Odd Thomas Series Books 1-5. Dean Koontz

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СКАЧАТЬ You must give it to that girl of yours. If properly presented, a single rose can express a suitor’s feelings more clearly than a bouquet.”

      She snipped off eight inches of stem with the bloom.

      I held the flower not far below its receptacle, pinching the stem with thumb and forefinger, between the highest pair of thorns.

      Glancing at my wristwatch, I saw that the lulling sun and the perfumed flowers only made time seem to pass lazily, when in fact it raced away. Robertson’s kill buddy might even now be driving to his rendezvous with infamy.

      Moving along the rosarium with a queenly grace and a smile of royal beneficence, admiring the nodding heads of her colorful subjects, my mother said, “I’m so glad you came to visit, dear. What is the occasion?”

      At her side yet half a step behind her, I said, “I don’t know exactly. I’ve got this problem—”

      “We allow no problems here,” she said in a tone of gentle remonstration. “From the front walk to the back fence, this house and its grounds are a worry-free zone.”

      Aware of the risks, I had nonetheless led us into dangerous territory. The decomposed granite under my feet might as well have been sucking quicksand.

      I didn’t know how else to proceed. I didn’t have time to play our game by her rules.

      “There’s something I need to remember or something I should do,” I told her, “but I’m blocked on it. Intuition brought me here because ... I think somehow you can help me figure out what I’ve overlooked.”

      To her, my words could have been barely more comprehensible than gibberish. Like my father, she knows nothing of my supernatural gift.

      As a young child, I had realized that if I complicated her life with the truth of my condition, the strain of this knowledge would be the death of her. Or the death of me.

      Always, she has sought a life utterly without stress, without contention. She acknowledges no duty to another, no responsibility for anyone but herself.

      She would never call this selfishness. To her it’s self-defense, for she finds the world enormously more demanding than she is able to tolerate.

      If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown. Consequently, she manages the world with all the cold calculation of a ruthless autocrat, and preserves her precarious sanity by spinning around herself a cocoon of indifference.

      “Maybe if we could just talk for a while,” I said. “Maybe then I could figure out why I came here, why I thought you could help me.”

      Her mood can shift in an instant. The lady of the roses was too frail to handle this challenge, and that sunny persona retreated to make way for an angry goddess.

      My mother regarded me with pinched eyes, her lips compressed and bloodless, as if with only a fierce look she could send me away.

      In ordinary circumstances, that look alone would indeed have dispatched me.

      A sun of nuclear ferocity rose toward its apex, however, rapidly bringing us nearer to the hour of the gun. I dared not return to the hot streets of Pico Mundo without a name or a purpose that would focus my psychic magnetism.

      When she realized that I would not immediately leave her to the comfort of her roses, she spoke in a voice as cold and brittle as ice: “He was shot in the head, you know.”

      This statement mystified me, yet it seemed to have an uncanny connection to the approaching atrocity that I hoped to prevent.

      “Who?” I asked.

      “John F. Kennedy.” She indicated the namesake rose. “They shot him in the head and blew his brains out.”

      “Mother,” I said, though I seldom use that word in conversation with her, “this is different. You’ve got to help me this time. People will die if you don’t.”

      Perhaps that was the worst thing that I could have said. She didn’t possess the emotional capacity to assume responsibility for the lives of others.

      She seized the rose that she had cut for me, gripped it by the bloom and tore it out of my hand.

      Because I failed to release the rose quickly enough, the stem ripped between my fingers, and a thorn pierced the pad of my thumb, broke off in the flesh.

      She crushed the bloom and threw it on the ground. She turned away from me and strode toward the house.

      I would not relent. I caught up with her, moved at her side, pleading for a few minutes of conversation that might clarify my thoughts and help me understand why I had come here, of all places, at this mortal hour.

      She hurried, and I hurried with her. By the time she reached the steps to the back porch, she had broken into a run, the skirt of her sundress rustling like wings, one hand on her bonnet to hold it on her head.

      The screen door slammed behind her as she disappeared into the house. I stopped on the porch, reluctant to go farther.

      Although I regretted the need to harass her, I felt harassed myself, and desperate.

      Calling to her through the screen, I said, “I’m not going away. I can’t this time. I have nowhere to go.”

      She didn’t answer me. Beyond the screen door, a curtained kitchen lay in shadows, too still to be harboring my tormented mother. She’d gone deeper into the house.

      “I’ll be here on the porch,” I shouted. “I’ll be waiting right here. All day if I have to.”

      Heart hammering, I sat on the porch floor, my feet on the top step, facing away from the kitchen door.

      Later, I would realize that I must have come to her house with the subconscious intention of triggering precisely this response and driving her quickly to her ultimate defense against responsibility. The gun.

      At that moment, however, confusion was my companion, and clarity seemed far beyond my reach.

       CHAPTER 53

      THE SHANK OF THE THORN PROTRUDED from my thumb. I plucked it free, but still the bleeding puncture burned as if contaminated by an acid.

      To a shameful degree, sitting there on my mother’s porch steps, I felt sorry for myself, as though it had been not a single thorn but a crown’s worth.

      As a child, when I had a toothache, I could expect no maternal pampering. My mother always called my father or a neighbor to take me to the dentist, while she retreated to her bedroom and locked her door. She sought refuge there for a day or two, until she felt certain I would have no lingering complaint that she might need to address.

      The slightest fever or sore throat that troubled me was a crisis with which she could not deal. At seven, afflicted by appendicitis, I collapsed at school and was rushed from there to the hospital; had my condition deteriorated at home, she might have left me to die in my room, while she occupied СКАЧАТЬ