Out of Tune

by Norah McClintock

  “Anyway,” she said in a much softer voice, “the cops think he did it. They think he killed Alicia.” She looked to me for backup. “Isn’t that right, Riley?”

  I knew Detective Martin was leaning toward that theory. Aunt Ginny hadn’t given away anything. Nor was she likely to tell me much. She was still angry with me.

  “We won’t know until they make a statement to the media, I guess,” I said.

  We talked for another half hour or so, jumping from topic to topic and time period to time period—Alicia, kindergarten, school concerts, Carrie, parents and their expectations, how crazy it seemed now that anyone had thought Carrie killed Alicia over a spot in a youth orchestra. Charlie talked about how hard it was going to be for Carrie to return to school and find out who had believed in her and who hadn’t.

  “That’s the worst,” Charlie said. He spoke from personal experience—he’d been accused of murder a while back. “One of her best friends did nothing to help her and actually went out of her way to make her look bad.” He meant Tina. “I bet that really hurt.”

  Ashleigh’s doorbell rang. It was Aunt Ginny, come to take me home.

  “That was fast,” I said when I got into the car with her.

  She didn’t say anything. She stayed silent until I got up the nerve to say something.

  “Did you close the case, Aunt Ginny?”

  “We spoke to the wife. The husband, whose real name is Brad Donnelly, has a history of domestic violence, that’s for sure. He was an officer of the courts, and look how he treated his own wife. He was out on parole. She had a restraining order and the conditions were strict—no contact with his wife or son, not to be within five hundred yards of his wife or son, no alcohol, no firearms.”

  “That didn’t do much good.”

  “We talked to the PI he hired who tracked the wife down to this general area. Once Donnelly had that information, he apparently took a leave of absence from work to come up here to look for her. She says he always had guns around the house. He liked to use them to threaten her. That’s his thing. Guns.”

  A picture flashed before my eyes—Donnelly’s gun, its barrel gaping like the jaws of hell, aimed straight at me. I started to shake.

  Aunt Ginny glanced at me. “Are you all right? You just turned as white as a sheet. Is your ankle bothering you? We’ll ice it as soon as we get home, just to be on the safe side. Unless you think you want to go to Emerg and get it checked out. Do you?”

  I rotated my sore ankle gingerly.

  “It hurts, but it’s definitely not broken. Let’s go home, Aunt Ginny.”

  For a change, Aunt Ginny was the one who wrestled the leftovers out of the fridge and heated some up for me. She insisted on helping me up the stairs to my room, even though I didn’t need help.

  “Let me know if the pain gets bad,” she said as she closed my door.

  I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, afraid to close my eyes because every time I did I saw the barrel of the gun again. Cooper—Donnelly—had come after me with a gun. He’d threatened his wife with a gun too. So why had he killed Alicia with a tree branch? Why not shoot her? True, a tree branch is easier to get rid of and much more difficult to, say, lift fingerprints from. But then why not bludgeon me the same way he’d bludgeoned Alicia? Why a gun for me and for his wife? Why not a gun for Alicia?

  There was something else that was bothering me. I crept back downstairs. Despite her obvious fatigue, Aunt Ginny was at the kitchen table, bent over a thick file.

  “What are you doing up?” she asked without turning to look at me.

  “What are you doing, Aunt Ginny? What file is that?” I caught a glimpse of the label before she closed it and covered it with her hands. “Did you search his stuff, Aunt Ginny?”

  “Whose stuff?”

  “Donnelly’s.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Did you find a necklace?”

  “What necklace?”

  “Alicia was wearing a necklace the day she died.”

  “Says who? I don’t remember anyone saying anything about a necklace.” Aunt Ginny prided herself on her memory and her ability to hold all the facts of a case in her head.

  “A kid named Simon Phillips gave her a necklace. He says she was wearing it the day she died. But I don’t remember seeing one when Charlie found her, and her dad said she wasn’t wearing any jewelry when they went to see her, and none was returned to him.” He was talking about when the Allens went to see Alicia’s body. According to Ashleigh, who heard it from her mom, who went to yoga with Alicia’s mother’s older sister, Mr. Allen had done his best to talk his wife out of going with him to the morgue, but she’d insisted. “If she was wearing it when she died, and if it’s been missing ever since, then the killer must have it. Right?”

  Aunt Ginny thumbed through the papers in her file. Her frown deepened. “I don’t see anything here about a necklace. I’ll look into it first thing in the morning. Now go to bed.”

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what Charlie had said. Why hadn’t Donnelly just followed Alicia if he wanted to find his wife? Why kill her?

  Maybe Alicia had realized she was being followed. Maybe she had confronted him. If she had, and if he’d demanded she tell, she would have refused. I was sure of it. But what if he had threatened her with a gun? Would that have made any difference?

  Say Donnelly had killed her. It wasn’t that much of a stretch. There was no doubt he’d been searching for his wife. And it was conceivable that he or the private detective he’d hired had stumbled onto the same thing I had—the link between Alicia and Jennifer. There was also no doubt that Donnelly was a violent man who was accustomed to using intimidation and force to get what he wanted. It wasn’t hard to imagine a man like that flying into a rage when confronted by a girl who refused to tell him what he wanted to know.

  But what about the necklace? Simon was sure Alicia had been wearing it the day she died. He’d even asked her parents about it at the memorial service. If Simon was right, if she’d been wearing it that day, what had happened to it? There was no mention of a necklace anywhere in Aunt Ginny’s file, and I was pretty sure Alicia hadn’t been wearing it when Charlie found her. So the killer must have taken it.

  That’s what niggled at me.

  Why would Donnelly have bothered with it? To make the killing look like a robbery? If so, it hadn’t worked. Or had he taken the necklace because of its value, because it was something he couldn’t resist? If that was so, then it should turn up among his possessions.

  There was also the unsatisfied look on Aunt Ginny’s face. Something was bothering her too.

  Aunt Ginny was pacing the kitchen, her cell phone pressed to her ear, when I went downstairs the next morning.

  “You have to be kidding me.” She glanced at me. “When? But what about—?” She frowned as she listened. “Great. Thanks for the heads-up.” She tossed her phone onto the kitchen table in disgust.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  “The chief is holding a press conference in a couple of hours to update the media about the Alicia Allen murder.”

  “What kind of update?”

  “Carrie’s being released. Donnelly’s been tagged as the murderer.”

  “You don’t think he did it, do you, Aunt Ginny?”

  “Let’s just say there are a couple of loose ends remaining. And I hate loose ends.” She drained her coffee cup. “I’m going in to work. Stay out of trouble, okay?”

  I took my breakfast up to my room, where I read the email attachments Charlie had sent me about Simon when Charlie had suspected him of killing Alicia. The first one was an article about a recent and prestigious international piano competition that Simon had won. A sidebar recapped the other major awards he had won, his accomplishments made all the more impressive by the tender ages at which he had won them.

  A second attachment was coverage of a national competition, held in front of a live audience, which bore the headline Pianist Melts
Down Over Texting. Apparently Simon had been distracted by the light from the phone’s screen. He stopped playing, jumped down off the stage, squeezed past a dozen pairs of knees, grabbed the phone from the offender’s hand and hurled it to the back of the hall, where it fell with a faint but audible thunk. He then jumped back onto the stage and started his piece from the beginning.

  The final attachment, dated a few years back, was a profile of Simon and his mother in a magazine for parents. Hitting the right note: What it’s like to raise a child prodigy. The article quoted his mother, a widow since Simon’s toddlerhood, as saying she was not surprised by his ability given the number of distinguished musicians in the family. Both of his maternal grandparents, two uncles and his mother were professional musicians. She also said she wished she could get Simon outdoors more often to play like other boys his age, but that it was next to impossible to separate him from his piano.

  I looked at the photos. Simon’s mother had been strikingly beautiful, with a cascade of dark hair and lively brown eyes. She had been a concert pianist right up until her husband’s death in an airplane crash. From then until her own death from cancer, she had dedicated herself to raising Simon. She had died four years ago.

  Simon’s two uncles took after their father—distinguished looking with leonine heads of hair and strong square jaws. One of them, of course, was Mr. Todd, the music teacher at our school. When I clicked on his name, I discovered that he had once been regarded as a brilliant, up-and-coming conductor. His career had ended a decade ago after psychological problems. He took up teaching.

  Charlie’s comment on all of this was, “This guy is weird. What if he found out Alicia didn’t feel the same way about him as he felt about her? What if he found out she was interested in Brendan?”

  But if Alicia had been wearing the necklace, as Simon had insisted to her parents, and if the necklace was missing precisely because the murderer had taken it, that let Simon off the hook. He’d been obviously distraught about the loss of the necklace. He wanted it back.

  It wasn’t hard to find out where he lived. It was a rambling Victorian farmhouse, complete with wraparound porch and gabled windows, and it stood on the outskirts of town on a full acre of land near the lift bridge. It took me nearly half an hour to get there by bike.

  I heard the music—a piece for piano that sounded familiar and that I probably should have known the name of, or at least the composer. The melody flowed and blossomed until it seemed to fill the air around me. If that was Simon playing, I had to admit he sounded pretty good.

  I rang the doorbell and heard its chime above the more delicate notes of the piano. The music stopped abruptly. For a moment or two I heard nothing at all, and then whoosh, the front door swung open and Simon’s face, red and peevish, glared out at me.

  “I need to talk to you, Simon,” I said quickly. “It’s about Alicia.”

  His face lost its look of annoyed impatience. He opened the door wide. “What about her?”

  “Can I come in?”

  He stepped aside to let me in and then closed the door behind me and waved me into the room to the left of the foyer. The music room. A grand piano on a well-lit expanse of hardwood floor. A cabinet, its door ajar just enough that I could see its contents—music. Sheets and sheets of it. Simon slid onto the piano bench.

  “What about Alicia?”

  I glanced around the room for somewhere to sit, but the room was empty of any other furniture except for a folding chair against one wall.

  “Do you mind?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  I unfolded the chair near the piano bench.

  “The police chief is holding a press conference in a couple of hours. He’s going to announce that they’re closing her case. They know who the murderer is.”

  “That’s not news. Carrie did it. That’s what they say, right?”

  I shook my head. “Not anymore. Now they’re saying it was a man named Brad Donnelly.”

  Simon looked puzzled. “Who is he?”

  I explained about Jennifer and her little boy. “Alicia was tutoring the little boy. Apparently she was good at it.”

  A gentle smile played across his lips. “She really liked working with kids. I can’t stand them. I don’t have the patience. But she loved it. She said she loved it more than anything.” He paused, seemingly lost in memories. But not for long. “Did they find the necklace?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Are you sure she was wearing it that day?”

  “She was wearing it. She wanted to give it back to me as soon as I gave it to her, but I wouldn’t take it.”

  “Why did she want to give it back?”

  “She said because it wasn’t right to take something so valuable, especially when we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend or anything like that.”

  “When did this happen, Simon?”

  “It was the day before.”

  “The day before she died?”

  He nodded.

  “You must have been disappointed when she said that.”

  “I was at first. Then she told me about Brendan. She looked so happy when she talked about him. Much happier than she had been.”

  “Alicia was unhappy?” No one had mentioned that before. Not to me anyway.

  “She missed a couple of practices with my uncle.”

  “She did?” This was also news to me.

  “She said there was something else she had to do.”

  “Did she say what it was?”

  He shook his head.

  “What days did she have practice with your uncle?”

  “Mondays and Wednesdays.”

  The same days she had been tutoring Teddy.

  “Is that what made her unhappy? Missing practice?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She asked me if I ever got tired of shutting myself up in a room every day after school for hours of practice.” He looked at me. “I never get tired of it. But Alicia wasn’t like that. I think she wanted something different.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She said that lately she felt her music was more important to everyone else than it was to her.”

  “Everyone else?”

  “Her parents. My uncle.”

  All of this was interesting, but it wasn’t what I’d come to ask about.

  “Simon, if you told her she could keep the necklace, why did you ask her parents for it back?” I asked.

  His cheeks turned as pink as the inside of a picture-book bunny’s ears.

  “My uncle was upset that I gave it to her. My mother left it to me. I thought I could do whatever I wanted with it. But my uncle said no. He said it had been in the family for four generations and that I was supposed to give it to my wife when I got married, and then it’s supposed to go to my daughter, if I have one, or to my oldest son if I don’t have a daughter.”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “If you mean is it worth a lot of money, not exactly. I mean, it’s not worthless. I’m sure it’s worth something. But mostly I think it’s the sentimental value. I think that’s why my uncle was upset.”

  “Did the Allens return it to you?”

  “They said they didn’t have it.”

  Still that niggling question. Where was the necklace?

  The front door opened. Simon and I both turned at the same time.

  “Why isn’t this door locked? Simon, haven’t I told you—”

  Mr. Todd appeared in the foyer, four bulging plastic shopping bags hanging from one hand, his keys dangling from his left hand. He stopped in mid-turn and mid-sentence when he saw me.

  “Ms. Donovan, isn’t it? What brings you here? I didn’t realize you and Simon knew each other.”

  “She came to give me some news,” Simon said.

  Mr. Todd set the bags of groceries on a small table beside the stairs so that he could pocket his keys and remove his jacket. “What news?”

  I stood up. “I should leave and let you practice,�
�� I said to Simon. An idea was taking shape in my head, and I wanted to talk to Aunt Ginny.

  “Simon?” Mr. Todd started to gather his shopping bags to take to the kitchen. “What news?”

  “About Alicia.”

  Mr. Todd looked at me with interest. “What about her?”

  Simon answered. “They’re saying it was a man who killed Alicia.”

  “A man?” Mr. Todd paused for a second, two shopping bags in one hand, one in the other. “But I thought—”

  “That it was Carrie. So did I. Everyone did.”

  Mr. Todd reached for the last bag. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “They’re going to let Carrie go. They don’t think she did it.”

  “Lovely,” Mr. Todd said, in a tone that signified lack of interest more than it did an appreciation of justice. “You need to get back to practicing, Simon. I’ll show your visitor out.”

  He stood aside slightly, making way for me to move from the music room to the foyer.

  “When are you going to tell Carrie?” Simon asked.

  “Tell her what?”

  “That she’s going to be in the youth orchestra.”

  “Good God, Simon, whatever gave you that idea?” his uncle asked.

  “She told you that’s what she wanted.”

  “Yes, well, you of all people should know we don’t always get what we want.” Mr. Todd nodded impatiently at the door. “If you wouldn’t mind, Ms. Donovan, Simon and I both have work to do.”

  I looked back at Simon. “That’s what who wanted?” I asked.

  “Alicia. She said my uncle should give Carrie the spot.”

  “Really, Simon, where did you get such a ridiculous idea?” Mr. Todd said.

  Simon drew back at the rebuke. His shoulders slumped, marring his perfect piano posture.

  “When did she tell you that, Simon?” I asked gently.

  Simon raised his head. “The last time she was here.”

  Mr. Todd sighed and shook his head and set down his bags of groceries. He took me by the arm and nudged me out of the music room and into the foyer. “Simon was very fond of Alicia. But I suppose you know that already.”