Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Capriccio for Unaccompanied Violin by S. L. Franklin

R. J. Begins:

The home of Byron L. Davis was almost new, virtually isolated in the countryside, and nearly the size and general likeness of the rural English manor houses you get a glimpse of sometimes in old Hitchcock movies. Instead of appearing to rise up out of the landscape, though, the way those generally do, the Davis place seemed as if it had been prefabricated elsewhere and lowered by a squadron of helicopters onto the wrong plot of ground, a treeless hillock that overlooked a year-old artificial lake to the west, a newly completed golf course to the east, and the poured concrete foundations of structures similar to itself to the north and south.

It was midaftemoon when I got out of the Chevy at the base of the hillock, and partly because I’d spent most of the day driving, I took a minute or so to stretch and look around before I tackled the ascent. The weather was warm for early April — at least in south-central Wisconsin — but the lake on the other side of the road was still an irregular stretch of soggy looking ice, and if the terraced lawn rising up to the house had ten green blades of grass on it, that was all it had.

I walked across to the verge of the lake and stared down at the grayish slush for a moment before I turned back and climbed the brick and pink-stone steps. As I got within about forty feet of the entrance, I could hear, from an open casement, the sound of a violin being played by someone with limited talent, and the inevitable recollection sprang to mind, from a radio program of my boyhood, of Jack Benny sawing away at “Love in Bloom.”

The person who came to answer the door wasn’t the violin player but a tall, muscular-looking male of around thirty in stylish tan slacks and a matching cotton sweater. He looked me over through the storm door to make certain I wasn’t peddling The Watchtower, peered past me down the slope at the Chevy, then opened the door a crack.

“What is it?”

I handed him one of my cards and said, “Václav Hucek — he’s still missing.”

He propped the door with his foot and examined the card closely, then fanned it with one hand against the opposite thumb.

“Mr. Davis can’t tell you anything,” he said.

“Then I won’t take much of his time,” I responded.

He looked me over again with the air of someone about to be forced by circumstance into committing an unpleasant but necessary act, so I drew the door open suddenly and said, “Look — I can come back with the sheriff if you want, but that’s what you don’t want and the sheriff won’t want it either if he has to come. Why not just skip the stale repartee and show me in? You can make jokes about my looks and my cheap suit after I’m gone.”

I stepped inside, forcing him back a pace, into a large parqueted foyer. “The name is R. J. Carr, just the way it reads on the card. Who are you?”

He stepped back two more paces as if he didn’t want to be close, but he did let me come in. The truth is, although he was big and tall, I was bigger and taller and tougher looking even though I’d just turned forty-eight. It was one of the few scenarios in which my birthmarked cheek and thick glasses were an asset.

“I’m... Mr. Davis’s man-of-all-work,” he said. “I manage the accounts, supervise the out-source help, cook, play games—” he hardened his stare “—such as chess and golf.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Clive Macmillan.”

“Were you here, Mr. Macmillan, on the night of December fifth?”

“Yes. But I can’t tell you anything either. Hucek never arrived, and that’s the extent of our knowledge on the subject.”

One of a pair of doors inset with stained glass opened to my right, and a tall, pear-shaped specimen choking a violin by the throat leaned out. “Is the man asking about Václav, Clive? Show him in.”

“...which, as you must have heard, was the evening of the ice storm, followed the next morning by two feet of snow.” Davis was a young-looking sixty in spite of his spreading waist and hips, a retired stockbroker and budding real estate tycoon from Chicago by way of Lake Geneva forty miles to the south of where we sat. He collected things in a small way, he told me: rare stamps and currency, not coins, an antique car or two. Mansion Lakes, the development outside the window, was his conception, so to speak, without being his concern — except for the one house — or not until it proved itself, at which time he was leveraged to buy in heavily.

In our first five minutes, in other words, Davis gave me the insider’s story of his life.

He had played the violin as a young man, he’d said, and for the past six years had resumed his musical studies by taking master lessons every other week from Václav Hucek, formerly concertmaster of the Prague Symphony Orchestra, well-known soloist, and currently — one hoped currently — professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin music faculty, who had retired to the Lake Geneva area in 1984.

“Václav was stubborn about his driving,” Davis said, “and that’s why I called to tell him not to come. He was to have dinner here and stay the night as he usually did, but even by four thirty our little byway was like a sheet of glass. Unfortunately, he’d already left home by then, or so one must assume, since he didn’t answer the telephone. At seven thirty, when he was two hours late, I called again.” He shook his head, then turned to stare across the room. “It’s been a shocking thing to me, Mr. Carr. I — sometimes I seem to see him, out of the corner of my eye, you know. But of course—” He drew his gaze back to me. “My playing has deteriorated. He was a wonderful teacher.”

Davis had been alternately tuning and sighting along the violin for much of our conversation. “Do you play, by chance?” he asked me, gesturing with the instrument.

“Organ and piano,” I admitted. “Not as much as I used to. That’s a beautiful violin, though.”

“Yes,” he said. “Not a true collector’s piece or I wouldn’t dare to play it but quite old, rebuilt many times, so Václav says.” He paused, then went on. “Oh, it is worth something, and I shouldn’t belittle it. Possibly by one of the lesser Amatis or... possibly not.”

“Not a Stradivarius, at any rate,” I said. I stood up from where we’d been sitting in Davis’s intimate little library-music room — twenty feet by thirty by twenty feet high with a sky-lit ceiling. He stood, too.

“When’s a good time to call you, Mr. Davis, in case I need to check back? Doesn’t seem likely right now, I know, but—” I shrugged.

“I wish you would call, Mr. Carr, if you find out anything about poor Václav. Anything at all.” He pondered with a hand to his chin. “Mornings are best because I’m always here. Weekdays only, though, and not too early, please. I’m no longer a slave to the opening bell on Wall Street.”

“Sure,” I said. He gave me his telephone number and accompanied me to the front door.

“It’s strange that Václav never mentioned having a brother,” he said.

“Oh, when someone disappears, a next-of-kin is bound to show up eventually, wanting to know what happened. Your friend is someplace between here and Lake Geneva, Mr. Davis, let’s not kid ourselves. He just hasn’t been found yet. He’s buried under fallen brush in a ravine or off in some woods, hidden from the highway, probably still behind the wheel of his car. If he came in a direct line, he was traveling county roads most of the way — in the dark, in hard, freezing rain. And he was seventy-four.”

“Driving that little car, too. I think they should be outlawed.”

Davis and I said goodbye with Clive Macmillan looking on in the background, and I couldn’t help wondering, as I descended to the Chevy, what kind of conversation they might be having in my immediate absence.

I took the obvious alternate route south to Lake Geneva, watching without conviction for sites where Hucek might have strayed from the road and stopping to investigate four of them with the same negative results I had had on the trip north. The truth, though, was that if Hucek really had left the highway for some accidental or voluntary reason and gotten himself even further lost, then after four months’ time and two official searches — the second following the spring melt-off — only luck or unforeseen happenstance was going to lead me to him. I didn’t have faith in either of these alternatives mainly because the situation was developing a different kind of feel to me.

The drive from Lake Geneva home to the Chicago suburbs gave me some time to mull the problem over, with the result that the next day when I had an hour free I put in a long distance call to the editor of the Walworth County Beacon, a biweekly paper out of Lake Geneva that had given the disappearance a front page headline a few days after it had happened.

“Yeah. This is Paul Zimmer,” said a sharp voice.

“My name is Carr,” I said. “I’ve been hired by Václav Hucek’s brother to—”

“Yeah, I heard about that. And brother — believe you me — I wish you luck.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why? You’re not God, are you? Or Superman? No X-ray vision? What I’ve said right along is, find the car and you’ll find the man. But the car — wow. Uh-uh.”

“Well, yeah. And that’s why I’d like to try a different starting point,” I said.

“A bright idea, only it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

The line went silent briefly, then he replied, “Don’t mind me, Mr. Carr. I was just being cute. But if there’s a different starting point, you’re the party that’s going to have to supply it.”

“Fine. Tell me about Václav Hucek.”

“Why? No — never mind. I see the inference. I don’t buy it, but I see it. And Hucek was a strange bird, all right — notice the use of the past tense — but I’ll tell you this, Mr. Carr, he wasn’t the kind of strange bird that flies away.

“He was what you’d probably call an eccentric, and my feeling is that some of it was phony but most of it wasn’t. If you saw him, you’d remember him, believe me, because he always wore a formal black suit with a tailcoat and a high collar — like he was on his way to a performance, you know — and in person he acted like the grand maestro. I interviewed him once just after he retired and got the full treatment: thick accent, big gestures, air of superiority. And mysterious, my God, did the guy like to act mysterious.”

“How?” I asked.

“The Paganini thing. He and Paganini were soulmates. You’ve heard of Paganini? I had to look him up. Nineteenth century virtuoso violinist, supposedly had the ladies swooning in the aisles. Hucek and Paganini ‘shared a sacred musical and spiritual bond’ — I’m quoting — only don’t ask how or why or you’ll get the icy stare of the maestro. Actually, Hucek was well known on this score, but I was the hick reporter. The tailcoat — that was Paganini. Also the flamboyant gestures. Also Hucek’s style of playing the violin.

“In my own defense, though, by the time Hucek retired, he wasn’t such a big noise. In the fifties and sixties behind the Iron Curtain he was a pretty hot number as a soloist, but he never came on that strong in the U.S. Defected in 1968 with his wife. Had open heart surgery in ’76 and took the... what’s it called? The Stenstrom Chair for Violin Studies, I think, over at Madison. That was 77. Mandated retirement in ’84. Came here because his wife liked Lake Geneva and picked up two hundred bucks per half hour giving lessons to hotshot kids and dilettantes of indeterminate gender like that Davis character he was on his way to see when the storm hit.

“Oh. His wife died about three years ago, and that reminds me of the guy’s last eccentricity. Supposedly, from the time she was laid out, he never went anyplace without a violin case under his arm — grocery shopping, walking on the beach.”

“Any theories on that?” I asked.

“Well, wherever he’s gone, that’s where the violin case has gone, too. It’s got a violin in it; don’t get me wrong. It’s not filled with money or one of his wife’s nightgowns because people have seen him take it out and play it while he was standing by the lake.

“And... what else? This is the last free tidbit because I’ve got a paper to run, but there’s a story that I don’t vouch for saying that when Hucek defected he brought with him some pretty rare and valuable instruments — one, three, or five, depending on the source — that were technically the property of the Czech government. His practice room, which I was in the one time, had, I’d like to say, at least four violins in display cases and one of those big ones — a cello — and some things like guitars only they weren’t. The official word, though, was that nothing was taken, so... I don’t see much in this particular angle, frankly.”

I thanked him and we said goodbye. But that evening on the vaguest kind of hunch I spent an hour and a half in our local library digging around at the real and rumored biography of a man who had been dead for one hundred fifty years named Niccolò Paganini.

At around ten thirty the following Saturday morning a man who looked suspiciously like myself was strolling along the edge of a county highway in south central Wisconsin near a sign inviting persons of easy means and limitless credulity to consider a future at Mansion Lakes. This man wore a hunter’s cap, a well-worn tan windbreaker, and a pair of field binoculars on a strap around his neck. On occasion he would peer earnestly through the binoculars into the woods on the opposite side of the road in the apparent hope of spotting a creature perched on a twig with a brain at least the size of his own. Or such seemed to be the man’s innermost desire.

At ten thirty-eight a metallic gray Ford station wagon slowed as it passed him on the pavement and came to a halt on the shoulder a hundred feet ahead. He trotted up to the car and climbed in on the passenger’s side before glancing across at the driver, a black-haired woman dressed in tweeds whose mature beauty was capable of stopping traffic on that particular or any other stretch of highway in the universe. Except for the tweeds she looked remarkably like the man’s wife, Ginny.

“You were right — as usual,” she said in a low, clear tone.

“I was afraid of that,” I replied. I looked out at the mild, cloudless sky. “Well. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it.”

“Yes. Breaking and entering in broad daylight — how to bring new excitement into your humdrum married life. Do Wisconsin jails allow conjugal visits?”

She drove the Ford ahead, reversed our course in the next lane, and braked to a halt five minutes later in front of the Byron Davis house. “I knocked seven times even though I felt silly doing it,” she said, “Perhaps you should, too.”

“Nope,” I said. “I feel silly enough as is. Just blow that whistle if you see them coming.”

We kissed for no special reason except that we always do; then I got out and looked around before climbing the steps. Golfers blocked from view by the hillock; no construction crews in sight; no farmers in the distant fields — only the occasional hum of a passing vehicle on the road beyond the artificial berm at the opposite end of the lake. And no one in the house. I hoped.

From the top of the hillock I could peer down and see Ginny standing beside the Ford with a scarf around her head and a police whistle hidden in her palm. She looked up and noticed me and made shooing motions, so I had to put on my gloves and go to work.

In the detective and security business, the business I happen to be in, you learn a lot about things like locks and alarms, and you notice such improvements as home protection systems as a matter of course. Davis’s new house had a lot of peripheral protection, but the front door stood vulnerable to anyone with the right key — or that was my assessment on my previous visit — and so I’d brought two bunches of Grunwalds along, eighty-three in all. Just into the second bunch, one of them turned freely and put me inside the entry.

The double doors to the library were unlocked, which saved a minute, and I was pulling out the drawers of a collector’s safe in no time, thanks to another bunch of keys. Of course Davis’s “small” collection amounted to hundreds of items, and it took me a couple of minutes even to figure out the organization, not that Ginny and I expected to find what we wanted correctly classified anyway.

After five minutes of random search with no luck, I took a break from the safe and walked around the room to try for some kind of new inspiration by looking at books and artifacts. Davis’s violin had a place of honor in a locked glass case, and even though it seemed like the absolute least promising possibility, I gave it a thorough examination by flashlight, especially inside the soundholes. Just as I finished I heard the honk of a car horn, which meant I had five minutes left out of the twenty I’d allowed, not the happiest development. I glanced around the room again, still feeling stymied.

What it boiled down to, I decided, was a single question that I didn’t have an answer for: exactly how clever did Davis think he was? Ginny probably would have spotted it right away, but I only caught on when I looked down at the violin another time and took real notice that in the same glass case, beside the glowing wood of the instrument, rested the polished leather of a very fine old Bible, printed in what I made out to be Italian and open to the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

I hadn’t planned on breaking into the case, but that’s what I did then, after I picked the lock. The book seemed too fragile to riffle, and even touching it worried me, but the first two leaves turned easily and well, and as it turned out, those were all I needed to see. Adhering to the title page of the New Testament was an ancient label that read GIUSEPPE GUARNERI IHS.

I turned the pages of the Bible back to Matthew 1, locked the glass case, replaced everything as I’d found it in the collector’s safe, and examined the room a last time to make sure I wasn’t leaving any traces of unauthorized entry.

My watch said it was time to go, but I found the main stair and hurried to the top of the house instead, where I could look out and down at the melting ice of the lake, using the binoculars I still had with me. I didn’t see anything important, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the car horn beeping twice. I descended carefully, locked the door on my way out, pulled off my white gloves, and joined the woman in tweeds for a quick getaway to her uncle’s farm and orchard ten miles north of Lake Geneva, the place where the trouble had begun.

On an evening two weeks earlier Ginny had called me to the telephone.

“R. J., you big old grampus,” said her Uncle Peter over the phone line, “how would you like some work?”

“What kind of work?” I asked him back.

“Well, it’s quite a story, if you can listen.”

“Sure. Only I don’t take payment in apples.” A lie if the job was for him.

“Nope,” he replied. “Ten thousand dollars — maybe. At first they... nope. Let me back up and start off right. Are you ready?

“I was out along County D this morning, you see, round about eleven, pruning some broken branches and looking over the stock, when a car pulls up and two guys climb out and come on over to talk. Well, I’m always ready to talk, but I couldn’t barely understand the one, and he was translating for the other. Seems this one I’m talking to is the son-in-law of the other one, and the other one is the seventy-four-year-old twin brother of a retired violin teacher from down by the lake, only the violin teacher went and disappeared — now I remember reading about it — back in that twenty-two inch storm we had before Christmas. This pair are straight from Prague, Czechoslovakia, and they’ve saved up their kopecks or whatever and come up here to try to find the missing brother themselves because the Wisconsin Highway Patrol don’t know its job.

“Let me tell you, R. J., these poor guys looked even more lost than they were, and I’m wondering what the Sam Hill possessed ’em to try this stunt until they mention Richard Mumphrey — ‘Slick Dick’ is what we call him hereabouts — who’s the lawyer assigned by the county court to oversee the violin teacher’s property. Am I being clear?”

“Sure,” I said. “You invited them in for lunch and told them you’ve got a nephew by marriage—”

“Well, they looked hungry, you’re right, and I couldn’t see this pair standing much of a chance if they’d let Slick Dick send ’em off, chasing wild geese from here to up near Watertown.

“So, yeah — Judy and I fed ’em some grub and got the story out of ’em. The violin teacher’s actually a big name sort of guy — from Czechoslovakia, of course — played fiddle with all the top symphonies at one time and was a professor over at Madison a few years, too. Widower, no children, so this brother from back in the old country is the guy’s next of kin, and eventually even Slick Dick probably had to drop a card in the mail and let him know what had happened.”

“And the lawyer’s in no hurry to find what’s probably a dead man because he can milk the estate for fees for the next five years—”

“You got it, R. J., and this couple of Czechs had pretty much got it, too, by the time I was through with ’em. The missing man owns a nice little place down near the west end of the lake worth a hundred and a half — I swung over and took a look — plus some CD’s in the bank and some valuable violins and what not, plus whatever Slick Dick is holding back on.

“But I told ’em if the troopers and such hadn’t found the old guy they’d never do it themselves, which I think they realized about two miles out of town. I also told ’em my niece’s husband had a nose like a bloodhound on this kind of thing but you were a professional and you’d have to come up from Chicago and you didn’t work for free.

“So, you know, R. J., I was sort of wondering if you might consider helping these fellas out on spec. They’ll pay your expenses — and if they can’t, I will, what the hell. But if you find the old guy’s remains — he went off the road some damn place, sure as apple cider — they’ve volunteered to put up ten thousand dollars from the estate. Mum’s the word with Slick Dick about it, of course. They’re heading back to Prague day after tomorrow, so...”

So that’s how the story began: with myself, as usual, on the hook — but also with a small, professional reservation, which I kept to myself, about the proposed size of the fee.

Ginny Concludes:

The story ended much differently, and on one of those truly springlike days in early May when the temperature is eighty degrees, the wind blows in quickening gusts, and an overcast sky threatens rain from four or five different types of clouds.

At eleven A.M. on that particular morning a small convoy of vehicles turned into the Mansion Lakes development from the county highway and followed the winding road beside the water to a point perhaps two hundred yards short of the Byron L. Davis residence. It halted and persons from four of the six vehicles emerged to confer, each of them making occasional gestures at the nearest approach to the lake, which along this abbreviated stretch consists of a moderately steep slope of lush green grass ending in deep, murky waters.

The man in the diver’s wetsuit signaled agreement and angled cautiously down the slope in bare feet, carrying flippers and a face mask in one hand and a tank harness in the other. The sheriff’s deputy waved the last two cars of the convoy onward, and after they had passed, the driver of the heavy equipment towtruck maneuvered his vehicle into a position on the pavement that was perpendicular to the shoreline below. Beside the third of the parked vehicles stood two solemn, foreign-looking men in black business suits, one of them middle-aged and one of them considerably older. As the man in diving dress jumped into the water, the older man made an impatient gesture and began an awkward, zig-zag course down the slope toward the shore.

That was the last glimpse I had for an interval of what R. J. called the “fishing expedition” because in the next moment he and I in the company of the county sheriff were shown by a sullenly handsome younger man into the foyer of the Davis house and from there into a spacious front sitting room lined with books and display cases.

“You’ll have to join the party, Mr. Macmillan,” R. J. said to him. “At least for a while.”

As we entered the room, we could observe Byron L. Davis, our involuntary host, standing near a distant casement window with his arms folded, staring out over a terrace at the activity farther down the shore. He turned reluctantly as we approached and said, “Good morning. Only I sense that the morning is far from good.” He singled R. J. out with his look. “You appear to have decided that Václav made it nearly to our door. How terribly strange.”

“I think it might be even stranger than that, Mr. Davis,” R. J. said. “I’m sort of hoping you and Mr. Macmillan can help us decide how much of it is really strange and how much of it isn’t.” He put his hand on my arm and said, “This is my wife, by the way. Ginny Carr, who helps me out sometimes when I’m stumped, and I understand that you’ve already met Sheriff Bonner.”

“I’m pleased,” Davis said to me with an unpleased face and held out a limp hand, following the performance of which duty he invited us to sit in a nearby group of sofas and chairs. A short period of quiet ensued before he cleared his throat. “What... or rather, I’m at a loss, Sheriff Bonner, and Mr. Carr, as to what information you are seeking.”

All at once a metallic whining noise reached our ears through the row of open casements, and we turned as a group to look in that direction. I rose to my feet, saying, “I’m the least necessary person to this conversation, I’m sure, so I think perhaps...” Without finishing the sentence except with a nod I moved quickly across to the windows and looked out.

“Nothing yet,” I reported disingenuously to the group, since I could see quite clearly that a long, heavy cable was unwinding from the rear of the towtruck, then down the slope and into the lake, and that the two men in black suits were now standing together on what appeared to be the very verge of the shoreline, leaning out intently over the water.

“Good,” I heard R. J. say. “Because I’d rather get this settled ahead of any developments.”

Developments, however, appeared to be coming on rather quickly. As I stood at the window watching, the diver surfaced from the depths, removed his breathing apparatus, and gave a shout, whereupon, in an incident of disturbing irony, one of the two men along the verge, the older one, overbalanced and fell into the lake.

Behind me R. J.’s steady voice was saying, “...so let me put it to you this way, Mr. Davis and Mr. Macmillan: provided that the body of Václav Hucek is found down below, can you suggest any reason why his cause of death might be something other than drowning?”

As for drowning, the unlucky gentleman who had lost his footing seemed to be a capable swimmer in spite of his age, and he was quickly helped back onto the land in his dripping suitcoat and pants by his companion.

“I — can’t imagine anything,” said Byron Davis in answer to my husband’s question. “Can you, Clive?”

“Yes, I can,” the young man responded in a guarded tone.

In the meantime, after removing his tank harness, the diver boosted himself out of the water as I continued to watch, then stood and waved broadly with both his arms toward the rear of the towtruck. At the sound of a noisy meshing of gears the cable grew taut, and then came the further sound of the truck’s engine laboring heavily, too heavily for me to pretend to ignore.

“They’ve hooked onto something,” I said, peering behind me.

Byron Davis, I saw, was on his feet, rubbing his hands together and looking distressed. “Poor Václav,” he said. “Poor Václav. I’ve had such awful visions...” His eyes roamed from me to Clive Macmillan to the glass-enclosed violin near where R. J. sat.

“Clive,” he said in a tone meant to be commanding but that sounded merely willful and shrill, “Clive — be very, very careful in what you say.”

“I intend to, Byron. I do intend to.”

“The car is breaking the water,” I reported. “And... now it’s... coming up on the land.”

There was a rush to join me at the windows on the parts of the sheriff and Clive Macmillan, but Byron Davis held back, and for that reason, no doubt, so did R. J.

The drama by the lake, meanwhile, played itself out in a scene of stark inevitability. As the wind whipped in gusts and the threatening sky seemed to grow yet darker and more ominous, the small, mud-encrusted vehicle, shedding water from every seam, rose onto the shore, slewing sideways, and came to a precarious halt on the slope, held in position by the towline.

Men approached from several directions, and one of them, after trying the driver’s door without success, applied a heavy crowbar to it near the handle. The door sprang open as we watched, releasing a small flood of water, and we knew from the way he shied hack, that the remains of Václav Hucek must be strapped inside on the seat.

“Clive,” said Byron Davis’s voice from behind us. “Please allow me to explain.”

“...at eight o’clock I reported my fears for Václav’s safety to your office, sheriff, and then sat here in this room with Clive, waiting and wondering and — and trying to find solace.” A look bordering on defiance passed briefly across his face. “I regarded Václav Hucek as my friend. I was weeping. And Clive was... holding me as I wept.

“When suddenly... when suddenly we heard a loud banging at one of the casements. A face peered in at us — and it was Václav’s face! He’d taken all that time to drive forty-five miles and then had climbed up the icy steps — such a stubborn, stubborn man — and had come for some reason of his own to the windows on the terrace instead of the door.

“We rushed, of course, to bring him in, and it was apparent to us immediately that he was not merely exhausted but suffering from some affliction. His face had a horrible cast to it, and he seemed almost to lurch as he walked. But rather than...” Davis passed a hand over his forehead and then stared away, as if he were in a trance. “Rather than allowing us to help him, he pulled himself into this room and... stood there, near that table. I can see him now, standing there, his face almost blood red and yet pallid somehow, standing there screaming at us, berating us for our... our presumed behavior. He called me a name which I refuse to repeat and will not tolerate, and I... I stepped forward and slapped him across the face. Involuntarily. Not hard — was it, Clive? — not hard, but he, Václav... his eyes rolled up, and he let out a horrible cry. Then he fell against the table and slipped to the floor.

“We tried to assist him. How we tried! Clive knows a great deal about CPR methods, and we labored, both together, pressing his chest, applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“But he was dead from the moment he fell. My friend Václav was dead.

“And in that moment I panicked. I had slapped him in senseless anger, and he had toppled like a felled tree. What we did then — Clive unwillingly but out of friendship — was the result of my panic, and I am solely at fault. But once done — once we sent Václav’s little car down the slope and into the water — there was no going back because — do you understand? — because no matter how much we wanted to, we could never bring him again among the living.

“And so — we waited instead for this inevitable day. I see him sometimes. Did I tell you that? Out of the corner of my eye, I see him, but then when I turn to look he isn’t there.” Davis drew a deep breath and made an effort to compose himself. “You will find, sheriff that Václav died of a seizure of some kind, I’m sure — a heart attack or a stroke. I am completely ashamed of my behavior — but I did not kill him.”

I had remained by the window, looking out from time to time at both the grim activities along the shore of the lake and also at the continued darkening of the troubled sky. But as Byron Davis came gradually to this emphatic conclusion to his revelations, I returned to the sofa and sat beside my husband. We exchanged a brief glance; then I ventured to speak.

“Mr. Davis,” I said, beginning tentatively. “Before R. J. or Sheriff Bonner responds to what you’ve said, I — that is, could I broach a rather different subject?” Without waiting for a reply I continued, “As a good friend of Václav Hucek, you were aware, I’m sure, of the sense of communion he felt for the music and personality of Niccolò Paganini. My question, simply put, is this: did he ever break his reticence on that subject with you? Regarding its source?”

“Is... this a... relevant question?” Davis spoke slowly but in a rising, querulous tone. “Sheriff why are you being so silent?”

Sheriff Bonner was a lean, reticent man with a mild voice. He said, “Why — I’m interested in hearing your answer, Mr. Davis.”

“Then—” Davis looked across at the table with, momentarily, a doomed expression in his eyes. “Then I don’t know a thing about it. Paganini was tall and slim; Václav was short and fat. Paganini was a notorious libertine; Václav was a paragon of conventional respectability. It was a preposterous pose on Václav’s part that no one took seriously but himself. I—”

He came to a sudden halt, doubtless because R. J. had risen to his feet and turned to peer down at the violin in the glass case. “That is a beautiful instrument, Mr. Davis,” he said. “My wife’s rather a fancier of violins. Would you mind if she took a look at it?”

The air within the room seemed to become completely still, although above the sound of the rushing wind outside I thought I could hear the rumble of distant thunder.

“Sheriff,” Davis said after a moment. “I... I don’t understand what Mr. and Mrs. Carr are about. Not at all. Can’t we simply come to the point between us, you and I? Caution me, condemn me, arrest me if you must, but—”

“I don’t have any plans to arrest you, Mr. Davis,” said the sheriff quietly. “Not so far. But I like Mr. Carr’s suggestion — and I do have a search warrant here that I’d rather not use.”

Davis stood then and moved with reluctant steps across to the glass case. “This is a purported Amati from 1693 which I have owned since 1987,” he said in a forced, even voice as he unlocked the case. “Please — handle it with care.” He brought the instrument to me and lowered it into my hands with an air of hostile caution. I, who had never so much as held a violin until the previous week, took it from him and pretended to an expertise I did not have. I examined the rich sheen of the ancient wood, both front and back, tucked it briefly under my chin and plucked a string or two, sighted along the top surface, tested the gloss of the finish with my finger.

“Surely this is no Amati, Mr. Davis,” I said. And in the interval that followed I did hear thunder.

I held the instrument up to my eyes to peer in through the sound-holes, then lowered it and gave a deliberate sigh. “But of course the maker’s label is missing, as they often are, and so—”

R. J., meanwhile, had remained by the open glass case, looking at and then turning pages in the Bible on display. “Here’s a label, Ginny,” he said innocently. “ ‘Giuseppe Guarneri, IHS.’ With a cross.”

Davis wrenched his gaze from me to my husband in a gesture of helpless fury, and in that moment, as if all the powers at hand were conspiring against him, there came a much louder rumbling of thunder followed closely by a sharp rapping at one of the casements. The thunder boomed again even as I turned with the others to look out at the dark and lowering sky and the equally dark and ominous figure framed there in the window, the figure of an old man dressed in black, peering into the room with a fiery anger in his eyes. He was a foreign-looking man, short and burly of build, with disheveled, damp hair and dirt smeared across his forehead. The severe black suit he wore clung to him in an extreme wetness, and in one hand he held up a violin — or what had once been a violin before five months submerged in freezing depths had destroyed its finish and warped it until it had split apart.

“Václav?” said Davis suddenly, in a horrified tone. “No!”

“Hvere-iss-da-Guar-ne-ri-us?” shouted the man through the casement.

And as a heavy peal of thunder shook the house, Byron L. Davis collapsed on the carpet at my feet.

“...because, you see, Peter,” I was saying to my uncle that evening, “perhaps the most famous violin in all musical history isn’t a Stradivarius but the Guarneri played by Niccolò Paganini and made by the famed ‘Giuseppe del Jesu,’ who labeled his instruments with his name followed by IHS and a cross, the IHS being the first three letters in Greek for the name Jesus.

“It does seem strange, at least to me, that a violin dedicated in such a way to holiness could have been the favored instrument of a man like Paganini, who traded on his reputation for demonic musical powers, but—” I made a gesture of incomprehension.

“And so what is it you’re saying, Ginny Girl? That old Hucek’s mysterious thing about Paganini was just that he’d swiped a fiddle made by this fella Guarneri?”

“No — because it’s far more complex than that. You have to understand, first of all, that he’d had the use of the violin for much of his career prior to his defection, and he sincerely believed that his playing had at least earned him the right to it for his remaining lifetime. I suspect also that he felt, as Paganini had, that he drew supernatural power from Giuseppe Guarneri’s craftsmanship, but he attributed that power to a holy rather than a diabolical source.

“And as far as mere physical ownership is concerned, who really owns the violin now, Peter? Václav’s brother Karl? The Czech people — no longer under a socialist government? The previous owner from whom the violin was confiscated?”

“I guess I know who doesn’t own it,” Peter remarked.

“Byron Davis?” said R. J. from beside me. “He owns a water-soaked, dubious Amati and more luck than he probably realizes. I don’t think there’s a chance in the world he’ll be prosecuted for theft, provided the autopsy confirms that Hucek’s death was natural, and I think it will I think up to the very last point Davis was telling us the truth about what happened that night — not necessarily about the hugs and consolation part, but that’s his own business and it doesn’t really matter. The big thing is this: after we brought him around and he offered to make amends by paying restitution to cover the cost of all the man-hours and equipment-hours spent searching for Hucek, I could see the sheriff backing off from any interest he might have had in criminal charges and considering a consent decree instead.”

“But what about the twin brother?”

“When I put the Guarneri into his hands, Peter,” I said, “he was rather like a person in ecstasy. That was all he cared about after the shock of losing Václav: that the violin, at least, had survived. He’d helped his brother smuggle it out of the country, and he was very well aware of its value and importance. What he intends to do with it, of course, isn’t altogether clear at this point, but it will be something far better, I’m sure, than shamefully gloating over its secret possession the way Byron Davis was doing, displaying it in plain view as something else with the maker’s label removed and hidden, half cleverly, in the same case.”

“Uh-huh. Only, you know what? You never did tell me how you and R. J. figured out about the violin and the label in the first place.”

R. J. and I looked at each other. “Well—” I said.

“Well, what?”

R. J. shrugged. “In a way it actually starts off with you, Peter, that’s all — since you’re the one who hooked me up with the Huceks. If I ever get around to writing the Carr Detective Handbook, I’m going to make Axiom Number Three the fact that clients almost always lie to detectives — mostly by leaving out parts of the truth.”

“You mean that that couple of innocents—”

“Well, yeah, Peter — that couple of innocents. It struck me right off the bat, you see, that ten thousand dollars didn’t make a lot of sense as a fee for what they wanted me to do unless there was some additional incentive that they weren’t talking about. So even though the violin was never mentioned, I was looking for something like it from the very beginning. And as it turned out, facts and inferences I picked up along the way pointed very strongly to its existence. Václav’s obsession with Paganini was a big one, of course, and the rumor of his bringing state-owned instruments with him when he defected, and the other obsession he had after his wife died of always carrying his violin around...” R. J. shrugged again. “It just made a lot more sense to think that my clients wanted me to find Václav’s violin as well as his remains even though they didn’t say it.”

“So we hypothesized,” I continued, “that the violin might be a virtually priceless Guarneri and that Byron Davis might have it unlawfully in his possession.”

“Which meant by extension,” R. J. said, “that the reason Václav and his car hadn’t been found might simply be because they were submerged all winter in the deep pool of Mansion Lake under three feet of ice. Ginny was the one who read up on violins and spotted the business about the labels, especially Giuseppe Guarneri’s labels—”

“And so we, or really R. J., went looking for the label removed from the instrument, because it seemed likely that Davis, if he did have the violin, wouldn’t want to advertise the fact.”

“When we found the label, which was pretty valuable in itself, we knew that Hucek had made it to Davis’s place the night of the storm, which meant that the car with Hucek in it almost had to be in the lake along with a replacement violin, probably the Amati that Davis claimed to own. So the only question left, to my mind, was whether Davis’s greed for the much more valuable Guarneri was triggered before or after Hucek died.”

“And you really think it was after?”

“Oh, it was after, all right. And I think we did Davis a big service by airing the whole thing. Maybe now he won’t think he sees the ghost of Václav Hucek every time he turns around.”