The Face (30 page)

CHAPTER 49

P
ROTECTED BY THE TREE OF ANGELS AND BY THE photo of the unknown pretty lady, Fric woke unharmed, with his body and soul intact.

Over the center of the library, the elaborate stained-glass dome brightened with the dawn, but the colors were muted because the early light fell weak and gray.

After studying the photograph of his dream mother for a moment, Fric folded it and returned it to a back pocket of his jeans.

He got up from the armchair. He yawned and stretched. He took a moment to be amazed that he was alive.

At the back of the library, he removed the bracing chair from under the knob of the powder-room door. He did not, however, enter that mirrored space to use the facilities.

Following a quick look around to be certain that he remained unobserved, he peed on the potted palm that he had begun to kill the previous evening. The experience was satisfying for him, but surely not for the tree.

He could think of no water closet in the mansion that could be reached without going through a bathroom with mirrors.

This unconventional toileting would be all right for a while, but only as long as he could stand up to do what needed to be done. The moment sitting was required, he would be in trouble.

If the rain ended at last—or if it didn’t—he might venture outside to the grouping of deodar cedars beyond the rose garden. There he could do what bears did in the woods, by which he didn’t mean hibernate or guzzle honey from bee hives.

Security guards would see him going to and from the cedars. Fortunately, no cameras were positioned inside that little grove.

If anyone asked why he’d gone out in the rain to the woods, he would say without hesitation that he’d been bird watching. He must remember to take with him a pair of binoculars for cover.

No one would doubt his story. People
expected
a geeky-looking kid like him to be a bird watcher, a math whiz, a builder of plastic model-kit monsters, a secret reader of body-building magazines, and a collector of his own boogers, among other things.

With his toilet strategy now devised, he plugged in the library phone, which he had unplugged the previous night. He expected his line to ring at once, but it didn’t.

He dragged the armchair away from the Christmas tree and returned it to its proper position. After turning out the lights, he left the library.

As he closed the door, some of the dangling angels glimmered softly in the gloom, barely touched by storm light filtering through the stained-glass dome.

Moloch was coming.

Preparations must be made.

He went down the main stairs, across the rotunda, and along the hall to the kitchen. En route, he switched off the lights that he had left on during the night.

The post-dawn stillness in the great house was deeper even than the silence that, during the long night, had made it seem like such a perfect haunt for ghosts of all intentions.

In the kitchen, passing a window, he noticed a lull in the rain, and he glimpsed the grove of cedars in the distance. At the moment, however, he felt no urge to engage in any bird watching.

Usually Fric avoided the kitchen on days when Mr. Hachette, the diabolical chef, was on the job. Here be the lair of the beast, where the many ovens could not help but bring to mind Hansel and Gretel and their close call, where you were reminded that a rolling pin was also a wicked bludgeon, where you expected to discover that the knives and the cleavers and the meat forks were engraved with the words P
ROPERTY OF THE
B
ATES
M
OTEL.

This morning, the territory was safe because Mr. Hachette—late of the Cordon Bleu school of culinary arts and more recently released from an equally prestigious asylum—would not be present to prepare breakfast for either family or staff. He would begin his day skulking from the farmers’ market to a series of specialty shops, selecting—and arranging for the delivery of—the fruits, vegetables, meats, delicacies, and no doubt poisons needed to prepare the series of holiday feasts that he had planned with his usual sinister secrecy. Mr. Hachette would not arrive at Palazzo Rospo before noon.

Although short, Fric could nevertheless reach the faucets at the kitchen sink. He adjusted the water until it was pleasantly warm.

If the kitchen had featured a mirror, he wouldn’t have dared to bathe here. You were so vulnerable when you were taking a bath, all defenses down.

The stainless-steel fronts of the six refrigerators and the numerous ovens had a brushed rather than a polished finish. They didn’t serve as mirrors and were therefore unlikely to offer cheap and easy travel to spirits good or evil.

Fric stripped off his shirt and undershirt, but nothing more. He was not an exhibitionist. Even if he
had
been an exhibitionist, the kitchen didn’t seem like a suitable place to exhibit.

Using paper towels and lemon-scented ooze from the liquid-soap dispenser, he washed his arms and upper body, with special attention to his armpits. He used more paper towels to rinse and dry himself.

No sooner had he shut off the water and finished blotting his torso than he heard someone approaching. The footsteps came not from the hall but through the butler’s pantry, where the china, crystal, and fine silverware were stored.

Grabbing his shirt and undershirt, Fric dropped to the floor and crawled as fast as a skittering skink, away from the butler’s pantry and around the corner of the nearest of three granite-topped center islands.

Atop this particular island were four deep-well French fryers, a griddle large enough to prepare two dozen pancakes side by side, and an acre of work surface. Cowering here, discovered by a grinning Mr. Hachette, Fric could be skinned, gutted, French fried, and eaten while the few people currently in the house snoozed on undisturbed, blissfully unaware that an extraterrestrial gourmet was whipping up a grisly breakfast for itself.

When he dared peek around the corner of the island, he saw not Mr. Hachette but Mrs. McBee.

He was doomed.

Mrs. McBee had dressed for her early-morning drive to Santa Barbara. She crossed the kitchen to her office, entered, and left the door standing open behind her.

She would smell Fric. Smell him, hear him, sense him somehow. She would discover the water beaded in the sink, would open the trash compactor and see the damp paper towels, and would instantly
know
what he’d done and where he now hid.

Nothing escaped the notice of Mrs. McBee or foiled her powers of deduction.

She would not gut him and French fry him, of course, because she was a good person and entirely human. Instead she would insist upon knowing why he was stripped to the waist in the kitchen, freshly washed, and looking as guilty as a stupid cat with canary crumbs on its lips.

Because she was Ghost Dad’s employee, Fric could have made the argument that technically she worked for him, too, and that he didn’t have to answer her questions. If he resorted to that argument, he would be in deep
merde,
as Mr. Hachette would say with glee. Mrs. McBee knew that she served
in loco parentis,
and while she was not quite power mad with that authority, she took it seriously.

Whether Fric concocted a false explanation or tried to get away with telling only part of the truth, Mrs. McBee would see through his deception as clearly as he himself could see through a window, and she would intuitively know everything that he’d been up to at least since he’d awakened in the armchair. Twenty seconds later, with one of his ears pinched firmly between the thumb and forefinger of Mrs. McBee’s right hand, he would find himself standing before the potted palm in the library, sweating like a lowlife scumbag as he tried to explain why he had attempted to assassinate the plant with a double volley of urine.

Minutes thereafter, she would have succeeded in getting him to spill the entire story from Moloch to mirror man to the phone call from Hell. Then there would be no going back.

Even Mrs. McBee, with her scary ability to see through any lie or evasion, would not recognize the truth in this case. His story was too outrageous to be believed. He would sound like a bigger lunatic than any of the uncountable entertainment-industry lunatics who, on visiting Palazzo Rospo, had astonished Mrs. McBee with their lunacy during the past six years.

He didn’t want Mrs. McBee to be disappointed in him or to think that he was mentally deranged. Her opinion of Fric mattered to him.

Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that if he tried to convince anyone that he was in communication with a mirror-traveling guardian angel, he’d be hand-carried into a group-therapy session. The group would be six psychiatrists and he would be the only patient.

Ghost Dad was almost as big on shrinks as he was on spiritual advisers.

Now Mrs. McBee stepped out of her office, closed the door, and paused to look around the kitchen.

Fric ducked back behind the fryer-and-griddle island. He held his breath. He wished that he could as easily close down his pores and prevent them from spewing out his scent.

The main kitchen was not quite a maze to rival the labyrinth of memorabilia in the attic, though it boasted not only six large Sub-Zero refrigerators but also two upright freezers, more ovens of more types than you would find in a bakery, three widely separated cooking areas with a total of twenty high-intensity gas burners, a planning station, a baking station, a clean-up station with four sinks and four dishwashers, three islands, prep tables, and a shitload of restaurant-quality equipment.

A Beverly Hills caterer and forty of his employees could work here with Mr. Hachette and the household staff, with little sense of being crowded. At a party, they prepared, plated, and served three hundred sit-down dinners, on a timely basis, from this space. Fric had seen it happen many times, and it never failed to dazzle him.

If two or even three ordinary people had set out to search the kitchen for him, Fric’s chances of eluding them would have been good. Mrs. McBee was in no way ordinary.

Holding his breath, he thought that he could hear her sniffing the air.
Fee-fie-fo-fum.

He was glad that he had not turned on the kitchen lights, though she was certain to smell the fresh water that remained in the central sink.

Footsteps.

Fric almost bolted to his feet, almost announced his presence, which seemed a wiser course of action than waiting here to be found lurking like a sleazeball criminal, stripped to the waist and clearly up to no good.

Then he realized the footsteps were moving away from him.

He heard the butler’s-pantry door swing shut.

The footsteps faded into silence.

Stunned and strangely dismayed to discover that Mrs. McBee was fallible, Fric breathed again.

After a while, he crept to the hall door, which he cracked open. He stood listening.

When he heard the distant hum of the service elevator, he knew that Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee were descending to the lower garage. Soon they would be off to Santa Barbara.

He waited a few minutes before he ventured from the kitchen to the laundry room in the nearby west wing, which also contained the McBees’ apartment.

Whereas the kitchen was gigantic, the laundry was only huge.

He liked the smell of this place. Detergent, bleach, starch, the lingering scent of hot cotton under a steam iron…

Fric would happily have worn the same jeans and shirt a second day. But he worried that Mr. Truman might notice, and inquire.

Mrs. McBee would have noticed in an instant. She would have insisted on knowing the reason for this slovenliness.

Mr. Truman couldn’t help but be slower on the uptake than Mrs. McBee. Still, he
was
an ex-cop, so he wouldn’t long overlook day-old, dirty, rumpled clothes.

The possibility might be slim that something evil and supremely slimy was waiting for Fric in his suite, but he didn’t intend to find out anytime soon. He would not return there to change clothes.

Monday had been a scheduled wash day. Mrs. Carstairs, one of the day maids and in fact the laundress, processed laundry one day and returned it promptly to family members and to staff the following morning.

Fric found his pressed blue jeans, pants, and shirts hanging from a cart similar to those with which hotel bellmen move suit bags and luggage. His folded underwear and socks were arranged under the hanging items, on the bed of the cart.

Red-faced, feeling like a pervert for sure, he stripped naked right there in the laundry. He changed into fresh underwear, jeans, and a blue-and-green checkered flannel shirt with a straight-cut tail that allowed it to be worn out, Hawaiian style.

He transferred his wallet and the folded photograph from his old jeans before dropping the soiled garments into the collection basket under the laundry chute that served the second and third floors.

Emboldened by having successfully toileted, bathed, and changed clothes under these desperate wartime conditions, Fric returned to the kitchen.

He entered cautiously, expecting to find Mrs. McBee waiting for him:
Ah, laddie, did ya truly think I was such a fool as to be that easily deceived?

She had not returned.

From the appliance pantry, he fetched a small stainless-steel cart with two shelves. He traveled the kitchen, loading the cart with items that he would need in his deep and special secret place.

He considered including a six-pack of Coke among his provisions, but warm cola didn’t taste good. Instead, he selected a four-pack of Stewart’s Diet Orange ’N Cream soda, which was fabulous even at room temperature, and six twelve-ounce bottles of water.

After he put a few apples and a bag of pretzels on the cart, he realized his mistake. When hiding from a demented psycho killer who had the sharply honed senses of a stalking panther, eating noisy food was no wiser than singing Christmas songs to pass the time.

Fric replaced the apples and pretzels with bananas, a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts, and several chewy granola bars.