"Ghosts can go into animals," Sam said. "Jeremy Kaczmarek's cousin saw it on In Search Of. Leonard Nimoy said."
"Leonard Nimoy," my father said, "is a Vulcan. He's got no business telling anybody about ghosts."
"Grandma isn't a ghost," I said. "She's in heaven. Or she's nothing. But she's not in the cat."
"Libby," my mother said, which was what she said about almost everything I said that December.
My father's theory was that it was a mouse. Old houses had mice, and an old piano was a mouse's paradise, all that felt and wood, and Oliver was a hunter, and he was trying to get at it. He went down to the basement with a flashlight and came back up and said he didn't see any droppings, but that didn't mean anything, mice were sneaky, and on Saturday he went to Eckerd and bought two Victor traps and baited them with Jif and put them under the piano. They sat there for three weeks and caught nothing but a dust bunny and, once, Sam's big toe.
My theory was that I didn't have a theory. I had questions, and I wrote them down in the back of my green spiral notebook, the one I used for social studies, under the heading OLIVER, underlined twice.
Why the same key?
Why at night? (Times: 11:52, 11:48, 11:55, 11:51, 11:50. Always just before 12.)
Why does he go to Mom and Dad's room after?
Why does Mom look like that?
That last one I wrote and then scribbled out so hard the pen went through the paper, and then I wrote it again underneath, smaller.
What I did not tell anyone, because I didn't know how, was that I'd started to wait for it. I would lie in bed with the lights off and the red numbers on my clock radio moving toward midnight, and something in me would grow tight and listening, and when the note came up through the floor grate I would let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding. Some nights I went down to watch. Most nights I didn't. It began to feel like something private that I shouldn't be spying on, like reading somebody's mail.