Saint Odd

I watched them drive away.

My attention was drawn to the lake by a sudden thrumming of wings and a chorus of low hoarse croaks. Eight or ten migrating egrets touched down where beach met water and spread out along the shore, each respecting the other’s hunting grounds. More than three feet tall, white but for their yellow bills and skinny black legs, moving slowly and with solemn deliberation, they stalked the shallows for their breakfast. They speared small wriggling fish from the water and tilted their heads to let the catch slide, still alive, down their long, sleek throats, and I wondered if even in the small brain of a little fish there might be a capacity for terror.

Eleven (#ulink_46e9ee93-0f9e-52dd-bd33-24c0f0b13d6c)

THE NIGHT BEFORE MY RETURN TO PICO MUNDO. The seaside cottage where I and Annamaria and young Tim slept in separate rooms. Windows open for the sea air. Borne on that faintest of breezes came the lulling susurration of the gentle surf breaking on the shore.

In the still and ordered cottage, I endured a dream of chaos and cacophony. Shrill screams of terror, screams of glee. Through smears of light that blur my vision, faces leer, loom, but then swoon from me. Hands pulling, pushing, plucking, slapping. Through it all the eerie tortured wail and bleat and churr and howl that might have been what passed for music in an alien world without harmony.

Although I’d never been drunk in my life, I seemed to be drunk in the dream, reeling across ground that yawed like the deck of a storm-tossed ship. Wrapped in my arms, held to my chest: an urn, a mortuary urn. I heard myself calling Stormy’s name, but this was not the urn that held her ashes. Somehow, I knew this urn contained the remains of dead people beyond counting.

Ribbons of darkness suddenly wound through the whirl of blurring light, so that I feared that blindness would overcome me. The booming of my heart grew louder, louder, until it exceeded in volume the hundred other sources of dissonance combined.

Out of the seething crowd, out of the light and the darkness, came Blossom Rosedale, the one and only Happy Monster, which was a name that she had given herself, not because she loathed the way she looked but because she was truly happy in spite of all her suffering.

Without realizing that I had staggered to a genuflection, I was on one knee when her left hand—scarred by fire, lacking all digits other than the thumb and forefinger—cupped my chin and lifted my bowed head, bringing me face-to-face with her. She said with great emotion, “Oddie, no. Oh, no, no.”

I had met her in Magic Beach, back in January; we had quickly become fast friends, each of us a different kind of outsider. Forty-five years earlier, when she’d been only six, her drunken father had in a fit of rage dropped her headfirst into a barrel of trash that he had set afire with a little kerosene. She toppled the barrel and crawled out, but by then she was aflame. Surgeons saved one ear and somewhat rebuilt her nose, reconstructed her lips. She had no hair thereafter, and her face remained seamed and puckered by terrible keloid scars that no surgeon could smooth away.

Never before had I dreamed of Blossom, but emerging from the chaos of this nightmare, she helped me to my feet and said that I should lean on her. For reasons I didn’t understand, I warned her away, insisted that I would be the death of anyone near me. But she would not be dissuaded. Although she was but five feet tall and more than twice my age, she gave me the strength that I needed to lurch forward through the growing bedlam, through the blurred dream light and gyrating dream shadows, through the screaming multitude, toward what I could not guess, toward what proved to be the amaranth.

Twelve (#ulink_19a80761-9a89-5f99-ad7c-4f1520a36b4d)

THE OLD BUT WELL-KEPT HOUSE STOOD ON three or four acres beyond the city limits of Pico Mundo, a two-story Victorian structure with a deep front porch and lots of gingerbread, painted white with pale-blue trim. A long blacktop driveway led between colonnades of velvet ash trees, their spring growth dulled by dust, past the house, to a long horse stable that had been converted into a garage with five double-wide doors.

As I approached the stable, one of the electrically powered doors rose, and as I slowed almost to a stop, a man stepped out of the shadowy interior, into sunlight. Tall, lean, weathered, wearing boots and jeans and a checkered shirt and a cowboy hat, he would have fit right into any Western that John Ford ever directed. He waved me into the garage, and I parked the Big Dog where he indicated.

As I took off my helmet and goggles, the cowboy introduced himself. He appeared to be as trim and fit as a man in his forties, but a life outdoors had given him an older face, seamed and as tanned as saddle leather. “Name’s Deacon Bullock, born and raised a Texan, lately of Pico Mundo. It’s a five-star honor to meet you.”

“I’m just a fry cook, sir.” I put the helmet and goggles on the seat of the bike. I shook his hand. “There’s no great honor in it.”

Every one of the many lines in his face conspired to be part of his smile. “I know your selfsame history, son. Don’t be hidin’ your light under a bushel.”

“I don’t need a bushel,” I assured him. “A paper cup will do.”

“You wasn’t followed?”

“No, sir.”

“You’d bet an ear on that?”

“I’d bet them both.”

“This here’s a safe house where our folks can hide out, and we mean to keep it safe. You been given a phone we tinkered with?”

I produced my jacket from one of the saddlebags, took the smartphone from the jacket, and handed it to him.

When Mr. Bullock activated the phone, the first thing that appeared on the screen wasn’t the name of a service provider or phone manufacturer, but instead a single thick exclamation mark in gold against a black background. It remained there until he entered a five-number code, and then the exclamation point was replaced by a photograph of my smiling face. He nodded, satisfied. After switching the phone off, he returned it to me.

“You understand, son, it don’t transmit your location when you use it, like all them other dang phones do. And it don’t identify the owner. Any call you got to make or text message you got to send, or any web surfin’ you got to do while you’re on this here property—or off it, for that matter—you use only this one phone.”

“It’s the only one I have, sir. Mrs. Fischer gave it to me.”

“The head honcho herself. All right, then. I’m told you travel light as a mayfly, but you must have yourself some luggage.”

“Yes, sir.” From the compartment in which I’d stowed the jacket, I retrieved a zippered leather kit that contained my electric razor and toiletries, and from the other saddlebag on the Big Dog, I took a matching soft-sided overnight bag that contained a pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, spare underwear, socks. “Somehow they learned what I’d be riding. We had a little confrontation a few hours back. The bike is hot.”

“So then we’ll shred her and melt her down.”

When I realized he was serious, I said, “Isn’t that a little extreme?”

“Not when you’re dealin’ with them folks.”

I looked at the beautiful Big Dog. “Sad.”

“Let me help with that,” Mr. Bullock said, and took the bag from me. “Nothin’ I hate worse than bein’ useless.” As I closed the lid of the saddlebag, he said, “So I’m given to understand you don’t have yourself a suitable gun.”

“Neither suitable nor unsuitable, sir.”

His eyes were blue, and when he narrowed them, they seemed to grow brighter, as if his squint compressed the color in them. “How come you rode through all that dangerous habitat of schemin’ men and all that wasteland crawlin’ with snakes and beasts, and you with no dang gun?”

“I don’t like guns, Mr. Bullock.”

“You don’t need to like one to know you got to have it. I don’t like gettin’ a colonoscopy every five years, but I grit my teeth and drop my drawers and get it done just the same.”

“I’ve never had a colonoscopy, either.”

“Well, you’re not of an age to need one. That there’s a joyful experience you got to earn by livin’ to my age. Anyways, around this here safe house, everyone’s got to have themselves a firearm, not just to keep in a drawer, but to carry at all times. Once we get you settled in, I’ll fix you up with the very thing you need. You had yourself some breakfast yet?”

“More than some, sir. Just need a bed. I didn’t sleep last night.”

“Then bring yourself on in the house and meet Maybelle. She’s my missus. You’ll like her. Everybody does. She’s a peach. We haven’t enjoyed a bit of company since that astronaut had to hide out here while we worked up a convincin’ new identity for him. Maybelle’s starved for better company than me.”