Part 9

CHAPTER 9 — The Night Before the Music

The voicing took four hours. Jenna went through the top octave with a needle and a strip of hard felt, needling the hammers down until the brightness mellowed and the whole top of the piano matched the middle. It was slow and delicate work, and it could not be rushed, and she rushed it anyway because there were four hours until seven and she was working with borrowed time.

Just after six, Claire came into the workshop with her phone in her hand and her face white.

“The door log,” she said. “Someone opened the front door twenty minutes ago. I didn’t hear a bell.”

Graham was on his feet. Jenna pulled the action forward and checked the hammers—all twenty-two, all signed, all hers. Then she looked at the door.

There was no one there. Just the green light on the panel, blinking, and the little screen scrolling its endless river of numbers.

“Could be a glitch,” Walt said.

“Could be.” Graham crossed the room and locked the back door and put the key back in his pocket. “Could be Trent letting himself in to see if we’d done it.”

“He’s off the code,” Claire said.

“He’s off the code. That doesn’t mean he’s off the building.” Graham came back to the piano. “It doesn’t matter. He can’t reach the piano. It’s done. Play it once more, Jenna. All the way, both hands.”

Jenna sat down at the bench. She played the old grand from the bottom to the top, and she played it slow and she played it clean, and she did not play it like a tuner testing a repair. She played it the way her father used to play the four chords he knew, sitting in a garage with a dead piano and a girl who was nine.

For the first time in three days, the piano sang the same thing all the way up the board.

“Good,” Graham said. And then, more quietly, “Good girl.”

At six-thirty, they loaded the Asheford Grand onto the truck. It took all four of them—Graham, Jenna, Walt, and Claire—to move it, and the piano seemed to fight them, heavy and unwilling, the way a piano does when it has spent a hundred and twenty years in one room and does not want to move. When the big case was in the truck, Jenna stood in the lot beside it and caught her breath, and the cold air stung her lungs and she coughed, and Graham looked at her sharply and she said, “I’m fine,” and meant it.

At seven, the hall was already full of people in good coats, and Diane Ror met them at the stage door with a face like a general. “You’ve got it?”

“I’ve got it.”

“It’s been tuned?”

“It’s been voiced and regulated and tuned. It’ll sing.”

Diane looked at the piano, and then at Jenna, and for a moment she looked like she might say something else, and then she said, “Get it on the stage.”