You convince yourself that you’re going to get it back, but the voice that tells you you’re going to get it back is also the voice that tells you, a half breath later, that you’ll never see it again. No matter what anyone says. No matter how often your girlfriend hugs you and holds you. No matter how many bouquets of flowers—or teddy bears—fans send you, or casseroles that your beloved mentor, friend, and teacher drops off, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help. The teddy bears pile up in a corner and you throw a sheet over them so you don’t have to encounter their accusatory glares, them telling you that it’s gone. It can’t be gone, it was just here. It’s gone.
Because here is the heart of it: it wasn’t about the money, or the prestige of playing a Stradivarius, or the looks people gave him—envious and impressed—when they learned who he was and what the violin had been. His loss had nothing to do with any of these things, and the wealth and fame were distractions that he shrugged off.
Here is what he realized in the gray shadows of his 3:00 a.m. vigils: He was alone now. He was desperately, terribly, alone. Until then, he’d been a solitary, lonely kid—and then a solitary, lonely man—who had had one special person in his life, dressed in a pink housecoat and smelling of lavender and bluing solution in her hair. She had gone, but she had given him music, and music had filled his world, had allowed him to connect with people in a way that he sometimes could not believe could ever be real. But now she was gone, and the violin had gone, and the music had gone, and he felt so lonely and guilty now that he often thought the misery would paralyze him and he would simply, suddenly, stop breathing under the weight of it.
He obsessed over who could have taken it. After the initial flurry of police activity, the FBI did not call that often, Alicia’s texts pinged his phone less frequently, the updates only trickled in. So he pushed them all—Bill Soames and Alicia Childress and the NYPD—to investigate every lead.
Nicole was convinced it was his family who wanted their half of the insurance money—and figured it would be better to wait the agreed-upon five years for it rather than have Ray dole out their money in tinier increments.
Ray, however, was convinced that it was the Marks family. They were crazy. They were also unscrupulous and obsessed with the violin. They seemed less interested in money and more interested in owning the violin itself, or in punishing Ray for his existence. The only thing that made him doubt his own theory was the ransom: the Marks family would have no intention of returning the violin for whatever price. But perhaps that, too, was part of their plan—to take the violin and an extra $5 million. He wouldn’t put it past them.
Chapter 25
Day 17: Raising Money and Hope
Here was the thing that Ray knew about himself: he was hardwired not to give up. The violin was gone, and its loss paralyzed him, but paradoxically, its loss also spurred him to control the two areas in his life that he could control: practicing his ass off and raising money for the ransom.
By the last week of May he had resumed his regular practice schedule: up at 6:00 a.m., exercising, and beginning practice by seven. Every morning he’d awake and expect the violin to be returned, and every day its loss punched him like a bowling ball to the face, but he would draw a breath—or two, or three—and reach for the Lehman. More than ever, he would not let the loss destroy him. He could still make music. He could still stand tall. He could still be worthy of respect.
He’d practice maniacally until early afternoon, until his legs wouldn’t hold him or his fingers had gone numb. Then he’d grab another bowl of cereal—cereal was pretty much all he was eating these days—and open his laptop.
He spent every afternoon trying to raise $5 million.
Six days in, his crowdfunding campaign had raised a whopping $143,228. “That’s an awesome beginning,” Nicole told him that afternoon on the phone. They were both in their respective cars: she driving to a last-minute substitute performance in Cleveland, and he in Charlotte, heading over to meet Wells Fargo’s wealth-management team to discuss possible benefactors or investors.
“That’s so far from five mil that it doesn’t even count,” he said.
“Will you stop? It’s a start, and a great one. These things take time. You have over a month to raise the money. And it always snowballs.” When he’d decided to raise money using crowdfunding, she’d helped him with a lot of the research, even edited his plea for money.
“I should have started it right away,” he said. “I should have gone on TV shows. I could have said something and millions of people would have heard me.”