Underneath her bluster, Bridgette is the most kindhearted of women, and Phee needs a little bit of kindness right now.
“The girl who plays the cello—Allie—her mother and brother were both killed in a car crash.”
Bridgette freezes in the act of dropping cookie dough onto a baking sheet. “Oh, the poor child. Has she a father?”
Oh, indeed she has a father, Phee thinks, or had one, anyway. Braden Healey, once a brilliant cellist, abandoned both his cello and his daughter and vanished off Phee’s radar almost eleven years ago. She dreams about him at night and runs internet searches for him by day. Always, at the back of her consciousness, a nagging little worry eats away at her.
Something bad is going to happen.
Has happened.
She shivers. The brightly lit kitchen darkens, and she glances up to the window, expecting storm clouds, surprised by a serene blue sky.
“Phee,” her mother says, calling her back to the present. “Tragic and terrible, but an accident has nothing to do with you and certainly nothing to do with the cello.”
“I have to go.” Phee clambers to her feet, stretching out the kinks in her back, waiting for sensation to return to her right foot, which is all pins and needles from being sat on. Celestine licks her hand, and she steadies herself against his solid bulk.
“Tell me you’re not going to dash over to the house of the bereaved and check on an instrument,” Bridgette demands.
“Of course I’m not.”
It’s a shading of the truth, not an outright lie. Phee learned as a very small child that her mother can smell lies, literally, with a little wrinkle of her freckled nose, a flaring of her nostrils. Bridgette has the second sight, although she’ll deny it until the cows come home.
Phee won’t go to the house now; she’ll go Sunday, after the funeral. Take some flowers for Allie, offer condolences, use the opportunity to check in on the cello in person and ask about Braden. She’s done repairs on the cello a time or two, so she can make a case for her appearance.
For now, she has other things she needs to do.
“Bye, Mom.” She drops a kiss on Bridgette’s cheek and grabs up a handful of cookies. “Remember what I said about the oatmeal and raisin.”
“Because you want them for yourself, greedy girl.”
Phee laughs. Under the influence of Bridgette and oatmeal cookies, it’s nearly impossible to feel tragic or believe in mysterious forces at work.
Back at her little apartment above the luthier shop she inherited from her grandfather, it’s a different story. Sometimes, Phee wonders if his ghost is haunting her. Little noises at night, bangs, and clatters. The random sound of strings from the shop below. On bright, sunshiny days, or even at night when the lights are on, she doesn’t believe in hauntings or curses. But in the midnight dark, or when something horrible has happened to the people connected to one of her instruments, she finds herself sucked into her grandfather’s mystique.
Celestine pokes her with a cold, wet nose, insisting that he is very much real and would like to be fed, thank you very much, so she gets him his dinner and pulls out celery and carrot sticks for herself as a compensation for too many cookies but also because crunching carrots is a fantastic deterrent to believing in the old stories.
She was eighteen the night Granddad laid the obligation on her to guard a group of instruments. “The specials,” he called them. She keeps the book he gave her that night under lock and key, as she swore to do. His version of that was an antique safe. Hers is a beautiful cedar chest that also holds her mother’s wedding dress; her grandmother’s china; the first violin built by her own clumsy, inexperienced hands; and other treasures she has packed away over the years.
She retrieves the key from an old cookie tin full of salt that she stores on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet, even though she sees no point in it. If some random thief were to break into the chest, pick the lock or splinter the wood with an axe, the old account book would hold no value for him.
Unwrapping the book from the towel in which she swathes it as one more level of concealment, she settles on the floor for what has become an evening ritual. Celestine, done with dinner, oomphs down beside her and rests his big head on her lap.