Brother Odd

If the Mr. Hyde part of Brother John Heineman’s personality had an animus against all mentally and physically disabled people, then no child in the school was safe. Every one of them might be slated for destruction.

Common sense suggested, nonetheless, that Jacob — Let him die — remained the primary target. He would most likely either be the only victim or the first of many.

When we returned to Jacob’s room, he was for once not drawing. He sat in a straight-backed chair, and a pillow on his lap served as a hand rest when he needed it. Head bowed, intently focused, he was embroidering flowers with peach-colored thread on white fabric, perhaps a handkerchief.

At first, embroidery seemed to be an unlikely pursuit for him, but his workmanship proved to be exquisite. As I watched him finesse intricate patterns from needle and thread, I realized that this was no more remarkable — and no less — than his ability to summon detailed drawings from pencil lead with these same short broad hands and stubby fingers.

Leaving Jacob to his embroidery, I gathered with Romanovich, Knuckles, and Brother Maxwell at the only window.

Brother Maxwell had graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. For seven years, he worked as a crime reporter in Los Angeles.

The number of serious crimes was greater than the number of reporters available to cover them. Every week, scores of industrious thugs and motivated maniacs committed outrageous acts of mayhem, and discovered, to their disgruntlement, that they had been denied even so much as two inches of column space in the press.

One morning, Maxwell found himself having to choose between covering a kinky-sex murder, an extremely violent murder committed with an ax and a pick and a shovel, a murder involving cannibalism, and the assault upon and ritual disfigurement of four elderly Jewish women in a group home.

To his surprise as well as to the surprise of his colleagues, he barricaded himself in the coffee room and would not come out. He had vending machines stocked with candy bars and peanut-butter-filled cheese crackers, and he figured he could go at least a month before he might develop scurvy due to severe vitamin C deficiency.

When his editor arrived to negotiate through the barricaded door, Maxwell demanded either to have fresh orange juice delivered weekly by ladder through the third-story coffee-room window — or to be fired. After considering those options for exactly the length of time that the newspaper’s vice president of employee relations deemed necessary to avoid a wrongful-termination lawsuit, the editor fired Maxwell.

Triumphant, Maxwell vacated the coffee room, and only later, at home, with a sudden gale of laughter, realized that he simply could have quit. Journalism had come to seem not like a career but like an incarceration.

By the time he finished laughing, he decided that his petit madness had been a divine gift, a call to leave Los Angeles and to go where he could find a greater sense of community and less gang graffiti. He had become a postulant fifteen years ago, then a novice, and for a decade he had been a monk under full vows.

Now he examined the window in Jacob’s room and said, “When this building was converted from the old abbey, some of the windows on the ground floor were enlarged and replaced. They have wood muntins. But on this level, the old windows remain. They’re smaller, and they’re solid bronze-rails, muntins, everything bronze.”

“Nothin’s gonna chop or chew through those too easy,” Brother Knuckles declared.

“And the panes,” said Romanovich, “are ten-inch squares. That brute we encountered in the storm would not fit through one. Indeed, if it managed to tear out the entire window, it would still be too large to get into the room.”

I said, “The one in the cooling tower was smaller than the one that smacked down the SUV. It couldn’t get through a ten-inch pane, but it’ll fit through an open window this size.”

“Casement window, opens outward,” Brother Maxwell noted, tapping the crank handle. “Even if it smashed a pane and reached through, it would be blocking the window it was trying to open.”

“While clinging to the side of the building,” said Romanovich.

“In high wind,” Brother Maxwell said.

“Which it might be able to do,” I said, “while also keeping seven plates spinning atop seven bamboo poles.”

“Nah,” Brother Knuckles said. “Maybe three plates but not seven. We’re good here. This is good.”

Squatting beside Jacob, I said, “That’s beautiful embroidery.”

“Keeping busy,” he said, his head remaining bowed, his eyes on his work.

“Busy is good,” I said.

He said, “Busy is happy,” and I suspected that his mother had counseled him about the satisfaction and the peace that come from giving to the world whatever you are capable of contributing.

Besides, his work gave him a reason to avoid eye contact. In his twenty-five years, he had probably seen shock, disgust, contempt, and sick curiosity in too many eyes. Better not to meet any eyes except those of the nuns, and those you drew with a pencil and into which you could shade the love, the tenderness, for which you yearned.

“You’re going to be all right,” I said.

“He wants me dead.”

“What he wants and what he gets are not the same thing. Your mom called him the Neverwas because he was never there for the two of you when you needed him.”

“He’s the Neverwas, and we don’t care.”

“That’s right. He’s the Neverwas, but he’s also the Neverwill. He never will hurt you, never will get at you, not as long as I’m here, not as long as one sister or one brother is here. And they’re all here, Jacob, because you’re special, you’re precious to them, and to me.”

Raising his misshapen head, he met my eyes. He did not at once look shyly away, as always he had done previously.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m all right. Are you all right?”

“Yeah.

I’m all right. You … you’re in danger?”

Because he would know a lie, I said, “Maybe a little.”

His eyes, one higher in his tragic face than the other, were pellucid, full of timidities and courage, beautiful even in their different elevations.

His gaze sharpened as I had never seen it, as his soft voice grew softer still: “Did you accuse yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Absolution?”

“I received it.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“So you’re ready.”

“I hope I am, Jacob.”

He not only continued to meet my eyes but also seemed to search them. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what, Jacob?”

“Sorry about your girl.”

“Thank you, Jake.”

“I know what you don’t know,” he said.

“What is that?”

“I know what she saw in you,” he said, and he leaned his head on my shoulder.

He had done what few other people have ever achieved, though many may have tried: He had rendered me speechless.

I put an arm around him, and we stayed like that for a minute, neither of us needing to say anything more, because we were both all right, we were ready.

CHAPTER 48

IN THE ONLY ROOM CURRENTLY WITHOUT children in residence, Rodion Romanovich put a large attaché case on one of the beds.

The case belonged to him. Brother Leopold had earlier fetched it from the Russian’s room in the guesthouse and had brought it back in the SUV.

He opened the case, which contained two pistols nestled in the custom-molded foam interior.

Picking up one of the weapons, he said, “This is a Desert Eagle in fifty Magnum. In a forty-four Magnum or three-fifty-seven, it is a formidable beast, but the fifty Magnum makes an incredible noise. You will enjoy the noise.”

“Sir, with that in a cactus grove, you could do some heavy-duty meditation.”

“It does the job, but it has kick, Mr. Thomas, so I recommend that you take the other pistol.”

“Thank you, sir, but no thank you.”

“The other is a SIG Pro three-fifty-seven, quite manageable.”

“I don’t like guns, sir.”

“You took down those shooters in the mall, Mr. Thomas.”

“Yes, sir, but that was the first time I ever pulled a trigger, and anyway it was someone else’s gun.”

“This is someone else’s gun. It is my gun. Go ahead, take it.”

“What I usually do is just improvise.”

“Improvise what?”

“Self-defense.

If there’s not a real snake or a rubber snake around, there’s always a bucket or something.”

“I know you better now, Mr. Thomas, than I did yesterday, but in my judgment you remain in some ways a peculiar young man.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The attaché case contained two loaded magazines for each pistol. Romanovich jammed a magazine in each weapon, put the spare magazines in his pants pockets.

The case also contained a shoulder holster, but he didn’t want it. Holding the pistols, he put his hands in his coat pockets. They were deep pockets.

When he took his hands out of his pockets, the guns were no longer in them. The coat had been so well made that it hardly sagged with its burdens.

He looked at the window, checked his watch, and said, “You would not think it was just twenty past three.”

Behind the white gravecloth of churning snow, the dead-gray face of the day awaited imminent burial.

After closing the attaché case and tucking it under the bed, he said, “I sincerely hope that he is merely misguided.”

“Who, sir?”

“John Heineman. I hope he is not mad. Mad scientists are not only dangerous, they are tedious, and I have no patience for tedious people.”

To avoid interfering with the work of the brothers in the two stairwells, we rode down to the basement in the elevator. There was no elevator music. That was nice.

When all the children were in their rooms and the stairwells were secured, the monks would call the two elevators to the second floor. They would use the mother superior’s key to shut them down at that position.

If anything nefarious got into a shaft from the top or the bottom, the elevator cab itself would blockade access to the second floor.

The ceiling of each cab featured an escape panel. The brothers had already secured those panels from the inside, so nothing on the roof of the cab could enter by that route.

They seemed to have thought of everything, but they were human, and therefore they had definitely not thought of everything. If we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.

In the basement, we went to the boiler room. The gas fire-rings were hissing, and the pumps were rumbling, and there was a general happy atmosphere of Western mechanical genius about the place.

To reach John’s Mew, we could venture out into the blizzard and strive through deep drifts to the new abbey, risking encounter with an uberskeleton sans the armor of an SUV. For adventure, that route had many things to recommend it: challenging weather, terror, air so cold it would clear your head if it didn’t freeze the mucus in your sinus passages, and an opportunity to make snow angels.

The service tunnels offered an avenue without weather and with no wind shriek to cover the rattling approach of the plug-uglies. If perhaps those boneyards, however many there might be, had all gone topside, to prowl around the school in anticipation of nightfall, we would have an easy sprint to the basement of the new abbey.

I took the special wrench from the hook beside the crawl-through entrance to the service passageway, and we knelt at the steel access panel. We listened.

After half a minute, I asked, “You hear anything?”

When another half minute had passed, he said, “Nothing.”

As I put the wrench to the first of the four bolts and started to turn it, I thought I heard a soft scraping noise against the farther side of the panel.

I paused, listened, and after a while said, “Did you hear something?”

“Nothing, Mr. Thomas,” said Romanovich.

Following another half-minute of attentive listening, I rapped one knuckle against the access panel.

From beyond exploded a frenzied clitter-clatter full of rage and need and cold desire, and the eerie keening that accompanied all the frantic tap-dancing seemed to arise from three or four voices.

After tightening the bolt that I had begun to loosen, I returned the special wrench to the hook.

As we rode the elevator up to the ground floor, Romanovich said, “I regret that Mrs. Romanovich is not here.”

“For some reason, sir, I wouldn’t have thought there was a Mrs. Romanovich.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Thomas. We have been married for twenty blissful years. We share many interests. If she were here, she would so enjoy this.”

CHAPTER 49

IF ANY EXITS FROM THE SCHOOL WERE BEING monitored by skeletal sentinels, the front door, the garage doors, and the mud-room door adjacent the kitchen would be the most likely places for them to concentrate their attention.

Romanovich and I agreed to depart the building by a window in Sister Angela’s office, which was the point farthest removed from the three doors that most invited the enemy’s attention. Although the mother superior was not present, her desk lamp glowed.

Indicating the posters of George Washington, Flannery O’Connor, and Harper Lee, I said, “The sister has a riddle, sir. What shared quality does she most admire in those three people?”

He didn’t have to ask who the women were. “Fortitude,” he said. “Washington obviously had it. Ms. O’Connor suffered from lupus but refused to let it defeat her. And Ms. Lee needed fortitude to live in that place at that time, publish that book, and deal with the bigots who were angered by her portrait of them.”

“Two of them being writers, you had a librarian’s advantage.”

When I switched off the lamp and opened the drapes, Romanovich said, “It is still a total whiteout. We will be disoriented and lost ten steps from the school.”

“Not with my psychic magnetism, sir.”

“Do they still include prizes in boxes of Cracker Jack?”

With a twinge of guilt, I opened a couple of Sister Angela’s desk drawers, found a pair of scissors, and cut off six feet of drapery cord. I wrapped one end around my gloved right hand.

“When we’re outside, I’ll give you the other end, sir. Then we won’t be separated even if we’re snow-blind.”