Odd Thomas: You Are Destined to Be Together Forever Read Online Free PDF Page A

faces of a number of pretty girls. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Of course it’s
poltergeist.
”
    “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said.
    “I don’t. We’re not talking about what happened up there. We’re just talking about a word.”
    “Well,” I said, “if it wasn’t a pollinosis up there, then what was it?”
    “Hay fever,” Stormy said, defining the word
pollinosis.
    “Poltergeist,” Roberta repeated. “But we ain’t never gonna say what it was, if we know what’s good for us.”
    “Polonium,”
I suggested.
    Stormy said, “A radioactive element.”
    The battered woman continued: “What we best say is Kurt done trashed the room while alive. Knocked me around some, too, give me all these bruises, black eye. Then he tried takin’ Kristen out to the shed, to the old cold cellar deep down under, where he done killed poor Hannah and hung her body, where he’d soon of killed and hung me, too. We say how I caught up with him, me all crazy with fear, and my mind snapped, and I chopped him to save Kristen.”
    Beginning to shake violently again, Roberta broke into tears.
    Kristen put an arm around her and said, “You saved me.”
    In the house, all had gone quiet.
    Before either of the women could start to wonder why Stormy and I had shown up in the first place, my girl said, “It’s over now. You two wait here. We’ll drive out to the highway, where there’s cell-phone service, and we’ll call the police.”
    In my experience, the spirits of truly evil people didn’t linger long in this world, if at all. When they were reluctant to cross to the Other Side, they were soon
taken
across against their will, as if by a bill collector for some lender to whom they owed a big debt.
    Because I couldn’t share that knowledge with these women without blowing my fry-cook cover, I worried that we were leaving them in a state of high anxiety. “Will you be all right here? The sun’s pretty hot. You could move onto the shade of the porch. It’ll be safe on the porch.”
    “I’ll keep myself right here,” Roberta said, “and to hell with the porch.”
    “It’s over now,” I assured them. “It really is. Or you could move into the shade of the cottonwoods. I mean, if you don’t think the porch is safe. But it is safe. The porch, I mean.”
    Kristen regarded me with a mix of pity and exasperation. To Stormy, she said, “Do you usually drive or does he?”
    “I will,” Stormy said. “Let’s go, Oddie.”
    Stormy and I started toward the cottonwoods, but then I had to hurry back to Roberta to return her rolling pin. I didn’t look at Kristen again.

Six
    While Stormy drove us to the fairground, I called Chief Wyatt Porter, who was something of a surrogate father to me, and told him what had happened, when, and where. As usual, he would do his best to keep me out of the official story.
    In the fairground parking lot, Stormy wanted to sit in silence, with the windows up and the air conditioner running. We watched the late-afternoon light darkle from peach to apricot to cherry, and after a few minutes she closed her eyes, whereupon I looked not at the colorful western sky but at her.
    Eventually she said, “When high school’s over and real life starts, can you go on being a fry cook?”
    “Sure. Why not?”
    “With everything…everything else in your life?”
    “Because of everything else, being a fry cook keeps me sane.”
    “Sooner or later, it’s all going to overwhelm you—what you see, what you can do, what you are.”
    “I’m getting a better handle on it all the time,” I assured her. “If my messed-up parents couldn’t drive me crazy, I’m not going to go nuts just because I can see the lingering dead.”
    “And have prophetic dreams.”
    “Not a big deal.”
    “And have psychic magnetism,” she said, referring to another gift of mine that played no role in that day’s adventure.
    After a silence, I said, “Maybe what you’re really wondering is if