← Lantern's Glow

The Unplayed Tune

The Unplayed Tune

The far end of the side parlor wasn't far from anything, which is the trouble with small old houses. The party still reached it: a child demanding to take a pumpkin home before anyone had finished its mouth, a parent insisting the knife stay on the table, the cider ladle knocking against the bowl. Liam followed Caitlin past the last chair, and she kept hold of his hand, because letting go now would make the whole thing look like a tour of the wallpaper.

The wallpaper was faded little flowers. She knew every one of them. She had helped Ms. Hawthorne choose where to hang the paper bats in this corner and had rubbed a worn patch by the window herself, squeezing past the armchair with trays. She'd never once needed instructions for this corner. She needed them now. She had dragged a man away from an entire Halloween party, and she had absolutely no idea what came next, and she was looking at the wallpaper so she wouldn't have to look at him while she worked it out.

Liam stopped by the window. The dark glass gave back the two of them over the black lawn: her red dress, his white cravat, their joined hands low at the bottom of the picture. A paper bat she'd hung that afternoon dangled above his head in the reflection.

"You wanted a few minutes away from everybody," she said, "so here you go. I found you the one corner of this party where nobody's holding a knife. You're welcome."

"That was fast."

"I'm good at finding things. It's a librarian thing. People come in with half a title and the color of the cover, and I find it for them."

"Are you?"

He said it without smiling, which might have been alarming if she couldn't see the corner of his mouth getting ready to give him away. She turned to face him. His hair had escaped whatever he'd done to it for the party, and his cravat had slid a little off center, and there was a yellow thread of pumpkin on his cuff. She had looked at him across a crowded room and from the wrong side of a vegetable. From here, close, she could see he was waiting for her to decide what her own invitation meant.

She knew what she wanted it to mean. Her mouth had spent the whole evening making jokes so it wouldn't have to say so.

"Your costume's crooked," she said.

He looked down. "I thought it was convincing."

"As an artist, yes. As a phantom, no. The collar's giving the whole thing away."

She let go of his hand to straighten the cravat. The knot was worse than she'd thought, and now she was fussing with it while he stood close enough that she had to look at his throat, at the place where his pulse moved. Maggie had done up the hooks on her dress upstairs while explaining at length that Caitlin was overthinking a stranger, and Caitlin had said she was checking for loose threads. Well. Here was an actual loose thread, and she was using it to keep her hands on him.

"Did you tie this yourself?" she asked.

"Eventually."

"So it's been fighting you all night. That explains why it's trying to crawl under your ear." She smoothed down one edge. "There. Now you look dead on purpose."

"Good. That was the goal."

She left her fingers resting on the cloth. The sensible thing would be to step back and ask how he was enjoying the party. She'd already asked him that. He had come to it. He'd drawn her laughing. He'd asked her here without a sketchbook in his hands. Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her fingertips, right there against his collar, and she wondered if he could feel it too, and decided she didn't care.

"Liam."

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to kiss you, I think. Unless that's a terrible idea, which it might be, because you're here for work and I'm the woman who hangs the bats, but I've been thinking about it since the pumpkin, so."

His eyebrows went up. "Was that a question?"

"It can be." She took her hand back off his collar, and her face was burning. "Do you want me to?"

"Yes."

He said it before she'd had time to put a joke in front of it. She put her hand back, caught the lapel of his tailcoat, and pulled him toward her, and her nose hit his.

They both stopped.

"That went well," he said.

"I was going for mysterious, and that was my nose, which isn't mysterious at all, it's only a nose, and now it's your nose's problem too."

"Try again."

She laughed against his cheek. Her whole face was hot. If she backed off now, they'd spend the rest of the night discussing whether her technique deserved a second chance, and she'd have to leave Glensford to escape the memory. She turned her head a fraction. His hand came to her waist and rested there, not pulling, giving her time. She kissed him.

He was smiling when her mouth first touched his. She could feel it. That ought to have made her self-conscious, and instead it made her brave, and when he started to draw back she followed and kissed him again. The smile went out of him. His hand closed at her waist, and he stepped in until the window frame was cold against her shoulder, and her grip on his coat tightened. She had expected to spend this moment worrying: how she looked, whether her lipstick was smearing, whether anyone could see. She thought about none of it. She thought about nothing at all until he pulled back far enough to breathe, and then she thought, oh.

There was lipstick at one corner of his mouth.

"You've got evidence on you," she said. "Right there. And it's my color, which I bought because the tube swore it wouldn't budge, and apparently it budges."

"Where?"

He rubbed the wrong side. She caught his wrist. "No, the other corner, your other, my left, hold still."

"You're going to help?"

"I'm going to try. But my record with your face tonight is one nose and one smudge, so I might make it worse."

"Then make it worse."

She almost missed it, and then she didn't. She kissed that corner of his mouth, and then the rest of it. His hand slid from her waist to the middle of her back. The hooks held; she knew because she felt every one of them through the velvet when he pulled her in. Thank you, Maggie, she thought, and I will never, ever tell you why.

Her skirt got caught between them. She tried to shift it with her knee, trod on the hem, and nearly took them both down. Liam caught her by the elbows. They ended up laughing into each other's faces, too close for it to be embarrassing, and Caitlin thought that the whole party could come crowding into this room right now and she would still want to keep him in this corner.

I'll hush. You don't need me for this part.

"Just so you know," he said, "I'm still technically working."

"I know. I've seen the sketches. The stair, and the rope, and the pumpkins. I've been very good about not flipping ahead."

"Some of them."

She thought of the loose drawing folded in her skirt pocket, between the layers of velvet, where she'd put it so she'd have both hands free. He'd drawn her when she'd forgotten anyone might be looking. She had kept it. She could say that. She touched the pocket instead, and his eyes followed her hand.

"I'm keeping the portrait, by the way," she said. "Which I realize is a lot to announce while I'm holding you by the coat. But you drew me laughing, and nobody's ever drawn me doing anything, so it's mine now."

"Good."

One word, and she pulled him back down by his crooked cravat. He made a startled sound that ended against her mouth. The kiss lost its manners. She felt the window at her back and his hand warm at her spine and her absurd skirt forcing him to find a way closer, and he found one. She wanted to know what he looked like when he stopped holding himself so carefully, and when she slid a hand into his hair he came closer again, and she heard herself make a sound she'd never made in any room in this house.

A note sounded in the doorway.

She paused. Somebody at the party must have tapped a glass with a spoon. There were plenty of glasses and plenty of children with terrible ideas. Just as she'd settled on the spoon, three more notes came, unevenly spaced, and the last one held.

Every hair on Caitlin's arms stood up.

She knew that tune. She had known it longer than she'd known how to read. She had heard it at her grandmother's kitchen table with a mug of cocoa going cold between her hands, and in the car with the radio off, and in the hospital, at the end, hummed so faintly she'd had to put her ear right down by the pillow. It belonged to one person. The clipping didn't have it. She had read that clipping so many times she could recite it, and it said music and never once said what the music was.

Liam lifted his head. "What is that?"

She looked past him to the open doorway. Beyond it the last carving table stood abandoned, its newspapers dark with pumpkin juice, a child's chair tipped against the wall. The guests from this end of the room had carried their pumpkins back to the parlor. There was nobody out there. There was no piano out there. There had never been a piano in the side parlor.

The notes came again, farther off, beyond the empty table. The last one held long enough that she could hear the party going on underneath it, laughter and a chair scraping and Ms. Hawthorne calling for somebody to put down a knife, all of it so ordinary that the tune sounded wrong laid over the top. Her throat had closed. Her hand was still tangled in Liam's hair, and she didn't notice until she tried to move and couldn't.

"Caitlin?"

"My grandmother's tune." Her voice came out thin. She let go of him and started toward the doorway. "The one I hummed you. When I told you about the guests."

He followed. She stopped at the empty table and listened with her whole body. It seemed to come from the public hall past the side parlor. She'd hummed it this afternoon, in the parlor, with the door open. Anybody could have heard her. She had watched a guess turn into Glensford history by the time it reached the front desk more times than she could count, and she refused to do that to her grandmother's story. She was already looking for a person who might have heard her hum, and she could feel how badly she wanted to find one.

"The clipping doesn't have a tune," she said. "I know that. I'm not misremembering. It only says music."

"I remember."

She took another step. Through the doorway she could see the public hall with its bats on the wall, every one where she had stuck it that afternoon, including the one she'd had to tape twice, and the rope sagging across the west passage where she'd left it. Nothing out there looked any different than it had when they'd left the parlor. That made it worse. That made her want to see who was playing.

The tune came once more while Caitlin stood in the side-parlor doorway. Four notes. The first two close together, the third late, the fourth held while the noise from the parlor ran on underneath. Liam had heard her hum that shape this afternoon. She remembered it a great deal better than she could sing it.

He came up beside her. His mouth still tasted of her lipstick, and his pulse hadn't come down from the window, and now something colder was running under it, at the back of his neck. Nobody was at the carving tables. The public hall ran off toward the foyer one way and toward the roped west stair the other. Through the parlor doorway at the far end he could see the mantel with the brass lantern on it, and from here its two little figures looked as though they were running toward the west passage. A group of guests crossed the far end of the hall carrying pumpkins and talking too loudly to hear anything, and turned into the parlor.

"Could it be one of them?" he asked.

"No. No, they're talking right over it. How don't they hear it?"

"Yeah."

A loose strand of her red hair had stuck to her cheek. She left it there. She was looking past his shoulder, down the hall, and he'd seen her face do a lot of things today, but he hadn't seen it do this. It had gone pale and still, and it made the skin on his arms tighten. He followed her gaze. The hall was empty. The notes had moved off away from them. No words. No instrument he could name.

"Nobody goes down there during the party," she said. "Ms. Hawthorne turns back grown men holding cider. So I don't know who'd be down there."

"Where does it go?"

"The west stair. The one behind the rope. You drew it. It goes up to the guest landing, and I've never heard anything up there louder than the radiators."

She'd told him that this afternoon. He had drawn the rope, the stair, the landing, the short passage to the Rose Room. The sketchbook was still on the shelf by the side-parlor door, where he'd left it to make a point, and now he wanted the page more than he could explain. He went back for it and found the floor plan. Caitlin's shortened kitchen hall, the circled 7:00, the little pumpkin, the arrow to the party. Everything was there. The building had looked so simple when he drew it.

"You went back for your map," she said.

"I want to know where the stairs go."

He held the page open between them. On paper the west stair bent out of sight, and his pencil had made it look shorter than it was. In the hall, the rope crossed a passage darker than the rest of the ground floor. Caitlin put her finger on the penciled guest landing. She knew that stair a hundred times better than he did. She checked his line anyway, and he understood that she needed to touch something that was where it ought to be.

The notes came again. This time they seemed to come from above the stair. Caitlin's head went up before his did.

"There's no piano up there either," she said. "It's guest rooms. There's nothing up there but beds and a lot of doilies. So somebody's playing a recording. On their phone. Right?"

"You want to ask them?"

"I want to know who heard my grandmother's tune." She glanced back toward the parlor, and her voice cracked a little on grandmother, and she pressed her lips together until it passed. "And I know how that sounds."

He closed the book around one finger to keep the page. "You said the clipping doesn't have the tune."

"It doesn't."

"Okay."

"That's it?"

"I heard it."

She looked at him then, and something in her face let go, and she almost smiled. She'd been waiting for him to argue. He had heard the tune; he wasn't going to tell her he hadn't. That was enough reason to go and look at a stair.

The rope was tied to a brass hook on one wall and looped over another hook on the far side. There was no sign. There didn't need to be. Caitlin crossed to it and stood with one hand on the cord.

"Ms. Hawthorne's going to have a fit if anybody sees us going up there," she said.

"Nobody's behind us."

"They were a second ago."

"They went into the parlor."

"Right. Where the cider is. Okay. If we get caught, I'm blaming you."

She unhooked the rope. He took the end from her and laid it along the wall so nobody would trip on it. They could have gone and fetched Ms. Hawthorne to listen too. Caitlin was already on the first step. The parlor was one turn away, he told himself; if anybody needed them, they could walk right back down. He followed her up.

The stair was colder than the hall, cold enough that he felt it through his jacket. The old wallpaper beside it had worn smooth where a century of hands had used it for a rail. The steps were steep and shallow, built for smaller feet than his. At the bend hung a narrow portrait of a woman in a dark dress, one hand resting on the back of a chair, and her frame was crooked. Caitlin straightened it without stopping, the way you'd tuck in a child's tag.

At the bend the tune faded under a burst of laughter from below. Liam turned his head. Through the open stairwell he could still see a slice of the ground-floor hall, the rope lying loose along the wall. It would be easy to go back. He noticed the edge of the sketchbook biting into his palm and loosened his grip.

"Do you hear it?" Caitlin asked.

He waited. A cup clinked against another cup downstairs. Somebody shouted for more candles. Above them the four notes came again, fainter, and the long last note wavered. If it was a recording, it was playing through a terrible speaker.

"Yes."

She let her breath out and kept climbing. At the top, the west end of the guest floor ran a short way toward the Rose Room. The attic stair went on up beyond it. Nothing about the passage surprised him: patterned carpet, a small table, a portrait of a man with his hand tucked in his waistcoat beside the corner, a paper bat pinned above it. Ahead he could see where this passage met the main guest corridor. In a building this size, whoever was playing had to be in one of the rooms.

The Rose Room door stood beside the portrait, a painted panel with a brass plate on it. ROSE ROOM, engraved, with a scratch through the last E.

"Nobody books the Rose Room," Caitlin said as they passed it. "She keeps it closed. I've never even been inside, which, for me, in this house, is weird."

"Could it be coming from in there?"

"No." She looked at the door and then down the passage. "It's past it. Farther on. It's not in there."

She was right. It came from beyond the corner where the west passage met the guest corridor. The tune paused, started again, and lost its third note in the sound of somebody moving around below. Liam checked his sketch. The turn ahead led toward the main landing. From there the foyer stairs would take them straight down to the party. The route fit the page and the walls in front of him, and he held on to that.

"Somebody could've come up the main stairs," he said.

"With a piano? Up the main stairs, past Ms. Hawthorne, past the entire party, carrying a piano?"

"Or a phone."

She glanced toward the main landing. Her laugh came late, and she cut it off short. He tucked the book under his arm and held out his hand, and she took it at once and held on hard. They could ask whoever was up here about the tune, then go back down before Ms. Hawthorne noticed her rope. He still wanted to finish that kiss. Caitlin looked at his mouth as though she was thinking the same thing, and her fingers tightened around his.

They rounded the corner together. The music stopped ahead of them.

A floorboard creaked behind them, back in the passage they'd just walked through. Liam turned. The short hall was empty all the way back to the stair. Caitlin's hand clamped down on his, and he felt his own heart jump against his ribs like something trying to get out.