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“But you weren’t.”
“My grand-mère was. I’m going to sleep like a queen. See you in the morning.”
Sonya might have shaken her head as she walked back to her room. But when she slipped into bed, she smiled knowing Cleo slept just a few rooms away.
“Sonya! Wake up!”
With the stage-whisper voice in her ear and the hand shaking her shoulder, Sonya shot from dead asleep to wide awake with a single wild jolt.
“What? What?”
“Ssh! Listen!” Cleo gripped her shoulder now.
The piano music seemed to float upstairs. “Do you hear that?” In the dim light of the fire, Sonya clutched at Cleo with both hands. “Tell me you hear that.”
“Of course I hear it. It’s why I’m waking you up at three in the morning. We have to go check it out.”
“We have to go check it out,” Sonya repeated, struggling against dread as she got out of bed.
“Do you know the song?” Still whispering, Cleo tugged Sonya out of the room. “It sounds familiar. Sort of familiar.”
“I thought I dreamed it.”
“Unless you and I are having the same dream at the same time while we’re walking out of your sitting room, that’s a no.”
As they approached the staircase, the music came clearer.
“Wait.” Sonya dashed into the library, arrowed toward the fireplace. She grabbed the poker.
“Son, I don’t think a piano-playing ghost is looking for a fight. Plus, what are you going to do with that? Kill them?”
Gripping the poker with both hands, Sonya sent Cleo a don’t-argue-with-me glare.
They crept down the stairs, and when they reached the base, Sonya nodded toward the music room. Light flickered there, as if from candles or flames in a hearth.
The song played on as they approached. Then came a long, distinctly human sigh, and it faded away.
Armed with the poker, Sonya rushed the doorway. She saw nothing but shapes and shadows in the dark. Cursing, she groped for the light switch.
Under the glitter of the chandelier, no one sat at the piano. But for the instruments, the furniture, the room was empty.
“This is bullshit. I saw light in here, and I can still smell candles. They heard us coming and took off.”
“Sonya, we were almost at the door when it went dark and the music stopped. Nobody could’ve gotten by us without us seeing them.”
“There could be a passageway. Another passageway, like for the servants.” Determined, she put the poker down to search along the walls. “The wainscoting, the—what do you call it?—chair rail. There could be a button or pull worked in.”
“I’m going to do reverseX-Files. You don’t want to believe.”
“Of course I don’t want to believe.” Her voice pitched up two full registers. “Especially at three in the morning I don’t want to believe some ghost got the urge to play the damn piano. Help me look.”
Obliging, Cleo took the next wall. “You’d rather believe someone’s sneaking around the house, opening doors, moving things, and so on, and playing the piano in the middle of the night? This person can also blow out the candles and zip into a secret passage in about two seconds?”
“At least I could give them a good smack with the poker and tell them to get the hell out of my house. So yeah, I’d rather believe that.”
She stopped, scrubbed her hands over her face. “And no, I don’t actually believe that. Before you got here today, I was torn between accepting there’s something in the house or accepting I was going crazy. Hallucinating. Maybe that brain tumor.”
“Well, I am here, and I can tell you you’re not crazy or hallucinating.” Cleo walked over, wrapped an arm around Sonya’s shoulders. “There’s more than one something in this house. And the one playing the piano’s a female.”
