Waltz Macabre

by Mary Bowers

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  For my late friend Beate Christopher, one of the greatest animal lovers I’ve ever known, and somebody I could really talk to – about anything. I will always miss you.

  As always, a big thank-you to Cousin Kiki.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Waltz Macabre

  Copyright © 2017 by Mary Bowers

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover art by Revelle Design, Inc., www.RevelleDesign.com

  * * * * *

  Chapter 1

  Barnabas seated himself at the piano and began to play. He started slowly, quietly, even awkwardly, not for lack of skill, but because the music itself resisted the piano. A rhythm began to stir, like an unwilling being coming to life. Something that had been content to rest, dead, was being called up by Barnabas’s fingers and made to move again through the old, tired dance.

  But in a moment it took up the rhythm and began to move, slowly, mindlessly. Waltz time. A step, a glide, a turn.

  I rested my head against the tall back of the wing chair and my eyelids began to flutter. Ghostly dancers took form in the dim room and held one another without warmth, and they moved together. A couple came before me and the lady let her head fall back slightly. They achieved a line of grace worthy of fine porcelain, then they moved on, swirling into the stream of dancers passing before me.

  And they moved. And they turned. And the rhythm took form and guided them.

  Among the shadowy couples, one pair suddenly shuddered to life. They took notice of one another. Of their touching hands. Of the music. Enmeshed in the sound and the movement, yet alone among the dimmer couples, they began to quicken their pace, to move synchronously, like little wheels within a watch.

  A new partner. A new man. She lifted her head and gazed at him and their bodies came together and they danced. A real dance now. Face to face, eyes to eyes, words with no sound, and still they moved, they danced.

  The waltz brightened and all the dead things came alive and quickened to the pulse of the music. Around the room they swept; the hem of a ball gown brushed against my leg like the breath of an angel and I smiled. Only within a dream could something be so soft.

  So lovely. A moment in time too alive to die. I could witness, but I could not touch. I could not speak to them. This was the moment of joy that had made all the rest of their lives worth the struggle. This was the only moment when they had been completely alive.

  Love. No, hate. No, love.

  My thoughts unraveled, I lost the sense of the dance and I felt myself floating above, looking down, and there were so many of them, bobbing heads and swirling gowns, filling out beyond the walls of the room, moving in time together, revolving around a darkly golden ballroom.

  And then there were two. I sat in my wingback chair and observed.

  A new partner. A new man. She drew back.

  The music thickened, became crazed, angry. Her hand was trapped in his, her waist pressed into him by an iron arm. Face to face. Eyes to eyes.

  And then the figures blurred and faded, even as they seemed more fiercely bound together. Repulsed, I looked away and in the periphery of my vision the dance continued. Shadows and mist. Love and hate. They would always dance. Their moment in time was inescapable and ineradicable, a throb of joy and bondage.

  The waltz was finished. Barnabas’s hands drew three quiet whimpers from the keys, like a music box winding down and finally stopping.

  Done. Finished. Silence.

  The room brightened on its own. The dancers were gone. I opened my eyes and blinked. Barnabas looked across the length of his grand piano and settled his gaze on me.

  “Valse Triste,” he said. “A sad waltz. Only in my hands, I’m afraid, it becomes macabre. Perhaps it’s this particular transcription of it. I don’t intend it to be morbid. Of course, I’d heard Sibelius’s waltz before I found this copy of it, but it was from this magazine that I actually played it for the first time, and it just . . .” He searched for the word and it escaped him. He finished the thought, unsatisfied. “It just comes out that way.”

  I took a deep breath, wondering if I’d been breathing at all while he’d played.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “So beautiful. And so – strong. While it’s played, it lives.”

  “And then, once again, it dies.” Barnabas gave me a wan smile. “I knew you’d understand. You heard it. You heard that thing that stirs within it. That image. That vignette.”

  I was almost afraid of asking him to describe the image, for fear we were talking about the same thing. If so, it was real. But the line of the waltz was so insistent, stuttering to life when commanded, and Barnabas’s playing was so skillful, maybe I’d only heard what he had managed to convey. Barnabas played at the level of a concert pianist; he was brilliant. But he’d been born to another job and had accepted it without any kind of rebellion that I knew of. He seemed quite content to run The Bookery.

  We were on the second floor of his Locust Street building. Below us were the million volumes of his used book store, and above us was the unofficial historical research library of Tropical Breeze, Barnabas’s private collection. Around us were the Regency furnishings of his great-grandmother’s parlor, freshly waxed and reupholstered, replaced only when absolutely necessary and only with reproductions. It was a living museum, fresh, but antique.

  Barnabas lived alone, the last of his line. Three Barnabas Elgins had owned the book store before him, but he would be the last. He had no children.

  Ishmael appeared out of nowhere, as only cats can do, and strode the edge of the mahogany bookshelf that stood within reach of the piano. He jumped onto the bench next to Barnabas and settled, resting his head in his lap.

  Correction: Barnabas lived with Ishmael, a sealpoint Siamese with clear blue eyes. And it’s generally believed around town that there are other, more nebulous boarders at The Bookery, but only one living human.

  Barnabas let his hand find the cat’s head and caressed it.

  The bookshelf held the sheet music of four generations, everything from pale gold Schirmer’s editions to personal binders and colorful, modern books from every decade. Chopin. Handel. Gluck. But also Joplin, Bernstein, Schifrin and The Beatles.

  Barnabas and I both gazed at the bookshelf, letting the moment hang. I was strangely reluctant to describe the images brought to me by the music. When I heard a healthy intake of breath from Barnabas, I finally looked at him. He was looking back. Looking at me, not at something near me, as he usually did. Barnabas is reserved with most people, and especially shy around women.

  Then he said in a very direct and uncharacteristic manner, “Come into the kitchen, Taylor. We’ll have tea. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Chapter 2

  The kitchen i
n Barnabas’s apartment was an actual kitchen, not the back of the family room, as it is in modern homes. The appliances were modern; the cabinets were vintage.

  He seated me at the little breakfast table and busied himself with the kettle. I watched him affectionately as he moved about his great-grandmother’s kitchen, a 60-something figure in black, with long salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a neat ponytail, tied with a black ribbon.

  “The sheet music came from an estate sale,” he told me, placing a prettily painted china cup and saucer before me. “The Carteret estate.”

  “I heard about that. I don’t know much about the Carterets, but I heard about the estate sale, all right.”

  “It was big news hereabouts, and it lived up to expectations. A fascinating collection. I’m afraid Ginny Carteret was driven to it. Her lovely house in town simply must go, and where she’ll be living now, there’s no room for the treasures of three or four generations. She’s moving her father, Robin, to an assisted living facility here in town, and taking an apartment across from the beach nearby.”

  “How sad. The Carteret family was one of the founding families of Tropical Breeze, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, the money came from the Wilkinson side of the family. Ginny’s grandmother, Phoebe, was a Wilkinson before she married. When the estate sale came up, I looked through the contemporary issues of my grandfather’s newspaper to get it all straight in my mind again. It was quite a scandal. Of course, I’d heard the stories when I was young –“

  “But with a whole ‘morgue’ of newspapers from that time at your fingertips, along with your family’s private journals, why waste time racking your brains or trying to pick up gossip around town?”

  He smiled. “I spent a very satisfactory Sunday afternoon in my research library, living among the Wilkinsons and the Carterets. Fascinating people. Tragedy, I’m sorry to say, is strangely gripping.”

  “Tragedy?”

  “I’m afraid so. Let me start at the beginning.”

  He seated himself across the little table from me, and I settled back, content to listen.

  “Robin’s mother, Phoebe, married Garrison Carteret. The Carterets had always been respectable, but the Wilkinsons were Tropical Breeze nobility. The Wilkinson Plantation was Phoebe’s birthright; she was an only child. But the frosts of the early 20th Century decimated the citrus crops, and the Wilkinson’s farm was less and less profitable. Her husband must have gotten tired of the struggle –“

  “Or maybe he’d only married her for her money in the first place.”

  “Perhaps. Naturally, that’s what the gossips decided. He simply walked out one day. He left them when Robin was very young. And, of course, in those days, young ladies weren’t groomed for business. Phoebe had no idea how to run a plantation. She hired an estate agent, but he was either incompetent or dishonest – the community at large tended to differ on that – and under his management the plantation failed. Phoebe was even worse off than before.

  “Her son, Robin, was too young to help, and he never did develop into the kind of man who could have turned things around. He was always the dreamy sort. I can’t picture him ever being a hard-nosed businessman or a vigorous farmer, even if she had managed to hang onto the farm long enough for him to take over. So there was Phoebe, abandoned by her husband, a single parent saddled with a farm that was about to fail. According to all accounts, she became bitter, reclusive.”

  “That’s when she gave up on the plantation and moved into town?”

  He nodded. “When her son became a teenager, Phoebe decided he needed the social advantages of living in town. At least that’s what she told everyone. Actually, she had given up on running the plantation, and she rented it out. Perhaps she was right about the social advantages of living in town after all, because Robin did marry a woman whose name, I’m afraid, I haven’t been able to discover. Her 1954 obituary was the only direct reference I found, and it referred to her as ‘Mrs. Robin Carteret.’ The poor lady seems to have been a footnote to history. She produced a daughter, Ginny, and died five or six years later.”

  “Leaving an unhealthy family dynamic behind for her little girl to grow up in,” I commented. “A bitter grandmother and an absent-minded father.”

  “Quite. As Ginny grew into womanhood, Phoebe left more and more of the responsibility of running the household to her and withdrew into her own little world. As the years went by, people saw less and less of her until she finally died in that house, and by then, people were surprised to find out that she’d still been alive. The world moves along rather ruthlessly, I’m afraid. If you aren’t involved in it, it quickly forgets you.”

  “And by then, Ginny was running things single-handedly. Even the lease of the plantation?”

  “They had been forced to sell it long before then. They had been living on the proceeds of the land sale. Phoebe’s been dead for over thirty years now, and the money has finally begun to run out. Ginny and her father can no longer afford to live in that house. And so they must sell it, to gain enough ready cash to live out their lives decently.”

  “I heard that Robin has been having memory problems.”

  “Yes.” Barnabas took a sip of good hot tea, set the cup down again and gazed into it profoundly. “He was never a very clever man. One wonders if he wasn’t always a bit wanting. He’s been so curiously absent from things. And Ginny has never worked. She spent her entire life taking care of her father and grandmother. Neither Phoebe nor Robin ever remarried, and Ginny never married at all. A great family had dwindled to just three people from three different generations, clinging to one another, using up one another’s lives.” He frowned into his teacup.

  “And now,” I said, “they’re losing their home. Everybody for miles around was interested in the estate sale. Just think of all the little treasures that accumulate in the attics of homes that have been lived in by one family for a long time. The estate sale must have been fabulous. Who was the pianist? Whose sheet music did you buy?”

  “It was Phoebe’s. She wrote her name inside many of the covers. The edition of The Etude from which I played the waltz just now was part of a complete set, running from 1911 to the day the magazine changed its name and format. Phoebe had apparently lost interest by then. There were no Keyboard Classics in the collection, and the later editions of The Etude are still in their original mailing envelopes.”

  “’The Etude?’”

  “Forgive me. It was a sheet music magazine, quite challenging, with articles about the composers, essays on theory, and histories of the music. It was intended for teachers and serious students who planned to be concert pianists. No frivolous ragtime or jazz. I remember running across an article in one edition that recommended six hours of daily practice for students who hoped to have a career. I was quite dedicated to the piano as a young man, but – six hours? I don’t suppose I’ve played the piano for six hours in a single day in my entire life. In the days before digital instruments and headphones, it must have made some neighborhoods quite . . . lively.”

  “I wanted to go to that estate sale myself, but my animal shelter doesn’t run that kind of a resale shop. Mostly we just take donated items. Not real antiques, or specialized things like sheet music. Even her costume jewelry would have been out of our league. We’d have been competing with the antique shops of St. Augustine and Daytona, and that’s not the kind of business we’re in.”

  “No, no. And think of the job, doing inventory.”

  He gave me a shy little smile, and I smiled back. It was our little joke. As the owner of Orphans of the Storm, outside of town, I was always scratching up funds from somewhere, and one of those somewheres was a resale shop called Girlfriend’s, right next door to The Bookery. It was a cheerful little island of chaos, and an exact inventory had never been made. We tried, but it just wasn’t possible. Barnabas’s used book store’s inventory was the same way.

  “I bought the sheet music collection as a job lot, planning on putting it all into the mu
sic section downstairs, but when I found the Etudes, a complete collection in superb condition, with no repeated editions, I became greedy. I had to have them. My grandparents subscribed, but in the early ‘30’s, when times were hard, Grandfather dropped it. After all, a yearly subscription was $2.00 – a shocking extravagance at the time.”

  “You play beautifully. Did you ever want to be a concert pianist?”

  I was immediately sorry I’d asked. He saddened.

  “It has to be a private joy. My personality, you know. I have never wanted to be the cynosure of all eyes.”

  “And you had your books.”

  “I had my books. My joy. My life. And I have my music. I was enchanted with the new collection of old sheet music. I began to play through it the very first night. I’m rather a good sight-reader, and I was charmed to find notations here and there that Phoebe had made on her favorite pieces. And Valse Triste was one of her favorite pieces. I could tell that that particular edition had sat open on her piano for a very long time; it’s more sun-bleached and worn than the others, and heavily notated. It was the July, 1926 edition, which had been packed at the front of the box, out of order, as if she’d taken it off the piano and put it carefully where she could find it again. She loved it. She loves it still. She came to me as I played it.”

  I blinked. “She came to you?”

  “Oh, yes. Didn’t I mention it? That’s why I asked you to come tonight. I’m afraid that Mrs. Phoebe Wilkinson-Carteret has, shall we say, upset the applecart in my little world here. She’s a disturbing presence. She’s angry. The others don’t like her.”

  I began to realize why he’d asked me to come to The Bookery that night. It was my turn to sadden.

  Much as I’ve fought against it, I’ve gained a reputation for being a psychic, or a medium, or something. I’m as psychic as a doorknob, but nobody believes me. It’s partly because things keep happening, but it’s mostly because of the company I keep. Edson Darby-Deaver. He’s just a friend, but he’s also a paranormal investigator, and while I wasn’t looking he wrote a book about me and my cat. It’s not on the New York Times Bestseller List, but within certain circles, it’s popular.