The Ghost Sonata

by Allison, Jennifer

“Just listen to this first.”

  “Don’t tell me; you made up with Julian, and now you’re in love again.”

  “Oh, please. Wendy, I’ve just been to Professor Waldgrave’s house, and he told me everything! I know exactly what happened to Charles Drummond, and why his ghost has been haunting this competition!”

  As Wendy listened to the story of the untimely death of the fourteen-year-old boy and the fate of the music he had written, she felt a strange feeling of release. A crucial piece of a maddening puzzle had finally fit in place, allowing her to see everything clearly. The music had finally been performed, and Charles Drummond had reached his audience. Still, her mind spun with bewildering questions about her own bizarre experience in Oxford.

  “Gilda,” she ventured as the two of them returned to the theater to find Gilda’s coat, “with all the musicians around here, why do you think his ghost picked me to play that music?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” said Gilda. “And I really don’t know. Maybe he just liked the way you play. Or maybe you were the only person who was willing to listen to him.”

  “I couldn’t help listening to him.”

  “See? You could be a little clairaudient, Wendy.”

  “I don’t think I want to be.”

  “I know it’s scary, but if you learned to control it more, it could be a great skill to have for our psychic investigations.”

  “You mean, it would be a great skill for your psychic investigations.”

  “I think we solved this haunting together, don’t you?”

  “I guess. Except I was the one who was haunted, so that’s kind of different.”

  “Can you imagine what we could accomplish back home? With your clairaudient skills and my psychic detective know-how, I bet we could solve things we’ve never even dreamed about!”

  “We’ll see.” At the moment, Wendy simply wanted to sleep long and hard, without dreams of any kind. She wanted to go home and face her parents’ prying questions, to play the piano and see her father tilt his head as he listened for mistakes, to hear her little brother’s nonsensical chatter, to walk through clean rooms decorated with her mother’s carefully positioned good-luck charms—the red frogs, the money plants, the mirrors. Whether or not they actually brought luck, they would feel familiar and safe, and for at least the first few days, she would be happy to be home, whether or not she was returning as a competition winner.

  53

  The Winners

  “Judges Face Discord in Selecting Competition Winner”

  Fifteen-year-old pianist Julian Graham of Crawling has been declared the winner of Oxford University’s Young International Virtuosos Competition. He will receive a prize of 5,000 pounds along with a potentially career-launching debut with the London Symphony Orchestra.

  “I’m dead chuffed,” was the winner’s response to the news. “I’m in shock, really.”

  Judges acknowledged the difficulty of choosing a winner from among the ten finalists in this year’s competition. “The environment was fraught with an unusual degree of discord and argument,” commented competition founder and concert pianist Eugene Winterbottom. “At midnight last night, I was certain that this would be the first year we would not be able to declare a winner, but thankfully, by morning, we had all come to an agreement.”

  Nigel Waldgrave initially favored the clean, accurate playing of pianist Ming Fong Chen, but Winterbottom countered that her performance was “unoriginal” and “completely derivative of the pianist Lang Lang.”

  Further complicating the decision-making process was a surprise musical selection by pianist Wendy Choy, who opted at the last minute to perform an unknown composition by the deceased young pianist Charles Drummond, who had once been a student of Nigel Waldgrave’s.

  “The performance was top-notch,” Winterbottom stated, “but Miss Choy completely disregarded the competition guidelines for acceptable repertoire.”

  Nigel Waldgrave hesitated to comment on Wendy Choy’s performance, noting that he had “strong emotions” associated with this music and the untimely death of its composer. He did not feel that he could judge its merits objectively.

  Celebrated pianist Rhiannon Maddox disagreed with Choy’s disqualification, almost withdrawing in protest at one point in the evening. “If we’re committed to rewarding artistry in this competition, it seemed a travesty to disqualify this unique performance based on a technicality.”

  Although she failed to win the top prize, Wendy Choy’s performance of Charles Drummond’s Sonata in A Minor has generated a flurry of interest from Oxford musicians and concertgoers who are keen to know more about the haunting melody and distinctive, modern harmonies written by a young local teen whose life ended four years ago in a car accident. Perhaps most intriguing and bizarre are the claims by Miss Choy of the “paranormal” means by which she and her best friend, Gilda Joyce, a self-proclaimed “psychic investigator,” discovered the music.

  “If I couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of this music myself,” Nigel Waldgrave commented, “I would have assumed this was merely an attention-seeking prank. As it stands, I have to acknowledge the possibility that these two girls had some psychic connection with a dead musician.”

  “This experience has changed me,” Wendy Choy noted. “I didn’t win the competition, but it made me see music differently. . . . I guess as something more interesting and mysterious than I realized.”

  Gilda Joyce, who also served as a page-turner for the competition, lamented her best friend’s loss of the winning prize, but offered their investigative services to potential clients throughout the British Isles at “reasonable rates.”

  “Solving mysteries is what we do,” said Miss Joyce. “And we’re always willing to travel.”