The Face

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.
        He added a quart-size Hefty OneZip plastic bag in which to store the peels after he ate the fruit. Left in the open air, peels would give off an intense banana scent as they darkened. According to the movies, every serial killer had a sense of smell keener than that of a wolf. Banana peels might be the death of Fric if he didn’t stow them in an airtight container.
        A roll of paper towels. Several foil-wrapped moist towelettes. Even in hiding, he would want to be neat.
        [342] From a cupboard filled with Rubbermaid containers, he chose a pair of one-quart, soft-plastic jars with screw-on lids. They would serve in place of the library palm tree.
        Mr. Hachette, being a deeply unstable person, had stocked the kitchen with ten times more cutlery than would ever be needed even if the entire staff developed knife-throwing acts and ran off to work in carnival sideshows. Three wall racks and four drawers offered enough blades to arm the entire coconut-rich nation of Tuvalu.
        Fric selected a butcher knife. Proportionate to his size, the blade was as large as a machete-scary to look at, but unwieldy.
        Instead, he chose a smaller but formidable knife with a six-inch blade, a wickedly pointed tip, and an edge sharp enough to split a human hair. The thought of cutting a person with it made him queasy.
        He put the knife on the lower shelf of the cart and covered it with a dishtowel.
        For the time being, he could think of nothing additional that he needed from the kitchen. Mr. Hachette-busy shopping and no doubt also shedding his skin for a new set of scales-wasn’t due to slither back to Palazzo Rospo for hours yet, but Fric remained eager to get out of the chef’s domain.
        Using the service elevator would be too dangerous because it was in the west wing, not far from Mr. Truman’s apartment. He hoped to avoid the security chief. The public elevator, toward the east end of the north hall, would be safer.
        In sudden guilty haste, he pushed the cart through the swinging door into the hallway, turned right, and nearly collided with Mr. Truman.
        “You’re up early this morning, Fric.”
        “Ummm, things to do, things, you know, ummm,” Fric muttered, silently cursing himself for sounding devious, guilty, and more than a little like an absentminded Hobbit.
        “What’s all this?” Mr. Truman asked, indicating the stuff piled on the cart.
        [343] “Yeah. For my room, things I need, you know, stuff for my room.” Fric shamed himself; he was pathetic, transparent, stupid. “Just some soda and snacks and stuff,” he added, and he wanted to smack himself upside the head.
        “You’re going to put one of the maids out of work.”
        “Gee, no, that’s not what I want.” Shut up, shut up, shut up! he warned himself, yet he couldn’t resist adding, “I like the maids.”
        “Are you all right, Fric?”
        “Sure. I’m all right. Are you all right?”
        Frowning at the items on the cart, Mr. Truman said, “I’d like to talk to you a little more about those calls.”
        Glad that he had covered the knife with a dishtowel, Fric said, “What calls?”
        “From the heavy breather.”
        “Oh. Yeah. The breather.”
        “Are you sure he didn’t say anything to you?”
        “Breathed. He just, you know, breathed.”
        “The odd thing is-none of the calls you told me about are on the computerized telephone log.”
        Well, of course, now that Fric understood these calls were being made by a supernatural, mirror-walking being who referred to himself as a guardian angel and who only used the idea of a telephone, he was not surprised that they weren’t recorded as entries in the log. He also wasn’t any longer puzzled about why Mr. Truman hadn’t picked up on the call the previous night, even though it had rung just about forever: Mysterious Caller always knew where Fric was-train room, wine cellar, library-and using his uncanny powers and only the idea of a phone, he made Fric’s line ring not throughout the house but only in the room where Fric could hear