Odds Are Good Read Online Free

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    A pigeon fluttered onto the lawn nearby. Jamie started, then frowned. His father had raised homing pigeons, and the two of them had spent many happy hours together, tending his flock. But the sight of the bird now, with the loss of his father still so fresh in his mind, only stirred up memories he wasn’t yet ready to deal with.
    He looked at the house again and was struck by an odd feeling: while this wasn’t home, coming here had somehow taken him one step closer to finding it. That feeling had to do with the horn, of course; of that much he was certain.
    Jamie was seven the first time he had seen the horn hanging on the wall of his uncle’s study.
    â€œNarwhal,” said his uncle, following the boy’s gaze. “It’s a whale with a horn growing out of the front of its head.” He put one hand to his forehead and thrust out a finger to illustrate, as if Jamie were some sort of an idiot. “Sort of a seagoing unicorn,” he continued. “Except, of course, that it’s real instead of imaginary. I’d rather you didn’t touch it. I paid dearly to get it.”
    Jamie had stepped back behind his father without speaking. He hadn’t dared to say what was on his mind. Grown-ups, especially his uncle, didn’t like to be told they were wrong.
    But his uncle
was
wrong. The horn had not come from a narwhal, not come from the sea at all.
    It was the horn of a genuine unicorn.
    Jamie couldn’t have explained how he knew this was so. But he did, as surely—and mysteriously—as his father’s pigeons knew their way home. Thinking of that moment of certainty now, he was reminded of those stormy nights when he and his father had watched lightning crackle through the summer sky. For an instant, everything would be outlined in light. Then, just as quickly, the world would be plunged back into darkness, with nothing remaining but a dazzling memory.
    That was how it had been with the horn, five years ago.
    And now Jamie was twelve, and his father was dead, and he had been sent to live with this rich, remote man who had always frightened him so much.
    Oddly, that fear didn’t come from his uncle. Despite his stern manner, the man was always quiet and polite with Jamie. Rather he had learned the fear from his father. The two men had not been together often, for his uncle frequently disappeared on mysterious “business trips” lasting weeks or even months on end. But as Jamie had watched his father grow nervous and unhappy whenever his brother was due to return, he came to sense that the one man had some strange hold over the other.
    It frightened him.
    Yet as scared as he was, as sad and lonely over the death of his father, one small corner of his soul was burning now with a fierce joy because he was finally going to be close to the horn.
    Of course, in a way, he had never been apart from it. Ever since that first sight, five years ago, the horn had shimmered in his memory. It was the first thing he thought of when he woke up, and the last at night when he went to sleep. It was a gleaming beacon in his dreams, reassuring him no matter how cruel and ugly a day might have been, there was a reason to go on, a reason to be. His one glimpse of the horn had filled him with a sense of beauty and rightness so powerful it had carried him through these five years.
    Even now, while his uncle was droning on about the household rules, he saw it again in that space in the back of his head where it seemed to reside. Like a shaft of never-ending light, it tapered through the darkness of his mind, wrist thick at its base, ice-pick sharp at its tip, a spiraled wonder of icy, pearly whiteness. And while Jamie’s uncle was telling him the study was off-limits, Jamie was trying to figure out how quickly he could slip in there to see the horn again.
    For once again his uncle was wrong. No place that held the horn could be off-limits for him. It was too deeply a part of