AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As Maura looked down atthe keyboard, she felt her heartbeat quicken, keeping pace with the allegro tempo the orchestra was now playing, every note, every measure, counting down toward her solo. She knew her part so well she could play it with her eyes closed, yet her hands trembled, her nerves drawing tighter and tighter as the strings and woodwinds called to one another. Now the bassoons joined in and the flutes trilled, and it was time.
She launched into her solo. The notes were seared into her muscle memory, as familiar to her now as the act of breathing, and her fingers moved effortlessly through the cadenza, slowing into the dolce, and then launched into the final trill. It was the cue for the string section to raise their bows for the tutti section. Only then, as the rest of the orchestra took over, could she lift her hands from the keys. She took a deep breath and felt her shoulders relax.I did it. Made it through without a single flubbed note.
Then the rehearsal fell apart. Somewhere among the strings, notes collided in a sour jumble, throwing off the woodwinds. In the midst of that dissonant scrimmage, the conductor’s baton rapped sharply on the music stand.
“Stop. Stop!” the conductor called out. The bassoon gave one final honk and the orchestra fell silent. “Second violins? What happened there?” He frowned at the offending string section.
Mike Antrim reluctantly raised his bow in the air. “My fault, Claude. I lost my place. Forgot which measure we were on.”
“Mike, we’ve got only two weeks till the concert.”
“I know, I know. I promise, it won’t happen again.”
The conductor gestured toward Maura. “Our pianist here is doing a bang-up job, so let’s try to match her performance, shall we? Now let’s go back to five measures before the tutti. Piano, lead us in with the trill, please?”
As Maura raised her hands to the keyboard, she glimpsed a red-faced Mike Antrim looking her way as he mouthed the wordsorry.
He still looked abashed when the rehearsal ended half an hour later. While the other musicians packed up their stands and instruments, he approached the piano, where Maura was gathering up her sheet music. “Well, that was pretty humiliating. For me anyway,” he said. “But you made it seem effortless.”
“Hardly.” She laughed. “I’ve done nothing but practice for the last two months.”
“And it certainly shows. Obviously, I should’ve been doing more of it myself, but I’ve been distracted.” He paused and looked down at the violin case he was holding, as if trying to come up with a way to broach the subject on his mind. “Are you in a rush to leave? Because I wondered if we could talk about the investigation.”
“The Suarez case?”
“Yes. It really shook me up, not just because I knew her. But now Detective Rizzoli’s raised the possibility that the killer has his eye on my daughter.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“It happened at Sofia’s funeral. There was this man at the cemetery who seemed far too interested in Amy. And that worries us.”
The other musicians were already heading out of the auditorium, but Antrim made no move to leave. The door banged shut, sending an echo through the deserted building. Only Maura and Antrim were left in the performance hall, standing alone among the empty chairs.
“Detective Rizzoli hasn’t told us anything since then,” said Antrim. “Julianne’s so anxious she can’t sleep. Neither can Amy. I need to know if there’s something we should be doing. If it’s something we even need to be worried about.”
“I’m sure Jane would tell you if there is.”
“I get the feeling she likes to keep her cards close to her vest. You know her pretty well, don’t you?”
“Well enough to know you can trust her.”
“To tell us the truth?”
Maura slipped the sheet music into her portfolio and looked at Antrim. “She’s the most honest person I know,” she said, and it was true. Too often people avoided speaking candidly because there were consequences to honesty, but that had never stopped Jane from delivering the truth, however painful.
“Do you think you could talk to her? Let her know how worried we are?”
“I’m having dinner with her tomorrow night. I’ll find out if there’s anything she’s willing to share with you.”
They walked out of the building, into a night so thick with humidity it felt like wading into a warm bathtub. She took a breathof syrupy air and looked up at a cloud of moths, swarming and battering themselves against the streetlamp. Theirs were the only cars still left in the lot, Maura’s Lexus parked half a dozen stalls away from Antrim’s Mercedes. She unlocked her vehicle and was about to slide in when he called out with a question.
“What else can you tell me about Detective Rizzoli?”
She turned back to him. “In what respect?”
“Professionally. Can we count on her to follow through with every detail?”
Maura eyed him over her car, its roof glistening with a wet film of humidity. “I work with a lot of detectives, Mike. I’ve never met a better investigator. Jane’s smart and she’s thorough. You could even call her relentless.”
