Part 5

CHAPTER 5 — The Wobble

The next three days passed in a rhythm Jenna had almost forgotten she could keep. She came in at eight, she sat at the bench, and she worked on the Asheford Grand.

She rebuilt the action one section at a time. She leveled the keys. She regulated the let-off and the drop. She voiced the hammers, needle by needle, until the tone came out round and even from the bottom of the board to the top. Graham stayed close, not supervising, just working, his own bench a few feet down, and they talked the way tuners talked—in fragments, in the language of strings and shanks and the small wars a piano fights against its own age.

He showed her the roll with the serial numbers. “See this? Nineteen twenty-one. My grandfather put our name on that door.”

“Did you ever miss a delivery?”

“Not once. A hundred and five years.” He set the register down. “If we ever did, I’d close this shop before I let our name go out that door broken.”

“That’s a lot of weight on one name.”

He was quiet a moment. “It’s the only thing I’ve got that’s older than me.”

On Wednesday afternoon, an old man in a windbreaker came into the shop to have his piano tuned, and since the Asheford action was gluing, Jenna tuned it.

She heard the wobble before she touched anything.

“Listen,” she said, and played a note. *Wah-wah-wah.* “Hear that? That’s two strings arguing.”

“How do you make them stop arguing?”

“You don’t make them stop. You make them agree.” She turned the pin, just a hair, and the beat slowed and smoothed and died. “There. Now they’re singing the same thing.”

The old man’s face opened up. Graham, at his bench, was watching with a look that was hard to read.

“Dad,” Claire said from the doorway, “you’re giving piano lessons now.”

“Tuning lessons,” Graham said. “She’s better than you ever were.”

“Thanks,” Claire said dryly. “I’ll put that in the family scrapbook.”

But she was looking at Jenna when she said it, and the look was not unfriendly. Jenna kept her eyes on the strings. She had learned, over the years, when to be invisible.

——

That evening Graham asked her the question she had been waiting for.

“Why the pencil mark? Really.”

She considered lying, and decided not to.

“My dad tuned pianos in Dayton. Frank Walsh. He had a shop on Third Street with a bell over the door he never oiled.” She smiled at the memory, then let it go. “He said, if you won’t sign your work, don’t let it leave the bench.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died the April I turned twenty-five.”

“And the shop?”

“Linquist Piano Works. I worked there eight years. Started in the rebuild line and ended up running it.” She kept her voice flat, because flat was the only way it would stay steady. “It closed eight years ago. A consultant from Chicago told us the market had changed and the building had value and we ought to take the offer before it went away. We all took severance and three of us worked the same floor at a hotel the month after.”

“Crestline,” Graham said. “That’s the national company. The one circling the hall.” He fell silent, and the silence was long. “I trusted the name on my door more than the work on my bench for thirty years,” he said at last. “I’d rather not do it a day longer.”

——

On Thursday morning, Graham handed her a key and a location and a job.

“An estate out on Ridge Road. A widow, an upright, hasn’t been tuned since her husband died. It’s routine. Two hours, take your time. I’ll be here with the Grand.”

She almost said no. Walt was at a doctor’s appointment, and Maisie got out of school early on Thursdays, and the plan had been for Maisie to come to the shop and sit quietly with her book while Jenna worked. But Graham said the widow had been waiting three weeks, and the shop needed the money, and the job was easy.

“Maisie can sit here with me,” Graham said. “I’ll keep her out of trouble.”

“She’s eight.”

“I’m aware. I raised one. Barely.”

So Jenna drove out to Ridge Road. The widow cried when the piano sang again, and hugged her, and Jenna sat in her truck for a long time before she drove back, thinking about signs a person carved into their work.

When she came in through the back door at four-fifteen, the shop was quiet. Too quiet.

Graham was at the bench, bent over the Asheford Grand, and his shoulders were rigid, and Claire was standing in the doorway with her hand pressed to her mouth, and Trent was there, and a man in a gray suit Jenna had never seen, and Maisie’s book lay closed on the chair by the window and Maisie was standing beside it with her hands at her sides, very still.

“Jenna,” Graham said, and his voice was wrung out. “Come here. Play a middle C.”

Jenna set down her box and walked to the bench. She played a middle C.

Nothing.

She tried the D. A dead key. The E. Dead. She ran her thumb up the treble and every note in the middle came out flat and hollow, like a sound made in an empty room.

“Graham,” the man in the gray suit said, “I warned you. She rushed it.”

“I didn’t rush it.” Jenna pulled the action forward before anyone could stop her. The hammers slid out into the light, and she looked, and her stomach dropped.

The three hammers she had rebuilt—the ones she had signed—were gone. In their place were three different hammers, cracked and dead, the felt worn through to the core so the shank struck wood on copper. She turned one over with her thumb.

No pencil mark.

A red X.

“I didn’t do this,” she said.

“Mr. Hartley, I’m sorry.” The gray suit spread his hands. “My board meets Monday. I need a piano by Saturday, or I need a new company. Diane Ror, Asheford Hall. We’ve been talking about moving our contract for a while. This settles it.”

“Don’t.” Jenna did not look up. “Please. Let me pull the whole action, let me show you—”

“You’re done here.” Trent’s voice was low and reasonable. “Leave your code at the office. I’ll take the action back to the shop myself tonight and sort out what’s salvageable.”

“Mr. Hartley,” Jenna said, and now she was looking only at Graham, “please just let me look. Twenty minutes. I’ll tell you everything I find.”

But Graham’s face had closed, the way a man’s face closes when he has been humiliated in front of the one witness who matters. He was looking at the name on each dead hammer—the ones with no name on them at all.

“You’re done,” he said. “Leave your code at the office.”

Maisie made a small sound. Jenna looked at her. The girl’s face was white but her jaw was set, and she was looking at the three dead hammers with the red X’s, and something in her expression was not fear. It was a kind of terrible attention.

“Mom,” she said, “come on.” Her voice cracked. “Did you break the piano, Mom?”

“No,” Jenna said. “I didn’t.”

“Then why are the notes dead?”

“Because they weren’t mine.”

She slid the action all the way out, lifted a hammer from the treble, and held it up to the lamp so it was caught against the light. The gray suit leaned closer. Trent did not lean closer. Trent, she noticed, did not need to.

“Look,” Jenna said. “When I finished, every hammer I touched had a pencil mark. My mark. Where nobody would look unless they pulled the action.” She turned the dead hammer over. “These have no mark. They have red X’s. These came out of the reject crate.”

The room was very quiet.

“Who knows about that crate?” Diane Ror asked, and her voice had changed, sharpened against the professional flatness it had held all afternoon.

“Everyone in this shop,” Graham said. “Everyone with a door code.”

“Then we look at the door code.” Diane handed her card to Claire. “This panel. It logs everyone, doesn’t it? That’s what you told me when I signed the contract. Show me Monday night.”

Claire took the card. Her hands were trembling. She went to the panel and the green numbers began to swim. She found the date, and she read the entries in a voice that got quieter with each one.

“Monday. In—six-fourteen. Out—five-forty-one. Back in—eleven-fifty-two.”

“Whose code is that?” Diane said.

Claire looked at the screen a long time. Then she looked at her husband.

“Trent,” she said. “It’s your code.”