A Multitude of Sins Read Free

work of Jennifer Hanson. There was power and conviction that sprang from the soul in this haunting image.
    She wondered bitterly if Catharine remembered the Knight; remembered her daughter’s early works.
    She turned to the wooden door. She couldn’t stay in here. Breaking and entering, invasion of privacy—she didn’t care. And where was Conan Flagg? Perhaps the open patio door was only a coincidental accident.
    With the library door closed behind her, she caught her breath, finding herself in a long corridor ending in the distance with another door. That must be the front entrance. On the left, spanning half the length of the hall, was a wash of light. The living room. An intricate wooden grille maintained the semblance of a corridor.
    She paused before taking the single step down to the living-room level. On the south wall was a bar decorated with Haida motifs. At the west end of the north wall was a stone fireplace; at the other end, a pass-through into the kitchen. There was a hint of voyeurism in this secret inspection of someone else’s house that made her uneasy; something unreal and dreamlike. But no more unreal than the situation that brought her here.
    Her abstracted gaze traced the spiral of the staircase to her left; the low ceiling of the hall was a balcony that must give access to the bedrooms. The living-room ceiling vaulted above it to the west wall, which, like the one in the library, was solid glass; solid sea and sky.
    She almost smiled, thinking that no decorator had ever touched this room. It was immaculately kept under Mrs. Early’s aegis, but immensely cluttered and furnished with abandoned eclecticism. Mr. Flagg was definitely a collector and paintings were only the beginning.
    But only one thing here could hold her attention for more than a few seconds.
    A concert grand.
    It was in the center of the room, turned so the pianist could look out over it to the windows. She walked toward it, drawn as if by an offered hand of solace, finding in its familiar lines a remedy.
    The name over the open keyboard was Bösendorfer, and her eyebrows came up at that. She wondered how many years had gone into the warm, satin gleam of the wood; how many hands now dead had touched the yellowed ivory of these keys, and how many yet unborn would make music with this instrument crafted out of exalting genius and exacting pride.
    That Conan Joseph Flagg, owner of this piano, was absent, might appear for an appointment she’d asked of him, or might not appear, was forgotten. The watchers, the coiling shadows on an innocent path, even the grief was forgotten.
    The piano was in perfect tune. The decision to begin playing occurred with the same absence of conscious consideration that let the testing chromatics glissando into the Paderewski Minuet in G, shift capriciously to Saint-Saens’s Swan, form a collage of Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff; music born in the minds of men who defied mortality on barred sheets of paper and in succeeding generations of memories. In these sounds, in the intricate, instant interplay of muscle and nerve, she was out of reach of fear or even time. A familiar paradox; music exists in one dimension, time, yet obliterates it.
    She didn’t know what made her stop.
    She only wondered how long she’d been playing, and when she’d ceased to be alone.
    He was standing by the staircase, watching her.
    Her first impression was shadow; whip-lean, relaxed as a cat, flashes of bronze in the sunlight. And she didn’t recognize him.
    Yet the face was quite familiar; dark skin drawn in angular contours, straight black hair, black eyes with an almost Oriental cast. But there was none of the polite friendliness a “proprietor” displays for his customers in those eyes. They were opaque as stone, yet she could all but feel the rapt tension in them, and her only coherent thought was: What in God’s name am I doing here?

CHAPTER 3
    It was a short walk. A block south to Day Street, then two