The Piano Maker Read Online Free

the policeman still stood looking after the car in a way she did not like. But the road was slippery and she had to pay attention, and the next time she checked the mirror he had turned away.
    The snowplow had been through and she drove in second gear, with the worn-out pair of shoes on the passenger seat, past the school and the co-operative, past the government dock and on through a stand of pines to the building with the tall brick chimney.
    In the front office she asked the girl if she could speak to Mr. David Chandler.
    “You’re the piano player, ma’am,” said the girl brightly. “From the funeral. I recognize you. If you ever …” She blushed and stopped.
    The girl was pretty in a way but there was something not quite right about one side of her face.
    “If I ever what?” said Hélène.
    “Oh, nothing, ma’am. You just go back out that door and turn left and you’ll see the sign down the brickway. That’s David’s shop. You can go right in, but maybe coveryour ears. It’s often noisy in there with all that screamin’ machinery he’s got.”
    When she entered the shop he was standing at a sander, holding a workpiece to the belt with both hands. The dust that came off disappeared into the open mouth of the kind of suction machine that might have saved her mother’s life, had there been one at the Molnar works. Around the room stood drawing boards and machinery and work tables. Hand tools hung within their outlines on peg-boards. The workshop smelled of dry shaved wood, and for a moment it all took her back twenty years and more.
    She walked between him and the window, and he looked up and nodded but kept on working. After a while he held up the piece and put callipers to it. He turned off the sander and the suction machine.
    “Snow so soon,” he said. He glanced at her city coat and hat and the shoes she was carrying. “How can I help you, ma’am?”
    She said she was new in town but that she’d heard from Mildred at the hotel that he’d made her favourite pair of shoes.
    “Her favourite pair,” he said. “That’s nice to hear.”
    She told him what she wanted, and he took the shoes and turned them in the light of the lamp over the work table.
    “I can do that,” he said. “If you sit in that chair and take off your boots, I can measure you for the last. Just have a seat while I wash up.”
    He went out through a door at the back of the room,and she could hear water running. When he came back she was still standing.
    “Could you not measure from the shoes, Mr. Chandler?”
    “From the shoes. Well. It’ll be so much better from the foot. Always from the foot, because every foot is different in small but important ways. Like the insteps or the arches, and how much the foot widens when we put weight on it. And so for the shoe to fit properly, that’s how it’s done.”
    He turned her right shoe in the light and put his hand inside.
    “With this, all the more,” he said.
    She sat down on a bench.
    “Ma’am?”
    “Yes, Mr. Chandler. Just give me a moment.” She looked around. “I spent most of my youth in a place like this. Much larger and more work stations, but the same wood smell and similar tools. My mother inherited a piano factory and she taught me the business. After she died I ran it for as long as I could. The war put an end to it.”
    He stood listening to her. Waiting, she imagined, for her to come to the point.
    “Interesting,” he said then. “And where was that?”
    “In a town in northern France. Our make was called Molnar. We sent many to North America.”
    “Molnar pianos?”
    “Yes. You have one right here in your church. I played it the night before the funeral.”
    “That was you? I wasn’t there, but I heard about it.”
    She smiled at him. “Mr. Chandler,” she said, “this shoe business is my secret.”
    “Well, ma’am. Your secret is safe with me.”
    “Thank you. Besides the pair to replace these, I need two pairs of indoor shoes. An elegant