Odd Hours by Dean Koontz Page B

in the way of things? What things are you standing in the way of?”
    “You misheard me. What lies before me is just the way of things, not a fix from which I need to be extricated.”
    Out of the shallow bowl, she retrieved one of the huge floating flowers, and she placed it on her folded napkin.
    “Then why did you ask that question, why did you give me the bell, what do you need me to do for you?”
    “Keep them from killing me,” she said.
    “Well, there you go. That sounds like a pickle to me.”
    She plucked one thick white petal from the flower and set it aside on the table.
    I said, “Who wants to kill you?”
    “The men on the pier,” she replied, plucking another petal from the flower. “And others.”
    “How many others?”
    “Innumerable.”
    “Innumerable—as in
countless,
as in the countless grains of sand on the oceans’ shores?”
    “That would be more like
infinite
. Those who want me dead can be counted, and have been, but there are too many for the number to matter.”
    “Well, I don’t know. I think it matters to me.”
    “But you’re wrong about that,” she quietly assured me.
    She continued to disassemble the flower. She had made a separate pile of half its petals.
    Her self-possession and calm demeanor did not change when she spoke of being the target of killers.
    For a while I waited for her eyes to meet mine again, but her attention remained on the flower.
    I said, “The men on the pier—who are they?”
    “I don’t know their names.”
    “Why do they want to kill you?”
    “They don’t yet know they want to kill me.”
    After considering that response for a moment and being unable to make sense of it, I said, “When will they know that they want to kill you?”
    “Soon enough.”
    “I see,” I lied.
    “You will,” she said.
    Impurities in the wicks periodically caused the flames to leap, flutter, and subside. The reflections on the ceiling swelled, shrank, shivered.
    I said, “And when these guys finally realize that they want to kill you,
why
will they want to kill you?”
    “For the wrong reason.”
    “Okay. All right. What would the wrong reason be?”
    “Because they’ll think that I know what horror they intend to perpetrate.”
    “Do you know what horror they intend to perpetrate?”
    “Only in the most general terms.”
    “Why not share those general terms with me?”
    “Many deaths,” she said, “and much destruction.”
    “Those are some spooky terms. And way too general.”
    “My knowledge here is limited,” she said. “I’m only human, like you.”
    “Does that mean—a little bit psychic like me?”
    “Not psychic. It only means that I am human, not omniscient.”
    She had plucked all the petals from the flower, leaving only the fleshy green receptacle, the sepals that had protected the petals, a spray of stamens, and the pistil.
    I plunged into our monkey-barrel conversation once more: “When you say they’ll want to kill you for the wrong reason, that implies there’s a right reason for them to want to kill you.”
    “Not a right reason,” she corrected, “but from their point of view, a better one.”
    “And what would be that better reason?”
    At last she met my eyes. “What have I done to this flower, odd one?”
    Stormy and only Stormy had sometimes called me “odd one.”
    Annamaria smiled, as though she knew what thought had passed through my mind, what association she had triggered.
    Indicating the pile of petals, I said, “You’re just nervous, that’s all.”
    “I’m not nervous,” she said with quiet conviction. “I was not asking you why I did it, only to tell me what it is that I’ve done to the flower.”
    “You’ve trashed it.”
    “Is that what you think?”
    “Unless you’re going to make a potpourri with it.”
    “When the flower was floating in the bowl, although it had been cut from the tree, how did it look?”
    “Beautiful.”
    “Lush and alive?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “And now it looks