"In case what?"
"She didn't say. I didn't ask." I heard her blow her nose. "Your grandma was a proud woman, Libby. Proud and stubborn and quiet. And your mother is her daughter. Those two loved each other something fierce and never once in twenty years knew how to say so. They talked on the telephone every Sunday about the weather." She laughed, wetly. "The weather. Can you imagine."
The clock on the stove said I'd been on the phone eleven minutes. My father had gotten his notice. I didn't care.
"Mrs. Kostelnik," I said. "Is there something in the piano?"
"In the piano?"
"A man came to look at it. To buy it. He said that key is worn down like a staircase. And he said whoever did it meant it. And I just thought—if somebody did something every single night for twenty-one years, they'd want to leave something. Wouldn't they? To explain?"
Another long silence. Then: "Oh my Lord," Mrs. Kostelnik said. "Oh my Lord. I told her. I told your mother at the funeral, and I don't think she heard a word I said, she was in such a state. June told me, the spring before she passed. She said, 'If anything happens to me, Edna, you tell Carrie the song is in the piano. Under the lid, where the music goes.' I thought she meant the sheet music. In the bench. I told Carrie, look in the bench. But maybe—" She stopped. "Honey, you go look. You go look, and then you call me back. Call me collect. Don't you dare pay for it."
* * *
There was sheet music in the bench. I'd looked before, the first week. Under the hinged seat there were stacks of yellowed books, Schirmer's Library and John Thompson's Modern Course for the Piano and a Methodist hymnal and a book of Stephen Foster songs and a big floppy book of Rodgers and Hammerstein. I went through every one of them again, page by page, kneeling on the living room rug while Oliver watched me from the radiator cover. There was nothing handwritten. There was a pressed four-leaf clover in the hymnal, brown as a tea stain, and a Woolworth's receipt from 1958 in the Stephen Foster, and that was all.
Under the lid, where the music goes.
I stood up and looked at the piano. On the front of it, above the keys, there was a long hinged ledge of wood that folded down to make a shelf for sheet music. The music desk. It was folded up flat now, and it was part of the front panel, the one Mr. Haines had unlatched and lifted off.