Odd Thomas

world in general, it had been bleak for Rosalia Sanchez in particular, beginning with the loss of her husband, Herman, on a night in April. She had gone to sleep next to the man whom she had loved for more than forty years - and awakened beside a cold cadaver. For Herman, death had come as gently as it ever does, in sleep, but for Rosalia, the shock of waking with the dead had been traumatic.
        Later that year, still mourning her husband, she had not gone with her three sisters and their families on a long-planned vacation to New England. On the morning of September 11, she awakened to the news that their return flight out of Boston had been hijacked and used as a guided missile in one of the most infamous acts in history.
        Although Rosalia had wanted children, God had given her none. Herman, her sisters, her nieces, her nephews had been the center of her life. She lost them all while sleeping.
        Sometime between that September and that Christmas, Rosalia had gone a little crazy with grief. Quietly crazy, because she had lived her entire life quietly and knew no other way to be.
        In her gentle madness, she would not acknowledge that they were dead. They had merely become invisible to her. Nature in a quirky mood had resorted to a rare phenomenon that might at any moment be reversed, like a magnetic field, making all her lost loved ones visible to her again.
        The details of all the disappearances of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle were known to Rosalia Sanchez. She'd read every book that she could find on the subject.
        She knew about the inexplicable, apparently overnight vanishment of hundreds of thousands of Mayans from the cities of Copan, Piedras Negras, and Palenque in a.d. 610.
        If you allowed Rosalia to bend your ear, she would nearly break it off in an earnest discussion of historical disappearances. For instance, I know more than I care to know and immeasurably more than I need to know about the evaporation, to a man, of a division of three thousand Chinese soldiers near Nanking, in 1939.
        "Well," I said, "at least you're visible this morning. You've got another whole day of visibility to look forward to, and that's a blessing."
        Rosalia's biggest fear is that on the same day when her loved ones are made visible again, she herself will vanish.
        Though she longs for their return, she dreads the consequences.
        She crossed herself, looked around her homey kitchen, and at last smiled. "I could bake something."
        "You could bake anything ," I said.
        "What would you like me to bake for you, Odd Thomas?"
        "Surprise me." I consulted my watch. "I better get to work."
        She accompanied me to the door and gave me a good-bye hug. "You are a good boy, Odd Thomas."
        "You remind me of my Granny Sugars," I said, "except you don't play poker, drink whiskey, or drive fast cars."
        "That's sweet," she said. "You know, I thought the world and all of Pearl Sugars. She was so feminine but also…"
        "Kick-ass," I suggested.
        "Exactly. At the church's strawberry festival one year, there was this rowdy man, mean on drugs or drink. Pearl put him down with just two punches."
        "She had a terrific left hook."
        "Of course, first she kicked him in that special tender place. But I think she could have handled him with the punches alone. I've sometimes wished I could be more like her."
        From Mrs. Sanchez's house, I walked the six blocks to the Pico Mundo Grille, which is in the heart of downtown Pico Mundo.
        Every minute that it advanced from sunrise, the morning became hotter. The gods of the Mojave don't know the meaning of the word moderation.
        Long morning shadows grew shorter before my eyes, retreating from steadily warming lawns, from broiling blacktop, from concrete sidewalks as suitable for the frying of eggs as the griddle that I would soon be attending.
        The air lacked the energy to move. Trees hung limp. Birds either retreated to leafy roosts or flew higher than they had at dawn, far up where thinner air held the heat less tenaciously.
        In this wilted stillness, between Mrs. Sanchez's house and the Grille, I saw three shadows moving. All were independent of a source, for they were not ordinary shadows.
        When I was much younger, I called these entities shades. But that is just another word for ghosts, and they are