Until I Find You

gesture. It was the way he’d removed his wig and wiped the mauve lip gloss off his lips with the back of his ski glove in My Last Hitchhiker. In a near-perfect imitation of Jack’s voice, Heather said: “You probably thought I was a girl, right?”

“That’s pretty good,” he told her, looking into her brown eyes.

“This isn’t a very safe place to stop,” Heather said, just the way he’d said it in My Last Hitchhiker. “I’m sorry for the trouble, but I catch more rides as a girl,” she went on. “I try not to buy my own dinner,” Heather said, with a shrug; she had Jack’s shrug down pat, too.

“How about Melody in The Tour Guide?” he asked her.

Heather cleared her throat. “It’s a good job to lose,” she said perfectly.

“How about Johnny-as-a-hooker in Normal and Nice?” (No girl can get that right, Jack was thinking.)

“There’s something you should know,” his sister said, in that hooker’s husky voice. “Lester Billings has checked out. I’m afraid he’s really left his room a mess.”

“Put your glasses back on,” Jack told her, getting up from the bed. He went to her closet and opened the door. Jack picked out a salmon-pink camisole and held it up by the hanger, against his chest.

“Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” Heather said, just the way Jack-as-a-thief had said it to Jessica Lee.

He hung up the camisole in her closet, and they went into the kitchen and washed and dried their teacups and put them away in the cupboard. To someone like Jack, the five-roommates idea was unthinkable.

“It must be like living on a ship,” he said to Heather.

“I’m moving out soon,” she told him, laughing.

They walked back the way they had come, through the Meadows. Jack carried the small photo album in one hand, although Heather had volunteered to carry it in her backpack.

Just before they got to George Square, they saw an old man with snow-white hair playing a guitar and whistling. He was always there, every day, Heather told Jack—even in the winter. The old man was often there at eight o’clock in the morning and would stay the whole day.

“Is he crazy?” Jack asked her.

“Crazy is a relative word,” his sister said.

She talked about playing squash, which she seemed to take very seriously. (The music department had a squash team, and she was one of the better players on it.) She also spoke of “a plague of urban seagulls.”

“Urban seagulls?” Jack said.

“They’re all over Edinburgh—they attacked one man so badly, he had to go to hospital!” Heather told him.

They came along South Bridge to where it intersected with the Royal Mile. Jack was not aware that he had looked the wrong way, but as they started to cross the street, Heather took his hand and spoke sharply to him: “Look right, Jack. I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” he told her.

“I mean crossing the street,” she said.

Jack doubted that he could have found Old St. Paul’s without a map and some detailed directions. The church was built into a steep hill between the Royal Mile and Jeffrey Street, where the main entrance was. There was a side entrance off Carruber’s Close, a narrow alley—and an even narrower alley called North Gray’s Close, where there was no entrance to the church.

Jack began to tell Heather the story his mom had told him. One night, shortly before midnight, William was playing the organ in Old St. Paul’s—a so-called organ marathon, a twenty-four-hour concert, with a different organist playing every hour or half hour—and their dad’s playing had roused a drunk sleeping in one of the narrow alleys alongside the church. The foul-mouthed down-and-out had complained about the sound of the organ.

That was as far as Jack got before Heather said: “I know the story. The drunk said something like ‘that fucking racket—that fucking bloody fuck of a fucking organ making a sound that would wake the fucking dead.’ Isn’t that the story?”

“Yes, something like that,” Jack said.

“I’ll play that piece for you,” Heather told him. “You can’t hear much outside the walls of this church. Either the story is exaggerated, or that drunk was asleep in a pew. Not even Boellmann’s Toccata could wake a drunk in Carruber’s or North Gray’s Close.”

While the side door to Old St. Paul’s, on Carruber’s Close, was locked, the front entrance on Jeffrey Street was open. The church was empty, but the oil lamps by the altar were lit. They were always lit, Heather told Jack— even when she played the organ very late at night. “It’s a bit spooky here at night,” she confessed. “But you have to practice playing in the dark.”

“Why?” he asked her.

“Lots of interesting things begin in darkness,” his sister told him. “The Easter vigil service, for example. You can learn to play in the dark, provided you’ve memorized the music.”

From the nave of the church, looking toward the high altar, the organ pipes stood nearly as tall as the stained-glass windows. The church was not vast, but dark and contained. One had no sense of the season outside, and—except for the muted light that made its way through the stained-glass windows and portals—no real sense of day or night, either.

Heather saw Jack looking at the Latin inscription on the altar. As Mr. Ramsey had observed, Jack struggled with Latin.

VENITE

EXULTEMUS

DOMINO

“ ‘Come let us praise the Lord,’ ” his sister said.

“Oh, right,” he said.

“You’ll get used to it,” she told him.

Heather crossed herself at the altar and took off her backpack. Jack sat on one end of the bench beside her.

“I’ll play something softer for you later,” Heather said, “but Boellmann’s Toccata isn’t supposed to be quiet. And when you hear him play it, it’ll be louder. A different church,” she said softly, shaking her head.

Jack wasn’t prepared for the way her hands pounced on the keyboard, transforming her. It was the loudest, most strident piece of music he’d ever heard inside a church. As the new chords marched forth, the old chords kept reverberating; the organ bench trembled under them. It was the soundtrack to a vampire movie—a Gothic chase scene.

“Jesus!” Jack said, forgetting he was in a church.

“That’s the idea,” Heather said; she had stopped playing, but Old St. Paul’s was still reverberating. “Now go outside and tell me if you can hear it.” She began the Boellmann again; it made his heart race to hear it.

Jack went out the Jeffrey Street door to the church and walked up North Gray’s Close, toward the Royal Mile. The alley was dirty and smelled of urine and beer; there were broken pieces of glass where bottles had been smashed against the church, and empty cigarette packages and chewing-gum wrappers were littered everywhere. Halfway up the alley, Jack pressed his ear to the stone wall of the church; he could barely hear the Boellmann, just enough to follow the tune.

On the Royal Mile, you couldn’t hear the organ at all—probably because of the traffic, or the other street sounds—and in Carruber’s Close, either a restaurant’s air conditioner or a kitchen’s exhaust fan made too much noise in the alley for the toccata to be followable. The organ was a distant, intermittent murmur. But when Jack went back inside Old St. Paul’s, the sound of the Father Willis was deafening. His sister was really putting herself into it.

As Heather said, the story about the drunk had been exaggerated—or the down-and-out must have been sleeping in a pew when the Boellmann came crashing down on him. The more important part of the story, Heather decided, was that William Burns had played the toccata so loudly that everyone inside the church—including Alice and the organist who was waiting his turn to play—had been forced to flee from the nave and stand outside in the rain.