IN THE KITCHEN, CONFERRING WITH MR. Hachette regarding dinner, Ethan found the chef barely communicative and stiff with anger that he flatly refused to explain. He would only say, “My statement on the matter is in the mail, Inspector Truman.” He would not describe the “matter” to which he referred. “It is in the mail, my passionate statement. I reject to be lowered into a brawl like a common cook. I am chef, and I announce my contempt like a gentleman by modern pen, not to your face but to your back.”
Hachette’s English was less fractured when he wasn’t angry or agitated, but you seldom had an opportunity to hear his more fluent speech.
In only ten months, Ethan had learned never to press the chef about any issue related to the kitchen. The quality of his food did justify his insistence on being given the latitude of a temperamental artist. His storms came and went, but they left no damage in their wake.
Responding to Mr. Hachette with a shrug, Ethan went in search of Fric.
Mrs. McBee disliked whole-house paging on the intercom. She considered it an offense against the stately atmosphere of the great [452] house, an affront to the family, and a distraction to the staff. “We are not at work in an office building or a discount warehouse,” she had explained.
Senior staff members carried personal pagers on which they could be summoned from anywhere on the sprawling estate. Squawking at them through the intercom system was seldom necessary.
If you needed to track down a junior staff member or if your position included the authority to seek out a member of the family at your discretion—which among the household staff was true only of Mrs. McBee, Mr. McBee, and Ethan—then you must proceed on the intercom one room at a time. You began with the three places where you most expected to find the wanted individual.
As five o’clock approached, only a minimal staff remained on duty to be distracted, all of them scheduled to leave within minutes. Fric was the sole member of the Manheim family in residence. The McBees were in Santa Barbara. Nevertheless, Ethan felt obliged to follow standard procedures in respect of tradition, in deference to Mrs. McBee, and in the conviction that if he paged Fric in all rooms at once, the dear lady in Santa Barbara would instantly know what had transpired and would have her brief holiday diminished by unnecessary distress.
Using the intercom feature on one of the kitchen phones, Ethan first tried Fric’s rooms on the third floor. He sought the boy next in the train room—“Are you there, Fric? This is Mr. Truman”—in the theater, and then in the library. He received no reply.
Although Fric had never been sulky and certainly never rude, he might for whatever reason be choosing not to respond to the intercom even though he heard it.
Ethan elected to walk the house top to bottom, primarily to find the boy, but also to assure himself that, in general, all was as it should be.
He began on the third floor. He didn’t visit every room, but at least opened doors to peer into most chambers, and repeatedly called the child’s name.
[453] The door to Fric’s suite stood open. After twice announcing himself and receiving no answer, Ethan decided that, this evening, security concerns took precedence over household etiquette and family privacy. He walked Fric’s rooms but found neither the boy nor anything amiss.
Returning through the east wing to the north hall, heading toward the main stairs, Ethan stopped three times to turn, to listen, halted by a crawling on the back of his neck, by a feeling that all was not as right as it appeared to be.
Quiet. Stillness.
Holding his breath, he heard only his heart.
Tuning out that inner rhythm, he could hear nothing real, only absurdities that he imagined: stealthy movement in the antique mirror above a nearby sideboard; a faint voice like that on the telephone the previous night, but fainter than before, crying out to him not from a third-floor room but from the far side of a blind turn on the highway to eternity.
The mirror revealed no reflection but his own, no blurred form, no boyhood friend.
When he began to breathe again, the distant voice that existed only in his imagination ceased to be heard even there.
He descended the main stairs to the second floor, where he found Fric in the library.
Reading a book, the boy sat in an armchair that he had moved from its intended position. The back of it was tight against the Christmas tree.
When Ethan opened the door and entered, Fric gave a start, which he tried to conceal by pretending that he had merely been adjusting his position in the armchair. Stark fear had widened his eyes and clenched his jaws for an instant, until he realized that Ethan was only Ethan.
“Hello, Fric. You okay? I paged you here on the intercom a few minutes ago.”
[454] “Didn’t hear it, ummm, no, not the intercom,” said the boy, lying so ineptly that had he been hooked up to a polygraph, the machine might have exploded.
“You moved the chair.”
“Chair? Ummm, no, I found it like this, here like, you know, just like this.”
Ethan perched on the edge of another armchair. “Is something wrong, Fric?”
“Wrong?” the boy asked, as though the meaning of that word eluded him.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me? Are you worried about something? Because you don’t seem like yourself.”
The kid looked away from Ethan, to the book. He closed the book and lowered it to his lap.
As a cop, Ethan had long ago learned patience.
Making eye contact again, Fric leaned forward in his chair. He seemed about to whisper conspiratorially but hesitated and straightened up. Whatever he’d been about to reveal, he let slide. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m tense ’cause my dad’s coming home Thursday.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“Sure. But it’s pretty tense, too.”
“Why tense?”
“Well, he’ll have some of his buddies with him, you know. He always does.”
“You don’t care for his friends?”
“They’re okay. They’re all golfers and sports fanatics. Dad likes to talk golf and football and stuff. It’s how he unwinds. His buddies and him, they’re like a club.”
A club in which you’re not and never will be a member, Ethan thought, surprised by a sympathy that tightened his throat.
He wanted to give the boy a hug, take him to a movie, out to a [455] movie, not downstairs to the mini-Pantages here in Palazzo Rospo, but to some ordinary multiplex crawling with kids and their families, where the air was saturated with the fragrance of popcorn and with the greasine............