Deeply Odd(65)

“Good. It’s a scary world. You do know guns, don’t you?”

“I have some experience of them, sir.”

Leander appeared in the doorway to the hall and said, “Mom, Harmony wants to talk to you about something.”

After Mazie left, Kipp finished putting everything together and stuffed it into a gunnysack with a drawstring top. Mrs. Fischer paid him, and all of us followed Biggy into the hallway.

Mazie and Harmony were waiting for me. They had a printout of a newspaper story about the mall shootings in Pico Mundo nineteen months earlier. My high-school yearbook picture was featured under a headline that claimed too much credit for me.

“I knew I’d seen your face,” Harmony said. “I’m sorry I said the boy-band thing. You’re no boy-band phony.”

“I’m not what that paper calls me, either.”

“Once a decade or so,” she said, “the newspaper gets something right, and I think they did this time.”

Mazie said, “If you understand the true and hidden nature of the world, you know that even the smallest details are of profound importance. Like a silly nickname. You’re not Thomas as in Tom. Odd Thomas. Odd doesn’t mean curious or peculiar or eccentric. Something is odd when it can’t be matched, when it’s singular, alone of its kind.”

“Please, ma’am,” I objected. “My name is nothing but my name. In a drawer of mismatched socks, every one of them is odd. Nothing glorious about that. A mistake on the birth certificate left the T off Todd.”

Here came again that smile of pure grace. “Nothing so mundane as that. At your birth it was known what name best suited you, and if your parents had wished to name you Bob, the certificate would nevertheless have shown you to be Odd.”

Her eyes were night sky again, so dark but full of the infinite possibilities to which the stars bear witness, and I didn’t know what to say to her.

She said, “May I touch your heart, Odd Thomas?”

Uncertain of her meaning, I said, “Ma’am?”

She put her right hand flat to my breast. Nothing in her gesture was forward or improper, but tender and loving to such an extent that she almost brought tears to my eyes.

“Women are drawn to you, Odd, not as they may be drawn to other men. I’m sure that your life is full of women who are drawn to you. Because they know or sense that you take a vow seriously, that you’re faithful forever, that you recognize and cherish in good women what qualities you loved in the one you lost, that you respect them, that you care deeply about their dignity perhaps even when they don’t, that you will never walk away from one in need.”

I couldn’t let her think of me in such elevated terms, for the truth was not so defined by chivalry as she imagined. I could barely summon enough power of voice to reveal that truth in a whisper: “Ma’am, I’ve killed two women. Shot them to death.”

Perhaps she was by nature a romantic, or more sentimental than she seemed, because my words had no effect on her smile. “If you killed them, they were murderers who had murdered before and would have murdered you.”

“I shot them, ma’am. The circumstances don’t change that fact. I shot them.”

Mazie took one of my hands in both of hers. “Believe me, when your time comes, it will be women who hold you and comfort you during your last moments in this world, who carry you into the next, and who greet you there.”

Mazie kissed me on the forehead, as if bestowing a benediction, and I said, “I have done terrible things.” Harmony took my hand that her mother-in-law relinquished, her touch another tender benediction, and I said, “I’ll do terrible things again.” Justine put one hand on my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek in what I at once recognized as the way that I had sometimes kissed the urn containing my Stormy’s ashes.

Their reverence was too much for me, to be mistaken for the man that I might want to be but am not, to be thought brave for only going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. I was no less uncertain and unsteady than anyone else in this broken world, often a fumbler and a fool, with more failures than successes. These were good women, good people, and their kindness consoled me. I could never fulfill such lofty expectations, however, and a quiet yet compelling embarrassment drove me to leave as politely and as quickly as possible.

The limousine waited under the portico.

With Big Dog scowling at the surrounding night to ward off any man or animal with ill intentions, Kipp stowed our purchases in the passenger compartment.

Beyond the overhang, rain chased past the house at an extreme angle in an escalating wind.