The Ghost in the Low A

There was a letter inside the piano, and Jonah Pell had been paid, for eleven years, not to find things.

He had been at the Van Alder house on Fifth Avenue since four o’clock, tuning the concert grand in a ballroom so large it seemed to have its own weather. Footmen went past him carrying ladders, garlands of hothouse lilies, crates of champagne packed in straw. The chandeliers had been lowered on their chains to be cleaned, and they hung at head height like enormous frozen fountains, trembling each time a door shut somewhere in the house. By six the scent of lilies was so thick he could taste it at the back of his throat, sweet and faintly funereal.

The ball was at nine. Mrs. Cornelia Van Alder had made it clear, through her secretary, through the housekeeper, and once through a note pinned to the music stand, that the instrument would be perfect by eight, or Mr. Pell would not be engaged again, by her or by anyone she dined with, which was everyone. He had met her once, years before, across a drawing room. She had looked at him the way one looks at a clock that is running slow.

So he worked. A fifth, a fourth, the octave; the tuning hammer turning a hair’s breadth at a time. It was the A below middle C that troubled him. It rang true and then, a moment later, buzzed: a faint papery rattle beneath the note, like a moth caught in a lampshade. Something was touching the soundboard.

He found it by lamplight, lying on his back beneath the case with his coat folded under his head. An envelope, wedged into the gap between the board and the rim, where no one would ever look unless a note went wrong. Cream paper, heavy, the flap sealed with dark green wax and pressed with a seal he did not recognise: a heron standing on one leg.

No name on the front. Only a date, in a small slanting hand. The fourteenth of March, 1893. Tomorrow.

Jonah lay very still. Above him the piano’s underside was a dark sky of pale ribs. He could hear the housekeeper in the corridor giving orders about the coats, and the distant, steady pop of champagne corks being tested in the butler’s pantry, and his own heartbeat, which was quicker than he liked.

He had tuned in houses like this for eleven years. He knew their rules the way he knew the circle of fifths. You did not see what lay on the desks. You did not hear what was said on the stairs. You did not notice who came down to the music room at two in the morning in a dressing gown, and you certainly did not notice who followed. Discretion was the second half of the trade. The first half was only an ear.

He eased the envelope free. It was lighter than he expected: a single sheet, perhaps two. He turned it toward the lamp, and through the heavy paper he could make out nothing but the shadow of a signature, looped and deliberate, and one word beneath it that might have been forgive or might have been forget. He was still deciding which when the ballroom door opened behind him.

“Mr. Pell?”

He sat up too fast and struck his head on the case. The piano answered with a low, offended hum.

A young woman stood in the doorway of the ballroom. Not a maid: her dress was grey silk, plain in the way that costs money. And not, he thought, one of the daughters, who had been described to him by the housekeeper as “fair, both of them, and hopeless at scales.” This woman was dark-haired, and her face had the stillness of someone who has learned to be looked at without offering anything back.

“Miss—?”

“Harlow. I’m Mrs. Van Alder’s companion.” Her eyes went to his hand. He had, without meaning to, put the envelope behind his back, like a boy with a stolen apple. “She sent me to ask whether the instrument will be ready.”

“It will be ready.”

“She’ll be relieved.” Miss Harlow came a few steps into the room. The chandeliers stirred as the door swung shut behind her, and a hundred crystal drops touched one another with a sound like distant rain. “It was her late husband’s piano. No one has played it since the funeral. She insisted it be tuned for tonight, and I confess none of us understood why.”

She stopped beside the case, close enough that he could smell her: not lilies, something drier, cedar and ink. She did not look at his hidden hand again. She looked instead at the open lid, at the long gleam of the strings, at the exact place where the hammer struck the A below middle C.

“The low A has always buzzed,” she said. “Ever since I came to this house. Mr. Van Alder used to say it was a ghost.” A pause, as light as a dropped glove. “Did you find the ghost, Mr. Pell?”

Jonah was aware of several things at once. That the wax pressed against his palm was faintly warm. That Miss Harlow had known exactly which string to look at. That the date on the envelope was tomorrow, and the ball was tonight, and in three hours two hundred of the most powerful people in New York would stand in this room drinking a dead man’s champagne while his widow’s companion watched his piano.

And that she was waiting, very politely, very patiently, for him to decide what kind of man he was.

Somewhere above them, a clock began to strike seven.