The Face

construct a house of cards, Jack Trotter brought the blimp lower and positioned it as required.
        According to the wristwatch favored by discerning anarchists-a reliable Rolex-transit time had been three minutes, twenty seconds.
        8:33. Service to all Manheim phones, hard-wired and cellular, had been discontinued three minutes ago.

CHAPTER 86
        
         “ FRIC WAS BORN … ON A WEDNESDAY.”
        In the white room behind the blue door, Ethan sat enraptured by the voice of his dead wife.
         “Fric was born … on a Wednesday.”
        This was exquisite music to him, pure and thrilling. The effect of a much-loved hymn on a religious heart or of a national anthem on one deeply patriotic could not have elicited a fraction of the strong emotion that this voice wrenched from Ethan.
        “Hannah?” he whispered, though a recording could not reply to him. “Hannah?”
        The tears that blurred his vision were largely tears of joy, pressed from him not because he had missed her so desperately these past five years but because this curious message delivered in her voice meant that somewhere the essence of Hannah survived, that the hateful cancer had won a battle but not a war. His loss was no less crushing than ever it had been, but now he knew that it was not a loss eternal.
        She had repeated the same six words twice. He played Call 56 three times before he could shift the focus of his attention from the miraculous sound of her voice to the content of the message.
        [535] “Fric was born … on a Wednesday.”
        Although Hannah clearly judged this information to be important, Ethan couldn’t see why the day of Fric’s birth had relevance to the current situation.
        Working from bottom to top of the log, he accessed Call 55 . As before, he chose the audio option over a printout of the transcript.
        Hannah again. This time she spoke but one word, twenty or thirty times. His name. “Ethan … Ethan … Ethan …”
        The poignant yearning in her voice matched that in Ethan’s heart. Listening, he could barely hold fast to what little of his composure he had not already lost.
        By phone, by elevator speaker, perhaps by other means, she had struggled to reach him, but she had not been able to make herself heard. Ironically, behind that Ronzoni door, in this ridiculous white room, with the aid of all this elaborate equipment, she had broken through.
        God worked in strange ways, indeed, when He worked through the likes of Ming du Lac.
        Ethan had come here with a sense of urgency that had briefly abated but that now overtook him once more.
        Backward to Call 54 . Hannah yet again.
         “Monday’s child is fair of face … ”
        Ethan’s breath caught in his throat. He slid to the edge of the chair.
         “Tuesday’s child is full of grace … ”
        He knew this. A children’s rhyme. He mouthed the words of the third line along with her.
         “Wednesday’s child is full of woe … ”
        The Cookie Kitten was filled with Scrabble tiles that spelled WOE ninety times.
        A kitten was a young cat. A kitten was a child . Like Fric.
        Why ninety? Maybe it didn’t matter. Ninety of each letter, two hundred and seventy tiles in total, were the number needed to fill the jar. Wednesday’s child is full of woe.
        [536] Call 53 . Hannah.
        Even with the static filtered out and the speech enhanced, her message could not be understood, as if on this occasion, the river between life and death had widened until the far shore lay at the other side of an ocean.
        Call 52. Also unclear.
        Call 51. Hannah with another nursery rhyme.
         “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home … ”
        As he shot to his feet, Ethan knocked over his chair.
         “Your house is on fire, and your children will burn.”
        Channing Manheim would not arrive home until the afternoon of December 24. The operative theory had been that the Face wouldn’t be in danger until that time, at the earliest.
        Maybe the Face himself had never been in danger. Maybe the target had always been Fric.
        Twenty-two ladybugs in a small glass jar. Why not twenty-three or twenty-four? Unlike the cookie jar, the beetle container had been less than half full. So why not fifty ladybugs packed to the lid?
        This was Tuesday, December 22.

CHAPTER 87
        
        AS CORKY SLID