Brother Odd

down, might have fired him.
        Brother Knuckles's suggestion that I keep a low profile with these authorities appeared to have been wise advice.
        "What're we going to do?" Brother Rafael worried.
        I shook my head. I didn't have an answer.
        Hurrying out of the room, speaking more to himself now than to me, he repeated, "What're we going to do?"
        I consulted my wristwatch and then went to a front window.
        Elvis phased through the closed door and stood outside in the sheeting snow, a striking figure in his black flamenco outfit with red cummerbund.
        The time was 8:40 a.m.
        Only the tire tracks of the recently departed police vehicles marked the path of the driveway. Otherwise, the storm had plastered over the variety and the roughness of the land, smoothing it into a white-on-white geometry of soft planes and gentle undulations.
        From the look of things, eight or ten inches had piled up in about seven and a half hours. The snow was falling much faster now than it had fallen earlier.
        Outside, Elvis stood with his head tipped back and his tongue out, in a fruitless attempt to catch flakes. Of course he was but a spirit, unable to feel the cold or taste the snow. Something about the effort he made, however, charmed me… and saddened me, as well.
        How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
        The previous evening, the TV weather report had predicted a minimum two-foot accumulation. Storms in the High Sierra could be prolonged, brutal, and might result in an even deeper accumulation than what had been forecast.
        By this afternoon, certainly before the early winter dusk, St. Bartholomew's Abbey would be snowbound. Isolated.

CHAPTER 13
        
        I TRIED TO BE THE SHERLOCK HOLMES THAT Brother Knuckles hoped I could be, but my deductive reasoning led me through a maze of facts and suspicions that brought me back to where I started: clueless.
        Because I am not much fun when I'm pretending to be a thinker, Elvis left me alone in the library. He might have gone to the church, hoping that Brother Fletcher intended to practice on the choir organ.
        Even in death, he likes to be around music; and in life he had recorded six albums of gospel and inspirational songs, plus three Christmas albums. He might have preferred to dance to something with a backbeat, but you don't get much rock and roll in a monastery.
        A poltergeist could have blasted out "All Shook Up" on the organ, could have pounded through "Hound Dog" on the piano in the guesthouse receiving room, the same way that Brother Constantine, deceased, rings church bells when in the mood. But poltergeists are angry; their rage is the source of their power.
        Elvis could never be a poltergeist. He is a sweet spirit.
        The wintry morning ticked toward whatever disaster might be coming. Recently I had learned that really brainy guys divide the day into units amounting to one-millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, which made each whole second that I dithered seem to be an unconscionable waste of time.
        I wandered out of the receiving room, from cloister to grand cloister, thereafter into other wings of the abbey, trusting that my intuition would lead me toward some clue to the source of the pending violence that had drawn the bodachs.
        No offense intended, but my intuition is better than yours. Maybe you took an umbrella to work on a sunny day and needed it by afternoon. Maybe you declined to date an apparently ideal man, for reasons you didn't understand, only to see him on the evening news, months later, arrested for having sexual relations with his pet llama. Maybe you bought a lottery ticket, using the date of your last proctological examination to select your numbers, and won ten million bucks. My intuition is still way better than yours.
        The spookiest aspect of my intuition is what I call psychic magnetism. In Pico Mundo, when I had needed to find someone who was not where I expected him to be, I kept his name or face in mind while driving at random from street to street. Usually I found him within minutes.
        Psychic magnetism isn't always reliable. Nothing is one hundred percent reliable this side of paradise, except that your cellphone provider will