Brother Odd

am these days, and that I have never claimed to be clairvoyant.
        Maybe my fear of fire was, in this case, like my suspicion of the Zorro impersonators: misguided.
        Although a survey of selected mechanical systems had given me no reason to believe that impending flames had drawn the bodachs to St. Bart's School, I remained concerned that fire was a danger. No other threat seemed to pose such a challenge to a large community of the mentally and physically disabled.
        Earthquakes were not as common or as powerful in the mountains of California as in the valleys and the flatlands. Besides, the new abbey had been built to the standards of a fortress, and the old one had been reconstructed with such diligence that it should be able to ride out violent and extended temblors.
        This high in the Sierra, bedrock lay close underfoot; in some places, great granite bones breached the surface. Our two buildings were anchored in bedrock.
        Here we have no tornadoes, no hurricanes, no active volcanoes, no killer bees.
        We do have something more dangerous than all those things. We have people.
        The monks in the abbey and the nuns in the convent seemed to be unlikely villains. Evil can disguise itself in piety and charity, but I had difficulty picturing any of the brothers or sisters running amok with a chain saw or a machine gun.
        Even Brother Timothy, on a dangerous sugar high and crazed by Kit Kat guilt, didn't scare me.
        The glowering Russian staying on the second floor of the guesthouse was a more deserving object of suspicion. He did not wear a porkpie hat, but he had a dour demeanor and secretive ways.
        My months of peace and contemplation were at an end.
        The demands of my gift, the silent but insistent pleas of the lingering dead, the terrible losses that I had not always been able to prevent: These things had driven me to the seclusion of St. Bartholomew's Abbey. I needed to simplify my life.
        I had not come to this high redoubt forever. I had only asked God for a time-out, which had been granted, but now the clock was ticking again.
        When I backed out of the heating-and-cooling-system schema, the computer monitor went to black with a simple white menu. In that more reflective screen, I saw movement behind me.
        For seven months, the abbey had been a still point in the river, where I turned in a lazy gyre, always in sight of the same familiar shore, but now the true rhythm of the river asserted itself. Sullen, untamed, and intractable, it washed away my sense of peace and washed me toward my destiny once more.
        Expecting a hard blow or the thrust of something sharp, I spun the office chair around, toward the source of the reflection in the computer screen.

CHAPTER 4
        
        MY SPINE HAD GONE TO ICE AND MY MOUTH to dust in fear of a nun. Batman would have sneered at me, and Odysseus would have cut me no slack, but I would have told them that I had never claimed to be a hero. At heart, I am only a fry cook, currently unemployed.
        In my defense, I must note that the worthy who had entered the computer room was not just any nun, but Sister Angela, whom the others call Mother Superior. She has the sweet face of a beloved grandmother, yes, but the steely determination of the Terminator.
        Of course I mean the good Terminator from the second movie in the series.
        Although Benedictine sisters usually wear gray habits or black, these nuns wear white because they are a twice-reformed order of a previously reformed order of post-reform Benedictines, although they would not want to be thought of as being aligned with either Trappist or Cistercian principles.
        You don't need to know what that means. God Himself is still trying to figure it out.
        The essence of all this reformation is that these sisters are more orthodox than those modern nuns who seem to consider themselves social workers who don't date. They pray in Latin, never eat meat on Friday, and with a withering stare would silence the voice and guitar of any folksinger who dared to offer a socially relevant tune during Mass.
        Sister Angela says she and her sisters hark back to a time in the first third of the previous century when the Church was confident of its timelessness and when "the bishops weren't crazy." Although she wasn't born until 1945 and never knew the era she admires, she says that she would