Forever Odd

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 eater-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,