"I have a self defense class tomorrow night, but I'll be…"
"Self defense class?"
Janice's lips tightened in irritation at herself, and she turned her head and looked at Celia. "That is something else I wouldn't want to become common knowledge," she said quietly.
"No one will ever hear about it from me, Doctor Wycliffe. Honest to God, I'd never tell."
"Please call me Janice," Janice said with a sudden smile. Celia seemed to be suddenly breathless as she looked at Janice's smiling face, then she smiled widely in response. "Yes… yes, all right," she murmured. "Thank you very much… Janice."
"Bring your notes and come by at eight. I live at…"
"I know where you live. I followed you home one time. It was… last month… the afternoon you conducted the matinee performance… Saturday…"
"At eight, then."
Celia continued to look down at her, a flushed smile on her face. "…best performance the phil ever gave… head and shoulders over what Doctor Jannison could get out of them on the best day of his life… it was a performance I'll always remember… just followed you home…" Her voice faded into silence and she looked down at the sidewalk, still smiling as she scuffed at the pavement with the toe of her shoe.
Janice straddled the motorcycle and plugged the key in, turning it. "I'll see you tonight, Celia." Celia's blue eyes sparkled as she nodded. "All right. And no one else will know." Janice touched the starter, and the engine snarled to a roaring start with a plume of smoke coming from the chrome tailpipes. Then it idled down and chugged smoothly as she tilted it to one side and kicked the stand up. "Bye for now."
Celia stepped back, smiling radiantly and waving her hand. "Goodbye… Janice."
The motorcycle accelerated sharply away from the curb, the engine winding up with a snarl, then the roar of the engine died and began winding up again as Janice shifted gears. Celia stood on the sidewalk and watched the slender woman expertly driving the long, heavy motorcycle down the street, then it turned the corner and the sound of its engine died away. She drew in a deep breath, and a sudden shiver raced through her as though a frigid breeze had touched her. She shrugged her shoulders and collected herself, turning to go back into the building, and she whistled tonelessly to herself and smiled as she walked up the steps.
Janice drove the motorcycle along the street of a quiet, suburban residential area and turned in at the driveway of a small, neat, brick house. She stopped the motorcycle on the driveway and propped it on the kickstand, then took the keys out of the ignition and opened the garage door. Half of the garage was occupied by a low-slung, racy-looking red Camaro. She went back to the motorcycle, started it and drove it in beside the Camaro, then turned it off, came back out and locked the garage door, and went around the walk to the front door of the house.
It was tastefully if somewhat sparsely decorated and furnished. The living room was massive, and it was organized around a concert-sized piano. A couch and chairs were arranged around the fireplace on the other side of the room, and the wall decorations were poster-size scenes of landscapes and European castles. She dropped the helmet and her jacket on the couch and walked to a wooden cabinet behind the piano. The shelves of the cabinet were stacked high with sheet music, and she thumbed through the stacks and selected a score.
There was a music stand leaning in the corner and she picked it up and carried it to the piano, shaking the legs to open them. She put it down by the piano and put the sheet music on it, glancing at the large, framed picture on the piano. "Guten abend. Lisa."
She returned to the cabinet and took a violin and a bow from the bottom shelf, inspecting the bow critically, then she put the violin down and began rubbing resin on the bow as she glanced at the picture again. It was a black and white picture with a subtle tone of sepia, a portrait photograph of a dramatically beautiful woman. The hair was long and thick, tumbling over the shoulders in gleaming masses, and the eyes were large and seemed lustrous even in the picture. There was the smallest hint of up tilt to the ends of the brows and the outside corners of the eyes which indicated East European ancestry, a characteristic which was accentuated by the slightly high cheekbones. The full, delicately molded lips were curved in a smile showing the edges of perfectly spaced even teeth.
Janice finished putting resin on the bow, then opened the keyboard on the piano and firmly fingered an A chord. The clear chime of the piano filled the room, and while the note was still ringing in her ears she tucked the violin under her chin and delicately slid the bow across the strings in an A note. Satisfied, she ran the bow back and forth across the strings in a scale, adjusted one of the pegs fractionally, then ran the scale again as she walked to the music stand. "Schumann," she murmured, glancing at the picture once more and tucking the violin firmly under her chin.
The violin began to sing melodiously in the ripple of the opening notes of the entrance, rising and swelling upward, and Janice swayed slightly as she fingered the strings with the sure, confident touch of a master and swung the bow with a loose, effortless movement of her arm. Her eyes moved along the notes on the score amid the confusion of bowing and accent annotations, some of them hurried scribbles in a square, childish hand with pencil, and some them neat, bold marks made by an adult hand in ink. The melancholy wail of the violin soared to embrace the theme, and her arm and fingers moved faster as the tempo quickened into a series of shelving climaxes. The feel of the violin and the spontaneous joy and personal involvement of the opus drew her back in time, and her eyes involuntarily moved to the picture. She blinked her eyes rapidly as she looked quickly back at the score, concentrating on the music again. But the concentration on the music and on the picture were one.
Her lips began trembling, and she pressed them together tightly and blinked her eyes rapidly again as her fingers flew nimbly through a soaring trill in the score. The muscles at the corners of her eyes quivered, and she suddenly struck a wolf a harsh discordant scraping sound. The bow stopped moving and she stood for a moment with the violin under her chin, her lips trembling uncontrollably and a tremor racing through her body. A tear dropped from the corner of her eye and fell on the violin, and she took it from under her chin as her features began crumbling. She stood in front of the music with the violin in her left hand and the bow in her right, her shoulders slumped and shaking, and the tears began pouring from her eyes. She turned and stumbled to the bench in front of the piano, and she sat down on it heavily and bent over as bitter sobs began shaking her.
CHAPTER TWO
Celia sat at the piano in shorts and a light cotton pullover, bending over the keyboard and looking at the laboriously hand-scribed score sheets on the music board as she played. Janice stood behind her, her arms folded. She frowned thoughtfully, sight reading the music and listening as Celia swayed back and forth, playing, then Celia came to the end of the notes and dropped her hands from the keyboard, shrugging helplessly and looking up over her shoulder at Janice. "See what I mean? It just doesn't go anywhere. It just sort of mills around for a few minutes, then it dies out from its own inertia. Just blah. Just nothing."
Janice nodded slightly, turning away and walking back and forth a few steps as she looked down in thought. She was dressed in a pair of loose, silky lounging pajamas in a muted blue color, and the cuffs flapped loosely around her soft shoes as she walked. "Well, I believe you started off wrong, Celia," she said, turning back and looking at her. "You don't seem to have a full and complete grasp of the theme."