As a kid, Lara recalled riding around with him in his old pickup truck to see a widow about a vintage guitar. Jason was always on the hunt for something, usually related to music. In those days, Lara followed him around like a bad shadow. This particular widow greeted them at the door in her housecoat and curlers, then led them through a maze of boxes and too-big furniture. As they navigated the tumbledown house that smelled of piss and old newspapers, Lara stuck close by her father, clutching his hand until her fingers went numb. At a clearing in the clutter, the woman presented Jason with a battered black guitar case.

While everything about the house was decayed, her father popped the case, and tucked in the worn red velvet was the most beautiful and well-tended guitar that Lara had ever seen. Lacquered and black with a big silver shield on the front, this instrument—as Lara would learn—was known as a resonator guitar. What she was looking at was, in fact, a 1937 Dobro. Her father seemed to sway at the sight of the instrument before he rubbed his hands together and coaxed it from its velvet cradle. He placed it on his lap, adjusted it briefly, and borrowed a worn finger pick from inside the case—one the guitar knew well. Jason didn’t even need to tune the guitar first, just wanting to hear what the instrument sounded like. When her father played the first few notes, Lara fell in love. It was a deep metal sound, rich yet spare, and she could hear the physical transitions from the strings and the melancholy sound of the minor chords. Her father’s smile told her the guitar would be going home with them that day.

As they drove down the dirt path out of the house, her father looked back at the guitar case. “You know about Robert Johnson?”

Lara shook her head.

“Robert Johnson had been an okay guitar player in Mississippi, getting gigs in juke joints and bars, but he was nothing great until he went away to Chicago and came back like a year later with skills he didn’t have before.”

“Maybe he practiced.” Lara was sure of things in those days, and practicing had been drilled into her head from her mother and Cecile. From riding horses to playing the piano, they believed in the power of practicing.

“Maybe so,” said Jason. “But the legend said that he’d gone to the crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and sold his soul to the Devil to play so well. Guitars are mysterious things, Lara. The strings hold things; so does the instrument. The man who owned that guitar—well, his energy is still in that instrument. I only want to try to honor it.”

“So it’s haunted?” Lara’s eyes were wide. She chewed on the end of her ponytail, an occasional habit to quell the nerves.