ONCE LOST

by Blake Pierce

  Chief Sinard scratched his chin.

  He said, “I hear that he’s kind of semi-retired these days. Probably not altogether by choice. As he got older, he got crankier—and meaner too, I hear. Kids who start studying with him generally don’t last long, and parents don’t like him either. Kids in Angier generally get their piano lessons at school or from some of the younger private teachers.”

  Riley’s interest was thoroughly piqued now.

  She said, “My partner and I need to go talk to him.”

  *

  Chief Sinard drove Riley, Jenn, and Harold and Dorothy Struthers back to Angier in his SUV. He told the Struthers couple that he’d have their own car returned to them. Neither of them was in any emotional condition to drive, and they didn’t argue with him. Dorothy was more subdued now, and Harold remained in a quiet state of shock.

  After the chief dropped the Struthers couple off at their house, he took Riley and Jenn back to City Hall, where the car they’d been using was still parked, and gave them directions to Alec Castle’s house.

  Jenn was quiet as she drove. Riley wondered whether she was offended by how she had stopped her from questioning the Struthers.

  It couldn’t be helped, Riley thought.

  She turned her thoughts to the situation at hand.

  “Something is bothering me,” she said to Jenn. “When we first interviewed Dorothy and Harold, Dorothy only said that Holly had lost interest in piano, the same as how she’d lost interest in lots of other things. She didn’t say anything about the teacher.”

  “Why does that bother you?” Jenn asked in a rather distant voice.

  Riley thought for a moment.

  “It just seems odd, I guess. Almost as if Dorothy mentioned the piano as …”

  Riley’s voice trailed off.

  “As a distraction?” Jenn asked.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”

  Jenn shook her head.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “That woman was in a lot of denial when we first talked to her. She was repressing any thoughts of anything bad that might have happened to Holly. That would include any thoughts about Alec Castle.”

  Riley was impressed by Jenn’s insight. As they fell silent again, Riley realized that Jenn wasn’t angry with her after all. Instead, Jenn seemed to be lost in her own thoughts.

  Maybe she’s got a theory, Riley thought.

  Or maybe it was something else—something that Riley wasn’t going to like.

  She still didn’t know whether she could trust her new partner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  The house at the address they’d been given for Alec Castle wasn’t at all what Riley had come to expect in Angier.

  “Is this the right place?” she asked when Jenn pulled their car up in front of the place.

  “I don’t know,” Jenn said. “It is the address they gave us.”

  The house was a brick bungalow much like the one where Katy Philbin’s family lived. It was even in the same quiet neighborhood. But this lawn was overgrown with weeds and wild vines climbed up the walls.

  At first glance, it looked like no one lived here.

  But then Jenn pointed and said, “It does look like that car has been in use.”

  Tracks worn into the weedy driveway showed that the old car parked there had been going in and out.

  Jenn parked their car and they both got out. From closer up, they could see curtains hanging at the windows, drawn nearly shut against the warm and pleasant day.

  Riley saw one curtain move slightly, a sign that the house probably was inhabited.

  She and Jenn walked along a narrow stone pathway onto the front porch, then knocked on the door.

  Almost immediately, a tall, elderly man answered.

  “Yes?” he said in a dark, low-pitched voice.

  “Are you Alec Castle?” Riley asked.

  “I am.”

  Riley and Jenn introduced themselves. Castle seemed to be only mildly surprised.

  “What’s your business here?” he asked.

  “We’d like to come inside and talk,” Jenn said.

  Castle didn’t speak for a moment. He stared back and forth at Jenn and Riley with piercing blue eyes. He was cadaverously thin, and his thick mane of hair was silvery gray.

  Finally, without a word, he turned and walked into the house, leaving the door open.

  Is he inviting us in? Riley wondered.

  She looked at Jenn, who seemed to be wondering the same thing.

  Jenn shrugged, and they both went on inside.

  They followed Castle into a large, dimly lit living room. The drapes Riley had noticed from outside were dark and heavy. The light that filtered through the narrow opening between them was barely supplemented by the glow from a little table lamp.

  Quite unlike the outside, the interior was clean and orderly. But the room struck Riley as strange even so.

  White doilies were tidily arranged on the arms and backs of antique furniture. The walls were covered with aged floral wallpaper, the pattern interrupted here and there by old photographs of dour-looking family members. Shelves were filled with decorative china and porcelain figures.

  Since she’d come to Angier, Riley had often felt that she’d stepped back in time—but never more so than right now. The room looked and felt as though a hundred years had passed it by.

  Something specifically odd about the place was nagging at Riley.

  It took her a few moments to bring it into focus.

  This isn’t a man’s house, she realized. This house had been decorated by a woman a long time ago.

  And little or nothing had been altered in all the years since.

  Two baby grand pianos were positioned back to back at the far end of the room. As if unaware of the agents’ presence, Castle sat down at one of the pianos and started to play from memory.

  Riley wasn’t very familiar with classical music, but the piece sounded familiar—something by Chopin, she guessed. The man’s hands appeared to be gnarled with arthritis, but he played skillfully and gracefully even so.

  Continuing to play, Castle asked again, “What’s your business?”

  Standing next to Jenn, Riley felt weirdly stranded. She wished they could sit down, but the nearest furniture was a little too far away for conversation, especially if they had to talk over piano music.

  Still standing, she asked, “Did you ever have a student named Holly Struthers?”

  He stopped playing at the sound of the name.

  “Not really, no,” he said.

  Then he started playing exactly where he’d left off.

  Riley said, “Her parents say that you did.”

  Castle kept on playing. He closed his eyes as if lost in the music.

  “She came for one lesson,” he said. “It didn’t work out. She didn’t come back.”

  Riley hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Are you aware that Holly was murdered?”

  Riley knew that the news of the discovery of Holly’s body probably hadn’t reached him.

  All the better to gauge his reaction, she thought.

  But Castle didn’t stop playing. His expression didn’t change.

  “No,” he said.

  A chill went down Riley’s spine.

  His response struck her as barely human.

  She swallowed down her shock and asked, “Did you happen to have a student named Katy Philbin?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell us where you were on Wednesday night?”

  Still playing, Castle said, “Yes, I can. I was at a piano recital. A student of mine was playing at her home for her friends and family. Her name is Avery Dalton. She’s not my student anymore, I’m sorry to say. She was the last I had.”

  “What happened?” Jenn asked.

  “She played a few Bach inventions and Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata. It was unbearable. I was shocked. Awful phrasing and dynamics, dreadful fingering, sloppy tempos, countless mistakes.
She forgot everything she’d been taught, as if she’d never studied with me at all. I found it personally insulting. But her family and friends loved it.”

  He played a few measures without talking.

  “Then she showed off with an encore,” he continued. “‘The Flight of the Bumblebee,’ which I had strictly ordered her not to play. Such a banal selection, so vulgar! Girls always want to play it—all those chromatic sixteenth notes played so ridiculously fast, no need for phrasing or nuance. And of course, everybody loved it. Her parents looked so proud.”

  His face twisted into an ugly sneer.

  “Well, I’d had enough by then. I stood up in front of everybody and told them exactly what I thought of the girl’s performance. And I told them exactly what I thought of their taste and discernment. Such philistines!”

  Castle came to the end of the piece he was playing.

  He said, “But that’s nothing new in this town. I’ve had to deal with it all my life. Imagine growing up in a wretched little town with no culture at all—a sensitive little boy, bullied every single day. And the bullying never stopped. It just took subtler forms—social snubs, smirking disrespect, mockery behind my back.”

  He shook his head wearily.

  “My mother was the only one who ever understood me. And she’s gone. Long gone.”

  He started playing another piece.

  Riley’s mind was clicking away as she imagined what his life had been like.

  This had been Alec Castle’s childhood home, and he had lived here with his mother until her death. Riley guessed that his father had abandoned his family at one time or another, probably when he was still a child.

  Had he struggled along the way, weighing his devotion to his mother against fantasies of being a renowned pianist?

  Riley thought maybe so.

  And what was left of him was a bitter shell of a man who hated everyone around him.

  He wanted revenge against them all.

  Was he capable of murder?

  Riley didn’t doubt it.

  For one thing, she sensed that he was physically much stronger than he looked. He clearly did have a pianist’s powerful arms.

  She was determined not to leave this house until she knew the truth one way or another.

  She still hadn’t asked about his whereabouts when Holly had disappeared. She was just opening her mouth to bring that up when Jenn surprised her by speaking up.

  “I’ve studied piano some myself. Do you mind if I …?”

  Jenn gestured to the piano.

  Castle stared at her. For a long moment it seemed that he was not going to reply at all.

  Then he got up from his piano bench and stood back. Jenn sat in his place.

  She immediately started playing. Riley was surprised to hear the same Chopin piece that Castle had just played.

  And to Riley’s untrained ear, Jenn played it about as well as Castle.

  Castle scowled angrily.

  In a sharp voice he said, “None of that, girl.”

  Jenn stopped playing.

  Castle picked up a conductor’s baton.

  “I want scales,” he said. “All twelve major scales.”

  Jenn obediently started playing a series of scales—perfectly accurately at first. During the first couple of scales, Castle simply waved his baton with her beat. But then he started tapping the keyboard with his baton, around her hands. Jenn became distracted and flustered, and she started making mistakes. At every wrong note, Castle struck her hands sharply with his baton.

  Jenn finally stopped playing and put her hands in her lap.

  Riley thought she saw tears in her eyes.

  In a thick voice, Jenn said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Castle. My partner and I will leave now.”

  Without another word or glance, Jenn got up from the bench and hurried to the front door.

  Riley was flabbergasted. She had a slew of questions she wanted to ask Castle.

  But Jenn was on her way out the front door. Riley felt that she had no choice but to rush after her.

  What on earth had just happened?

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  Without a word to the piano teacher, Riley followed Jenn out the door. When she got outside of the house, she saw that the younger agent was hurrying toward the car. Riley broke into a run and caught up with her.

  She said, “Jenn, what are you doing? We’ve got a lot more questions for that man.”

  “No, we don’t,” Jenn said, opening the driver’s side door.

  “Hold it,” Riley said.

  Jenn froze in place, staring down at the car door.

  “You’re not driving,” Riley said firmly. “Not in your current state of mind.”

  Without comment, Jenn walked around to the other side of the car and got in on the passenger’s side.

  Riley looked back at Alec Castle’s house. The front door had been closed behind her and the house looked as uninhabited as it had when they’d first driven up. She opened the car door and sat down the wheel, but had no intention of driving anywhere—not yet.

  Riley said, “Listen to me. I don’t know if Castle’s our killer, but he’s our most likely suspect so far. Likelier than Trip Crozier, I think. We’ve got to get back in there. We’ve got to push him harder.”

  Jenn drew a deep sigh. “He’s got an alibi,” she said. “The girl’s recital—Avery Dalton, he said her name was. We can check it out.”

  Riley was growing more flustered by the second.

  “Jenn, for all we know right now, he made the whole thing up. Besides, a kid’s recital doesn’t last all night long. It’s not nearly enough of an alibi to prove he didn’t kill Holly Struthers. And I didn’t even get a chance to ask him where he was when Katy Philbin was murdered.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jenn said.

  “It does matter!”

  Now Jenn looked directly at Riley. Her voice was suddenly sharp and loud.

  “Castle is not our killer, OK?” she said. “He’s not a killer at all.”

  Riley fell into a stunned silence.

  Jenn took a long, deep breath.

  “Don’t laugh when I tell you this,” she said. “But when I was a girl, I wanted to be a ballerina.”

  Riley didn’t know what to say.

  Why would I laugh? she wondered.

  And what did this have to do with Alec Castle?

  She waited for Jenn to say more.

  “That was why I studied piano,” Jenn said. “To get a deeper musical background, to make myself into a better dancer.”

  Jenn paused for a moment.

  “My dance teacher’s name was Mr. Katz. Everybody said he was one of the best dance teachers in Richmond. His students often went on to study in New York, and some of them wound up in professional companies.”

  Jenn swallowed hard.

  “I think I was really quite a good dancer. Actually, Mr. Katz told me that I was good—very good. He told me I had real promise, that I could really be a professional dancer someday, maybe even famous. But he also kept telling me how fat I was, telling cruel jokes about my weight. He made me write down every single thing I ate for every meal. No matter how little I ate, he always said it was too much. I was making myself crazy, starving myself. And I couldn’t get thin enough. Ever.”

  Jenn forced a bitter laugh.

  “Well, I wasn’t fat. I was just big-boned and athletic and muscular—like I am now, I guess. What Mr. Katz wouldn’t tell me was that I was just the wrong body type to be a ballerina. Ballerinas have to be thin and willowy. All the dieting in the world couldn’t change that. I could never get thin enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Riley said. “But what does this have to do with—?”

  Jenn interrupted, her voice shaking with anger.

  “The thing is, he could have just told me. I was never going to be a ballerina, and it wasn’t my fault or anybody else’s, I just got stuck with the wrong genes for it. That didn’t mean I couldn’t keep on dancing and
really enjoy it. Maybe I could even take up choreography or teaching.”

  Jenn let out a growl of quiet fury.

  “But he just kept lying to me about it, saying if only I weren’t so grotesquely fat, I could take the dance world by storm. And the only reason he treated me like that was …”

  She fell quiet.

  Riley finished her sentence.

  “Sheer cruelty.”

  Jenn nodded.

  “That’s right. I took me a long time to realize it wasn’t just me he treated like that. He had it in for girls especially. If a girl wasn’t a natural-born star, he did everything he could to make her life miserable, all the while building up her hopes. Girls who studied with him got injuries left and right, working themselves too hard, starving themselves for no good reason. He didn’t care. It was all a game to him.”

  Jenn lifted her head and looked at Riley.

  “He was a misogynist—and a sadist. And I learned a lot from him about misogynists and sadists, and still more while training for the BAU. I learned that there are two kinds of sadists—the kind who torture and rape and kill, and the kind who are just petty and mean. And believe me, there’s a big difference. Mr. Katz wouldn’t kill anybody. He was too much of a coward for that. And he enjoyed the torture too much to ever end it. He kept his victims going as long as he could get them to study with him.”

  Jenn shook herself, as if trying to throw off her anger.

  “I was testing Alex Castle just now by asking if I could play for him. I knew he’d show his true character. I could tell as soon as he started hitting me with that baton—not even hard enough to hurt really bad physically, just enough to make me feel thoroughly humiliated. That was all he really wanted—to make me cry if he possibly could. That’s what he does. That’s why Holly was crying after the one lesson she took from him.”

  Jenn swallowed hard and wiped her eyes.