CHAPTER THREE
I stay awake late into the night hoping to hear the promised music that Amelia speaks of. I hear nothing, however, and even my dreams—long a blessing and a curse to me for their vividness and their tendency to awaken the deepest secrets of my subconscious—reveal nothing. I wake wondering if perhaps their truly is no secret music and Etienne is simply overly concerned with his daughter’s active imagination.
But then there was the terror in Josephine’s eyes. No, there is a secret here. I am sure of it. That could explain why the children are homeschooled rather than placed in a local private school or sent away to boarding school. Perhaps that secret is known among the community and keeping the children home is a way to protect them.
But you’re not here for that secret, are you?
I sigh. I’m not here for that secret, but then again, I have stumbled across many secrets that have led me to useful discoveries about Annie. Perhaps fate has led me here for the same reason.
Still, there’s no use prying at something when I have no idea where to look. Besides, I can’t neglect the children to focus on my own problems. I’ll take today to introduce them to their lessons and learn how they might best benefit from my instruction.
As promised, the children are awake and dressed already when I leave my room at six-thirty. I find them both downstairs tuning their instruments. Well, Amelia tunes hers. Gabriel is practicing scales to warm up. As I observe, he finishes the scales and launches into a simple melody.
I am not a musical genius nor anything close. Because of that, I can’t properly articulate to you what I feel when Gabriel’s fingers move over the keys of that piano, nor could I tell you what about the player or the instrument makes it the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard in my life. I can only tell you that I’m utterly transfixed. It is as though the soul of the universe were laid bare and its meaning and purpose translated into raw emotion through the piano.
And he’s only warming up! Good lord, what shall I feel when he plays in earnest?
“Listen to this, Mary!” Amelia says brightly. “I’m learning to play Vivaldi!”
She launches immediately into a dazzling recital of Vivaldi’s Spring Concerto. I am amazed at her speed and prowess with the instrument. For one so young, she has an ease in her playing that suggests decades of experience. She is indeed, as she tells me last night, very good.
But as impressive as her playing ability is, Gabriel’s piano playing is on an entirely different level. Amelia is skilled and immensely talented. Gabriel has his finger on the fabric of melody itself.
Boy, listen to me! He’s only warming up. He’s not done anything particularly virtuoso. No doubt it is the instrument that sounds so perfect. I’m sure Gabriel’s good, but I don’t know enough about music to trust my opinion of it.
Then he begins to play in earnest, and I know instantly that I am right about him. He plays Claire de Lune, perhaps the most well-known classical composition for piano of all time, but when he plays, it is as though I hear it for the first time. His eyes are closed, and his body sways in time with the music, but his hands! Goodness, it’s as though they have a mind of their own. They move over the keys like water flowing over smooth stones, like… well, come up with any metaphor you like. It is perfect. Utterly perfect. He has inherited his grandfather’s gift. Even Amelia stops her violin and stares at him in rapture.
The door opens, and the music abruptly stops. A mellow voice calls to Gabriel, “Showing off for your new governess, I see.”
Gabriel flushes beet red and looks down at his keys, grinning bashfully. I turn toward the sound of the voice to see a handsome man around my age dressed in a brown suede suit and wearing polished black shoes. He carries himself with the swagger of an old-time jazz musician, and indeed, that’s exactly what he looks like to me. He smiles and bows deeply. “Charles Gilroy, ma’am. Pianist ordinaire and teacher extraordinaire.”
“He’s lying,” Amelia informs me. “He’s really good.”
“And someday,” a second voice—this one less mellow but still kind—interrupts, “you will be too, Amelia, if you can focus on your own practice and not your brother’s.”
Amelia sticks her tongue out at a thin, balding man in a gray pinstripe suit. The gentleman—Mr. Franz, I assume—remarks drily, “Very ladylike of you, Miss Amelia. Shall we practice violin perhaps, or would you rather blow raspberries?”
Amelia giggles. “That’s okay. I’m ready to practice. Bye, Gabriel! Bye, Mary!”
She skips out of the parlor, and Franz gives me a resigned look as he follows her. I am enough a student of human nature to see the affection behind his forced impatience, though.
“We should get to practicing too,” Gilroy says.
It takes me a moment to realize he’s waiting for me to leave. I smile at him and say, “Of course.” To Gabriel, I say, “I look forward to hearing you play again.”
He releases a small sound that might have been, “thank you.”
That’s progress. He’s starting to sort of speak to me. Not bad for only twelve hours.
I leave the room, and shortly after, I hear the piano again. It is hauntingly beautiful, but for some reason it doesn’t pierce my soul as it does before. Perhaps I need to be there to watch it, or perhaps Gabriel plays differently when he’s not in the middle of a lesson.
Normally, I would make myself breakfast and coffee or tea at this time, but instead, I choose to explore the house a little more. Josephine showed me the main rooms on the first floor, but she only showed me my room on the second floor.
This is another habit of mind that Sean decries. He calls it snooping. I call it curiosity. And even he can’t deny that my curiosity has revealed many secrets that shouldn’t remain hidden.
In this case, my curiosity is toward my sister. I don’t know why I’ve been led here, but I am convinced there’s a reason. Maybe it has nothing to do with this house and only has to do with New Orleans. Maybe it doesn’t even have to do with this city but only the memory that’s resurfaced of Annie’s old history with music. Either way, I must know what this house is hiding.
The second floor is rather disappointing. It contains only bedrooms, most of them not in use. Nothing hidden in closets, nothing written in journals or slipped in between mattresses. Just ordinary bedrooms. In my past places of employment, the most damning secrets were found in studies and master bedrooms, but I’m not going to sneak into Josephine’s room while she’s sleeping in her bed.
That leaves the attic.
I feel a slight chill as I ascend the staircase. Attics have revealed their own secrets, but those secrets always trigger the darkest memories I have. I worry that I will find something in this attic that triggers a memory I’d rather leave forgotten.
But if I am to find out what happened to my sister, I must be brave. So, I take a deep breath and open the door.
Lights come on automatically when the door opens. I’m grateful for that. This attic is cluttered, and several of the shapes of old furniture, coatracks, clothing and stacks of keepsakes and decorative items could look rather sinister in darkness.
As it is, I find nothing immediately frightening, so I start to look around. As I do, the music lifting to my ears from the first floor brings more flashes of Annie with her saxophone. I see her practicing in her room, and in the backyard. I see her performing at our high school and then again at our university.
How is it that I don’t remember any of this? Most of my repressed memories are isolated incidents, usually moments of extreme danger or of violence or conflict. These memories seem rather ordinary.
And I can’t remember how she sounds. I can see her body moving, her hips swaying, her fingers pressing and releasing valves on the saxophone, but I can’t hear any noise but the noise of the children practicing downstairs. Could I have repressed the memory of how she sounded when she played, or has the memory faded to the point where I can’t remember what she sounded like?
I find a bookshelf on which are stacked hundreds of spiral bound notebooks. I open the first one and see that each book contains compositions written by Marcel Lacroix.
I peruse some of them, but I’m truly not skilled at music. I can read simple notes, but the complex pieces jotted in these books are beyond me. They look jumbled and erratic, and while I’m sure that’s not at all the case, I can’t hear what any of these are supposed to sound like by reading the notes.
I look through a few, then decide I won’t find anything interesting. Just before I turn to leave, though, I catch a glimpse of yellowing paper out of the corner of my eye. I turn back to the bookcase and see a sliver of the paper sticking out in between two notebooks.
I carefully remove the composition and hold it to the light. The papers are old and yellowing, but not yet cracking. The notes written on the page are faded but still readable.
And they’re complex. I don’t know how to read them well, but I know enough to see that this piece is extraordinarily technical and extremely demanding. I feel a touch of anxiety looking through it, funny since I can’t even play the Happy Birthday song on any musical instrument.
The title of the piece reads Vie Apres a la Mort. Life after death.
Something stirs in my mind when I read that. The sound from downstairs fades. My hands begin to tremble, but though the composition vibrates in my hand, the words remain steady. Something about the handwriting lends a vicious animation to the letters, as though they would jump off of the page and force into my mind the understanding of a terrible secret not meant for the living.
“What’s that?”
I gasp and spin around to see the twins staring at me. Amelia’s smiling at me, her brow furrowed in curiosity. Gabriel is pale and when I turn to him, he quickly looks away.
“It’s a composition by your father,” I tell Amelia. “Aren’t you two supposed to be practicing?’
Amelia frowns. “It’s almost ten o’clock, Mary. We were looking for you to begin our lessons.”
“Ten? But that’s…”
My voice trails off as I check my phone and find that it is indeed almost ten. I’ve somehow spent over two hours in this room.
My blood chills. “Right. Well, let’s get to it then.”
“What were you looking for?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I reply, a little too crisply. She raises her eyebrow, and I soften my voice. “Nothing. Let’s get your lessons done, shall we?”
Amelia sets the composition down, and we head downstairs. I have to fight a powerful urge to look back at those papers.
I don’t yet know why, but that composition is central to the secrets of this house. I also am not sure if I still want to know that those secrets are.
Life After Death. To many, a promise of eternal rest. To some, a promise of eternal damnation.
But which does that piece promise? Rest or damnation?