Third Bid, Last Call

The St. Jude's auction happens every year on the third Saturday of October, and I've been to eleven of them in a row. I'm fifty-two years old and I've never taken a date. I take my own car, I park behind the abbey wall where the goose grass grows through the gravel, and I buy something small. That's the ritual. Ten pounds for a soup tureen one year. Fifteen for a set of watercolors of the market square that I've never hung anywhere. My mother ran the pharmacy on Gilder Street for thirty years, and she went to this auction every autumn of her life. She died ten years ago this month, and I keep bidding because it's the only hour of the year I feel like her son instead of just the man who fills your prescription.

The hall smelled like instant coffee and old radiators. Folding tables in crooked rows, a trestle near the stage with the bigger lots on it, and a crowd I've known my whole life saying my name like they'd only just remembered it.

"Melvin! Over here, we saved you a seat."

Lacey Prichard, seventy-one if she was a day, patting the chair beside her like she was calling a dog.

"Morning, Lacey."

"You look thin. Are you eating?"

"I eat fine."

"He says that," she told the woman next to her, "but have you ever once seen him at the Rose and Crown?"

I sat down. The paddles were in a cardboard box on the trestle, cardboard numbers stapled to lollipop sticks, and I took number nineteen because I take nineteen every year. Nobody else knows that matters. Nobody else would care.

I picked up the catalog and flicked through. Lot twelve, gilt mirror, water damage. Lot thirteen, box of assorted tools, sold as seen. Lot fourteen made me stop.

Vintage cello case, black, early twentieth century. Interior lined in green velvet. Some wear to brass corners.

I'd seen it when I came in. Propped against the wall behind the trestle like it had been left there by accident. It reminded me of the one my mother kept in the back room of the shop, under the stairs, with her sheet music in it. She played badly and she loved it completely. When I looked at that case on the table I could smell the shop again, the menthol and the paper bags, and I know that's not a reason to bid on anything. I know that. I bid on things like that anyway, every year, small things, ten or twenty pounds, and I bring them home and put them somewhere and think of her.

The catalog said nothing about what was inside it.

---

Cheyenne got there at half past one, late, still in her work coat, because the delivery schedule had fallen apart at eleven and she'd spent two hours on the phone with a haulage firm in Swindon. She's twenty-nine, she moved here two years ago for a job at the distribution center, and most of the town still thinks she's new, which around here means anyone who arrived after the millennium.

She'd been thinking about the cello case for a week. The notice in the parish newsletter had a photograph, small and gray, and she'd known straight away. Knew it like you know your own front door.

She found the catalog on the table by the door and read the entry twice.

"Vintage cello case," she said under her voice. "That's it? That's the whole entry?"

A man sorting raffle tickets glanced at her. "Sorry?"

"Nothing. Thanks."

No mention of the contents. No mention of the music. Her grandmother's handwriting, forty pages of it, folded into the velvet lining, the waltzes and the little unlabeled pieces her gran wrote, the only person in her family who never once got her name wrong. Cheyenne had held her gran's hand at the end. Then her aunt had packed the whole house into skips while Cheyenne was living four hundred miles away, and the case had vanished into the great secondhand economy of the west of Holt, and now here it was in a church hall in the Cotswolds with a stapled number on it.

Lot fourteen. She took paddle thirty-one.

She found a seat at the back, near the radiator that knocked, and watched the case while Lacey Prichard's raffle tickets got sorted and the vicar said something about the roof fund and the auctioneer, a big cheerful man called Sonny Hobbs, started working through the lots.

---

Sonny took his time. Lot twelve, the gilt mirror, went for six pounds to a woman who I'm fairly sure wanted the frame. Lot thirteen, the tools, went to the man who'd donated them, which is the sort of joke this hall finds funny every single year.

Then Sonny looked over at the case and something changed in his voice.

"Right, lot fourteen. Now this is a nice one. Vintage cello case, pre-war they think, lovely old thing. Green velvet inside. Come on, what am I hearing to start?"

"Five pounds," said someone near the front.

"Five pounds I have. Do I hear ten? Ten?"

"Ten," said a voice behind me, and I turned around. A young woman at the back, dark hair, work coat, sitting very straight.

"Ten pounds, thank you madam. Fifteen?"

"Fifteen," I said.

I would like to claim the rest of it happened slowly, but it did not. It happened like weather.

"Twenty."

"Twenty-five," I said, without turning fully around.

"Thirty," she said.

I turned around then. She was looking straight at me. Not hostile, exactly. Determined. The way my mother used to look at a stubborn jar lid.

"Thirty-five," I said.

"Forty."

"Forty-five."

"Melvin," Lacey whispered, "you never go past twenty."

"I know, Lacey."

"Fifty," the young woman called, and now other people had turned around to watch. There is nothing the people of this town love more than two strangers fighting over a piece of furniture.

"Sixty," I said.

"Seventy."

"Eighty."

"Eighty-five," she said, and her voice had gone a bit tight, and I heard her say, mostly to herself, "come on, come on."

"Ninety."

She stood up. Standing up at an auction in this hall is a declaration of war. "A hundred."

"A hundred and ten."

"A hundred and twenty," she said, "please."

The please affected me. I should have stopped there. I had a hundred pounds in my head, forty more than my usual ceiling, and she'd said please.

"A hundred and thirty," I said.

"A hundred and forty."

"A hundred and fifty."

"A hundred and sixty," she said, and her hand was shaking, actually shaking, holding the little cardboard paddle.

"A hundred and seventy," I said, and Sonny slammed his gavel down so fast I nearly didn't hear it.

"Sold! A hundred and seventy pounds to number nineteen. That's the most exciting thing that's happened at this auction since the tombola incident of 2019, and we all remember that. Tea and biscuits at the back, roof fund bucket by the door."

The hall clapped, which embarrassed me more than the money. A hundred and seventy pounds. My mother would have laughed herself sick. She never paid more than a fiver for anything in her life.

I collected the case from the trestle. It was heavier than I expected. I signed the sheet, wrote the check, said the right things to Sonny, and carried it out through the side door into the courtyard, where the cold hit me like a hand on the chest. Autumn had turned properly sharp that week. The abbey wall was black with wet.

I set the case down by the bench and I was reaching for my keys when the side door banged open.

She came out fast, work coat flapping, and stopped three feet away with her hands in fists.

"You don't even want it," she said. "Do you? You've got no idea what's in there. You bid a hundred and seventy pounds on a thing you don't want."

"I, well. Hello. I'm Melvin."

"I know who you are. Everybody knows who you are. You run the pharmacy."

"That's right. And you are?"

"Cheyenne Morrison." She took a breath and visibly made herself unclench her hands. "Look. I'm not trying to be rude. I'm sorry. But there is sheet music inside that case. Handwritten. In my grandmother's hand. She hid it in the lining during the war and it's still there, it's the only thing of hers I have left, and the catalog didn't say one word about it, and now a stranger who collects soup tureens has taken it home."

"That's not..." I stopped. "How do you know about the soup tureens?"

"Lacey Prichard talks to everyone in a queue."

"Of course she does." I looked at the case between us. "Can I ask you something honest?"

"I'd rather you did than not."

"Would a hundred and seventy pounds help? I mean. It's your grandmother's. If I'd known that I'd have stopped at the please."

She stared at me. The courtyard was quiet except for a jackdaw on the wall making its one noise.

"You'd give it up?"

"I'd want something for it, I'm not made of money, the roof fund took enough out of me tonight. But yes. I'd sell it to you. Though I'd like to see the music first, if that's fair. My mother kept hers in a case like this. That's why I bid. I didn't know about the lining. I just liked the case."

Cheyenne looked at the case for a while. Then she sat down on the bench, suddenly, like her legs had voted without her.

"Can I tell you the whole thing?" she said. "It takes about four minutes and I've never told anyone."

"Sit a minute," I said, and sat down next to her.

She smoothed her coat over her knees and looked at the case, not at me. "Her name was Edith. Edith Morrison. She played cello at the abbey here, would you believe. Before