to look at instruments. Some are not music people at all, and I send them away. The boy and the cello are a matched set. They belong together.”
The old man’s eyes look deep into Braden’s, right into the depths of his soul.
“A forever home, you understand. A marriage. This cello is not a thing to be acquired and cast aside. And when you die and the bond is broken, your next of kin will bring the cello back to me. Here.”
Phee’s voice pulls him back. “Do you remember?”
Braden nods, a long way from words. “You were there,” he manages, lips stiff. “I’d forgotten that part.”
The memory of that first meeting is so vivid he can still feel the warmth of the cello between his knees, the easy sweep of his bow arm, the tiny adjustments made so automatically by his hands. It’s as if he’s lost her all over again. His grief over Lilian and Trey, compounded by this fresh loss of the cello, threatens to break something loose at the core of him.
“Come upstairs.” Phee walks away from him, the dog at her heels.
He hesitates, every nerve in his body signaling warning. The hair on the back of his neck prickles, his belly feels full of wet cement. All the same, this moment is predestined, like he’s dreamed it, maybe even lived it before.
He follows Phee back into the workroom, and from there up a flight of narrow stairs.
“Music is a curse,” he hears as he sets his right foot on the first step.
Lilian said that, not long after they met.
The words were said so lightly, with an upward sweep of her black lashes and the slightest tilt of her rounded chin, that he’d missed the conviction that marked them. He’d kissed away the tang of bitterness the words left on her lips, kissed her eyelids, her cheek, her hands.
“Music is magic,” he hears as he sets his left foot on the second step. He’d said that, had believed it. “Music is a gift from the gods.” And when he played for her, just for her, coaxing songs out of the cello that were new in the world, born of his love and the wonder he felt that Lilian allowed the liberty of his kisses, he’d felt like a god himself. Anything was possible.
Braden stands still on the stairs. Phee and Celestine have both vanished out of sight. He can go up, or down. He chooses up, finds himself in a light-filled, high-ceilinged space with floor-to-ceiling windows and skylights above. Outside, the city is moving into evening. Fog creates ghostly haloes around the streetlights, half obscuring the bumper-to-bumper traffic down below.
“Sit,” Phee says.
Braden sinks into a comfortably worn armchair. Celestine flops down at his feet.
“Why did it have to be you?” Phee asks.
Braden, not understanding the question, doesn’t try to answer.
She bends over an antique cedar chest, inserting a heavy, old-fashioned key into the lock. A fragrance of old linen and lavender wafts upward when she lifts the lid.
“My grandfather left the shop to me, along with all of the instruments he built, and all of his clients. There are certain strings attached. When I came to talk to you, after your accident, I told you that you have to play. I didn’t tell you why.”
Braden’s throat is dry. A sense of something heavy compresses the air.
Phee kneels in front of his chair, a book in her hands. It is clearly old, the binding a faded green. Drawn by curiosity and dread, Braden watches her turn the pages, catching glimpses of handwritten transactions.
Thomas McCullough, violin, Derry, Ireland, 1 June 1822.
Daniel Marcus, violin, London, 1 November 1884.
Julia Weisel, viola, Berlin, 15 August 1901.
Some of the names he recognizes, well-known violinists and cellists. Others he has never heard of. As the pages turn, the handwriting changes, once, twice. Phee stops on the last page. He sees his own name, the last written, blank spaces below it.
Braden Healey, cello, Seattle, 5 January 1990.
Only a transaction record. Nothing unusual or terrifying about that, and yet he feels the jaws of a trap closing around him.
“This book was my grandfather’s. It was his father’s before him, and his father’s before that. A long, unbroken line of luthiers passing lore down from father to son. My father has no interest in music or instruments, and so it fell to me.”
“Did you want to be a luthier?”
“I wanted to build and repair instruments.”
“Isn’t that what a luthier does?”
“Ordinary luthiers, yes. My family line has other .