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I should tell you about our house, because the house matters to what happened, the way the shape of a room matters to how a sound carries in it.
It was a narrow two-story frame house with green asbestos shingles, built in the twenties for a family who worked at the Hammermill paper plant, my father said, though by the time we lived there everyone on our block either worked at General Electric out in Lawrence Park or knew someone who did. My father had been at GE for fourteen years, building locomotives. He came home smelling of cold metal and Lava soap, and he could tell you the horsepower of a Dash 8 the way some fathers could tell you batting averages.
Downstairs there was the living room, the dining room nobody ate in except at holidays, and the kitchen at the back with its yellow linoleum and the wall phone beside the refrigerator. Upstairs there were three bedrooms off a short hall and one bathroom with a pink tub. My room was at the top of the stairs, directly above the living room. The heating vent in my floor was just a square iron grate that opened onto the ceiling below, so the warm air could rise, and if I lay with my ear near it I could hear everything that happened downstairs. I heard the eleven o'clock news through that grate. I heard my parents talk about money after we'd gone to bed. I heard, once, my mother crying, so quietly that at first I thought it was the furnace.
So I was the one who heard it first.
It was the Tuesday after the piano came, the first of December. Oliver had finally come out from under the bed that weekend and begun prowling the house in a slow, considering way, as if he were measuring it. He walked the baseboards. He sat for a long time in front of the basement door. He jumped up onto the kitchen counter, and my mother said "Off" without even turning around, and he got off, which surprised everyone. He would not let Sam pick him up, but he would let me scratch the white patch under his chin, and when I did it he closed his eyes and leaned his whole weight into my fingers like I was holding him up.
That night I went to bed at nine-thirty, after Moonlighting, which I was not technically allowed to watch but watched anyway from the stairs. My parents went up at ten-thirty. I heard my father's feet on the stairs, heavy, and then my mother's, light, and then the click of their door, and then the house settled into its night sounds: the furnace kicking on, the tick of the radiator in the hall, a car going by on Wolf Street with its tires hissing in the slush.
I was nearly asleep when the note came.
One note. Not loud, but very clear, rising up through the grate in my floor and into my room as if someone had set it there on the rug. It was a soft note, round, a little below the middle of things, and it hung in the air a long time, longer than I thought a note could, slowly thinning out until I couldn't tell whether I was hearing it or remembering it.
I sat up. The clock radio on my nightstand said 11:52 in red numbers.
I waited for another note. There wasn't one. There was only the furnace and the radiator and the fading ring, and then nothing.
I got out of bed and went down the stairs in my socks, keeping to the edges where the treads didn't creak, which I had learned from years of sneaking down for the end of Johnny Carson. The living room was dark except for the streetlight coming orange through the front curtains. The piano was a black shape against the wall.