Also by
Megan Edwards
Getting Off on Frank Sinatra
Roads from the Ashes
IMBRIFEX BOOKS
Published by Flattop Productions, Inc.
8275 S. Eastern Avenue, Suite 200
Las Vegas, NV 89123
Copyright © 2017 by Megan Edwards. All Rights Reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the express written permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. For further information, please contact the Publisher, Imbrifex Books, 8275 S. Eastern Avenue, Suite 200, Las Vegas, NV 89123.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
IMBRIFEX® is a registered trademark of Flattop Productions, Inc.
Set in Adobe Caslon, Designed by Jennifer Heuer
Cover design by Jennifer Heur and Sue Campbell
E-book designed by Sue Campbell
ISBN 9781945501036 (trade paper)
ISBN 9781945501043 (e-book)
ISBN 9781945501067 (audiobook)
First Edition: September 2017
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932680
For Margaret and Diana
Chapter 1
The Merino Rose is sitting on my coffee table. I can see it in the lights I left blazing in the practice room, but seeing it doesn’t make it any more believable.
What’s even more incredible is that the Merino Rose—“the violin of angels”—is actually mine. The Brahms Violin Concerto was played for the first time on this violin.
The King of Strings.
And it doesn’t even exist. The Merino Rose was destroyed in the Trieste Opera fire in 1881. Everybody knows that. If a Guarnerius with inlaid roses around the back edge shows up at auction, it’s got to be a fake.
Except—maybe not. What keeps those forgeries coming is that no one can prove that the fire destroyed the Merino Rose. No one can even prove the violin was actually in Trieste. It was Vittorio Bonacci who was there. Was the Merino Rose with him? Was he the thief who stole it from Joseph Joachim’s Berlin conservatory?
The questions don’t matter anymore. The violin is real. It’s been gone for more than a century, and it vanished before reliable sound recording was invented. Even so, the legend of the Rose’s unsurpassed brilliance has lived on. It defies reason, but the world still mourns the loss of a violin no one alive has ever heard.
I knew this was the Rose the instant I heard that one note. Yes, I have years of experience playing and appraising stringed instruments, but that knowledge only served to corroborate what I knew the moment I plucked that string. The Merino Rose is more than a haunting memory. The world will soon find out that one of its loveliest treasures still occupies three dimensions.
I can already see the cameras, the microphones, the throngs of reporters. When I say the word, they’ll be here, each one more eager than the last to hear the edict of Edward Spencer IV. They consider me an undisputed authority, after all, an expert with unimpeachable credentials to give them the answer to the one question they’re all dying to ask.
Oh, they’ll listen in rapt silence while I play the Brahms, and they’ll pretend they care when I speak of the Rose’s sweet perfection. But that’s not what they’re really after. All they want is a number.
In the end I’ll give them exactly that, and they’ll go away happy, believing I have priced the priceless. They will never know what it really cost to bring the Merino Rose to my coffee table. Only Olivia knows, and she’s not here.
•••
I discovered I was a string man when I was eight years old and attending summer camp in Idaho. The music counselor handed me a violin when I arrived, and the moment I felt the smooth wood under my fingers, I was smitten.
At first, it was the construction of the thing that captivated me. I come from a manufacturing family—yes, I’m a Spencer from the Spencer Luggage family—and I’d spent my early years hearing about the intricacies of design and fabrication. I’d hung around our factory in Los Angeles every day after school, and I could have constructed a suitcase single-handed by the time I’d finished fourth grade. The violin was far finer than a valise, and its curved surfaces fascinated me. Even the bow seemed like a work of art.
If you think it odd that I’d never touched a violin until I was eight, you’ve never met my father. Edward Spencer III thought music was fine, in its place. He’d sung with the Yale Alley Cats when he was in college, but that was over once the sheepskin traded hands. Singing was just wholesome recreation, the same as summer camp. There was no room for it in real life. Hobbies like building models belonged there—that was practical engineering. But music? Frank Sinatra on the hi-fi while you sipped your pre-dinner Scotch—that was where music belonged.
Fathers, however, have always had a hard time stifling their children’s infatuations. I was in love with the violin from that first moment of contact, and I spent the summer making it mine. The music counselor, happy to find an avid pupil, spent hours with me, got me excused from canoeing and archery. By the end of the summer, I could play.
And play I did. When my parents came to collect me on the last day of camp, I was the star of the talent show, the centerpiece of a group that included the music counselor and two of his friends who were members of the Spokane Symphony.
My parents were very proud, and they seemed to listen carefully when the music counselor told them I was a “natural talent.”
“He should have lessons,” Mike said, and he gave them the name of a teacher in Los Angeles.
My mother agreed that I should continue studying violin, and she arranged for lessons with Howard Stiles, who had just retired as concertmaster with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mr. Stiles wasn’t the name my counselor had suggested. My mother moved in Los Angeles’s social stratosphere, and if her son was going to study violin, the teacher would have to be Someone.
My father didn’t start worrying about my love affair with music until I entered high school. I enrolled at Haviland, a boarding school located in the picturesque hamlet of Ojai in the oak-studded hills near Santa Barbara. The first three Edward Spencers had gone to Andover, but my father had decided when I was very young that if we were going to be a West Coast family, we needed to start some West Coast traditions. These new traditions didn’t extend past high school, however. I’d known since I started eating solid food that I was expected to graduate from Yale.
For the first three years I attended Haviland, I played in the orchestra. This meant several performances each semester, and the big event was always the spring musical. I played for Oklahoma! and The Music Man, but the closest I ever came to acting was the title role