his chest, as if he quite literally were bursting with happiness. In spite of the sleepless night just passed, he was full of energy, wide awake, keenly aware of the special woman in his arms--her warmth, her sweet curves, her deceptive softness, the resiliency of her mind and flesh, the fading scent of her perfume, the pleasant animal odor of clean hair and skin.

He said, "Now that we've found each other, everything will be all right."

"Not until we know about Bruno Frye. Or whoever he is. Whatever he is. Nothing will be all right until we know he's definitely dead and buried, once and for all."

"If we stick together," Tony said, "we'll come through safe and sound. He's not going to get his hands on you so long as I'm around. I promise you that."

"And I trust you. But ... just the same ... I'm scared of him."

"Don't be scared."

"I can't help it," she said. "Besides, I think it's probably smart to be scared of him."

Tony thought of the destruction downstairs, thought of the sharp wooden stakes and the little bags of garlic that had been found in Frye's van, and he decided that Hilary was right. It was smart to be scared of Bruno Frye.

A walking dead man?

She shivered, and Tony caught it from her.

PART TWO

The Living and The Living Dead

Goodness speaks in a whisper.

Evil shouts.

--a Tibetan proverb

Goodness shouts.

Evil whispers.

--A Balinese proverb

Five

TUESDAY MORNING, for the second time in eight days, Los Angeles was rocked by a middle-register earthquake. It hit as high as 4.6 on the Richter Scale as measured at Cal Tech, and it lasted twenty-three seconds.

There was no major damage, and most Angelenos spoke of the tremor only to make jokes. There was the one about the Arabs repossessing part of the country for failure to pay oil debts. And that night, on television, Johnny Carson would say that Dolly Parton had caused the seismic disturbance by getting out of bed too suddenly. To new residents, however, those twenty-three seconds hadn't been the least bit funny, and they couldn't believe that they would ever become blasé about the earth moving under their feet. A year later, of course, they would be making their own jokes about other tremors.

Until the really big one.

A never-spoken, deeply subconscious fear of the big one, the quake to end all quakes, was what made Californians joke about the smaller jolts and shocks. If you dwelt upon the possibility of cataclysm, if you thought about the treachery of the earth for too long, you would be paralyzed with fear. Life must go on regardless of the risks. After all, the big one might not come for a hundred years. Perhaps never. More people died in those snowy, sub-zero Eastern winters than in California quakes. It was as dangerous to live in Florida's hurricane country and on the tornado-stricken plains of the Midwest as it was to build a house on the San Andreas fault. And with every nation on the planet acquiring or seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, the fury of the earth seemed less frightening than the petulant anger of men. To put the quake threat in perspective, Californians made light of it, found humor in the potential disaster, and pretended that living on unstable ground had no effect on them.

But that Tuesday, as on all other days when the earth moved noticeably, more people than usual would exceed the speed limit on the freeways, hurrying to work or to play, hurrying home to families and friends, to lovers; and none of them would be consciously aware that he was living at a somewhat faster pace than he had on Monday. More men would ask their wives for divorces than on a day without a quake. More wives would leave their husbands than had done so the previous day. More people would decide to get married. A greater than usual number of gamblers would make plans to go to Las Vegas for the weekend. Prostitutes would enjoy substantial new business. And there most likely would be a marked increase in sexual activity between husbands and wives, between unwed lovers, and between inexperienced teenagers making their first clumsy experimental moves. Uncontestable proof of this erotic aspect of seismic activity did not exist. But over the years, at several zoos, many sociologists and behavioral psychologists had observed primates--gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans--engaging in an abnormal amount of frenzied coupling in the hours following large- and middle-sized earthquakes; and it was reasonable to assume that, at least in the matter of primal reproductive organs, man was not a great deal different from his primitive cousins.

Most Californians smugly believed that they were perfectly adjusted to life in earthquake country; but in ways of which they were not aware, the psychological stress continued to shape and change them. Fear of the impending catastrophe was an everpresent whisper that propagandized the subconscious mind, a very influential whisper that molded people's attitudes and characters more than they would ever know.

Of course, it was just one whisper among many.

***

Hilary wasn't surprised by the police response to her story, and she tried not to let it upset her.

Less than five minutes after Tony placed the call from a neighbor's home, approximately thirty-five minutes before the morning earthquake, two uniformed officers in a black-and-white arrived at Hilary's house, lights flashing, no siren. With typical, bored, professional dispatch and courtesy, they duly recorded her version of the incident, located the point at which the house had been breached by the intruder (a study window again), made a general listing of the damage in the living room and the dining room, and gathered the other information required for the proper completion of a crime report. Because Hilary had said that the assailant had worn gloves, they decided not to bother calling for a lab man and a fingerprint search.

They were intrigued by her contention that the man who attacked her was the same man she thought she had killed last Thursday. Their interest had nothing to do with a desire to determine if she was correct in her identification of the culprit; they made up their minds about that as soon as they heard her story. So far as they were concerned, there was no chance whatsoever that the assailant could have been Bruno Frye. They asked her to repeat her account of the attack several times, and they frequently interrupted with questions; but they were only trying to determine if she was genuinely mistaken, hysterical and confused, or lying. After a while, they decided that she was slightly mixed up due to shock, and that her confusion was exacerbated by the intruder's resemblance to Bruno Frye.

"We'll work from this description you've given us," one of them said.

"But we can't put an APB on a dead man," said the other. "I'm sure you understand that."

"It was Bruno Frye," Hilary said doggedly.

"Well, there's just no way we can go with that, Miss Thomas."

Although Tony supported her story as best he could without having seen the assailant, his arguments and his position with the Los Angeles Police Department made little or no impression on the uniformed officers. They listened politely, nodded a lot, but were not swayed.

Twenty minutes after the morning earthquake, Tony and Hilary stood at the front door and watched the black-and-white police cruiser as it pulled out of the driveway.

Frustrated, she said, "Now what?"

"Now you'll finish packing that suitcase, and we'll go to my apartment. I'll call the office and have a chat with Harry Lubbock."

"Who's he?"

"My boss. Captain Lubbock. He knows me pretty damned well, and we respect each other. Harry knows I don't go out on a limb unless I've thoroughly tested it first. I'll ask him to take another look at Bruno Frye, get some deeper background on the man. And Harry can put more pressure on Sheriff Laurenski than he's done so far. Don't worry. One way or another, I'll get some action."

But forty-five minutes later, in Tony's kitchen, when he placed the call, he could not get any satisfaction from Harry Lubbock. The captain listened to everything that Tony had to say, and he didn't doubt that Hilary thought she had seen Bruno Frye, but he couldn't find any justification for launching an investigation of Frye in conjunction with a crime that had been committed days after the man's death. He was not prepared to consider the one-in-ten-million chance that the coroner had been wrong and that Frye miraculously had survived massive blood loss, an autopsy, and subsequent refrigeration in the morgue. Harry was sympathetic, soft-spoken, and endlessly patient, but it was clear that he thought Hilary's observations were unreliable, her perceptions distorted by terror and hysteria.

Tony sat down beside her, on one of the three breakfast bar stools, and told her what Lubbock had said.

"Hysteria!" Hilary said. "God, I'm sick of that word! Everyone thinks I panicked. Everyone's so damned sure I was reduced to a blubbering mess. Well, of all the women I know, I'm the one least likely to lose my head in a situation like that."

"I agree with you," Tony said. "I'm just telling you how Harry sees it."

"Damn."

"Exactly."

"And your support didn't mean a thing?"

Tony grimaced. "He thinks that, because of what happened to Frank, I'm not entirely myself."

"So he's saying you're hysterical."

"Just upset. A little confused."

"Is that really what he said?"

"Yeah."

Remembering that Tony had used those same words to describe her when he'd first heard her story about a walking dead man, she said, "Maybe you deserved that."

"Maybe I did."

"What did Lubbock say when you told him about the threats--the stake through the heart, the mouth full of garlic, all of that stuff?"

"He agreed it was a striking coincidence."

"Just that? Just a coincidence?"

"For the time being," Tony said, "that's how he's going to look at it."