The Enchanter Heir Read Free

granddaughter?”
    “Yes.”
    Emma heard the clatter of a keyboard as the dispatcher took down the information.
    “Anything else, Emma? Can you see any other injuries?
    Broken bones?”
    Emma shook her head, which of course the dispatcher couldn’t see through the phone. “No.”
    “Any history of stroke?”
    “Not that I know of,” Emma said.
    “They’ll be there any minute. Listen for the sirens. Are you on the first floor?”
    “Yes. Door’s unlocked. Come in through the shop. Studio Greenwood. I won’t hang up.” Emma set the phone down on the floor next to her and leaned over Sonny Lee. STo her surprise, her grandfather opened his eyes. He tried to speak, but the words came out garbled.
    “Sonny Lee! Hang on,” Emma said. “The paramedics are coming and you’re gonna be fine, all you have to do is lay there and wait.”
    In answer, Sonny Lee flopped his right hand, banging it on the floor. He clutched an envelope in his gnarly fingers. “What’s that?”
    He flopped his hand again in answer. Carefully, she extricated the envelope from his grip. On the outside, Memphis Slim was scrawled in pencil.
    Memphis Slim. Sonny Lee’s name for her.
    Emma sat on the floor next to him. “Just hang on a little longer,” she said, pressing her hand against his cheek, blinking back tears. He breathed out, a long sigh of letting go. His head drooped back and his eyes glazed over, like a skin of ice on a blackwater puddle. He was dead.
    Emma could hear the faint sound of sirens through the open windows, too late. They couldn’t bring Sonny Lee back to life. What would happen to her now? Would she end up in foster care? That old fear kindled and burned.
    No. She had places she could go, people she could crash with for a night or two.
    A night or two. What about the rest of her life? And what about the shop, with all its woodworking tools? And Sonny Lee’s collection of vintage instruments, many of them one of a kind. What would happen to them?
    She needed time to think. To plan, and she wouldn’t have it if she stuck around. She needed to get out of there. She could at least take the guitars that she’d built herself. She could claim that much. Maybe she could get the rest later somehow. When she had a place to stay.
    In a daze of grief, Emma climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She yanked a backpack off a hook on the wall and stuffed four T-shirts, a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt, and socks and underwear inside. That was most of her clothes, when you counted the ones on her back. She pushed up the loose ceiling tile over the mattress she used for a bed and pulled down her money stash—the proceeds from the sale of two guitars. She slid the money into the backpack pocket, and Sonny Lee’s letter into the front pocket of her jeans. That was about it: her whole life inside one backpack.
    Sirens clamoring right outside pulled Emma out of her thoughts, and emergency lights bloodied the windows. There was no time to pack anything else. The two Studio Greenwood guitars she’d finished leaned against the wall, still in their cases, where she’d left them the last time she came back from Mickey’s.
    She pulled one of Sonny Lee’s fedoras down low over her eyes, slung the backpack over her shoulder, scooped up the guitars, and descended the outside stairs to the alley as the paramedics came in the front.
    Moments later, she was walking down Beale Street, a guitar in either hand. Emma looked just like a hundred other guitarists in Memphis, heading for a gig. Except for the tears streaming down her face.

Chapter Two

Too Little, Too Late
    By the time Jonah broke into the dungeon, Jeanette was dead. She hung from the wall, her long plait of gray hair matted with blood, her face swollen, her body bruised and broken. Tools of torture had been flung carelessly aside— useless now.
    Jonah knew she was dead because he couldn’t feel her pain. The pain he was feeling was all his own. “Jeanette,” he whispered, his voice