Forever Odd (6 page)

CHAPTER 12

N
OT ENTIRELY TO MY SURPRISE, AGAIN THE Blue Moon Cafe.

The cloak of night had dressed the alleyway with some romance, but daylight had stripped it of the pretense of beauty. This was not a realm of filth and vermin; it was merely gray, grim, drab, and unwelcoming.

All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. For the most part, this is a consequence of limited resources, budgets.

Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about the condition of their souls.

Although I’m not as cynical as Danny, and although I don’t think the analogy between back doors and souls is well drawn, I’ll admit to seeing some truth in what he says.

What I could not see, here in the pale-lemon morning light, was any clue that might lead me a single step closer to him or to his psychotic father.

The police had done their work and gone. The Ford van had been hauled away.

I hadn’t come here with the expectation that I would find a clue overlooked by the authorities and, shifting into Sherlock, would track down the bad guys in a rush of deductive reasoning.

I returned because this was where my sixth sense had failed me. I hoped to find it again, as though it were a spool of ribbon that I’d dropped and that had rolled out of sight. If I could locate the loose end of the ribbon, I could follow it to the spool.

Opposite the kitchen entrance of the cafe was the second-floor window from which the elderly woman in the blue robe had watched as I had approached the van only hours ago. The drapes were shut.

Briefly I considered having a word with her. But she had already been interviewed by the police. They are far more skilled than I am at teasing valuable observations from witnesses.

I walked slowly north to the end of the block. Then I turned and walked south, past the Blue Moon.

Trucks were angled between the Dumpsters; early deliveries were being received, inspected, inventoried. Shopkeepers, almost an hour ahead of their employees, were busy at the rear entrances of their establishments.

Death came, Death went, but commerce flowed eternal.

A few people noticed me. I knew none of them well, some of them not at all.

The character of their recognition was uncomfortably familiar to me. They knew me as the hero, as the guy who stopped the lunatic who had shot all those people the previous August.

Forty-one were shot. Some were crippled for life, disfigured. Nineteen died.

I might have prevented all of it.
Then
I might have been a hero.

Chief Porter says hundreds would have perished if I hadn’t acted when I did, how I did. But the potential victims, those spared, do not seem real to me.

Only the dead seem real.

None of them have lingered. They all moved on.

But too many nights I see them in my dreams. They appear as they were in life, and as they might have been if they had survived.

On those nights, I wake with a sense of loss so terrible that I would prefer not ever to wake again. But I do wake, and I go on, for that is what the daughter of Cassiopeia, one of the nineteen, would want me to do, would
expect
me to do.

I have a destiny that I must earn. I live to earn it, and then to die.

The only benefit of being tagged a hero is that you are regarded by most people with some degree of awe and that, by playing to this awe, by wearing a somber expression and avoiding eye contact, you can almost always ensure that your privacy will be respected.

Wandering the alleyway, occasionally observed but undisturbed, I came to a narrow undeveloped lot. A chain-link fence restricted access.

I tried the gate. Locked.

A sign declared
MARAVILLA COUNTY FLOOD-CONTROL PROJECT,
and in red letters warned
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Here I discovered the unspooled ribbon of my sixth sense. Touching the chain-link gate, I felt certain that Danny had gone this way.

A lock would be no impediment to a determined fugitive like Simon Makepeace, whose criminal skills had been enhanced by years of prison learning.

Beyond the fence, in the center of the lot, stood a ten-foot-square slump-stone building with a concrete barrel-tile roof. The two plank doors on the front of this structure were no doubt also locked, but the hardware looked ancient.

If Danny had been forced through this gate and through those doors, as I sensed he had been, Simon had not chosen this route on impulse. This had been part of his plan.

Or perhaps he had intended to retreat here only if things went badly at Dr. Jessup’s place. Because of my timely arrival at the radiologist’s house and because of Chief Porter’s decision to block both highways, they had come here.

After parking in the Blue Moon lot, Simon had not put Danny in another vehicle. They had instead gone through this gate, through those doors, and down into a world below Pico Mundo, a world that I knew existed but that I had never visited.

My first impulse was to reach Chief Porter and to share what I intuited.

Turning away from the fence, I felt restrained by a subsequent intuition: Danny’s situation was so tenuous that a traditional search party, pursuing them into the depths, would likely be the death of him.

Furthermore, I sensed that while his situation might be grave, he was not in
imminent
danger. In this particular chase, speed wasn’t as important as stealth, and the pursuit would be successful only if I remained acutely observant of every detail the trail provided.

I had no way of knowing any of this to be true. I
felt
it in a half-assed precognitive way that is far more than a hunch but far short of an unequivocal vision.

Why I see the dead but cannot hear from them, why I can seek with psychic magnetism and sometimes find, but only sometimes, why I sense the looming threat but not its details, I do not know. Perhaps nothing in this broken world can be pure or of a piece, unfractured. Or perhaps I haven’t learned to harness all the power I possess.

One of my most bitter regrets from the previous August is that in the rush and tumble of events, I had at times relied on reason when gut feelings would have served me better.

Daily I walk a high wire, always in danger of losing my balance. The essence of my life is supernatural, which I must respect if I am to make the best use of my gift. Yet I live in the rational world and am subject to its laws. The temptation is to be guided entirely by impulses of an otherworldly origin—but in
this
world a long fall will always end in a hard impact.

I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and the irrational. In the past, my tendency has been to err on the side of logic, at the expense of faith—faith in myself and in the Source of my gift.

If I failed Danny, as I believed that I had failed others the previous August, I would surely come to despise myself. In failure, I would resent having been given the gift that defines me. If my destiny can be fulfilled only through the use of my sixth sense, too great a loss of self-respect and self-confidence would lead me to another fate different from the one that I desire, making a lie of the fortune-machine card that is framed above my bed.

This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.

I would not call Chief Porter. If my heart said I alone must go after Danny, I would obey my heart.

CHAPTER 13

A
T MY APARTMENT, I STUFFED A SMALL BACK-PACK with items I might need, including two flashlights and a package of spare batteries.

In the bedroom, I stood at the foot of the bed, silently reading the framed card on the wall:
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

I wanted to pry out the backing and remove the card from the frame, to take it with me. I would feel safer with it, protected.

This was a variety of irrational thought that could never serve me well. A card dispensed by a machine in a carnival arcade is not the equivalent of a fragment of the true cross.

Another and even less rational thought tormented me. In pursuit of Danny and his father, I might die, and having crossed the sea of death, arriving on the shore of the next world, I would want to have the card to present to whatever Presence met me there.

This,
I would say,
is the promise I was made. She came here ahead of me, and now you must take me to her.

In truth, although the circumstances in which we had gotten this fortune from the machine had seemed extraordinary and meaningful, no miracle had been involved. The promise was not of divine origin; it was one that she and I had made to each other, with mutual trust in the mercy of God to grant us the grace of eternity together.

If a Presence meets me on the farther shore, I cannot prove a divine contract merely with a card from a fortune-telling machine. If the afterlife I envision is different from the one Heaven has planned for me, I can’t invoke the threat of litigation and demand the name of a good attorney.

Conversely, if this grace should be granted and the promise of the card fulfilled, the Presence who meets me on that distant shore will be Bronwen Llewellyn herself, my Stormy.

The proper place for the card was in the frame. There it would be safe and could continue to inspire me if I returned from this expedition alive.

When I went into the kitchen to call Terri Stambaugh at the Pico Mundo Grille, Elvis was sitting at the table, weeping.

I hate seeing him like this. The King of Rock ’n’ Roll should never cry.

He shouldn’t pick his nose, either, but occasionally he does. I am sure this is a joke. A ghost has no need to pick its nose. Sometimes he pretends to find a nugget and to flick it at me, then grins boyishly.

Lately, he’d been reliably cheerful. But he suffered sudden mood swings.

Dead more than twenty-seven years, with no purpose in this world but unable to move on, as lonely as only the lingering dead can be, he had reason to wallow in melancholy. The cause of his distress, however, appeared to be the salt and pepper shakers on the table.

Terri, as devoted a Presley fan and authority as anyone alive, had given me the two ceramic Elvises, each four inches high, which dated to 1962. The one dressed in white dispensed salt from his guitar; the one in black gave pepper from his pompadour.

Elvis looked at me, pointed at the salt shaker, at the pepper, then at himself.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, though I knew that he would not answer.

He turned his face to the ceiling, as though to Heaven, with an expression of abject misery, sobbing silently.

The salt and pepper shakers had stood on the table since the day after Christmas. He had previously been amused by them.

I doubted that he had been moved to despair by the long-delayed realization that his image had been exploited to sell cheap, cheesy merchandise. Of the hundreds if not thousands of Elvis items that had been marketed over the years, scores were tackier than these ceramic collectibles, and he had not disapproved of licensing them.

Tears streamed down his cheeks, dripped off his jaw line, off his chin, but vanished before they spattered the table.

Unable to comfort or even understand Elvis, eager to get back to the Blue Moon alleyway, I used the kitchen phone to call the Grille, where they were in the breakfast rush.

I apologized for my bad timing, and Terri said at once, “Have you heard about the Jessups?”

“Been there,” I said.

“You’re in it, then?”

“To the neck. Listen, I’ve got to see you.”

“Come now.”

“Not in the Grille. All the old gang will want to chat. I’d like to see them, but I’m in a hurry.”

“Upstairs,” she said.

“I’m on my way.”

When I hung up the phone, Elvis gestured to get my attention. He pointed at the salt shaker, pointed at the pepper shaker, formed a V with the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand, and blinked at me tearfully, expectantly.

This appeared to be an unprecedented attempt at communication.

“Victory?” I asked, reading the usual meaning in that hand sign.

He shook his head and thrust the V at me, as though urging me to reconsider my translation.

“Two?” I said.

He nodded vigorously. He pointed at the salt shaker, then at the pepper shaker. He held up two fingers.

“Two Elvises,” I said.

This statement reduced him to a mess of shuddering emotion. He huddled, head bowed, face in his hands, shaking.

I rested my right hand on his shoulder. He felt as solid to me as every spirit does.

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what’s upsetting you, or what I should do.”

He had nothing more to convey to me either by expression or by gesture. He had retreated into his grief, and for the time being he was as lost to me as he was lost to the rest of the living world.

Although I regretted leaving him in that bleak condition, my obligation to the living is greater than to the dead.

CHAPTER 14

T
ERRI STAMBAUGH OPERATED THE PICO Mundo Grille with her husband, Kelsey, until he died of cancer. Now she runs the place herself. For almost ten years, she has lived alone above the restaurant, in an apartment approached by stairs from the alleyway.

Since she lost Kelsey, when she was only thirty-two, the man in her life has been Elvis. Not his ghost, but the history and the myth of him.

She has every song the King ever recorded, and she has acquired encyclopedic knowledge of his life. Terri’s interest in all things Presley preceded my revelation to her that his spirit inexplicably haunts our obscure town.

Perhaps as a defense against giving herself to another living man after Kelsey, to whom she has pledged her heart far beyond the requirement of their wedding vows, Terri loves Elvis. She loves not just his music and his fame, not merely the
idea
of him; she loves Elvis the man.

Although his virtues were many, they were outnumbered by his faults, frailties, and shortcomings. She knows that he was self-centered, especially after the early death of his beloved mother, that he found it difficult to trust anyone, that in some ways he remained an adolescent all his life. She knows how, in his later years, he escaped into addictions that spawned in him a meanness and a paranoia that were against his nature.

She is aware of all this and loves him nonetheless. She loves him for his struggle to achieve, for the passion that he brought to his music, for his devotion to his mother.

She loves him for his uncommon generosity even if there were times when he dangled it like a lure or wielded it like a club. She loves him for his faith, although he so often failed to follow its instructions.

She loves him because in his later years he remained humble enough to recognize how little of his promise he had fulfilled, because he knew regret and remorse. He never found the courage for true contrition, though he yearned to achieve it and the rebirth that would have followed it.

Loving is as essential to Terri Stambaugh as constant swimming is essential to the shark. This is an infelicitous analogy, but an accurate one. If a shark stops moving, it drowns; for survival, it requires uninterrupted movement. Terri must love or die.

Her friends know she would sacrifice herself for them, so deeply does she commit. She loves not just a burnished memory of her husband but loves who he truly was, the rough edges and the smooth. Likewise, she loves the potentiality
and
the reality of each friend.

I climbed the stairs, pressed the bell, and when she opened the door, she said at once, as she drew me across the threshold, “What can I do, Oddie, what do you need, what are you getting yourself into this time?”

When I was sixteen and desperate to escape from the psychotic kingdom that was my mother’s home, Terri gave me a job, a chance, a life. She is still giving. She is my boss, my friend, the sister I never had.

After we embraced, we sat cater-corner at the kitchen table, holding hands on the red-and-white-checkered oilcloth. Her hands are strong and worn by work, and beautiful.

Elvis’s “Good Luck Charm” was on her music system. Her speakers are never sullied by the songs of other singers.

When I told her where I believed Danny had been taken and that intuition insisted I go after him alone, her hand tightened on mine. “Why would Simon take him down there?”

“Maybe he saw the roadblock and turned around. Maybe he had a police-band radio and heard about it that way. The flood tunnels are another route out of town, under the roadblocks.”

“But on foot.”

“Wherever he surfaces with Danny, he can steal a car.”

“Then he’s already done that, hasn’t he? If he took Danny down there hours ago, at least four hours ago, he’s long gone.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

Terri frowned. “If he’s still in the flood tunnels, he took Danny there for some other reason, not to get him out of town.”

Her instincts do not have the supernatural edge that mine do, but they are sharp enough to serve her well.

“I told Ozzie—there’s something wrong with this.”

“Wrong with what?”

“All this. Dr. Jessup’s murder and all the rest. A
wrongness
. I can feel it, but I can’t define it.”

Terri is one of the handful of people who know about my gift. She understands that I am compelled to use it; she would not attempt to argue me out of action. But she wishes that this yoke would be lifted from me.

So do I.

As “Good Luck Charm” gave way to “Puppet on a String,” I put my cell phone on the table, told her that I had forgotten to plug it in the previous night, and asked to borrow hers while she recharged mine.

She opened her purse, fished out the phone. “It’s not cell, it’s satellite. But will it work down there, underground?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. But it’ll probably work wherever I am when I come up again. Thanks, Terri.”

I tested the volume of the ringer, dialed it down a little.

“And when mine is recharged,” I said, “if you get any peculiar calls on it…give out the number of your phone, so they can try to reach me.”

“Peculiar—how?”

I’d had time to mull over the call that I received while sitting under the poisonous brugmansia. Maybe the caller had dialed a wrong number. Maybe not.

“If it’s a woman with a smoky voice, cryptic, won’t give her name—I want to talk to her.”

She raised her eyebrows. “What’s that about?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Probably nothing.”

As I tucked her phone into a zippered pocket on my backpack, she said, “Are you coming back to work, Oddie?”

“Soon maybe. Not this week.”

“We got you a new spatula. Wide blade, microbeveled front edge. Your name’s inlaid in the handle.”

“That’s cool.”

“Entirely cool. The handle’s red. Your name’s in white, and it’s in the same lettering as the original Coca-Cola logo.”

“I miss frying,” I said. “I love the griddle.”

The staff of the diner had been my family for more than four years. I still felt close to them.

When I saw them these days, however, two things precluded the easy camaraderie we had enjoyed in the past: the reality of my grief, and their insistence on my heroism.

“Gotta go,” I said, getting to my feet and shouldering the backpack once more.

Perhaps to detain me, she said, “So…has Elvis been around lately?”

“Just left him crying in my kitchen.”

“Crying again? What about?”

I recounted the episode with the salt and pepper shakers. “He actually made an effort to help me understand, which is something new, but I didn’t get it.”

“Maybe I do,” she said, as she opened the door for me. “You know he was an identical twin.”

“I knew that, yeah, but I forgot.”

“Jesse Garon Presley was stillborn at four o’clock in the morning, and Elvis Aaron Presley came into the world thirty-five minutes later.”

“I half remember you telling me about that. Jesse was buried in a cardboard box.”

“That’s all the family could afford. He was laid to rest in Priceville Cemetery, northeast of Tupelo.”

“How’s that for fate?” I said. “Identical twins—they’re going to look exactly alike, sound alike, and probably have exactly the same talent. But one becomes the biggest star in music history, and the other is buried as a baby in a cardboard box.”

“It haunted him all his life,” Terri said. “People say that he often talked to Jesse late at night. He felt like half of himself was missing.”

“He sort of lived that way, too—like half of him was missing.”

“He sort of did,” she agreed.

Because I knew what that felt like, I said, “I’ve suddenly got more sympathy for the guy.”

We hugged, and she said, “We need you here, Oddie.”

“I need me here,” I agreed. “You’re everything a friend should be, Terri, and nothing that one shouldn’t.”

“When would it be a good idea for me to start worrying?”

“Judging by the look on your face,” I said, “you already have.”

“I don’t like you going down there in the tunnels. It feels like you’re burying yourself alive.”

“I’m not claustrophobic,” I assured her as I stepped out of the kitchen, onto the exterior landing.

“That’s not what I meant. I’m giving you six hours, then I’m calling Wyatt Porter.”

“I’d rather you wouldn’t do that, Terri. I’m as sure as I’ve ever been about anything—I’ve got to do this alone.”

“Are you really? Or is this…something else?”

“What else would it be?”

Clearly, she had a specific fear, but she didn’t want to put it into words. Instead of answering me, or even searching my eyes for an answer, she scanned the sky.

Dirty clouds were scudding in from the north-northeast. They looked like scrub rags that had swabbed a filthy floor.

I said, “There’s more to this than Simon’s jealousies and obsessions. A weirdness, I don’t know what, but a SWAT team isn’t going to bring Danny out of there alive. Because of my gift, I’m his best chance.”

I kissed her on the forehead, turned, and started down the steps toward the alley.

“Is Danny dead already?” she asked.

“No. Like I said, I’m being drawn to him.”

“Is that true?”

Surprised, I halted, turned. “He’s alive, Terri.”

“If Kelsey and I had been blessed with a child, he could’ve been as old as you.”

I smiled. “You’re sweet.”

She sighed. “All right. Eight hours. Not a minute more. You might be a clairvoyant or a medium, or whatever it is you are, but I’ve got women’s intuition, by God, and that counts for something, too.”

No sixth sense was required for me to understand that it would be pointless to try to negotiate her up from eight hours to ten.

“Eight hours,” I agreed. “I’ll call you before then.”

After I had started down the open stairs again, she said, “Oddie, the main reason you came here really
was
to borrow my phone—wasn’t it?”

When I stopped and looked up again, I saw that she had come off the landing, onto the first step.

She said, “I guess for my own peace of mind, I’ve got to lay it out there…. You didn’t come here to say good-bye, did you?”

“No.”

“True?”

“True.”

“Swear to God.”

I raised my right hand as though I were an Eagle Scout making a solemn pledge.

Still dubious, she said, “It would be shitty of you to go out of my life with a lie.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you. Besides, I can’t get where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I’ve got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can—that’s how I buy the ticket to where I want to be. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Terri settled down on the top step. “I’ll sit here and watch you go. It feels like bad luck to turn my back on you just now.”

“Are you okay?”

“Go. If he’s alive, go to him.”

I turned away from her and descended the stairs once more.

“Don’t look back,” she said. “That’s bad luck, too.”

I reached the bottom of the stairs and followed the alleyway to the street. I didn’t look back, but I could hear her softly crying.