Greywalker - Kat Richardson [121]
I wrenched my arm from her grip, surprising us both. “Why not? What’s to stop me?”
“I’ve said I wouldn’t harm you if you did as I instructed.”
“And I have, but all you’ve done is complain about how I haven’t. So I’m screwed, aren’t I? Forget it.”
Alice growled.
I turned back to her and stared her in the eye, pushing against the Grey as hard as I could, hoping I had it right. “All right. Then promise that you won’t harm me if I help you get to Edward. So long as I stay out of your way, you leave me alone. Promise me that.”
Infinite cold bore through me as she stared. When she spoke, her voice had dropped low and resonant. “I promise I won’t harm you so long as you help me get to Edward, and stand aside.”
I smiled at her and turned away again before she could reconsider.
She stared at me as I left, and I felt it all the way down my spine.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Tuesday started out raining. Even though I felt weak and calcified, I ran until my chest hurt from something purely physical for the first time in days. My body was fine but I was falling apart in all other ways. I ran on, amazed that I could, considering how often I had thought of simply stopping over the past few days. And I got furious with myself for my self-pity and self-doubt. I was still afraid, still weak and unsure and in the midst of the unknown, but if I stood still, there was only one possible end. At least, going forward, I stood a chance, however small.
I ran. Sweat and rain washed away my stupidity and despair. I wanted to stay in the clean downpour until everything washed away, but I had made a choice and I would stick to it.
From the office, I called the curator of the Madison Forrest House and persuaded her I needed to see the organ that night. She agreed to let us in at nine, though she was not pleased. With another phone call, Mara agreed to come, too.
I chased down some more prosaic business, keeping my mind busy, and was interrupted by a call from Will.
He sounded tired. “Hey, Harper. I checked up on that Tracher organ some more.”
“That was quick.”
“A lot of the records have been computerized over the last few years and I know the right people to call in Europe. Anyhow, I don’t know what your client wants it for, but that organ is a fake-up.”
“Totally fake? It looked old.”
“Parts of it are too old, actually. The frame and action numbers didn’t match. There’s some additional paneling behind the mirror and over the pipes which is older than the case and shouldn’t be there at all. According to Tracher, the frame came from an instrument that was damaged in a fire in Amsterdam in 1923. The case was written off by the insurance company and sold to a furniture jobber. He probably installed the action, which came from another organ built in 1902. But there’s no way to tell.”
“Which part is the ‘action’?”
“In this case, just the keyboard—the rest wouldn’t have fit. Whatever your client told you about the instrument, it’s probably not true. The organ disappeared for a while and finally turned up again in a Swiss estate auction in 1957, where it was bought by the last owner of record, a G. Sergeyev of Bern. I tried to track him down, but the best I could do was a news article about his death in 1960. He doesn’t seem to have had any relatives to inherit the organ, so I don’t know what happened to it between 1960 and when it was shipped out of Oslo.”
My ghostly client’s clothing and speech predated the 1950s, so he certainly wasn’t the man from Bern.
“Did the obit say what the last owner died of ?”
“It was a news item, not an obituary. He was crushed by a trolley. There’s not a lot else, except a partial provenance on the organ from the estate auction, but it’s completely bogus. It claims the family—Mandon was their name—was the original owner, but they only had it thirty-three years, at the most, and that hardly makes it an heirloom. And there’s one creepy thing: the Mandons died of asphyxia from a gas leak in the house. That’s, what, five owners who all died in accidents.”
I wondered how