A diner beckoned, perfumed with the scents of roasting meats and grilled onion. He thought of sitting at the counter but decided to eat back at the hotel. “Whatcha havin’， hon,” said the thick-waisted, thick-accented woman at the counter. He ordered tater tots, Cobb salad, and a slice of apple pie to go.
While he waited, he called Nicole. He hadn’t talked to her since early that afternoon, and he wondered how her own performance that evening had gone: she was playing a chamber music recital, Brandenburg Concerto no. 6, which featured two viola soloists. She’d been very excited about the performance, and he regretted having to miss it.
But she didn’t pick up: his call went straight to voice mail. “Hey. My recital went well—how did yours go? Did the cellist get the rhythm right? I’m going to get something to eat before I head back to the hotel. I’ll call you later.”
A few minutes later, takeout bag in hand, he shouldered open the diner’s door and the cold Boston night blew around him. He wasn’t really aware of the people standing outside on the sidewalk until one of them spoke.
The voice was terrifyingly familiar: high yet gravelly. “That was just the most amazing performance I think I’ve ever heard!” Dante Marks and his sister stood not five feet away, their hands in their pockets, their eyes bright beneath ski caps pulled low across their foreheads. Behind them was a very tall man wearing a tan overcoat. He kept looking left, then right, then at Ray.
“What the—”
“You did such a fine job tonight,” Andrea said. She sounded earnest, but he somehow thought she was mocking him.
“Why are you here? Are you following me?”
“We know you’re often traveling, so we just wanted to see for ourselves that you’re taking good care of our violin,” Dante explained.
Heat surged through Ray. Our violin. The words lay on the pavement, cold and dead, like something run-over. He took a step forward. “I don’t know what drugs you two freaks are doing that make you think you can follow me around, but let me make it clear to you: This is my violin. I’ll say it again. My violin. It belonged to my great-great-grandfather and now it’s mine. You’re out of your fucking minds if you think you’re getting your dirty fingers on it.”
“Rayquese, or whatever the hell your name is,” Andrea said, “we are getting that violin back. If you think you have a chance in hell of keeping it, you better think again.”
The tall man loomed over all of them, glancing around as if waiting for something.
“You know damn well what my name is, lady. If you think I’m giving you my violin—”
“Our violin,” Dante said. “See, we tried to be nice and give you a chance to give back our violin without getting lawyers involved, but you had to try to be Billy Badass and act all tough. You’re not gonna win this one.”
Our violin. Ray could hear only those two words. Something cut loose inside him and he was suddenly yelling. “Shut your fucking mouth. I swear if you say ‘our violin’ one more fucking time, I won’t be responsible for what happens next. Your rapist great-great-great-grandfather gave that fiddle to my PopPop. He didn’t steal from you or anyone else. If it was so important to you, why the fuck didn’t you try to get it back thirty years ago?”
Passersby turned to look at him. He didn’t care. Both Dante and Andrea seemed, maddeningly, to be smiling. The tall man looked off to the right, behind Ray.
“Stay the hell away from me. If I see you again, I swear the cops—”
“The cops what?” a deep, thick Boston accent said behind him.
And another voice: “What’s going on over here?”
Ray turned: two big-bellied police officers, hands on their belts, stood splay-legged on the sidewalk. Steam seemed to snake from their nostrils and form a plume above their heads. The one on the left was in his fifties, a little heavier, with a clean-shaven face that looked scraped raw. The one on the right was younger, with a thin dark mustache and the promising beginnings of a paunch to rival his partner’s.
“Officers, thank goodness you’re here,” Andrea said. Ray would have sworn she batted her eyelashes like some kind of geriatric Miss America contestant. “We were simply asking this young man to return some property when he started threatening us.”
“What?” Ray said. “That’s not—”
“You got some ID?” the cop on the left said.
Ray let out a breath. “Officer, this isn’t what it looks like. These people are basically stalkers. They showed up at my house. They showed up here, and—”