He sighs. “Drink your whiskey, Phee. It was a good year.”
Chapter Two
PHEE
2018, Seattle
Later, Phee will remember the shooting star framed perfectly in her bedroom window last night, the salt she’d spilled at dinner, the full moon that woke her at the witching hour. But in this moment, she has forgotten all about them. Superstitions are not permitted in her mother’s comfortable kitchen, especially with cookies in the oven and a glass of milk in front of her on the table.
“Not oatmeal for the fund-raiser,” Phee says, even as she lifts another cookie from the plate, warm and buttery, and stuffs half of it into her mouth. Crumbs tumble into her lap, and her huge black dog, Celestine, licks them up at once, leaving a pool of slobber soaking into her jeans. “Bake-sale people never buy oatmeal.”
“You seem to have no problem with them,” her mother says. “And have you still not learned manners?”
“Incorrigible, that’s me.” Phee grins, talking around a mouthful of cookie. “Born in a barn and all that.” Nearly forty years of lecturing, and you’d think her mother would get the message by now that it’s pointless, but Bridgette is not the sort of woman to be easily deterred.
“Make chocolate chip for the sale,” Phee advises. “And those meringue things. Nobody really wants to eat raisins.”
“Raisins are healthy.” Bridgette slaps Phee’s hand as she reaches for another cookie. “In moderation. I have no idea how you stay so thin.”
“Hard work.” Phee stretches, indolent as a cat, then tucks both legs up in the chair beneath her. “Physical labor.”
Her mother makes a hmph sound under her breath, and Phee takes the hint. Push too far, and she’ll end up doing dishes and scrubbing floors for the rest of the afternoon. She did work hard last week. Her eyes are tired. The muscles in her neck and shoulders are tight and her feet ache. The last thing in the world she wants to do is spend her remaining free hours suffering retribution from a fiery Irish temper pushed too far.
Her phone chirps and she ignores it. Probably a text message complaining about one of the recently repaired instruments. If she doesn’t know, if she doesn’t look, then she can’t be responsible. She’s been known to fix things at one in the morning for an overwrought violinist whose instrument is suffering. Obsessive beings, musicians, the whole lot of them.
Phee doesn’t hold this against them. She is every bit as bad when it comes to the instruments in her care.
Her phone chirps again.
“Can you hush that thing?”
Bridgette disapproves of cell phones in general and Phee’s in particular. “When I was young,” she says, “we had freedom. Not at everybody’s beck and call every minute of every day.”
“When you were young, unicorns still walked the earth.”
“Respect, young lady.” Bridgette raps Phee’s knuckles with the wooden spoon, bits of dough spattering onto the countertop, and both of them break into laughter.
“Why, thank you very much,” Phee says, licking the buttery, sugary sweetness off her fingers before Celestine can beat her to it.
“You’ll get salmonella. For the love of God, Phee, please stop that noise.”
Phee rubs her hands on her jeans and picks up the offending phone. Not a text message at all. An alert blinks, baleful and ominous.
She remembers, then, the way the shooting star fell across her line of vision, right to left. The moon. The salt. What’s waiting for her is infinitely worse than an unhappy musician.
“Oh, damn it all to hell and back again.”
“What is it?”
“Heredity.”
Bridgette’s sigh could blow out a candle from fifty feet away. “Still that load of blarney from your grandfather? He was a crazy old man, Phee. Let it go.”
Maybe not so crazy as all that, Phee thinks but doesn’t say. She’s had this argument with both of her parents so many times she knows the script by heart, forward and backward and upside down.
“I promised him.”
“And he’s dead. I’m certain sure he doesn’t care about those old instruments anymore.”
Phee makes a noncommittal sound, and Bridgette flings up her hands. “There is no curse, Ophelia MacPhee.”
When Phee doesn’t answer, her mother sighs again, then asks in a world-weary tone, “Which one is it?”
“The cello.”
Phee scans the news article that triggered her app. A chill crawls up her spine, out of place in the heat of the kitchen.
“Don’t tell me. A dark robed figure carrying a scythe was seen walking down the street where the cello resides.”