The Face

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.
        [131] 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 [132] 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