Annie tinkled the keys until the note resolved, the tension in the room withdrew, and I could breathe again. “Why would the composer write music that annoying?” I asked.
Annie’s hands hovered over the keys, soundlessly. “I don’t think he did.”
“What?”
“I told you I was looking for something, and this is it,” she explained. “My teacher discovered this piece. He found the original sheet music rolled up in a tube and shoved in a hollowed-out old umbrella in an antique shop on London’s Portobello Road. Since then, it has been picked apart and analyzed by scholars all around the world. But there is something they did not have. Something Dmitry hid from them.”
She closed her eyes as if she were making a wish and then reached up, pulled off her necklace, and held it out to me.
I rolled the box around on my palm. Slightly bigger than my thumbnail, it was warm from being next to her skin. The sides were decorated with intricate swirls and tiny musical notes. In the middle of a half note was a small button, flush with the surface.
“Press it,” Annie urged, when she saw that I’d found it.
I held the box between the fingers of my right hand and depressed the tiny button with my left. The music that came out was louder than I expected. The notes were thin, but still recognizable. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “That’s…”
“Yes. The next eight measures,” she said.
“Where—”
She cut me off again. “Dmitry found this in Tunisia. He bought it for less than the gold it took to make the box was worth. The seller told him he needed to get rid of it because it was cursed.” She took it back and draped the chain around her neck.
I walked over to the old leaded-glass window that gave everything a slight blur. It was like looking through water and made me slightly dizzy.
“I know it is odd,” Annie continued. “There are a million pieces of music in the world. But Dmitry wanted to find this one. He wanted me to play it. The entire thing. I guess I want to play the entire thing too.”
I turned and watched as she closed the piano lid. “I am not sure whether it was the music or the mystery behind it that interested Dmitry most,” she said and hesitated. I badly wanted to ask about the mystery, about the music, about her. I was a box filled with unasked questions.
“There are stories about the composer too,” Annie continued. “Mostly about how he was young when he wrote the Prelude. They say that his father tried to imprison him in a mental hospital but disappeared before that could happen. Why would a father do that?” Annie’s hand reached protectively around the charm.
I thought about my parents who were always supportive of our dreams, even when Harriet left and moved to New York to intern for a finance company on Wall Street. That was about as far from the life of St. Hilaire as possible. What would they think about my plans to bail?
I couldn’t answer.
Annie ran her hands along the keys, not making a sound. “I have Dmitry’s notes. He found pieces of the Prelude scattered throughout Europe, always with some curious story attached. But he found so little information about the composer. People say he was cursed too.”
I took a deep breath and knew I was screwing myself in the worst possible way. I was leaving in less than two weeks, and I also knew, without question, that some part of this musical search was going to force me to do something I didn’t want to do.
As I exhaled, I tried to let go of my hope that I’d ever have a life that didn’t involve spirits, visions, or mediums. The word “curse” curdled in my stomach. Had it come out of the mouth of anyone other than Annie Krylova, I might have hit something, thrown something, even. As it was, all I could do was parrot it back. “Cursed.”
Thankfully, Annie seemed oblivious to my distress. She said, “What is shocking is that the composer was supposedly our age. It is amazing that someone so young could have written a piece so heart-wrenching and exciting.”
I pictured the Carnegie Hall poster in my room that announced Annie’s show. At once, every single one of my failures came surging back. I was the only one who hadn’t done anything by seventeen. I was the only one still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, or even where I wanted to live. I didn’t even have the guts to tell Annie I knew who she was. I was a coward.
“And the whole curse thing seems so cruel. I mean, if you believe in things like that,” Annie continued.
I was about to point out the obvious, that a boy who lived in a town of mediums was more inclined to believe a story about a curse than just about anyone she could have told, when a loud roar surged up the drive.
St. Hilaire was a quiet town. A peaceful town. There was only one thing in it that sounded like a lion devouring a herd of terrified gazelles, and that was the Mackenzies’ pieced-together Mustang.
“Shit,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Either nothing or the end of the world, take your pick,” I muttered, and then realized I wasn’t making any sense. “I’m sorry. In advance, I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For whatever is about to happen.”
The front door burst open, and Alex Mackenzie’s dog came rushing in. It circled Annie and then fell to the ground, looking up at her, a string of drool hanging from his mouth.
I really needed to start locking the freaking door.
Alex Mackenzie followed his dog. There was a hitch in his step when he saw Annie, but then he looked at me and broke into a carnivorous leer. “You’ve been practicing your conjuring skills, right, Hampton? I mean that’s the only way you’re going to get a girl who isn’t your sister.”
I went for his throat while Annie said some things in Russian that I hoped she would teach me.
My punch was interrupted by a shout that started outside and carried through into the room. “Alex!”
I held onto Alex’s shirt until Colin Mackenzie was in striking distance, and then I pushed Alex away with a shove that made him stumble backward. I wasn’t sure if Colin would want to pick up the fight from there, but I almost didn’t care, and was disappointed when Colin only wound up and slapped his brother in the head.
“Two minutes. You can’t keep your mouth shut for two minutes, can you?” Where Alex was a pinless grenade, looking for an excuse to self-destruct, Colin was a nuclear core, hot as molten lava one minute and cold as dry ice the next. I might have had issues with Ian, but at least he’d kept his brothers in check.
Colin pulled back his shoulders and turned to me. “We’re here about the piano,” he said, all business. “Rice and Norton are on their way.”