Read Odd Interlude Part One for Free Online Page B

spoke was as imaginary as the homicidal one with the carving knife.
    As I have learned before, it is possible to feel as foolish when alone as when one’s lapse in judgment or behavior is witnessed by an astonished crowd.
    To avoid feeling even sillier, I decide not to exit the pipe backward, but instead to turn and walk out with no concern about who might be at my back. With the first step, my imagination conjures a knife arcing through the darkness, and by my third step, I expect the point of the weapon to stab past my left shoulder blade and into my heart.
    I exit the drainpipe without being wounded, turn left on the beach, and walk away with the increasing conviction that, whatever kind of movie I’m in, it’s not a slasher film. When I reach the rutted track littered with broken shells, I look back, but the girl—if it had been a girl—is nowhere to be seen.
    Returning to the blacktop lane and the last of the seven houses, where lamplight brightens a couple of ground-floor rooms, I decide to reconnoiter window-to-window. As I climb the front steps with catlike stealth and mouselike caution, a woman says, “What do you want?”
    Pistol still in hand, I hold it down at my side, counting on the gloom to conceal it. At the top of the steps, I see what seem to be four wicker chairs with cushions, all in a row on the porch. The woman sits in the third of them, barely revealed by the glow that emanates from the curtained window behind her. I smell the coffee then, and I can see her just well enough to discern that she holds a mug in both hands.
    “I want to help,” I tell her.
    “Help what?”
    “All of you.”
    “What makes you think we need help?”
    “Donny’s scarred face. Holly’s amputated fingers.”
    She drinks her coffee.
    “And a thing that almost happened to me as I drank a beer and watched TV.”
    Still she does not reply.
    The rhythmic rumble of the surf is hushed from here.
    Finally she says, “We’ve been warned about you.”
    “Warned by whom?”
    Instead of answering, she says, “We’ve been warned to avoid you … and we think we know why.”
    In the west, the moon is as round as the face of a pocket watch, and in this exceptionally clear sky, it seems to have a fob of stars.
    The dawn is still more than an hour from the eastern horizon. I don’t know why, but I think that getting one of them to speak frankly will be easier in the dark.
    She says, “I’ll be punished if I tell you anything. Punished severely.”
    Had she already decided not to speak with me, she would have no need to suggest that she will pay dearly for doing so. She simply would tell me to go away.
    She needs a reason to take the risk, and I think that I know what might motivate her. “Is that your daughter I saw on the beach?”
    The woman’s eyes glisten faintly with ambient light.
    I take the first seat, leaving an empty chair between us, and hold the pistol in my lap.
    With less dismay than I ought to feel, I seek to manipulate her. “Is your daughter scarred yet? Does she still have all her fingers? Has she been punished severely?”
    “You don’t need to do that.”
    “Do what, ma’am?”
    “Push me so hard.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “What are you?” she asks. “Who do you work for?”
    “I’m an agent, ma’am, but I can’t say of what.”
    That is true enough. I could tell her what I’m
not
an agent of: the FBI, the CIA, the BATF.… The office that I hold comes without a badge or a paycheck, and although it seems to me that my gift makes me the agent of some higher power, I can’t prove it and dare not say as much for fear of being thought delusional.
    Strangely emotionless considering her words, she says, “Jolie, my daughter, is twelve. She’s smart and strong and good. And she’s going to be killed.”
    “What makes you think so?”
    “Because she’s too beautiful to live.”

FIVE
     
    The woman’s name is Ardys, the wife of William Harmony, whose parents created Harmony Corner.
    A