Brother Odd

listened. The snow did not even whisper its way to the earth, but seemed to salt the night with silence.
        I waited. I'm good at waiting. I waited sixteen years for my disturbed mother to kill me in my sleep before at last I moved out and left her home alone with her beloved gun.
        If, in spite of the periodic peril that comes with my gift, I should live an average life span, I've got another sixty years before I will see Stormy Llewellyn again, in the next world. That will be a long wait, but I am patient.
        My left shoulder ached, and the back of my head, grazed by the club, felt less than wonderful. I was cold to the bone.
        For some reason, I had not been pursued.
        If the storm had been storming long enough to whiten the ground, I could have stretched out on my back and made snow angels. But the conditions were not yet right for play. Maybe later.
        The abbey was out of sight. I wasn't sure from which direction I had come, but I wasn't worried that I would lose my way. I have never been lost.
        Announcing my return with an uncontrollable chattering of teeth, holding a stone in each hand, I warily retraced my route across the meadow, found the short grass of the yard again. Out of the silent storm, the abbey loomed.
        When I reached the corner of the library where I had nearly fallen over the prone monk, I found neither victim nor assailant. Concerned that the man might have regained consciousness and, badly hurt and disoriented, might have crawled away, only to pass out once more, I searched in a widening arc, but found no one.
        The library formed an L with the back wall of the guest wing, from which I had set out in pursuit of a bodach little more than an hour ago. At last I dropped the stones around which my hands were clenched and half frozen, unlocked the door to the back stairs, and climbed to the third floor.
        In the highest hallway, the door to my small suite stood open, as I'd left it. Waiting for snow, I'd been sitting in candlelight, but now a brighter light spilled from my front room.

CHAPTER 8
        
        AT SHORTLY PAST ONE IN THE MORNING, THE guestmaster, Brother Roland, was not likely to be changing the bed linens or delivering a portion of the "two hogsheads of wine" that St. Benedict, when he wrote the Rule that established monastic order in the sixth century, had specified as a necessary provision for every guesthouse.
        St. Bartholomew's does not provide any wine. The small under-the-counter refrigerator in my bathroom contains cans of Coke and bottles of iced tea.
        Entering my front room, prepared to shout "Varlet," or "Blackguard," or some other epithet that would sound appropriate to the medieval atmosphere, I found not an enemy, but a friend. Brother Knuckles, known sometimes as Brother Salvatore, stood at the window, peering out at the falling snow.
        Brother Knuckles is acutely aware of the world around him, of the slightest sounds and telltale scents, which is why he survived the world he operated in before becoming a monk. Even as I stepped silently across the threshold, he said, "You'll catch your death, traipsin' about on a night like this, dressed like that."
        "I wasn't traipsing," I said, closing the door quietly behind me. "I was skulking."
        He turned from the window to face me. "I was in the kitchen, scarfin' down some roast beef and provolone, when I seen you come up the stairs from John's Mew."
        "There weren't any lights in the kitchen, sir. I would've noticed."
        "The fridge light is enough to make a snack, and you can eat good by the glow from the clock on the microwave."
        "Committing the sin of gluttony in the dark, were you?"
        "The cellarer's gotta be sure things are fresh, don't he?"
        As the abbey's cellarer, Brother Knuckles purchased, stocked, and inventoried the food, beverages, and other material goods for the monastery and school.
        "Anyway," he said, "a guy, he eats at night in a bright kitchen that's got no window blinds-he's a guy tastin' his last sandwich."
        "Even if the guy's a monk in a monastery?"
        Brother Knuckles shrugged. "You can never be too careful."
        In exercise sweats instead of his habit, at five feet seven and two hundred pounds of bone and muscle, he looked like a die-casting machine that had been covered in a gray-flannel cozy.
        The rainwater eyes, the hard