The Face

much the way that garlic and a crucifix discouraged vampires.
        He came to a seven-foot-high mirror in a frame of carved and hand-painted snakes writhing in jewel-colored tangles. In Black Snow, Fric’s father had seen glimpses of his future in this mirror.
        Fric saw Fric, and Fric alone, squinting at his reflection as he sometimes did, trying to blur his image into someone taller and tougher than who he really was. As usual, he failed to fool himself into feeling heroic, but he was glad that the mirror didn’t reveal scenes from his future, confirming what a hopeless geek he would still be at thirty, forty, fifty.
        As Fric stepped back from the mirror and began to turn away, the glass appeared to ripple, and a man came through it, a big man, looking plenty tough without having to squint. The grinning brute reached for Fric, and Fric ran for his life.

CHAPTER 39
        
        TROUBLED AS NEVER BEFORE BY THE DARKNESS beyond the windows, Ethan went through his apartment, closing the drapes and shutting out the rainy night as if, in fact, it had a thousand eyes.
        In his study, at his desk, he switched on the computer and engaged the house-control program. On the screen, icons appeared for the heating-cooling controls, the pool and spa heaters, the landscape watering and lighting, the interior lighting, the interlinked audio-video equipment, the electronic security apparatus, the telephones, and other systems.
        Using his mouse, he clicked the telephone icon. A request for his password appeared, and he entered it.
        Among everyone on the household staff, only Ethan could access and reprogram the security and the telephone systems.
        The screen changed, offering him a new set of options.
        The phones in his apartment featured all twenty-four lines, but only two were accessible to him. He could not eavesdrop on anyone’s calls, and they were likewise unable to overhear his.
        Furthermore, when calls came through to other lines in the house, [263] Ethan heard no ringing in his rooms. The indicator light above the number of each line did, however, flutter when a call was coming in, and it burned steadily when a conversation was being conducted.
        Having entered the telephone program, Ethan edited the controls to make Line 23, Fric’s line, henceforth accessible to his apartment phones. It would also ring here using Fric’s personal tone.
        With this task completed, he perused the day’s phone log.
        Every incoming call to Palazzo Rospo and all outgoing calls as well were automatically logged-although not voice recorded. Note was made of the time that each connection had been effected and of the duration of each conversation.
        For every outgoing call, the phone number was also preserved on the computer log. Incoming caller numbers were noted as well, except in those instances when they had Caller ID blocking to protect their privacy.
        He entered his name and saw that he had received only one call while he’d been out of the house. The calls he’d made and received on his cell phone were not included in these records.
        He snatched up the phone to check his voice mail. The call had been from the hospital, informing him of Dunny’s death.
        When Ethan cleared his name and typed Aelfric’s, the computer reported that the boy had received no calls at any time on this date, Monday, December 21.
        According to Fric, the breather had phoned twice. And at least once, the boy had tracked him back with *69. All three occurrences should have been noted.
        Ethan jumped from Fric’s file to the master log, which listed all phone-line activity since the previous midnight in the order that the calls had been placed and received. The list was long because the staff had been busy making Christmas preparations.
        Carefully scrolling through the log, Ethan found no calls to or from Fric’s line.
        [264] Unless the record-keeping system had erred, which it had never done before in Ethan’s experience, the inescapable conclusion had to be that Fric lied about receiving obscene calls.
        His respect for the boy motivated Ethan to scroll through the phone log again, bottom to top this time. The result was the same.
        As difficult as it might be to believe that the system had failed to note the calls that Fric reported, Ethan found it almost equally hard to accept that the kid had