Dark Rhapsody Page 4

  She came to 57th Street. Jogging in place at the light, she turned off the Vivaldi. Now taxi horns, the clip of carriage horses’ hooves, the rumble of busses, and the low murmur of conversation surrounded her. She waved to the pretzel vendor whose cart was parked every afternoon at the curb and—

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Gunfire! Maggie cried out, dropped to the sidewalk, and covered her face.

  “Lady! Hey, lady! Are you okay?”

  Maggie blinked and looked up into the face of the old vendor, bending close, his eyes full of concern. She shook her head in confusion and embarrassment. “I heard gunshots,” she murmured. Her words echoed in her ears.

  “It was just a car’s backfire,” said the vendor, helping her to her feet. “Can I get you some water?”

  “No, I’m fine, thank you.” Right. So much for regaining control.

  No gunshots, she told herself. The Hall was just two blocks away. She would shower off the dust, practice for four or five hours, and still have time to make the benefit at the Morgan.

  And buy a bottle of crème de menthe, she reminded herself, thinking of Rachmaninoff. A very large bottle. Or maybe a Barolo would be better.

  Anything not to think about today’s date. Just get through the day.

  But how does a woman get through the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death?

  The light changed. She exhaled and sprinted across the street.

  * * *

  The stage door down the hall opened, clanged shut. Jimmy Cosantino heard the low murmur of the guard’s voice, soft laughter, the quick, light footsteps.

  The stage manager set his Starbucks coffee cup on the desk and gazed at his open office door, waiting, suddenly aware of a faint scent of roses drifting in the air. A moment passed, and then she was leaning against his doorframe, bent forward and trying to breathe, smiling wanly at him.

  “Hey, Jimmy, have you got any water?”

  “Anything for you, Mrs. O.” He reached beneath his desk, tossed a Fiji water bottle toward her. She caught it with her left hand, and with a grateful nod, twisted the cap and drank. Every movement she made was fluid, graceful. He watched her, a slight-framed woman with dancers’ legs and hair black as piano keys caught up in a careless bun. She was in her late forties, he’d heard, but you’d never know it. No way she was a granny. He tried not to stare at the words on the damp, clingy t-shirt, but the bright red letters were hard to miss. The piano has been drinking, not me.

  He chuckled, and she turned those astonishing green eyes on him with a raised eyebrow.

  The stage manager waved a hand at her, smiling. “Your shirt,” he acknowledged. “Where the heck do you find those tees of yours?”

  “Catalogs, Jimmy. Cheap catalogs.” She returned his smile, but today it didn’t reach her eyes. What was troubling her?

  “Big practice scheduled?” he asked, tilting his chin toward the long hallway. Her rehearsal room was the last room on the left.

  “Hope so. I’m going to shower first and then get started. Will you bang on my door around five?”

  “Sure.” He knew that she would lose all track of time when the music took over. “Headed to the benefit later today?”

  This time the smile was real. “I love the Morgan Library. Are you going, too?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “I’m meeting my godfather there, I’ll introduce you.”

  “Great, see you later,” he said, but the doorway already was empty.

  The stage manager shook his head, too aware that he had just a bit of a crush on the beautiful pianist. What had that reviewer said? “Magdalena O’Shea looks like a nymph but plays like an angel.”

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  He was just reaching for his coffee when he heard her cry out.

  His cup crashed to the floor as he lunged across his office and sprinted down the hallway.

  She was standing outside her rehearsal room, very still, staring through the open doorway. He gazed over her shoulder. The air shimmered with an unsettling crimson light.

  “Jesus H. Christ and all his little kittens.”

  The whole room was filled with vases of huge red roses. Roses that bloomed as brightly as blood.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NEW YORK CITY

  SUNDAY

  “I COUNT SEVENTEEN vases,” said Jimmy. “At least two dozen roses in each one. Not to mention the ones scattered all over the floor.”

  Standing in the middle of the practice room, Maggie wrapped her arms around her body and shivered. “Four hundred roses? You’re sure you didn’t see anyone deliver them, Jimmy?”

  He shook his head. “Maybe they were delivered while I was at the daily briefing. But I—wait a minute. There was a guy, early this morning, in a black uniform. And a backstage tour went through here about an hour ago. We’ll check the security tapes.” His eyes scanned the room. “We would never allow vases of flowers on the lids of our grand pianos. Any idea who would do this?”

  She shook her head and wordlessly held out the folded note she’d found propped on the piano keyboard.

  He took it from her, read the words inside, and whistled. “Happy Anniversary? Is this a special day for you?”

  It’s the anniversary of my husband’s death.

  “No,” she said softly. “Not even close.”

  “Give me a break,” muttered the stage manager. “A close friend, an admirer, a fan—maybe sends a dozen roses. At most. This has to be some sick joke.”

  Sick … and sinister. Maggie stared at the five bouquets crowded together on top of the Steinway. Under the ceiling lights, the beautiful polished wood glowed a deep red. The rest of the vases were scattered about the room, on every surface including the floor. “That was the only note,” she acknowledged.

  “Mind if I keep it?” Jimmy looked down at the thick, expensive parchment. The letters were printed in heavy jet-black marker. “I’ll get someone to take these out of here. Room five is free today. Why don’t you go practice there?”

  “Okay. But don’t toss the flowers, Jimmy. Send them to the hospital, or a nursing home, will you, please? Someone should get pleasure from them.”

  “Consider it done.” He leaned toward her, touched her arm. “You’re so pale, Maggie. Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you, Jimmy. It’s just been one of those days, you know?” She reached out, touched a velvet petal. “There’s no good reason why I should be so upset by such beautiful roses.”

  Unless Dane had sent them.

  She turned and walked down the hallway toward room five.

  * * *

  It was cold in the rehearsal room.

  The new rehearsal rooms in the Carnegie education wing were bright, airy, state of the art, but this windowless room was basically bare, just the scarred Yamaha concert grand piano and a straight-backed chair in the corner next to a brass music stand. A long table on a side wall held several bottles of water and towering, precarious stacks of piano scores. That was it.

  She adjusted the heat, sat down on the piano bench, closed her eyes and exhaled slowly, trying to clear her mind. The scent of the roses was still strong and sickening.

  They weren’t from Michael, she was certain of that. He had given her flowers just twice, once in France and then that first night at his cabin. White lilacs, both times. Because she had told him once that Rachmaninoff had a secret fan who always sent white lilacs before a concert. Rachmaninoff had never found out who sent them.

  The roses were beautiful, surely. But so many? She felt as if she were standing all alone on a stage in a darkened, empty theater—unsettled, anxious, enveloped by a sense of deep foreboding.

  Happy Anniversary.

  Before his death, her husband, Johnny, had always given her roses. Red for passion, lass, he would tell her. Red for our love.

  She’d thought then that their love would last forever. Never for an instant had she imagined that he would die too soon, so horrifically, so
far from home. So far from her …

  A year after his death, the shattered white sailboat still spun into her nightmares.

  Maggie closed her eyes. Johnny? she tried. For months after her husband died, she had felt him close, talked to him, heard the low whisper of his voice, glimpsed his bright eyes in the depths of her mirror. But no longer. The rehearsal room remained silent.

  I want the roses to be from you, Johnny.

  Maggie opened her eyes, straightened her shoulders, and shook her head, trying to banish the image of a small room filled with too many blood-colored roses. Red is also the color of rage, she thought.

  No. They are just roses, for God’s sake. From someone who loves music. Get over yourself, damn you, get on with it. You have a concert in less than two months. That’s what should be terrifying you.

  She checked her watch. Okay, practice here for the next four hours while the roses were removed from her rehearsal room. Then she could head home, shower, and be at the Morgan benefit by five.

  She set her score on the stand, opened it to Variation #7. Rachmaninoff introduced the Dies irae here, the Latin funereal hymn, to create a disturbing, sinister melody. Perfect for the way she was feeling.

  Slipping on her new tortoise glasses, she set the timer on her watch. Then she lifted her hands above the keys, counted to three, and, eyes on the score, began to play.

  Four hours later, the tiny timer on her watch beeped. Already? Maggie finished a passage and let her trembling hands come to rest on the keys, reminding herself to breathe. God, Rachmaninoff was brilliant. He was the reason she had used her timer. She simply got lost in his music.

  Fingers still cramping and slippery with perspiration, shoulders aching and stiff, she gathered her sheet music and made her way to the elevator at the end of the hallway. She loved wandering Carnegie’s halls, as they were filled with framed, signed photographs of the great composers and musicians who had performed on its stage over the decades. Toscanini, Caruso, Isaac Stern. Midori, Rostropovich, Casals, Yo-Yo Ma. Zubin Mehta, Van Cliburn, and Horowitz. Leonard Bernstein. The Beatles, Billie Holiday, Isadora Duncan. Her mother, Lily Stewart, at the piano. And her father, Finn, his eyes closed and his baton held high …

  The elevator doors slid open with a whir and, unable to resist, she pressed “S” for Stage.

  The doors opened into the huge backstage area of the main auditorium. Tonight, the theater was dark, with no performance scheduled, and the backstage was quiet and deeply shadowed. Just the creak of her footsteps on the boards, the low hum of the theater’s massive heating pipes, and the glow of the infamous “ghost light”—the single incandescent bulb set on a tall stand, always left burning in the center of an otherwise darkened stage.

  It’s called a ghost light, Maggiegirl.

  Maggie stiffened, hearing her father’s low voice thrum in her head. She had been—what? Eleven? Twelve? Standing with him on a dark stage just like this one. A time before her mother’s death, when she and her father had been so close. She closed her eyes, let the memory come.

  Many theaters have ghost lights, Maggie. The public is told that they are there to help navigate the stage, avoid accidents in the darkness. But performers know better. It’s there for the ghosts who inhabit the theater, who come out to perform onstage late at night when no one is watching.

  Every theater has its ghosts, sprite. That’s why the theater is dark on Mondays. It’s closed for the ghosts.

  Somewhere behind her a metal door banged shut with finality, and the memories scattered.

  Just one of the ghosts, she told herself, peering into the shadows.

  Maggie walked slowly to the center of the stage and gazed out at the beautiful concert hall—“the house that music built”—now called the Isaac Stern Auditorium. The red velvet orchestra seats were barely visible in the shadows, the white and gold balconies set in an almost perfect semicircle around them, like enveloping arms. She counted the five levels, smiling as she remembered a long-ago breathless climb up the one hundred and thirty-seven steps to the top balcony.

  Built in the late 1800s by Andrew Carnegie, the New York industrialist and music lover, the Italian Renaissance landmark building had been designed, she knew, by an amateur cellist named William Tuthill. The architect had been ahead of his time, forgoing the traditional heavy curtains and ornate chandeliers for an elliptical shape and a domed ceiling. Musicians and audiences alike, including herself, were in awe of the clarity and richness of the acoustics. Just yesterday, alone in the back of the theater, she had heard a musician onstage turning the pages of a score.

  Maggie raised her eyes to the high dome, its circle of small lights like stars winking in the dimness.

  She took a deep breath, enjoying the familiar scents of the theater. Old wood, paint, resin, perfume and perspiration, velvet. This was her world. God, she had missed it. A concert hall was what she knew. It was her safe place.

  Maggie smiled, remembering a night in Paris during the summer when she and Michael had been standing on an empty stage, much like this one. The old Paris Opera House—the Palais Garnier. She closed her eyes, hearing his deep, low voice resonate in her head.

  “How do you make something so beautiful out of thin air, Mrs. O’Shea? Where does the music come from inside you?”

  “Music chose me. My body pulses with music. I wake up with rhythms singing in my head. Music is the last sound I hear before I sleep”.

  Now, standing alone on the dark stage, she felt close to Michael Beckett. That day on a shadowed Paris theater stage … was that the moment when their relationship had shifted? Become deeper?

  There is just something about an empty theater, she thought now. Shadowed and mysterious, echoing with ghosts and the music of the great ones. A Steinway stood alone in the center of the stage, and Maggie ran her fingers over the keys. Yellowed now with age, they felt cool and worn beneath her fingertips. Who had played this piano? What music had they chosen? Why? Music tells our stories, she thought.

  A noise backstage, behind her.

  She turned.

  A soft footfall. Then quiet.

  She tensed. “Is anyone there?”

  Silence.

  A musician? A stagehand? Someone who had been on the backstage tour earlier? Maggie turned in a circle, peering into the darkness, the ropes and pulleys suddenly like a giant tangled forest casting long, distorted shadows. Fear fluttered like wings against her skin.

  Breathing. Behind her!

  She spun around.

  The outline of a man, darker than the shadows. A pale face, featureless, appearing in the wings. Just for an instant. Then gone.

  Quick footsteps in the blackness.

  No. I will not be afraid here.

  “This is my place, damn you!” shouted Maggie into the darkness. “You won’t take it from me!”

  Then she turned, gathered her music, and, with one last glance around the stage—her stage—she strode, fierce and angry as a Greek Fury, toward the wings.

  * * *

  In the Tuscan attic so far away, Dane held the cell phone to his ear, listening to the distant ring. Finally, a voice.

  “Thanos. You did as I asked? You delivered all the roses? No one saw your face?”

  A low, murmured response.

  “Excellent. Ah, you followed her backstage as well?” He nodded, smiling. “Even better. I want her frightened, terrified. I am pleased with your work. And now—” he looked at his watch—“I have one more job for you to do. It’s critical. I need to eliminate someone. Do not disappoint me.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE MORGAN LIBRARY, NYC

  SUNDAY

  MADISON AVENUE WAS shimmering with dusky shadows when Maggie hurried up the wide marble stairs of the Morgan Library. As usual, she was running late.

  The landing by the glass doors of the new, modern entrance was crowded with gala guests. She hesitated just for a moment before entering, her eyes on the streetlamps glinting on the young oaks that lined
the sidewalk, her mind still whirling with questions about the roses left for her at Carnegie Hall. But those secrets would have to wait. She stepped through the glass doors into the grand foyer.

  She saw herself reflected in the tall mirrors and polished marble, a slender dark-haired woman in a tube of deep forest-green velvet. Then she raised her eyes, once more marveling at the huge expanses of glass and the bright-colored panels that shifted and swayed above her, catching the very last glimmer of daylight and casting deep emerald, blue, and violet shadows across the upturned faces of the guests. Smiling, she accepted a glass of champagne from a tuxedoed waiter and moved into the glittering, buzzing crowd that ebbed and flowed beneath the soaring central court.

  Even in her high-heeled sandals, most of the guests were taller than she was, and she felt surrounded by a murmuring sea of black. Jostled by the overflow crowd, she searched the guests for a friendly face. Her godfather had to be somewhere in the library. And Carnegie’s stage manager, Jimmy, had said he was coming. She wanted to ask him about the security tapes, but he was not to be found. Where was he?

  Stopping to speak with colleagues and friends, she slowly made her way up the small corner staircase into Mr. Morgan’s East Room Library and stopped, as she always did, in the doorway to take in the space. The library was beautiful and intimate, with three tiers of centuries-old tooled leather volumes set on glowing walnut shelves that rose thirty feet into the air. The arched, ornate ceiling was decorated with murals and the signs of the Zodiac, which she’d been told had a personal meaning for J. P. Morgan and eleven of his colleagues. One more mystery.

  “The preservation of art and ideas,” murmured Maggie. It was what she always taught her music students. History matters.

  “Hi, Lewis,” she smiled at the room’s aging guard standing in the doorway.

  “Ms. O’Shea! It’s been too long. Where’ve you been?”

  She looked down at her hands. “It’s a long story, Lewis.”

  He nodded as if he knew, then gestured toward the right bookcase near the door. “Well, you’re back now, that’s what counts. Remember when I showed you the secret staircase?”