PART 1 — THE TAPE

“Here’s how I heard it—and this is straight from Luther King, Sonny Ray Redding’s drummer.

The one from the Tear Me Down LP—not that twat he’s using now.

And listen—Luther knows his shit when it comes to myths, legends, all that weird stuff.

You know that Robert Johnson ‘sold his soul’ ghost-story bullshit?

Dude, that really happened.

And it wasn’t the Devil.

It was aliens—just like in the Book of Enoch.

All that crazy shit is one hundred percent true—the aliens, the giants, all of it.

There’s a bunch of books from the Bible they hid.

Luther knows all that mess.

His ex-wife was a legit Egyptian and knew everything about pyramids and curses.

She was a spooky bitch.

She was a sweetheart, don’t get me wrong.

There was just something off about her.

It’s a shame what happened to them.

Anyway, we were opening for Sonny.

Luther got so high he forgot what time our set started.

Total mess.

But that’s when he told me Bubellé Reinholdt really tortured—really tortured and murdered—the guy who made Sydney’s LaRoche.

Yeah, the million-dollar fiddle.

You know he played that museum piece on Buck Williams’ new record?

A thousand-year-old work of art on a bumpkin hillbilly album.

Well, the man who made that fiddle was tortured to death by Bubellé Reinholdt.

That’s where Reinholdt got his guitar—the masterpiece.

The luthier—Henri LaRoche—came from a family that had crafted ‘magic’ instruments for over a thousand years.

And you know how folks say they ‘saved the best for last’?

That’s exactly how it went.

It’s a big corporation now.

But before the war, it was a tiny mom-and-pop shop.

Back then, they had the caste system—you didn’t pick your path.

You became whatever your father was.

Twenty generations of instrument makers—and Henri was the last and the most gifted.

After his wife died, he became a recluse.

For decades.

No one had seen hide nor hair of him in fifty years.

Meanwhile, Bubellé and his fiddle player were tearing up Paris.

They’d signed their first deal.

They were just about to cut their first record when the rumor started spreading—”

PART 2 — CINDY BEGINS

Cindy stopped the tape.

She shuffled through the original police report Inspector Lucien Morel had been kind enough to send her.

Getting the file was a stroke of luck—and annoyingly, Gypsy Jake’s idea.

For a male chauvinist beatnik burnout who needed to retire, he still coughed up a good idea now and then.

She would never have thought to request a Paris police report.

She liked to imagine she always thought of everything—but honesty, when it rarely surfaced, told her otherwise.

But this was the big league: her first mainstream publication.

A magazine she’d read since childhood.

A magazine her mother read.

She needed to make a strong showing.

She was going to be a real vest-wearing reporter.

If she didn’t daydream so much about the awards she’d win, she might’ve finished the story already.

Her imagination set her apart—and stalled her out.

It was late summer.

The days were shrinking.

Fall—and the long winter—loomed close.

Staying consistent was hard when the beach block parties kept calling.

Back home, time was simple.

Her school had 118 kids, grades one through twelve.

Not much competed for attention.

A few awkward backseat “adventures,” more fumbling than thrilling.

But Berkeley had changed her.

She’d blossomed physically and mentally.

Her spiritual and psychological growth felt profound—so profound she feared no future husband would be on her level.

Back to work, Cindy, she scolded herself.

But the files bored her.

They were so dry that her mind immediately slipped back to her real problems.

One of them was Jeffrey, the SinHouse intern who’d translated the report.

He wasn’t being generous—he was leveraging his bilingual advantage to corner her into a date.

She only agreed under pressure.

That didn’t make her a whore.

Of course, she wasn’t going to sleep with him.

Even if he hoped.

Which men always did.

She admired her eyeshadow in the window.

Another problem: she hadn’t called her mother.

But calling her mother wasn’t a call—it was an ordeal.

A full hour of emotional labor.

She checked the clock.

Not late.

Not early.

She should be at the Fillmore covering new bands.

That’s what real music journalists did.

Don’t write ghost stories about a luthier who died a century ago.

Except… she had heard of LaRoche.

Everyone had.

She’d visited their New York shop plenty of times to fix her brother’s violins.

Her father always said the instruments were overpriced junk—but the five-year repair guarantee was useful.

Her brother was a klutz.

Then it hit her:

Was it the same LaRoche?

Print Shop coming soon…