Saint Odd (21 page)

For a moment I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I seemed to be alone. I tried to look around, but I couldn’t lift my head. I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t move as much as one finger. Panic took me. I thought that I must be paralyzed. But then Annamaria
spoke to me, and her voice at once calmed me, though I couldn’t see her
.

“Well, young man, you have had quite a day.”

Another of those dream transitions left me sitting in a chair, across a table from Annamaria. Between us stood a wide shallow bowl containing an inch of water, and in the water rested an exquisite white flower larger than a cantaloupe, thick white petals spiraling from a loose perimeter to a tight center
.

During our four months of friendship, this flower graced rooms where Annamaria lived. In the cottage by the sea, there were always bowls of these enormous blooms. She claimed that she cut them from a tree in the neighborhood. Although I went on long walks for blocks in every direction, I never saw a tree laden with such flowers
.

Back in January, in the town of Magic Beach, using the flower, Annamaria had performed a magic trick of some kind for Blossom Rosedale, but I hadn’t been present to see it. The Happy Monster had been amazed, astonished, exhilarated by the illusion with the flower. Annamaria promised that she would perform it for me, too, when the time was right. In her ever-mysterious way, she had never felt the right time had arrived—until now, here in a dream
.

“The flower,” she said, “is the amaranth.”

Around my neck, upon a chain, the thimble-size bell given to me by this woman, on the occasion when she asked if I would die for her, began tinkling sweetly, although I did not move. The tiny silver clapper beat against the silver strike and silver lip, perhaps to call me to some task, perhaps to celebrate some pending triumph—perhaps to warn me of a mortal threat
.

Annamaria began to pluck loose the largest of the petals, those
around the perimeter of the bloom, and drop them on the table. They were as thick as if they had been peeled from a wax flower. At first they glowed snow-white against the wood, then began to yellow, turn brown. Soon they withered even as they fluttered from her fingers. (The silver bell rang faster, louder.) Fear welled again as the petals began to discolor and shrivel before she could pluck them. The deterioration of the bloom accelerated, racing from one petal to the next, around the spiral pattern, rapidly toward the center. (Louder, the silver bell, louder, faster.) I tried to tell her to stop. She was killing not the flower, she was killing me. I could not speak. The large petals fell out of the flower of their own accord, as if they were puzzle pieces from a picture of a beaten and bruised man, quickly curling, cupping, now as crisp as the skin from a desiccated corpse
.

I thrust straight up, out of the dream, sweating and gasping, damp sheets clinging to me as if they were a shroud, as if I had sat up not in bed, but from a granite slab in a morgue, where an autopsy was about to be performed on me
.

At the end of the silver chain around my neck, the tiny bell rang three times. Each time it sounded less insistent than in the nightmare. Then it fell silent
.

I had awakened late. Annamaria and young Tim had finished their breakfast. They were off somewhere together
.

After a shower, I packed what little I needed in my toiletries case and in a soft-sided overnight bag. I loaded them in the Big Dog motorcycle’s saddlebags
.

Annamaria and Tim returned on foot at 1:30, having eaten a light lunch at a restaurant in town. The boy had not been much like a boy, emotionally and intellectually, when we rescued him
from horrific circumstances in that Montecito estate. He had been old beyond his years. But day by day, he seemed to forget what he had endured. Soon he became an ordinary, energetic boy of nine. This change had been wrought by Annamaria, but she had declined to explain how she could have done what an entire corps of psychiatrists and a pharmacy of the latest antidepressants would surely have failed to achieve
.

Now Tim wanted to change into swim trunks and search the shore for seashells, go wading, swim a little. Annamaria preferred to keep him in sight when he was on the beach. She said she’d been pregnant a long time and would be pregnant longer still, but she declined to say if this child she carried was her first. As she was eighteen, it most likely would be her first. Yet, as she had shown with Tim, she had about her the wisdom and the manner of someone well experienced in mothering
.

As the boy entertained himself along the breaking surf, plucking up half-buried shells to add to his collection, we stood seaward of the picket fence that separated yard grass from sand
.

Between the clear sky and the blue rolling sea, brown pelicans glided northward in formation
.

She said, “So, odd one, you had a dream, and the bell rang you to action last night.”

“How could you know?”

“The way things are known,” she said with an enigmatic smile. “A dream but not just a dream.”

“Not just a dream,” I agreed. “Chief Porter was in it, so I must have been in Pico Mundo. But I don’t know exactly where.”

“You’ve known since Nevada, the cult will strike in Pico Mundo.”

“You were in the dream,” I said. “Will you be there for real?”

“I phoned Edie Fischer this morning. Tim and I will go out there with her. I wouldn’t miss it, young man.”

“What is it you wouldn’t miss?”

“Whatever is to be.”

“There you go again.”

“Where do I go?”

“In clouds of mystery. By the way, you frightened me in the dream.”

She put a hand on my shoulder. “I will endeavor not to frighten you for real.”

I watched Tim dancing jubilantly in the foaming surf. “Should I be afraid?”

“Not of anything in Pico Mundo,” she said
.

“Of what comes after Pico Mundo?”

“Don’t lay out an entire itinerary, Oddie. Take one destination at a time.”

When I got into the front passenger seat of the limousine and closed the door behind me, Mrs. Fischer grabbed one of my hands in both of hers, pulled me toward her, and kissed me on the cheek.

“Child,” she said, “even the sweetest baby in a cradle isn’t more kissable than you.”

She was a pixie, an inch short of five feet, perched on a pillow to see over the steering wheel. At eighty-six, she had more energy and considerably more gumption than the average thirty-something corporate hotshot.

“I’ve missed you, Mrs. Fischer.”

“And I’ve missed you, too, my dear chauffeur.”

As I’ve detailed in the next-to-last volume of these memoirs, I had been employed as her chauffeur for an event-packed day or so, during which she had done most of the driving.

“But of course,” she continued in her lilting voice and cheery manner, “I’ve been busy helping our little network of like souls to neuter as many rotten scum as we have time to confront. I’m sorry to say, there are so many rotten scum in these perilous times
that some days I fear we’re falling behind. But then …” She looked toward the front porch, where the clean-up crew had joined Mr. and Mrs. Bullock and were following them into the house. “But then sometimes the rotten scum come to us, which saves us the trouble of finding them.” She looked at me again and frowned. “What is it, dear? You don’t appear to be having as much fun as you should be having after all your success in Nevada.”

“A lot of people died there, ma’am.”

“Yes, many of those kidnappers and would-be child-killers died, but the children all lived, thanks to you. Don’t mourn the death of monsters, dear. Celebrate the saving of the innocents.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right. I guess what disturbs me isn’t so much killing the killers. It’s the
necessity
of killing them, that they push us to that.”

“We’re not engaged in police work, child. This is war. A secret war at our level of the action, but a war nonetheless. There are fewer shades of gray in a war than in police work.”

She had one of those faces—fine-boned and symmetrical—that not only weathered the years well but also pushed the
GRANDMOTHER LOVE
button deep in your psyche, so that you took seriously whatever she said and felt it to be wise. Her soft skin hadn’t wrinkled randomly, hadn’t puckered her face in unflattering ways; every line seemed to have been designed to maintain a gentle and genteel countenance and to have been executed by a seamstress to royalty.

“Ma’am, as totally impressive as your network was when we worked together back in March, I’m only now beginning to realize its true scope. You and Heathcliff must have built quite a fortune.”

Heathcliff, her husband, apparently had been many things, including a magician. No. What she had told me, exactly, was that he could “appear to be a magician,” that he could appear to be anything he wished, and convincingly.

“Oh, dear, don’t give me too much credit. Heathcliff already had a Scrooge McDuck fortune when he met me and saved me from a life as a mediocre actress. Over the years, my little ideas added only a couple of hundred million to the pot. Anyway, I’m not the only one who funds the resistance. Now tell me, what should we be afraid might happen to your darling little Pico Mundo?”

She had left the engine running, so that we could have air-conditioning in the warm desert night. Although the instrument panel in the dashboard had been dialed up to its brightest level, the limo was softly illuminated. I felt cocooned and, as I always did in her company, quite safe in a dangerous world.

I told her about the dream of the flood, about Malo Suerte Dam and the stolen thousand kilos of C-4. “But you see, ma’am, I never know about my dreams. Sometimes they’re literal, other times only symbolic. If I have to live with this gift, I don’t understand why things can’t always be clearer to me.”

Patting my cheek affectionately, she said, “Because, dear boy, then you would be just another silly superhero who’s never really at risk.”

“I could live with that.”

“But you might then grow too certain of yourself, cocksure and arrogant. Even you. And then you might become one of the very people that my network of friends must thwart. Isn’t that a lovely word—
thwart
?”

“
Thwart
? I’ve never thought about it, ma’am.”

“Well, do think about it, dear. Please do. It’s a lovely word.
Thwart
. To obstruct is as noble an act as to facilitate, if what you are obstructing is the facilitation of evil. Anyway, to maintain the right perspective, sweetie, we always should be at risk of failure, the possibility of making wrong choices.”

“Free will, you mean.”

Pinching my cheek this time, Mrs. Fischer said, “Now, there’s the lovely fry cook who could save this town. You’re very nearly fully smooth and blue.”

“Fully smooth and blue. I still don’t know what that means, ma’am.”

“Oh, don’t puzzle yourself. You’ll know what it means when you know. Meanwhile, there isn’t going to be a test about it.”

She was dressed in a pink pantsuit with a frilly white blouse. On the lapel of her jacket glimmered the exclamation point crafted of gold, diamonds, and rubies.

“I don’t know what that means, either. A version of it turns up on the phone you sent me.”

“It’s a kind of logo,” Mrs. Fischer said. “It’s like that Pepsi circle with the red-white-and-blue waves in it. Or the smiling cow on a can of Lucerne whipped cream.”

“Cows and cream. Okay,
that
I understand.”

“Of course you do. A smiling cow makes everyone feel good. A smiling cow is a delightful thing, and whipped cream is delightful.”

“But the exclamation point …”

“Well, it’s also a promise.”

“A promise of what?”

“And a statement of conviction. It’s many things, dear, just as anything you can point at in this world is many things.”

I pointed at
her
.

She pointed at
me
.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I wish Stormy could have known you, ma’am. She’d think you were a hoot.”

“She was a lovely girl. She still used the name Bronwen then, hadn’t quite started calling herself Stormy. We got along famously.”

Mrs. Fischer could draw upon a greater variety of smiles than anyone I’d ever known, perhaps because the life that she’d lived had given her so many different kinds and degrees of happiness. The smile with which she favored me now was one I’d seen several times before: what I might call the Smile of Pleasurable Expectation, with her head cocked to one side and her blue eyes bright with curiosity regarding my response to her revelation, also with an impish pleasure in having astonished me.

“You knew Stormy? How did you? When did you?”

Mrs. Fischer took one of my hands in both of hers again and pressed it firmly. “After she was adopted by that dreadful couple, after that horrible thing happened, our little organization got her out of the situation.”

Stormy was seven years old when her parents died in a plane crash, seven and a half when she was adopted by a wealthy, childless couple in Beverly Hills. During the second week in her magnificent new home, her adoptive father came into her room after midnight, exposed himself to her, and touched her in ways no grown man should ever touch a child.

She had still been intensely grieving for her lost parents. Humiliated, ashamed, frightened, alone, confused, she endured the man’s depraved behavior for three months before desperately seeking help.

“But,” I said, “she reported it to a social worker who was making a house call for the adoption agency.”

“Yes, dear. She did.”

“So she was taken out of that place. And then … then she lived in Saint Bart’s Orphanage till she graduated high school.”

“Yes, but she wasn’t removed for a week. Your lovely girl never realized that the first social worker wasn’t the one who helped her. In fact, never would have helped her.”