Odd Thomas

cross the street. The bodachs at his sides and in his wake were difficult to count as they swarmed over one another, but I would have bet a week's wages that they numbered no fewer than twenty.
        

CHAPTER 6
        
        ALTHOUGH HER EYES ARE NEITHER GOLDEN NOR heavenly blue, Terri Stambaugh has the vision of an angel, for she sees through you and knows your truest heart, but loves you anyway, in spite of all the ways that you are fallen from a state of grace.
        She's forty-one, therefore old enough to be my mother. She is not, however, eccentric enough to be my mother. Not by half.
        Terri inherited the Grille from her folks and runs it to the high standard that they established. She's a fair boss and a hard worker.
        Her only offbeat quality is her obsession with Elvis and all things Elvisian.
        Because she enjoyed having her encyclopedic knowledge tested, I said, "Nineteen sixty-three."
        "Okay."
        "May."
        "What day?"
        I picked one at random: "The twenty-ninth."
        "That was a Wednesday," Terri said.
        The lunch rush had passed. My workday had ended at two o'clock. We were in a booth at the back of the Grille, waiting for a second-shift waitress, Viola Peabody, to bring our lunch.
        I had been relieved at the short-order station by Poke Barnet. Thirty-some years older than I am, lean and sinewy, Poke has a Mojave-cured face and gunfighter eyes. He is as silent as a Gila monster sunning on a rock, as self-contained as any cactus.
        If Poke had lived a previous life in the Old West, he had more likely been a marshal with a lightning-quick draw, or even one of the Dalton gang, rather than a chuck-wagon cook. With or without past-life experience, however, he was a good man at grill and griddle.
        "On Wednesday, May 29, 1963," Terri said, "Priscilla graduated from Immaculate Conception High School in Memphis."
        "Priscilla Presley?"
        "She was Priscilla Beaulieu back then. During the graduation ceremony, Elvis waited in a car outside the school."
        "He wasn't invited?"
        "Sure he was. But his presence in the auditorium would have been a major disruption."
        "When were they married?"
        "Too easy. May 1, 1967, shortly before noon, in a suite in the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas."
        Terri was fifteen when Elvis died. He wasn't a heartthrob in those days. By then he had become a bloated caricature of himself in embroidered, rhinestone-spangled jumpsuits more appropriate for Liberace than for the bluesy singer with a hard rhythm edge who had first hit the top of the charts in 1956, with "Heartbreak Hotel."
        Terri hadn't yet been born in 1956. Her fascination with Presley had not begun until sixteen years after his death.
        The origins of this obsession are in part mysterious to her. One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day.
        I suspect that Terri is obsessed with Elvis partly because, on an unconscious level, she has been aware that he has moved among us here in Pico Mundo at least since my childhood, perhaps ever since his death, a truth that I revealed to her only a year ago. I suspect she is a latent medium, that she may sense his spiritual presence, and that as a consequence she is powerfully drawn to the study of his life and career.
        I have no idea why the King of Rock-'n'-Roll has not moved on to the Other Side but continues, after so many years, to haunt this world. After all, Buddy Holly hasn't hung around; he's gotten on with death in the proper fashion.
        And why does Elvis linger in Pico Mundo instead of in Memphis or Vegas?
        According to Terri, who knows everything there is to know about all the days of Elvis's busy forty-two years, he never visited our town when he was alive. In all the literature of the paranormal, no mention is made of such a geographically dislocated haunting.
        We were puzzling over this mystery, not for the first time, when Viola Peabody brought our late lunch. Viola is as black as Bertie Orbic is round, as thin as Helen Arches is flat-footed.
        Depositing our plates on the