Chapter 5
Story: The Chairwoman Grabbed a Six-Year-Old on Stage — Then the Locket Swung Into the Light
For four years, the story everyone in that ballroom believed had been simple, and nobody had had any reason to question it.
Celiby Boyne-Ashford, of the Cincinnati Boyne-Ashfords, was a patron. She had been gala chair four times running. She sat on three boards, attended two Beethoven cycles a year, hosted a Christmas recital in her Richmond Street house. And in her early fifties, in the middle of her second widowhood, she had discovered that she could write music.
That was the version. It was in the program. It was in the newspaper insert that had run on Tuesday. It was in the donor email that had gone out a week ago with the subject line *A Composer in Our Midst.*
The featured work was called *Riverside Suite*, and it was beautiful. Four movements, twenty-two minutes. Strings-forward, a cello line in the third movement that made grown men in tuxedos put down their forks.
People heard it at last year's gala and stood for four minutes. Somebody said she should publish it. Somebody else said the hospital should commission her next one. Since then, *Riverside Suite* had been played twice more — at a fundraiser in Columbus in March and at a chamber series in Louisville in May. All three times, the printed program read: *Music by Celia Boyne-Ashford.*
Nobody in the ballroom on Saturday knew that the third movement of *Riverside Suite* was the last page of a piece called *Threads* — written on a Saturday in October eight years earlier, at a kitchen table in Cheviot, by a cellist named Marguerite A. Bower, who spent her last three years playing Sunday chapels at Riverside Children's Hospital and who died the summer her daughter turned three.
The second row of table one had all of this in their heads by now, because people who work in development for a hospital board are professional readers of rooms. Lila Fernandez had the manuscript page on the big screen directly in front of her. She had spent three years reading Celia's "original" scores for program notes. She knew the handwriting.
She leaned across the table and said something to the young woman next to her, who took out her phone and started typing fast.
Up on the stage, Celia Boyne-Ashford had not yet turned to look at the screen. She was still holding the locket up in her fist, still smiling, still performing.
"You see," she said to the room. "The child can't produce a single — "
"Margo," a voice said from the center aisle. Hollis Brand's voice. It was quiet and it was not rhetorical. "Is that your mother's music?"
The chairwoman turned.
The screen behind her had changed.
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