Frozen Heat

TWENTY

Nikki splashed more cold water on her face and rose up to see herself in the mirror above the women’s room sink. Her lips began to turn downward and tremble, and she looked away, only to force herself to go back for a brave stare, but the trembling only grew and grew and her eyes were rimmed with tears. Before they could roll down her cheeks, she bent to the faucet again and scooped more water onto herself.

Unlike with his handler’s faked death in Paris, Detective Heat had the means and cause to verify that Petar Matic had indeed expired. A call to her friend, Lauren Parry, brought the medical examiner from a sound sleep to the holding cell in less than forty-five minutes. Dr. Parry’s prelim squared with the eyeball evidence. Poison, introduced through an innocuous, half-pint plastic bottle of apple juice. Strong stuff, too. In all her years, Lauren had never seen such a ferocious attack by an outside toxin. “This dose-of whatever the hell it turns out to be when we lab it-was designed to put him down fast and hard. Full organ shutdown with no chance of resuscitation. Better believe I’ll be double-checking the seals on my moon suit when I do his postmortem.”

Petar’s postmortem.

Heat dried her face with some paper towels and held them to her closed eyes. Behind the lids she was thirteen, on a school ski trip to Vermont where she had lost her way on the trail and skied onto a steep incline that had iced over. When she fell that day, she had lost her gloves and a ski that had spun sideways down the ice and clattered off a precipice into a gulch she couldn’t see. The gloves had stopped yards below, but to go for them she would risk following the ski.

Alone and in peril, Nikki had clawed her fingernails into the ice, trying to pull herself to safety. All she had to do was make it ten feet up the incline and grab hold of a rock. Halfway there, her fingertips lost purchase and she slid back to where she had begun. Sobbing, and with skin raw from ice burn, she found the strength to draw herself up the slope again. Almost there, reaching out for the chunk of stone which sat just inches from her grasp, she lost her grip again. The slide took her farther down, all the way to her gloves, which fell over the cliff when she skidded into them.

Heat opened her eyes. She was in the precinct restroom. But she was still on that frozen slope.

“Got something for you on our poisoned food,” said Detective Feller when she came back into the bull pen. “The delivery kid from the deli where Holding places our orders got spiffed a twenty at his bike rack by someone who said they’d handle this one.”

“Excellent. Did he give you a good description?” she asked.

“Yes, and when I heard it, I showed him this.” Feller held up the APB pic of Salena Kaye on his cell phone. “Positive ID.”

“I’ll see that and raise you one,” said Raley, coming through the door clutching a photo print. “Just pulled this still from my surveillance screening of the OCME cams. Check out who dropped off the bad gas at the loading dock.” He held up the shot for them all to see: Salena Kaye in a delivery uniform and baseball cap.

Rook joined them from his desk and said, “That is one naughty nurse.”

“Yeah,” said Raley. “Too bad this surveillance tape has been sitting around unscreened for a couple of days. If we’d only seen this day before yesterday, we might have gotten her before she rabbitted.”

“Or got Petar,” added Feller.

“Refresh my memory,” said Rook. “Who was it who said he wanted to take point on the gas truck, personally? Then delegated it to his secret weapon?”

Nikki took the still from Raley and walked it into Irons’s office and shut the door. Less than three minutes later, the captain must have decided not to summon the press, after all. He grabbed his coat and left in a hurry.

Exhausted, but unwilling to go home with things in such flux, Heat spent the night at the precinct. Rook came in at daybreak with a latte and fresh change of clothes for her. “Did you get any sleep?” he asked.

“Ish,” she said. “Tried to grab a few winks in one of the interrogation rooms, but, you know.” She took a sip of her coffee. “My dad’s an early riser, so I called him a little while ago to fill him in, so he wouldn’t hear it on the news first.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Closed, as ever. But at least he didn’t screen me out when he saw the caller ID, so that’s a start.”

Rook thought back to the brittle exit from her father’s condo after she had asked him for the bank statements. “You’re either stronger than I thought you were or a glutton for punishment.”

“Aside from all the personal crap? I really thought I had this case locked down.” She led him to the twin Murder Boards. Both were brimming with new notes she had made on them in the predawn hours. “I thought once I nailed the killer, I’d be done. But Petar ended up-well, he ended up just the consolation prize.”

“You know, Nikki, that’s the tragedy of all this. I was feeling that your old boyfriend and I were just starting to bond.” He looked at her innocently. “What, too soon?”

“A little,” she said, but smiled in appreciation of his usual effort to try to make her laugh, in spite of. “This nerve’s still a bit exposed. But don’t give up, OK?”

“Deal.”

She contemplated one of the boards with a bleak sigh. “This one…” Nikki tapped Tyler Wynn’s name, now featured prominently. “He called the orders. Because of him, my mother died, Nicole died, Don died.”

“Carter Damon, also.”

“Right. And why?” She shook her head. “Damn, I really thought I’d be done.”

Most of the squad gathered early. Clearly, sleep was not anybody’s priority. Roach came in a little later, but only because they had paid a visit to the MTA headquarters on the way in to check surveillance video from the 96th Street station. “They’re making dubs for us now,” said Detective Raley, “but we logged Nicole Bernardin going over the platform toward the Ghost Station with the leather pouch and then coming back without it the same night she died.”

“Any idea what was in it?” asked Rhymer.

“None. I never even touched it.”

Detective Feller joined them. “Any guess who Nicole left it for?”

Heat bobbed her head side to side. “I would only be guessing.” Although Nikki did have one idea she would keep to herself.

Detectives Malcolm and Reynolds came into the bull pen with fresh news from Forensics. The blood traces in the cargo hold of Carter Damon’s van matched Nicole Bernardin’s type. “They’re running it at the DNA lab for confirmation,” said Reynolds. “But I’d bet we hear a ding, for sure.”

Malcolm added, “Carpet fibers match positive for Damon’s work boots. And, even though there’s more fingerprints on that vehicle than an airport lap dancer, they also managed to isolate three big hits: Damon, Salena, and Petar.”

Behind them they heard raised voices and a door slam and all turned toward the glass office to see Captain Irons in a muffled shouting match with Detective Hinesburg, whose mascara had raccooned down the sides of her cheeks. “Trouble in the diorama,” said Feller.

“You guys didn’t see this morning’s Ledger?” asked Reynolds. “ Metro column was all about wondering how a prisoner could die in custody.”

Ochoa said, “All the papers are on that.”

“Yeah, but Tam Svejda has a source who says one of the detectives dropped the ball on identifying Salena Kaye from surveillance video.”

“And we know who that source is, don’t we?” said Feller. “The survivor.”

Ochoa agreed. “Hey, if Wally’d knock a kid over to get on camera, why wouldn’t he save his ass by throwing Sharon Hinesburg under the bus?”

“Or, in this case, under the pressurized gas truck,” added Rook.

Heat cleared her throat. “Much as you know I love forming a gossip circle, maybe we could keep our heads in the game and get back to work?” But as they all returned to their desks, her own gaze drifted to the glass office and she secretly hoped if Hinesburg didn’t get transferred, at least she’d get a nice, fat suspension.

Rook joined her. “I’m going to head out. I have some work of my own to do. Outside stuff. No big deal.”

“Liar. You’re going to work this up as your next article, aren’t you?”

“All right,” he said, “as long as you’re forcing my hand, my editor at First Press e-mailed me to say that they’re going to do a major launch for a new online version of the magazine and think an exclusive on this case would be a perfect cover story to premiere on the new website.”

“And you know how much I loved the last article.”

“I promise, nothing about your sexual prowess, strictly facts.”

“Pants on fire.”

“Let me put this another way,” he said. “Would you prefer I do the article of record, or Tam Svejda?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Get crackin’, writer boy.”

“You won’t be sorry.”

“I already am.”

“Can I buy you lunch later?”

She lowered her eyes from his. “You go on. I’ve got something to do around lunchtime.” When he studied her, deciding whether to ask what it might be, she said, “Go on. I’ll see you at my place after work tonight.”

When she got to the door, she put her ear to it and heard nothing inside. Nikki rapped lightly to make sure the place was empty, and when nobody answered, she quietly slipped in and twisted the lock on the knob.

Taking care not to disturb Detective Raley’s screening notes that were stacked in neat piles along the counter in front of the monitor, she sat behind the console in the little closet he had converted to his surveillance media kingdom. Heat smiled when she saw the cardboard Burger King crown she had awarded to him in a squad meeting after he had found the security cam footage of a gigolo’s street abduction last winter. Then she took a memory key out of her pocket, plugged it into the USB port, and put on the earphones.

Nikki didn’t know how many times over ten years she had listened to the audio of her mother’s murder. Perhaps twenty? First, she had made a crude dub of it by holding a dictation recorder beside the answering machine before Detective Damon could take the mini cassette from the apartment. The quality was poor so, when she became a detective, Heat wrote herself a pass into the Property Room and got the phone cassette copied as a digital file. That WAV sounded much cleaner, yet with all the times she had listened to it, straining to analyze the muffled voice of the killer in the background, she had never gotten closer to identifying it.

She always did it in secret because she knew it would seem ghoulish to anyone who didn’t know she was only doing a clinical playback. This was a search for clues, not an obsession with reliving the event. That’s what she told herself, anyway, and felt it to be true. Her focus was on background, not foreground. She especially hated hearing her own voice on it, and always-every single time-stopped the audio just before it picked up her coming into the apartment and screaming.

That was too much to bear.

Of all the times she had listened to it, though, this was the first time she had knowing that the muffled voice was Petar’s.

Homicide 101. In any murder case, the likely killer is close in. You clear husbands, wives, exes, common-laws, estrangeds, children, siblings, and relatives before you move on to the other likelies. Beyond her father, they looked for boyfriends in her mother’s life but not in Nikki’s. But then, who was the lead investigator but Carter Damon, Petar’s accomplice-after-the-fact and obstructionist-for-hire.

Nikki listened again and yet listened anew. She heard the familiar small talk with her mother about spices, the checking of the fridge, her screams, and the dropped phone. The mumbled voice of a man. She paused and played it back. And then she played that section back again and again.

At straight-up noon, Heat sat on the twelfth floor, in the tranquil room on York Avenue, at the session she’d booked that morning with Lon King, Ph. D. Nikki told the department psychologist about her history with the recording and that, for the first time ever that day, when she listened to it, she heard Petar.

“And why is this something you want to focus on, this recording?”

“I guess to ask if I could have been in denial.”

“That’s always possible, but I wonder if your curiosity goes deeper.”

“See, this is the part I hate.”

He smiled. “They all do, at first.” Then, he continued, “I don’t care how resilient you are, Nikki, you have a lot to deal with here.”

“That’s why I called you.”

“I’m certain you are not only reliving trauma and loss, but also experiencing a profound sense of anger and betrayal. Not to mention confusion about your own choices and instincts. As a detective, about crime. As a woman, about men.”

Nikki sat back and rested her neck against the cushion. As she stared at the unblemished whiteness of the ceiling, she tried to wish away the confusion, to grab the handle on the sense of order she’d held just a day before. “I feel like I had the rug pulled. Not just on the case, but on what I thought my own life was. What I thought love was. It makes me worry about what I can trust.”

“And for you, I know trust is paramount. Mistrust feels… well, it’s chaotic.”

“Yes,” she said, but it came out in breath without resonance. “Which is what I feel now. I always envisioned solving my mom’s murder would be clean and neat. Now all I feel is…” She swirled a finger like a cyclone.

“I’m sure. Especially with the betrayal of your intimacy. But could part of it also be because your life has been so defined by this case you don’t know who you are if it’s over?”

She sat up to face him. “No, it’s upsetting because it still isn’t over and I don’t want to let my mother down.”

“You can’t. She’s dead.”

“And the man who ordered it is still out there.”

“Then you will do what you have to do. I know that just by your unique definition of a leave of absence.” She nodded in agreement but without humor. “I’d ask you to try to keep scale on this, as overwhelming as it all is. Mistrust feeds on itself. It’s like a virus. You can’t do your work-or live your life-second-guessing your instincts. You’ll become the proverbial deer, frozen in the headlights. Who do you trust the most, Nikki?”

“Rook.”

“Can you discuss this with him?”

Nikki shrugged. “Sure.”

“Openly?” She hesitated, which answered his question. “My experience with cops in this room is that grace under pressure is great in a moment. As a lifestyle it takes a toll. It’s the stoicism. You are alone.”

“But I’m not now. I’m with Rook.”

“How much of you?” He didn’t make her answer but let the softly ticking second hand behind her fill some space before he continued.

“At one time or other, if we’re lucky, we struggle with how much of ourselves to reveal to one another. At work. In friendships. In relationships. You and Don kept the struggle physical without revealing or sharing. That worked because of parity. Neither of you wanted to go deeper. That won’t be so in all relationships. You may want to reveal more of yourself than someone else. But, from what you’ve told me, the opposite is true. So-long term-the issue will have to be confronted at some point if Rook needs more intimacy than you are willing to give. It may turn him away. Not now, but someday, that reckoning will come. And you will let him in, or not. You will be vulnerable with him, or not. And you will experience the consequences, based on your choice. I hope the choice you make fulfills you.”

Nikki stepped out onto the sidewalk from her session bearing more questions than solutions, but one thing in life looked brighter. The yellow Wafels amp; Dinges gourmet food truck had parked for its lunchtime business that day a block up York Avenue. She waited in line, vacillating between sweet and savory and went for a mashup: de Bacon-Syrup wafel, and ate it on a bench under the Roosevelt Island Tram. When Nikki finished, she sat a while to watch the red gondolas of passengers float overhead and ride out over the East River, and wished the weight of her cares could be packed into a sealed capsule and borne away into the sky on steel cables. It didn’t work. That became clear when Agent Bart Callan, Department of Homeland Security, sat beside her.

“You should try de Throwdown,” he said. “It’s the wafel that beat out Bobby Flay’s.”

“Don’t you guys have e-mail? Instead of ambushing me, how about a nice OpenTable invitation next time?”

“Like you would respond.”

“Try me, Agent Callan. As I said last meeting, come in through the front door, I’m very cooperative by nature.”

“Unless cornered.”

“Who isn’t?”

“I need to know everything you learned from Tyler Wynn and Petar Matic. If you can tell me what was in that drop box, that would be helpful, too.”

Heat took her eyes off the tugboat churning upriver under the Queensboro Bridge and regarded the agent. Peel away the military zeal and the aggravating habit of surprise appearances, he seemed like an OK guy. Then self doubt about her trust instincts raised a caution flag. “You must have One PP on speed dial. Use it.”

He shook no. “Not optimal. This is too sensitive, too big. If this goes into the bureaucracy chain, there’s no containment.”

“Then why involve me?”

“Because you are already involved. And you don’t have a big mouth.” He grinned. “I learned that the other night in the warehouse.” She returned his smile and he held out his hand. At first, Nikki thought he wanted to hold hers, but he took her lunch garbage, and she blushed at her misunderstanding. He tossed her plate and fork in the can beside him and then pivoted on the bench to face her. “Detective Heat, I can assure you of one thing. The case we are working is developing into a matter of the highest national security. Maybe if I disclose to you, it will make you feel better about sharing with us.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s a short story. Nicole Bernardin, who was once CIA, reached out to us about a month and a half ago to say that she had come upon highly sensitive documentation of something urgent she needed to share. We did thorough checks on her background with Central Intelligence as well as her more recent history working with Tyler Wynn in his new-let’s call it, independent-capacity. We made arrangements for her to get the information to us, but someone killed her before she could tell us where to find it.”

Heat said, “If you want to know about the drop box, I found it, but I never saw what she had stashed.”

“What did it look like?”

“A tan leather pouch with a zipper on top. The kind merchants use to take their cash to the bank.”

He squinted, envisioning it, and said, “Thank you for that.”

“You can thank me by answering this. If you knew Tyler Wynn had switched sides, why didn’t you arrest him? Especially if he was into something endangering national security?”

“Exactly for that reason. Come on, Heat, you know what it’s like to keep a suspect on a leash. We never picked up Wynn because we didn’t want to blow his cover before he led us to whatever he’s involved with.”

“And how many people have died while you held this leash, Agent Callan?”

He knew what she was getting at and said, “For the record, Intelligence had no information Tyler Wynn had gone rogue at the time of your mother’s death. In fact, her murder is where this investigation began. I was FBI back then, and I was the designated contact for your mother.” That made Nikki turn to face him. “That’s right, I knew her,” he said. “In a scenario that played out very close to Nicole Bernardin’s, your mother had reached out to us, voicing suspicion about a developing security threat on U.S. soil. We seeded her with two hundred thousand bucks to bribe an informant to get the proof and she was murdered the night she got it.”

Nikki watched a tram float overhead as she digested the news. If Callan was telling the truth, that money wasn’t her mother’s Judas payoff, after all. She brought her eyes down to meet his, and he said, “So there you have it. That’s the story.”

“Except for what sort of domestic plot she uncovered that, apparently, has been sitting on your radar all these years.”

“That’s classified.”

“Convenient. And meanwhile, Tyler Wynn has been roaming free. Excuse me, on your leash.”

Agent Callan ignored the shot. Part of that double-locked military demeanor, nothing appeared to knock him off mission. “A lot of people have asked you this, but I’m going to ask again, and I hope you will be straight with me. Do you have any idea what your mother received from that informant?”

“No.”

“And you have no thoughts about where she might have hidden it?”

“No. Wherever it is, she hid it very well.”

“You found Nicole Bernardin’s drop.”

“I told you, I don’t know. Don’t you think I’ve been through this on my own a million times?”

After a crisp nod, he got to his point. “I want you to cooperate with me on this.”

“I have been. Are you listening?”

“I mean moving forward.”

“I work for NYPD.”

“I work for the American people.”

“Then use your speed dial to call an American downtown at headquarters, then I’m all yours. Otherwise, thanks for the visit.”

She was almost to York with her hand up for a cab when he walked toward her, trying out any leverage he could bring to bear. “Think about this. Doesn’t the fact that someone can reach one of your prisoners and kill him while he’s in custody tell you something about how serious this threat could be?”

“I can’t help. I simply don’t have anything to give you.”

“I could help you get Tyler Wynn.”

Or, thought Nikki, keep me from getting him if it didn’t serve your purposes. She said, “Thanks for the tip on the wafel,” and got into her taxi.

Heat got back to her apartment that evening and Rook got up from his MacBook at her dining room table to greet her with a deep kiss. He folded his long arms around her and they melted into each other where they stood. After they held each other a moment, he said, “You’re not falling asleep on me, are you?”

“Standing up? Are you calling me a horse?”

“Neigh,” he said, and she laughed for the first time that day.

“So stupid.” She laughed again because it was stupid. And welcome. She cupped a hand on his jaw and caressed his cheek.

When he asked her how she was managing, she told him the truth. That the day had been a struggle and that she craved a warm bath. But after he mentioned he’d made a pitcher of Caipirinhas, the bath went on hold and the glasses came out.

They settled on the couch and she filled him in on her meeting with Bart Callan. “So that was your mysterious lunch engagement, DHS?”

For a moment, she thought about telling him about her shrink session but felt too spent to open up that topic and let it go. But then Nikki considered what Lon King had said about her reticence to reveal herself-his version of the wall speech-and she said, “No, I saw my shrink.”

“So you’ve gone from calling him ‘the’ shrink to ‘my’ shrink? That’s new.”

“Let drop it, OK?” Baby steps, she thought, baby steps.

But he persisted. “I think it’s good for you. If ever there was a time, Nikki. For the Petar baggage alone, if not for Don.”

“Speaking of Don,” she said, seizing an alternate topic to steer the conversation elsewhere. “I’m planning to fly to San Diego day after tomorrow. His family is holding a memorial at the navy base.”

“I’d like to go with you, if that’s all right.”

Nikki’s eyes widened in surprise. “You’d do that?” Rook’s smile said yes, and she leaned forward and kissed it, beautiful to her as it was.

They snuggled for a moment, and after just the right amount of stillness, he said, “But if Petar has a funeral? I’m busy.” The shock and poor taste of it made her laugh the way only Rook could, making the unsayable funny because it wasn’t unthinkable.

Then her brow darkened. He knew what that was about. She didn’t need to say anything. “I know it’s disheartening. You solve this huge case only to have it lead to another dead end. We’ll find out what’s behind this. Just not now.”

“But suppose what both Petar and Bart Callan said is true, that something big is coming that needs to be stopped?”

“At this point, I don’t know where to go with that. And from what you said about Agent Callan, the feds don’t either. Obviously Tyler Wynn is the key. It’s all about whoever he’s working for now. What did my friend Anatoly say that night in Paris? That it’s a new era and that when spies turn it’s not for other governments but-what did he call them-’other entities’?”

She rubbed her face in her palms. “It all feels bigger than me right now.”

“Nikki? That’s all right.” Rook put a hand on each of her shoulders and turned her to him. “You don’t have to be the one-person crime task force. You’ve already done a great job. Right now you could plant the flag, declare victory, and move on. Nobody would fault you.” And then he added, “I’ll be with you, either way.”

Everything rolled up in that sentence warmed her to the core, and Nikki said, “That helps, thanks.” She set her unfinished drink on the coffee table. “Would you be terribly offended if I took that bath and just spent some alone time here tonight?”

“You want to cocoon?”

“Desperately. I need it.”

“You’ve got it.”

Rook packed up his laptop and notes into his backpack, and after they kissed at the door, he said, “Think about this tonight in your jammies.”

“OK.”

“One thing that’s made this worth the trip: At least you learned your mother wasn’t having an affair. And she wasn’t a traitor. In fact, your mom was a hero.”

“Yeah, you know what F. Scott Fitzgerald said, though. ‘Show me a hero…’”

”’… I’ll write you a tragedy.’”

“Plus,” she said, “noble cause or not, I still feel pissed that she shut me out of so much of her life. Intellectually, I can say I want to forgive her, but the truth is, I don’t feel it. Not yet.”

“I understand,” said Rook. “Listen, I’m no shrink, but if I were, what I’d suggest is that maybe the best you can do in the meantime is find some way to connect with her and see where that goes.”

She floated in the indulgent warmth of lavender-scented water until the next track loaded on her boom box: Mary J. Blige, testifying to “No More Drama.” Nikki sang along at first, belting it out, but then became an audience of one receiving the message of the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul about standing for yourself, ending the pain and the game. Nikki had heard the song many times, but-like the answering machine recording that documented her mother’s stabbing-that day, it came to new ears. Especially the part about not knowing where the story ended, only where it began.

Sitting cross-legged on the couch with a hot cup of chamomile and wet hair dampening the terry shoulders of her robe, Nikki traced her mother’s life story into her own. She tried not to dwell on the blemishes Cynthia Heat’s secret life had created. Of course there were the absences that bred longings and fears, but more impactful were the learned traits that Nikki had so elegantly carried into her own life and selectively employed: caution, secretiveness, isolation. These could be her never-ending story, if she allowed it. The shrink had cautioned her to accept that her mother was dead, but Nikki knew her mother’s story would live on through her and that her mother still resided in her heart, as she always would.

Still, Nikki sought the beginning of a story. One that fastened itself to the many good things received from her mother that so outweighed the rest. Or, at least, they would, if she chose no drama.

In her living room in the solitude of the night she owned, Heat’s choice was to reflect on virtues and gifts. On the independence she’d gained from the upbringing her mother gave her. The sense of wonder, of imagination, of standards, and character, the value of hard work, of goodness itself, and the power of love. The new story she began went on like that, a tale of glasses that grew from half-full to brimming the more she composed it. It told her that laughter transcended, forgiveness healed, and music enkindled the coldest of hearts.

Music.

Nikki stared at the piano across the room.

Her mother had played it beautifully and shared its wonder with her. Why had it gained so much power in silence?

A flutter rose in her breast as she recalled Rook’s parting words about finding some way to connect with her again. The flutter became dread, but she chose courage and stood anyway. As she crossed the rug to the baby grand, her dread melted away and became something that buoyed her as she lifted the bench’s seat to take out the top booklet of sheet music. Mozart for Young Hands.

It was the first time in ten years she had opened that bench; even longer since she had held that book. Nikki was certain it had been lost.

She had been nineteen when she last lifted the cover on the Steinway. Nikki hesitated, not to falter but to mark the new passage.

The hinges on the cover creaked as she opened it and exposed the keys. Her fingers trembled with the anticipation of every one of her childhood recitals as Nikki sat, opened the music book to the first page, pumped the pedals for feel, and then began to play.

For the first time in a decade, music from that cherished instrument filled the apartment, and it came out of Nikki by way of Cynthia. Music is sense memory; however, it’s muscle memory, too, so she misstruck a few keys, but that only made her smile as she began Mozart’s Sonata Number Fifteen. Her play, which felt so rote and halting at first, slowly became more fluid and graceful. She fumbled, though, when she got to the bottom of the page and had trouble coordinating the turn with her fingering. Or maybe it was the tears that had clouded her vision. She wiped them away and prepared to resume, but stopped.

Nikki frowned and looked at the sheet music, confused. She leaned forward to the booklet on the stand and saw strange pencil marks in her mother’s handwriting between the notes.

Her mom had always told her that Mozart considered the space between the notes music, too, but these were not music notations that she recognized, but something else.

But what?

Heat snapped the light up one more notch and held the music book under its brightness to study the marks. To her eye, they appeared to be some sort of code.

She began to rock slightly on the bench and the floor felt like it shook. Nikki thought she was experiencing another aftershock. But then she looked around her.

The rest of the room sat perfectly still.