Everything You Are(4)
“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.
Thus fortified, Phee opens the first page, suppressing a sneeze as the familiar smell of dust and dry rot irritates her nostrils.
The first page looks as ordinary as her mother’s kitchen, apart from its age. Spidery handwriting, the ink faded to brown, reads:
Client Pledges.
Some pledge. More like “Deals with the Devil,” Phee thinks. The entries should be written in blood. The first is dated 1 June 1822, in the same handwriting as the header.
Thomas McCullough, violin, Derry, Ireland. A check mark after his name means that Mr. Thomas McCullough of Derry, Ireland, is dead, his contract with the violin ended.
She turns the brittle pages with care, feeling the weight of all of the lives marked by this book. The last seven names, on the very last page, are all in her grandfather’s handwriting, but their names are as familiar to her as her own. She tracks their lives on a daily basis, watching for signs of trouble on Google and even the dark web. She’s set up an app to trawl the internet and give her early-warning alerts, the same app that notified her of the upcoming funeral.
There is a check mark next to one of these names, the only one Phee has added so far. She’s made it red and flamboyant to mark that account as done.
Marilyn Browning, violin, Kansas City, 3 May 1963.
“May you rest in peace,” Phee whispers, tracing lightly over the name. The violin sits on a stand here in her apartment, and Phee plays it herself, these days. She’s not prepared to sell it to somebody else.
Of the remaining names, five are violinists. The sixth is, or was, a cellist. The entry might as well be permanently burned into her retinas.
Braden Healey, cello, Seattle, 5 January 1990.
This man-and-cello pairing, the very last of the accounts in this book, has caused her more trouble than any of the others. Braden broke the terms of his contract and went AWOL about eleven years ago, leaving the cello behind.
In the wake of the tragedy that has befallen his family, though, she asks herself if she has really done everything she could.
She could have searched harder. Pressured Braden’s wife. Hired a private investigator. When the first accident happened, the one that destroyed the sensation in his hands, she grieved over him, went soft. Who was she to insist that he continue to play when clearly that ability had been stolen from him?
The cello was in good hands. His daughter made a fine surrogate. Phee persuaded herself that the circumstances were exceptional and it was best to leave everything alone. For almost eleven years nothing has gone wrong, and she’d almost stopped worrying about the curse.
Now another tragedy has fallen, and even though so much time has passed without event, she has to admit that both she and Braden are in violation of sworn oaths to the same old man. According to that old man, when oaths are broken, the curse rolls in.