Odd Thomas

she'll wait until Tuesday or Wednesday to treat herself to one. She insists that the wait makes the float taste better.
        My point of view is this: If you like root-beer floats so much, have one on Monday, another on Tuesday, and a third on Wednesday.
        According to Stormy, if I live by this philosophy too long, I'm going to be one of those eight-hundred-pound men who, when they fall ill, must be extracted from their homes by construction crews and cranes.
        "If you want to suffer the humiliation of being hauled to the hospital on a flatbed truck," she once said, "don't expect me to sit on your great bloated gut like Jiminy Cricket on the brow of the whale, singing 'When You Wish Upon a Star.'"
        I'm reasonably sure that in Disney's Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket never sits on the brow of the whale. In fact I'm not convinced that he himself encounters the whale.
        If I were to make this observation to Stormy, however, she would favor me with one of those wry looks that means Are you hopelessly stupid or just being pissy! This is a look to be avoided if not dreaded.
        As I waited there on the edge of the boy's bed, even thinking about Stormy couldn't lift my spirits. Indeed, if the grinning images of Scooby-Doo, imprinted on the sheets, didn't cheer me, perhaps nothing could.
        I kept thinking about Harlo losing his mother at six, about how his life might have been a memorial to her, about how instead he had shamed her memory.
        And I thought about Penny, of course: her life brought to such an early end, the terrible loss to her family, the enduring pain that had changed their lives forever.
        Penny put her left hand in my right and squeezed reassuringly.
        Her hand felt as real as that of a living child, as firm, as warm. I didn't understand how she could be this real to me and yet walk through walls, this real to me and yet invisible to others.
        I wept a little. Sometimes I do. I'm not embarrassed by tears. At times like this, tears exorcise emotions that would otherwise haunt me and, by their haunting, embitter me.
        Even as my vision blurred at the first shimmer of tears not yet spent, Penny clasped my hand in both of hers. She smiled, and winked as if to say, It's all right, Odd Thomas. Get it out, be rid of it.
        The dead are sensitive to the living. They have walked this path ahead of us and know our fears, our failings, our desperate hopes, and how much we cherish what cannot last. They pity us, I think, and no doubt they should.
        When my tears dried, Penny rose to her feet, smiled again, and with one hand smoothed the hair back from my brow. Good-bye, this gesture seemed to say. Thank you, and good-bye.
        She walked across the room, through the wall, into the August morning one story above the front yard - or into another realm even brighter than a Pico Mundo summer.
        A moment later, Wyatt Porter appeared in the bedroom doorway.
        Our chief of police is a big man, but he isn't threatening in appearance. With basset eyes and bloodhound jowls, his face has been affected by Earth's gravity more than has the rest of him. I've seen him move fast and decisively, but in action and in repose he seems to carry a great weight on his beefy, rounded shoulders.
        Over the years, as the low hills encircling our town have been sculpted into neighborhoods of tract houses, swelling our population, and as the meanness of an ever crueler world has crept into the last havens of civility, like Pico Mundo, perhaps Chief Porter has seen too much of human treachery. Perhaps the weight he carries is a load of memories that he would prefer to shed, but can't.
        "So here we are again," he said, entering the room.
        "Here we are," I agreed.
        "Busted patio door, busted furniture."
        "Didn't bust most of it myself. Except the lamp."
        "But you created the situation that led to it."
        "Yes, sir."
        "Why didn't you come to me, give me a chance to figure a way Harlo could entrap himself?"
        We had worked together in that fashion in the past.
        "My feeling," I said, "was that he needed to be confronted right away, that maybe he was going to do it again real soon."
        "Your feeling."
        "Yes, sir. That's what I think Penny wanted to convey. There was a quiet urgency about her."
        "Penny Kallisto."
        "Yes, sir."
        The chief