“You pay,” he said. “She’s getting your oil changed.”
“Yeah, but it’s your concert.”
“She can schedule my concert after she’s done with the oil change.”
“I wish we could hire her today,” Nicole said. “I need to have my oil changed when I get back.”
“Didn’t you just get one?”
“Yeah, but I’m almost a thousand miles overdue. I’m going to have her keep track of that, too. When my car needs an oil change.” Nicole hated putting miles on her car—she loved public transportation and took it as often as possible.
“A thousand miles? Good grief. Why do you drive so much?”
“Don’t act like you don’t drive a lot.”
“Sure I do, but jeez. Was this the last trip to Cleveland?” She’d performed as a substitute for the Cleveland Orchestra a few weeks ago.
“No, when I went to New York that time.”
“When did you drive back from New York?”
“When you were with Leonid at Juilliard,” she said. “Remember I drove?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Right.” Something curled in the back of his head, a question mark.
“Anyway,” he said after a moment, “I really think we should think about the personal assistant thing.” He searched on his phone. “Looks like they’d charge between fifteen and thirty dollars an hour. How many hours do you think you’d need?”
“Say, ten hours a week,” Nicole said. “If we each did ten, that would be three hundred dollars a week, or fifteen thousand a year. I think that’s way cheaper than a management company. But is it worth spending fifteen thousand dollars to pick up my dry cleaning? Then again, if it’s fifteen dollars an hour, it might be worth it.”
He wasn’t listening anymore, thinking about her driving back to Erie from New York.
She’d flown, not driven.
And then it all made sense.
Chapter 35
Day 56: Marcus Terry
Ray stood in Nicole’s living room, staring blankly at a print over her living-room sofa: three cows in a field, a barn, and a few trees on the horizon.
Where to start the search?
She’d rented a house on Windview Place Road in Fairview, a quiet suburb of Erie a couple miles from the Lake. Being so close to Lake Erie made the properties in the area highly sought after. The family of a wealthy orchestra patron actually owned the house—the only reason that Nicole could afford it was that the patron had died, and the family had offered to rent the house to one of the symphony musicians for a couple years while the patron’s will worked its way through probate. The house was big for one person: two levels, three bedrooms, a yard that Nicole would mow, complaining, with a push mower once a week. She wasn’t much of a homemaker—Erie was clearly just a stepping-stone to bigger orchestras in bigger cities—but she kept the house clean and neat.
He’d called Alicia the moment the plane had touched down at JFK and the seat belt sign had gone off. “I know where it is,” he told her.
It was three days after the conversation at the Moskva. Janice and Nicole had returned together to the United States the day after; Ray was supposed to be in Moscow to begin the Tchaikovsky Competition tour. Instead he’d taken a flight to America a day later—after they’d both left.
He hadn’t said anything to either Janice or Nicole; he didn’t want to arouse any suspicion, especially if he was wrong. He was desperate to tell Janice, but she was traveling with Nicole. It was too risky.
Now that he was back in the United States, he called Alicia, who was still in Europe, tracking down leads to other violins which, Ray now knew, were not his Strad.
“What do you mean?” Alicia asked him. “How? Where is it? Where are you?”
“Nicole has it. Just landed at JFK.”
“What? Where is this coming from?”
“She said she drove.”
“What?”
“She drove. She said she drove back to Erie. From New York. She didn’t fly out of Newark like she said. She drove.”
“Hold on,” Alicia had said. “Let me get my notes.” Computer keys tapping. “You know of course that she had the most access of anyone, so we’ve been looking at her the hardest.”
“Still?”
“Yep. Following her credit card bills, phone calls. Nothing. No unusual charges, nothing out of the ordinary. Hold on, here it is. No, she flew. She definitely flew from Newark to Erie. I have confirmation from the airlines. Plus we have surveillance footage of her in the airport. And the X-ray footage of her suitcases going through the scanner.”