Digging Up the Dead (17 page)

Blair jabbed his finger at the phone’s red circle to close the call. He finished removing the harp’s D string and went online to place his order for the new set.

His thoughts returned to Oliver Swenson. Damn writers, always angling for more money or recognition, even one like Oliver, who knows very well that he must stay behind the scenes about books he has ghostwritten. The contract drawn up between him and the publisher was specific about non-disclosure. What could the man want? First Sally, now Swenson.

A knock at the door caused him to call out, “It’s open.”

He heard a voice say, “Oh, thank you. Terribly sorry to disturb you on such a wonderfully sunny morning. It’s raining curtain rods in London at the moment.”

That Brit!

“Mrs. Trevant, am I correct?”

He came forward and invited her in.

“Please do call me Tosca. We met at Karma’s party. I was so interested to meet you. I know you were Fuller Sanderson’s literary agent after your father died. How exciting to be privileged to carry on selling the works of such a legendary crime novelist. I’m writing an article about Karma’s anniversary celebration and the fundraiser for a library. The evening ended in such sadness with Sally dying. A mystery in itself, don’t you think, Mr. Blair?”

“A mystery? Oh, yes, the police were here. I suppose they interviewed everyone who was at the party, looking for whoever slipped Sally the poisonous sap they said she succumbed to.”

“Oh, how alliterative you are. I’ll use the phrase in my article, if it’s all right with you?”

Blair’s eyebrows drew together in a frown. “Do not attribute any quotes to me,” he said.

Without expanding further and deciding he needed to be a little more hospitable to this gossipy woman who could be a threat, he asked if she’d like a cup of coffee. Shiny copper pots and skillets hung from a circular metal ceiling rack, and three glass-fronted cabinets held dishes and glasses. The bare white marble countertops and floor, meticulously clean, sparkled. Only the kitchen table showed signs of activity, and he watched Tosca immediately pounce upon it.

“Your Kinnor harp,” she said, wonder sending her voice high as she regarded the instrument and reached out to touch it. “I hadn’t seen one of these close up in years until I heard you play it at Karma’s party. Where did you get it? What a beautiful instrument. How old is this one?”

At her enthusiastic barrage of questions, Blair felt disarmed. She sure knew her harps. He went to the Keurig coffee machine he kept on a side table and asked her preference.

“Espresso Roast or Perfetto? No, you look like a Mocha Swirl lady,” he said, cocking his head and regarding her. “Or perhaps Tetley’s British Blend Tea?” He held up the small K-cup.

“Thank you, yes, the tea will be fine. Oh, just a minute. You’re brewing it in that thing?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m sure it will taste wonderful. You Americans are so far ahead of us in many ways, but,” she seemed to be searching for the right words, “don’t you agree that tea needs to steep for a while, even when the leaves are reduced to dust and packed into those ugly teabags?”

“Sorry,” Blair said, his tone breezy, ignoring her remark. “This is it. Did you take a good look at the Kinnor?”

He watched her run her fingers over the harp again, this time along one of its two horizontal curved arms, and explained he’d been tuning it up when he discovered the D string needed replacing. Blair complained at the length of time it took to reorder and asked if she played any instruments.

“No. I am a student of music, of opera most of all, and I’ve studied medieval instruments. I saw you playing this Kinnor at Karma’s party, and late one evening we heard you on your boat—I assume it was you—playing a spinet. An ottovino, I assumed. You are multi-talented, Mr. Blair, or may I call you Graydon?” At his nod she continued, “You own quite an extraordinary instrument.”

Blair jumped eagerly to his feet, clearly flattered. “Oh, this is just part of my collection. Let me show you some of the others. It’s a small but highly significant group. I rarely let anyone see them, but I know you’ll appreciate them.”

He left the kitchen and returned carrying two stringed instruments under his arms and a third in his hand. He set them on the table along with a bow that he placed alongside the almond-shaped rebec.

“Do you know what they are?”

He was sure she didn’t.

“Umm, let’s see,” Tosca said, peering at them closely. “They are basically all fiddles.”

At his look of horror she laughed and said, “All right, but it’s the truth. Anyway, I only know a few of them from seeing photos. This is a Welsh lyre, it’s called a crwth,” pronouncing the word as ‘kruth’ and smiling when Blair nodded in appreciation. “It’s probably from the thirteenth century,” continued Tosca, “and that one with the lovely bow looks like a Middle Eastern rebec, the kind Chaucer wrote about in his medieval work,
The Miller’s Tale.
Such a pity it has a scratch. But this third one with a string missing has me stumped. A guitar, I’d guess, but what kind?”

“Well done, but I knew you wouldn’t be able to name my Italian chitarra battente. Very few people can. It’s a chordophone, belongs to the lute family. It’s one of the rare smaller models. Medium and large sizes are much more common. Okay, I grant it’s similar to a Spanish guitar, but I’m surprised that, with all the supposed knowledge of these musical instruments you’ve shown so far, you don’t know this one.”

He saw at once he’d hit a soft spot. Tosca launched into what she knew about the crwth and rebec, which was precious little, but she managed to make it sound comprehensive.

Blair let her ramble on, his mind distracted by the annoyance of having to order new strings for the Kinnor. Besides, anything she said was of no interest, because he knew the background of his collection inside out, of course. Hadn’t he studied their origin before figuring out where and how to obtain them?

After he served Tosca the tea, making sure to provide milk and sugar, and brought his coffee cup to the table, Blair sat down, but his mind drifted off again as Tosca kept talking. Her comments about musical instruments became a buzz to his ears, and his thoughts turned once more to what he thought of as the rescue of each instrument, a small smile hovering at the edges of his mouth.

He re-lived having to pull the rebec forcibly out of its owner’s arms. The man wasn’t supposed to be home, and Blair had expected a quick in-and-out mission with gloves the only necessary accessory. It was pure luck that the guy, a Jordanian diplomat, happened to be a collector of other items in addition to musical instruments. He also loved Arabian daggers, which were conveniently displayed on a nearby wall shelf. How easy it had been to grab one when the man refused to let go of the rebec.

Blair took the weapon away with him when he left, along with the musical instrument, and for a while he considered keeping the dagger instead of getting rid of it. He was intrigued by the fine hilt decorated with two silver rosettes and the gold adorning the handle. It was obviously valuable, but having the rebec was reward enough.

He looked at the crwth that sat on the table between him and Tosca and remembered its acquisition, too. Ah, yes, the young student from Cardiff, Wales. She had been in New York to perform as a member of a Welsh orchestra. As soon as he’d set eyes on it during the concert, he knew he had to have it. After the concert Blair went backstage, ostensibly to congratulate her on her skill with the ancient instrument.

There were too many people milling around to get close to her. He waited until all of them left, including the other musicians who told her to join them as soon as she’d finished packing up her crwth. Blair entered the room and said how much he admired the strangely shaped instrument with its two cutouts. He asked if she found it awkward to play because of having to wear a strap that went around her neck to hold up the bulky, square harp.

How enthused she had been to tell him that no, the strap was fine, it helped to support the instrument as long as it was placed correctly. Blair asked her if she minded demonstrating again the positioning. She obliged, slipped the strap around the back of her neck and held her hands in place as if playing. It was a matter of seconds for Blair to wind the strap, so conveniently in place, completely around her neck and pull it tight. She’d barely struggled.

He read in the newspaper a few days later, when the murder was reported, that this particular crwth went back to Roman times when Britain was occupied. The instrument had originally been discovered during an archaeological dig on land that belonged to the student’s family. The crwth was immediately declared a national treasure and displayed in a Cardiff museum. The girl was given permission play the precious instrument only at international music events, Wales having realized its significance, and the museum as a tourism attraction.

“Graydon, hello!” Tosca said, realizing he was daydreaming.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was distracted for a moment, thinking about the crwth. It’s stunning, isn’t it?”

She agreed it was most lovely and that all of them were the best of any odd, stringed instruments she’d ever seen.

“You said these are only part of your collection. What else do you have?”

“Only two others, a fourteenth century Psaltery, which you may know is a zitherized harp, and another kind of zither, a Chinese chyn.”

“Way out of my field of knowledge,” said Tosca. “I was wondering, when we heard you play the other night on your boat, if the sea air has any effect on them?”

“Not that I’ve noticed. I mostly keep them at home, though, and occasionally bring some of them on board to work on or play.”

“May I ask you about this Baroque chitarra battente? It looks like a Spanish guitar, but I know that it didn’t originate in Spain.” She indicated the instrument. “What’s its history?”

Blair was tempted to tell her that it had been the easiest to steal. His old-timer musician friends in New York had told him about an elderly Italian woman with a chitarra battente. She’d brought it with her when she immigrated to the States fifty years earlier, said it was a family heirloom. Blair had soon found out her name and paid her a midnight visit. Piece of cake.

“Its history?” he said to Tosca. “I really have no idea; I bought it at a second-hand store in New York. The owner didn’t remember where or when he’d purchased it. Said it had been sitting in a corner for as long as he could remember.”

He realized Tosca was standing up. “I’ll have to come back and listen to you play each one in turn,” she said.

Blair knew he’d better say nothing. No sense in encouraging her. He walked her to the door and thanked her for her visit, which he silently and fervently hoped she would not repeat.

After he ushered her out Tosca turned back halfway down the front path and said, “Oh, I must talk to you about Fuller Sanderson and his lost manuscripts. That’s actually why I came to see you.”

But Blair made no reply and was already closing the door.

She strolled slowly home, thinking about the man’s passion for his musical instruments and his transparent obsession with owning them. Where had he found them all? The mini-sized spinet and the rebec were centuries old. She didn’t know a lot about the crwth but knew one was displayed in the Cardiff museum as one of its most treasured artifacts. Was Blair’s from the same era, or was it a copy?

Once settled at the dining table after breakfast, J.J. having left early again, Tosca booted up the laptop and Googled the square-shaped “crwth.” She learned it originally came from Central Asia in the ninth century, eventually reaching Europe in the tenth and twelfth centuries. She was fascinated to read, too, that the instrument was a favorite of the lower classes and never made its way into a royal court. But then another document claimed the reverse. It didn’t matter that much, but she did like to get her facts straight. Her newspaper editor was a stickler for citing reliable sources.

Tosca found several more articles relating to the archaic stringed instrument. One magazine story claimed that only four crwths had survived, one of which had been stolen from the Cardiff Museum seven years earlier. A photo of the last person to play it, a young university student from Wales, accompanied the article, as well as a photo showing her family weeping at her funeral. Despite extensive Interpol searches among private collectors, the crwth nor the strap that had strangled the musician had ever been found.

Was Blair’s crwth the one from Wales? There was no strap with it, and she assumed the murderer would have disposed of it separately. The article ran a portion of the police report of the theft, noting that the museum director said there were no distinguishing marks with which to identify it, were it ever recovered.

The next instrument Tosca researched was the rebec. One batch of articles caught her eye. Several newspaper stories that ran consecutively for over a week in the
New York Ledger
said an extremely rare rebec had been stolen from a diplomat in New York eleven years earlier along with a medieval dagger. There were photos of similar daggers, detailed descriptions of the rare piece and interviews with Jordanian diplomats.

The thief, the police believed, had stabbed the man to death during the commission of the robbery, using an ancient Arabian dagger from the diplomat’s own valuable group of six displayed on a wall near the man’s body. The weapons were arranged in a star shape, and the photo showed one piece was missing. Like the rebec, Tosca realized as she read on, the dagger had never been recovered. The local police and the FBI had publicized the murder and theft widely, and the Jordanian Consulate had launched an extensive search, but neither the rebec nor the dagger was ever recovered and a murder suspect never identified nor apprehended.

Tosca peered closely at the photo of the instrument, then went upstairs to get her magnifying glass. Studying the photo of the rebec again, she saw a scratch on the side, similar to the one on Blair’s instrument. Was he the thief? And the killer? Had Blair been in New York at the time? No wonder he was so secretive about showing off his instruments.