Odd Thomas

unimportant, but he secured from her a promise that she would look up the original cost and let him know the figure.
        He offered me a ride home, but I said, "Quickest for me is just to go back the way I came."
        I left the house through the hole where the glass door had been, walked around the pool instead of splashing through it, climbed the slumpstone wall, crossed the narrow alleyway, climbed the wrought-iron fence, walked the lawn around another house, crossed Marigold Lane, and returned to my apartment above the garage.
        

CHAPTER 4
        
        I SEE DEAD PEOPLE. BUT THEN, BY GOD, I DO something about it.
        This proactive strategy is rewarding but dangerous. Some days it results in an unusual amount of laundry.
        After I changed into clean jeans and a fresh white T-shirt, I went around to Mrs. Sanchez's back porch to confirm for her that she was visible, which I did every morning. Through the screen door, I saw her sitting at the kitchen table.
        I knocked, and she said, "Can you hear me?"
        "Yes, ma'am," I said. "I hear you just fine."
        "Who do you hear?"
        "You. Rosalia Sanchez."
        "Come in then, Odd Thomas," she said.
        Her kitchen smelled like chiles and corn flour, fried eggs and jack cheese. I'm a terrific short-order cook, but Rosalia Sanchez is a natural-born chef.
        Everything in her kitchen is old and well worn but scrupulously clean. Antiques are more valuable when time and wear have laid a warm patina on them. Mrs. Sanchez's kitchen is as beautiful as the finest antique, with the priceless patina of a life's work and of cooking done with pleasure and with love.
        I sat across the table from her.
        Her hands were clasped tightly around a coffee mug to keep them from shaking. "You're late this morning, Odd Thomas."
        Invariably she uses both names. I sometimes suspect she thinks Odd is not a name but a royal title, like Prince or Duke, and that protocol absolutely requires that it be used by commoners when they address me.
        Perhaps she thinks that I am the son of a deposed king, reduced to tattered circumstances but nonetheless deserving of respect.
        I said, "Late, yes, I'm sorry. It's been a strange morning."
        She doesn't know about my special relationship with the deceased. She's got enough problems without having to worry about dead people making pilgrimages to her garage.
        "Can you see what I'm wearing?" she asked worriedly.
        "Pale yellow slacks. A dark yellow and brown blouse."
        She turned sly. "Do you like the butterfly barrette in my hair, Odd Thomas?"
        "There's no barrette. You're holding your hair back with a yellow ribbon. It looks nice that way."
        As a young woman, Rosalia Sanchez must have been remarkably beautiful. At sixty-three, having added a few pounds, having acquired the seams and crinkles of seasoning experience, she possessed the deeper beauty of the beatified: the sweet humility and the tenderness that time can teach, the appealing glow of care and character that, in their last years on this earth, no doubt marked the faces of those who were later canonized as saints.
        "When you didn't come at the usual time," she said, "I thought you'd been here but couldn't see me. And I thought I couldn't see you anymore, either, that when I became invisible to you, you also became invisible to me."
        "Just late," I assured her.
        "It would be terrible to be invisible."
        "Yeah, but I wouldn't have to shave as often."
        When discussing invisibility, Mrs. Sanchez refused to be amused. Her saintly face found a frown of disapproval.
        "When I've worried about becoming invisible, I've always thought I'd be able to see other people, they just wouldn't be able to see or hear me."
        "In those old Invisible Man movies," I said, "you could see his breath when he went out in really cold weather."
        "But if other people become invisible to me when I'm invisible to them," she continued, "then it's like I'm the last person in the world, all of it empty except for me wandering around alone."
        She shuddered. Clasped in her hands, the coffee mug knocked against the table.
        When Mrs. Sanchez talks about invisibility, she's talking about death, but I'm not sure she realizes this.
        If the true first year of the new millennium, 2001, had not been good for the