Odd Hours by Dean Koontz Page A

question that Annamaria had posed to me. Stormy and I had understood, at a level more profound than mind or heart, at the level of blood and bone, that we were committed to each other at any cost.
    Although I would have given my life for my lost girl, Fate had not allowed me to make that trade. Since the bullet-shattered day in which she died, I have lived a life I don’t need.
    Don’t get me wrong. I do not seek death. I love life, and I love the world as its exquisite design is revealed in each small portion of the whole.
    No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the
idea
of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place—home—above all others.
    I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love—the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street—and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend. I don’t love them to excess, and I stand in awe of them only to the extent that an architect might stand in the receiving room of a magnificent palace, amazed and thrilled by what he sees, while knowing that all this is as nothing compared to the wondrous sights that lie beyond the next threshold.
    Since that day of death in Pico Mundo, seventeen months earlier, my life had not been mine. I had been spared for a reason I could not understand. I had known the day would come when I would give my life in the right cause.
    Will you die for me?
    Yes.
    Instantly upon hearing the fateful question, I felt that I had been waiting to hear it since Stormy’s death, and that the answer had been on my tongue before the question had been spoken.
    Although I had committed myself to this cause with no knowledge of it, I was nevertheless curious about what the men on the pier were planning, how Annamaria figured in their plans, and why she needed my protection.
    With the silver chain around my neck and the small bell pendant against my breastbone, I said, “Where is your husband?”
    “I’m not married.”
    I waited for her to say more.
    With her fork she held down a fig, and with her knife trimmed off the stem.
    “Where do you work?” I asked.
    Setting the knife aside, she said, “I don’t work.” She patted her swollen abdomen, and smiled. “I labor.”
    Surveying the modest accommodations, I said, “I suppose the rent is low.”
    “Very low. I stay here free.”
    “The people in the house are relatives?”
    “No. Before me, a poor family of three lived here free for two years, until they had saved enough to move on.”
    “So the owners are just…good people?”
    “You can’t be surprised by that.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You have known many good people in your young life.”
    I thought of Ozzie Boone, Chief Wyatt Porter and his wife, Karla, Terri Stambaugh, and all of my friends in Pico Mundo, thought of the monks at St. Bartholomew’s, of Sister Angela and the nuns who ran the orphanage and school for special-needs children.
    “Even in this rough and cynical age,” she said, “you’re neither rough nor cynical yourself.”
    “With all due respect, Annamaria, you don’t really know me.”
    “I know you well,” she disagreed.
    “How?”
    “Be patient and you’ll understand.”
    “All things in their time, huh?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I sort of think the time is now.”
    “But you are wrong.”
    “How can I help you if I don’t know what kind of fix you’re in?”
    “I’m not in a fix.”
    “Okay, then what kind of mess, what kind of pickle, what kind of trap?”
    Finished eating, she blotted her mouth with a paper napkin.
    “No mess, pickle, or trap,” she said, with a trace of amusement in her gentle voice.
    “Then what would you call it?”
    “The way of things.”
    “You’re