THE GENTLY CIRCULATING WATER IN THE POOL stirred the light that rose through it, causing shimmering auroras and shadows to quiver ceaselessly across the limestone walls and barrel-vaulted ceiling.
Fric brought a linen tablecloth to one of the poolside tables and arranged place settings of good china and silverware.
He almost added candles, but figured that two guys wouldn’t have dinner by candlelight. Maybe by the glow of a firepit or Polynesian party torches, maybe beside a campfire in a forest full of prowling wolves, but not by candlelight.
With a dimming switch, he adjusted the sconces on the limestone columns until they produced a soft golden glow.
In good weather, Fric enjoyed eating by the outdoor pool, when he was the sole member of the family in residence and when Ghost Dad’s girlfriends weren’t lying around in bikini bottoms, thickly slathered in number-fifty sunblock, like plucked ducks in a marinade.
The indoor pool didn’t measure up to the one outdoors: only eighty feet long and fifty-two feet wide, not quite large enough if you wanted to hold powerboat races. The room was warm in winter, however, and [489] a double shitload of palm trees in huge pots gave it a pleasant tropical feeling.
Three walls of the pool room featured big windows framing the parklike grounds. The windows in the third wall were shared with the conservatory, offering a view into its jungly realms.
A poolside dinner appealed to Fric because in the adjacent conservatory he had carefully prepared his deep and special secret place. Given the slightest reason to believe that Moloch was coming, he could bolt for cover and be out of sight as quick as a rabbit.
Weirdly, he suspected that Mr. Truman, too, expected Moloch. The voltage-flow-testing story was crap. Something must be up.
He hoped that Mr. Truman wouldn’t page him by intercom, as he had earlier paged him in the library. Not even under duress would Fric press the RESPOND button, because he was afraid that like *69, it might connect him with that place from which something had tried to squirm through the handset cord and into his ear.
Finishing the table preparation sooner than expected, he checked his wristwatch. Mr. Truman would not arrive with the food for perhaps ten minutes.
The rain-soaked, fog-swaddled grounds beyond the windows were revealed by many landscape lights, but the theme was enchantment and romance, which meant that shadows ruled. If Moloch had scaled the estate wall without being detected by the security system, he might be out there, shrouded in the murk, watching.
Fric considered hurrying to the kitchen under the pretense of lending a hand with dinner, but he didn’t want to appear to be needy, nerdy, geeky.
If he actually might run away and join the Marine Corps someday, instead of hiding out in Goose Crotch, Montana, he ought to start thinking like a Marine and behaving like one, sooner rather tha............