"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Except the Music" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

"You don't have to run out," she said.

"Actually, I do," he said, picking up the jacket in one neat movement. "I'm staying with a local family, and
it would be rude to wake them just because I stayed out too late."

That shoulder shrug again, accompanied by a practiced pout. "So don't go home at all."
"I'm the celebrity," he said, with only a trace of irony. "They'll be watching for me."

As if he were a child again, and they were his parents. He hated this part of music festivals, and he didn't
care how much the organizers explained it to him, he still didn't understand the lure. He felt as though the
patrons, who had spent thousands of dollars supporting music in the hinterlands, had also bought a piece
of him, even though none of them acted that way. They all seemed honored that a man of his skills would
deign to visit their home.

He would rather have deigned to drop five hundred dollars per night for a suite at a local resort, but that
money would have come out of his own pocket. And with CD sales declining precipitously and classical
music going through a concurrent but unrelated slide, he had to watch his pockets closely. He still had a
lot of money by most people's standards, but he also had a sense that that money might have to last him
for the rest of his life.

"Poor, poor pitiful you," she said with a smile. It had been that smile, wide and warm and inviting, that
had brought him here in the first place.

"Yep," he said, "poor, poor pitiful me."

And with that he slipped out the front door and into the cool fog-filled night. As he walked the three
blocks back to the performing arts center--built twenty years ago with funds raised at the festival--he
realized that he hadn't even learned her name.

He was out of practice. There had once been a time when he would have learned enough about her to
cover himself for the rest of the festival. Now he was going to have to avoid her.

He sighed, feeling the accuracy of his earlier statement.

This really was where classical musicians went to die.
****
The North County Music Festival drew several thousand people annually to the Oregon Coast. Max had
come every year since the very first, mostly because of Otto Kennisen, the genius behind it all. Otto had
taken Max under his wing when Max had been fourteen, and Max owed him for that.

The festival had grown from a tight little community of internationally known musicians who wanted a
coastal vacation into one of the more respected classical music festivals in the Northwest. Although that
didn't mean much any more.

When he had started in professional music as an acclaimed prodigy about thirty years ago, the
international music scene had more festivals than sense. Classical music sales were at an all-time high, and
some musicians had become superstars.

Now, the music wasn't being taught in the schools or played much on the radio, and what was being