CHAPTER 54
Why strengthen your walls—they are trash; the walls with which a Christian should fortify himself are made, not of stone and mortar, but of prayer and faith.
Martin Luther
Woody looked with dismay at the new cracks in the east wall. They had crept up and fanned out like forked tendrils of lightning. He couldn’t understand it. He left the sanctuary and descended two flights of stairs to look at the foundation. In the furnace room he worked his way through the warped scenery left over from a Christmas pageant until he uncovered the supporting walls of the east end of the church.
The stones were not rectangular blocks but ragged boulders fitted neatly together. In his basement office they were painted white. They looked immensely heavy and strong, mighty enough to hold up a building ten times the size of the Church of the Commonwealth.
Ah, here was the problem. A fissure had opened in the wall where the mortar had given way. Nothing to it. Woody went to the closet where he kept bags of sand for the winter sidewalk and sacks of lime and fertilizer for the garden, and hauled out a bag of cement. Dumping some of it into a bucket, he added water from the set tub in his office and stirred up a batch. Then he applied it to the fissure, using a putty knife to shove it deep between the stones. There, that was taken care of. Now he could concentrate on resurfacing the walls of the sanctuary.
Woody didn’t trust anybody else to do it. Who else could restore the William Morris trim of vine leaves around the windows? It would be a full-time job, and it would have to be done by Easter Sunday. He’d have to call in a retired friend of his to take over the usual cleaning and daily up-keep. Woody cleaned out his bucket and called up the friend, who said he’d be right over, toot sweet.
When Martin Kraeger came striding in next morning, the place was noisy. A stranger was running a waxer in the vestibule, making shiny circles on the floor. Above the whine of the waxer there was a high buzzing from the sanctuary, and the loud bah-bah of the organ.
Feeling uneasily at loose ends, Kraeger climbed the steps to the balcony. From there he could see Woody on a high ladder at the far end of the sanctuary, using a power sander on the wall. Alan Starr sat at the organ console, his eyes closed, trying to hear above the racket while he played a pedal scale. Kraeger sat down and listened.
Whah,
whah,
whah,
whah,
whah, droned the sixteen-foot Prestant.
Kraeger found it comforting. The nice thing about music was its abstractness. It was totally unconcerned with human problems and nasty little random perversions.
Alan hit the lowest note and held it. The balcony shook. On his ladder Woody was surprised to see the crack he had filled with Spackle open up again. Below the dried surface it must have been still a little wet.
Alan turned to Kraeger and said, “Good morning.” His greeting was friendly and natural, not tainted with loathing.
Kraeger was grateful. “Nobody’s been bending any more pipes?” he said, just to say something.
“No, everything seems all right. Woody’s hired a doctoral candidate from Boston University for weekend nights. He writes his thesis in here, doesn’t fall asleep like some of us jerks.”
“Well, good.”
Alan looked at him keenly. “Are you all right?”
Kraeger was surprised at the way it flooded out of him, the whole crazy story about his ex-wife’s unsavory accusation.
“But nobody will believe it, will they?” said Alan. “I’ve heard that your former wife is—forgive me—some kind of a fruitcake.”
Kraeger grinned painfully. His wife was a fruitcake, all right, but the wrong kind of fruitcake. If she were huddling in a corner with her head drooping on her breast, she would have been hauled off to a psychiatric ward long ago. Instead she was a totally self-confident megalomaniac, and it would take a war to stop her from ruling the world. “Maybe so,” he said, “but her lawyer isn’t a fruitcake.”
The sander buzzed again. Alan looked down thoughtfully at his feet and ran up the scale again. Then he stopped and turned to Kraeger. “You need a lawyer too.”
“I suppose so. I haven’t got one.”
“I know a good one. So do you. Homer Kelly used to be an attorney, back when he was a lieutenant detective in Middlesex County.”
“Oh, yes, I remember. Does he take an interest in this kind of—repulsive sort of matter?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Well, all right, I will.”
“I see him pretty often. He’s working on the disappearance of Rosie Hall.”
“Disappearance? But she’s dead.”
“Well, maybe, maybe not. Did I tell you, I’m staying in her place now? You know, right next door. So is Harold. We’re staying there together.”
“Is her child still missing?”
“I’m afraid so.” Alan looked gloomily at the DIV INSP stop knob, reached over and pulled it out. A little DIV INSP was what he needed right now. “Here,” he said, fishing in his pocket, “I’ve got Homer’s phone number right here.”
Kraeger went to his office and called the number. Mary Kelly answered the phone. When she spoke, Martin remembered meeting her at the church door after a service last month. He remembered her great height and sympathetic face. Once again his story poured out of him.
“Tell you what,” said Mary Kelly. “Homer isn’t here, but he’ll be back later on. Why don’t you come out for supper?”
Kraeger paused, remembering the church council meeting he was supposed to attend. Well, those people would have a better time of it if he weren’t there. They could tear him to shreds in absentia. “Sure, I’d love to.”
“Good. Now, listen closely, here’s how to find us.”
It was no joke. Finding Fair Haven Road in Concord was tricky in itself, and then you had to choose fork after fork in the woods and look for a faded sign on a tree. It was like going deep into the forest to find the cottage of the wise witch.
He found it at last, a small house at the end of a long dirt road. “What a beautiful lake,” said Martin, looking out at Fair Haven Bay.
“It’s not a lake,” explained Homer. “It’s a big bend in the Sudbury River.”
“Oh, I see. What’s that bird in the water? See the one with its head sticking up?”
“No. Oh, yes, I do. Oh, my God, it’s a loon. Look, Mary, a loon.”
“So it is. Well, good for you, Mr. Kraeger. We’re off to a lucky start.”
They sat down in the narrow living room under the map of the river, and once again Martin went over his sordid little story, his tongue loosened by whiskey. At the end he said, “Do you people have kids?”
“Well, no.” Homer glanced at Mary. “But we’ve got a little nephew named Benny.”
Mary grinned. She was wearing flowered shorts over stockings with red horizontal stripes. “So we know all about it. My sister and brother-in-law had already reared six kids when Benny came along. He was the last straw. They sort of gave up, with Benny. He’s ten now, and he goes to baseball camp every summer, but there was a time”—Mary gazed dreamily into the past—”he was three before he was out of diapers, although he could spell metamorphosis. In first grade he was doing algebra, but he always got to the boys’ room too late. Darling child.” Mary looked at Martin. “Pansy has the same problem?”
“Exactly, but her mother refuses to recognize it. That day I met you two people in church, Kay brought Pansy to spend the afternoon with me, and Pansy was wearing wet panties. I washed them out and dried them on the radiator in my office, and then put them back on Pansy, so Kay may not have noticed what happened. But the occasion she’s so furious about was the weekend she wanted me to stay with Pansy because she was going away, and I was supposed to fix the drain in the kitchen sink. Pansy wet her pants, so I washed them out and put them in the laundry basket. My wife must have found them there, and of course she would have known right away what happened.”
“So you think she made up this story about your molesting Pansy?” said Homer.
“Well, of course, she must have. But she’s so angry, she really seems to have convinced herself I’m a monster.”
“I don’t suppose the panties would still be there in the laundry?” suggested Mary.
“Oh, no, I’m sure they’ve been thoroughly scrubbed in scented soap by now.”
“Look,” said Mary, “don’t bother with Homer. This is right up my alley. Benny spent a lot of time with us, and I was the one who handled the problem of his excitable urinary tract. Let me handle it.”
“Wonderful,” said Martin. “I feel better already. Mrs. Kelly, I put my entire future in your hands, like a holy chalice. Speaking of chalices—” He held out his glass.