“I thought you knew. Everyone knows. Especially now that she doesn’t believe in God.”
“It’s all right not to believe in God,” Wakely said. “That’s one of the things we mean when we say it’s a free country. People are welcome to believe whatever they want as long as their beliefs don’t hurt others. Besides, I happen to think science is a form of religion.”
Madeline raised one eyebrow.
“Who’s this, by the way?” he asked, reaching his hand out for the dog to sniff.
“Six-Thirty,” she said as two women walked by chatting loudly.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Sheila,” one of the women was asking, “but didn’t she say cast iron requires zero-point-one-one calories of heat to raise the temperature of a single gram of atomic mass by one degree Celsius?”
“That’s right, Elaine,” the other said. “That’s why I’m buying a new skillet.”
“I remember him now,” Wakely continued after the women had passed. “From your family photograph. What a handsome dog.”
Six-Thirty pressed his head into the man’s palm. Good man.
“Anyway, I bet you think I forgot all about this—so much time has passed—but I did finally follow up with All Saints. The truth is, I’d called several times after we first spoke, but the bishop was never in. Today, though, I reached his secretary and she said there’s no record of a Calvin Evans. Looks like we have the wrong home.”
“No,” Madeline said. “That’s the one. I’m positive.”
“Mad, I doubt a church secretary would lie.”
“Wakely,” she said. “Everybody lies.”
Chapter 34
All Saints
“What’s it called again? All Saints?” the bishop repeated in shock. It was 1933, and although he’d been hoping for a new assignment in a wealthy parish soaked in scotch, instead he’d netted a ratty boys home in the middle of Iowa where more than a hundred boys of varying ages in training to become future criminals served as a constant reminder that the next time he made fun of an archbishop he would try not to do it to his face.
“All Saints,” the archbishop had said. “The place needs discipline. Just like you.”
“The truth is, I’m not good with children,” he’d told the archbishop. “Widows, prostitutes—that’s where I really shine. What about Chicago?”
“In addition to discipline,” the archbishop said, ignoring his plea, “the place needs money. Part of your work there will be to secure long-term funding. Do that and maybe I’ll find something better for you in the future.”
But the future never seemed to arrive. By the time 1937 rolled around, the bishop still hadn’t solved the cash-flow problem. The only productive thing he’d done? Edit his ten-page list of “I hate this place” fury down to five central problems: third-rate priests, starchy food, mildew, pedophiles, and a steady trickle of boys deemed too wild or too hungry to be part of a normal family. They were the kids no one wanted, and the bishop completely understood because he didn’t want them either.
They’d been limping along via the usual Catholic means: sherry sales, Bible bookmarks, begging, brownnosing. But what they really needed was exactly what the archbishop had suggested—an endowment. The problem was, rich people tended to endow things the boys home didn’t have. Chairs. Scholarships. Memorials. No matter how often he tried to sell the endowment idea, potential donors could identify the fatal flaws right off the bat: “Scholarships?” they’d scoff. The boys home wasn’t really a school in the same way a prison isn’t really a place to rehabilitate— no one tries to get in. Funding a chair? Same problem—the home didn’t have departments, much less department chairs. Memorials? Their wards were too young to die, and anyway, who wanted to memorialize the very children everyone was trying to forget?
So here he was, four years later, still stuck in the middle of cornfields with a bunch of castaway kids. It seemed pretty clear no amount of prayer was going to change that. To pass the time he sometimes ranked the boys by who caused the most trouble, but even that was a waste of time because the same kid always topped the list. Calvin Evans.
* * *
—
“That minister from California called about Calvin Evans again,” the secretary said to the now-much-older white-haired bishop, dropping some files on his desk. “I’d already done what you’d said— I told him I’d checked the records and no one by that name had ever been here.”