Children in the Morning by Anne Emery Page B

going to spend a couple of hours in one of the libraries and do a CD-Rom search for cases handled by Delaney.”
    My face must have betrayed my surprise.
    “What?” Burke asked.
    “I never had you pegged as being in the vanguard of 1990s information technology.”
    “I do teach the odd course at the university level, Collins. My area of expertise may be twenty centuries old, but word reaches me of the latest research techniques.”
    “I stand corrected, Reverend Dr. Professor Burke.”
    “And so you should.”
    “I’ll do some legal research into his criminal cases.”
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    “Depending on what I find, you may not need to. No point in duplicating our efforts.”
    “True enough. I’ll hold off till I see what you come up with.”
    (Normie)
    “What’s an ‘asylum’?” I asked Mum on the way to school Friday. I said it like “az-ee-lum” because I didn’t want to say “ass-ee-lum.” But that wasn’t the right way to say it anyway.
    Mummy answered: “The usual meaning of it is a mental hospital. It can also mean giving shelter to people fleeing evil governments in other countries. But psychiatric hospital would be the most common meaning. You pronounce it ‘ah-sigh-lum.’ Why are you asking, sweetheart?”
    “No reason, just wondering.” Mental people again! I couldn’t tell her why I was asking, because they might put me in an asylum! So I kept quiet about what I had seen in my mind’s eye when I woke up that morning. I drew a picture in my diary of what I saw. It was a really old building and it said “asylum” on it, and there were other words but I forgot them because I was concentrating on remembering “asylum”
    to ask Mum. I had heard the sound of screaming and crying coming from inside the building, and there was a feeling of sadness there.
    I saw Kim waiting for me in front of the school. She had one of her braids in her mouth the way she often did when she thought nobody was looking. “Kim!”
    “Normie!”
    We went in to school together, and I stopped thinking about the old building.
    †
    “I heard this really cool song on the radio,” Richard Robertson said to Father Burke when we were beginning choir practice that afternoon. “A choir was singing it. And they went ‘hoo hoo hoo’ and ‘yip yip yip’ and did all kinds of animal sounds in the middle of it. Can we do a song like that?”
    “What you’re describing, Richard, is a choir having fun . Like a 63

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    women’s choir singing the work songs of a chain gang or something with ‘Hey, nonny, nonny’ in it. Or, as you say, the hooting and bray-ing of animals. Some of the most excruciating music in the world issues forth from choirs having fun . Well, no choir is going to have fun on my time. You are going to sing music that cries out to heaven in its beauty and poignancy. Pick up the Palestrina I gave you last week, Missa Papae Marcelli . Turn to the Kyrie .”
    Everybody scrabbled around for their music. Except Richard. And Ian. They didn’t have it.
    “Boys! Where’s your music?”
    Ian didn’t answer. Father Burke glared at him, then at Richard.
    Richard said: “I can’t find it, Father.”
    “Fortunately for you, I have a couple of extra copies in my room.”
    “I’ll go get them!”
    “No, I’ll go,” Ian said.
    “Neither of you lads will go. You’d be apt to lose them on the way back. Could you take a run up there, Normie? You know where my room is. All the music is piled on my table.”
    The other kids gawked at me. None of them were ever allowed to go up there. And now they knew I knew where his room was. But that was only because I was up there with Daddy a couple of times. Anyway, I said okay and I went out of the school, across Byrne Street, and into the priests’ house. I told Mrs. Kelly, the housekeeper, that I was on an important errand for Father Burke. You have to tell her