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  Megan Edwards

  Getting Off on Frank Sinatra

  Roads from the Ashes

  IMBRIFEX BOOKS

  Published by Flattop Productions, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2017 by Megan Edwards. All Rights Reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the express written permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. For further information, please contact the Publisher, Imbrifex Books, 8275 S. Eastern Avenue, Suite 200, Las Vegas, NV 89123.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  IMBRIFEX® is a registered trademark of Flattop Productions, Inc.

  Set in Adobe Caslon, Designed by Jennifer Heuer

  Cover design by Jennifer Heur and Sue Campbell

  E-book designed by Sue Campbell

  MeganEdwards.com

  Imbrifex.com

  ISBN 9781945501036 (trade paper)

  ISBN 9781945501043 (e-book)

  ISBN 9781945501067 (audiobook)

  First Edition: September 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932680

  For Margaret and Diana

  Chapter 1

  The Merino Rose is sitting on my coffee table. I can see it in the lights I left blazing in the practice room, but seeing it doesn’t make it any more believable.

  What’s even more incredible is that the Merino Rose—“the violin of angels”—is actually mine. The Brahms Violin Concerto was played for the first time on this violin.

  The King of Strings.

  And it doesn’t even exist. The Merino Rose was destroyed in the Trieste Opera fire in 1881. Everybody knows that. If a Guarnerius with inlaid roses around the back edge shows up at auction, it’s got to be a fake.

  Except—maybe not. What keeps those forgeries coming is that no one can prove that the fire destroyed the Merino Rose. No one can even prove the violin was actually in Trieste. It was Vittorio Bonacci who was there. Was the Merino Rose with him? Was he the thief who stole it from Joseph Joachim’s Berlin conservatory?

  The questions don’t matter anymore. The violin is real. It’s been gone for more than a century, and it vanished before reliable sound recording was invented. Even so, the legend of the Rose’s unsurpassed brilliance has lived on. It defies reason, but the world still mourns the loss of a violin no one alive has ever heard.

  I knew this was the Rose the instant I heard that one note. Yes, I have years of experience playing and appraising stringed instruments, but that knowledge only served to corroborate what I knew the moment I plucked that string. The Merino Rose is more than a haunting memory. The world will soon find out that one of its loveliest treasures still occupies three dimensions.

  I can already see the cameras, the microphones, the throngs of reporters. When I say the word, they’ll be here, each one more eager than the last to hear the edict of Edward Spencer IV. They consider me an undisputed authority, after all, an expert with unimpeachable credentials to give them the answer to the one question they’re all dying to ask.

  Oh, they’ll listen in rapt silence while I play the Brahms, and they’ll pretend they care when I speak of the Rose’s sweet perfection. But that’s not what they’re really after. All they want is a number.

  In the end I’ll give them exactly that, and they’ll go away happy, believing I have priced the priceless. They will never know what it really cost to bring the Merino Rose to my coffee table. Only Olivia knows, and she’s not here.

  •••

  I discovered I was a string man when I was eight years old and attending summer camp in Idaho. The music counselor handed me a violin when I arrived, and the moment I felt the smooth wood under my fingers, I was smitten.

  At first, it was the construction of the thing that captivated me. I come from a manufacturing family—yes, I’m a Spencer from the Spencer Luggage family—and I’d spent my early years hearing about the intricacies of design and fabrication. I’d hung around our factory in Los Angeles every day after school, and I could have constructed a suitcase single-handed by the time I’d finished fourth grade. The violin was far finer than a valise, and its curved surfaces fascinated me. Even the bow seemed like a work of art.

  If you think it odd that I’d never touched a violin until I was eight, you’ve never met my father. Edward Spencer III thought music was fine, in its place. He’d sung with the Yale Alley Cats when he was in college, but that was over once the sheepskin traded hands. Singing was just wholesome recreation, the same as summer camp. There was no room for it in real life. Hobbies like building models belonged there—that was practical engineering. But music? Frank Sinatra on the hi-fi while you sipped your pre-dinner Scotch—that was where music belonged.

  Fathers, however, have always had a hard time stifling their children’s infatuations. I was in love with the violin from that first moment of contact, and I spent the summer making it mine. The music counselor, happy to find an avid pupil, spent hours with me, got me excused from canoeing and archery. By the end of the summer, I could play.

  And play I did. When my parents came to collect me on the last day of camp, I was the star of the talent show, the centerpiece of a group that included the music counselor and two of his friends who were members of the Spokane Symphony.

  My parents were very proud, and they seemed to listen carefully when the music counselor told them I was a “natural talent.”

  “He should have lessons,” Mike said, and he gave them the name of a teacher in Los Angeles.

  My mother agreed that I should continue studying violin, and she arranged for lessons with Howard Stiles, who had just retired as concertmaster with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mr. Stiles wasn’t the name my counselor had suggested. My mother moved in Los Angeles’s social stratosphere, and if her son was going to study violin, the teacher would have to be Someone.

  My father didn’t start worrying about my love affair with music until I entered high school. I enrolled at Haviland, a boarding school located in the picturesque hamlet of Ojai in the oak-studded hills near Santa Barbara. The first three Edward Spencers had gone to Andover, but my father had decided when I was very young that if we were going to be a West Coast family, we needed to start some West Coast traditions. These new traditions didn’t extend past high school, however. I’d known since I started eating solid food that I was expected to graduate from Yale.

  For the first three years I attended Haviland, I played in the orchestra. This meant several performances each semester, and the big event was always the spring musical. I played for Oklahoma! and The Music Man, but the closest I ever came to acting was the title role in Fiddler on the Roof. It never crossed my mind to audition for a speaking part in one of these productions until my senior year. I happened to be standing near the music department office when Mr. Harper emerged and posted a flyer on the bulletin board.

  “Auditions for all roles in Camelot will begin Tuesday, January 16, in Goddard Hall at four o’clock,” the flyer read. I would have thought no more about it if Bill Cross hadn’t read the words aloud.

  “All roles except Lancelot,” he continued as though he were still reading. “No tryouts are necessary for a role custom made for Haviland’s pride, Ted Spencer.”

  Andy Be
echam and a few other guys were standing nearby, and they all hooted. I felt color rise in my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop myself from tossing my chemistry book into a hedge and tackling my best friend. Caught completely off guard, Bill landed in the hedge, too.

  “Hey, this thing has thorns,” he yelped. “Damn you, Spencer. I was only joking.”

  “Sorry,” I said, grabbing his hand and helping him up. “Don’t know what got into me.”

  “Good thing he didn’t have his lance with him,” Andy said, and all the guys laughed again.

  “Screw you,” I said, just as Mr. Harper stuck his head out the door.

  “What’s going on out here?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Bill said quickly. “I just tripped, and Ted was just helping me up.”

  Mr. Harper heaved a weary sigh.

  “Get moving,” he said. “I know you all have someplace to be.”

  “Hey, come on. Just do it,” Bill said as we headed toward the science building. “I’m stuck doing the lights. Harper says I have to train my replacements—a couple of freshmen.”

  “Ha,” I said. “If he only knew what they’re really going to learn.”

  Bill had been Haviland’s light man since ninth grade. The light booth in Goddard Hall was his secret hideaway. Fortunately, he was very talented at snowing faculty members, or he would have been expelled many times over for what he did and stored in there.

  “The key to doing anything you want,” he used to say, “is remembering that what you are and what you seem don’t have to match.”

  I envied him that. I could never seem like anything different from what I was, a self-consciously square violin player. Bill was a chameleon. To the Haviland faculty, he was a valuable asset. Not only did he keep the antiquated wiring system in Goddard Hall working flawlessly, he once prevented a fire in the science building by noticing a leaky gas valve in the chemistry lab. Another time, he saw that the retaining wall above the gym was developing a big crack. It turned out a water pipe had broken, and he was credited with saving the gym from a giant mudslide. Deeds like that are unusual for a high school student, and they gave Bill an equally unusual invincibility.

  “You have to admit you’d make a good Lancelot,” Bill went on. He dodged as I took another half-hearted swing at him. “No, Ted. I mean it. Good legs, golden curls, and we’ve all heard you in the shower. Perfect pitch.”

  “The hell with you, Cross,” I said. Mr. Gillespie was standing at the door of the chemistry lab, or Bill might well have found himself in another hedge.

  But Bill was right. Again. The guy was a master at pushing my buttons. If it hadn’t been for him, I never would have joined the tennis team, and I would have gone my entire high school career without once drinking beer or sneaking off campus. I wasn’t nearly appreciative enough at the time, but if it weren’t for Bill, I would have been an impossible goody-goody.

  Which, of course, was exactly why I was such a good candidate for the role of Lancelot. Even though I detested the idea at first, I couldn’t help considering it. For starters, I actually had a little free time. Teachers know better than to try to get second-

  semester seniors to work very hard, and my college applications were in. Until the deciding envelopes arrived, I was in a tense holding pattern, and I longed for a little distraction. Gradually, I decided that an acting part in Camelot might be an amusing way to close out my four years at Haviland, and more chances to hang out with Bill in the light booth didn’t sound too bad, either.

  And so it came to pass that on the appointed day, I arrived at the back door of Goddard Hall at precisely four o’clock. I was not carrying a violin.

  Chapter 2

  I was a shoo-in for the role of Lancelot, but it wasn’t because I was a fantastic actor. Only five boys showed up at the first round of tryouts, and Camelot has five significant male roles. Mr. Harper gave the part of Merlyn to Jonathan Griffith, who was the shortest among us, and the part of the aged King Pellinore to Greg Hornsby, who was skinny and not much taller. David Cummins, a pudgy bookworm type, got the role of Mordred. That left Arthur and Lancelot, and as soon as Mr. Harper told Brian Collier he’d have to work on his regal bearing, I knew Bill’s prediction had been accurate. Even though I was happy about it by then, I was glad my buddy wasn’t there. One smug smirk, and I would have decked him.

  If casting the boys was easy for Mr. Harper, dealing with the girls more than made up for it. There was only one significant female role, and it seemed like every girl in school was determined to have it. “Who’s going to be Guenevere?” echoed across the campus for days. The scuttlebutt around the dorms was that Elizabeth Dunhill would get the part. Not only was her father the president of Twentieth Century-Fox, he was a member of Haviland’s board of trustees. How could Mr. Harper ignore those connections? If not Elizabeth, then Robin McCullough. Her father was the American ambassador to Japan, and Robin had been acting in Haviland musicals since ninth grade. This was her last chance to be a star. And then there was Penelope Lambros, and Margaret Kellerman. Or what about Roberta Phillips? The list went on, and so did the midnight gossip sessions. It seemed unfair that I had walked into my own role so easily, but there was nothing to do but wait and see what decision emerged from Mr. Harper’s office.

  Olivia de la Vega. The group that had gathered around the bulletin board next to the music room looked at the name in disbelief. Two girls started to cry, and two more ran away. Brian and I, who had been inside Mr. Harper’s office when he said he was ready to post his decision about Guenevere, just stared in surprise. Who the heck was Olivia de la Vega? Haviland was not a large school, and I was sure I knew everyone. But Olivia de la Vega? The name was new to me.

  “Who—?” I began, but Brian interrupted.

  “She’s the daughter of one of the cleaning ladies,” he said. “A sophomore.”

  Word spread like lightning, and the reaction was just as swift. Robin McCullough threw a noisy tantrum in the dining hall at lunch, and Elizabeth Dunhill swore she’d get Mr. Harper fired. I decided to keep a low profile until the hysteria blew over.

  In spite of Robin’s histrionics and Elizabeth’s threats, rehearsals began on schedule. Mr. Harper, who no doubt had weathered some brutal telephone calls from parents and board members, didn’t back down. Olivia de la Vega was Guenevere, and the Haviland student body would have to learn to live with it.

  I didn’t meet Olivia until the first rehearsal. It was a table reading of the script, and we were meeting in a conference room next to Goddard Hall. I was late, and the reading had already begun when I got there.

  Olivia was speaking when I opened the door, and she paused to look up at me before continuing. Light from the window lit her face, and as our eyes met, I saw that hers were green. As she looked at me, the rest of the room fell away. A current as tangible as physical touch passed between us, and a shiver rippled through my body.

  Olivia looked back down at her script, and I slid into a chair next to Jonathan Griffith. Mr. Harper shot me a disapproving glance over his reading glasses from the end of the table, but I hardly noticed. I was still under the spell of Olivia’s gaze.

  I sat there transfixed, unable to take my eyes off her as she read her lines. How could it be that I had not noticed her before? She was strikingly beautiful. She had long, smooth black hair and creamy skin that glowed golden in the afternoon sun. Her voice sounded as if she were singing even though she wasn’t, and she used her hands when she spoke. They were lovely, delicate hands, with slender fingers that seemed almost translucent. And those eyes. Those marvelous, magical green eyes.

  Jonathan nudged me under the table, yanking me from my thoughts. “Who’d’ve thought we’d get a Mexican Guenevere?” he whispered.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Mr. Harper had won his skirmish, and my leading lady had won her role. But the battle for Camelot had barely begun.

&nbs
p; Chapter 3

  God, it was a battle. It was actually fortunate for Olivia that she didn’t live in the girls’ dorm. She and her mother, the housekeeper for said dorm, shared a little stucco cottage behind the maintenance building. Haviland had a policy that the children of full-time employees, even the janitors and kitchen help, could attend the school gratis if they could meet admission requirements. Though it was a generous benefit, it extended only to tuition, not to a room in a dormitory. Since most of the eligible offspring were already housed on campus with their parents, it made sense from a financial point of view. The trouble was, social interaction at Haviland happened mostly in the dorms, which meant that the children of employees were mostly excluded. The teachers’ children, who possessed enough confidence to climb through windows at night, suffered the least, but kids like Olivia were so invisible they weren’t even shunned. If she hadn’t tried out for the musical, I might well have graduated without knowing Olivia existed.

  But she did try out, even though her mother, I later learned, tried her best to talk her out of it.

  “Don’t torture yourself, Livie,” she’d said when Olivia announced her plan. “You don’t have a chance against all those debutantes.” Eleanor de la Vega later told me herself that she knew her warning was futile.

  “When Olivia makes her mind up,” she said, shaking her head, “forty mules can’t budge her. But I thought it was worth a try.”

  A nasty little editorial in the school paper aroused my wrath. It appeared the day after Mr. Harper announced his decision. “Taco Time in Camelot,” the headline read, and even though it was against school rules to publish a story anonymously, the piece was mysteriously byline-free.

  I knew who’d written it the second I saw it. Elizabeth Dunhill was the editor of the Haviland Horn, and she’d recently whipped up a tempest with another of her little masterpieces: a detailed article about how to grow, store, and smoke marijuana in a dorm room without getting caught. In 1968, it was enough to convene an emergency meeting of the board of trustees. Elizabeth, in exchange for agreeing not to submit the story to a local paper, got off with a warning, and the next day, she wore pajamas to her American history class to protest the school’s uniform requirements. I mention the latter incident to illustrate the fact that Elizabeth was not driven by principle. She just liked making a splash, and she took advantage of the immunity her powerful father gave her.