He spun back to the keyboard and hit the high B. “It's five down and five up,it's funny."
The B was a five-step down from the E, so after all the previous harmonic movement, the E came as an almost comic resolution. It was no wonder Cobbie could imitate voices perfectly. He had perfect pitch, or what we call perfect pitch, anyhow—the ability to hear precise relationships between sounds.
"How did you know where they were?"
He walked up to me, laid his forearms across my knees, and stared into my eyes, asking himself if I were really that dumb or just pretending. "Because," he said, "one is very, very, veryred. And the big one is very, very, veryblue."
"Naturally," I said.
"Very, veryblue. Now can we have the funny Frank Sinatra song?"
"Just what we need," I said.
He charged back to the player, inserted the CD ofCome Dance with Me, and called up a crisp drum roll and Billy May's brass figures. Cobbie sank to the floor and crossed his legs, listening to Sinatra's perfectly timed entrance on "Something's Gotta Give" with the same concentration he had brought to Monteverdi and Debussy. He twinkled at me at the beginning of the bridge and smiled at Sinatra's stretching out of the rhythm after the instrumental break. Because I was listening partially through Cobbie's ears, what I heard gleamed with a loose, confident power. But for some reason, a part of me shrank away—Sinatra's "Something's Gotta Give" was the last thing I wanted to hear. The track ended with a swaggering downward phrase and an exultantCome on, let's tear it up that made Cobbie laugh out loud.
He fastened his eyes on mine. "Again?"
"Ring-a-ding-ding," I said.
The jazzy call to arms from the drummer; urgent shouts from the trumpets and trombones; the saxophone section unfurlinga carpet-smooth lead-in; at the exact center of the exact center of the first beat of the first bar of the first chorus, a lean baritone voice took off in a racing start. Fear slid up my spine, and goose pimples bristled on my arms.
When the song ended, Posy Fairbrother appeared at the entrance of the room. "Let's tear up some wild, knocked-out, koo-koo spaghetti, what do you say?"
Cobbie plunged toward her. At the corner leading to the kitchen, he looked back at me. "Ned! We're having knocked-out, koo-koo spaghetti!"
"You and I are having spaghetti, Frank," Posy told him. "You can say good night to Ned afterward, and then he's going to have dinner with your mommy."
Laurie moved around them, holding a wineglass in each hand. "You and Posy go in the kitchen. I'll be there in a minute."
Cobbie put his hand into Posy's and vanished around the corner. For what seemed an absurdly long time, Laurie and I walked toward each other. When we stood face to face, she leaned forward to kiss me. The kiss lasted longer than I had expected.
"What did you think? Whatdo you think?"
"He's incredible, that's what I think. I think he should skip grade school and go straight to Juilliard."
Laurie put her forehead on my shoulder. "Now what do I do?"
"You should probably start him on piano lessons with a good teacher. Five years later, get him a great teacher and hire a lawyer whose nickname is Jaws."
She straightened up and stared at me, almost exactly as Cobbie had done while explaining that E and B were colored red and blue.
"What impresses me most is that he's such a good kid. I think he's going to need as much protection as encouragement. Apart from that, just stand back and enjoy the show. But, hell, I'm just making this stuff up, I don't know anything."
Laurie moved against me once more, put an arm around my back, and then broke apart and held out a slip of paper. "Posy found a listing for a Donald Messmer in Mountry. While I spend a little time with Cobbie, would you like to see what he has to say?"
I took the paper from her.
The fireplace came through into a kind of television room or den with track lighting aimed down at half-empty shelves. Toy trucks and children's books were scattered across the carpet. I sat on the sofa and picked up the telephone, but the first person I called was Nettie.
"Your Mountry trash came around this morning," she said. “I told that sorry excuse for a man he needed more than a big mouth and a baseball bat to scareme. Sent them away with their tails between their legs. You don't happen to have a piece, do you?"
I laughed. "No, I don't have a gun."
"Get one. Show iron to fools like that, they get out of your face lickety-split."
Rinehart's book dug into my side, and I took it out of my pocket before dialing the other number.
Posy's CD-ROM had located the right Donald Messmer, but it took me a couple of minutes to get him talking.
"You saw my name on the marriage license, and you got curious about me, huh? Guess I can't blame you for that."
I thanked him and called him Mr. Messmer.
"Star let you know I wasn't your dad, I hope?"
We spoke a little more. Messmer said, “I'm real sorry about your mom. If you don't mind my saying so, I was nuts about her. I would have done anything for Star Dunstan."
It was the reason he had married her. Two months after getting pregnant and moving in with Rinehart, Star's infatuation had curdled into fear. When she had confided to Messmer that she thought Rinehart intended to injure her, the child, or both of them, Messmer helped her escape from Buxton Place. They were married by a justice of the peace and fled across Ohio and into Kentucky, where Messmer had family. When his relatives proved hostile to Star, the couple went to Cleveland. They took jobs in restaurants and lived together in reasonable happiness. A month later, Star went for a medical checkup, and everything changed.
“I was this stupid kid," he said. “If something was more than five minutes ahead of me, I couldn't think about it. The idea of having a child was almost more than I could handle, so I just tried to forget it, figuring it would work itself out. When she came back from the doctor and said it was twins, it was like, Sorry, Don, you're spending the next twenty years in slavery."
"And the twins weren't yours," I said.
“I'm glad you can understand that. A week later, I was shaving in front of the mirror, and this corpse looked back at me. I packed my stuff and took off. I should have been a better guy, but I did what I did. Does that make sense to you?"
"You did her a favor by getting her away from Rinehart."
"That's a nice thing to say. The truth is, we wouldn't have stayed together anyhow."
After arriving in Mountry, he tended bar until he had saved enough money to buy his own place, which he still ran. His wife had died three years ago, and he had two daughters and six grandchildren. When Messmer looked back at the young man who had run away from Edgerton with Star Dunstan, he saw a person he could scarcely recognize.
"Do you know a man named Joe Staggers?"
"Everybody in Mountry knows Joe Staggers. Most wish they didn't. Why, you run into him somewhere?"
“It's all a mistake, but Staggers thinks he has a grudge against me."
"The asshole's whole life is a mistake." I could hear him wondering how far he wanted to go. "This grudge, was a guy named Minor Keyes involved in that?"
"So I hear," I said.
“If you're going to be around more than a couple days, you might see can you borrow a weapon from someone. Staggers is a mean son of a bitch."