Whispers (31 page)

They ate too many of Mel's clams and then too much red snapper with too many Malaysian shrimp. They also drank too much white wine.

Considering how much they consumed, it was amazing, Hilary thought, that they had so much time between mouthfuls for conversation. But they never stopped talking. She was usually reticent on the first few dates with a new man, but not with Tony. She wanted to hear what he thought about everything, from
Mork and Mindy
to Shakespearean drama, from politics to art. People, dogs, religion, architecture, sports, Bach, fashions, food, women's liberation, Saturday morning cartoons—it seemed urgent and vital that she know what he thought about those and a million other subjects. She also wanted to tell him what she thought about all those things, and she wanted to know what he thought of what she thought, and pretty soon she was telling him what she thought of what he thought of what she thought. They chattered as if they had just learned that God was going to strike everyone in the world deaf and dumb at sunrise. Hilary was drunk, not on wine, but on the fluidity and intimacy of their conversation; she was intoxicated by communication, a potent brew for which she had built up little tolerance over the years.

By the time he took her home and agreed to come in for a nightcap, she was certain they would go to bed together. She wanted him very much; the thought of it made her warm and tingly. She knew he wanted her. She could see the desire in his eyes. They needed to let dinner settle a bit, and with that in mind, she poured white crème de menthe on the rocks for both of them.

They were just sitting down when the telephone rang.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Did he bother you after I left last night?”

“No.”

“This morning?”

“No.”

“Maybe that's not him.”

They both went to the phone.

She hesitated, then picked it up. “Hello?”

Silence.

“Damn you!” she said, and she slammed the receiver down so hard that she wondered if she'd cracked it.

“Don't let him rattle you.”

“I can't help it,” she said.

“He's just a slimy little creep who doesn't know how to deal with women. I've seen others like him. If he ever got a chance to make it with a woman, if a woman offered herself to him on a silver platter, he'd run away screaming in terror.”

“He still scares me.”

“He's no threat. Come back to the couch. Sit down. Try to forget about him.”

They returned to the sofa and sipped their crème de menthe in silence for a minute or two.

At last, she softly said, “Damn.”

“You'll have an unlisted number by tomorrow afternoon. Then he won't be able to bother you any more.”

“But he sure spoiled this evening. I was so mellow.”

“I'm still enjoying myself.”

“It's just that . . . I'd figured on more than just drinks in front of the fireplace.”

He stared at her. “Had you?”

“Hadn't you?”

His smile was special because it was not merely a configuration of the mouth; it involved his whole face and his expressive dark eyes; it was the most genuine and by far the most appealing smile that she had ever seen. He said, “I've got to admit I had hopes of tasting more than the crème de menthe.”

“Damn the phone.”

He leaned over and kissed her. She opened her mouth to him, and for a brief sweet moment their tongues met. He pulled back and looked at her, put his hand against her face as if he was touching delicate porcelain. “I think we're still in the mood.”

“If the phone rings again—”

“It won't.”

He kissed her on the eyes, then on the lips, and he put one hand gently on her breast.

She leaned back, and he leaned into her. She put her hand on his arm and felt the muscles bunched beneath his shirt.

Still kissing her, he stroked her soft throat with his fingertips, then began to unbutton her blouse.

Hilary put her hand on his thigh, where the muscles were also tense beneath his slacks. Such a lean hard man. She slid her hand up to his groin and felt the huge steeliness and fierce heat of his erection. She thought of him entering her and moving hotly within her, and a thrill of anticipation made her shiver.

He sensed her excitement and paused in the unbuttoning of her blouse to lightly trace the swell of her breasts where they rose above the cups of her bra. His fingers seemed to leave cool trails on her warm skin; she could feel the lingering ghost of his touch as clearly as she could feel the touch itself.

The telephone rang.

“Ignore it,” he said.

She tried to do as he said. She put her arms around him and slid down on the couch and pulled him on top of her. She kissed him hard, crushing her lips against his, licking, sucking.

The phone rang and rang.

“Damn!”

They sat up.

It rang, rang, rang.

Hilary stood.

“Don't,” Tony said. “Talking to him hasn't helped. Let me handle it another way and see what happens.”

He got up from the couch and went to the corner desk. He lifted the receiver, but he didn't say anything. He just listened.

Hilary could tell from his expression that the caller had not spoken.

Tony was determined to wait him out. He looked at his watch.

Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Two minutes.

The battle of nerves between the two men was strangely like a childish staring contest, yet there was nothing childish about it. It was eerie. Goosebumps popped up on her arms.

Two and a half minutes.

It seemed like an hour.

Finally, Tony put down the phone. “He hung up.”

“Without saying anything?”

“Not a word. But he hung up first, and I think that's important. I figured if I gave him a dose of his own medicine he wouldn't like it. He thinks he's going to frighten you. But you're expecting the call, and you just listen like he does. At first, he thinks you're only being cute, and he's sure he can outwait you. But the longer you're silent, the more he starts to wonder if you aren't up to some trick. Is there a tap on your phone? Are you stalling so the police can trace the call? Is it even you who picked up the phone? He thinks about that, starts to get scared, and hangs up.”

“
He's
scared? Well, that's a nice thought,” she said.

“I doubt that he'll get up the nerve to call back. At least not until you've changed numbers tomorrow. And then he'll be too late.”

“Nevertheless, I'll be on edge until the man from the phone company's done his job.”

Tony held out his arms, and she moved into his embrace. They kissed again. It was still extraordinarily sweet and good and right, but the sharp edge of unrestrained passion could no longer be felt. Both of them were unhappily aware of the difference.

They returned to the couch, but only to drink their crème de menthe and talk. By twelve-thirty in the morning, when he had to go home, they had decided to spend the following weekend on a museum binge. Saturday, they'd go to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to look at the German expressionist paintings and the Renaissance tapestry. Then they would spend most of Sunday at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which boasted a collection of art richer than any other in the world. Of course, in between the museums, they would eat a lot of good food, share a lot of good talk, and (they ardently hoped) pick up where they had left off on the couch.

At the front door, as he was leaving, Hilary suddenly couldn't bear to wait five days to see him again. She said, “What about Wednesday?”

“What about it?”

“Doing anything for dinner?”

“Oh, I'll probably fry up a batch of eggs that are just getting stale in the refrigerator.”

“All that cholesterol's bad for you.”

“And maybe I'll cut the mold off the bread, make some toast. And I should finish the fruit juice I bought two weeks ago.”

“You poor dear.”

“The bachelor's life.”

“I can't let you eat stale eggs and moldy toast. Not when I make such a terrific tossed salad and filet of sole.”

“A nice light supper,” he said.

“We don't want to get bloated and sleepy.”

“Never know when you might have to move fast.”

She grinned. “Precisely.”

“See you Wednesday.”

“Seven?”

“Seven sharp.”

They kissed, and he walked away from the door, and a cold night wind rushed in where he had been, and then he was gone.

Half an hour later, upstairs, in bed, Hilary's body ached with frustration. Her breasts were full and taut; she longed to feel his hands on them, his fingers gently stroking and massaging. She could close her eyes and feel his lips on her stiffening nipples. Her belly fluttered as she pictured him braced above her on his powerful arms, and then she above him, moving in slow sensuous circles. Her sex was moist and warm, ready, waiting. She tossed and turned for almost an hour before she finally got up and took a sedative.

As sleep crept over her, she held a drowsy dialogue with herself.

—No. Of course not.

—No. Love's dangerous.

—Remember Earl and Emma.

—You're horny. That's all it is. You're just horny.

That, too
.

She slept, and she dreamed. Some of the dreams were golden and fuzzy about the edges. In one of them she was naked with Tony, lying in a meadow where the grass felt like feathers, high above the world, a meadow atop a towering pillar of rock, and the warm wind was cleaner than sunshine, cleaner than the electric current of a lightning bolt, cleaner than anything in the world.

But she had nightmares, too. In one of them, she was in the old Chicago apartment, and the walls were closing in, and when she looked up she saw there was no ceiling, and Earl and Emma were staring down at her, their faces as big as God's face, grinning down at her as the walls closed in, and when she opened the door to run out of the apartment, she collided with an enormous cockroach, a monstrous insect bigger than she was, and it obviously intended to eat her alive.

 

At three o'clock in the morning, Joshua Rhinehart woke, grunting and tussling briefly with the tangled sheets. He'd drunk a bit too much wine with dinner, which was most unusual for him. The buzz was gone, but his bladder was killing him; however, it was not merely the call of nature that had disturbed his sleep. He'd had a horrible dream about Tannerton's workroom. In that nightmare, several dead men—all of them duplicates of Bruno Frye—had risen up from their caskets and from the porcelain and stainless steel embalming tables; he had run into the night behind Forever View, but they had come after him, had searched the shadows for him, moving jerkily, calling his name in their flat dead voices.

He lay on his back in the darkness, staring at the ceiling which he could not see. The only sound was the nearly inaudible purr of the electronic digital clock on the nightstand.

Before his wife's death three years ago, Joshua had seldom dreamed. And he'd never had a nightmare. Not once in fifty-eight years. But after Cora passed away, all of that changed. He dreamed at least once or twice a week now, and more often than not the dream was a bad one. Many of them had to do with losing something terribly important but indescribable, and there always ensued a frantic but hopeless search for that which he had lost. He didn't need a fifty-dollar-an-hour psychiatrist to tell him that those dreams were about Cora and her untimely death. He still had not adjusted to life without her. Perhaps he never would. The other nightmares were filled with walking dead men who often looked like him, symbols of his own mortality; but tonight they all bore a striking resemblance to Bruno Frye.

He got out of bed, stretched, yawned. He shuffled to the bathroom without turning on a lamp.

A couple of minutes later, on his way back to bed, he stopped at the window. The panes were cold to the touch. A stiff wind pressed against the glass and made mewling sounds like an animal that wanted to be let inside. The valley was still and dark except for the lights of the wineries. He could see the Shade Tree Vineyards to the north, farther up in the hills.

Suddenly, his eye was caught by a fuzzy white dot just south of the winery, a single smudge of light in the middle of a vineyard, approximately where the Frye house stood. Lights in the Frye house? There wasn't supposed to be anyone there. Bruno had lived alone. Joshua squinted, but without his glasses, everything at a distance tended to grow hazier the harder he tried to focus on it. He couldn't tell if the light was at the Frye place or at one of the administration buildings between the house and the main winery complex. In fact, the longer he stared the less he was sure that it was a light he was watching; it was faint, lambent; it might only be a reflection of moonlight.

He went to the nightstand and, not wanting to turn on a lamp and spoil his night vision, he felt for his glasses in the dark. Before he found them, he knocked over an empty water glass.

When he got back to the window and looked up into the hills again, the mysterious light was gone. Nevertheless, he stood there for a long while, a vigilant guardian. He was executor of the Frye estate, and it was his duty to preserve it for final distribution in accordance with the will. If burglars and vandals were stripping the house, he wanted to know about it. For fifteen minutes, he waited and watched, but the light never returned.