The Ghost Sonata

by Allison, Jennifer

  Gilda thumbed through the folders in the cabinet and found that each one documented previous years and locations of the competition: the Fourth Annual Young International Virtuosos Competition in Stockholm, the Third Annual Young International Virtuosos Competition in Paris, the Second Annual Young International Virtuosos Competition in Prague. Finally, she pulled a folder labeled FIRST ANNUAL YOUNG INTERNATIONAL VIRTUOSOS COMPETITION, OXFORD, U.K.

  Inside, the introductory letter from the competition’s founder, Professor Eugene Winterbottom, appeared next to a picture of a white-haired man with rabbitlike front teeth. So that’s Winterbottom, Gilda thought.

  When she turned to notes from the preliminary round, Gilda let out a little squeak of astonishment. She squinted at the paper more closely, just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.

  Halfway down the page was the name Charles Drummond. Omigod, Gilda thought, feeling almost dizzy at the discovery. His performance number is nine. That must be why Wendy keeps drawing it!

  Something else also seemed eerily familiar—the titles of Charles’s performance selections—the Mozart and Bach... Weren’t those Wendy’s pieces as well?

  A note next to Charles’s name said “qualified for finals.” But when Gilda turned the page to view the list of final performers, only nine pianists remained: Charles’s name had somehow vanished from the list.

  Gilda wanted to sit down, but she was too excited to find a chair. She dropped down to the carpeted floor. Sitting cross-legged, she flipped open her reporter’s notebook and began to scribble furiously:

  Gilda remembered glimpsing the rage in Professor Waldgrave’s eyes when she had mentioned Charles’s name. Was Waldgrave capable of murdering someone?

  Gilda felt a new sense of urgency. She wanted to do more research, but she decided she had to hurry to the Music Building to tell Wendy what she had found right away. She had to warn Wendy to be careful.

  43

  A Drop of Poison

  The Music Building hallway reverberated with chaotic sound—a tangle of scales, arpeggios, and pounding passages from Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, and Beethoven. Anticipation, fear, and white-hot concentration pervaded the practice rooms: all ten finalists played with feverish intensity, as if declaring: This is it. I might actually win this!

  Gilda peeked into a practice room window and spied Ming Fong blasting out a series of running octaves over and over, with robotic precision and focus.

  Gilda made her way down the row of practice rooms, glancing into each window in search of Wendy. Just then, she heard a passage of music that sounded distinctly unserious—a boisterous, ridiculously embellished version of “Heart and Soul.” Gilda remembered learning to play a clunky version of this piece during her short-lived stint as a piano student. She smiled, feeling certain that it must be Julian playing. It would be just like him to turn the most intense practice session of the competition into a joke, she thought.

  But when she stood on tiptoe and peeked into the practice room window, Gilda’s smile faded. Her skin turned hot and cold all at once. She felt as if microscopic spiders were skittering across her nerves.

  Inside the practice room, Julian sat at the piano next to Jenny Pickles.

  Jenny’s face looked flushed. She giggled as Julian reached across her body to drag the back of his hand across the keys in a sweeping glissando that nearly knocked Jenny off the piano bench. Then the music stopped because Julian was leaning closer to Jenny, and she was leaning closer to him. Gilda couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It can’t be happening, she thought. It just can’t be happening.

  But it was happening: right before her eyes, the two of them were actually kissing.

  Gilda was about to burst into the room, but something stopped her. She turned around and leaned against the practice room door, absorbing her shock and revulsion at the scene she had just witnessed. She reached in her handbag and put on her cat’s-eye sunglasses, as if a disguise would protect her from the hot spring of jealousy that bubbled inside.

  Feeling that tears might surface at any moment, Gilda whisked out her notebook and marched down the hallway to the ladies’ room. Once safely inside, she closed a stall door, sat on a toilet, and began scribbling as fast as she could:

  Gilda felt a little better after expressing her feelings in a poem. Her blood still boiled with outrage, but she couldn’t help but feel pride in her literary talent. Maybe this is what it means to “suffer for your art,” she thought.

  Gilda paused, searching for words that would make herself feel strong again—words that would somehow make her care less.

  Somewhat bolstered by the pep talk she had just given herself, Gilda stood up and checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her false eyelashes were askew, so she peeled them off, slipped her sunglasses back on, and reapplied her white lipstick.

  She returned to the hallway lined with practice rooms, determined to find Wendy and to forget about Julian.

  Gilda burst into Wendy’s practice room, eager to vent her outrage about Julian and announce the discoveries she had made in the library that afternoon. Instead, she fell silent. She felt compelled to sit down and listen.

  Wendy leaned forward on the piano bench, squinting at the handwritten, yellowed pages on her music stand as her hands flew across the keyboard. Something about the music she played made Gilda’s scalp prickle; she could literally feel her hair standing on end. She knew it had to be the music they had discovered in the well.

  Gilda had heard of people who could literally see music—people who had something called kinesthesia, which enabled them to perceive sound waves as colors. As she listened to the Sonata in A Minor written by a boy who died at age fourteen, Gilda could almost imagine what this sensation must be like. If this music had a color, she thought, it would be silver and pearly white, dark blue and black. It would be like a ghost wandering through a moonlit graveyard.

  44

  The Ghost in Gloucester Green

  So far, Gilda had avoided calling home as a matter of principle. She wanted to be able to tell herself, I went overseas for the first time in my life and didn’t get homesick! I didn’t even need to call home once!

  But as she walked toward the Gloucester Green bus station, something about the waning daylight made her feel nostalgic for home. Maybe it was the damp chill that seeped into the air with the settling fog, the echoing clip-clop of leather shoes upon the pavement as people hurried home from work, the glimpses through basement windows of lonely students typing papers at their desks. To make matters worse, she kept seeing boys who resembled Julian—tall, thin boys with pale skin and dark hair—boys who hunched their shoulders as they cringed from the cold, wearing jackets that weren’t warm enough.

  Gilda stepped into a phone booth and placed a collect call to her mother. As she listened to the faraway ringing of her family’s telephone back in Michigan, she read the graffiti on the phone booth wall:

  Stephen answered the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Stephen! It’s your long-lost sister!”

  “Mom’s not here right now, Gilda.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “Sorry—I just assumed you wanted to talk to Mom. Are you in trouble or something?”

  “Why would I be in trouble?”

  “Because this is the first time you’ve called. Mom was worried, but then she said, ‘No news is good news when it comes to Gilda.’”

  “It’s good to know my family has such a high opinion of me.” Gilda began to regret calling home at all. “Actually, things are fabulous here. I did a fantastic job turning pages and Wendy made it into the final round of the competition.”

  “Wow. She made it into the finals?”

  “We’re both practically celebrities around here, Stephen. We’re meeting absolutely brilliant people.”

  “Are you trying to speak in an English accent?”

  “This is how I always talk.”

  “It kind of sounds like you’re faking an English accent.�
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  “I also met this absolutely brilliant bloke named Julian.” And he broke my heart, Gilda thought.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Why ‘uh-oh’?”

  “Anyone with the name ‘Julian’ sounds like a potential problem.”

  “You’re so provincial, Stephen.” Secretly, Gilda wanted to agree with him.

  “I’ll tell Mom you called, okay?”

  “Wait, Stephen—”

  “Yeah?”

  Gilda wanted to confide in someone, and she particularly wanted a boy’s perspective. Of course, Stephen wasn’t known for his dating expertise. He had suffered a single broken heart in the past, and it had left him almost permanently grouchy. He’s probably the worst person I could talk to, Gilda thought. On the other hand, Wendy had been preoccupied with preparing for the competition finals, and Gilda simply needed someone to listen. “Stephen,” she said, “I need your opinion about something.”

  “You do?”

  “Let’s just say you were a boy.”

  “I am a boy.”

  “I mean, let’s just say you were a boy who liked girls.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let’s just say you liked a particular girl—in fact, you acted like you liked her a lot. It was all really romantic and intense.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Hardly anything.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Mom.”

  “She’ll just get all worried and start calling me night and day. Anyway, as I was saying, let’s say you like this girl and you let her know it, but the weird thing is that the very next day—you kind of did the same thing with this other girl.”

  “Is the other girl cute?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Maybe I like both girls.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “Look, for one thing, I’m not exactly sure what we’re talking about here, and I don’t think I want to know. For another thing, I probably wouldn’t be lucky enough to have two girls get interested in me at the same time.”

  “You’re a huge help.”

  “You asked me what I thought.”

  “My mistake.”

  “Gilda, the only thing I can tell you is that some guys—some people—they don’t take everything as seriously as you do.”

  “I don’t take things seriously.”

  “You take everything seriously.”

  “I do?”

  “You have to watch out for being too clingy.”

  Gilda was indignant at this comment. “What do you mean clingy?! Which one of us is in a foreign country all by herself, and which one is clinging to his mother’s bosom?”

  “For your information, I’ve hardly seen Mom all week. Anyway, all I was saying is that you have a way of getting involved and sticking with people, whereas other people might let go more easily.”

  “Maybe other people are shallow.”

  “Yeah, they probably are.”

  “And I don’t ‘stick’ with people, either. I drop people like hot potatoes, right and left.”

  “You’ve had the same best friend for years.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  “Okay. But what about all of this stuff about trying to talk to dead people? Isn’t that just a way of not being able to let go of someone who’s not here anymore?”

  Now Gilda was completely offended. “Listen, Stephen, I’m not chasing dead people around because I’m ‘clingy.’ They’re the ones who talk to me!”

  “Forget I said anything.”

  “I will.”

  “Gilda . . . I just don’t want you to get hurt, okay?”

  “Oh.” This comment surprised Gilda. “Okay.” She rarely encountered a protective streak in her older brother. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m as tough as they come.”

  As she hung up the phone, she had to admit she felt a little better after talking to Stephen. Maybe by the time I get home and sit down in the kitchen to eat a Pop-Tart and tell Mom and Stephen about my adventures, Julian won’t matter to me anymore, Gilda told herself.

  As she made her way back through the square, which was now almost completely empty, Gilda thought about what Stephen had said. Am I really “clingy”? she wondered. It was an insulting, diminishing word that in no way reflected how Gilda saw herself—brilliant, sultry, rough-edged—a psychic detective who managed to combine high fashion with the hard-boiled demeanor of a seasoned police officer. Hadn’t she proven that she wasn’t afraid of ghosts, foreign travel, or performing in front of live audiences? Surely she wasn’t the type of fragile girl who could be so easily “hurt” by the silly whims of a boy.

  On the other hand, she couldn’t help thinking there might be a kernel of truth to Stephen’s point. What if there was something about losing her dad that made her want to hang on to certain people—even people who had already disappeared forever?

  But why is that such a bad thing? Gilda wondered. Why does it always seem that people are supposed to care about each other less?

  As Gilda considered these questions, she noticed a boy walking through Gloucester Green—a stranger who seemed somehow familiar. He wore a long, black overcoat and carried what looked like a term paper or manuscript rolled up as if it were a diploma or an antique scroll. He walked through the silent square whistling a somber tune—a melody that also sounded like something she had heard before.

  The boy disappeared around the corner onto the High Street, and Gilda decided to follow him.

  But when Gilda rounded the corner, the boy had vanished. Standing on the empty street lined with streetlamps and shops that had closed for the evening, Gilda felt a cold, tingling sensation. She remembered reading about “walking ghosts” in her Psychic’s Handbook—ghosts that materialize to walk a certain path and then vanish just as an onlooker approaches to speak to them.

  Gilda remembered the apparition she saw on her first night at Wyntle House. I feel like I just saw a ghost again, she thought.

  45

  The Last Sign

  Wendy stayed in her practice room until after nightfall, memorizing the structure of the Sonata in A Minor. The composition was more complex than the simple melody she had heard in her mind, but she loved the way a single familiar voice wandered through the entire piece, sometimes inverted and interwoven with countermelodies as in a fugue.

  Something had changed, because Wendy no longer felt scared. Instead, she felt excited, as if she had a special secret—a secret kept between herself and somebody nobody else could see.

  I’ve never really had any interesting secrets of my own, Wendy thought. My parents always know where I am. I always practice the piano and do my homework. I’ve always tried to perform my music exactly the way Mrs. Mendelovich wants me to play it. And what do I get in return? I get to feel like I’m a good person—a dutiful daughter who’s grateful for everything her parents have sacrificed.

  Wendy still wanted to please her parents, but for the first time in her life, she sensed a different calling. When she played the Sonata in A Minor, she felt like a true artist— someone who was making her own choices, someone who felt compelled to play music for its own sake.

  As Wendy played through the composition, an idea was taking shape in her mind—a rebellious, impetuous idea that Mrs. Mendelovich, her parents, and quite possibly the judges would not like.

  I’ve always been afraid of disappointing other people, Wendy thought. I’m done being afraid.

  It was late, and Wendy knew she would have to head back to Wyntle House in the dark. She turned off the light and shut the door to her practice room just in time to see Ming Fong leaving her practice room at exactly the same moment. Wendy knew the two of them should walk back to Wyntle House together, but she simply didn’t want to face Ming Fong’s competitive questions and comments: “Do you feel ready?” “How long did you practice today?” “What did Mrs. Mendelovich say at your last lesson? She told me I have a cha
nce of winning!” “Don’t worry; I know you’ ll be perfect next time, Wendy. Not like your first performance. . . .” Wendy slipped down the hallway before Ming Fong noticed her, deciding to walk in the opposite direction instead.

  Wendy walked past Christ Church College in the moonlight and decided to take a shortcut down Dead Man’s Walk. She shivered in the damp fog, walking as quickly as she could. When she reached the Merton College Chapel, she heard the faint, ethereal sound of a boys’ choir accompanying an evensong service. Then she heard something that made her heart beat faster—the lonely sound of footsteps walking a short distance behind. Someone’s following me, she thought.

  A familiar icy sensation crept under Wendy’s skin and into her bones; it seemed she had wandered into an unpleasantly familiar dream.

  You’re not afraid anymore, Wendy reminded herself. She took a deep breath and turned to glance behind her. The footsteps immediately stopped.

  It was hard to see clearly in the foggy darkness, but Wendy glimpsed what appeared to be the shadowy figure of a young man wearing a dark coat. He slipped through a gate in the college wall.

  See? Wendy told herself. It was just a college student.

  Nevertheless, Wendy walked at an even brisker pace as she made her way back to the guesthouse.

  Wendy entered the dim, yellowish light of Wyntle House with a feeling of relief. She heard the television blaring from inside Mrs. Luard’s room. As she climbed the creaking staircase leading to the second floor, she heard a mother reprimanding her young son from inside a guest room: “Stop hitting him, Sam!”