The stradivarius, p.1
The Stradivarius, page 1
The Stradivarius
“The Stradivarius is claustrophobia incarnate. Each turn of the page creeps walls closer in with cracks opening in their old, Victorian wood for eyes to peep through; even the air feels too thick for sound to traverse...Knowles masterfully constructs a mystery that twists and turns in places one least expects; even when the pieces seem to all fit together, both the main character, Mae, and you the reader will be forced to question everything with the rampant gaslighting that nails self doubt in among the tight wooden walls. With such a visceral and realised world that often feels alive, the rising feminine rage that boils right until the last page, and a well thought out mystery that seems to always be a few steps ahead of you, The Stradivarius is an absolute must have.”
—Sapphire Lazuli, Author, Blogger at sapphirelazuli.com, & Youtube Video Essayist @sapphicsapph
Rae Knowles writes beautifully and precisely. The Stradivarius is an unfor- gettable read!
—Samantha Kolesnik, author of Waif and True Crime
“Goddamn if this isn’t a delicious, Ingrid Bergman Gaslight (1944) vibes—just as thrilling and tantalizing. Rae Knowles is on my insta-buy list!”
—Sadie Hartmann, Author of 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered, Bram Stoker Awards® nominated editor
The Stradivarius
by Rae Knowles
The Stradivarius
Copyright 2023 © Rae Knowles
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.
Edited by MJ Pankey
Proofread and formatted by Stephanie Ellis
Cover illustration and design by David Román (Max Stark)
First Edition: May 2023
ISBN (paperback): 9781957537528
ISBN (ebook): 9781957537511
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932795
BRIGIDS GATE PRESS
Bucyrus, Kansas
www.brigidsgatepress.com
Printed in the United States of America
For everyone who wasn’t sure if it was real.
Content warnings are provided at the end of this book
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Content Warnings
More from Brigids Gate Press
Prologue
Landrum, South Carolina
Spring 2008
Detective Williams gasped, though no one heard. Whether the sound was hushed by heavy curtains or gobbled up by the blood-soaked carpet, he didn’t know. But the fact remained the same: at the foot of a snaking staircase, below flowery wallpaper and cherry-stained wainscoting, Richard Pruitt lay sprawled, an axe in his skull.
Beside him and still as a porcelain doll, a girl’s head barely cleared the banister. Her nightgown dragged, leaving a trail of bloody streaks on the hardwood. “The bangin’ woke me,” she said, a voice like spun sugar. She was Mae Pruitt, according to dispatch, the victim’s daughter.
Uniformed officers buzzed around the scene, their careless steps peppering dirt around her already soiled home.
“Give me the room,” Detective Williams said.
Mae watched them scuttle to the front door, an oversized trail of ants. Her sandy hair drooped around her shoulders in loose curls, brushing the silky hem of her ruined nightgown, her wide eyes sitting atop deep purple recesses, unnatural on a girl her age. Williams crouched to meet them, hazel irises searching him for answers he couldn’t provide.
“It’s okay, sweetie.”
Though, it wasn’t.
He cuffed his arm around her shoulders, turning her tiny frame with a gentle nudge away from her father’s body. Shards of glass glistened against wide oak floorboards, triangles large and small, a clustered mosaic dyed burgundy by specks of blood spray. He lifted Mae, sparing her vulnerable toes.
“Do I have to go to my aunt?” she asked, her voice mousy. “What if he wakes up?”
A twinge. Williams shielded her view with a curved palm and glanced back at Richard Pruitt. The axe remained upright, steadfast, posed and ready for its closeup from forensic photographers.
“It’s just for a while,” he said.
Glass crunched under his heavy boots as he maneuvered around the crimson spatter. He hesitated in the entry, stealing one last look at the empty display case hanging above the mantle.
A robbery gone wrong, they’d told him.
Surviving glass clung to the wooden frame in violent spikes, haphazard arrows pointing to the empty space in the middle, the small black prongs and hourglass stencil of dust tracing the void. It was a position of honor, centered over the fireplace. In the time the home was built, Williams imagined a grand portrait had hung where the shattered case did now. Oak floors groaned as he carried Mae across. Stained glass embedded in the front door bent and colored the light cast by gas lamps outside. On the wraparound porch, bloody footprints were stark against white paint, surrounded by rainbow patches of filtered light. Williams hopped from one foot to another to avoid the blood, over the vibrant patterns which dared to be beautiful despite the tragedy congealing around them. Down the steps he found a soft patch of grass and eased Mae onto her feet, hoping the blades would be kind to her exposed soles.
A wiry-haired woman waited for him beside her sedan. She wore her blazer over a sleep shirt and clutched a cup of coffee.
“You the social worker?”
The woman nodded, her face bare and eyelashes crusted with sleep. “Lydia Co—ollins,” she said mid-yawn, “DSS.” She flashed credentials and her eyes perked when she noticed Mae’s bloodied nightgown. “Does she have anything to change into?”
“Ay! Jenkins!” Williams shouted.
A thin, uniformed cop popped out from around the corner, carrying a bag and passed it over to the social worker. “Anything to help, Williams, sir.”
“We’ll keep her for the night,” Lydia said, tossing her empty coffee cup into her passenger seat. “Figure out next of kin in the morning.” She bent over and addressed the girl with a softened tone. “And you must be Mae. Does that sound okay, honey? I have a big girl bed at a very safe place with your name on it. And tomorrow, we’ll sort out what’s what.”
Mae nodded, but her eyes drifted across the winding gravel driveway, coming to rest on a tire swing. Suspended on the hefty bough of a mature oak, it swung that night, as if pushed by some benevolent specter, longing for joy amongst the dark.
“She mentioned an aunt,” Williams said in a gravelly whisper.
Mae accepted the woman’s hand and took a few steps toward the backseat before Lydia stopped her, eying the rusty ombre of Mae’s nightgown.
“Let’s just—” She popped her trunk. It was stuffed with papers, folded beach chairs, a bottle of bug spray, and two, sun-bleached towels which she pulled out and spread across the booster seat and floor. “It’ll be more comfortable for you, dear.”
Williams’s expression twisted into a scowl.
Lydia’s face responded, It’s not your car, is it?
Williams glanced over to see if Mae was hurt by the social worker’s hesitation and found her staring over her tiny shoulder at the old Victorian. With a gentle nudge from Lydia, Mae crawled inside and settled.
“She’s gonna take good care of you, sweetie.” Williams shot Lydia a you’d better look.
With Mae buckled in and the doors shut, the sedan growled to life, its tires crunching the gravel drive as it rolled away and turned right onto Alquist Ave.
Williams caught sight of his men congregating around the newly erected caution tape barrier. “Nothing else?” he called as he approached.
“Nah.” The uniformed officer examined his notebook. His outfit was pressed, his shave fresh. He pointed his pen at his writing. “Watches still there. Cash still there.” Another point. “Tablet—”
“Yes, Jenkins, I get the picture.”
“I don’t get it, man,” Ruthers chimed in, “I mean ... all this shit lying around, but he only makes off with something he’d have to pawn, and for what? A hundred bucks?”
“Maybe it was w
“I don’t know about that,” Ruthers said with a self-satisfied puff on his cigarette. “Seems to me, this was personal. A vendetta or something. The theft was maybe a fuck you after the fact, to stick it to him and throw us off.”
“And the glass?”
Ruthers stopped mid-drag.
“How would the killer have smashed the glass after the fact, when the axe is still lodged in the guy’s head? Did you see any shards on the body?”
“No.”
William double-tapped the side of Ruthers’s head with his index finger. “That’s because they’re under him. Glass was smashed first. The killer took it, Pruitt came downstairs and caught an axe to the head.”
Ruthers sucked his teeth while the uniformed Jenkins confined his smile to his eyes. Williams motioned them away, watched Jenkins throw an elbow into Ruthers’s side as they trudged up the porch steps, then took in the property.
Woods bordered the 1800s Victorian on the east, west, and south sides, and a quaint, family cemetery peered down on the grounds from the north. The yard stretched far enough to accommodate a small barn and greenhouse, built by long deceased owners who likely rested in the dirt over the north property line.
Richard Pruitt restored it to historical perfection, painting the slatted siding a rosy pink. A strange choice, Williams thought, for a single father. The house’s proud three stories culminated in a grand iron finial atop slate tiles at a steep pitch. A high stained-glass window towered above—a dollhouse come to life.
No doubt Richard thought he’d walk Mae down this gravel driveway in her prom dress, reluctantly turn her over to the care of her date. That he’d one day tend to the greenhouse for only himself, after she’d moved away for college. That she’d have a family of her own, maybe a young daughter to enjoy the rosy Victorian before she inherited it.
Williams’s eyes trailed down to the wraparound porch, alive with plants. To the surrounding, manicured garden beds. To the rock between them, carved with Mae’s name.
It was then that the full breadth of tonight’s crime struck Williams.
All this ... he thought. All this for a violin.
Chapter One
Chipley, Florida
Late July 2018
Auntie Bel, with the frame and voice of a toad, leaned against the mildewed screen of her open window. Her chubby fingers, nicotine yellow and strangled by too-small, bejeweled rings, held her lit cigarette, smoke curling in the wind. “Hurry up!” she croaked.
Mae, arms laden with puck-sized mineral disks of mysterious composition, blew a puff of air at her wispy flyaways to dislodge them from her eyes.
“Over there,” her aunt commanded, but if she gave some sense of direction, Mae hadn’t seen. “Or do you want the Wi-Fi to do me in? Hah!” Auntie Bel grunted. “Wouldn’ surprise me one bit!”
Mae stumbled over a stray piece of rebar and struggled to hold onto the last two speckled lumps in her arm. First, they were for ‘imposters’, now they block the Wi-Fi. She scraped the orgonite disk with her fingernail. Look like bath bombs to me.
“Not there! Shit, girl, toward the mailboxes.”
She reversed course, phone buzzing in her pocket. Placing the supposedly mystical disk where the curb met the weedy grass, she fished out her phone.
Unknown number.
Mae slid the bar to answer. “Hello?”
“Busy, busy lady!” Auntie Bel mocked from the window.
“Hello, may I speak to Mae Pruitt?”
“This is—” Auntie Bel’s window slammed shut. “She,” Mae finished firmly.
“This is Robert Feinstein, I’m the trustee of your father’s estate.”
Estate?
“I’d like to speak with you at my office. Do you have any availability this week?”
“I, uh, you said your name was Robert?”
“You can call me Bob.”
“Bob, okay.” Mae walked a tight circle in the grass. “What is this regarding?” She enunciated more than she was used to, trying to sound older, more collected, thinking Bob would laugh if he saw her ill-fitting tie-dye T-Shirt, her tousled bun which flopped from one side of her head to the other at the slightest movement.
“It’s regarding your inheritance.”
Inheritance? The thought had crossed Mae’s mind before, but when her eighteenth birthday came and went with no news of it, she’d chucked her hopes of inheritance to the wind. “I’m free tomorrow,” she blurted.
“Tomorrow,” he mused. A beat passed and Mae pictured him checking his schedule, better yet, calling in his prim secretary to check it for him. “Yes, tomorrow will do just fine. Three o’clock.”
“Three o’clock,” Mae repeated, perfect diction. “See you then.”
The call disconnected, Mae shook her head, exchanged her phone for the vape pen in her pocket. Inheritance? She took a long toke as the word bounced around in her head. Oil crackled as it vaporized and sailed into her lungs. What could he have left her? A college account? Why wait until now? She was already twenty, that money could’ve gotten her out of here years ago, saved her countless errands for Auntie Bel, offered her independence. Excitement distilled into acidic resentment. She squeezed the last orgonite disk in her palm.
Ten years from now I’m sure we’ll hear that these things cause some new kind of cancer, she thought, digging her nail into the mineral cake. Two years longer of exposure. She took another sharp pull on the vape.
But hey, maybe the Bayou’s Angel is right, and we’ll all be murdered by the New World Order before the cancer takes hold.
She chuckled quietly, the vapor escaping her mouth in puffs.
Better late than never. Mae stole one more hit before sneaking the pen back into her pocket.
The screen door creaked shut behind her and Auntie Bel was lighting a fresh cigarette at the kitchen table. The warm hug of THC engulfed Mae’s body.
Auntie Bel grumbled something Mae couldn’t discern. “Who was that on the phone?” Her eyes were slits.
“Oh, nothing. Telemarketer.”
Auntie Bel harrumphed and Mae realized she was still holding the last disk. She braced for the diatribe. “I know you think you’re way too smart, way too sophisticated for all this. But I tell you what. When they do come for me, and best believe they comin’ sweetie, they gone’ get more than they bargained for!”
Mae nodded and smiled in agreement. She learned long ago not to argue with conspiracy logic. The microwave beeped a sweet respite.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” Mae said, though she knew her aunt wouldn’t have budged either way. Anything to distract from another lesson on the New World Order. She placed the disk on the counter and wrapped a paper towel around her fingers. The blazing Mac ’n cheese bubbled, its plastic bowl threatening to melt beneath her fingers.
“Well?” Auntie Bel called.
Mae held up the container. The bottom warped and sagged.
“Just a minute.”
She pulled a bowl from the cupboard, quickly dumping the steaming contents inside. The wafting scent of cheese nuzzled her nose. Her stomach grumbled in response. Mae eyed the pantry, the sandwich cookies seducing her from their shelf.
“WELL?”
Auntie Bel’s call snapped Mae back into reality.
“Here you go.” She laid the bowl on the TV table beside the worn sofa. Auntie Bel, who was already absorbed in a low budget documentary, grunted in acknowledgment.
Mae glanced at the time. Six twenty-two.
“Need anything else?”
Auntie Bel waved her off.
“I’m just gonna ... ” she trailed off when Auntie Bel didn’t look up.
Mae snatched the box of cookies and slid out the front door, closing it gingerly behind her. She took long strides across the narrow street, skipping over potholes as she passed a dozen trailers in various stages of decay. When she reached the white metal fence, stained brown where the sprinklers beat down, she peered around the corner in anticipation. Fingers rolling around the vape pen hidden in her pocket, arms encircled her. All went black as he pulled her face to his chest.
“Ah, babe! I came early. Just couldn’t wait to see you.”
Carter released her, and she beamed as she took him in. His angular jaw adorned with rugged stubble. His thin black T-Shirt drawn tight across his broad chest. Men her age never cared enough about their appearance to work out. But Carter was different.
