Page 41 of One Last Regret

Josephine arrives a moment later. When she sees the piano, she releases a scream like a tea kettle boiling.

“I had to,” Amelia weeps. “I had to stop it before it…”

Her voice trails off. Her eyes grow wide, and her mouth pops open. “No,” she whispers. “No, no,no!”

I follow her eyes, and a shiver runs through me when I see the sheet music, untouched and unburnt, lying atop the otherwise completely charred music stand above the keyboard.

The grandfather clock chimes the hour. To my ears, it sounds like monstrous laughter.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The family sits in the dining room, speechless. I sit in between the children while Josephine and Etienne sits across from us. Henri stands in front of the door leading to the parlor, as though to protect the charred remnants of Marcel’s piano in case Amelia decides to make a second attempt at destroying the sheet music.

No one is cleaning up the parlor. The splintered coffee table remains exactly where it was when Claude Durand crushed it in his death throes. Now Marcel Lacroix’s piano is a half-charred centerpiece, covered in foam,Vie Apres a la Mortstill resting on the burnt sheet music stand.

Amelia hasn’t stopped crying since seeing the undamaged music. I keep my arm around her while she weeps, but like the rest of them, I say nothing.

“Where were you, Mary?” Etienne asks.

“I was in my room,” I reply. “I cleaned trash from the yard, then went upstairs to shower. I came downstairs when I smelled the smoke.”

“Where wereyou, Etienne?” Josephine asks. “They’reyourchildren. You’re so concerned I’m going senile, but instead of caring for them yourself, you hire a stranger? Don’t try to take the moral high ground here. This wasn’t Mary’s fault.”

I don’t respond to that. It was Josephine who hired me, not Etienne, but perhaps she did so at his insistence. As for the rest, I can’t quite blame myself for Amelia’s choice to set fire to the sheet music while it was still on the piano, but I suppose I can’t quite absolve myself from blame. The children have proven themselves unreliable. I suppose I just didn’t consider how far they could take things.

I can’t quite blame Amelia either. She’s in the middle of the worst crisis of a very young life and doesn’t know how to react. I can help, but I’ve only just arrived. And I was about to leave. I don’t know if I can anymore. If I hadn’t come downstairs when I did, they might have lost the house, and Amelia might have lost her life. Neither EtiennenorJosephine is in any shape to care for the children, and I can’t bring myself to abandon them now that I understand how dangerous their grief is.

Only Gabriel seems unaffected, but of course, he seems that way preciselybecausehe’s affected. He doesn’t seem upset at all that the piano is likely ruined beyond repair. He’s dissociated so much from reality that he probably won’t even realize what’s happening until much later.

I wish I had a place to take the children. They’re not safe here. I may have to try to have them removed. If I can, which considering my lapse in judgment yesterday is probably not likely.

Good God, was that only one day ago? This is ridiculous. So much has happened so fast. No wonder the children are reacting so poorly.

Etienne sighs and rubs his eyes. “Amelia, why did you burn the music on top of the piano? Why not take it outside?”

“I didn’t want to touch it,” she admits in a small voice. “I was afraid it would hurt me.”

He chuckles, more in exhaustion than anger. “How could it hurt you? It’s a piece of paper.”

“You destroy it then,” she said.

“No. I’m not going to do that.”

“Exactly. You can’t.”

“Ican, but if Ido, then I’m admitting that there’s something supernatural going on here.”

Which he did only a couple of hours ago to me.

“You don’t?” Amelia challenges. “What doyouthink is going on?”

He sighs. “I think we’re all doing an utterly terrible job of handling grief. Me included. Yes, I’ll admit, I had some thoughts that stretched logic, but I never acted on them. I knew that my mind was lying to me. But this… this could have killed us all.” He shakes his head. “If I give in and tear those notes up, I’m validating dangerously poor behavior from all of us. I won’t do that.”

“You see?” Amelia cries. “It’s manipulating you. It’s trying to keep itself alive so it can keep hurting us.”

“The only person hurting anyone is you,” Etienne counters. “You nearly burned us all alive.”

Finally, I speak up. “Perhaps it’s best we all take some time away from this house. We’ll gain nothing at each other’s throats.”

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