Frowning, Sister Miriam looked at her mother superior. "Do you know?"

Sister Angela shook her head. "I suppose it would be in the patient records."

"How long will it take you to review the records, ma'am?"

"Half an hour, forty minutes? Maybe we'll find something like that in the first file."

"Would you please do it, Sister, fast as you can? I need a child who was dead once but can still talk."

Of the three of them, only Sister Miriam knew nothing about my sixth sense. "Dear, you are starting to get downright spooky."

"I've always been, ma'am."

CHAPTER 42

IN ROOM 14, JACOB HAD FINISHED THE LATEST portrait of his mother and had sprayed it with fixative. He carefully sharpened each of his many pencils on the sandpaper block, in anticipation of the blank page of the drawing tablet on the slantboard.

Also on the table was a lunch tray laden with empty dishes and dirty flatware.

No bodachs were currently present, although the darksome spirit who called himself Rodion Romanovich stood in the open doorway, his coat draped over one arm but his fur hat still on his head. I had forbidden him to enter the room because his glowering presence might intimidate the shy young artist.

If the Russian entered against my wishes, I would snatch his hat from his head, park my butt on it, and threaten to scent it with essence of Odd if he didn't back off. I can be ruthless.

I sat across the table from Jacob and said, "It's me again. The Odd Thomas."

Toward the end of my previous visit, he had met my every comment and question with such silence that I'd become convinced he had gone into an internal redoubt where he didn't any longer hear me or even recognize that I was present.

"The new portrait of your mother came out very well. It's one of your best."

I had hoped that he would be in a more garrulous mood than when I had last seen him. This proved to be a false hope.

"She must have been very proud of your talent."

Jacob finished sharpening the last of the pencils, kept it in his hand, and shifted his attention to the drawing tablet, studying the blank page.

"Since I was last here," I told him, "I had a wonderful roast-beef sandwich and a crisp dill pickle that probably wasn't poisoned."

His thick tongue appeared, and he bit gently on it, perhaps deciding what his first pencil strokes should be.

"Then this nasty guy almost hanged me from the bell tower, and I got chased through a tunnel by a big bad scary thing, and I went on a snow adventure with Elvis Presley."

He began lightly and fluidly to sketch the outline of something that I could not recognize at once from my upside-down point of view.

At the doorway, Romanovich sighed impatiently

Without looking at him, I said, "Sorry. I know my interrogation techniques aren't as direct as those of a librarian."

To Jacob, I said, "Sister Miriam says you lost your mother when you were thirteen, more than twelve years ago."

He was sketching a boat from a high perspective.

"I've never lost a mother because I never really had one. But I lost a girl I loved. She meant everything to me."

With a few lines he suggested that the sea, when fully drawn, would be gently rolling.

"She was beautiful, this girl, and beautiful in her heart. She was kind and tough, sweet and determined. Smart, she was smarter than me. And so funny"

Jacob paused to study what he had thus far put on the paper.

"Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army."

His tongue retreated, and he bit instead on his lower lip.

"We never made love. Because of a bad thing that happened to her when she was a little girl, she wanted to wait. Wait until we could afford to be married."

With two styles of cross-hatching, he began to give substance to the hull of the boat.

"Sometimes I thought I couldn't wait, but then I always could. Because she gave me so much else, and everything she gave me was more than a thousand other girls could ever give. All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that. I don't know what she saw in me, you know? But I could give her that much."

The pencil whispered over the paper.

"She took four bullets in the chest and abdomen. My sweet girl, who never hurt a soul."

The moving pencil gave Jacob comfort. I could see how he took comfort from creation.

"I killed the man who killed her, Jacob. If I had gotten there two minutes sooner, I might have killed him before he killed her."

The pencil hesitated, but then moved on.

"We were destined to be together forever, my girl and I. We had a fortune-teller's card that said so. And we will be… forever.

This here, now-this is just an intermission between act one and act two."

Perhaps Jacob trusts God to guide his hand and show him the very boat and the precise place on the ocean where the bell rang, so he will know it, after all, when his own time comes to float away.

"They didn't scatter my girl's ashes at sea. They gave them to me in an urn. A friend in my hometown keeps it safe for me."

As the pencil whispered, Jacob murmured, "She could sing."

"If her voice was as lovely as her face, it must have been sweet. What did she sing?"

"So pretty. Just for me. When the dark came."

"She sang you to sleep."

"When I woke up and the dark wasn't gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again."

That is the best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small.

"Jacob, earlier you told me about someone called the Neverwas."

"He's the Neverwas, and we don't care."

"You said he came to see you when you were 'full of the black.'"

"Jacob was full of the black, and the Neverwas said, 'Let him die.'"

"So 'full of the black' means you were ill. Very ill. Was the man who said they should let you die-was he a doctor?"

"He was the Neverwas. That's all he was. And we don't care."

I watched the graceful lines emerge from the simple pencil gripped by the stubby fingers of the short broad hand.

"Jacob, do you remember the face of the Neverwas?"

"A long time ago." He shook his head. "A long time ago."

Cataracts of falling snow made a blind eye of the window.

In the doorway, Romanovich tapped one finger against the face of his watch and raised his eyebrows.

We might have precious little time remaining, but I could think of nowhere better to spend it than here, where I had been sent by the medium of the once-dead Justine.

Intuition raised a question that at once seemed important to me.

"Jacob, you know my name, my full name."

"The Odd Thomas."

"Yes. My last name is Thomas. Do you know your last name?"

"Her name."

"That's right. It would be your mother's last name, too."

"Jennifer."

"That's a first name, like Jacob."

The pencil stopped moving, as if the memory of his mother came so vividly to him that no part of his mind or heart remained free to guide his drawing.

"Jenny," he said. "Jenny Calvino."

"So you are Jacob Calvino."

"Jacob Calvino," he confirmed.

Intuition had told me that the name would be revealing, but it meant nothing to me.

Again the pencil moved, and the boat took further form, the vessel from which Jenny Calvino's ashes had been dispersed.

As during my previous visit, a second large drawing tablet lay closed on the table. The longer I tried and dismally failed to think of questions that might extract vital information from Jacob, the more my attention was compelled toward that tablet.

If I inspected the second tablet without permission, Jacob might consider my curiosity a violation of his privacy. Offended, he might withdraw again, and give me nothing further.