Read Online Repair to Her Grave by Sarah Graves - Free Book Online Page B

we’re on-line we can upload pictures of the jug,” Maggie said. “I borrowed my Dad's digital camera while he was up here.”
    Maggie's dad was a salesman in Bangor; he and her mom were on decent terms and he visited often. “See,” she said, “they’re on this disk. Sure wish he’d left the camera, too,” she sighed.
    I heard the computer's disk drive whirr as it accepted the pictures, which was a process I no more understood than I caught the drift of quantum physics, but it worked.
    “Great,” Sam said. “Um, you’ll write the captions?”
    “Uh-huh.” Maggie finished whatever arcane maneuvers it took to get snapshots of a two-hundred-year-old seltzer jug onto the World Wide Web, and snapped the floppy from the drive. “That's the bargain, right? I do the words, you do the numbers.”
    “You got it.” Sam was dyslexic, a handicap that made reading and writing laborious, but he drove a hard bargain; Maggie, smoothly literate, tended to low-ball. So they made a good team for the Internet auctions where they sold their finds.
    And in other ways, I thought. But I reminded myself that it was none of my business, as Raines looked puzzled.
    “Tune? I don’t know. Guess I heard it somewhere.” He tipped his head, thinking.
    Or acting as if he were trying to think, while knowing where he’d heard it.
    “Not in Boston,” he mused aloud. “I think I’d recall. Hmm, that is a riddle—maybe from you? Did you happen to be whistling it yourself when I came in? Because I’m sure I heard it when I—”
    “No, Jonathan.” My patience was wearing thin. “We all know the tune.”
    It was a dervish of a virtuoso fiddle number; local players had tried it, and although they could reproduce the melody, the tempo was demonic and in the end they all confessed that it had beaten them.
    “But I can’t whistle,” I went on, “and Sam wasn’t here, and when Monday tries to whistle all she does is spit out little dry bits of dog biscuit. So tell me the truth, for once.”
    What I wanted was the rest of the story: not just how he’d known the music or why he was here, but why he was so sure a country fiddler named Jared Hayes had really had a Stradivarius.
    And why he thought it was still in Eastport. That was what I wanted that night, safe and sound at the kitchen table.
    Instead, as he whistled the tune again, the old music books in the library seemed to rise in my mind's eye: thickly quill-penned with eighth- and sixteenth-notes, the heavy old vellum foxed and faded but still thrillingly legible, even to me.
    The pieces, mostly dance tunes with titles like “Jo's Jig” and “Mandalay Reel,” painted a portrait of Hayes as a man with energy and style. When they were played at musical evenings put on by the Eastport Historical Society, you could almost hear him laughing merrily in the background.
    But there were darker pieces, also, as presto yet filled with minor-key flourishes and throbbingly sad melodies, hinting at an awful yearning. Like …
    “ ‘Pirate's Revenge.’ ” Raines snapped his fingers, smiling with the happy surprise of a man who has answered a difficult game-show question. “But for the life of me I couldn’t tell you how I know,” he said.
    Whereupon all the lights went out.
    And stayed out. We lit candles, which didn’t do much for our activity level; really, there are few things anybody wants to do nowadays by candlelight, with the notable exception of one thing. But Wade had not gotten back, yet.
    We called the power company to no avail as the blackout time lengthened to an hour and then another. And we played a few games, trying to tell Go To Jail from Park Place in the gloom. But we were a dull company, and finally when George stopped back to get Ellie and Maggie had gone home, we went to bed. George had promised to fix whatever had gone wrong—it wasn’t the fuse box, and no one else in town had lost power—in the morning.
    Lonesomely, I got under the covers. Of course, the