by Dean Koontz
Now her attention focused on me. Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience—a quality I had also seen before, in eyes this very shade.
“So you like dogs, Flossie?”
“Yes, but I don’t like my name.” If she had once had a speech impediment caused by brain damage, she had overcome it.
“You don’t like Flossie? It’s a pretty name.”
“It’s a cow’s name,” she declared.
“Well, yes, I have heard of cows named Flossie.”
“And it sounds like what you do with your teeth.”
“Maybe it does, now that you mention it. What would you prefer to be called?”
“Christmas,” she said.
“You want to change your name to Christmas?”
“Sure. Everyone loves Christmas.”
“That’s true.”
“Nothing bad ever happens on Christmas. So then nothing bad could happen to someone named Christmas, could it?”
“So, let me begin again,” I said. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Christmas Bodenblatt.”
“I’m gonna change the last p-p-part, too.”
“And what would you prefer to Bodenblatt?”
“Almost anything. I haven’t made up my mind yet. It’s gotta be a good name for working with dogs.”
“You want to be a veterinarian when you grow up?”
She nodded. “Can’t be, though.” She pointed to her head and said with awful directness, “I lost some smarts in the car that day.”
Lamely, I said, “You seem plenty smart to me.”
“Nope. Not dumb but not smart enough for a vet. If I work hard on my arm, though, and my leg, and they get b-b-better, I can work with a vet, you know, like help him with dogs. Give b-baths to dogs. Trim them and stuff. I could do a lot with dogs.”
“You like dogs, I guess.”
“Oh, I love dogs.”
A radiance arose in her as she talked about dogs, and joy made her eyes appear less wounded than they had been.
“I had a dog,” she said. “He was a good dog.”
Intuition warned me that questions I might ask about her dog would take us places I could not bear to go.
“Did you come to talk about dogs, Mr. Thomas?”
“No, Christmas. I came to ask a favor.”
“What favor?”
“You know, the funny thing is, I don’t remember. Can you wait here for me, Christmas?”
“Sure. I got a dog book.”
I rose to my feet and said, “Sister, can we talk?”
The mother superior and I moved to the farther end of the room, and confident that we could not manhandle him, the Russian joined us.
In a voice almost a whisper, I said, “Ma’am … what happened to this girl … what did she have to endure?”
She said, “We don’t discuss the children’s histories with just anyone,” and fried the Russian with a meaningful look.
“I am many things,” said Romanovich, “but not a gossip.”
“Or a librarian,” said Sister Angela.
“Ma’am, there’s a chance maybe this girl can help me learn what is coming—and save all of us. But I’m … afraid.”
“Of what, Oddie?”
“Of what this girl might have endured.”
Sister Angela brooded for a moment, and then said, “She lived with her parents and grandparents, all in one house. Her cousin came around one night. Nineteen. A problem boy, and high on something.”
I knew she was not a naïf, but I didn’t want to see her saying what surely she would say. I closed my eyes.
“Her cousin shot them all. Grandparents and parents. Then he spent some time … sodomizing the girl. She was seven.”
They are something, these nuns. All in white, they go down into the dirt of the world, and they pull out of it what is precious, and they shine it up again as best they can. Clear-eyed, over and over again, they go down into the dirt of the world, and they have hope always, and if ever they are afraid, they do not show it.
“When the drugs wore off,” she said, “he knew he’d be caught, so he took the coward’s way. In the garage, he fixed a hose to the exhaust pipe, opened a window just wide enough to slip the hose into the car. And he took the girl into the car with him. He would not leave her only as damaged as she was. He had to take her with him.”
There is no end to the wailing of senseless rebellion, to the elevation of self above all, the narcissism that sees the face of any authority only in the mirror.
“Then he chickened out,” Sister Angela continued. “He left her alone in the car and went in the house to call nine-one-one. He told them he had attempted suicide and his lungs burned. He was short of breath and wanted help. Then he sat down to wait for the paramedics.”
I opened my eyes to take strength from hers. “Ma’am, once last night and once today, someone on the Other Side, someone I know, tried to reach me through Justine. I think to warn me what’s coming.”
“I see. I think I see. No, all right. God help me, I accept it. Go on.”
“There’s this thing I can do with a coin or a locket on a chain, or with most anything bright. I learned it from a magician friend. I can induce a mild hypnosis.”
“To what purpose?”
“A child who’s been dead and revived is maybe like a bridge between this world and the next. Relaxed, in a light hypnosis, she might be a voice for that person on the Other Side who wasn’t able to speak to me through Justine.”
Sister Angela’s face clouded. “But the Church discourages an interest in the occult. And how traumatic would this be for the child?”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m not going to do it, Sister. I just want you to understand that maybe, doing this, I could learn what’s coming, and so maybe I should do it. But I’m too weak. I’m scared, and I’m weak.”
“You’re not weak, Oddie. I know you better than that.”
“No, ma’am. I’m failing you here. I can’t handle this … with Christmas over there and her heart so full of dogs. It’s too much.”
“There’s something I don’t understand about this,” she said. “What don’t I know?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t think how to explain the situation.
After retrieving his fur-trimmed coat from Paulette’s bed, Romanovich said in a rough whisper, “Sister, you know that Mr. Thomas lost one who was most dear to him.”
“Yes, Mr. Romanovich, I am aware of that,” she said.
“Mr. Thomas saved many people that day but was not able to save her. She was a girl with black hair and dark eyes, and skin like this girl here.”
He was making connections that could only be made if he knew much more about my loss than was in the press.
Previously unreadable, his eyes were still storyless; his book remained closed.
“Her name,” Romanovich said, “was Bronwen Llewellyn, but she disliked her name. She felt that Bronwen sounded like an elf. She called herself Stormy.”
He no longer merely puzzled me. He mystified me. “Who are you?”
“She called herself Stormy, as Flossie calls herself Christmas,” he continued. “Stormy was abused as a girl, by her adoptive father.”
“No one knows that,” I protested.
“Not many do, Mr. Thomas. But a few social workers know. Stormy did not suffer severe physical damage, mental retardation. But you can see, Sister Angela, the parallels here make this most difficult for Mr. Thomas.”
Most difficult, yes. Most difficult. And as a mark of how very difficult, no twist of wit came to mind in that moment, not even a pucker of sour humor, no thin astringent joke.
“To speak to the one he lost,” Romanovich said, “through the medium of one who reminds him of her … too much. It would be too much for anyone. He knows that using this girl to channel a spirit would be traumatic for her, but he tells himself her trauma is acceptable if lives can be saved. Yet because of who she is, of how she i
s, he cannot proceed. She is an innocent, as Stormy was, and he will not use an innocent.”
Watching Christmas with her book of dogs, I said, “Sister, if I use her as a bridge between the living and the dead … what if that brings back to her the memory of death that she’s forgotten? What if when I’m done with her, she has one foot in each world, and can never be whole in this one or know any peace here? She was already used as though she were just a thing, used and thrown away. She can’t be used again, no matter what the justifications are. Not again.”
From an inner pocket of the coat draped over his arm, Romanovich produced a long vertical-fold wallet, and from the wallet a laminated card, which he did not at once present to me.
“Mr. Thomas, if you were to read a twenty-page report on me that was prepared by seasoned intelligence analysts, you would know all that is worth knowing about me, as well as much that would not have been of interest even to my mother, though my mother doted on me.”
“Your mother the assassin.”
“That is correct.”
Sister Angela said, “Excuse me?”
“Mother was also a concert pianist.”
I said, “She was probably a master chef, too.”
“In fact, I learned cakes from her. After reading a twenty-page report on you, Mr. Thomas, I thought I knew everything about you, but as it turns out, I knew little of importance. By that, I do not mean only your … gift. I mean I did not know the kind of man you are.”
Although I wouldn’t have thought the Russian could be a medicine for melancholy, he suddenly proved to be an effective mood-elevator.
“What did your father do, sir?” I asked.
“He prepared people for death, Mr. Thomas.”
Heretofore, I had not seen Sister Angela nonplussed.
“So it’s a family trade, sir. Why do you so directly call your mother an assassin?”
“Because, you see, technically an assassin is one who proceeds only against highly placed political targets.”
“Whereas a mortician is not as choosy.”
“A mortician is not indiscriminate, either, Mr. Thomas.”
If Sister Angela didn’t regularly attend tennis matches as a spectator, she would have a sore neck in the morning.
“Sir, I’ll bet your father was also a chess master.”
“He won only a single national championship.”
“Too busy with his career as a mortician.”
“No. Unfortunately, a five-year prison sentence fell at that very point at which he was at his most competitive as a chessman.”
“Bummer.”
As Romanovich gave me the laminated photo-ID card with embedded holographs, which he had taken from his wallet, he said to Sister Angela, “All of that was in the old Soviet, and I have confessed it and atoned. I have long been on the side of truth and justice.”
Reading from the card, I said, “National Security Agency.”
“That is correct, Mr. Thomas. After watching you with Jacob and with this girl here, I have decided to take you into my confidence.”
“We must be careful, Sister,” I warned. “He may only mean that he is a confidence man.”
She nodded but seemed no less perplexed.
“We need to talk somewhere more private,” Romanovich said.
Returning his NSA credentials, I said, “I want a few words with the girl.”
As once more I sat on the floor near Christmas, she looked up from her book and said, “I like cats, too, b-b-but they aren’t dogs.”
“They sure aren’t,” I agreed. “I’ve never seen a group of cats strong enough to pull a dogsled.”
Picturing cats in the traces of a sled, she giggled.
“And you’ll never get a cat to chase a tennis ball.”
“Never,” she agreed.
“And dogs never have mouse breath.”
“Yuck. Mouse breath.”
“Christmas, do you really want to work with dogs one day?”
“I really do. I know I could do a lot with dogs.”
“You have to keep up rehab, get back as much strength in your arm and leg as you can.”
“Gonna get it all b-back.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“You gotta retrain the b-b-brain.”
“I’m going to stay in touch with you, Christmas. And when you’re grown up and ready to be on your own, I have a friend who will make sure you’ll have a job doing something wonderful with dogs, if that’s still what you want.”
Her eyes widened. “Something wonderful—like what?”
“That’ll be for you to decide. While you’re getting stronger and growing up, you think about what would be the most wonderful job you could do with dogs—and that will be it.”
“I had a good dog. His name was F-Farley. He tried to save me, but Jason shot him, too.”
She spoke about the horror with more dispassion than I could have done, and in fact I felt that I would not maintain my composure if she said another word about it.
“One day, you’ll have all the dogs you want. You can live in a sea of happy fur.”
Although she couldn’t go directly from Farley to a giggle, she smiled. “A sea of happy fur,” she said, savoring the sound of it, and her smile sustained.
I held out my hand. “Do we have a deal?”
Solemnly, she thought about it, and then she nodded and took my hand. “Deal.”
“You’re a very tough negotiator, Christmas.”
“I am?”
“I’m exhausted. You have worn me down. I am bleary and dopey and pooped. My feet are tired, my hands are tired, even my hair is tired. I need to go and have a long nap, and I really, really need to eat some pudding.”
She giggled. “Pudding?”
“You’ve been such a tough negotiator, you’ve so exhausted me that I can’t even chew. My teeth are tired. In fact my teeth are already asleep. I can only eat pudding.”
Grinning, she said, “You’re silly.”
“It’s been said of me before,” I assured her.
Because we needed to talk in a place where bodachs were unlikely to enter, Sister Angela led Romanovich and me to the pharmacy, where Sister Corrine was dispensing evening medicines into small paper cups on which she had written the names of her patients. She agreed to give us privacy.
When the door closed behind Sister Corrine, the mother superior said, “All right. Who is Jacob’s father, and why is he so important?”
Romanovich and I looked at each other, and we spoke as one: “John Heineman.”
“Brother John?” she asked dubiously. “Our patron? Who gave up all his wealth?”
I said, “You haven’t seen the uberskeleton, ma’am. Once you’ve seen the uberskeleton, you pretty much know it couldn’t be anyone else but Brother John. He wants his son dead, and maybe all of them, all the children here.”
CHAPTER 46
Rodion Romanovich had some credibility with me because of his National Security Agency ID and because he was droll. Maybe it was the effect of rogue molecules of tranquilizers in the medicinally scented air of the pharmacy, but minute by minute, I grew more willing to trust him.
According to the Hoosier, twenty-five years before we had come under siege in this blizzard, John Heineman’s fiancée, Jennifer Calvino, had given birth to their child, Jacob. No one knows if she had availed herself of a sonogram or other testing, but in any case, she had carried the child to term.
Twenty-six, already a physicist of significant accomplishments, Heineman had not reacted well to her pregnancy, had felt trapped by it. Upon his first sight of Jacob, he denied fatherhood, withdrew his proposal of marriage, cut Jennifer Calvino out of his life, and gave her no more thought than he would have given a basal-cell carcinoma once it had been surgically removed from his skin.
Although even at that time, Heineman had been a man of some means, Jennifer asked him for nothing. His hostility to his deformed son had been so intense that Jennifer decided Jacob would
be both happier and safer if he had no contact with his father.
Mother and son did not have an easy life, but she was devoted to him, and in her care, he thrived. When Jacob was thirteen, his mother died, after arranging for his lifelong institutional care through a church charity.
Over the years, Heineman became famous and wealthy. When his research, as widely reported, drove him to the conclusion that the subatomic structure of the universe suggested indisputable design, he had reexamined his life and, in something like penitence, had given away his fortune and retreated to a monastery.
“A changed man,” said Sister Angela. “In contrition for how he treated Jennifer and Jacob, he gave up everything. Surely he couldn’t want his son dead. He funded this facility for the care of children like Jacob. And for Jacob himself.”
Leaving the mother superior’s argument unaddressed, Romanovich said, “Twenty-seven months ago, Heineman came out of seclusion and began to discuss his current research with former colleagues, by phone and in E-mails. He had always been fascinated by the strange order that underlies every apparent chaos in nature, and during his years of seclusion, using computer models of his design, processed on twenty linked Cray supercomputers, he had made breakthroughs that would enable him, as he put it, ‘to prove the existence of God.’ ”
Sister Angela didn’t need to mull that over to find the flaw in it. “We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.”
Romanovich continued: “Because some of the scientists with whom Heineman spoke were on the national-security payroll, and because they recognized risks related to his research and certain defense applications as well, they reported him to us. Since then, we have had one of ours in the abbey guesthouse. I am only the latest.”
“For some reason,” I said, “you were alarmed enough to introduce another agent as a postulant, now a novice, Brother Leopold.”
Sister Angela’s wimple seemed to stiffen with her disapproval. “You had a man falsely profess vows to God?”
“We did not intend for him to go beyond simple postulancy, Sister. We wanted him to spend a few weeks deeper in the community than a guest might ever get. As it turned out, he was a man searching for a new life, and he found it. We lost him to you—though we feel he still owes us some assistance, as his vows allow.”