CHAPTER 64
FRIC IN THE ROSE ROOM, IN A CHAIR BY THE windows, looked out at his mother?s love-affirming gift of high-piled bronze road apples.
The picnic hamper stood on the floor beside his chair, the lid closed.
Although he would spend time here to support the story that he had stupidly spewed out to Mr. Devonshire, he would not actually pretend to eat nonexistent ham sandwiches, partly because if someone saw him, they would for sure think Like mother, like son, but largely because he didn?t have any nonexistent dill pickles to go with them.
Ha, ha, ha.
At the time of the incident, almost two years ago, his mother?s publicist explained to the weasels in the scandal-hungry press that Freddie Nielander had been admitted to a private hospital somewhere in Florida. She was said to be suffering from exhaustion.
With surprising frequency, supermodels were hospitalized for that reason. Apparently, being wildly glamorous twenty-four hours a day could be as physically demanding as the work of a plowhorse and as emotionally draining as tending to the terminally ill.
Nominal Mom had done one Vanity Fair cover too many, one [426] Vogue spread more than had been wise, leading to the temporary but complete loss of muscle control throughout her body. That seemed to be the official story, as far as Fric could understand it.
No one believed the official story. Newspapers, magazines, and the gossipy reporters on the TV entertainment-news shows spoke darkly of a ?breakdown,? an ?emotional collapse.? Some actually called it a ?psychotic episode,? which sounded like an installment of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and Ethel mowed down a bunch of people with submachine guns. They referred to her hospital as a ?sanitarium for the richest of the rich? and as an ?exclusive psychiatric clinic,? and Howard Stern, the shock jock on radio, reportedly called it a ?booby hatch for a broad who?s got more boobies than brains.?
Fric had pretended not to know what the media were saying about his mother, but secretly he had read and listened to every scrap of coverage that he could find. He?d been frightened. He?d felt useless. Reporters disagreed over which of two institutions she might be in, and Fric didn?t have an address for either of them. He couldn?t even send her a card.
Eventually, his father had taken him aside in the rose garden, which had already been moved away from the house, to ask if Fric had heard any strange news stories about his mother. Fric had pretended to be clueless.
His father had said, ?Well, sooner or later, you?ll hear things, and I want you to know none of it?s true. It?s the usual celebrity-bashing crapola. They?ll say your mom had some nervous breakdown or something, but she didn?t. The truth isn?t pretty, but it?s not half as ugly as you?ll hear, so Ming and Dr. Rudy are going to share with you some techniques for keeping your mind at peace through all this.?
Dr. Rudy was Rudolph Kroog, a psychiatrist famous in Hollywood circles for his unconventional past-life therapy. He talked to Fric for a little while, trying to determine if in a previous incarnation he might have been a boy king in Egypt during the centuries it was ruled by [427] pharaohs, and provided a bottle of capsules with directions to take one at lunch and one at bedtime.
Remembering that boy kings had sometimes been poisoned by their advisers, which he?d learned on Saturday-morning cartoon shows, Fric had carried the capsules directly to his third-floor suite, where he flushed them down the drain. If a green, scaly monster had lived in his toilet, he killed it with an overdose that day.
As easy as Dr. Rudy had been to endure, Ming was hard. After two days of ?sharing,? Fric preferred to be consigned to the mercy of Mr. Hachette, the brain-diseased chef, even if he would be roasted with apples and fed to unsuspecting Bowery bums on Thanksgiving.
Eventually, everyone had left him alone.
He still didn?t know whether it had been a hospital, sanitarium, or booby hatch.
His mother had been to Palazzo Rospo only once since then, but she hadn?t mentioned the incident. That was the visit in which she told Fric that he was an almost perfect invisible little mouse.
Then they had gone riding on a pair of great black stallions, and Fric had been exuberant, self-assured, athletic like his father, and a superb rider.
Ha, ha, ha.
Sitting here in the rose room, gazing through the windows, he had gotten so lost in the past that he hadn?t noticed when Mr. Yorn, the groundskeeper, had entered the picture. Wearing green rain togs and black wading boots, Mr. Yorn must have been checking the lawn drains or investigating a clogged downspout. Now he stared through the rose-room windows at Fric, from a distance of six feet, looking puzzled, perhaps worried.
Maybe Mr. Yorn had waved and Fric, lost in the past, had not waved back, and so Mr. Yorn had waved again, and still Fric had not waved back; and now maybe Mr. Yorn thought Fric was in a trance.
To prove that he was neither a rude little snot nor hypnotized, Fric [428] waved, which seemed to be the right thing to do, whether Mr. Yorn had been standing there unacknowledged for ten seconds or five minutes.
Fric waved a little too vigorously, which might have been what caused the groundskeeper to step closer to the windows and say, ?Are you all right, Fric??
?Yes, sir. I?m fine. I?m just having some ham sandwiches.?
Apparently the leaded glass panes and the roar of the rain filtered some of the sense out of Fric?s voice, for Mr. Yorn edged closer still and spoke again: ?What did you say??
?Ham sandwiches!? Fric explained, raising his voice almost to a shout.
For a moment Mr. Yorn continued to peer in at him, as though studying a curious bug trapped in a specimen jar. Then he shook his head, causing the brim of his rain hat to flap comically, and he turned away.
Fric watched the groundskeeper walk past the bronze bowel movement. Mr. Yorn receded into the storm, dwindling across the immense lawn until he appeared to be no bigger than a garden gnome, until he was finally gone like a ghost.
Fric figured he knew exactly what Mr. Yorn was thinking: Like mother, like son.
Rising from the chair, stretching, shaking stiffness out of his legs, Fric accidentally kicked the picnic hamper, knocking it over.
The lid fell open, revealing something inside: a whiteness.
The hamper had been empty. No quake lights, no ham sandwiches, no anything.
Fric scoped the parlor. He saw no place in which an unsuspected companion might be hiding. The door to the hall remained closed, as he had left it.
Hesitantly, he stooped. Cautiously, he reached into the hamper.
He withdrew a folded newspaper and shakily opened it. The Los Angeles Times.
[429] The headline was too bold, too black, too incredible to miss:
FBI ENTERS MANHEIM KIDNAPPING
.
A chill shuttled and wove in Fric.
A sudden brine moistened his palms, as if he had dipped his hands into a supernatural sea, and his fingers stuck to the paper.
He checked the date of the issue. December 24. The day after tomorrow.
On the front page, under the frightening headline, were two photographs: a publicity shot of Ghost Dad, and the front gate of the estate.
Reluctant to read the report for fear that reading it would make it come true, Fric glanced at the bottom of the column and saw that the story continued on page 8. He turned to page 8 in search of the picture most important to him.
And there he was.
Under his photo were these words: Aelfric Manheim, 10, missing since Tuesday night.
As he stared in shock at the photo, his black-and-white image morphed into that of the mirror man, Mysterious Caller, his guardian angel: the cold face, the pale gray eyes.
Fric tried to throw the Times down, but was unable to let go of it, not because his hands were moist with fear but because the newspaper seemed to have acquired a static charge, and clung to him.
In the picture, Mysterious Caller became animated, as if this were not a newspaper photo but a miniature TV screen, and he spoke warningly from the Los Angeles Times: ?Moloch is coming.?
Then with no recollection of having taken a step, Fric found that he had crossed the rose room to the door.
He gasped for breath, though not because of his asthma. His heart boomed louder than the thunder that earlier had knocked through the sky.
The Times lay on the floor by the overturned hamper.
As Fric watched, the newspaper exploded off the Persian carpet as if caught in a wild wind, although not so much as a faint draft could [430] be felt. The several sections of the Times unfolded, blossomed; in seconds, they rumpled and swirled and noisily assembled themselves into a tall human figure, as if an invisible man had been standing there all the time and as if the blown newsprint had adhered to his heretofore unseen form.
This did not have the aura of a guardian angel, though surely it was. This felt menacing.
The paper man turned from Fric and flung himself at the bay windows. When the crackling newsprint hit the glass, it ceased to be paper anymore, became a shadow, a flowing darkness, that swarmed through the beveled panes in the very way that it had pulsed through the ornaments on the Christmas tree the previous night.
The phantom faded, vanished, as though it had traveled by glass into the rain, and then had ridden on the rain to some place far away and unthinkable.
Fric was alone once more. Or seemed to be.