Page 76 of The Kiss Of Death
“Yes, you never mentioned anything about it, and you’re not the type to—” She gulped. “Let’s just say playing an instrument requires sensitivity.”
“Despite my mother’s dedication in teaching me her art, I assure you I’m as terrible as most common mortals out there.”
“I’m sure you aren’t.” Her eyes briefly darted to her ribbons tightened on my wrist, probably her silver one, before returning to meet mine. With a coy gesture, she crossed her legs. “Let’s play this duet together.”
She took her violin, and I confronted the piano, cracking my neck to the side. For some unfathomable reason, my heart thrummed with an erratic rhythm, a disconcerting anomaly asthough my own emotions dared to defy my meticulously crafted control. The unwelcome intrusion irked me.
“Are you okay?” Dalia asked.
“I’m fine,” I grumbled.
This was ridiculous. I should just have asked someone else to play. But I didn’t want someone else to play with her tonight, so a choice had to be made.
“You start when you’re ready.”
Fingers fumbling on the piano keys, I attempted to follow the sheet music. The notes slipped through the spaces between my uncertain touches, a mocking reminder of my estranged relationship with this instrument. I stole a glance at Dalia, her bow gracefully gliding over the violin strings with practiced precision.Perfection.
She led the melody. I only accompanied her except when the piano had to speak instead of the violin, and my cadences were off-key. I’d never felt so incompetent. The piano’s lackluster tones clashed against her violin’s eloquent phrases.
She was right; my mother had composed a duet from two opposing forces. The piano’s melody was akin to a lullaby. It was like a battle between light and darkness.
The room dissolved around her, and her performance clawed its way into my depths. A deceptive warmth, like a wave, momentarily thawed the titanium fortress within me, infusing my dark cells with a riot of colors. She wove an illusion until reality yanked me back and murdered it. The warmth vanished. For a fleeting moment, Dalia’s melody had a grip on my ghosts, but now it was too late. Even her melody couldn’t soothe, not when the echoes of a familiar tune surfaced.Could it be?I identified the passage and continued playing, my gaze lost in the abyss.
“I can’t believe it worked.” Dalia laughed, her last note lingering in the air. “This full melody, together, it’s so beautiful. It was meant to be a duet, don’t you think?”
Of course it was similar. It was a piece of music I had long forgotten.
“Levi,” she called, probably not for the first time.
An angry twitch contorted my features. “Around measure thirty in the piano sheet music, a part resembles the beginning of ‘Your Song’ by Elton John. It lasts about eight seconds.”
Dalia meticulously examined the sheet, scrutinizing each note and comparing them with the piano sheet music from Elton John she searched online on her phone.
“You’re right,” she acknowledged after several minutes. “Is that it?”
She replicated the segment on her violin.
“Yes.”
“There is a sixteen-bar segment, eight seconds if you prefer, that matches the harmonic progression of the beginning of ‘Your Song.’ In Lucie’s scores, the same melody is repeated and varied:Mi?, Mi, La?, So?,these four chords forming your name. In ‘Your Song,’ it’s similar except one chord is missing—theMi. That’s our first clue.”
Guess we all learned today my mother’s inspiration for naming me Levi.
“I also noticed that the rhythmic pattern repeats itself frequently throughout the composition. Always in the same order. It’s constant, which is weird coming from Lucie,” Dalia mumbled to herself. “Listen.”
Dalia proceeded to craft a rhythm, her finger tapping the piano, a mixture of short and long notes.
“Do it again,” I demanded.
I took the piano sheet music and wrote the long notes in the form of lines and the short notes in the form of points. When she finished, I gave it back to her.
“Morse code?” She frowned. “How did you know?”
“In sixth grade, I created a script that changed the keyboard functions. Letters became Morse code. It was to piss off a teacher. He ended up resigning and breaking his computer. Fun times.” I didn’t mention that he was the tech teacher. But Dalia wasn’t listening to me. She had her head buried in the score, referring to each line and dots to translate the Morse code into the alphabet.
“That’s it,” she said. “The rhythm forms ‘Your Song’ in Morse code. You were right, Levi, she hid this music in her score. You’ve got a great ear. Now we’ve got to find out why she chose this music in particular.”
Dalia smiled. I didn’t.
