Chapter 2
Story: The Chairwoman Grabbed a Six-Year-Old on Stage — Then the Locket Swung Into the Light
The question hung in the air for three full seconds, and in those three seconds the room rearranged itself.
People at the front tables had started doing math. The locket. The chairwoman's tone. The way the board president had gone stiff at table one. There is a specific kind of attention a fundraising crowd gives to a public embarrassment that might be about to become a scandal, and the whole ballroom was now paying it at once.
Margo did not know what the question meant. She knew she was supposed to hold the tote. Her father had told her so, twice, before he went down to the orchestra pit: hold the tote, don't wander, come find me when the applause starts. He played the cello. He was second chair in the house orchestra hired for the benefit, and he had already been crying a little in the car on the way over, which was something he did now sometimes when he didn't think she could see.
She also knew the tote's contents mattered. Not because anyone had told her exactly why. She was six, and six-year-olds are precise about some things and vague about others. She knew the paper inside was her mother's. Her mother had written on it. It was the last piece of her mother's handwriting she had ever seen, and she was not going to put it on a table for a waiter to take away.
"I asked you a question," the chairwoman said.
"Boyne-Ashford." That was Hollis. He had come around the front of table one now, unhurried, his reading glasses in his fist. He said it flat — not loud, but flat enough that it reached the microphone, which meant it reached the back wall through the ballroom's rented speakers.
The chairwoman turned her head a fraction. "Hollis. Not now."
"Now."
"I'm handling a disruption."
"You're handling a child."
A murmur moved through the room, warm and unpleasant, like water coming to a boil. The chairwoman gave the donors a small closed smile — a see-how-patient-I-am smile — and turned her attention back to the stage.
She stepped closer to Margo. Her heels made a clean hard sound on the platform.
"You know," she said, almost gently, "this is a very special night for me. I wrote the piece we're about to hear. The featured work. Six years of evenings in my study. And tonight the room is full of people who paid a great deal of money to hear it, and you've decided to stand on my stage and wave a stranger's jewelry at the crowd."
"I live here," Margo said. She meant the church youth orchestra — she meant the borrowed dress, the donated instrument, the basement rehearsal room where she and eleven other kids sat in a half circle on Tuesdays. She didn't have the words to say what she meant.
The chairwoman's eyebrows went up. "You live here." She looked at the audience. Someone laughed again, harder this time.
Behind the child, the projection screen at the back of the stage woke up with a soft blue blink. It had been showing the gala program all evening: the donor list, the menu, the featured work's title in a font large enough to read from the last row.
Hollis Brand was not looking at the screen. He was looking at the locket.
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