Part 4

CHAPTER 4 — The Asheford Grand

The workshop at eight in the morning smelled like hide glue warming in a pot and coffee that had been on the burner too long. Jenna stood in the doorway with her toolbox under one arm and a folded letter from her doctor in her pocket and felt, for the first time in eight years, that she was standing in a place that understood her.

Claire met her at the front desk with a lanyard and a clipboard and a smile that was trying. “Miss Walsh. Dad’s already back there. He’s been back there since six.”

“Thank you.”

“Your code.” Claire slid a small card across the counter. “Six digits. Don’t lose it. It’s tied to the log.”

Jenna looked at the card. Then she looked at the little panel beside the door, the one with the green light and a slot for a card and a thin line of letters that spelled nothing.

“It logs everyone?”

“Everyone. In and out, every hour.” Claire’s smile tightened. “Even my husband.”

Jenna put the card in her pocket.

The back room was bigger than she remembered from Maisie’s telling of it, and quieter. Racks of actions leaned against the far wall. A long wooden bench ran beneath the window, and on it, angled toward the lamp, lay the most beautiful piano Jenna had ever seen up close.

It was a concert grand. Rosewood, nearly black with age, the lid propped open so the light fell down into the strings. On the plate, in gilt that had softened but not faded, a maker’s name and a date: 1904.

“The Asheford Hall Grand,” Graham said, coming out of the shadows where he’d been doing something with a clamp. “Built in 1904. The hall turns a hundred and twenty on the fourteenth of this month, and this piano plays the gala.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then the hall hands its contract to a national company, and this shop closes.” He wiped his hands on a cloth. “No pressure.”

Jenna set her toolbox down and walked slowly along the bench, looking. The casework was sound. The plate was clean. The keys were original ivory, yellowed to the color of old paper, the fronts worn in the way that told you a hundred pianists had played here and each of them had favored the same few notes.

“You asked for the hardest test you had,” she said.

“I promised you nothing easier.”

“Then let me see the action.”

Graham pulled the action out himself, sliding it forward out of the case with the care of a man handling something that had outlived him. He set it on the bench under the lamp. Eighty-eight hammers, in three sections, the felt new-ish and the shanks straight.

“Three hammers in the treble are cracked,” he said. “Rebuild them. You have ninety minutes. The others got ninety.”

Jenna leaned in. She found them in a minute and a half—the shanks, not the felt, hairline cracks where the wood had dried and split along the grain. She ran her thumbnail along the third one and felt it flex wrong, like a bad tooth.

“You said anything cracked goes in a crate with a red X.”

“That’s the rule.”

“Where’s the crate?”

Graham nodded toward the far corner. Jenna looked. A wooden crate sat against the wall, painted with a red X on the side, filled with the bones of rejected parts.

“Nobody ever uses it,” Graham said.

Jenna took out her hammer and her knife and her pot of hot glue and she began.

It took her sixty minutes, not ninety. She rebuilt the three cracked hammers and, while the glue cured, she fixed two others that weren’t cracked yet but were going, because she could hear them going even though no one had asked. She signed the underside of each one with her small looped mark. When she was done she wiped her hands and set the action back and said, “Play it.”

Graham sat down at the bench. He played a chord in the treble, and then a run, up and down, and he stopped, and he played it again, slower, listening.

“That’s not a repair,” he said. “That’s a rebuild.”

“It’s the same thing when you do it right.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he stood and offered his hand, and his hand was dry and hard and honest.

“You’re hired, Miss Walsh. Full-time, benefits from day one. You start Monday on the Asheford Grand.”

“Today is Monday.”

“Then you start today.”

Claire came through with a clipboard and a form, and Jenna signed her name at the bottom of a page without reading any of the words, because she had read the words before and knew exactly what they cost. When she finished, Graham was standing at the door with his hands in his pockets.

“Your code will open the back door, the front, and this room,” he said. “The panel logs it. If you come in at midnight, the panel will know.”

“I don’t come in at midnight.”

“I know.” He turned to go. “That’s why I gave you the code.”

——

That afternoon Trent Kesler came down the back stairs from operations, and his smile arrived before he did.

“So this is the new technician.” He put out his hand. “Trent Kesler. I run the operations side. Graham tells me you did the test in sixty.”

“Three hammers. It wasn’t hard.”

“It’s harder than it looks, or we wouldn’t have fired the last three.” He looked around the room, at the bench, at the piano, at the red crate in the corner, and his eyes stopped there a moment too long. “You’ll want to keep that crate locked. We’ve had parts wander away before. Guys from the street, you know how it is.”

“I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Good. Good.” He clapped his hands together. “Well. Welcome aboard.”

He was gone before she could answer, and the room was quieter for it, and Jenna stood very still for a moment with a hammer in her hand and the strange, cold feeling that she had been measured and found useful in a way she would not like.

——

That evening, Claire caught her at the back door.

“Miss Walsh. Can I ask you something?”

“Jenna.”

“Jenna.” Claire looked down the hall, then back. “Why did my father hold that bench for you?”

“He told Maisie it was for whoever built the key.”

“That’s what he told a child.” Claire’s voice was careful. “I want to know what he told you.”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He asked one question and looked at my hands.”

Claire studied her. “You know what’s odd? My husband has been trying to sell this building for two years. My father wouldn’t hear of it. And then a cleaner’s daughter walks in with a tuning hammer, and suddenly my father has a reason to fight.” She paused. “I don’t know if you’re that reason, or if you’re just in the way of something. But I’d watch the people around this shop, Jenna. Some of them are not what they’re smiling about.”

She turned and walked up the stairs, and her heels clicked away, and Jenna stood by the back door with her hand on the panel.

On the little screen, numbers scrolled in a slow green river. *0700 IN. 0714 IN. 0812 IN. 0905 IN.*

Her own code, just now, at 6:41.

She watched it a moment longer, then went home.

——

At the apartment, Maisie had made dinner, which meant peanut butter sandwiches cut into triangles, arranged on a plate by size, with the largest in front like a train.

“You’re not supposed to cook,” Maisie said sternly.

“I didn’t cook. You did.”

“You’re not supposed to be tired.”

“I’m not tired.”

Maisie looked at her. Jenna sat down and ate the sandwich and pretended she wasn’t tired, and Maisie watched her with the flat, assessing gaze of a girl who had grown up in the care of a woman who worked too much and knew exactly what a lie looked like.

“Mom,” Maisie said at last. “The angry man. The one who called us charity.”

“Yes?”

“He was at the shop today. I saw him.”

Jenna set her sandwich down.

“When were you at the shop?”

“After school. I walked over. Walt said I shouldn’t, but I wanted to see you at your new bench.” Maisie pushed the crust back and forth with one finger. “I was only there a minute. He came out the back door and he didn’t see me. He was on the phone.”

“What did he say?”

Maisie’s brow furrowed, and she said it slowly, the way she said things she had been turning over.

“He said, ‘It’s under the action. Nobody looks under the action.'”

Jenna’s blood went cold and quiet.

“You’re sure that’s what he said?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Under the action.”

“Under the action.” Maisie looked up. “Mom? What’s under the action?”

Jenna thought about the red crate. She thought about the twenty-two hammers nobody would ever count. She thought about the little panel by the door that logged everyone, in and out, every hour, even the boss, even the family.

“Nothing yet,” she said. “Finish your sandwich.”