Finally, Duster pushed his plate forward. “We have one more thing we want to show you before we head back up to the lodge.”
“It’s close to here,” Bonnie said, standing and starting to collect the paper plates and silverware.
Talia and Ryan both helped Bonnie as Duster went to the back of the SUV and pulled out some sort of small instrument in a backpack.
It took only a few minutes before they had everything cleaned up and back inside the car.
“This way,” Duster said, striding off toward a flat bridge where the road crossed over the stream, his long coat flowing behind him, his cowboy boots kicking up a small cloud of dust with each step.
He kept going along the road as Talia followed. Ryan was behind her and Bonnie behind him. Bonnie only had on jeans, tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved blouse, but Duster had kept on his long coat and cowboy hat. Talia was starting to doubt he went anywhere without it on.
The dirt road went up a side valley off the canyon, climbing at a decent slope, just enough to start to wind Talia.
“How high are we here?” Ryan asked.
“Around seven thousand feet,” Bonnie said.
Talia nodded. No wonder she was getting winded with a short hike.
Duster had said the road led into a patented mining claim that was still being worked in the next valley over. It seemed that patented mining claims remained when they turned this massive center of Idaho into a wilderness area. And the claims could maintain roads, the only reason there was a road even close to the old lake.
About a hundred paces up the side valley, Duster turned off the road to the left and followed what might be called a trail on generous days back toward the main valley. The trail cut along the side of the hill and kept climbing.
Around the edge of a small ridge, the trail seemed to vanish into a flat area covered with small rocks and some light brush. A couple pine trees grew tucked against the hillside on the flat area.
“This an old house site?” Ryan asked.
When he said that she could see some stones that looked like part of an old fireplace and some rocks for foundations.
“It was,” Bonnie said. “A beautiful home.”
Duster just nodded to that.
Talia was surprised. They were about fifty feet over the large valley floor. She could almost see the lake in the distance and from here looking back up the valley, she could see the magnificent Monumental Summit Lodge spanning across the top of the summit. That lodge had to be three miles away and a thousand feet above them and it still looked majestic and impressive.
“This is called Melody Ridge,” Duster said. “It seems to be where the clearest sound from the pianos can be heard.”
“Seriously?” Talia said. She was far, far from convinced about this idea of still hearing pianos playing from over a hundred years in the past. Nothing in all of her study had ever shown such a thing possible. But what she and Ryan had talked about had her excited at the quest.
They all stood, silently listening. All she could hear was the sound of the water running in the stream below them.
“In the winter,” Bonnie said, “in the snow, without the sounds of the stream, the pianos can really be clear here.”
Talia said nothing.
Duster set the pack he had been carrying on a rock and indicated Talia should take a look at the device inside it.
“Recognize what this is?” Duster asked.
She knew exactly what it was. It was a simple amplifier used to pick up sounds outside human hearing range. She noticed that the one Duster had was just a simple amplifier attached to a light battery pack.
“I do,” she said. “Usually it’s attached to recording or playback equipment and is plugged into a circuit, but a battery pack allows for less electrical interference.”
“The recording part of all this was too much at this point to lug around,” Duster said. “You used these before?”
“Regularly,” Talia said.
He indicated that she should work the machine.
She got it turned on and then focused on the stream sounds and had the device block the sound of the stream and the water, filtering it out. Then she filtered out the slight sounds of a breeze through the pine trees.
“So I suppose I’m looking for music?” she asked.
“More like music mixed with the sounds of a valley alive with activity,” Bonnie said. “Boost it if you find anything like that so we can all hear it.”
Talia nodded.
She expected to find nothing.
But after a moment she was wrong. There was an area of waves that under normal conditions would be considered just very faint background noise. But up here in the mountains, there were no other background noises that she hadn’t already filtered.
The sun beat on her back as she knelt beside the rock and filtered out one area after another, leaving only the unknown sound waves.
Then she amplified them so they all could hear them.
At first it sounded to her like a jumble of just noise.
Then the sound of a hammer banging came clear. And then other sounds of an alive valley, as if ghosts from a hundred years before were suddenly working around them.
And behind it all, clear as anything she had ever heard, were the sounds of numbers of pianos playing various songs, the music echoing.
She stood and stepped back, staring at the device as the sounds filled the flat area around them.
“Shit,” Ryan said softly, as if his voice might disturb sounds coming through time from over a hundred years before.
She looked at him. Ryan’s face was white, his eyes wide as he stared out at the empty valley listening to the sounds from the past.
She also stared down the valley toward the lake that covered the old mining town as around them, the sounds of pianos filled the air.
Impossible pianos.
Pianos that had not played a note in this valley for a very, very long time.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
December 24th, 1994
Outside of Boise, Idaho
A LIGHT SNOW kept the old Ford’s windshield wipers busy as David and Elaine headed down the gravel country road toward the lights of the city.
“Silent Night” was playing on the portable radio on the seat between them. She was singing along, her voice pure and clear, even though a little drunk. The party, just south of town in the foothills, had been a good one and they had stayed far later than they planned.
David looked over at his wife of six months. She had dark brown hair that flowed long and straight down her back. Her eyes were a dark green and her face lightly wrinkled with laugh lines. While David was in school, she worked at a dress shop. Her desire was to someday design clothes, and he knew she would be, would have been, good at it.
“Son of a bitch,” he said out loud. “Stout was right.”
“Who was right?” Elaine said, then went back to singing and watching the beautiful countryside flash by through the snow.
David glanced once more at her and then back at the road. He couldn’t let her die.
Stout had known that.
David braked the car to a quick stop on the side of the road. He turned off the car, yanked the keys out of the ignition and got out. Then as hard as he could, he tossed the keys into the brush. In the silence of the night he could hear them catch brush as they landed.
That was his only set. Now there would be no way he could drive again tonight.
“David,” Elaine said, getting out of the car and coming around to him. “What are you doing?”
“Saving our lives,” he said.
He grabbed her and held her tight, relishing in the feeling of her against him after such a long time. He had never remarried because there had never been anyone again he felt this way about. No one woman who had felt this good.
The faint sounds of “Silent Night” drifted from the portable radio in the car. The song was about half over.
He didn’t have much ti
me.
“Are you all right?” Elaine asked. “Why did you throw the...”
“I’m fine. Like I said, I was just saving our lives. But now, before that song ends, I need to save a friendship. A very important friendship to me. And I’m going to need your help.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
December 24th, 2015
Boise, Idaho
STOUT LET HIS hand slip off the jukebox as the last strains of the song faded into the empty Garden Lounge. David’s glass was in Stout’s hand. Stout looked down at it, feeling its heavy weight.
David must have stopped the wreck.
Of course he had. It was the only thing he could have done.
“Well, you idiot,” Stout said to himself just to hear some noise. “Looks as if you’ve gone and done it now.”
He moved slowly around behind the bar and set David’s glass beside the other three, name out. “I’m going to have to find some special place for these.” He laughed. “To remind me of another life that never was.”
The silence seemed to echo in the room. It was going to be a very long, very quiet Christmas.
He refilled his glass of eggnog and moved around to what had been David’s favorite stool. The jukebox seemed to call to him. “Come play me, Mr. Radley Stout. Come and see your old girlfriend again. Ask her to marry you. What would it hurt?”
“No,” Stout said, loud enough to echo between the empty tables and booths. He squarely faced the glasses on the back bar and held up his mug in a toast.
“Merry Christmas, my friends.”
Then he added softly, “Wherever you are.”
The empty glasses didn’t return his toast, so he went ahead and drank alone. He had the sneaking feeling he was going to be doing that for a while.
He had finished the eggnog and was about to start closing down when someone knocked on the front door.
“I’m closed,” he yelled. “Merry Christmas.” He was in no mood for visitors now.
But the person knocked again.
“All right, all right. Hang on a minute.”
He went around to the back bar and, being careful to not look at the four glasses lined up there like so many tombstones, retrieved the keys and headed for the front door.
As he unlocked it and swung it open he heard, “Merry Christmas, Mr. Radley Stout.”
David and a woman about his same age stood arm in arm facing the door. He wore an airline overcoat and she had on a nice leather jacket.
“David,” Stout said. “How...?”
David unhooked himself from the woman’s arm and extended a perfectly healthy right hand for Stout to shake.
“Your hand,” Stout said as he shook it. “You didn’t...?”
Again he stopped. There was no way David could know about the wreck and his lame hand if it hadn’t happened. And in this world it hadn’t.
“This is my wife, Elaine,” David said.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Stout took her hand. He felt as if he was shaking the hand of a ghost.
“Please come in.” He stepped back, the feeling of shock washing over him.
David and Elaine moved into the bar. Both of them walked directly to the jukebox.
“But how could you remember?” Stout asked moving up beside them.
“He doesn’t,” Elaine said, laughing with a tense sort of laugh.
David only nodded and then turned to face Stout.
“Christmas Eve, twenty-one years ago, Elaine said I suddenly called out the name ‘Stout,’ then stopped the car. I then proceeded to toss the car keys into the brush. For what crazy reason, I have no idea.”
Stout laughed. “I do. Pretty smart thinking if you want to make sure you can’t drive that night.”
“But why would I want to do that?” David said. “And how would you know anything about it? This entire thing has been driving me nuts for over two decades.”
Stout waved his hand. “I’ll try to explain in a minute. For now please go on.”
Elaine reached into her purse, pulled out a few tattered pieces of paper, and handed them to Stout. “For the next minute after he tossed the keys into the brush, David madly wrote this while repeating your name and the name of this bar over and over again so that I would remember it. He made me promise that no matter what he claimed he didn’t remember, we would come to this bar on this Christmas Eve at this time to meet you. Not one minute before or one minute after.”
David shrugged. “Damned if I can remember why. It was as if I was possessed.”
“In a way, you were,” Stout said.
“You know what else he said?” Elaine asked. She looked at David and he motioned for her to go ahead. “He said it was his Christmas present to you.”
David looked at Stout. “Did it work?”
Stout nodded, afraid to say anything. But he could feel the smile trying to break out of the sides of his face. And after a moment all three of them were laughing just because Stout was smiling so hard. He was going to enjoy these new friends.
Stout motioned for them to take a seat at the bar. “Boy have I got a story to tell you.”
He scampered like a kid around behind the bar and grabbed the glass with David’s name on it.
“And for you, David,” Stout said as he held the glass up for them to see. “A very special Christmas present and a toast to friendship.”
PART TWO
Lost and Found
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
June 10th, 2020
Central Wilderness Area, Idaho
AFTER THE INCREDIBLE sounds of an alive, people-filled valley and piano music from the past, Ryan felt more in shock than anything else. The four of them had talked some about the valley and the sounds on the walk back to the SUV and then on the drive back up the valley. But then Duster had cut off conversation just before they got to the lodge.
“We have much more to talk about at dinner tonight,” Duster had said. “So we’ll meet in a private room behind the dining room at 6 p.m.”
Duster had parked the SUV beside the lodge and then he and Bonnie had gone inside, leaving Ryan and Talia alone together under the tall pine trees that surrounded the parking area on the ridge.
The day was still warm since it was only about four in the afternoon. A slight breeze felt nice against Ryan’s bare arms and the smell of hot pine needles seemed extra strong.
“You up for a drink on the deck?” Ryan asked Talia. He was really thirsty and needed to just sit and think and talk.
She nodded, but said nothing.
Ten minutes later they both had glasses of iced water and Diet Cokes and were sitting at one end of the long deck looking back out over the valley they had just been in.
Only two other tables were occupied, and they were both near the other end, so Ryan and Talia had a very private place to talk.
As they both stared at the valley, Ryan had to get the one question out that he needed to ask. “I can’t imagine those two doing so, but was there any way the sounds of those pianos were faked or recorded?”
Talia just shook her head. “No chance at all. Those sounds existed on that old cabin site. That instrument that Duster had was state of the art and could pick up and filter out sounds at extreme frequencies.”
Ryan nodded. “So where did the sounds come from?”
“I have no idea,” Talia said. “I would have to record them and analyze them in a modern lab. If they were manufactured in any way and played back from another point in the valley, I would be able to detect that.”
“But if they were not?” Ryan asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Talia said.
He could tell she was upset. He didn’t blame her. He was as well. The idea of Bonnie and Duster faking the sounds was just too silly to imagine. So that left Bonnie and Duster’s theory, that the sound waves could travel through time.
That simple idea, backed up by many hearing the piano music at different times over decades, tore apart a lot of belief systems.
Even the groundbreaking work in mathematics on time and energy and matter that Bonnie and Duster had done didn’t account for this being possible.
“Any other evidence of anything like this before?” Ryan asked.
“I would have to go back and scan through data from other experiments,” she said. “But honestly, with sound, we are always filtering out unknown factors.”
“You would have filtered that out?” Ryan asked.
Talia nodded. “Most likely. The universe seems to almost have a background noise that mathematics has not yet explained.”
“Maybe we are about to explain it with this project,” Ryan said, starting to lose the feeling of shock and regaining the excitement.
“We don’t even know what the project is yet, exactly,” Talia said.
“I have a hunch we’re going to know tonight,” Ryan said, smiling at her.
She nodded, smiling slightly as well. “It would be exciting, wouldn’t it?”
“Challenging,” Ryan said.
They both stared out over the beautiful valley, the steep walls seeming to funnel everything down to the stream. The sun had left the valley floor, leaving the trees and brush and the dirt road in dark shadows.
In that valley Ryan knew that pianos had echoed from open saloon doors for years.
And now, if what Bonnie and Duster said was happening was real, those echoes had made their way through time.
And that scared Ryan and excited him more than he wanted to ever admit.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
December 24th, 2018
Boise, Idaho
FRED JUST FELT stunned. She came through the heavy front door of the old hotel with a face as young as yesterday. And for just a moment, the stale piss-smell of the thick air, the stained and faded linoleum floors, the peeling paint on the smoke-yellowed walls in the front foyer simply vanished.
For just a moment, the long, dull days were forgotten.
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