CHAPTER 37

God has his measuring lines and his canons, called the Ten Commandments; they are written in our flesh and blood.

Martin Luther

“Okay, little guy, come to Daddy.” Charley stumbled across the rug and fell against Alan’s knees. His cheeks were sticky with strawberry jam. Some of it stuck to Alan’s trousers. “Hey, watch it there, kid. These are my best pants. Come on, little guy, time for your nap.”

While Charley was sleeping, Alan took Rosie’s notebook out of the drawer and started another page.

I bought Charley a toy xylophone, and he really whacks it. I play it too, and give him concerts. His favorite is “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Rosie, where are you?

At once he erased the last sentence, but it had been ringing in his head. He put down the notebook and called Homer Kelly, struck with an idea.

“Homer’s not here,” said Mary. “He’s teaching today. Can I help?”

“It’s just that I’ve been wondering whether Rosie might have been calling the Department of Social Services to find out where Charley is. It’s something Mrs. Barker said, the social worker. She said he was strangely popular—that’s what she said. I wondered if they’ve been getting queries about him, and she’s stalled them off the way she did me.”

“I see. You’re assuming Rosie is a good mother and wants him back. But don’t forget, it’s possible she just went off and left him in the lurch, and then somebody faked her death in that car, and now she’s got a whole new life someplace else, and doesn’t give a damn about Charley.”

Alan was startled by the strength of his answer: “No, no!”

“Well, I don’t think so either, but perhaps you and I are just being sentimental. Tell you what, I’ll call that woman, what’s her name? Mrs. Barker, and ask her if anybody’s been inquiring after Charley’s whereabouts.”

“Good for you, that’s great. Call me back. I’m at Rosie’s apartment with Charley. Do you know the number?”

Mary wrote it down, then got to work at once.

Mrs. Barker’s voice on the line was brisk. “Department of Social Services, Marilynne Barker speaking.”

“Mrs. Barker, my name’s Mary Kelly. My husband and I are working with the police department on the case of Rosalind Hall, whose infant son is in foster care under the auspices of your department. We—”

“Oh, no, not another call about Charley Hall!”

“Oh, you’ve had other calls?”

Mrs. Barker fumed. “Yes, we’ve had other calls, and I’m getting sick and tired of it. Oh, your stories are very clever, I must say, but you will not worm his whereabouts out of me.”

Mary stared at the buzzing phone. She called Alan. “She hung up on me, but I gather she’s had a number of inquiries about Charley, somebody wanting to know where he is, telling different stories. She thought I was another one.”

“But that’s good. Why would anybody but his mother want to know where to find him?”

“Well, all right, but why doesn’t she just say she’s his mother? Why the vanishing and pretending to die in a burning car?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why in the hell.”

It was time to take Charley home. Alan raced him across the Public Garden and up Beacon Hill, and handed him over to Debbie Buffington. Afterward, slipping and sliding back to the Church of the Commonwealth, he was pleased to see a truck double-parked in the street, unloading the sixteen-foot pipes, which had come at last from Marblehead.

Harold Oates was taking charge. “The thirty-two-footers are still missing, damn them. They won’t get here until next month.”

“Next month? God, I’ve promised to have the organ completed by Easter Sunday, all tuned and voiced and ready for the Bach Passacaglia.”

“Hey, fella,” said the driver of the truck, “how about taking the other end?” Alan grasped one end of a pipe tray and backed up as the driver slid it off the end of the truck.

Oates looked on, grinning. He was sporting a suede coat with a fur collar. The price tag hung from one sleeve. “That low C in the Passacaglia, it’ll give those bloody Christians a thrill.”

Alan glanced at him, then almost dropped his end of the pipe tray. There were still ugly black gaps in Oates’s teeth.

“Hey, watch it,” said the truck driver.

“Oh, sorry.” Alan backed up the church steps. “Hey, Harold, what about your teeth? You were going to get your teeth fixed.”

Oates made a grotesque face. “Fucking teeth.” Then he cackled and made a joke about the old lady who had only two teeth in her head, but thank God they met.

“But what happened? We made an appointment with Dr. Slot. He was going to put in temporary substitutes while the new ones were being made.”

“Bunch of bullshit, you ask me,” muttered Oates, hunching his head down into his fur collar.

“Oh, God,” said Alan, holding the door of the church open with his shoulder. “Sometimes, Mr. Oates—” He backed his end of the pipe tray through the door and left the sentence hanging.

Oates came in too, grinning sheepishly, his mouth full of godawful holes.

To Alan’s surprise he found Pip Tower waiting for him in the balcony. “Oh, hi,” said Alan, embarrassed. He hadn’t talked to Pip since their painful telephone conversation after the auditions.

But Pip had come back to help with the voicing. Shamefacedly he admitted needing the money. “I’m sorry about what I said. I was pretty goddamn awful.”

“No, no, it’s okay. Oh, say, Pip, have you met Harold Oates? Harold, this is Philip Tower, another student of Jim Castle’s.”

“How do you do, Mr. Oates,” said Pip smoothly, shaking Oates’s hand.

Once again Oates displayed the holes in his yellow teeth in a hideous smile.

Next day Alan made a visit to the office of Dr. Roderick Slot. It was on the first floor of a handsome brick building on Dartmouth Street, adorned with patterned brick and jutting bays. In the waiting room Alan was confronted at once by the secretary-receptionist. She glowered at him. “Do you have an appointment?”

He recognized her at once as the dragon he had encountered so frequently in offices, libraries, schools and buses. Men or women, they were all the same dragon, with clawed bat wings and leathery scales. Her desk was a fortress between him and the dentist. Alan could see Dr. Slot in the next room, bent over a supine figure who had his hands clasped on his chest like a deceased person in a funeral parlor. “Can you tell me what happened to the appointment for Harold Oates? He was to have three crowns fitted last week.”

The dragon glared at him. Little streams of smoke leaked from her reptilian jaw. “We received no prepayment. The appointment was cancelled.”

“But the check was mailed to you. Mr. Kraeger told me he sent it. Reverend Kraeger from the Church of the Commonwealth, he sent you a check for nine hundred and fifty dollars.”

Sparks flashed from the hooded eyes. “Young man, do you doubt my word?”

“Why, no, but there must be some mistake. Never mind, we’ll just make another appointment.”

“Until we receive an advance payment that will be impossible.”

“But we could at least make the appointment. There’s been some silly mistake.”

The dragon reared up on her hind legs and flapped her wings. Flame shot from her forked tongue and seven rows of long sharp teeth. “Out,” she said, pointing at the door with one claw. “Out, out.”

The dentist looked up from his patient and met Alan’s eyes. No message passed between them. The dentist looked down again, and Alan left the office of Roderick Slot, Doctor of Dental Surgery, driven from the field of battle by Mrs. Eloise Drathmore, Dragon First Class.

In the Church of the Commonwealth Donald Woody was shutting up shop, taking a last look around before turning the building over to the night sexton.

In the vestibule some of the new pipes still lay in their boxes, ready to be carried up to the organ in the morning. He glanced into the sanctuary, where the evening light slanted through the Burning Bush window above the balcony and fell on the picture of Reverend Wigglesworth on the east wall. The picture was crooked.

Woody wandered down the aisle and shifted it so that it hung straight. Then he saw with dismay why it had tipped to one side. There was a crack running up the wall. There had been other cracks, and he had repaired them carefully, using patching plaster and taking a lot of trouble to match the paint exactly. This time he vowed to replaster the whole wall, perhaps the entire sanctuary.

Alan Starr would be pleased. He’d been calling for it, because the present coating of plaster was filled with nineteenth-century horsehair. “It’s terrible,” he said. “It sops up the sound. It’s like acoustic tile, the way it deadens the reverberation. They’ve got it in King’s Chapel too. Big mistake.”

The picture was again at a little angle from the vertical. Woody straightened it. Reverend Wigglesworth looked back at him vaguely, clutching his book. The gold letters of the title, Divine Inspiration, glimmered in the last rays of the afternoon sun.