“That doesn’t make sense,” he’d said. “She told me that she drove from New York.”
“It must have been some other time,” Alicia had said.
“There was no other time. She hates to drive her car as it is. She was complaining about needing an oil change. She said that she was putting too many miles on her car after the trip from New York. She has never driven to New York since I’ve known her. Never. She never drives anywhere if she can help it. She takes public transportation. She’s like the queen of public transportation. She knows every bus route from here to New York. You should hear about the complicated way she gets from Manhattan to Newark Airport to save four dollars.”
“I can’t possibly get a warrant to search her house based on a drive back from New York.” It was hard to hear her over the noise of the plane: people talking loudly and the thrum of the engines. Then the engines started powering down.
“There’s no other explanation,” he’d said. “She has to have it. She drove back with it to Erie, which is why it didn’t get flagged in the airport. It must have been in one of her suitcases. She had two—I remember really clearly that she had two. I’m going to confront her. I’ll wear a wire, I’ll get it on tape—”
“You will do nothing of the kind,” Alicia told him. “If she doesn’t have it, you won’t get anywhere. If she does have it, you’ll tip her off.”
“How am I going to get it back, then?”
“Don’t do anything rash, you hear me? I know you’re upset, but—”
“Upset? Are you fucking kidding me?” His voice was getting louder. His seatmate was staring at him. He ducked, whispered into the phone, “My girlfriend stole my violin and you don’t want me to be upset?”
“Look, I hear you. I’m still in Belgrade. Let me get back and we can regroup. I’ll put the art team and the FBI on it in the meantime, and I’ll dig in from here. I can get a flight out tomorrow. It’s waited this long, it can wait a little bit longer. Let me think it through.”
“Great idea,” he said. “Can you get a warrant in the meantime?”
“There’s not enough for a warrant,” she repeated. “Yet.”
Around him the other passengers were standing, grabbing luggage, moving down the aisle. He seized the violin case. “Okay. I’m heading to Erie now. I’ll wait for you there.”
“Don’t you dare,” she said. “Just stay where you are and don’t do anything to tip her off. If she has it, she’s hidden it for this long. Don’t blow it. Just go back to Charlotte like you planned.”
“Okay,” he said “I gotta go,” and hung up.
Ten minutes later, in the customs line, he thumbed through his Delta Airlines app. Yes, there was a flight to Erie in two hours. He could make it.
That had been four hours ago. Now he stood in Nicole’s living room, staring at her living-room walls. Where to start? Over the past year, he’d spent days here. Weeks. Often alone. Was the violin here, all along, in a closet? In her basement? In the attic? How could he search now without giving himself away? How could he have been so close?
Six p.m. He’d timed his arrival after she’d left for rehearsal at the symphony: the Erie Philharmonic had a major performance in a few weeks, which meant that the earliest she’d be back was ten fifteen, ten thirty. Unless they let out early, which they also might do. He had four hours.
He thought back to those days at Grandma Nora’s, hunting for PopPop’s fiddle in the attic. He’d started by randomly looking in boxes, opening drawers, but soon enough became systematic: proceeding stack by stack, box by box, no matter how unlikely a hiding place. In the end, his system hadn’t worked—who knew where Grandma Nora had hidden it all that time; she’d just beamed at him and never told him—but perhaps this time the system would hold him in good stead.
He’d begin in the attic （if there was an attic? he didn’t know—and he sure hoped she wasn’t hiding his violin in an attic with widely fluctuating temperatures） and work downward. He’d look for anything—a violin-size box, keys to a storage unit, any kind of reference that might seem like a lead. He’d look for hiding places in the drywall, loose floorboards. He’d seen enough movies to know the drill. He couldn’t imagine her giving the violin to her parents, or to a friend, for safekeeping. She’d want as few people to know about it as possible.