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  And therefore it was all young professional couples now along Commonwealth Avenue, and dentists and doctors. Marlborough and Beacon were brimming with students from Boston University and Northeastern, careless young people with hideous styles of dress and frightening haircuts, totally ignorant of the history of the houses they occupied, unfamiliar with the fine old families who had lived in them once upon a time—Sturgises, Dwights, Welds, Wheelwrights, Osgoods, Brewsters, Coffins, Searses, Abbotts. The good old names meant nothing. The new ones were so outlandish! But of course it was a good thing, Edith could see that. Give me your tired, your poor, etc., you couldn’t argue with it.

  Still, there was something sad about the change. No longer could she walk down the street to take tea with a family of cousins. No longer was she pillowed on a sturdy support system in the basement, where the laundress plunged red arms in hot water to scrub the shirts and soaked the collars in starch and pressed the sheets with a smoothing iron and billowed them over the beds and tucked them in. No longer did coal rattle down the chute into the bin, no longer did the grate clatter as it was shaken down, no longer were the ashes lugged up to the alley. Gone were the invitations on the hall table—gone, all gone away—along with the musicales and the dinner dances and the balls.

  With tenderness Edith remembered her mother’s dressing table, with the hand mirror of heavy silver and the matching brush, comb, shoehorn and buttonhook. Flown to the winds of heaven were the lacy dresser scarf, the eiderdown puff and the fragrant spills of powder, gone with the other lovely things—gone too with dreadful forgotten wars, with doughboys marching too fast on the scratched film, lying swollen and dead on the barbed wire. Edith shuddered.

  But the Church of the Commonwealth was still there, occupying the same corner as always. The church was a monument to the unity of Edith’s life, to lasting values in an era of terrifying change. On the first shopping day of the new year she stood on the cold grass of the narrow park running down the center of the avenue and looked up at the tower, feeling a strong sense of possession, as if the sixty-two courses of Roxbury pudding stone belonged to her, and the decorative stripes of Longmeadow freestone, and the medieval interior. The sanctuary was something to be especially proud of, Edith knew, because the stone vaults were the first in the United States.

  The new organ of course was truly her own. The organ was the direct result of Henry’s investment in South African diamond cartels in the decade before his death. All the profits, every single dollar, had gone to form the new trust for the church, the Frederick Music Endowment.

  Edith knew nothing about its source. The other day, listening to the voicing of the Spire Flute, she had not given a thought to the thousands of black laborers somewhere in South Africa, hacking at the soil with pickaxes. The pressurized air blown into the pipe from the windchest of the organ bore no relation to the gasping breath of a black man with tubercular lungs in a Kimberley diamond mine. If the blowing air whispered anything to the Spire Flute, it was the story of Henry’s cleverness and generosity, and that was all.

  Here and now, on this second day of January, Edith waited for the green light, then walked across the street to the arched entry of the church, copied, she knew, from some medieval cathedral in southern France. As usual the aura of the building reached out to enclose her. It gave her a sense of expansion to enter the church, to feel herself part of so majestic a thing. Within these walls her timid life was founded on solid stone, uplifted by luminous panels of stained glass. Here for the moment it had weight and sublimity, it was not simply a succession of fragile pearls on a raveling string.

  “Good morning, Loretta,” she said brightly, walking into the secretary’s office. “Is Mr. Kraeger in?”

  “Martin? Oh, sure, he’s in.”

  “Do you think he’d mind if I took a few minutes of his time?”

  Loretta leaned forward and yelled “MARTIN,” then flopped her knitting over and started back on the next row.

  Edith turned away in sorrow, remembering secretaries from the past—Millicent Marchbanks with her Remington typewriter, Amelia Parsons with her mimeograph machine, Nedda Mistletoe with her splendid new filing system, and even Dorothy Keene with her newfangled word processor. Loretta Fawcett was a pitiful comedown.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Martin, but Alan tells me the organ is sufficiently voiced so that it can be played regularly from now on.”

  “Oh, yes, he told me. He’s finished half a dozen ranks. Doesn’t it sound great?”

  Mrs. Frederick hastened to the business at hand. “I’m arranging with the music committee to audition candidates for the job of substitute while Jim Castle is away.”

  “Good for you.” Kraeger waved at the sofa and moved aside a stuffed animal belonging to his daughter Pansy, and a crystal ball, the gift of a comedian in the congregation. Picking up a fallen pillow, he said, “Do sit down.”

  The pillow was the one Edith had made for him herself. She pretended not to notice the grubby condition of her fine stitches, although it gave her a pang, remembering all the loving hours she had spent with the bright strands of wool. It distressed her that Kraeger made such a bear’s den of his fine mock-Tudor study. Disorder bothered Edith.

  She talked about the substitute organist, the arrangements for tryouts, the importance of the temporary position, the salary, which would be the same as that paid to James Castle. “It’s such a prestigious appointment. It will be a great boost to someone’s career.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Edith.” Kraeger admired the fragile woman sitting so upright on the monstrous sofa. Edith Frederick was stiff and prudish and often irritatingly old-fashioned and conventional, but she was also affectionate, vulnerable, easily wounded, and truly generous. Tin ear and all, she had devoted herself to the musical life of the church.

  But she was old. How old? Kraeger didn’t know. Looking at the hollows in her cheeks, the withered dewlaps, the sad descending lines around her mouth, he thought of Holbein’s woodcuts of the Dance of Death—all those agile skeletons arm in arm with emperors and bishops, plucking the sleeves of nuns and stout German burghers with their bony fingers, summoning them without warning, dragging them away. Now, looking at Edith Frederick, he could almost see the jolly skeleton hovering beside her, its arms hooked tenderly around her little jacket, its empty eye sockets snapping at the joke, its grin widening in silent laughter. Well, the bony fingers would be reaching for all of them before long—just as they had reached for Mr. Plummer. Death had taken him without warning in the same way.

  Kraeger winced and suffered.

  CHAPTER 10

  Take hold of time, while ’tis time, and now, while ’tis now.

  Martin Luther

  Alan spent the week after Christmas with his parents and his sister Betsy in Brunswick, Maine. During the day he did his best to be a cheerful son and brother, but at night he couldn’t sleep for thinking about Rosie Hall.

  He sounded out Betsy. “What was she like, I mean, really?”

  “Rosie?” Betsy frowned, trying to explain. “She was smart, that’s for sure. Let’s see—she bit her fingernails.”

  “Well, where do you think she’s gone?”

  “How should I know? But it’s terrible, really. The blood on the floor! And the baby being left behind like that. Ghastly, just incredibly ghastly.”

  Alan made up his mind. When he got back to Boston he would hire somebody, like that professor-policeman who had looked into the fire at Commonwealth, Homer Kelly. Kelly would know how to look for a missing person.

  And Alan could afford to pay him, at least for a while. His parents had given him money for Christmas. He was supposed to spend it on a better place to live.

  “Alan, dear,” said his mother, “I want you to find a nicer apartment. You can’t entertain your friends in that squalid hole on Russell Street.”

  Alan told her his friends lived in places just as bad if not worse, but that seemed to pain her even more. He went back to Bost
on with the check in his pocket and a guilty conscience. But when he walked into his rented room, it looked fine. There was nothing the matter with it. One of these days he’d hang up his clothes and put up some shelving. If he spent a weekend painting the place it would be almost respectable, even to his mother.

  No time for that now. Alan lifted a bag of pipe-notching tools from a chair and sat down to call Homer Kelly.

  “Mr. Kelly? My name’s Alan Starr. We met on the day after the fire in the Church of the Commonwealth. I was there to look at the organ. But I’m calling about something else. I wonder if you remember the disappearance a month ago of Rosalind Hall? It was in the news for a while. Her baby was left behind, remember?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, the abandoned baby.”

  “Well, I’m the one who found him and called the police.”

  “That’s right, I remember your name. What can I do for you, Alan Starr?”

  Alan explained. In his own ears his interest in the matter sounded feeble, just as it had seemed to Mrs. Barker in the Department of Social Services.

  But Homer Kelly didn’t boggle. “I’ve got a tutorial this morning. I could meet you afterward, say around noon?”

  “A tutorial? That’s right, you’re a professor. What do you teach, Professor Kelly?”

  “Oh, one thing and another. Thoreau and Emerson. Do you know Christopher Cranch? Tell me, brother, what are we?/Spirits bathing in the sea/Of Deity! I don’t know if that sort of thing will come in handy. What do you think?”

  There was a pause while Alan sorted it out. “Well, I guess it can’t do any harm. Could you meet me at 115 Commonwealth Avenue? It’s Rosie’s apartment, near Clarendon Street.”

  Alan spent the morning at the Church of the Commonwealth, voicing the new organ. What should he work on next? More foundation stops on the Great? Or get started on the Choir?

  Pip Tower was there to lend a hand, to sit at the console depressing one key after another while Alan worked among the pipes, notching a languid, shaping a lip.

  For a concert organist like Pip it was a comedown, but as usual he had to take whatever work he could get. He was only one of many Boston Conservatory graduates eking out a living with part-time jobs. They were a minor population of opera singers, flutists, string players and pianists, scraping along by giving lessons, filling in as temporary secretaries, working as hospital orderlies, bartenders, waiters, hoping for the big concert opportunity, the opening in a church somewhere, a symphony orchestra, the music department of a university.

  Pip was darkly comic on the subject. “We were fools to choose church music in the first place. Who cares about sacred music in the United States? It’s a crass vulgar country of atheists and unbelievers. I’m an atheist myself, so what the hell? Of course there are all those people on the religious right, but their music comes from Nashville.”

  He sat at the console of the new organ in the balcony of the Church of the Commonwealth and listened while Alan explained from within the massed rows of pipes. “You just play one key at a time, while I work my way up the rank. Degrees of glory, that’s what you listen for. Jim Castle wants glory. Here, wait a minute.” Alan used his voicing spoon on the lower lip of a Spindle Flute to make the flue a little narrower.

  Pip played low C on the Swell keyboard. “It’s still a little breathy.”

  Alan made the opening still narrower. “Try it now. What do you think?”

  “Glorious. Absolutely glorious.”

  “Wait a sec. I’ll make it more so. How is it now?”

  “Even more glorious. Divinely, gloriously glorious. What about that old biddy who paid for it? Do you have to please her too?”

  “What? I can’t hear you very well.”

  Pip spoke louder. “That old crone with the moneybags, Mrs. Frederick. Why doesn’t she subsidize good-looking young guys with talent? Maybe she needs a boyfriend. Only, God, imagine going to bed with an old hag like Edith Frederick.”

  “Try the D-natural.”

  They worked at it all morning, then called it quits. “I don’t suppose you could pay me right now?” said Pip, looking embarrassed.

  “Oh, sure.” Alan counted out a bunch of bills and handed them over. Then he stopped in the office of the accountant, Jenny Franklin, hoping to be reimbursed.

  Jenny tut-tutted. “Alan, you really ought to be more systematic. You should make out a request ahead of time, with the address and social security number, and then I’ll send a check.” But she reimbursed him. “Just this once.”

  On his way out, Alan met Mrs. Frederick in the vestibule beside the table of church bulletins and pious pamphlets—Walter Wigglesworth and His Times, Stained Glass at Commonwealth, Our Ministry to Children and Youth, Sermons from a City Church.

  She held out her hand to Alan. Her face was gray. “Alan, tell me, who was that young man?”

  “What young man?”

  “He just went out. Thin, with fair hair.”

  Alan was in a hurry. He threw open the door and called back to Mrs. Frederick, “Tower, Philip Tower. Organist, old friend of mine.” In the side garden of the church he passed Donald Woody and a man in a heavy overcoat. They were staring up at the window high overhead.

  Alan stopped and looked too. The Wise and Foolish Virgins were only dark shapes of glass.

  “Have to take the whole thing out,” said the man in the overcoat. “Starts to buckle, you’ve got to reshape the whole outer edge. Building’s probably settled, changed the outlines. We’ll have to make a template.”

  “Well, you’ll be putting something temporary in its place, right?” said Woody. “Something translucent? Most of the morning light comes in that east window.”

  “Well, you’ve got several alternatives—”

  Alan stopped listening and hurried away, while behind him, unnoticed, Edith Frederick slipped out of the church and started home, eager for the comfort of a cup of Hu Kwa tea beside the fire in her own bedroom, with its apricot walls and silk comforter and the portrait sketch over the fireplace, Great-Aunt Amelia by John Singer Sargent. As she walked along Commonwealth Avenue, pulling her scarf close around her throat, she committed the name to memory. Philip Tower.

  Edith had been meeting with the other members of the Music Committee, but before the meeting she had spent a few moments in the sanctuary. Sitting under the balcony during the voicing of the Spindle Flute, she had heard every cruel word—old biddy, old crone, old hag. Bitterly she vowed never to forget. The name of the brutal young man was Philip Tower.

  “Department of Social Services, Mrs. Barker speaking.”

  “Oh, good, I’ve been trying to reach you. Your phone sure is busy. Mrs. Barker, my name is Arthur Victoria. I’m with the Boston Hygiene Inspectional Services Department.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Rodent control, vermin in public buildings, lead paint removal. We have a complaint about rats in one of your foster homes.”

  “Rats? What did you say your name was?”

  “Victoria, Arthur Victoria.”

  Mrs. Barker wrote it down. “Rats, you say? Which foster home?”

  “Well, that’s just it. We’ve lost the complaint form. All we remember is the child’s name, Charles Hall. Can you tell us where he is situated?”

  Mrs. Barker sucked her pencil thoughtfully. A complaint about rats? She had an acute sense of smell, useful for sniffing out rats of an entirely different kind. Picking up the Boston phone book, she slammed it down on her desk and flipped the pages. “Wait a minute, let me find your department in the phone book, and I’ll call you right back. What was that again? Hygiene Inspectional Services?”

  Arthur Victoria hung up.

  CHAPTER 11

  Great people and champions are special gifts of God.

  Martin Luther

  When Alan arrived at Number 115 Commonwealth Avenue, he found Homer Kelly waiting for him. Homer’s greeting was hearty. Alan guessed that other people’s business was his meat and drink.

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nbsp; “Oh, shit,” said Alan, when his stolen key failed to open the front door.

  “Damn,” said Homer, whose obscenities derived from an earlier age. “Do you suppose there’s a back entrance?”

  “The key says Rear. Let’s try the alley.”

  They walked past the church and turned the corner on Clarendon. “What’s going on over there?” said Homer, staring across the street at the excavation, where power shovel and crane still sat idly in the hole.

  “Litigation, I think. Somebody’s suing somebody. Everything’s on hold.”

  In the alley it was easy to distinguish the first private house. A brick wall surrounded its small back yard, separating it from the parking places for MINISTER and BUILDING MANAGER. “This must be Number 115,” said Alan. “You can see this wall from her living room.”

  “But there’s a padlock on the gate. Your key won’t open that.”

  Alan looked at him inquisitively. “How good are you at climbing?”

  “Old hand,” said Homer. Wedging the toe of one shoe on the edge of a brick, he grasped the top of the wall and tried to heave himself over. “Ugh, umph, whoops!” Alan gave him a boost, and Homer fell clumsily into a bush on the other side.

  Alan vaulted nimbly after him, and helped him up. “Oh, no, I’m afraid you’ve torn that handsome jacket. Gee, I’m sorry. It looks expensive.”

  “Morgan Memorial,” mumbled Homer, looking with horror at the ripped fabric. In truth the jacket was a Christmas present from his wife, and it had come from a fancy men’s clothing store, probably Brooks Brothers. Mary had pasted a discount-store label on the box, because that was more Homer’s style.

  Rosie Hall’s garden was handsome, even in winter, with its ivy-ringed circle of grass. The back door of the house projected at one side.

  The key worked. Homer grinned at Alan, and said, “Sshh.”

  “Don’t we need a search warrant or something?”

  “And you with a stolen key in your hand? What a question.”