The Violin Conspiracy(13)

“Mom, I—” There was so much he wanted to say. He just looked at the top of her head, smooth and gleaming, as if she’d spent twenty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing her hair and pursing her lips. “Got it,” he said. “Sorry to bother you.”

As soon as he got home, he logged onto the crowdfunding website he’d been clicking on for days, called Nicole.

“Hey,” he said when she picked up. “I think we should do the crowdfunding.”

She’d been after him to set up RaysFiddle.com, a crowdfunding site to raise the ransom money himself—just in case the police or Alicia Childress didn’t recover the violin on their own.

“Okay,” she said without hesitation. “What do you need me to do?”

Together they spent the afternoon and evening preparing the files and uploading photos under the heading “Please Help Me Rescue My Stolen Violin,” with a donation goal of $5 million, due by July 13, two days before the ransom date.

“This is gonna work,” she told him. “You’re gonna have the money in no time.”

“I sure hope so,” he said. But he already felt lighter and more confident.

That evening he struggled to get back into the mindset of practicing. The competition loomed. He was flying out in two weeks. He did his best to clear his head and focus on the Mozart fingering, on putting his whole soul and personality into telling Mozart’s story, but he could feel that he wasn’t emotionally connecting with the music the way he needed to.

When the phone rang, he was grateful for the distraction, hoping it was Alicia with news about the former housekeeper, but it was Uncle Thurston. Wow—perhaps the talk with his mom was already working. He should have known his family had been involved. “Hello?” he said.

“What the hell you thinking, boy, going over and threatening your mama? That’s just bullshit, you hear me?” He continued to swear so much that Ray couldn’t even get a word in. “I thought she raised you better than that, but what you need is to have someone take you outside and show you what happens when you threaten your mom.”

“What are you talking about? I never threatened—”

“Sure you didn’t,” Thurston cut him off. “I don’t want to hear your excuses. No excuse for that kind of behavior. How you turned out to be such a piece of shit is beyond me. It was always about you, wasn’t it? You selfish son of a bitch. Always about you. Well, now the shoe’s on the other foot, ain’t it?”

“I didn’t—”

“I just called to tell you one thing—just one thing. If you think for even a second we’ll help you—any of us will help you get that fucking violin back, you can think again. You ain’t never going to see that thing again. And you know what? I’m glad. You deserve what’s coming to you. You earned it.”

Thurston hung up, and Ray, trembling, set down the phone.

How had it ever gotten so awful?





Chapter 6


    The Wedding


October

One early October day in Ray’s senior year in high school, he was sitting at the kitchen table watching Hilary Hahn’s performance of Vivaldi’s L’Inverno on his phone when his mother said from the doorway, “Cheryl’s son Ricky is graduating next month with his GED.”

He looked up, the violins soaring in his left ear; he had only one earbud in so he could hear his mom if she wanted something. He hated hearing her yell.

“She got him a job working at the hospital,” his mother was saying. A slender woman, she liked looking good—even now, with her hair tied up in a scarf and wearing her favorite faded red T-shirt with Property of North Carolina State University Athletic Department on it. She leaned back against the doorjamb, looked at her fake yellow nails with studied casualness.

“At the hospital?” Ray repeated, not really listening. Hilary Hahn’s fingering was delicate and impressive. He slowed down the replay, lifted the violin to his chin, practiced the fingering without letting the bow touch the strings. His mom didn’t like him playing the violin in the house, even though he’d bought a cheap practice mute so she wouldn’t hear it.

Ray was the only kid in orchestra with a rental instrument—a beat-up ancient wreck, dirty and rough sounding. He’d strapped a sponge with a rubber band to the violin’s base to create a makeshift shoulder-rest.

The YouTube video swelled around him. His left arm was rigid; his right sawed the air. There were so many flats in the piece that he had to make sure his hand slid back into half position.

“Yeah,” his mom was saying, “he’s working in the cafeteria. He gets free food and benefits. Can’t you graduate early?”

He stopped, looked up at her. “What? Why?”

“So you can get a job.”

“I have a job,” he said. He rewound the video twenty seconds to examine how Hahn moved up and down the fingerboard. He hit pause and marked the music on the table in front of him. Of course—why was he trying to play that phrase in third position?

“Will you listen to me and stop with that noise?” his mother said. “That little part-time job ain’t going to make you no money. Plus it’s over in a month. You gotta help out with these bills around here. You gotta make plans.”