The Face

childhood friend, so long estranged, wasn’t the source of the threat to Fric, that Dunny’s role in these bizarre events was more benign than not. A man who had loved Hannah, who had kept her picture five years after her death, must have within him at least the potential for good and surely could not harbor the purity of evil required to harm a blameless child.
        Folding the photo away into a pocket, Ethan called out, “Fric! Fric, where are you?”
        When he received no answer, he hurried through the library, along the canyons of books, from Aesop and Conrad Aiken to Alexandre Dumas, from Gustave Flaubert to Victor Hugo, from Somerset Maugham to Shakespeare, all the way to Emile Zola, afraid of finding the boy dead and of not finding him at all.
        No Fric.
        The reading nook farthest from the library entrance included not only armchairs but also a worktable with a telephone and a computer.
        [568] Although the outgoing lines were no longer working, the in-house intercom was a function of the system separate from phone service. Only a power failure could disable it.
        Ethan pressed the button labeled INTERCOM, then pressed HOUSE, and broke one of Mrs. McBee’s cardinal rules by paging the boy from the third floor to the lower garage. His summons issued from the speaker in every phone in the mansion: “Fric? Where are you, Fric? Wherever you are, speak to me.”
        He waited. Five seconds was an excruciatingly long time. Ten equaled eternity.
        “Fric? Talk to me, Fric!”
        Beside the telephone, the computer switched on. Ethan hadn’t touched it.
        The ghost operating the computer accessed the house-control program. Instead of presenting him with the usual three columns of icons, the screen immediately revealed the floor plan of the ground level of the mansion, the eastern half.
        Before him, unbidden, was the motion-detector display. A blip, signifying movement and body heat, blinked in the conservatory.

        Seventy-four feet in diameter, forty-eight feet from floor to ceiling, the conservatory was a jungle with windows, tall panels of leaded glass, salvaged from a palace in France that had been mostly destroyed in World War One.
        Here Mr. Yorn and his men maintained and continually refreshed a collection of exotic palm trees, tulip trees, frangipanis, mimosas, many species of ferns, spaths, smithianthas, orchids, and a shitload of other plants that Fric was not able to identify. Narrow pathways of decomposed granite wound through the curbed planters.
        A few steps after you entered the green maze, the illusion of tropical wilderness was complete. You could pretend to be lost in Africa, [569] on the trail of the rare albino gorilla or in search of the lost diamond mines of King Solomon.
        Fric called it Giungla Rospo, which was Italian for “Toad Jungle,” and felt that it had all the cool stuff of a real tropical forest but none of the bad. No humongous insects, no snakes, no monkeys in the trees, shrieking and throwing their crap at your head.
        At the center of its carefully orchestrated wildness, Giungla Rospo offered a gazebo built of bamboo and bubinga wood. There you could have dinner or get puking drunk if you were old enough, or just pretend to be Tarzan before the nuisance of Jane.
        Fourteen feet in diameter, raised five feet above the floor of the conservatory, reached by eight wooden steps, the gazebo held a round table and four chairs. A secret panel in the floor, when slid aside, revealed the door to a small refrigerator stocked with Coke, beer, and bottles of natural spring water, though not so natural that it came with dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, or ravenous parasites that would eat you alive from the inside out.
        Another secret panel, when slid aside, provided access to the five-foot-high space under the gazebo. This allowed the refrigerator to be serviced if it broke down, and made it possible for the guys with the monthly pest-control service to get under the gazebo and ensure that no nasty spiders or disease-bearing mice would establish nests in this cozy dark refuge.
        Dark it was. During the day, no hint of sunshine penetrated to the subgazebo den, which meant at night the quake lights would not be seen from outside if the conservatory lamps were all extinguished.
        Bringing doughnuts, other noiseless foods, foil-wrapped moist towelettes, and