“Not that. Some bad guys are looking for her.”
“Bad guys?” Blossom asked Annamaria.
“Nobody’s inherently bad,” said Annamaria. “It’s all about the choices we make.”
“And the Deceiver,” said Blossom, “is always there to whisper the wrong choice in your ear. But I believe remorse can lead to redemption.”
“Some people,” I said, “the only way they get around to remorse is after you break a baseball bat over their head.”
“When he sobered up, my father regretted what he did to me,” said Blossom.
“Some people,” I testified, “they lock you in a car trunk with two dead rhesus monkeys, put the car in one of those huge hydraulic crushers, push the SQUISH-IT button, and just laugh. They don’t even know the word regret.”
“Did you forgive your father?” Annamaria asked.
“He’s eighty-two,” Blossom said. “I pay his nursing-home bills. But I don’t see him.”
“Some people,” I said, “they lose their temper and you have to take a gun away from them, and you give them a chance to rethink what they did, and they say they were wrong, they’re remorseful, but then they let you walk into a room where they know there’s a crocodile that hasn’t been fed in a week.”
Both women gave me the kind of look you usually reserve for a two-headed man walking a blue dog.
“I’m not saying everyone,” I clarified. “Just some people.”
To Blossom, Annamaria said, “But you forgave your father.”
“Yes. A long, long time ago. It wasn’t easy. The reason I don’t see him is because he can’t take it. Seeing me tears him apart. The guilt. It’s too hard on him.”
Annamaria held out a hand, and Blossom took it, and then they hugged each other.
I said, “So, these bad guys looking for Annamaria and me—I need to poke around, learn more about them. I thought she’d be safe here with you for a couple hours, if you’re cool with that.”
To Annamaria, Blossom said, “We could play cards or Scrabble or backgammon or something.”
“I like backgammon,” Annamaria said. “Do you ever add a little vanilla to your coffee when you brew it?”
“Sometimes vanilla, sometimes cinnamon.”
“Cinnamon. That sounds good.”
“Cousin Melvina—not the one married to Norman in the missile silo, the other one—she likes to add a half-teaspoon of cinnamon and a full teaspoon of cocoa to a twelve-cup pot.”
“That sounds good to me. Let’s do that. Why would parents name both daughters Melvina?”
“Oh,” said Blossom, fetching the can of cocoa powder, “they aren’t sisters. They’re cousins to each other. They were both named after our maternal grandmother, Melvina Belmont Singleton, who was famous in her time.”
“Famous? For what?”
“For living with gorillas.”
“What gorillas did she live with?”
“Oh, anywhere they had gorillas, sooner or later, she went there to live with them.”
“What was she—a naturalist or an anthropologist?”
“No, she wasn’t any of that. She just thought the world and all of gorillas, couldn’t get enough of watching them, and the gorillas didn’t seem to mind.”
“I’d think they would mind,” Annamaria said.
“Well, when scientists move in to study them, the gorillas sometimes give them a lot of grief, but they didn’t object to Grandma Melvina.”
“She must have been a formidable person.”
“We have strong women in our family,” said Blossom.
“I can see that,” said Annamaria, and they smiled at each other.
Blossom said, “Grandma Melvina taught a gorilla named Percy to write poetry.”
Annamaria said, “Free verse, I imagine.”
“No sane person would have paid for it,” Blossom said, and they both laughed.
I wanted to hear more about Grandma Melvina and the gorillas, but I needed to have a serious talk with Flashlight Guy. Blossom and Annamaria were having such a good time, I didn’t interrupt to tell them that their Odysseus was about to set sail on his warship.
Crossing the living room, I noticed that the mantel clock read one minute till midnight.
According to my wristwatch, the time was 7:52.
At the mantel, I put one ear to the clock, but it seemed to have spent its treasure of time, and it did not pay out a single tick.
Throughout my life, when the supernatural had become apparent to me in the natural world, it had always been through my paranormal senses, shared by no one else: the ability to see the lingering spirits of the dead, the frustrating gift of enigmatic predictive dreams, and psychic magnetism.
The stopped clock in Annamaria’s one-room apartment had not been a vision but a reality, seen not just by me, but visible to her as well. I had no doubt that if I were to call her and Blossom from the kitchen, they would see what I saw on the mantel.
One clock frozen at a minute until midnight is nothing more than a broken clock. In this night of fog and spellbound coyotes and porch swings that swung themselves, however, meaning could not be denied upon the discovery of a second timepiece with its hands fixed at the very minute of the same hour.
The supernatural had entered the natural world in ways new to my experience, and this development struck me as ominous.
I could think of only one interpretation to be made of broken but synchronized clocks. Only a little more than four hours remained for me to prevent the many deaths and the vast destruction planned by the yellow-eyed giant and his associates.
TWENTY
A DOVE DESCENDING THROUGH CANDESCENT air, a bush bursting into fire and from the fire a voice, stars shifting from their timeless constellations to form new and meaningful patterns in the heavens…
Those were some of the signs upon which prophets historically had based their predictions and their actions. I received, instead, two stopped clocks.
If I am not just a freak whose extrasensory perceptions are the result of a few mutated synapses making strange connections in my brain, if my gift has a giver other than indifferent Nature and comes with a purpose, then the angel in charge of the Odd Thomas account must be operating on a shoestring budget.
Making my way through Magic Beach, toward the address I had found in the wallet of Sam Whittle—alias Sam Bittel, known to me affectionately as Flashlight Guy—I felt as if the fog drowning the town had flooded into my head. In that internal mist, my thoughts were as disconnected as, in the outer world, houses on the same block seemed to be separate islands, each a stranger to the other, in a white sea.
More traffic rolled through the quiet night than I had seen earlier.
Some of the vehicles were at such a distance, passing across the streets on which I traveled, that I could make out little more than the submerged glow of their headlights. Perhaps some were driven by ordinary men and women engaged upon the mundane tasks of daily life, with neither an unworthy thought nor an evil purpose among them.
At the first sight of any vehicle that shared a street with me, I hid behind the nearest cover and, from concealment, watched as it drifted past. One after another proved either to be labeled HARBOR DEPARTMENT or to be a police car.
Perhaps the police had put their entire motor pool on the streets because the cloaking fog facilitated burglary and other crimes. Call me paranoid, but I suspected the authorities were out in force only to support certain friends in the harbor department.
Through windshields and side windows, I glimpsed a few faces barely and queerly revealed in the glow of instrument panels and computer screens. None looked suitable for a poster celebrating the friendliness and selflessness of our public servants.
I felt as though extraterrestrial seeds, come quietly to Earth behind the curtains of fog, had grown swiftly into large pods that had been busily disgorging men who were not men.
Sam Whittle lived on Oaks Avenue, which was not grand enough to warrant bei
ng called an avenue, and was not shaded by oaks. Formerly called Founders Street, it had been renamed in honor of John Oaks, a sports star who never lived in Magic Beach or even visited, but whose cousin—or a woman who claimed to be his cousin—served on the city council.
Whittle lived in a bungalow as unremarkable as a cracker box, graced by no ornamental millwork, as plain as the fog that embraced it. The front porch was unfurnished, the yard devoid of landscape lighting, and the back porch as empty as the front.
No light brightened any window. No vehicle stood in the carport.
At the back door, I took a laminated driver’s license from Sam Whittle’s wallet and used it to loid the lock. The deadbolt had not been engaged, and when the license pressed back the latch, the door swung inward with a faint creak of hinges.