Chapter 9

The woman who came down the center aisle was seventy-one years old, in a black dress with a jet cameo at the throat, and every dealer in the room knew her by sight.

Odette Le Moyne had owned the house since 1991, and she had spent the last forty minutes in the back row behind a pillar, listening.

She stopped at the podium and looked at her floor manager.

"Colby. Give Hollis your phone and your earpiece."

"Odette -"

"Now."

He did it. His hands were not steady. Hollis took the phone and set it face down on the console like something that might bite.

"The sale on Lot Twelve is void," Odette said into the microphone. Her voice was not loud. It did not need to be. "The console is released to Mr. Thibodeaux as the parish's custodian of record. The house returns the buyer's deposit, withdraws the lot from tonight's sale, and will not offer it again without the written consent of St. Cecilia's Parish."

She turned to Reinhardt.

"You pre-sold a parish lot to a telephone bidder at the reserve, before the lot opened, on a catalog description you had been told was wrong." She said it without heat, which made it worse. "You have cost this house one hundred and twenty years of name. You're finished here tonight. The house returns your commission, and I will personally file with the state licensing board Monday morning."

She walked him to the door herself. Nobody in the room said anything. His cap-toe shoes made a small, quick sound on the herringbone, and then the door opened onto Royal Street and the rain, and he was gone.

Odette came back and stood in front of Wil.

"Mr. Thibodeaux. The console is yours to take."

"It goes back to St. Cecilia's," Wil said. "That's where it lives. I'll tune it myself."

"Then that's what happens."

"And your four thousand dollars -"

"I'm not taking it back."

She looked at him a moment, then nodded once, turned to the room, and said, "The parish needs a roof. The estimate is sixty-eight thousand dollars. The house waives the seller's premium. Who's first?"

Deacon Ray Boudreaux was first. Then the dealer in the bolo tie. Then the woman in pearls, and a man who had come for a sideboard and stayed, and a young couple at the back who had won nothing all night and pledged two hundred dollars. Cleo Baptiste stood up and said she'd match the floor dollar for dollar up to the estimate, and the room made a sound like a church.

It took eleven minutes.

Hollis Prine read the total off the console: sixty-eight thousand four hundred dollars, against a roof that needed sixty-eight thousand.

Then he said, "Line four called back. He's withdrawing."

Nobody in the room cared.

On Sunday, at St. Cecilia's, the ten-thirty Mass ran long because the choir would not sit down. The console stood in the loft where it had stood since 1974, tuned that Saturday by an old man who had spent four hours on his knees behind it with a flashlight in his teeth, and the fifth pipe - the cypress one - sang the way it had not sung in years.

Wil Thibodeaux sat in the front pew with the receipts in his jacket pocket, soft as cloth, and did not take them out.

After the last hymn, Cleo Baptiste came down the aisle and sat on the end of his pew, which she was not supposed to do during a recessional, and nobody stopped her.

"Fifty years," she said. "You never came to one concert."

"I came to all of them," Wil said. "I stood in the back."

She was quiet for a long moment.

"Why didn't you ever let anybody say thank you?"

Wil thought about the road to Bayou Goula in 1957, cane dust and gravel, and the mission chapel with the tin roof, and Sister Perpetua, who died in 1971 and never knew what she started. He was seven years old and barefoot, and there had been a box by the chapel door with three pairs of shoes in it, and none of them had a name on them. He had asked her whose they were. She had said, Somebody who doesn't need to be thanked.

"The box never had a name on it," Wil said.

Cleo sat with that.

Then she stood, and the choir stood behind her, and they sang the last verse the way that choir had been singing it for fifty years. Wil stayed where he was. He did put his hand on the console, though - flat on the cypress, on the fifth pipe, the one he had set in the spring of 1974, still warm from the singing.