Brother Odd

looked like whichever no-nonsense grandmother had passed down to George S. Patton the genes that had made him a great general.
        I regretted having to let the air out of her plan after she'd evidently spent some time inflating it.
        "Sister, we don't know for sure that the violence, when it happens, will happen here at the school."
        She looked puzzled. "But it's already started. Brother Timothy, God rest his soul."
        "We think it's started with Brother Tim, but we don't have a corpse."
        She winced at the word corpse.
        "We don't have a body," I amended, "so we don't know for sure what's happened. All we know is that the bodachs are drawn to the kids."
        "And the children are here."
        "But what if you move the kids in town to a hospital, a school, a church, and when we get them settled in, the bodachs show up there because that's where the violence is going to go down, not here at St. Bart's."
        She was as good an analyst of strategy and tactics as Patton's grandma might have been. "So we would have been serving the forces of darkness when we thought we'd been thwarting them."
        "Yes, ma'am. It's possible."
        She studied me so intently that I convinced myself I could feel her periwinkle-blue stare riffling through the contents of my brain as if I had a simple file drawer between my ears.
        "I'm so sorry for you, Oddie," she murmured.
        I shrugged.
        She said, "You know just enough so that, morally, you've got to act… but not enough to be certain exactly what to do."
        "In the crunch, it clarifies," I said.
        "But only at the penultimate moment, only then?"
        "Yes, ma'am. Only then."
        "So when the moment comes, the crunch-it's always a plunge into chaos."
        "Well, ma'am, whatever it is, it's never not memorable."
        Her right hand touched her pectoral cross, and her gaze traveled across the posters on her walls.
        After a moment, I said, "I'm here to be with the kids, to walk the halls, the rooms, see if I can get a better feel for what might be coming. If that's all right."
        "Yes. Of course."
        I rose from the chair. "Sister Angela, there's something I want you to do, but I'd rather you didn't ask me why."
        "What is it?"
        "Be sure all the doors are dead-bolted, all the windows locked. And instruct the sisters not to go outside."
        I preferred not to tell her about the creature that I had seen in the storm. For one thing, on that day I stood in her office I did not yet have words to describe the apparition. Also, when nerves are too frayed, clear thinking unravels, so I needed her to be alert to danger without being in a continuous state of alarm.
        Most important, I didn't want her to worry that she had allied herself with someone who might be not merely a fry cook, and not merely a fry cook with a sixth sense, but a totally insane fry cook with a sixth sense.
        "All right," she said. "We'll be sure we're locked, and there's no reason to go out in that storm, anyway."
        "Would you call Abbot Bernard and ask him to do the same thing? For the remaining hours of the Divine Office, the brothers shouldn't go outside to enter the church through the grand cloister. Tell them to use the interior door between the abbey and the church."
        In these solemn circumstances, Sister Angela had been robbed of her most effective instrument of interrogation: that lovely smile sustained in patient and intimidating silence.
        The storm drew her attention. As ominous as ashes, clouds of snow smoked across the window.
        She looked up at me again. "Who's out there, Oddie?"
        "I don't know yet," I replied, which was true to the extent that I could not name what I had seen. "But they mean to do us harm."

CHAPTER 19
        
        WEARING AN IMAGINARY DOG COLLAR, I LET intuition have my leash, and was led in a circuitous route through the ground-floor rooms and hallways of the school, to a set of stairs, to the second floor, where the Christmas decorations did not inspire in me a merry mood.
        When I stopped at the open door to Room 32, I suspected that I had deceived myself. I had not given myself to intuition, after all, but had been guided by an unconscious desire to repeat the experience of the previous night, when it seemed that Stormy had spoken to me through sleeping Annamarie by way of mute