The Copper Bow

Mara Voss learned the difference between a crack and a seam before she learned to answer the telephone. Her hands had a memory older than words: the way a spruce throat calls for thinning, the way glue breathes as it cools, the tiny grain lines that sing when the bow passes. The workshop sat at the elbow of Greyhaven's harbor, a lean, brick room where gulls' calls arrived like punctuation and the smell of tar threaded through varnish. A string of bulbs swung above the bench and threw chemistry into amber: rosin glittering like sugar, lemon oil, the sharp tang of boiled linseed. Outside, the city huddled under its usual damp shawl. Inside, the instruments waited like people who'd lost their voices.

She had come to Greyhaven six years ago after the sea took what naming could not. The town kept its own calendar of absences—empty chairs on porches, a pair of boots by a pier that no longer creaked, a window half-curtained where someone stopped looking. Mara kept to the workbench. She mended strings and balanced bridges and listened to clients tell their stories in the pauses between notes, accepting grief as one of the woods she worked with. It was a tidy kind of mercy, measurable in hours and price lists.

On a Tuesday that smelled of cold iron, a crate arrived at dusk. No name on the bill, only a looped rope and a damp smell that wasn't mildew but something older, like salt pulled through cedar. The crate was small, the wood soft under the blade. Inside lay a violin wrapped in oilcloth. It looked ordinary at first glance: thumb-smoothed varnish, a faint finger-scar on the lower bout, a bridge that had been too quickly raised. Mara set it on the bench and turned on the lamp. The varnish held an undertone of green, the color of sea-glass left too long in a tide pool.

She ran her thumb along the belly and felt a resonance that was not musical so much as personal. A thin, high thread of sound slid under her skin, like the ghost of a melody you remember at the exact moment before it arrives. The peg-box bore a tiny carving she had seen in an old photograph at the harbor museum: an anchor wound into a ring of tiny stars. Her chest tightened. She did not know why.

When she tightened the strings, the violin answered with a note that should not have been there. It was not produced by horsehair nor by wood; it was a thin, persistent hum that rinked the lamp glass as if someone had whispered into air. Mara's fingers stilled over the strings. Somewhere beyond the street a barge's horn took up the same pitch and carried it off into fog. She told herself it was nothing—the sort of thing a busy brain will invent when it craves a story. Then, under the humming, a tiny tune, like a lullaby half-remembered, rose and fell with the ebb of her breath. It sounded, impossibly, like a child's humming.