The Face (13 page)

CHAPTER 18

F
RIC IN THE SUFFACATORIUM, ANXIOUS AND wheezing, and no doubt bluer than a blue moon, dragged himself out of the middle of the room and sat with his back against a steel wall.

The medicinal inhaler in his right hand weighed slightly more than a Mercedes 500 M-Class SUV.

If he’d been his father, he would have been surrounded by an entourage big enough to help him lift the stupid thing. Yet another disadvantage of being a geek loner.

For lack of oxygen, his thoughts grew muddled. For a moment he believed that his right hand was trapped on the floor under a heavy shotgun, that it was a shotgun he wanted to lift, put in his mouth.

Fric almost cast the device away in terror. Then in a moment of clarity, he recognized the inhaler and held fast to it.

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only wheeze and cough and wheeze, and seemed to be spiraling into one of those rare attacks that were severe enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. Doctors would poke him and prod him, bend him and fold him, babbling about their favorite Manheim movies. The scene with the elephants! The airplane-to-airplane midair jump with no parachute! The sinking ship! The alien snake king! The funny monkeys! Nurses would gush over him, telling him how lucky he was and how exciting it must be to have a father who was a star, a hero, a hunk, a genius.

He might as well die here, die now.

Although he was not Clark Kent or Peter Parker, Fric raised the gazillion-pound device to his face. He slipped the mouthpiece between his lips and administered a dose of medication, sucking in the deepest breath that he could manage, which wasn’t deep at all.

In his throat: a hard-boiled egg or a stone, or a huge wad of phlegm worthy of the Guinness book of world records, a plug of some kind, allowing only thin wisps of air to enter, to exit.

He leaned forward. Clenching and relaxing neck muscles, chest and abdominal muscles. Struggling to draw cool medicated air into his lungs, to exhale the hot stale breath pooled like syrup in his chest.

Two puffs. That was the prescribed dosage.

He triggered puff two.

He might have gagged on the faint metallic taste if his inflamed and swollen airways could have executed a gag, but the tissues were able only to contract, not expand, flexing tighter, tighter, tighter.

A yellow-gray soot seemed to sift down through his eyes, the slow fall of an interior twilight.

Dizzy. Sitting here on the floor, back against the wall, legs straight out in front of him, he felt as if he were balanced on one foot on a high wire, teetering, about to take a death plunge.

Two puffs. He’d taken two doses.

Overmedicating was inadvisable. Dangerous.

Two puffs. That ought to be enough. Usually was. Sometimes just one dose allowed him to slip out of this invisible hangman’s noose.

Don’t overmedicate. Doctor’s orders.

Don’t panic. Doctor’s advice.

Give the medication a chance to work. Doctor’s instruction.

Screw the doctor.

He triggered a third puff.

A bone-click sound like dice on a game board rattled out of his throat, and his wheezing became less shrill, less of a whistle, more of a raw windy rasping.

Hot air exploding out. Cool air going down. Fric on the mend.

He dropped the inhaler on his lap.

Fifteen minutes was the average time required to recover from an asthma attack. Nothing could be done but wait it out.

Darkness faded from the edges of his vision. Blur gradually gave way to clarity.

Fric on the floor in an empty steel room, with nothing to distract him but hooks in the ceiling, naturally looked at those peculiar curved forms, and thought about them.

When he’d first discovered the room, he’d been reminded of movie scenes set in meat lockers, cow carcasses hanging from ceiling hooks.

He had wondered if a mad criminal genius had hung the bodies of his human victims in
this
meat locker. Perhaps the room had once been refrigerated.

The hooks weren’t set far enough apart to accommodate the bodies of grown men and women. Initially, Fric had sprung to the grim conclusion that the killer had collected dead, refrigerated
children
.

On closer inspection, he had seen that the stainlesssteel hooks were not sharp. They were too blunt to pierce either kids or cows.

That’s when he’d set the matter of the hooks aside for later contemplation and had come to the determination that the room had been a suffacatorium. The existence of the interior lock release, however, had proved this theory wrong.

As his wheezing quieted, as breath came more easily, as the tightness in his chest loosened, Fric studied the hooks, the brushed-steel walls, trying to arrive at a third theory regarding the purpose of this place. He remained mystified.

He’d told no one about the pivoting section of closet shelving or about the hidden room. What made the hidey-hole so cool was less its exotic nature than the fact that only he knew it existed.

This space could serve as the “deep and special secret place” that, according to Mysterious Caller, would soon be needed.

Maybe he should stock it with supplies. Two or three six-packs of Pepsi. Several packages of peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches. A couple flashlights with spare batteries.

Warm cola would never be his first choice of beverage, but it would be preferable to dying of thirst. And even warm cola was better than being stranded in the Mojave with no source of water, forced to save and drink your own urine.

Peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, tasty under ordinary circumstances, would be unspeakably vile if accompanied by urine.

Maybe he should stock
four
six-packs of cola.

Even though he wouldn’t be drinking his urine, he would need something in which to pee, supposing that he would be required to hide out longer than a few hours. A pot with a lid. Better yet, a jar with a screw top.

Mysterious Caller hadn’t said how long Fric should expect to be under siege. They would have to discuss that in their next chat.

The stranger had promised that he would be in touch again. If he was a pervert, he would call for sure, drooling all over his phone. If he wasn’t a pervert, then he might be a sincere friend, in which case he would still call, but for better reasons.

Time passed, the asthma relented, and Fric got to his feet. He clipped the inhaler to his belt.

A little woozy, he balanced himself with one hand against the cold steel wall as he went to the door.

A minute later, in his bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed and lifted the handset from the telephone. An indicator light on the keyboard appeared at his private line.

No one had phoned him since he’d answered his
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo
in the train room. After pressing *69, he listened while his phone automatically entered the number of his most recent caller.

If he’d been a brainiac trained in the skills required to be an enormously dangerous spy, and if he’d had the supernaturally attuned ear of Beethoven before Beethoven went deaf, or if one of his parents had been an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to crossbreed with humans, perhaps Fric could have translated those rapidly sounded telephone tones into numerals. He could have memorized Mysterious Caller’s phone number for future use.

He was nothing more, however, than the son of the biggest movie star in the world. That position came with lots of perks, like a free Xbox from Microsoft and a lifetime pass to Disneyland, but it didn’t confer upon him either astonishing genius or paranormal powers.

After waiting through twelve rings, he engaged the speakerphone feature. He went to a window while the number continued to ring.

The billiards-table smoothness of the east lawn sloped away through oaks, through cedars, to rose gardens, vanishing into gray rain and silver mist.

Fric wondered if he should tell anyone about Mysterious Caller and the warning of impending danger.

If he called Ghost Dad’s global cell-phone number, it would be answered either by a bodyguard or by his father’s personal makeup artist. Or by his personal hair stylist. Or by the masseur who always traveled with him. Or by his spiritual adviser, Ming du Lac, or by any of a dozen other flunkies orbiting the Fourth Most Admired Man in the World.

The phone would be handed from one to another of them, across unknowable vertical and horizontal distances, until after ten minutes or fifteen, Ghost Dad would come on the line. He would say, “Hey, my main man, guess who’s here with me and wants to talk to you.”

Then before Fric could say a word, Ghost Dad would pass the phone to Julia Roberts or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or to Tobey Maguire, or to Kirsten Dunst, or to Winnie the Wonder Horse, probably to all of them, and they would be sweet to Fric. They would ask him how he was doing in school, whether he wanted to be the biggest movie star in the world when he grew up, what variety of oats he preferred in his feed bag….

By the time that the phone had been passed around to Ghost Dad again, a reporter from
Entertainment Weekly,
using the wrong end of a pencil, would be taking notes for a feature piece about the father-son chat. When the story hit print, every fact would be wrong, and Fric would be made to look like either a whiny moron or a spoiled sissy.

Worse, a giggly young actress with no serious credits but with a little industry buzz—what they used to call a starlet—might answer Ghost Dad’s phone, as often one of them did. She would be tickled by the name Fric because these girls were always tickled by everything. He’d talked to scores of them, hundreds, over the years, and they seemed to be as alike as ears of corn picked in the same field, as if some farmer
grew
them out in Iowa and shipped them to Hollywood in railroad cars.

Fric wasn’t able to phone his Nominal Mom, Freddie Nielander, because she would be in some far and fabulously glamorous place like Monte Carlo, being gorgeous. He didn’t have a reliable phone number for her.

Mrs. McBee, and by extension Mr. McBee, were kind to Fric. They seemed to have his best interests always in mind.

Nevertheless, Fric was reluctant to turn to them in a case like this. Mr. McBee was just a little…daffy. And Mrs. McBee was an all-knowing, all-seeing, rule-making, formidable woman whose soft-spoken words and mere looks of disapproval were powerful enough to cause the object of her reprimand to suffer internal bleeding.

Mr. and Mrs. McBee served
in loco parentis
. This was a Latin legal phrase that meant they had been given the authority of Fric’s parents when his parents were absent, which was nearly always.

When he’d first heard
in loco parentis,
he’d thought it meant that his parents were loco.

The McBees, however, had come with the house, which they had managed long before Ghost Dad had owned it. To Fric, their deeper allegiance seemed to be to Palazzo Rospo, to place and to tradition, more than to any single employer or his family.

Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was a friendly acquaintance, not actually a friend, and certainly not a confidant.

Mr. Hachette, the fearsome and possibly insane chef, was not a person to whom
anyone
would turn in time of need, except perhaps Satan. The Prince of Hell would value the chef’s advice.

Fric carefully planned every foray into the kitchen so as to avoid Mr. Hachette. Garlic wouldn’t repel the chef, because he loved garlic, but a crucifix pressed to his flesh would surely cause him to burst into flames and, screaming, to take flight like a bat.

The possibility existed that the psychotic chef was the very danger about which Mysterious Caller had been warning Fric.

Indeed, virtually any of the twenty-five staff members might be a scheming homicidal nutjob cunningly concealed behind a smiley mask. An ax murderer. An ice-pick killer. A silk-scarf strangler.

Maybe
all twenty-five
were ax murderers waiting to strike. Maybe the next full moon would stir tides of madness in their heads, and they would explode simultaneously, committing hideous acts of bloody violence, attacking one another with guns, hatchets, and high-speed food processors.

If you couldn’t know the full truth of what your father and your mother thought of you, if you couldn’t
really
know who they were and what went on inside their heads, then you couldn’t expect to know for sure anything about other people who were even less close to you.

Fric pretty much trusted Mr. Truman not to be a psychopath with a chain-saw obsession. Mr. Truman had once been a cop, after all.

Besides, something about Ethan Truman was so
right
. Fric didn’t have the words to describe it, but he recognized it. Mr. Truman was solid. When he came into a room, he was
there
. When he talked to you, he was
connected
to you.

Fric had never known anyone quite like him.

Nevertheless, he wouldn’t tell even Mr. Truman about Mysterious Caller and the need to find a hiding place.

For one thing, he feared not being believed. Boys his age often made up wild stories. Not Fric. But other boys did. Fric didn’t want Mr. Truman to think he was a lying sack of kid crap.

Neither did he want Mr. Truman to think that he was a fraidy-cat, a spineless jellyfish, a chicken-hearted coward.

No one would ever believe that Fric could save the world twenty times over, the way they believed his father had done, but he didn’t want anyone to think he was a timid baby. Especially not Mr. Truman.

Besides, he sort of liked having this secret. It was better than trains.

He watched the wet day, half expecting to catch a brief glimpse of a villain skulking across the estate, obscured by rain and mist.

After Mysterious Caller’s number had rung maybe a hundred times without being answered, Fric returned to the phone and terminated the call.

He had work to do. Preparations to make.

A bad thing was coming. Fric intended to be ready to meet it, greet it, defeat it.

CHAPTER 19

U
NDER A BLACK UMBRELLA, ETHAN TRUMAN walked the grassy avenue of graves, his shoes squishing in the saturated turf.

Giant drooping cedars mourned with the weeping day, and birds, like spirits risen, stirred in the cloistered branches when he passed near enough to worry them.

As far as he could see, he alone walked in these mortal fields. Respect for the loved and lost was usually paid on sunny days, with remembrances as bright as the weather. No one would choose to visit a cemetery in a storm.

No one but a cop whose mainspring of curiosity had been wound tight, who had been born with a compulsive need to know the truth. A clockwork mechanism in his heart and soul, designed by fate and granted as a birthright, compelled him to follow wherever suspicion and logic might lead.

In this case, suspicion, logic, and dread.

Intuition wove in him the strange conviction that he would prove to be not the first visitor of the day and that in this bastion of the dead, he would discover something disturbing, though he had no idea what it might be.

Headstones of time-eaten granite, mausoleums crusted with lichen and stained by settled smog, memorial columns and obelisks tilted by ground subsidence: None of that traditional architecture identified this as a cemetery. The marker at each of these graves—a bronze plaque on a pale granite plinth—had been set flush with the grass. From a distance the burial ground appeared to be an ordinary park.

Radiant and unique in life, Hannah was here remembered with the same drab bronze that memorialized the thousands of others who slept eternal in these fields.

Ethan visited her grave six or seven times a year, including once at Christmas. And always on their anniversary.

He didn’t know why he came that often. Hannah didn’t lie here, only her bones. She lived in his heart, always with him.

Sometimes he thought he traveled to this place less to remember her—for she was not in the least forgotten—than to gaze at the empty plot beside her, at the blank granite tablet on which a cast-bronze plaque with his name would one day be fixed.

At thirty-seven, he was too young a man to welcome death, and life continued to hold the greater promise for him. Nevertheless, five years after losing Hannah, Ethan still felt that something of himself had died, as well.

Through twelve years of marriage, they delayed having children. They had been so young. No need to hurry.

No one expected a vibrant, beautiful, thirty-two-year-old woman to be diagnosed with a virulent cancer, to be dead four months later. When it took her, the malignancy also claimed the children they might have brought into the world, and the grandchildren thereafter.

In a sense, Ethan
had
died with her: the Ethan who would have been a loving father to the children blessed with her grace, the Ethan who would have known the joy of her company for decades yet to come, who would have known the peace and the purpose of growing old at her side.

Perhaps he would have been surprised to find her grave torn open, empty.

What he found instead of grave robbery, though unexpected, did not surprise him.

At the base of her bronze plaque lay two dozen fresh long-stemmed roses. The florist had wrapped them in a cone of stiff cellophane that partly protected the blooms from the pelting rain.

These were hybrid tea roses, a golden-red variety named Broadway. Of all the roses that Hannah loved and grew, Broadway had been her favorite.

Ethan turned slowly in a full circle, studying the cemetery. No figure moved anywhere on those gently sloped green acres.

He peered with special suspicion at every cedar, every oak. As best he could tell, those trunks didn’t shelter a lurking observer.

No traffic moved on the narrow winding road that served the cemetery. Ethan’s Expedition—white as winter, glimmering like ice—was the only vehicle parked along the lane.

Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery, urban vistas loomed in veils of rain and fog, less like a real city than like a metropolis in a dream. No rumble of traffic, no bleat of horn penetrated from its maze of streets, as though all its citizens had long ago gone horizontal in these silent grassy acres surrounding Ethan.

He looked down at the bouquet once more. In addition to bright color, the Broadway rose offers a fine fragrance. It flourishes in any sun-drenched garden and is more resistant to mildew than are many other varieties.

Two dozen roses found on a grave would not be admitted as evidence in a court of law. Yet Ethan regarded these colorful blooms as proof enough of a strange courtship of the dead, by the dead.