The note came at 11:53.
In the morning I got up before anyone, went down, and pressed Stop. Then I took the recorder up to my room, put my headphones on, and rewound and listened, and fast-forwarded and listened, through forty minutes of furnace hum and radiator ticking and something I realized, after a while, was my father snoring all the way through two floors. Then a soft thump. A pause. The note, so loud in the headphones that I jumped. Then a few seconds of the note fading, and fading, and then, very faintly, a sound I hadn't heard in person. It was a purr. Not the big rattling purr Oliver did when I scratched his chin, but a thin one, almost a hum. It lasted maybe five seconds. Then the thump of him jumping down, and nothing.
I played it back nine times. It was a strange thing to hear. It sounded like a cat purring at someone.
* * *
Mr. Dombrowski taught music at Wilson Middle School, which meant sixth-grade general music and seventh- and eighth-grade chorus and the band, which was terrible. He was a heavy, rumpled man with a gray beard and enormous glasses that made his eyes look like they were floating, and he wore the same brown corduroy sport coat every single day, and he was the only teacher I knew who called girls "Miss" and boys "Mister," like it was 1950. Most of the kids made fun of him. I liked him because once, when I'd been sitting alone at lunch in the first week of seventh grade, he'd come by with his tray and sat down across from me and said, "Miss Haskins, settle a dispute. Is a Pop-Tart a pie?" and argued with me about it for twenty minutes until the bell rang.
I went to the music room during my study hall on Tuesday and found him eating an apple and grading quizzes with a red felt-tip pen.
"Miss Haskins. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I need you to tell me what note something is," I said, and set the tape recorder on his desk.
He raised his eyebrows. I'd cued it up at home, so I pressed Play, and the furnace hum came out of the little speaker, and the thump, and then the note.
Mr. Dombrowski put down his apple.
He listened to the whole thing, through the fading and the faint purring, and then he reached over with one thick finger and pressed Stop. Then he got up and went to the piano in the corner of the room, a scarred brown Baldwin with a Wilson Wildcats sticker on the side, and played a note. Then another. Then he came back and played my tape again, and went back to the piano and played the second note again, holding it down, letting it ring.
"E-flat," he said. "The one just above middle C. Your piano's a hair flat. Old instrument?"