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“How so?”
“Do you think Devine knew about Johnny Seabrook and Angela Buford?”
She stared down, watched the mist curl off her mug. “The thing about Luke? He can be all kinds of wonderful. And all kinds of awful. But I’ve never known him to lie.”
Mr. No Name nodded.
“He surrounds himself with these excesses and extreme people,” she said. “But he’s oddly … pure that way. I don’t know if that’s still the case. But that’s how I always experienced him. I’m sorry”—ugh—“if that’s not super helpful.”
“It is.”
“Okay. I don’t really get it. Why what I think about all this is useful to you.”
“Because you see things other people don’t.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I don’t think it. I know it. Just like you do.”
He held her stare, but it wasn’t threatening, not at all. It was more like he was willing to look into her if she was willing to let herself be looked into. Breathing a haze of chamomile, she decided that maybe it might be okay.
His face wasn’t particularly interesting. He was so plain-looking. Not much to see, really. And yet he had such presence, as if he was right where he was and nowhere else.
“I’m scared,” she said. “All the time.”
“You’re either that,” he said, “or you’re that while working onnotbeing that.”
She thought for a very long time. And then she nodded.
He moved to rise.
“I said there wasn’t any music in your voice.” She’d begun speaking the thought without realizing it. “But I think there is. It’s just ancient, really deep. Maybe it’s a pitch most people can’t hear anymore. Like a dog whistle.”
Mr. No Name gave a partial grin. “If that’s true,” he said, “I’m glad you hear it.”
She lost herself in the mist rising from her tea, in her blanket, in a wave of emotion she didn’t understand. When she came back to herself, he was gone.
He’d replaced the chair over by the table in the kitchen.
It was as though he was never even there.
She stared at the empty chair. And then at her cello reclining on its stand by the front door.
She was up on her feet, gliding across the studio, and then she was gazing down at the narrow-grained-spruce face of her cello, the steel-core strings stretching from the neck across the beautiful wide hips, each a fifth apart. There and waiting, ready to give voice to sensation, to speak in tongues, to span the universe.
Music flooded her mind. Her hands twitched with musclememory. For the first time in a long time, she felt a pull back to brightness, an opening of the heart she recognized as a glimpse of freedom.
She reached for her instrument.
49
All the Way Down
Luke Devine had a dream that he was all his worst parts.
And nothing else.
Pick one thing you’ve done.
