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.
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 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 lying sack of kid crap.
Neither did he want Mr. Truman to think that he was a fraidy-cat, a spineless jellyfish, a chicken-hearted coward.
No one would ever believe that Fric could save the world twenty times over, the way they believed his father had done, but he didn’t want anyone to think he was a timid baby. Especially not Mr. Truman.
Besides, he sort of liked having this secret. It was better than trains.
He watched the wet day, half expecting to catch a brief glimpse of a villain skulking across the estate, obscured by rain and mist.
After Mysterious Caller’s number had rung maybe a hundred times without being answered, Fric returned to the phone and terminated the call.
He had work to do. Preparations to make.
A bad thing was coming. Fric intended to be ready to meet it, greet it, defeat it.
UNDER A BLACK UMBRELLA, ETHAN Truman walked the grassy avenue of graves, his shoes squishing in the saturated turf.
Giant drooping cedars mourned with the weeping day, and birds, like spirits risen, stirred in the cloistered branches when he passed near enough to worry them.
As far as he could see, he alone walked in these mortal fields. Respect for the loved and lost was usually paid on sunny days, with remembrances as bright as the weather. No one would choose to visit a cemetery in a storm.
No one but a cop whose mainspring of curiosity had been wound tight, who had been born with a compulsive need to know the truth. A clockwork mechanism in his heart and soul, designed by fate and granted as a birthright, compelled him to follow wherever suspicion and logic might lead.
In this case, suspicion, logic, and dread.
Intuition wove in him the strange conviction that he would prove to be not the first visitor of the day and that in this bastion of the dead, he would discover something disturbing, though he had no idea what it might be.
Headstones of time-eaten granite, mausoleums crusted with lichen and stained by settled smog, memorial columns and obelisks tilted by ground subsidence: None of that traditional architecture identified this as a cemetery. The marker at each of these graves—a bronze plaque on a pale granite plinth—had been set flush with the grass. From a distance the burial ground appeared to be an ordinary park.
Radiant and unique in life, Hannah was here remembered with the same drab bronze that memorialized the thousands of others who slept eternal in these fields.
Ethan visited her grave six or seven times a year, including once at Christmas. And always on their anniversary.
He didn’t know why he came that often. Hannah didn’t lie here, only her bones. She lived in his heart, always with him.
Sometimes he thought he traveled to this place less to remember her—for she was not in the least forgotten—than to gaze at the empty plot beside her, at the blank granite tablet on which a cast-bronze plaque with his name would one day be fixed.
At thirty-seven, he was too young a man to welcome death, and life continued to hold the greater promise for him. Nevertheless, five years after losing Hannah, Ethan still felt that something of himself had died, as well.
Through twelve years of marriage, they delayed having children. They had been so young. No need to hurry.
No one expected a vibrant, beautiful, thirty-two-year-old woman to be diagnosed with a virulent cancer, to be dead four months later. When it took her, the malignancy also claimed the children they might have brought into the world, and the grandchildren thereafter.
In a sense, Ethan had died with her: the Ethan who would have been a loving father to the children blessed with her grace, the Ethan who would have known the joy of her company for decades yet to come, who would have known the peace and the purpose of growing old at her side.
Perhaps he would have been surprised to find her grave torn open, empty.