Odd Thomas

entered St. Bart's through the main door. The narthex is a softly lighted and welcoming space, paneled in cherry wood stained dark with ruby highlights.
        Instead of proceeding into the nave, we turned immediately to the right and stepped up to a locked door. Stormy produced a key and let us into the bottom of the bell tower.
        Father Sean Llewellyn, rector of St. Bart's, is Stormy's uncle. He knows she loves the tower, and he indulges her with a key.
        When the door fell quietly shut behind us, the sweet fragrance of incense faded, and a faint musty smell arose.
        The tower stairs were dark. Unerringly, I found her lips for a quick but sweeter kiss than the first, before she switched on the light.
        "Bad boy."
        "Good lips."
        "Somehow it's too strange… getting tongue in church."
        "Technically, we're not in the church," I said.
        "And I suppose technically that wasn't tongue."
        "I'm sure there's a more correct medical term for it."
        "There's a medical term for you," she said.
        "What's that?" I wondered as, carrying the hamper, I followed her up the spiral staircase.
        "Priapic."
        "What's it mean?"
        "Perpetually horny."
        "You wouldn't want a doctor to cure that, would you?"
        "Don't need a doctor. Folk medicine offers a reliable cure."
        "Yeah? Like what?"
        "A swift, hard blow to the source of the problem."
        I winced and said, "You are no Florence Nightingale. I'm going to start wearing a cup."
        At the top of the spiral stairs, a door opened to the belfry.
        A carillon of three bronze bells, all large but of different sizes, hung from the ceiling in the center of this lofty space. A six-foot-wide catwalk encircled them.
        The bells had rung for vespers at seven and would not ring again until morning Mass.
        Three sides of the belfry were open above a waist-high wall, presenting splendid views of Pico Mundo, the Maravilla Valley, and the hills beyond. We stationed ourselves at the west side, the better to enjoy the sunset.
        From the hamper, Stormy produced a Tupperware container filled with shelled walnuts that she had deep-fried and seasoned lightly with both salt and sugar. She fed me one. Delicious - both the walnut and being fed by Stormy.
        I opened a bottle of good Merlot and poured while she held the wineglasses.
        This was why earlier I had not finished the glass of Cabernet: As much as I love Little Ozzie, I would rather drink with Stormy.
        We don't eat in this perch every evening, only two or three times a month, when Stormy needs to be high above the world. And closer to Heaven.
        "To Ozzie," Stormy said, raising her glass in a toast. "With the hope that one day there'll be an end to all his losses."
        I didn't ask what she meant by that because I thought perhaps I knew. By the affliction of his weight, there is much in life that Ozzie has been denied and may never experience.
        Citrus-orange near the western horizon, blood-orange across the ascending vault, the sky darkened to purple directly overhead. In the east, the first stars of the night would soon begin to appear.
        "The sky's so clear," Stormy said. "We'll be able to see Cassiopeia tonight."
        She referred to a northern constellation named after a figure of classic mythology, but Cassiopeia was also the name of Stormy's mother, who had died when Stormy was seven years old. Her father had perished in the same plane crash.
        With no family but her uncle, the priest, she had been placed for adoption. When in three months the adoption failed for good reason, she made it explicitly clear that she didn't want new parents, only the return of those whom she had loved and lost.
        Until the age of seventeen, when she graduated from high school, she was raised in an orphanage. Thereafter, until she was eighteen, she had lived under the legal guardianship of her uncle.
        For the niece of a priest, Stormy has a strange relationship with God. There is anger in it - always a little, sometimes a lot.
        "What about Fungus Man?" she asked.
        "Terrible Chester doesn't like him."
        "Terrible Chester doesn't like anyone."
        "I think Chester's even afraid of him."
        "Now that is news."
        "He's a hand grenade with the pin already pulled."
        "Terrible