Chapter Thirty-Four
FOR CALLUM, the rest of the day couldn’t pass fast enough.
After the bomb of Marilee Nelson bringing in the lost spiral notebook containing the complete works of Iris Wallingford, the bell had rung, and he’d had to flip the switch back into teacher mode.
Part of him wanted to check out for the day and make the kids watch Wicked and write bland, predictable observations about it.
The rest of him, the responsible conductor part of him, knew there weren’t enough rehearsal days before the December concert as it was and he’d better make the most of the ones he did have.
But that notebook, now sitting on Blair’s desk, called to him. The siren song of potential answers to questions that had burned in his heart since the day they’d found that worn sheet music in the library.
Finally, finally, the bell rang and the students trickled out.
As soon as the last of them had left, Blair made a beeline for the office.
But instead of starting her usual cinnamon-candle-and-peanut-butter-cup ritual, she grabbed Iris’s notebook and met Callum’s gaze.
Her eyes held the same combination of excitement and trepidation that filled his own heart.
“Do you think she knew?” Callum asked.
“Who?” Blair made her way toward the piano. “Marilee?”
“Yeah. How much did she know and when did she know it?”
“I have no idea. But the important thing is she brought us the notebook now.” Blair set Iris’s notebook on the piano’s music rack and turned toward him. “And she’s afraid enough of him that she flew to Florida to stay with her sister.”
Callum nodded. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t at least a little bit afraid of Vic Nelson now too.
He definitely wasn’t the person Callum had believed him to be for all these years.
Who was he really? And what was he capable of?
Fear of the unknown chilled him and made him cross the room and dead bolt the door to the choir room.
“Vic doesn’t still have a key to this place, does he?” Callum jiggled the door handle to double-check.
“No, thankfully. They put new locks on everything two or three years ago.”
“That’s probably for the best.” One more jiggle—still locked—and then he sat down on the piano bench next to Blair.
She turned toward him, her fingertips on the upper-right corner of the spiral notebook. “Shall we?”
He nodded, and she opened the front cover.
Everything was ivory with age, and some of the pencil markings were blurred. Iris had scrawled her name in ballpoint pen inside the front cover, and the handwriting looked every inch like that of a teenage girl. No inkling of her musical genius.
That came on the second page. The first page of written music.
A choral piece, four-part, a cappella. “Song in the Night” was the title, though there was no text beneath the notes.
Some bars were scratched out, a few arrows indicated possible revisions .
. . but there was the music. The music of Iris Wallingford. Right there. Before his very eyes.
What he wouldn’t give to have known her. To have her here, alive, now, in his class. To be her teacher.
Oh, who was he kidding? He probably wouldn’t be able to teach this girl anything.
But he could sure learn from her. Talk with her.
Listen to her. Be a safe place and person for her.
So just in case the thought ever crossed her mind to take her own life, he could speak to those lies and shower down truth over her.
He couldn’t have saved Rayne. But he’d like to believe that maybe, just maybe, he could’ve helped Iris.
He glanced toward Blair. “Do you mind if I play this one?”
“Not at all.” She gave his upper arm a quick squeeze. “I know how much this means to you.”
He put his hands to the keyboard and was surprised to find them shaking. Not so much that he couldn’t play, though. And while his piano chops weren’t the caliber of Blair’s, he could find his way around a choral score well enough to bring Iris’s music to life.
It was beautiful.
And haunting. His heart ached. What this girl could have been had she lived. What music she could have written.
And wait . . . just like the song text the police had assumed was her suicide note, this melody seemed very familiar.
To his right, Blair frowned. “Does that sound like Vic’s ‘Voice in the Wilderness’ to you?”
Crap. “Unfortunately, yes.”
Blair rose from the bench and disappeared into the choir office. A moment later she returned with a file box in her arms, which she set on the lid of the piano. The red-lettered cover of one of Vic’s earlier pieces came into view, and Blair set the sheet music next to Iris’s notebook.
Callum’s heart sank to the basement storage area beneath the choir room. The similarities were uncanny. Eerie.
“It’s not an exact replication.” Blair sounded like she was grasping at the last few molecules of hope.
“No, but it’s close enough.” He stopped playing. “Vic stole this idea.”
“What’s the copyright?” Blair flipped back a page. “It’s 1980. Ten years after Iris died.”
“And long enough for everyone to forget about her.” Feeling sick, Callum returned to Iris’s notebook, turned the page, and resumed playing. Another piece. Another beautiful melody. More richly developed harmonies.
“I can’t believe this.” Blair put a hand to her forehead. “That motive is in ‘My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose.’”
“Iris has a different text to this,” he said over the music. “So the rhythm isn’t the same. But that’s her tune.”
Once more he trailed off, his hands still on the keys, and met Blair’s eyes.
“I’m almost afraid to look,” she said. “But I have to know how much of his other music is copied from Iris’s.”
“Me too.”
He rose from the bench and followed Blair into the storage room, where the two of them pulled down all the file boxes of Vic’s music.
Then they went into the choir room and sat on the floor in front of the piano, taking one piece from each folder and spreading them in a circle.
Blair reached up, grabbed Iris’s notebook off the music rack, and put it between herself and Callum, and the two launched into a sordid game of Musical Match.
Which piece of Victor’s corresponded with which page from Iris’s notebook?
Ever the detail person, Blair wrote down each instance on a sheet of paper she’d snagged from the recycle bin.
Not all of Victor’s works were plagiarized—at least, not from pieces they’d found in Iris’s notebook. And not everything Iris had written had found its way into Vic’s music.
But enough of her pieces were copied that the last remaining illusions Callum held about Vic Nelson as a person, as an artist, as a mentor, shattered in a storm of shimmering shards.
“I can’t believe this.” Callum glanced through Blair’s lengthy list. “I struggled to come up with ideas for . . . for years, Blair. Literal years. And I never would’ve stolen an idea from someone else.
It never even occurred to me. It’s just .
. . it’s despicable. It undermines the very creative process we seek to honor. ”
“I know. I’m as disgusted as you are.” She took the list back and set it next to the notebook with a weary sigh.
“Vic was my teacher. My coworker. He’s my .
. . was my friend. Iris should have had so much more life.
She should’ve had the opportunity to accomplish what Vic did.
To surpass Vic. She deserved to have her name on that music, not his. ”
Blair’s voice broke, and she put a hand to her face. “I’m sorry, Callum, I just . . . this is a lot.”
“Of course it’s a lot.” He pulled her close. “You have nothing to apologize for. Vic betrayed you. He betrayed Iris. He betrayed all of us.”
“Yeah,” she choked. “He did.”
The indomitable concrete wall of Blair Emerson had crumbled. He held her as she wept, stroking her hair and pressing kisses to the top of her head.
So what if they were sitting on a cold, hard choir room floor in middle-of-nowhere Illinois? So what if they were in the center of a pile of plagiarized music and demolished illusions? There was no place on earth Callum would rather be than right here. With Blair.
Because he loved her.
The truth rushed in on the wave of a new melody, but he didn’t feel immediately compelled to write it down. In fact, he didn’t care if he ever did. If God meant it for him, it would come back. And if it didn’t, he’d still remember the music of this moment.
This was why Blair had inspired him to write after so many years in the desert. Why he felt alive for the first time since Rayne’s death.
He was in love with Blair.
He loved her battle-scarred heart. Her stubborn insistence on getting up and trying again every time life coldcocked her.
Her care for the kids. Their verbal sparring, their disagreements, even her prickly, exacting nature and her ridiculous cinnamon candle.
All the things that had once irritated him about her now either didn’t matter or had become something he loved.
He wanted to spend his life like this. Comforting her when she was upset. Working together, giving their all to achieve a common goal. Making music with her. Feeling her rock-steady, reassuring presence at his right hand—his right hand in the choir room and in life.
Had he truly thought his real life was in Boston? Was it only a couple of weeks ago that he was counting the days until he could go back?
Now he couldn’t even fathom it.
His real life was here. In Peterson. Teaching. Composing.
With Blair.
“Callum?”
Her eyes were wide and bright with tears, her face was flushed and blotchy, and a chunk of hair had fallen across her cheek.
“Yes?” Whatever she asked him right now, he would be powerless to resist giving to her. Literally anything at all. His car. His life savings. A kidney. Whatever she needed, if it made her happy, he’d—
“I think we need to call the police.”
Oh. Right. That.
They were in something of a mess with Vic, weren’t they? His mentor and her former teacher and colleague was a pathological liar and plagiarist at best and a murderer at worst.
Yeah, they should probably do something about that.
“I agree,” he said.
She smiled, pure sunshine after a rainstorm. “You agree with me? Well, that’s a first.”
He laughed and pulled her close once more.
In an afternoon of weighty darkness and world-altering revelations, love was a welcome ray of light.