“Yes, ma’am, whatever it is. I just saw seven of them in the recreation room.”
“Seven.” Her soft grandmotherly features stiffened with steely resolution. “Is the crisis at hand?”
“Not with seven. When I see thirty, forty, then I’ll know we’re coming to the edge. There’s still time, but the clock is ticking.”
“I spoke with Abbot Bernard about the discussion you and I had last night. And now with the disappearance of Brother Timothy, we’re wondering if the children should be moved.”
“Moved? Moved where?”
“We could take them into town.”
“Ten miles in this weather?”
“In the garage we have two beefy four-wheel-drive extended SUVs with wheelchair lifts. They’re on oversize tires to give more ground clearance, plus chains on the tires. Each is fitted with a plow. We can make our own path.”
Moving the kids was not a good idea, but I sure wanted to see nuns in monster trucks plowing their way through a blizzard.
“We can take eight to ten in each van,” she continued. “Moving half the sisters and all the children might require four trips, but if we start now we’ll be done in a few hours, before nightfall.”
Sister Angela is a doer. She likes to be on the move physically and intellectually, always conceiving and implementing projects, accomplishing things.
Her can-do spirit is endearing. At that moment, she looked like whichever no-nonsense grandmother had passed down to George S. Patton the genes that had made him a great general.
I regretted having to let the air out of her plan after she’d evidently spent some time inflating it.
“Sister, we don’t know for sure that the violence, when it happens, will happen here at the school.”
She looked puzzled. “But it’s already started. Brother Timothy, God rest his soul.”
“We think it’s started with Brother Tim, but we don’t have a corpse.”
She winced at the word corpse.
“We don’t have a body,” I amended, “so we don’t know for sure what’s happened. All we know is that the bodachs are drawn to the kids.”
“And the children are here.”
“But what if you move the kids in town to a hospital, a school, a church, and when we get them settled in, the bodachs show up there because that’s where the violence is going to go down, not here at St. Bart’s.”
She was as good an analyst of strategy and tactics as Patton’s grandma might have been. “So we would have been serving the forces of darkness when we thought we’d been thwarting them.”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s possible.”
She studied me so intently that I convinced myself I could feel her periwinkle-blue stare riffling through the contents of my brain as if I had a simple file drawer between my ears.
“I’m so sorry for you, Oddie,” she murmured.
I shrugged.
She said, “You know just enough so that, morally, you’ve got to act…but not enough to be certain exactly what to do.”
“In the crunch, it clarifies,” I said.
“But only at the penultimate moment, only then?”
“Yes, ma’am. Only then.”
“So when the moment comes, the crunch—it’s always a plunge into chaos.”
“Well, ma’am, whatever it is, it’s never not memorable.”
Her right hand touched her pectoral cross, and her gaze traveled across the posters on her walls.
After a moment, I said, “I’m here to be with the kids, to walk the halls, the rooms, see if I can get a better feel for what might be coming. If that’s all right.”
“Yes. Of course.”
I rose from the chair. “Sister Angela, there’s something I want you to do, but I’d rather you didn’t ask me why.”
“What is it?”
“Be sure all the doors are dead-bolted, all the windows locked. And instruct the sisters not to go outside.”
I preferred not to tell her about the creature that I had seen in the storm. For one thing, on that day I stood in her office I did not yet have words to describe the apparition. Also, when nerves are too frayed, clear thinking unravels, so I needed her to be alert to danger without being in a continuous state of alarm.
Most important, I didn’t want her to worry that she had allied herself with someone who might be not merely a fry cook, and not merely a fry cook with a sixth sense, but a totally insane fry cook with a sixth sense.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll be sure we’re locked, and there’s no reason to go out in that storm, anyway.”
“Would you call Abbot Bernard and ask him to do the same thing? For the remaining hours of the Divine Office, the brothers shouldn’t go outside to enter the church through the grand cloister. Tell them to use the interior door between the abbey and the church.”
In these solemn circumstances, Sister Angela had been robbed of her most effective instrument of interrogation: that lovely smile sustained in patient and intimidating silence.
The storm drew her attention. As ominous as ashes, clouds of snow smoked across the window.
She looked up at me again. “Who’s out there, Oddie?”
“I don’t know yet,” I replied, which was true to the extent that I could not name what I had seen. “But they mean to do us harm.”
CHAPTER 19
WEARING AN IMAGINARY DOG COLLAR, I LET intuition have my leash, and was led in a circuitous route through the ground-floor rooms and hallways of the school, to a set of stairs, to the second floor, where the Christmas decorations did not inspire in me a merry mood.
When I stopped at the open door to Room 32, I suspected that I had deceived myself. I had not given myself to intuition, after all, but had been guided by an unconscious desire to repeat the experience of the previous night, when it seemed that Stormy had spoken to me through sleeping Annamarie by way of mute Justine.
At the time, as much as I had desired the contact, I had spurned it. I had been right to do so.
Stormy is my past, and she will be my future only after my life
in this world is over, when time finishes and eternity begins. What is required of me now is patience and perseverance. The only way back is the way forward.
I told myself to turn away, to wander farther onto the second floor. Instead I crossed the threshold and stood just inside the room.
Drowned by her father at four, left for dead but still alive eight years later, the radiantly beautiful girl sat in bed, leaning against plump pillows, eyes closed.
Her hands lay in her lap, both palms upturned, as though she waited to receive some gift.
The voices of the wind were muffled but legion: chanting, snarling, hissing at the single window.
The collection of plush-toy kittens watched me from the shelves near her bed.
Annamarie and her wheelchair were gone. I had seen her in the recreation room, where behind the laughter of children, quiet Walter, who could not dress himself without assistance, played classical piano.
The air seemed heavy, like the atmosphere between the first flash of lightning and the first peal of thunder, when the rain has formed miles above but has not yet reached the earth, when fat drops are descending by the millions, compressing the air below them as one last warning of their drenching approach.
I stood in light-headed anticipation.
Beyond the window, frenzies of driven snow chased down the day, and though obviously the wind still flogged the morning, its voices faded, and slowly a cone of silence settled upon the room.
Justine opened her eyes. Although usually she looks through everything in this world, now she met my gaze.
I became aware of a familiar fragrance. Peaches.
When I worked as a short-order cook in Pico Mundo, before the world grew as dark as it is now, I washed my hair in a peach-scented shampoo that Stormy had given me. It effectively replaced the aromas of bacon and hamburgers and fried onions that lingered in my locks after a long shift at the griddle and grill.
At first dubious about peach shampoo, I had suggested that a bacon-hamburgers-fried-onions scent ought to be appealing, ought to make the mouth water, and that most people had quasi-erotic reactions to the aromas of fried food.