11 The Blood Ballad by Rett MacPherson

Author:Rett MacPherson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781466888791
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Leo King’s studio was located in the upstairs loft of his apartment in Wisteria. Wisteria is located just west of New Kassel and is the largest city in Granite County. That’s not saying a whole lot, but the jail, sheriff’s office, and community college are all within Wisteria’s city limits. It’s also a fast-food haven, home to the county library, and boasts a movie theater, the only movie theater in the whole county. You must understand that Granite County is mostly made up of farms and little bitty towns.

Since my dad didn’t know exactly where Leo’s studio was, he rode along with me. We arrived about 7:30. I still hadn’t shaken the uneasy feeling Phoebe’s visit had given me. The fact that she had just showed up with those letters unnerved me. There was something not quite right about it. I figured she would have fought me tooth and nail even to look at the letters. Instead, she’d just sauntered in and handed them to me. Of course, she’d snatched them away from me so quickly that I knew I’d never get a chance to have them looked at by a professional, but I was about as close to a professional as you could get in this area, and they looked authentic to me. The paper had been soft and yellowed, small, and lined with a faint blue. The handwritten ink had faded to sepia, but what really did it for me was the handwriting. A person might be able to fake old paper and old ink, or even find old paper and old ink to use in a new letter, but people wrote in a distinctive way back then. The cursive style was a little more formal in those days than it was now, a little blockier. In the letters Phoebe had shown me, it was definitely old cursive. So unless she’d hunted up a hundred-year-old person to write the letters for her, or gone to a lot of time, trouble, and expense to hire a professional forger, I’d say they were authentic.

But I couldn’t help it. The whole thing felt odd to me.

Leo King was an old musician. Meaning he was from that school of honky-tonk from the fifties and sixties that had brought us the likes of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. Even though nowadays he chose to play a more mountain style of country picking, rather than the slower crying-in-your-beer music. That didn’t take away the fact that he’d been one of the great crying-in-your-beer music musicians. So had my dad. So they hit it off quite well. In fact, I just stood back for a good ten minutes while they discussed music. Finally, Leo remembered why I was there.

He was in his seventies, with a huge belly and hairy ears. Don’t let that fool you. When he picked up a guitar, the man was magic. “Torie, I’ve got to say that these are some awesome recordings. Absolutely awesome.”

“Yes, but have they been doctored?”

“Not at all.” He handed me a stack of CDs.

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