I shook my head. “I only saw seven bodachs this morning. There would be more if the violence was imminent.”
“That was this morning. Do you think we should have a look now—past one-thirty in the afternoon?”
“Bring all your tools and the…weapons,” Abbot Bernard advised his brothers.
The snow had melted off my boots. I wiped them on the mat at the door between the garage and the basement of the school, while the other men, who were all veterans of winter and all more considerate than I, shucked off their zippered rubber boots and left them behind.
With lunch finished, most of the kids were in the rehabilitation and recreation rooms, each of which I visited with the abbot, a few brothers, and Romanovich.
Sooty shadows, cast by nothing in this world, slid through these rooms and along the hallway, quivering with anticipation, wolfish and eager, seeming to thrill to the sight of so many innocent children who they somehow knew would in time be screaming in terror and agony. I counted seventy-two bodachs and knew that others would be prowling the corridors on the second floor.
“Soon,” I told the abbot. “It’s coming soon.”
CHAPTER 41
WHILE THE SIXTEEN WARRIOR MONKS AND the one duplicitous novice determined how to fortify the two stairwells that served the second floor of the school, Sister Angela was present to ensure that her nuns were prepared to offer any assistance that might be wanted.
As I headed toward the northwest nurses’ station, she fell in beside me. “Oddie, I hear something happened on the trip back from the abbey.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sure did. I don’t have time to go into it now, but your insurance carrier is going to have a lot of questions.”
“Do we have bodachs here?”
I looked left and right into the rooms we passed. “The place is crawling with them, Sister.”
Rodion Romanovich followed us with the authoritarian air of one of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret.
“How is Mr. Romanovich assisting here?” Sister Angela asked.
“He isn’t assisting, ma’am.”
“Then what’s he doing?”
“Scheming, most likely.”
“Shall I throw him out?” she asked.
Through my mind flickered a short film of the mother superior wrenching the Russian’s arm up hard behind his back in some clever tae kwon do move, muscling him downstairs to the kitchen, and making him sit in a corner on a stool for the duration.
“Actually, ma’am, I’d rather have him hovering over me than have to wonder where he is and what he’s up to.”
At the nurses’ station, Sister Miriam, with Thanks be to God forever on her lips, or at least forever on the lower one, was still behind the counter.
She said, “Dear, the dark clouds of mystery surrounding you are getting so thick I soon won’t be able to see you. This sooty whirl of smog will go past, and people will say, ‘There’s Odd Thomas. Wonder what he looks like these days.’”
“Ma’am, I need your help. You know Justine in Room Thirty-two?”
“Dear, I not only know every child here, but I love them like they were my own.”
“When she was four, her father drowned her in the bathtub but didn’t finish the job the way he did with her mother. Is that correct, do I have it right?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to think in what sort of place his soul is festering now.” She glanced at her mother superior and said, with an edge of guilt in her voice, “Actually, I not only sometimes think about it, I enjoy thinking about it.”
“What I need to know, Sister, is maybe he did finish the job, and Justine was dead for a couple minutes before the police or the paramedics revived her. Could that have happened?”
Sister Angela said, “Yes, Oddie. We can check her file, but I believe that was the case. She suffered brain damage from prolonged lack of oxygen, and in fact had no vital signs when the police broke into the house and found her.”
This was why the girl could serve as a bridge between our world and the next: She had once been over there, if only briefly, and had been pulled back by men who had all the best intentions. Stormy had been able to reach out to me through Justine because Justine belonged on the Other Side more than she did here.
I asked, “Are there other children here who suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation?”
“A few,” Sister Miriam confirmed.
“Are they—are any of them—more alert than Justine? No, that’s not the issue. Are they capable of speech? That’s what I need to know.”
Having moved to the counter beside the mother superior, Rodion Romanovich scowled intently at me, like a mortician who, in need of work, believed that I would soon be a candidate for embalming.
“Yes,” said Sister Angela. “There are at least two.”
“Three,” Sister Miriam amended.
“Ma’am, were any of the three clinically dead and then revived by police or paramedics, the way Justine was?”
Frowning, Sister Miriam looked at her mother superior. “Do you know?”
Sister Angela shook her head. “I suppose it would be in the patient records.”
“How long will it take you to review the records, ma’am?”
“Half an hour, forty minutes? Maybe we’ll find something like that in the first file.”
“Would you please do it, Sister, fast as you can? I need a child who was dead once but can still talk.”
Of the three of them, only Sister Miriam knew nothing about my sixth sense. “Dear, you are starting to get downright spooky.”
“I’ve always been, ma’am.”
CHAPTER 42
IN ROOM 14, JACOB HAD FINISHED THE LATEST portrait of his mother and had sprayed
it with fixative. He carefully sharpened each of his many pencils on the sandpaper block, in anticipation of the blank page of the drawing tablet on the slantboard.
Also on the table was a lunch tray laden with empty dishes and dirty flatware.
No bodachs were currently present, although the darksome spirit who called himself Rodion Romanovich stood in the open doorway, his coat draped over one arm but his fur hat still on his head. I had forbidden him to enter the room because his glowering presence might intimidate the shy young artist.
If the Russian entered against my wishes, I would snatch his hat from his head, park my butt on it, and threaten to scent it with essence of Odd if he didn’t back off. I can be ruthless.
I sat across the table from Jacob and said, “It’s me again. The Odd Thomas.”
Toward the end of my previous visit, he had met my every comment and question with such silence that I’d become convinced he had gone into an internal redoubt where he didn’t any longer hear me or even recognize that I was present.
“The new portrait of your mother came out very well. It’s one of your best.”
I had hoped that he would be in a more garrulous mood than when I had last seen him. This proved to be a false hope.
“She must have been very proud of your talent.”
Jacob finished sharpening the last of the pencils, kept it in his hand, and shifted his attention to the drawing tablet, studying the blank page.
“Since I was last here,” I told him, “I had a wonderful roast-beef sandwich and a crisp dill pickle that probably wasn’t poisoned.”
His thick tongue appeared, and he bit gently on it, perhaps deciding what his first pencil strokes should be.
“Then this nasty guy almost hanged me from the bell tower, and I got chased through a tunnel by a big bad scary thing, and I went on a snow adventure with Elvis Presley.”
He began lightly and fluidly to sketch the outline of something that I could not recognize at once from my upside-down point of view.
At the doorway, Romanovich sighed impatiently.
Without looking at him, I said, “Sorry. I know my interrogation techniques aren’t as direct as those of a librarian.”