Aunt Sara

My parents were long dead by then, when a woman showed up at my doorstep, dressed in black, sunshades on, a violin case in her right hand, and while I was staring at the case wondering if it contained a submachine gun, yes, I've seen too many gangster movies, said, "Hi, I'm your aunt Sara!"

I said, "Uh, I don't believe I have an aunt named Sara!"

With her free hand she removed the sunglasses and asked, "And now?"
I must have opened my mouth wide, as I saw in front of me a picture perfect face of my mother's twin.  Is it makeup, plastic surgery or what, I thought,  trying to examine her features.  She looked more like my mother than my mother's older sister, my deceased aunt.  I invited her and her violin case inside.

She was a violin player, she said with the Q_______ Quartet, a world famous ensemble, that even I had heard about, and in the case was a 150 year old Italian made instrument that she didn't want to leave in the car.  She opened the case and invited me to pick it up, but  remembering my bad luck and tendency toward clumsiness in such situations I declined.   Aunt Sara then told me that she was born after her and my mother's father was killed, and her mother decided to give her up for adoption.  I realized that my mom and her older sister, my other aunt, kept this a secret from me, and they certainly must have known it themselves.  Aunt Sara said that she had found me through Red Cross.

"You're my only living blood relative!" she said.  That wasn't exactly true, as I had several cousins from my mother's side who would be her cousins as well.  In any case, I learned that she and the string quartet traveled the world, were based in Sydney, Australia, where two of the members were from, her husband was their manager, and they owned several apartments around the world, including one here in the city.  She promised to send me tickets to one of their appearances.

And as promised, a week later, a pair of tickets to a concert at the symphony hall arrived in the mail.  I went to see the quartet.  I called my mom's elderly  cousin, a distant aunt, to report all this, and she confirmed that indeed there had been a girl infant given up for adoption.   Then I heard nothing from Aunt Sarah for six or seven months.

She showed up again, this time without a violin and without sunglasses, dressed colorfully, and when I opened the door, said, "I need your help, my husband's dead!"

I invited her inside, and she explained that she wasn't a grieving widow because the marriage was merely a business arrangement.  She asked me to provide her with an alibi for the previous evening.  No, she didn't murder him, but there was another man involved, and she wanted to avoid a scandal.  I was on the spot, and I tried to persuade her that it wasn't a good idea, as the investigators would look for any inconsistencies in our stories and we just couldn't coordinate everything between us.  Besides, I had three guests here the previous night, so now I'd have to lie that no one but her was present.  But she begged me, and eventually I relented, we agreed on a story line, time, circumstances, details, conversation topics, menu, everything I could think of, knowing full well that it still wouldn't be enough for a skillful investigator to demolish.

Sure enough, a  couple of days later a police detective called me asking to verify her story.  The conversation was brief and he appeared satisfied with my answers.  As it later turned out, aunt Sara's husband was accidentally  murdered by a local impresario who negotiated with him the purchase of a 40 or 50% interest in the Quartet, and for some reason or another spiked his drink with a dose of sleeping pills that proved fatal.  The man went to prison, the Quartet continued touring.

Then, about a year later, a New York journalist asked me to speak about the case and I reluctantly agreed.   I told him our version of the story, he recorded it, and I asked that my name not be used in print, or I'll sue.  The story appeared in a national magazine a couple of months later.  In it, without mentioning my name the writer accused me of lying and being in cahoots with my aunt Sara, who had been allegedly in cahoots with the murderer, in a plot to take over the management of the Quartet.