Odd Thomas Read Online Free Page B

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 sighed. He settled upon the only chair in the room: a child-size, purple upholstered number on which Barney the dinosaur’s torso and head served as the back support. He appeared to be sitting in Barney’s lap. “Son, you sure complicate my life.”
    “
They
complicate your life, sir, and mine much more than yours,” I said, meaning the dead.
    “True enough. If I were you, I’d have gone crazy years ago.”
    “I’ve considered it,” I admitted.
    “Now listen, Odd, I want to find a way to keep you out of the courtroom on this one, if it comes to that.”
    “I want to find a way, too.”
    Few people know any of my strange secrets. Only Stormy Llewellyn knows all of them.
    I want anonymity, a simple and quiet life, or at least as simple as the spirits will allow.
    The chief said, “I think he’s going to give us a confession in the presence of his attorney. There may be no trial. But if there is, we’ll say that he opened his wallet to pay some bet he’d made with you, maybe on a baseball game, and the Polaroids of Penny fell out.”
    “I can sell that,” I assured him.
    “I’ll speak with Horton Barks. He’ll