Odd Hours

don’t yet know they want to kill me.”
    After considering that response for a moment and being unable to make sense of it, I said, “When will they know that they want to kill you?”
    “Soon enough.”
    “I see,” I lied.
    “You will,” she said.
    Impurities in the wicks periodically caused the flames to leap, flutter, and subside. The reflections on the ceiling swelled, shrank, shivered.
    I said, “And when these guys finally realize that they want to kill you, why will they want to kill you?”
    “For the wrong reason.”
    “Okay. All right. What would the wrong reason be?”
    “Because they’ll think that I know what horror they intend to perpetrate.”
    “Do you know what horror they intend to perpetrate?”
    “Only in the most general terms.”
    “Why not share those general terms with me?”
    “Many deaths,” she said, “and much destruction.”
    “Those are some spooky terms. And way too general.”
    “My knowledge here is limited,” she said. “I’m only human, like you.”
    “Does that mean—a little bit psychic like me?”
    “Not psychic. It only means that I am human, not omniscient.”
    She had plucked all the petals from the flower, leaving only the fleshy green receptacle, the sepals that had protected the petals, a spray of stamens, and the pistil.
    I plunged into our monkey-barrel conversation once more: “When you say they’ll want to kill you for the wrong reason, that implies there’s a right reason for them to want to kill you.”
    “Not a right reason,” she corrected, “but from their point of view, a better one.”
    “And what would be that better reason?”
    At last she met my eyes. “What have I done to this flower, odd one?”
    Stormy and only Stormy had sometimes called me “odd one.”
    Annamaria smiled, as though she knew what thought had passed through my mind, what association she had triggered.
    Indicating the pile of petals, I said, “You’re just nervous, that’s all.”
    “I’m not nervous,” she said with quiet conviction. “I was not asking you why I did it, only to tell me what it is that I’ve done to the flower.”
    “You’ve trashed it.”
    “Is that what you think?”
    “Unless you’re going to make a potpourri with it.”
    “When the flower was floating in the bowl, although it had been cut from the tree, how did it look?”
    “Beautiful.”
    “Lush and alive?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “And now it looks dead.”
    “Very dead.”
    She propped her elbows on the table, rested her face in her cupped hands, and smiled. “I’m going to show you something.”
    “What?”
    “Something with the flower.”
    “All right.”
    “Not now.”
    “When?”
    “All things in their time,” she said.
    “I hope I live that long.”
    Her smile broadened, and her voice was soft with the affection of a friend. “You have a certain grace, you know.”
    I shrugged and shifted my attention to the flame within the red glass lamp between us.
    She said, “Let’s have no misunderstanding. I mean—a grace on which you can rely.”
    If she thought that she had distracted me with the flower and that I had forgotten the question that she had dodged, she was wrong. I returned to it:
    “If they don’t want to kill you right now but will want to kill you soon, and for the wrong reason—what is the right reason? I’m sorry. Excuse me. I mean, what is the better reason they might have for wanting you dead?”
    “You will know when you will know,” she said.
    “And when will I know?”
    As she replied, I answered my question in sync with her: “All things in their time.”
    Crazily, I did not believe that she was withholding information or was speaking in riddles either to deceive me or to entice me. She impressed me as being absolutely truthful.
    Furthermore, I had the sense that everything she had said had carried more meaning than I had taken from it, and that eventually, when I looked back on our dinner, I would realize that on this night, in this hour, I should have known her for who she was.
    With both hands, Annamaria picked up her mug of tea and sipped from it.
    She looked no different in this flattering lamplight from the way that she had looked in the gray light of late afternoon, on the pier. Neither beautiful nor ugly, and yet not merely plain. Petite yet somehow powerful. She had a compelling presence for reasons that I could not define, a presence that was not as magnetic as it was humbling.
    Suddenly my promise to keep her