The Ghost Sonata (9 page)

“You saw Wendy Choy at a competition?”

“That's right—Wendy Choy. She was awesome! Well, I'd better go make myself purdy if I'm going to turn up on time for my performance.”

“Jenny—”

“Yes?” Jenny paused on the steps.

“This sounds weird—but have you noticed anything
strange
in this house since you've been here?” Gilda decided she might as well find out whether any other ghosts had been spotted in the guesthouse.

“Hell, yeah.”

Jenny counted items on her fingers as she spoke: “Creepy bath and shower, weird button to flush the toilet, breakfast of eggs and sausages that look like they're going to crawl off your plate—”

“I mean, have you noticed any
other
strange things?” Gilda decided it was best not to tell Jenny about the vision of a boy she had seen—at least not yet. She had learned during the past year that once people
expect
to see ghosts, they often start seeing them everywhere.

“What
sort
of strange things?”

“Jenny! What the hell are you doing piddlin' around up there? Your hair rollers are hot!”

“Coming, Mummy!” Jenny rolled her eyes and tried to fake an English accent at the sound of her mother's loud, twangy voice from the floor below. “Sorry, Gilda; I'd better get moving before my hair dries looking like the Bride of Frankenstein or my mother has a coronary fit. She believes that ‘
hair
is the key to success.'”

“Your mother is absolutely right. In fact, I was just about to give myself a quick perm before I head down to the competition.”

Jenny snorted with laughter and bounded down the steps to fix her hair.

Gilda entered the grotty bathroom and found that the floor was cold and wet. A sheer, flimsy curtain fluttered over a drafty window, forcing bathers to expose their naked bodies to the walled gardens below as they climbed into the shower.

Gilda normally wasn't the squeamish type, but the combination of slimy white lime scale, black grout, and a crumbly rusty-brown substance that surrounded the edges of an ancient tub perched on porcelain feet made her feel a new kinship with people who rarely bathed.

If you can face a ghost, you can face a dirty bathtub
, Gilda told herself.

She turned on the shower pump and discovered that the handheld shower head attached to the bathtub didn't work. There was no way around it; she would have to take a bath. Gilda took a deep breath, climbed into the tub, and stuck her head under the running water. She gasped, realizing that the water flowed from a single spout in two separate streams—one boiling hot and the other freezing cold. She shampooed hastily, braced herself for the simultaneous onslaught of hot and cold water as she rinsed, then hurriedly wrapped herself in a towel, shivering in the chilly air.

Gilda scurried back to her room and hastily grabbed her “London mod” outfit, pulling on the white tights and boots and the checked wool minidress. She didn't have time to dry her wet hair, so she quickly pulled her hair back in a ponytail and stuck the large, plumed hat on her head instead. She grabbed her coat, umbrella, and shoulder bag and ran out the door.

Gilda assumed Wendy had already left, but she nevertheless paused to rap on her door just in case. “Wendy? You in there?”

Gilda was surprised to hear rustling from inside Wendy's room, followed by the sound of objects clattering to the floor. She heard Wendy's voice. “Crap! You've got to be kidding me!” Something else toppled over. “Ow!”

“Wendy? What are you doing?”

Wendy opened the door angrily, and Gilda was taken aback to see her standing in her pajamas with tousled hair and puffy eyes. One thing was for sure: she did
not
look like someone who was about to perform in an international piano competition.

“It's all over,” she said. “I'm completely doomed.”

“Why aren't you dressed? I thought you were supposed to be at Holywell Music Room by now!”

“Why didn't
you
wake me up?”

“I overslept, that's why. I thought you had already left!”

“Well, I obviously overslept, too. I must have turned off my alarm in my sleep or something.” Wendy picked up a book of music and hurled it across the room as if she were an angry toddler. Then she sat down at the foot of her bed and covered her face with her hands.

Gilda had never seen this side of Wendy, who was almost always in control of her emotions.
Maybe Wendy's big secret is that she throws a little tantrum before every one of her piano competitions
, Gilda thought.
Maybe her parents have to stuff her into the car kicking and screaming before her performances.

“Look, Wendy, we have to get moving. You can still make it.”

“No, I can't!”

“Now don't your knickers in a twist, luv; we just need to find you a frock to wear and then we can shove off.” For some reason, Gilda felt that an approximation of a northern English accent was best suited to the stressful occasion.

“Stop talking in that accent, please.”

Gilda opened Wendy's wardrobe and found all of her clothes neatly folded or hanging from hangers. “Hey, how about this little red number?”

“Gilda, there's no point. I knew I was jinxed!”

Gilda turned to face Wendy with hands on hips. “Wendy, you flew across an ocean to play for these people, so there's no way you're going to miss this just because you're running a little late this morning. Now—just throw on your clothes, curl your eyelashes, and get your butt down to the concert hall!”

“You don't understand. I can't do it.”

“Why not?”

“There's this whole
thing
I'm supposed to do before I perform.”

“Thing? What kind of thing?”

“Just a bunch of stuff I do for luck. Kind of a ritual.”

“You do a
ritual
?” Wendy had never mentioned this before.
Maybe you never really know your friends until you travel to England with them and stay in a decaying, haunted house
, Gilda thought. “So . . . what does this ritual involve?”

“A bunch of things. It takes some time. I have to shampoo my hair and eat exactly a half a bowl of Cheerios . . .”

“Why
half
a bowl of Cheerios?”

“I don't know why. It's just something that works for me. See? I knew you would just think I'm weird.”

Wendy's ritual involved washing her hair in strawberry-scented shampoo while tapping the fingering of her piano music on her scalp, eating exactly half a bowl of Cheerios with her lucky spoon, brushing her hair twenty times on each side, then closing her eyes and visualizing her entire performance from beginning to end. She had carried out the ritual ever since she won her first competition. Objectively, she knew that winning a competition had nothing to do with the half bowl of Cheerios she had consumed that day or the strawberry scent of her long hair, but the repetition of as many of the details as possible of that first winning morning reassured and calmed her on the day of a performance. And the truth was, it did seem to bring a kind of luck; she had won many competitions since that day.

“Wendy, I don't think you're weird at all. I just think you're crazy.”

“The thing I love about your jokes, Gilda, is that they're so well-timed. It's like you can tell I'm just sitting here wishing that someone would make fun of me as my entire life falls apart.”

“Come on—my brother was just telling me about this baseball player who has a ritual of eating nothing but chicken on the day of a big game because he's sure it helps him win.”

“What happens if he
doesn't
eat chicken?”

“I don't know. I guess he loses the game.”

“That really helps me.”

“Wendy, we both know your ritual is not what makes you able to play the piano brilliantly, okay?”

“Maybe not, but it makes me
believe
that I can play.”

Gilda thought for a moment. “Look, maybe you can do
part
of your lucky ritual. There isn't time to wash your hair and all that, but why don't I run downstairs and fix you a bowl of cereal while you get dressed? I bet Mrs. Luard has some English cereal like Weetabix or Shredded Hedgehog Crisp, or something.”

“What about my hair?”

“Just brush it.”

“I'm supposed to
wash
it!”

With a surge of frustration, Gilda grabbed Wendy's strawberry shampoo from its perch on the wardrobe and thrust it in Wendy's face. “Wendy, stop acting like a spoiled child star. This bottle of pink chemicals does not hold the key to your piano performance, okay? It makes you smell like a cough drop anyway.”

“It smells like strawberries.”

“Well, today you're going to pretend you're English royalty, and go without bathing or shampooing.”

“I bet Prince William takes showers.”

“I'm talking about the queens of the olden days,” said Gilda, absentmindedly sticking Wendy's bottle of strawberry shampoo into her shoulder bag. “We'll just squirt some perfume on you like they did during the Elizabethan era when nobody bathed.” Gilda remembered reading in a history book that Queen Elizabeth I used to bathe once a year with a stick of butter. “Now—I'm going to head downstairs to get your cereal. When I come back, I expect you to be dressed. Okay?”

Wendy sighed. “Okay.”

As she turned to leave Wendy's room, Gilda noticed something unusual on the floor. She stooped to pick it up, and when she flipped it over, she felt an icy sensation in her stomach. She stared at the object for a minute, trying to absorb its significance. It was a tarot card—the Nine of Swords. The frightening thing about the presence of the card on Wendy's floor was that it was from a completely
different
deck of cards than the one Gilda owned. The image on this version of the Nine of Swords featured the enormous numeral
9
and the word
despair
looming over a darkened landscape. A lone, shadowy figure walked amid nine swords piercing the dry earth. The picture had a moody, nightmarish quality. It was as if some phantom had read Wendy's future during the night, leaving behind a cryptic, bleak verdict.

“Wendy,” said Gilda cautiously, “you didn't buy a deck of tarot cards yesterday, did you?”

“When would I have time to buy tarot cards?” Wendy grabbed a wool sweater from her wardrobe and hurriedly pulled it over her head.

“Just wondered . . .” Gilda didn't want Wendy to see the card before her performance, but it was too late because Wendy was already peering over her shoulder.

“Where did
that
come from?”

“I just found it here on your floor. It seems like someone slipped it under the door.”

Gilda and Wendy contemplated the mysterious card. Worse than the gloomy picture on the Nine of Swords was the realization that someone had purposefully placed it under Wendy's door with the hope that she would discover it on the first morning of the competition.

“It seems like a warning of some kind,” said Gilda.

Wendy nodded and grew very pale, remembering the music she had heard in the middle of the night. For some reason, she didn't want to tell Gilda about it yet. She still hoped it had all been an unusually vivid dream.

“Don't worry about this now, Wendy.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“I'll figure out what this means. You just finish getting dressed, and I'll run downstairs and grab a couple muffins or something to take with us.”

 

Outside the door to Wendy's room, Gilda pulled out her journal and quickly scribbled some notes to herself: