Saint Odd (22 page)

Having to discuss this, having to consider again what Stormy had told me about the abuse she suffered, I found that the memory came braided with heartache.

Mrs. Fischer said, “The couple who adopted Stormy—”

“She called them Mr. and Mrs. Hellborn. Not their real names, obviously.”

“But apt,” Mrs. Fischer said. “Mr. and Mrs. Hellborn weren’t just corrupt. They were also corrupting of so many people who came into contact with them. And the first social worker was corruptible. Another caseworker in the same child-welfare agency heard a few things and became suspicious. She was one of us.”

By the gentle tenor of her voice, by the compassion in her eyes, by the hands with which she held my hand, she made it clear that what she had to tell me might leave me shaken, but that she would be my anchor through it all.

“The Hellborns thought of themselves as citizens of the world. Which in their case meant they felt above the laws of any one city or state, or country. They had lived in several exotic places where life is accorded less value than it is here. Tragic places where children of the slums are vulnerable, often regarded as a commodity. The crooked authorities let the Hellborns pursue their desires unobstructed. But they had a reputation among locals.”

Stormy and I had never made love. She wanted to know beyond any doubt that I loved her for herself, not merely for the physical pleasure that she could give me. Considering what happened to her, considering that she had triumphed over what would have destroyed many others, considering that she became such a self-sufficient joyful person, I would have been a world-class jerk if I pressured her. Stormy wanted to wait for marriage; I wanted whatever Stormy wanted.

Mrs. Fischer said, “The Hellborns were making plans to take little Bronwen out of the country aboard their hundred-sixty-foot yacht. The Beverly Hills estate was owned by their corporation in the Cayman Islands. The corporation quietly listed it for sale. Those people would never have brought your girl back. Never. And God knows what might have happened to her.”

At first it seemed to me that there was no good reason for Mrs. Fischer to tell me all of this. Stormy was gone. What might have happened to her didn’t matter. What mattered was only what
did
happen to her both at the hands of the Hellborns and years later on a day of evil at the Green Moon Mall. Why dwell on horrors that
might
have occurred?

“She was,” said Mrs. Fischer, “the sweetest child, orphaned and abused and traumatized, but already determined not to be a victim. Not ever again. I spent only two days with her, but they were days I will never forget, Oddie. There she was, this precious little person, forty-some pounds, hardly taller than a lawn gnome, but determined to take on the world and win.”

I said, “Nothing scared her, not really. She was afraid for me sometimes but never for herself.”

Mrs. Fischer squeezed my hand. “The dear girl said her name, Bronwen, sounded like an elf or a fairy, and she wasn’t either one.
She decided to find a strong name for herself. The second day we were together, there was a terrible storm. Such bright bolts of lightning. Wind and thunder that shook the building. She stood at the window, watching it all, fazed by none of it, and that’s where she found her new name.”

I realized that I was squeezing one of Mrs. Fischer’s hands so tightly that I must have been hurting her, though she didn’t so much as wince, let alone try to pull away. I relaxed my grip.

“I never … never knew why she chose Stormy. It fit her so well, you know, ’cause she had such power, such a strong presence. But there was no destruction in her, like there can be in a storm, none at all.”

Cocooned in the limo, with the purr of the engine and the soft light and the coolness issuing from the dashboard vents, I almost felt that we weren’t in a mere car. We might instead have been aboard a more significant conveyance, perhaps outbound in space or traveling in time, seeking a world more peaceful than this one or a future when, by some great grace, humanity had recovered its innocence and its birthright.

The exclamation-point brooch on Mrs. Fischer’s lapel sparkled in the dashboard light when I looked at her again. I said, “At first I couldn’t understand why you told me all this. But now I get it.”

“I knew you would, child.”

“Sometimes, when I’m feeling sorry for myself, it seems that I’m made to carry this impossibly heavy weight, the crushing weight of losing her. I have moments of bitterness and doubt. You know? But the weight is a blessing, really, and I shouldn’t be bitter about it. The weight is on my heart because I knew her and loved her. The weight is the accumulation of all we had together,
all the hopes and worries, all the laughs, the picnics in Saint Bart’s bell tower, the adventures we shared because of my gift.… If they had taken her away on their yacht, if I had never met her, there would be no weight to carry—and no memories to sustain me.”

Mrs. Fischer smiled at me and nodded. “Fully blue and so very, very near to being fully smooth.”

Minutes before the cultists found me, Mrs. Fischer drove off the two-lane blacktop and parked on the shoulder of the road, near the grove of cottonwoods in which I had left the Ford Explorer. She shut off the engine, switched off the lights, got out of the limo, and came around to my side, so that we could have a proper hug.

She was birdlike, tiny. And yet I suspected that anyone who tried to mug her or hijack her would discover that being petite and eighty-six did not guarantee that she would be an easy target.

Walking with me through the dark, toward the trees, she said, “I want you to know that Tim will be fine. Set your mind at rest about him. Some of our people are taking him into their family. They’ll take the dog, too, Raphael. They have a golden retriever of their own and a twelve-year-old boy, so Tim will have two dogs and an older brother.”

“What if his past starts coming back to him, who he was and all he went through?”

“It won’t come back to him, dear. Annamaria tells me that she
has spared him those memories. And he has new memories that give him a good foundation for a happy future.”

“I know he remembers a different past from what he actually lived. I just don’t understand how it could be done. Not hypnosis. Not drugs.”

“No, no, no. Good gracious, nothing as crude as that.”

“Then what?”

“Well, it’s all a little mystical, isn’t it? Don’t worry your lovely head about it.”

“Back in March,” I reminded her, “you told me I would eventually understand the true and hidden nature of the world. It’s still hidden to me, ma’am.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s any less true, sweetie.”

I had come to love Mrs. Fischer, to trust her entirely. But at times, our conversations seemed to have come straight from the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

I said, “Am I right to think you’ve known Annamaria a long time? Much longer than I’ve known her?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve known her for ages.”

“She’s only eighteen.”

“Yes, dear, she’s been eighteen for ages.”

“How does that work?”

“It works splendidly for her.”

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, “I could be inscrutable, too, you know.”

“Actually, you couldn’t be, dear.”

“Who is she?”

“It’s not for me to tell you, Oddie.”

“So who
will
tell me?”

“She will, when the time has come for you to know.”

“When will the time come?”

“You’ll know the time has come when it comes, of course. You’re so full of questions, you should be the host of a game show.”

I sighed and stopped at the trees.

We had neither moon nor stars. Her face was ghostly in the gloom. Her white hair veiled her head, all but her face, as if she were of some holy order. I didn’t resort to my flashlight, because under her talk of game-show hosts, I heard a repressed sadness and sensed that she might be struggling to hold back tears. If this might be my last encounter with, my last memory of, Mrs. Edie Fischer, I didn’t want it to be one in which she wept.

“Will I see you again?” I asked.

“Of course you will, dear. You’ll see everyone again. Let me have a question now. What is your next move?”

“You’ll know my next move when it’s time for you to know it.”

“You simply are not charming when you try inscrutability, dear. It’s most unbecoming on you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is your little rebellion over now?”

“Yes, ma’am. My next move is … I’ve got to talk with Chief Porter and find out if he’s gotten any new info on this Wolfgang Schmidt, one of the cultists.”

“Yes, one of the three that were shot in the back of the head by others of their ilk.”

“How do you know that?”

She pinched my cheek. “How could I
not
know, dear?”

“If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am—and I’m sure you do—what’s
your
next move?”

“As always, I’m an open book. I intend to pick up Annamaria and Blossom Rosedale where we’re staying together, and go over to the fairgrounds for a couple of hours.”

“Hey, whoa. That’s a bad idea, ma’am. I’m heading back there myself, ’cause I think that’s where something pretty serious might happen. Not necessarily the big thing. Not the whole town drowned. But something not good.”

She clapped her hands together with girlish enthusiasm. “Well, isn’t that where it’s always the most fun to be—where things are happening?”

I hugged her again. “Heathcliff must have been some guy, ma’am.” I let her go. “Tell me straight now. Do you know what’s going to happen tonight?”

“No, Oddie. For all you may think differently, I’m only human. Annamaria’s human, too, though she’s more than that, as you no doubt suspect. But human nonetheless. We don’t know. Whatever happens will happen because you—and others—make it happen.”

“Free will,” I said.

“Free will,” she agreed, “our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.”

“Got to be going. I’m running out of time. I think we all are.”

I could see her nod only because her cap of white hair moved up and down.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Fischer.”

“Until we meet again, dear.”

She made her way back to the limousine as if guided by some lamp that I could not see.

I watched her get in the enormous car and drive away. She
drove well. Back in March, her best friend and chauffeur of twenty-two years, Oscar Dunningham, had died of a massive heart attack at the age of ninety-two. They had been at dinner in a superb restaurant in Moonlight Bay. As Oscar finished his last spoon of an excellent crème brûlée, his eyes widened, and he said, “Oh, I think the time has come to say good-bye,” and he slumped dead in his chair. According to Mrs. Fischer, although she usually tipped twenty-five percent, she tipped seventy-five because the waiter was kind enough to wipe a dribble of crème brûlée off dead Oscar’s chin. She was also pleased that the busboy, the waiter, and the maître d’ all continued to refer to the deceased as “the guest” even as they assisted in his quiet removal from the dining room, leaving most of the other customers unaware that a death had occurred, and presenting Mrs. Fischer with a small box of chocolate mints accompanied by a sympathy card.

I would have liked to be her chauffeur. I’m sure the pay was good. And the benefits would have been unique.

I switched on my flashlight. Walked among the cottonwoods to the Explorer. Behind the wheel, I inserted the key in the ignition. As the engine turned over, I looked up, through the dusty windshield and between the trunks of the trees, toward the two-lane backroad. Distant headlights flared.

I would have driven from the cover of the trees if the vehicle hadn’t been approaching so fast. On that narrow, curved, and potholed blacktop, such high speed was reckless, almost suicidal. The driver evidently needed to get someplace yesterday. Or maybe he needed to get to
someone
.

Sometimes intuition tickled like a spider crawling along the back of my neck. At other times, it was a cold robot hand that
clamped around my throat for a moment and wouldn’t allow me to breathe. This time: robot hand.

The oncoming vehicle closed on me so fast that I had no hope of getting to the road and away before it blocked access. I could tell now that the headlights were high off the pavement, as if it must be either a jacked-up SUV on big tires or a truck. Probably a truck.

I switched off the engine. Got out of the Explorer. Hurried around to the passenger side, to put the Ford between me and the road. Drew the Glock from my shoulder rig.

I was not—and never had been—a man of action. I only pretended to be one. I remained always aware that I was pretending, desperately trying to be Mr. Daniel Craig or Mr. Vin Diesel in one of their more assured performances. Consequently, I frequently felt foolish while doing all the jumping and running and brandishing guns that a man of action is called upon to do.

Now I felt like a self-delusional fry cook as I crouched beside the Explorer, Glock in hand, when it should have been a spatula, watching the truck rocket along the roadway. I told myself,
Don’t be paranoid. It’s just someone in a hurry. His wife’s in labor or his little boy swallowed an entire package of laxatives and he doesn’t want to wait for an ambulance. They’re not looking for me. They’re not worried I’ll upend their plans. They have no way of locating me
.

The truck shifted gears. Brakes shrieked. The vehicle departed the pavement, angled toward the grove of cottonwoods, and jolted to a halt in a cloud of dust, the headlights slashing through the trees, cutting away some of the shadows, possibly revealing the Explorer. I heard what might have been a segmented steel
door rolling up on the back of the truck, and, peering through the many trees, I glimpsed men spilling out of the cargo box.

Not being bulletproof, as is the average man of action in the movies, I holstered the Glock, turned from the Explorer, and ran deeper into the cottonwood grove, trying not to think about trees, lest my psychic magnetism lead me face-first into one.