by Dean Koontz
“Sent to him by whom?”
“By someone dead who tried to help me through Justine.”
“Through the drowned girl you mentioned earlier, the one who was dead and then revived.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was right about you,” Romanovich said. “Complex, complicated, even intricate.”
“But innocuous,” I assured him.
Unaware that she walked through a cluster of bodachs, scattering them, Sister Angela came to us.
She started to speak, and I zipped my lips again. Her periwinkle blues narrowed, for although she understood about bodachs, she wasn’t used to being told to shut up.
When the malign spirits had vanished into various rooms, I said, “Ma’am, I’m hoping you can help me. Jacob here—what do you know about his father?”
“His father? Nothing.”
“I thought you had backgrounds on all the kids.”
“We do. But Jacob’s mother was never married.”
“Jenny Calvino. So that’s a maiden—not a married—name.”
“Yes. Before she died of cancer, she arranged for Jacob to be admitted to another church home.”
“Twelve years ago.”
“Yes. She had no family to take him, and on the forms, where the father’s name was requested, I’m sad to say, she wrote unknown.”
I said, “I never met the lady, but from even what little I know about her, I can’t believe she was so promiscuous that she wouldn’t know.”
“It’s a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so.”
“I’ve learned some things from Jacob. He was very ill when he was seven, wasn’t he?”
She nodded. “It’s in his medical records. I’m not sure exactly, but I think…some kind of blood infection. He almost died.”
“From things Jacob has said, I believe Jenny called his father to the hospital. It wasn’t a warm and fuzzy family reunion. But this name—it may be the key to everything.”
“Jacob doesn’t know the name?”
“I don’t think his mother ever told him. However, I believe Mr. Romanovich knows it.”
Surprised, Sister Angela said, “Do you know it, Mr. Romanovich?”
“If he knows it,” I said, “he won’t tell you.”
She frowned. “Why won’t you tell me, Mr. Romanovich?”
“Because,” I explained, “he’s not in the business of giving out information. Just the opposite.”
“But, Mr. Romanovich,” said Sister Angela, “surely dispensing information is a fundamental part of a librarian’s job.”
“He is not,” I said, “a librarian. He will claim to be, but if you press the point, all you’ll get out of him is a lot more about Indianapolis than you need to know.”
“There is no harm,” Romanovich said, “in acquiring exhaustive knowledge about my beloved Indianapolis. And the truth is, you also know the name.”
Again surprised, Sister Angela turned to me. “Do you know the name of Jacob’s father, Oddie?”
“He suspects it,” said Romanovich, “but is reluctant to believe what he suspects.”
“Is that true, Oddie? Why are you reluctant to believe?”
“Because Mr. Thomas admires the man he suspects. And because if his suspicions are correct, he may be up against a power with which he cannot reckon.”
Sister Angela said, “Oddie, is there any power with which you cannot reckon?”
“Oh, it’s a long list, ma’am. The thing is—I need to be sure I’m right about the name. And I have to understand his motivation, which I don’t yet, not fully. It might be dangerous to approach him without full understanding.”
Turning to the Russian, Sister Angela said, “Surely, sir, if you can share with Oddie the name and motivation of this man, you will do so to protect the children.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily believe anything he told me,” I said. “Our fur-hatted friend has his own agenda. And I suspect he’ll be ruthless about fulfilling it.”
Her voice heavy with disapproval, the mother superior said, “Mr. Romanovich, sir, you presented yourself to this community as a simple librarian seeking to enrich his faith.”
“Sister,” he disagreed, “I never said that I was simple. But it is true that I am a man of faith. And whose faith is so secure that it never needs to be further enriched?”
She stared at him for a moment, and then turned to me again. “He is a real piece of work.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’d turn him out in the snow if it wasn’t such an unchristian thing to do—and if I believed for a minute we could manhandle him through the door.”
“I don’t believe we could, Sister.”
“Neither do I.”
“If you can find me a child who was once dead but can speak,” I reminded her, “I might learn what I need to know by other means than Mr. Romanovich.”
Her wimpled face brightened. “That’s what I came to tell you before we got into all this talk about Jacob’s father. There’s a girl named Flossie Bodenblatt—”
“Surely not,” said Romanovich.
“Flossie,” Sister Angela continued, “has been through very much, too much, so much—but she is a girl with spirit, and she has worked hard in speech therapy. Her voice is so clear now. She was down in rehab, but we’ve brought her to her room. Come with me.”
CHAPTER 45
NINE-YEAR-OLD FLOSSIE HAD BEEN AT ST. Bartholomew’s for one year. According to Sister Angela, the girl was one of the minority who would be able to leave someday and live on her own.
The names on the door plaques were FLOSSIE and PAULETTE. Flossie waited alone.
Frills, flounce, and dolls characterized Paulette’s half of the room. Pink pillows and a small green-and-pink vanity table.
Flossie’s area was by contrast simple, clean, all white and blue, decorated only with posters of dogs.
The name Bodenblatt suggested to me a German or Scandinavian background, but Flossie had a Mediterranean complexion, black hair, and large dark eyes.
I had not encountered the girl before, or had seen her only at a distance. My chest grew tight, and I knew at once that this might be more difficult than I had expected.
When we arrived, Flossie was sitting on a rug on the floor, paging through a book of dog photographs.
“Dear,” said Sister Angela, “this is Mr. Thomas, the man who would like to talk to you.”
Her smile was not the smile that I remembered from another place and time, but it was close enough, a wounded smile and lovely.
“Hello, Mr. Thomas.”
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her, I said, “I’m so pleased to meet you, Flossie.”
Sister Angela perched on the edge of Flossie’s bed, and Rodion Romanovich stood among Paulette’s dolls and frills, like a bear that had turned the tables on Goldilocks.
The girl wore red pants and a white sweater with an appliquéd image of Santa Claus. Her features were fine, nose upturned, chin delicate. She could have passed for an elf.
The left corner of her mouth pulled down, and the left eyelid drooped slightly.
Her left hand was cramped into a claw, and she braced the book on her lap with that arm, as if she had little other use for it than bracing things. She had been turning pages with her right hand.
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 is, 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 pres
ent 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.”