but with powers that defied reason

The disappearance of the string of little bells from Ethan’s desk suggested that Dunny had been in Palazzo Rospo. The e-mails from Devonshire, Yorn, and Hachette had supported what the missing bells suggested. As far as Ethan was concerned, this photo qualified as hard proof. Dead, stone-solid-perfect dead, according to Dr. O’Brien at Our Lady of Angels, Dunny remained at large in the world, but with powers that defied reason and that defined a supernatural entity. [567] He had been in Palazzo Rospo. He was here now. Ethan wouldn’t have believed in a walking dead man if he hadn’t been shot point-blank in the gut, hadn’t died and been resurrected, if he hadn’t been trashed by a PT Cruiser and a truck, hadn’t been on his feet again an instant after his second death. He himself wasn’t a ghost, but after the events of the past two days, he could believe in a ghost, all right, and in lots of things to which previously he had given no credence. Maybe Dunny wasn’t a ghost, either. He might be something else for which Ethan had no name. Whatever Dunny proved to be, he was no longer merely a man. His motives, therefore, couldn’t be identified either by the process of deduction or by the intuition on which a cop relied. Nevertheless, Ethan sensed now that his childhood friend, so long estranged, wasn’t the source of the threat to Fric, that Dunny’s role in these bizarre events was more benign than not. A man who had loved Hannah, who had kept her picture five years after her death, must have within him at least the potential for good and surely could not harbor the purity of evil required to harm a blameless child. Folding the photo away into a pocket, Ethan called out, “Fric! Fric, where are you?” When he received no answer, he hurried through the library, along the canyons of books, from Aesop and Conrad Aiken to Alexandre Dumas, from Gustave Flaubert to Victor Hugo, from Somerset Maugham to Shakespeare, all the way to Emile Zola, afraid of finding the boy dead and of not finding him at all. No Fric. The reading nook farthest from the library entrance included not only armchairs but also a worktable with a telephone and a computer. [568] Although the outgoing lines were no longer working, the in-house intercom was a function of the system separate from phone service. Only a power failure could disable it. Ethan pressed the button labeled INTERCOM, then pressed HOUSE, and broke one of Mrs. McBee’s cardinal rules by paging the boy from the third floor to the lower garage. His summons issued from the speaker in every phone in the mansion: “Fric? Where are you, Fric? Wherever you are, speak to me.” He waited. Five seconds was an excruciatingly long time. Ten equaled eternity.