“Now,” Geordie was saying into the microphone, “we’re going to take you from County Clare, where that last set originated, all the way across the Irish Sea and up into the Shetland Isles for a set of tunes from the playing of Tom Anderson. We’ll start with a hornpipe he wrote for the pianist Violet Tul-loch, then move on into a pair of reels….”
The community center wasn’t set up like a regular concert hall. The stage had some extra lighting on it, but the audience wasn’t lost in the usual sea of darkness. Sitting where she was, Miki could actually see the audience. As Emma Jean started the hornpipe, fingerpicking the melody on her guitar, Miki studied the crowd, looking for familiar faces.
There was her brother Donal with Ellie—shame things hadn’t worked out between them—and the rest of his Crowsea arts crowd, Jilly, Sophie, Wendy, and all. Here and there she spotted regular customers from the store—how had they even known she was playing this gig? The advertising had all been for the previously slated band with only small corrections running in the “What’s On” sections of the papers on Friday and this morning. She recognized some Fall Down Dancing fans, then spied Hunter standing off to one side, near the back.
Amy had joined Emma Jean now, her whistle playing harmonies to Emma Jean’s guitar lines. Hunter lifted a hand when he saw Miki looking at him.
Miki smiled, then looked down at her instrument and pretended to check the workings of her bellows. She could feel a flush coming on and hoped it wasn’t noticeable from the audience—or at least not from where Hunter was standing.
Donal shouldn’t have started in on teasing Hunter at the session the other night, and she shouldn’t have kept it up, because things had been getting a little awkward at the store ever since. Where usually she and Hunter had such an easy rapport between them, now everything felt stilted. She kept catching him studying her, his face a mix of puzzlement and that look some of the regulars got when they were trying to build up the nerve to ask her out. By Friday it had been a relief to be able to have the excuse to take Saturday off to work on material for tonight’s show.
The trouble was, she didn’t know how she felt any more than Hunter knew how he did. For him the idea that she was interested in him would generate the simple relief that, okay, J^ia had dumped him, but he wasn’t a complete loser; other women still found him interesting. She could almost see him working out the difference between his pal Miki and the woman Miki he’d probably never really looked at all that closely before. Certainly not in this way. One thing you could say about Hunter: He was steadfast and true. The whole time he’d been living with Ria, Miki had never once got the sense that he was in the least bit interested in another woman.
For her own part, well, she’d been joking with Hunter at the session, taking it up where Donal had left it off, not at all serious, but it had been cozy, snuggled up beside him at the end there. She’d always looked at Hunter as a friend first, then her boss. Nothing else. Not because she didn’t find him attractive, or charming. Or fun, when it came down to it—the past few weeks notwithstanding. Part of the reason she’d not even considered him as boyfriend material had been because, well, he was taken, wasn’t he? And he was, what? Ten years older?
Except that gap in their ages didn’t seem all that terribly wide—at least not anymore. When she was younger, yes, but now… And if they could get along as well as they did as friends, why should a closer relationship be any different? She’d always believed that lovers should be friends as well, because otherwise—
She looked up suddenly, realizing that the band had jumped into the reel that followed “Violet Tulloch’s Hornpipe” and she’d missed her cue to come in with them. The audience wouldn’t know, but Emma Jean was giving her a puzzled look. Miki shrugged an apology to her bandmate, then waited for the “B” part of the tune to come around. It’d sound better if she came in then—like it was part of the arrangement.
No more woolgathering, she told herself.
When the others came to the end of the “A” part’s repeat, she was ready and joined in. Actually, she thought, that sounded pretty good. Gave the second part of the tune a nice little lift.
She made herself stop thinking of anything but the music then, concentrating instead on the wash of sound coming back from the monitors, letting it pull her back into that fey state she could fall into so readily when a great tune banged up against a great audience. It didn’t take long before she was jigging in her seat once more, grinning wildly as she worked the bellows, the fingers of her right hand dancing up and down, and back and forth, between the two rows of melody buttons.
It wasn’t until after the break, when they were playing their second set, that she noticed the line of tall, dark-haired men standing at the very back of the community center. Six, no, seven of them. She recognized them immediately from the sessions at The Harp. The hard men. Dressed in their dark broadcloth suits, cans of Guinness in hand. Appreciating the music, no doubt, though it was hard to tell from the guarded look in their eyes.
She hoped they weren’t here to cause trouble.
Well, it wasn’t her problem if they were. Jigabout had only been hired to play the music tonight, not deal with security as well.
The a cappella song that Amy and Emma Jean had been singing came to a conclusion. Next up was a set of Johnny Doherty reels that she and Geordie started off as a duet before the others came in. She looked away from the hard men and raised an eyebrow to Geordie.
“Anytime,” he said.
She counted them in and they were off, fiddle and accordion playing the first tune on their own until Emma Jean joined them on guitar for the second time through. Miki cocked her head, smiling when Amy’s pipe drones cut in at the beginning of the second tune. She loved the way they bottomed a tune with their bass hum. By the time Amy had joined them on her chanter, Miki had put the hard men right out of her mind.
8
“I don’t get it,” Ellie said to Donal.
They were standing on the edge of the dance floor, waiting in line to get a drink from the makeshift bar that the Newford Traditional Music Society had set up in the community center’s kitchen. Donal had already wrinkled his nose earlier at the idea of Guinness in a can, though that hadn’t stopped him from finishing one and probably planning to order another.
“Why hasn’t Miki made an album yet?” Ellie went on. “For that matter, why isn’t she off on tour somewhere instead of working at the record shop and only playing her music part-time?”
Donal shrugged. “I know why she hasn’t recorded. She figures the tunes already exist on enough tapes and CDs by other artists and she doesn’t see the point in recording one more version of them.”
“But they’d be her versions.”
“I know, I know. Only try telling her that. It’s like trying to argue with a drunk—you’ll get no sense out of her.”
The man in front of them stepped away with his order and it was their turn.
“I’d like a Kilkenny Cream Ale, please,” Ellie told the woman taking orders. She glanced at Donal. He offered up a weary sigh. “And a Guinness,” she added.
She pushed his hand back into his jacket when he tried to pay.
“I feel like a kept man,” he said.