The half dozen musicians were dressed in dark slacks or skirts and white shirts, and were led by a lean, balding conductor in a black suit. The concert began at eight and they worked through some pieces that were vaguely familiar and some that were not. Having had a glass of wine before they left, and another at intermission, she struggled to stay awake. (Robert made the wise choice of going with coffee.)
But there was no risk of nodding off during the last piece on the program.
The Midnight Sonatina, the notes reported, was rarely performed, the Salem Players being perhaps the only group in the country that had the piece in its repertoire.
Beth was curious why.
She soon learned.
The conductor gestured to the lead violinist, an attractive young woman with a tangle of red hair, which sported a distinctive white streak. She rose and, with understated accompaniment from the others, launched into the lightning fast piece. It was wildly complicated, richly melodic at times, eerily discordant at others. Beth, Robert—the whole audience—sat frozen in place, mesmerized during the five or six minute performance.
“My,” she found herself whispering. Robert’s handsome face was frozen, his mouth agape. No wonder it wasn’t played much; few would have the technical skill to master it.
When they finished, the sultry violinist, her narrow face dotted with sweat, strands of hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks, stood with her eyes closed, breathing hard from the effort.
The audience rose to their feet and applauded hard and cheered and fired off dozens of “Bravas!”
As they drove home, on the dark hilly country roads, twice their Acura sedan strayed onto the shoulder. The night was windy but that didn’t seem to be the problem for the low-slung vehicle. The third time the car lurched to the side Beth glanced at her husband. He seemed lost in thought.
“Honey?” she asked.
At first he didn’t appear to hear her. He kept staring straight ahead, at the wisps of ghostly fog which the car sped through.
Beth repeated, “Honey? Something wrong?”
He blinked. “Fine. Maybe a little tired is all.” Robert’s firm was miles from their home and he had to be awake at 5:30 or so to beat rush-hour traffic.
“I’ll drive.”
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
But farther down the road he nearly missed a turn.
“Robert!”
He blinked, gasped and skidded the car to a stop. They’d narrowly missed slamming into a road sign.
“What happened?” she asked urgently. “You fall asleep?”
“I… No…. I don’t know. It’s too foggy. And…I zoned out, or something.”
“Zoned out?”
He shrugged, nodded at the wheel. “Maybe you better.”
They swapped places and in twenty uneventful minutes they were home.
Beth parked in the driveway and they walked into the house. Robert almost seemed to be sleepwalking.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
He looked at her with a blank expression.
“Robert. Are you sick?”
“I’m going to bed.”
He didn’t shower or brush his teeth. He just changed into his pajamas and lay down on the bed, not even climbing under the blankets. He stared at the ceiling. His body, Beth noted, didn’t seem relaxed.
“The flu?” she asked.
“What?”
“You have a bug or something?” She felt his forehead. He was chill to the touch.
But then suddenly he grew relaxed. He squinted and seemed to notice his wife sitting on the bedside. “Weird dream,” he said, then smiled, rolled over and fell asleep in seconds.
Dream? Beth thought. Hadn’t he been wide awake?
* * *
At three a.m. Beth was startled awake. What? A noise, a motion?
She looked over at Robert’s side of the bed. He wasn’t there.
Alarmed, thinking about his odd behavior, she rose, pulled on her bathrobe and walked into the hallway. There she paused and listened. A faint humming was coming from downstairs. She continued to the first floor and there she found her husband, in the living room, staring out the window. There wasn’t much to see, just the neighbors’ house, the Altman’s place, fifty feet away. They were the neighbors from hell; Robert and Fred had been feuding for years over petty but irritating things. Beth tried to remain above it, but she joined the fray occasionally. Sandra could be an utter bitch.
Robert was staring at the glaring yellow clapboard (the color being one of the sources of dispute; Robert was sure they’d picked the hue just to spite the Tollners). Robert was humming. The sound was very quiet. Four notes over and over again. If they were from a tune, she didn’t know what it might be.
Was he asleep?
What was that rule? Never wake somebody up when they are sleepwalking?
But she was alarmed. “Robert? Honey?”
No response.
“Honey? Is that a song? What is it?”
Maybe from an ad? From a movie? If so, and she could learn the name, maybe she could get through to him.
She got her phone and ran her name-that-tune app. It returned no titles, other than the pitch of the notes: A-D-D-E.
“Robert?”
Eventually the humming stopped but he kept staring out the window. She walked up to him and put her arm around his shoulder. His muscles were hard as a bag of concrete, his skin still chill. She pulled her hand away, alarmed.
The humming resumed.
At six a.m. she called the ambulance.
* * *
“He’s responsive now. Vitals are good. MRI and CT are normal. To be honest, we have no diagnosis at this point.” The psychiatrist told her this as he sat across from Beth in the Westfield Hospital waiting room.
A slow-speaking man, with a faintly Southern accent, he continued, “Robert was in some kind of a fugue state. Like he was hypnotized.” The lean doctor, in a well-worn light blue jacket, consulted a chart. “I was just speaking to him earlier and he said he hasn’t been taking any drugs. Nothing showed up in the preliminary bloodwork but we’ve sent samples to New Haven for some other tests. I wanted to ask you.”
“No, nothing,” she said, her voice ragged—from exhaustion.
“Has he ever taken any psychedelics?”
“Lord, no.” Neither of them had done anything more than smoke a little pot and not for a year or so.
He jotted a note then looked up. “Anything unusual happen last night, prior to the event? Traumatic?”
“We went to a concert.” She told the doctor about the drive home. How he “zoned out.”
Another look at the chart. “And no occurrences in the past like this?”
She shook her head.
“Has he ever seen a psychiatrist before?”
Her pause got the man’s attention and he cocked his head.
“We’ve been to a counselor, the two of us. He has…Robert has some anger issues. We worked it out. But, no, he’s never seen a doctor for anything like this.”
She thought he’d leap on that fact but he wasn’t interested. Anger was boring maybe, compared with Robert’s bizarre fugue state.
“Do you have any idea what the humming was about?” he asked.
“No.”
Since Robert was not considered a danger to himself or anyone else and seemed fully cognizant, the doctor said he could go home. If anything troubling was revealed in the new bloodwork someone would call.
To her relief, Robert recognized her instantly; she wasn’t sure he would. He rose from the wheelchair and hugged her hard.
He said, “Hey… Don’t know what happened. Just…too much crap at work. Too long hours.”
The partners worked the younger lawyers half to death, especially those like Robert, who represented some massive hedge funds based in the state.
They walked to the car. On the drive home he pulled down the visor to examine his face and finger-brushed his mussed, brown hair.
The radio was on, music softly playing. Robert shut it off. An awkward silence descended.
“Nice place, the hospital,” he said.
“It is. Staff’s friendly.”
“Décor’s good.”
“Landscaping’s nice. Are you hungry?”
He thought for a moment. “No.”
There followed a dozen other deflecting questions and answers.
“I don’t think you should go in to work today.”
“No. I shouldn’t.”
Beth was relieved; she’d been worried that he’d insist.
“You don’t remember last night?”
“Well, the first part of the concert. Not the last. And not driving home.” A frown. “Did I drive?”
“I did.” She didn’t want to mention the near accident.
He took this in and fell silent.
Soon, they arrived and pulled into the driveway. She climbed out and stepped around the car to open the door for him.
But he lifted a hand, gave a laugh and said, “I’m good, m’lady,” in a bizarre British accent.
He got out and hugged her. Robert was back. This was confirmed when he shot a scowl at the Altman’s house. The color was the gaudiest shade of yellow you could imagine. “Bile,” he called it. “I’m writing another letter.”
The last letter of complaint to the homeowners’ association had infuriated the Altmans, and shortly afterward the Tollners found dog crap dotting their front yard. Their neighbors owned a pit-bull mix that was as obnoxious as its owners.
Inside, he went to the bedroom and changed into jeans and a gray UConn sweatshirt.
Robert had apparently changed his mind about his appetite and decided to eat something.
“I’m totally famished.” He devoured half of the tuna salad sandwich she made, then the other. Sipped coffee.
She said, “I should get to the school for about an hour. Are you…?”
“Oh, sure, honey. I’ll be fine. Give me a chance to catch up on my games.”
He certainly did love video games. He’d had to give them up almost entirely, though, because of the long hours at work.
She hugged him again, and he kissed the top of her head. She could smell his sweat; it was strong. He didn’t seem to notice his own odor. She thought about telling him a shower might make him feel better but wasn’t sure what his reaction would be.
* * *
Beth drove to her office at the private college where she was a professor of sociology. She finished a departmental report and graded a dozen papers. These tasks took longer than they should have because her mind kept jumping back to last night: Seeing her husband’s glazed face. Feeling his taut muscles and cold skin.
Zoned out…
It was then that the doctor’s question about drugs came back to her. No, he didn’t do recreational drugs and, at the moment, no prescription ones.
But what if he had ingested something that affected him? After all, the final blood workup wasn’t in yet. Food? They’d had the same casserole at dinner and Beth was fine, but at the intermission of the concert, he’d had that coffee with milk. He’d eaten something too. Cookies, she believed. And they were homemade, baked by the friends of the chamber group or of the performing arts venue. Could the milk or the pastry have been tainted?
Beth pulled her laptop closer, went online and looked up the local newspaper, to see if anyone else had gotten sick after the venue.
No, no one had been. Or, if so, the malady hadn’t made the news.
Her search had also turned up a review of the concert. It was favorable and, as she expected, the notice centered on the Midnight Sonatina, the mesmerizing violin solo.
The reviewer wrote that he had never heard of the piece but, upon research, learned several things: one, it was so difficult to play that it was rarely performed—as the program notes had reported; and, two, the piece had a connection to several crimes. A link sent her to another article: “The Curse of the Midnight Sonatina.”
She gave a soft laugh and went to the site on which the story was posted, a history journal she’d never heard of.
The first of the crimes surrounding the Midnight involved the creator of the piece himself.
Italian composer Luigi Scavello, 1801-1842, was known to be eccentric and would wander by himself through the hills outside of Florence, disappearing for days at a time. It was then that he did much of his composing. He said the earth and animals and sky and rocks gave him the inspiration for the songs he wrote. He usually returned from his hiking wild-eyed and disheveled. He studied with the famed Paganini, whose difficult compositions he would have no trouble performing—one of the master’s few students to be able to summon the skills required.
But Scavello soon quit his studies and grew more and more reclusive.
In 1841, he vanished for three days and when he emerged he reported that he’d spent the time in a cave in the Tuscan hills. It was there that he’d written what he considered his masterpiece, Sonatina in E Minor for Violin (the “Midnight”). He’d composed the piece over the course of a single day and night, he claimed. Fellow musicians didn’t know what to make of the sonatina, as it was well beyond the ability of most violinists.
The first performance was a chamber concert in a church near Chianti. Scavello played the piece himself. By all accounts, the sonatina mesmerized the audience—moving them to tears in some instances, to shock in others. A few actually collapsed with emotion.
A week after the performance Scavello went mad and murdered a local priest, then cut his own throat, bleeding to death in the middle of the square outside the church.
All word of the Midnight Sonatina was lost and there’s no record of its having been played again, until decades later, when a British musicologist doing research in Italy discovered the piece. The professor returned to London, where a chamber group there added the sonatina to their repertoire. It was at one of their concerts that the sonatina was associated with yet another horrific crime.
Beth was interrupted when her phone hummed. She glanced at the number.
She frowned. It was the mobile of Sandra Altman, from next door.
Neighbors from hell…
“Sandra.”
“Look, I don’t know what your husband’s up to but you better tell him to stop it.”
“What’re you talking about?” Beth asked.
“He’s at your living room window. He’s been there for an hour, staring at us. Glaring. It’s very upsetting. We tried calling the house but he’s not picking up. If he doesn’t stop, Fred’s going to call the police.”
Beth’s heart sank. Robert had relapsed into his odd behavior of last night.
She said stiffly, “He hasn’t been feeling well.”
“Feeling well? He’s sick, all right. Sick in the head. I’ve always known it.”
Coming from the woman who would steal their newspaper and refused to trim trees whose branches fell onto their property.
Not to mention dog shit.
“I’ll give him a call. And—”
But then the woman was talking to someone else; her husband, Beth supposed. “Where are you going?”
“To tell him to stop,” came the man’s distant voice.
Then there was a pause. “Fred, no! He’s in the front yard. He’s got a knife! Get back here. Fred? Now!”
Beth heard a shrill scream. The line went silent.
* * *
The police were at the house when she arrived. Beth skidded the car to a stop, half in the driveway, half on the lawn.
Two men—both pale-complexioned, one round, the other tall and balding—were on her doorstep. They wore nearly identical suits, navy blue, and white shirts. Gold badges rested on their belts. She jogged to them, breathless from the run and breathless from the shock of what she’d learned had happened.
She stared at the Altman house. The medical examiner was wheeling one body out. That would be Sandra’s; Fred had been slashed to death in the front yard
.
Crying softly, Beth asked the stocky detective where her husband was, and how was he?
“He’s in custody, Mrs. Tollner. We found him walking down the street, about three blocks from here.”
“He was holding the knife. The murder weapon.”
She dabbed her eyes and thought of the people she’d have to notify: her parents, Robert’s. His sister, too, and her husband, Joanne and Edward, the only relatives who lived nearby.
“Is he—was he hurt when you arrested him?”
“No,” the tall officer said. “Looks like, according to the arresting officers, it was like he was sleepwalking. Muttering and humming to himself. He was read his rights but he didn’t acknowledge understanding them.”
His partner: “Mrs. Tollner, does your husband have any history of mental illness?”
Through her mind streamed images of the incident from last night, her discussion with the psychiatrist. It occurred to her that maybe she shouldn’t be answering their questions. Wasn’t there something about a privilege between husbands and wives?
“I think I’ll talk to our attorney,” Beth said evenly.
“This is a very serious crime,” the heavy-set officer said.
Her look was essentially: And you need to remind me why?
“It’ll go a long way for Robert, if we get cooperation. From all parties.” That was from his partner.
Was this good cop/bad cop? Beth knew all about that; she had watched many of the true-crime TV shows.
“I’m going to talk to a lawyer.” She looked defiantly from one to the other.
“That’s your right.” This was from the one she thought was the bad cop. Maybe they had swapped parts.
When they were gone, she went inside and stepped into the kitchen to make some coffee. She stopped abruptly. Robert had removed four sharp knives from the wooden blocks and arranged them carefully on the green granite island. They appeared to make a pattern but she couldn’t find any meaning.
She started to put them away but then thought maybe the police would get a warrant or ask her if she’d moved anything. She left the blades where they were.
In the spacious living room, Beth dropped onto the couch and placed a call to a man named Julian Kramer. He was a criminal lawyer with one of the biggest firms in southern Connecticut, and she’d been given his name by Robert’s sister, Joanne, who like her brother was also an attorney, though the woman did no criminal work.
Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology Page 19
