Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology

A Creative Defense Jeffery Deaver

She hadn’t wanted to go.

Though she was an academic at a school with a “fine fine-arts program,” as she joked, classical music wasn’t really Beth Tollner’s thing.

Pop, sure. Jazz. Even soft rap, a phrase she coined herself.

Musicals, of course.

Wicked, In the Heights, Hamilton...

She and Robert were, after all, only in their late twenties. Wasn’t classical for fogies?

Then she’d reflected: That wasn’t fair to those of middling age. Most classical was just boring.

But Robert had been given a couple of tickets from one of the partners at the firm where he was a young associate, and he thought it would be political to attend and report back to his boss how much they liked the performance.

Beth had thought: What the hell? Why not get a little culture?

And nothing wrong with dressing up a bit more than you would to see Van Halen or Lady Gaga. She pinned her blonde hair up and picked a black pant suit — Robert wore navy, lawyer attire sans tie. Quite the handsome couple, she thought, catching a glimpse of themselves in the mirror.

The venue was an old monastery on the edge of their small town, Westfield, Connecticut. The place had been renovated but maintained much of the gothic atmosphere it would have had when it housed a functioning religious order. Much of the chill, too; the November cold seeped in through a dozen crevices. Beth supposed that the music she and Robert were about to listen to had echoed around these stone walls long, long ago; the Salem Chamber Players, out of Massachusetts, would be playing music from the 18th and 19th centuries tonight.

The half dozen musicians were dressed in dark slacks or skirts and white shirts, and were led by a lean, balding conductor in a black suit. The concert began at eight and they worked through some pieces that were vaguely familiar and some that were not. Having had a glass of wine before they left, and another at intermission, she struggled to stay awake. (Robert made the wise choice of going with coffee.)

But there was no risk of nodding off during the last piece on the program.

The Midnight Sonatina, the notes reported, was rarely performed, the Salem Players being perhaps the only group in the country that had the piece in its repertoire.

Beth was curious why.

She soon learned.

The conductor gestured to the lead violinist, an attractive young woman with a tangle of red hair, which sported a distinctive white streak. She rose and, with understated accompaniment from the others, launched into the lightning fast piece. It was wildly complicated, richly melodic at times, eerily discordant at others. Beth, Robert — the whole audience — sat frozen in place, mesmerized during the five or six minute performance.

“My,” she found herself whispering. Robert’s handsome face was frozen, his mouth agape. No wonder it wasn’t played much; few would have the technical skill to master it.

When they finished, the sultry violinist, her narrow face dotted with sweat, strands of hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks, stood with her eyes closed, breathing hard from the effort.

The audience rose to their feet and applauded hard and cheered and fired off dozens of “Bravas!”

As they drove home, on the dark hilly country roads, twice their Acura sedan strayed onto the shoulder. The night was windy but that didn’t seem to be the problem for the low-slung vehicle. The third time the car lurched to the side Beth glanced at her husband. He seemed lost in thought.

“Honey?” she asked.

At first he didn’t appear to hear her. He kept staring straight ahead, at the wisps of ghostly fog which the car sped through.

Beth repeated, “Honey? Something wrong?”

He blinked. “Fine. Maybe a little tired is all.” Robert’s firm was miles from their home and he had to be awake at 5:30 or so to beat rush-hour traffic.

“I’ll drive.”

“No, I’m fine. Really.”

But farther down the road he nearly missed a turn.

“Robert!”

He blinked, gasped and skidded the car to a stop. They’d narrowly missed slamming into a road sign.

“What happened?” she asked urgently. “You fall asleep?”

“I... No... I don’t know. It’s too foggy. And... I zoned out, or something.”

“Zoned out?”

He shrugged, nodded at the wheel. “Maybe you better.”

They swapped places and in twenty uneventful minutes they were home.

Beth parked in the driveway and they walked into the house. Robert almost seemed to be sleepwalking.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

He looked at her with a blank expression.

“Robert. Are you sick?”

“I’m going to bed.”

He didn’t shower or brush his teeth. He just changed into his pajamas and lay down on the bed, not even climbing under the blankets. He stared at the ceiling. His body, Beth noted, didn’t seem relaxed.

“The flu?” she asked.

“What?”

“You have a bug or something?” She felt his forehead. He was chill to the touch.

But then suddenly he grew relaxed. He squinted and seemed to notice his wife sitting on the bedside. “Weird dream,” he said, then smiled, rolled over and fell asleep in seconds.

Dream? Beth thought. Hadn’t he been wide awake?

At three a.m. Beth was startled awake. What? A noise, a motion?

She looked over at Robert’s side of the bed. He wasn’t there.

Alarmed, thinking about his odd behavior, she rose, pulled on her bathrobe and walked into the hallway. There she paused and listened. A faint humming was coming from downstairs. She continued to the first floor and there she found her husband, in the living room, staring out the window. There wasn’t much to see, just the neighbors’ house, the Altman’s place, fifty feet away. They were the neighbors from hell; Robert and Fred had been feuding for years over petty but irritating things. Beth tried to remain above it, but she joined the fray occasionally. Sandra could be an utter bitch.

Robert was staring at the glaring yellow clapboard (the color being one of the sources of dispute; Robert was sure they’d picked the hue just to spite the Tollners). Robert was humming. The sound was very quiet. Four notes over and over again. If they were from a tune, she didn’t know what it might be.

Was he asleep?

What was that rule? Never wake somebody up when they are sleepwalking?

But she was alarmed. “Robert? Honey?”

No response.

“Honey? Is that a song? What is it?”

Maybe from an ad? From a movie? If so, and she could learn the name, maybe she could get through to him.

She got her phone and ran her name-that-tune app. It returned no titles, other than the pitch of the notes: A-D-D-E.

“Robert?”

Eventually the humming stopped but he kept staring out the window. She walked up to him and put her arm around his shoulder. His muscles were hard as a bag of concrete, his skin still chill. She pulled her hand away, alarmed.

The humming resumed.

At six a.m. she called the ambulance.

“He’s responsive now. Vitals are good. MRI and CT are normal. To be honest, we have no diagnosis at this point.” The psychiatrist told her this as he sat across from Beth in the Westfield Hospital waiting room.

A slow-speaking man, with a faintly Southern accent, he continued, “Robert was in some kind of a fugue state. Like he was hypnotized.” The lean doctor, in a well-worn light blue jacket, consulted a chart. “I was just speaking to him earlier and he said he hasn’t been taking any drugs. Nothing showed up in the preliminary bloodwork but we’ve sent samples to New Haven for some other tests. I wanted to ask you.”

“No, nothing,” she said, her voice ragged — from exhaustion.

“Has he ever taken any psychedelics?”

“Lord, no.” Neither of them had done anything more than smoke a little pot and not for a year or so.

He jotted a note then looked up. “Anything unusual happen last night, prior to the event? Traumatic?”

“We went to a concert.” She told the doctor about the drive home. How he “zoned out.”

Another look at the chart. “And no occurrences in the past like this?”

She shook her head.

“Has he ever seen a psychiatrist before?”

Her pause got the man’s attention and he cocked his head.

“We’ve been to a counselor, the two of us. He has... Robert has some anger issues. We worked it out. But, no, he’s never seen a doctor for anything like this.”

She thought he’d leap on that fact but he wasn’t interested. Anger was boring maybe, compared with Robert’s bizarre fugue state.

“Do you have any idea what the humming was about?” he asked.

“No.”

Since Robert was not considered a danger to himself or anyone else and seemed fully cognizant, the doctor said he could go home. If anything troubling was revealed in the new bloodwork someone would call.

To her relief, Robert recognized her instantly; she wasn’t sure he would. He rose from the wheelchair and hugged her hard.

He said, “Hey... Don’t know what happened. Just... too much crap at work. Too long hours.”

The partners worked the younger lawyers half to death, especially those like Robert, who represented some massive hedge funds based in the state.

They walked to the car. On the drive home he pulled down the visor to examine his face and finger-brushed his mussed, brown hair.

The radio was on, music softly playing. Robert shut it off. An awkward silence descended.

“Nice place, the hospital,” he said.

“It is. Staff’s friendly.”

“Décor’s good.”

“Landscaping’s nice. Are you hungry?”

He thought for a moment. “No.”

There followed a dozen other deflecting questions and answers.

“I don’t think you should go in to work today.”

“No. I shouldn’t.”

Beth was relieved; she’d been worried that he’d insist.

“You don’t remember last night?”

“Well, the first part of the concert. Not the last. And not driving home.” A frown. “Did I drive?”

“I did.” She didn’t want to mention the near accident.

He took this in and fell silent.

Soon, they arrived and pulled into the driveway. She climbed out and stepped around the car to open the door for him.

But he lifted a hand, gave a laugh and said, “I’m good, m’lady,” in a bizarre British accent.

He got out and hugged her. Robert was back. This was confirmed when he shot a scowl at the Altman’s house. The color was the gaudiest shade of yellow you could imagine. “Bile,” he called it. “I’m writing another letter.”

The last letter of complaint to the homeowners’ association had infuriated the Altmans, and shortly afterward the Tollners found dog crap dotting their front yard. Their neighbors owned a pit-bull mix that was as obnoxious as its owners.

Inside, he went to the bedroom and changed into jeans and a gray UConn sweatshirt.

Robert had apparently changed his mind about his appetite and decided to eat something.

“I’m totally famished.” He devoured half of the tuna salad sandwich she made, then the other. Sipped coffee.

She said, “I should get to the school for about an hour. Are you...?”

“Oh, sure, honey. I’ll be fine. Give me a chance to catch up on my games.”

He certainly did love video games. He’d had to give them up almost entirely, though, because of the long hours at work.

She hugged him again, and he kissed the top of her head. She could smell his sweat; it was strong. He didn’t seem to notice his own odor. She thought about telling him a shower might make him feel better but wasn’t sure what his reaction would be.

Beth drove to her office at the private college where she was a professor of sociology. She finished a departmental report and graded a dozen papers. These tasks took longer than they should have because her mind kept jumping back to last night: Seeing her husband’s glazed face. Feeling his taut muscles and cold skin.

Zoned out...

It was then that the doctor’s question about drugs came back to her. No, he didn’t do recreational drugs and, at the moment, no prescription ones.

But what if he had ingested something that affected him? After all, the final blood workup wasn’t in yet. Food? They’d had the same casserole at dinner and Beth was fine, but at the intermission of the concert, he’d had that coffee with milk. He’d eaten something too. Cookies, she believed. And they were homemade, baked by the friends of the chamber group or of the performing arts venue. Could the milk or the pastry have been tainted?

Beth pulled her laptop closer, went online and looked up the local newspaper, to see if anyone else had gotten sick after the venue.

No, no one had been. Or, if so, the malady hadn’t made the news.

Her search had also turned up a review of the concert. It was favorable and, as she expected, the notice centered on the Midnight Sonatina, the mesmerizing violin solo.

The reviewer wrote that he had never heard of the piece but, upon research, learned several things: one, it was so difficult to play that it was rarely performed — as the program notes had reported; and, two, the piece had a connection to several crimes. A link sent her to another article: “The Curse of the Midnight Sonatina.”

She gave a soft laugh and went to the site on which the story was posted, a history journal she’d never heard of.

Beth was interrupted when her phone hummed. She glanced at the number.

She frowned. It was the mobile of Sandra Altman, from next door.

Neighbors from hell...

“Sandra.”

“Look, I don’t know what your husband’s up to but you better tell him to stop it.”

“What’re you talking about?” Beth asked.

“He’s at your living room window. He’s been there for an hour, staring at us. Glaring. It’s very upsetting. We tried calling the house but he’s not picking up. If he doesn’t stop, Fred’s going to call the police.”

Beth’s heart sank. Robert had relapsed into his odd behavior of last night.

She said stiffly, “He hasn’t been feeling well.”

“Feeling well? He’s sick, all right. Sick in the head. I’ve always known it.”

Coming from the woman who would steal their newspaper and refused to trim trees whose branches fell onto their property.

Not to mention dog shit.

“I’ll give him a call. And—”

But then the woman was talking to someone else; her husband, Beth supposed. “Where are you going?”

“To tell him to stop,” came the man’s distant voice.

Then there was a pause. “Fred, no! He’s in the front yard. He’s got a knife! Get back here. Fred? Now!”

Beth heard a shrill scream. The line went silent.

The police were at the house when she arrived. Beth skidded the car to a stop, half in the driveway, half on the lawn.

Two men — both pale-complexioned, one round, the other tall and balding — were on her doorstep. They wore nearly identical suits, navy blue, and white shirts. Gold badges rested on their belts. She jogged to them, breathless from the run and breathless from the shock of what she’d learned had happened.

She stared at the Altman house. The medical examiner was wheeling one body out. That would be Sandra’s; Fred had been slashed to death in the front yard.

Crying softly, Beth asked the stocky detective where her husband was, and how was he?

“He’s in custody, Mrs. Tollner. We found him walking down the street, about three blocks from here.”

“He was holding the knife. The murder weapon.”

She dabbed her eyes and thought of the people she’d have to notify: her parents, Robert’s. His sister, too, and her husband, Joanne and Edward, the only relatives who lived nearby.

“Is he — was he hurt when you arrested him?”

“No,” the tall officer said. “Looks like, according to the arresting officers, it was like he was sleepwalking. Muttering and humming to himself. He was read his rights but he didn’t acknowledge understanding them.”

His partner: “Mrs. Tollner, does your husband have any history of mental illness?”

Through her mind streamed images of the incident from last night, her discussion with the psychiatrist. It occurred to her that maybe she shouldn’t be answering their questions. Wasn’t there something about a privilege between husbands and wives?

“I think I’ll talk to our attorney,” Beth said evenly.

“This is a very serious crime,” the heavy-set officer said.

Her look was essentially: And you need to remind me why?

“It’ll go a long way for Robert, if we get cooperation. From all parties.” That was from his partner.

Was this good cop/bad cop? Beth knew all about that; she had watched many of the true-crime TV shows.

“I’m going to talk to a lawyer.” She looked defiantly from one to the other.

“That’s your right.” This was from the one she thought was the bad cop. Maybe they had swapped parts.

When they were gone, she went inside and stepped into the kitchen to make some coffee. She stopped abruptly. Robert had removed four sharp knives from the wooden blocks and arranged them carefully on the green granite island. They appeared to make a pattern but she couldn’t find any meaning.

She started to put them away but then thought maybe the police would get a warrant or ask her if she’d moved anything. She left the blades where they were.

In the spacious living room, Beth dropped onto the couch and placed a call to a man named Julian Kramer. He was a criminal lawyer with one of the biggest firms in southern Connecticut, and she’d been given his name by Robert’s sister, Joanne, who like her brother was also an attorney, though the woman did no criminal work.

Kramer had been expecting the call. He listened patiently and told her his fee structure, which she instantly agreed to. He asked a number of questions. She sifted his words for clues as to whether or not he was hopeful for Robert, but she spotted no tell.

Then thought to herself: given the facts, how much hope could he offer?

Was there any doubt her husband had stabbed to death two people he despised?

“Give me the names of the detectives,” the lawyer said. I’ll call and see what the booking plans are. If he’s in an unstable mental state, there’ll be a different set of procedures.”

She did this then hesitated. What did she want to say? Do your best. Please help. You have to understand he’d never do anything like this.

Except he had.

“Anything else, Mrs. Tollner?”

“Does it look hopeless?”

Now the lawyer was the one pausing. “We’ll probably need to be creative in crafting our defense. I’ll be in touch.”

Creative. What did that mean?

She then took a deep breath and began making calls to the family.

They were, of course, difficult — impossible conversations, largely because she had no answers to the rapid fire and frantic questions friends and family and co-workers of Robert asked.

She then called the jail and learned that Robert was still in the prison hospital. He remained unresponsive. He wasn’t able to talk to anyone. He was, however, still compulsively humming.

Beth disconnected and slumped on the couch. A moment later she sat up, as if jolted from a nightmare.

She’d been thinking of the four notes Robert had been humming in repetition. She realized she’d gotten the order of them wrong, starting with what would have been the third, not the first note. Not A-D-D-E.

What Robert was really humming was “D-E-A-D.”

The bell rang and Beth opened the door to admit Joanne Post.

In the driveway her husband, Edward, a lean, handsome man of around forty, sat in his work truck, JP Designs stenciled on the side. He owned a landscaping company.

Beth waved to him. The couples had been close for the past year, ever since Joanne and Ed had moved here from Virginia. He waved back.

She closed the door and the two women walked into the living room. Robert’s sister was a tall, lanky woman, a lawyer for a firm that did environmental law. Her salt and pepper hair was cropped short. Joanne was an avid runner and today she wore orange athletic shoes, as well as jeans and a navy sweatshirt.

The women embraced and Joanne wiped a tear with her index finger.

Beth adjusted a log in the fireplace — she’d found fires comforted her at frantic times like this. Joanne sat on the couch next to the crackling blaze and warmed her hands. Beth brought in mugs of coffee.

The sister asked, “How is he?”

“The doctor, from the jail? He called. He was nicer than I thought he’d be, I mean, he’s also a guard, when you think about it. He said Robert’s still in some kind of fugue state. He told me they don’t use the word ‘breakdown’ anymore — it’s not specific enough — but it fits in Robert’s case since there’s no particular category they can put him in.

“What do you know about the insanity defense?”

“I do real estate,” Joanne said, shrugging.

“But from law school? You must remember something.”

Joanne looked off. “I think it’s that you can’t be tried if you didn’t understand the nature of what you did. Or if you can’t participate in your defense.”

She added there would be motions for a mental evaluation. A doctor picked by them, one picked by the prosecution, and a judge-appointed third psychiatrist. This would take some time. “Are you thinking of insanity for Robert?”

“This is going to sound strange at first, but hear me out.”

She told Robert’s sister about the curse of the Midnight Sonatina — the composer’s murder of the priest and his suicide.

She then went online and found the article she’d been reading earlier, when she got the call from Sandra Altman. The women sat next to each other and read:

Joanne said, “What, claim that he was possessed by a piece of music? You know that can’t happen.”

Beth was an academic and approached life according to the scientific method. Of course there was no such thing as a curse. The supernatural did not exist.

But she said, “Hypnosis is real. What if, instead of a swinging watch, a string of notes could put you under, let you act out your impulses?”

“Claiming he was hypnotized into delusion?”

Beth nodded and added about his humming the four notes. What they spelled.

“Jesus,” Joanne whispered.

“The lawyer said we needed a creative defense.”

“That’s pretty damn creative.” Joanne thought for a moment. “Maybe there is some basis for it. What if it happened other times? Somebody hearing music and losing their mind temporarily.”

“If it is temporary.” Beth choked on a sob.

Joanne took her hand. “He’ll get better. We’ll get the best doctors we can.”

Beth wiped the tears. “Let’s get to work.”

Sitting, hunched forward at the glass-topped coffee table, each looked over her own laptop.

“First,” Beth said, “let’s go the broadest we can: Sound inducing impulsive behavior. Not necessarily music.”

It was possible, they learned, to, yes, induce hypnosis via sounds, though it seemed generally to be true, too, that being hypnotized could not turn otherwise upstanding people into criminals.

“It’s something,” Joanne said. She jotted references and websites on a legal pad. “What about military marches?” she suggested.

Nothing, though, suggested that martial music affected the psychology of soldiers, other than inspiring them into battle.

Discouraging.

Joanne kept searching. “Here’s a YouTube video of the Salem Players. I want to see if anybody commented on it.” The piece played softly. Given the computer’s tiny speakers, it didn’t sound nearly as eerie as it had last night.

“And?” Beth asked.

“Nothing helpful. Just like ‘Cool Piece.’ ‘Where are you playing next?’ ‘Love your hair!’ Stuff like that.”

Beth watched the energetic performance for a moment and then had a thought. She placed a call to the venue and learned the musicians were at rehearsal, but were presently on a break. She was put through to the conductor.

“Hello?”

Beth identified herself and said, “I was at the concert last night. First, what an incredible performance.”

“Why, thank you, Mrs. Tollner,” the man said in his lilting British accent. He added modestly, “The hall is acoustically marvelous. How can I help you?”

“I’m a professor and I’m doing some research.”

Both were true, in a way.

“I’m curious about the Midnight Sonatina.”

“Yes?”

“Do you know if anyone in the audience has ever had an odd reaction to the music?”

“Odd reaction... You mean those stories that it drove people mad?”

“Yes.”

He chuckled. “Urban legend. It’s probably driven some violinists mad when they tried to play it but that’s because it’s the most difficult violin piece that’s ever existed.”

“But no one in the audience?”

“Never.”

She thanked him and hung up.

The two women kept up the work at their respective laptops for another half hour before Joanne stretched and looked at her watch. It was nearly six in the evening. “You have any wine? I need something stronger than coffee.”

“Sure. Fridge if you want white, cupboard to the left if you want red.”

“You want some?”

“Not now.” Beth returned to the computer and kept at the search.

Nothing...

But then she had a hit.

She’d missed the article in her earlier searches because the piece was not named, described merely as an Italian sonatina. It was the Midnight, though, because the composer was Luigi Scavello and the date of the composition was the same.

She read the article quickly. It was published in a Boston newspaper in 1923. Following a concert in a music college south of the Charles River, a member of the audience suddenly began ranting at a couple with whom he and his wife had attended the performance. He then drew a knife and stabbed the husband to death. He’d had no history of criminal activity, though the two men had quarreled over a business loan not long before.

The defendant’s solicitor came up with a novel legal claim that he had grown temporarily deranged because of the piece of music.

The lawyer admitted that, yes, it was an extraordinary claim, but the medical testimony established that what had once been an intelligent functioning man was reduced to an animalistic state.

She called to Joanne: “I’ve got another one. And listen to this. The judge ruled the man was not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to a home and didn’t have to go to prison.”

So there was yet another instance of precedence for the argument for insanity.

A creative defense...

A moment later Beth heard a soft sound behind her.

Humming.

Gasping, Beth turned and, in shock, stared at Joanne, who was gazing at her sister-in-law. Her face had the same eerie, blank expression as Robert’s.

And the humming, too, was the same as earlier, the notes her husband had hummed over and over again.

The notes that spelled D-E-A-D.

Beth realized that Joanne had just listened to the Midnight Sonatina on YouTube. And she, like her brother, had also been possessed by the bewitching tune.

Joanne grabbed Beth’s hair and lifted the knife, the longest and sharpest of those that had been sitting on the island in the kitchen.

Edward Post, Joanne’s husband, was finishing the interview with the detectives from the Westfield Police Department.

The town was generally idyllic and free of crime — serious crime, at least, so two knife-wielding psychotic attackers was a rarity, to put it mildly.

The odds that they’d be brother and sister? Nearly impossible.

But here they were.

The man stepped outside, stretched and walked to his Jeep. He climbed in and drove to his company, JP Designs. It was one of the more successful landscaping companies in South Central Connecticut.

In the back of the east lot was a large trailer, a nice one. Post would occasionally stay here if the hours were long and he didn’t feel like tackling the long drive home.

He parked and then walked inside.

Beth Tollner walked forward and the two embraced.

They sat down on the couch. They were here because reporters were mobbing their houses.

“You can stay here for the time being.” He nodded to a second bedroom in the rear of the trailer.

“I think I will. Thanks.”

“How’s Joanne?” Beth asked.

Edward answered, “Broken arm. Concussion. She’s in the same prison hospital as Robert.”

As Joanne had lifted the knife, Beth had reached behind her and grabbed the fireplace poker. She’d struck her sister-in-law a half-dozen times, and the woman collapsed on the floor. She remained conscious — and humming eerily — but didn’t have the energy to rise and renew her attack.

“The physical stuff isn’t that bad. But she’s still in that weird state. Like sleepwalking.”

Beth said, “I figured out the knives, the pattern.”

“That he left on the kitchen island?”

“Right. Robert arranged them like they were notes on a musical staff. D-E-A-D.”

Edward shook his head.

“That two people flew into murderous rages after listening to the music? That’ll help the defense.” She looked over at her brother-in-law. “I’ll meet our lawyer tomorrow. I’m sure he can recommend somebody to represent Joanne. He can’t handle her case too. There’d be a conflict.”

“She did try to kill you, after all.”

“No, she didn’t. It was somebody — something — else.” Beth nodded at her computer. “I want to give the lawyers as much information as we can about the sonatina.”

She returned to the article she’d been reading — the account of the Boston concert attack in 1923.

Beth clicked forward and came to the last page.

A short scream shot from her mouth.

Edward spun and approached.

“No,” Beth whispered.

“What is it? Tell me.”

“They’re the same,” she whispered.

“Who?”

Beth was looking at a photograph of Matta, the conductor of the chamber group in Boston, where the murder had occurred in 1923. And beside him, the beautiful young violinist who’d performed the Midnight Sonatina that night.

They were identical to the conductor and principal violinist of the Salem Chamber Players from the concert yesterday evening.

Identical, right down to a scar on the conductor’s jaw and a streak of white in the young woman’s hair.

How could this be?

Then, with a shock, she remembered that she’d called the conductor, saying she was researching any odd incidents surrounding the sonatina. And given her name.

No one will ever stop us from performing the piece...

Just then Edward’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen — she could see it read No Caller ID — and hit answer, held the unit up to his ear. “Hello?”

He frowned and glanced at Beth. “Odd. Nobody’s there. Just some music.”

The chill shot through her body like an electrical jolt. She whispered: “Put it on speaker.”

He did, and a whirlwind of notes, like knives hissing through the air — the opening measures of the Midnight Sonatina — filled the trailer.