The Silent Sister(59)

* * *

She’d gotten in the habit of using Ingrid’s phone on those rare occasions she needed to make a call. It was cheaper, easier, and less disgusting than using a pay phone, but it came with the possibility of Ingrid overhearing the conversation. She could usually wait until Ingrid was working in the garden or taking cookies to the homeless on the beach. This afternoon, though, she was too impatient. She needed to call about that Jay Haide violin before it was snapped up by someone else, and it didn’t matter if Ingrid was in the kitchen or not.

So Ingrid chopped vegetables to toss in a stockpot while Jade placed the call. The girl—her name was Cara—was a senior, and she told Jade that she was moving up to a nineteenth-century Amati. They made plans to meet in one of the practice rooms at San Diego State the following day. Jade had hoped Cara could meet that evening. She would have turned around and driven all the way back to school if Cara had been free, but she said she had classes and then a date with her boyfriend.

When Jade hung up the phone, Ingrid handed her a chunk of the celery she was chopping.

“A violin?” She looked amused, as though she thought Jade had lost her mind.

“I used to play when I was a kid,” Jade said, “and I kind of miss it.”

“Cool.” Ingrid scooped the celery pieces into the pot on the stove. “I can’t wait to hear you play.”

Jade shrugged, as though buying the violin was no big deal. “Oh, well, it’s been years,” she said. Two years, nine months, and about fourteen days, to be exact.

“Well, good for you for pursuing a passion,” Ingrid said. “Stay for dinner? Turkey soup.”

Jade shook her head. “Thanks, no. I have homework.” Ingrid was really nice but Jade tried not to spend too much time with her. She no longer worried about being recognized, but she did worry about the police showing up at Ingrid’s door one day, asking questions about her strange tenant.

She barely slept that night, she was so excited about the violin. The excitement, though, was tempered by thoughts of her father. Never pick up a violin again, Lisa, he’d warned her. He’d be furious if he knew, but she would be very careful. She’d play only in her cottage. She had no reason at all to play anywhere else.

* * *

Cara was twenty-one and extraordinarily beautiful. Total California girl, Jade thought. The kind she could picture surfing rather than cooped up in the music building at San Diego State. But Cara was a good violinist, and Jade sat mesmerized as she played the opening section of “Czardas” by Monti. She watched Cara’s tanned and toned bare arms work the bow and her long fingers sail over the strings, and she was unsure whether she was more taken with the violin or the violinist.

Cara finished playing, then handed the instrument to Jade. Holding a violin beneath her chin for the first time in so long felt like holding a friend she’d thought she’d lost forever. She played some scales and arpeggios to hear the sound and warm up her tense, tight fingers. Then she played a bit of Vivaldi’s Concerto in A Minor, and she didn’t have to work hard at sounding like a novice. It had been so terribly, painfully long.

She gave Cara five one-hundred-dollar bills, then carried the violin across campus to her car, hugging the case tightly in her arms as if it were a baby.

* * *

San Diego was in the midst of the hot, dry Santa Ana winds of autumn, and even though her cottage felt like a sauna, Jade closed all the windows, stood in her living room, and played. Although her left hand and bow hand worked seamlessly together, her fingers felt weak from too much time away, and they moved sluggishly at first. Her control of the bow was imprecise, but none of that mattered. She cried with happiness and sorrow as she played. She’d lost so much. Her home. Her family. Her future. But in her hands she held the one thing with the power to bring her joy, and she played her new best friend until the early hours of the morning.





28.

Riley

I pulled into the circular drive of the oceanfront house in Myrtle Beach and sat there a moment, thinking through what I planned to say to Caterina Thoreau. Caterina—not Steven Davis—had been Lisa’s violin teacher at the time she supposedly killed herself. I’d found her name in several of the newspaper articles my father had saved. She was the only person still alive who’d truly known my sister around the time of her death—if indeed she was dead. I felt a desperate need to talk to someone who had known her well and, I hoped, cared about her.

Caterina had been remarkably easy to find. Now seventy-six, she’d retired from the National Symphony ten years earlier and moved to South Carolina to be near her daughter. I found her phone number online and told her who I was and that I wanted to talk to her. After expressing her shock at hearing from me, she invited me to her home. I didn’t let the fact that her home was nearly four hours from New Bern stop me. I would do whatever I needed to do to get answers about Lisa.

The bonus of driving to Myrtle Beach was getting away from the insanity in my house. When I’d first arrived in New Bern, I’d wanted to get the house cleaned out and on the market as soon as possible. Now I wanted to slow everything down, but with Christine and Jeannie on a rampage as they tore through the rooms, I wasn’t sure I could make that happen. I’d told them I was visiting a friend in Virginia and would be home some time this evening. Christine opened her mouth and I was sure she was going to get on my case about my father’s paperwork, but I left the house, shutting the door behind me, before she had a chance to say a word.