It was 1959. Rayne Burns had been gone for three days, and Mister Ridge could still hear her singing in the night, in his sleep. He hoped he hadn’t strangled her.
When Rayne Burns sang a song, her voice sounded like brandy pouring from a bottle; a warm, husky flow you’d happily be swept up in. She made you forget. She made you come alive. And Mister Ridge had drowned in her.
We worked at the Rumpus Room—a joint on 57th Street. The doors opened at nine, but nothing really took off until around midnight, once the liquor tide had come in. It was on such a night, two weeks earlier, that Mister Ridge had first heard the voice of the angel.
Two Weeks Earlier…
Left. I was vamping, a slow, steady groove down at the bottom end of the piano. Key of A minor.
Right. My brother, up at the other end of the keyboard, was picking out little patterns of melody in the pentatonic, with the occasional blue note. He was good with that, little improvised runs to offset my bass progression.
The piano keyboard was a long, narrow river of variables: eighty-eight keys and almost infinite ways to play them. Get one note wrong and everyone knew it.
My brother and I both worked for Mister Ridge. When he sat at the piano, our job was to play the true notes.
Rayne Burns walked out onto the club’s little stage. Red dress and red heels. She walked up to the microphone and into the spotlight, and we went into Gershwin’s “Summertime.” And it was summertime, and she could sing, and everyone in the room knew it. Only O’Neill, the drummer, had heard her before; he had stood his paycheck on her voice. The band’s previous singer had had to be let go (she’d been on the needle one too many times). O’Neill grinned like a cat. He traded a satisfied nod with Hooper on the double bass and with Mister Ridge on the piano. The new girl had the pipes.
“Is there hot water in this building?” Rayne asked the next afternoon, an undercurrent of Irish in her accent. She stood on the staircase of our rooming house, her thin arms wrapped around a bag of groceries, her two hands held flat against it. Her fingers were slender and smooth. Delicate. They had never seen hard work. They didn’t need to. Her voice was her work.
“I know this is an old building, but I only get cold water,” she said. “And it looks like it flows out of the East River.”
The building dated back to 1880; the pipes were all shot to hell. We’d all had problems. She needed to talk to Frobisher, the building’s supervisor. He lived down on the ground floor.
She knew him. She had taken the vacant room on the third, the same floor as O’Neill. The drummer had gotten her the gig with the band and had found her a place to stay. He was good with that.
I reached out to carry her bag.
She was fine.
Mister Ridge walked up with her.
“I like the way you play,” she said. There was sincerity.
My brother and I were proud.
Mister Ridge paused when we got to her floor. There was no more talking, just that no-words communication that exists between musicians. The knowing. We had played together only one night, but we were already in tune, and we were liking it.
She went into her room.
Mister Ridge went up to ours, up on the fourth.
“Who is the girl?” the woodpecker asked. “She’s cute.” Jack Staines (the “woodpecker”) had been creeping down the staircase; he had been watching.
The woodpecker’s hands smelt of soap and hung motionless at his sides. His fingers were clean, always clean, and red, as though they had been scrubbed under hot water for long periods. The nails were chewed.
I didn’t like Staines. Thirty-two, and he’d inherited the building from his grandfather. He lived up on the fifth, above us all, and he knew it.
Mister Ridge left him on the stairs and went into our room.
That night at the Rumpus Room, the band cooked. Rayne held the small crowd in her grip as she tore through the songbook: “Misty,” “Funny Valentine,” “Stormy Weather,” “Fever.” She brought the microphone over to the piano and sang “Black Coffee” to us directly. Lady Day in heaven, hear the angel and smile. And when it came around to Mister Ridge’s solo, my brother and I took over, and baby, we are a beautiful pair. My brother is indifferent to most things, mostly to me, but when we’re together on a keyboard, we go to work. Left hand, right hand. The hot notes.
“I’m a bride of the wind,” Rayne said.
She drank some more. We were seated with her in a coffee shop two blocks from our building. I held a cigarette. My brother was a drinker; he held a cup of joe with a jolt of whiskey. We had been there for two hours. Dawn was staggering in with a yawn, rubbing the nighttime out of its eyes.
“I had a kid,” Rayne said. “Back in Los Angeles.” And, after a pause: “I still have her fourth birthday present. It’s still wrapped.”
She put a hand on the table, facedown.
My brother instinctively reached out and cupped it.
“After she died, I took a Greyhound east, and I haven’t been back.”
Many times I wished Mister Ridge had been left-handed. I so badly wanted to comfort her, to touch her skin, to feel the heat of her body. I had to make do with nonchalantly nursing our cigarette and feeling the heat of the tobacco.
Rayne kissed Mister Ridge on the staircase at floor three. I got my chance. I reached out and took her right hand. Her fingers were the cherished notes made flesh.
She said good night.
For the next two weeks, Mister Ridge’s blood flowed in a major key. He felt good. The band was good, life was good. The whole damned world was good.
And then the angel vanished.
Friday night, and she didn’t show up at the club for work. She didn’t answer her door when it was knocked, and Frobisher wouldn’t open it; she’d paid her rent a month in advance, it was her business what she did.
The night was a wreck.
My brother and I did the thing with the needle: the sweet syrup into the vein and into the soul. Mister Ridge took the hit. He lay back on the bed and thought about the moon and the stars and the end of the universe. And the angel.
There had been no message, no explanation, no reason. She was just gone, plain and simple.
Now…
Mister Ridge woke up.
Rayne had been singing “Summertime” again, and it sounded like she had been right there in the room. She wasn’t. She had been gone for three days, and Mister Ridge hoped he hadn’t strangled her.
We helped him sit up.
It was moments before daybreak. A bus passed by down in the street. Mister Ridge climbed off the bed, and my brother and I shut the window. We were lit up in the on/off of the red neon that ran down the edge of the building across the street:
D
R
U
G
S
The last Mister Ridge could remember of Rayne had been a kiss; standing in the hall outside her room three days earlier. It had been the last he had seen of her; the last anyone had seen of her. A wet kiss and tight embrace. In the short space of two weeks, they had become close friends. In that moment, they had become lovers. He knew she soon would have opened her door and let him inside.
Mister Ridge thought again about the photograph of the kid: a postcard-sized photograph, black-and-white, not quite in focus. A kid on a swing in a park.
That wasn’t right.
My brother and I helped Mister Ridge put on his clothes. We buttoned up his shirt and tied his shoelaces. We lit a cigarette, and I held it.
Mister Ridge went looking for Frobisher. The building supervisor could damn well unlock Rayne’s door and let us look in her room. Maybe she was in there? Maybe she’d been hurt?
I didn’t like Frobisher, and neither did my brother. Frobisher had pudgy workman’s hands—rough and raw. They were never calm. They fidgeted. The right playing with the left, tugging, forever pulling at loose skin.
Frobisher wasn’t in his little office on the ground floor. There was a little, dirty glass window that looked out into the lobby and to the mailboxes. His face wasn’t in it. He wasn’t in his room, either; it connected to his office by a door. He had a big set of keys, duplicates of every key in the building—we couldn’t find it. All we found was an unmade bed, a pinup magazine under it, and a little wooden figurine of a monkey.
Mister Ridge went up to the third floor and to Rayne’s door.
I knocked.
There was no answer.
Locked or not, I was going to open it.
I put the cigarette in Mister Ridge’s mouth, and I took a slender tuning fork out of his pocket together with a nail file.
My brother was hesitant. He didn’t like this kind of work. He didn’t like to have to concentrate. He was all about passion and the spur of the moment. He had a streak of violence to him that was like a thunderbolt. He’d rather have simply punched the door open, despite the damage to his manicure.
I forced the nail file into his palm.
I slid the tuning fork into the keyhole and waited. Tricking a lock was like playing ragtime; it only sounded the hell like ragtime if there were two hands on the keyboard.
He joined me. Hesitation be damned, he wanted to get into that room, too.
My brother looked down on everything I did. I was the bottom end of the keyboard; the chord progressions and the bass lines. The under work. He was of the noble notes, the melody, the ethereal above. I was just his counterpoint.
We concentrated. Together, with several flicks of his file and the counterpunch of my fork, we unlocked the door and went into the room.
Rayne wasn’t there.
The photograph Mister Ridge had remembered was pinned to the wall above the dresser. A single pin. A picture of a little girl in a park on a swing. Rayne’s kid.
Rayne’s room was the same as our own: single window, bare wood floor, green wallpaper that dated back to the nineteenth century, and a faded picture of a sunflower by that van Gogh fellow hung on the wall. Mister Ridge had the same cheap print on the wall in his room. Every room in the building probably had the sunflower.
Rayne’s room didn’t make sense. Clothes still hung in the closet. Personals were still spread out across the top of the dresser: lipstick, powder compact, hair brush. If she had gone, she’d taken nothing other than the matching red dress and high-heeled shoes she wore on stage when she sang at the Rumpus Room.
At the bottom of the wastepaper basket next to the dresser lay a little wooden figurine of a bird. I plucked it out. The woodpecker had made it. Everyone in the building had a custom-made, wooden sculpture of an animal. That’s how the woodpecker saw us all. Animals.
Where was Rayne’s suitcase?
We found it under the bed. I reached under and dragged it out. My brother and I opened it. Inside lay a small parcel wrapped in pale pink paper and bound in a bow. It had the dimensions and weight of maybe a coloring book. The kid’s fourth birthday present.
Mister Ridge sat on the end of the bed and took a final inhale on the cigarette. I dropped it to the floor, and he stamped it out with his heel.
As he looked up, he caught sight of a mirror, a little shard of reflection that hung on a nail. Ridge saw himself. Immediately I rose to cover his eyes. My brother did, too. With both of us in the way, he couldn’t see himself no more. Mister Ridge didn’t like looking in mirrors. He didn’t like being reminded he was alone.
We dropped away after a few moments, and he stared instead at the photograph pinned to the wall.
He had a moment of clarity.
The story everyone had been buying had been that Rayne had pulled out and moved on—the bride on the wind. The story was wrong. She wouldn’t have walked out without taking the photo.
Mister Ridge had a second moment of clarity. He wondered how he had known about it, how he had known it was pinned to her wall. He hadn’t ever been inside her room before.
For a moment, he remembered my brother and me tightening our grip around a neck.
He hoped we hadn’t strangled her.
He really did.
“She was an overnight girl,” O’Neill said. “She’s over you in a night and gone the next day. We cats see them come and go all the time.”
He gripped his glass of gin with annoyance. He had powerful arms and strong hands with big fingers. And if he had laid any of them on the angel, we’d have broken all of them.
The drummer lost himself in thought. He drummed those big fingers on the table.
I smoked a cigarette.
The late afternoon sun had no chance of entering the Rumpus Room—no windows. The club didn’t open until nine, but the bar was open to musicians. Musicians lived outside the clock.
O’Neill’s drumming slowed to a faint, unsteady, no-tempo tap of his index finger.
“Our world is changing, my friend,” he said. He was almost talking to himself. He took another drink. Tight grip.
Mister Ridge remembered my brother and me taking a tight grip around a neck. He remembered the struggle, and then the relaxation at the slump. As I’ve said, my brother has a temper. Sometimes, all I could do was to join in and help out. It was better that way for Mister Ridge. It was better for all of us.
“It’s this new music,” O’Neill said. “It’s been bubbling away for a couple of years, and now it’s starting to bubble over.”
He meant that popular music, that upbeat blend of country and blues the radio stations were all pushing, with those three-minute slices of cheerfulness the kids were all loving.
“You’ve noticed our crowds are getting smaller, and that they’re not getting any younger?”
We had noticed.
“This is the bottom of 1959,” he said. “I started playing back in the ’20s. I can’t play that young music. I only know the old music; the old grooves are the only ones I understand.”
He drank another mouthful.
“One day, you and me, we’re gonna be gone, man. Just like the girl.”
The band played again that night, but it wasn’t the same without the girl. Hooper, the bass player, filled in on vocal duties. He was adequate, but it was like comparing lemonade to liquor. The word was put out for a new singer, a new girl, someone as good as Rayne. You may as well go try and catch a falling star.
“Why is Staines called the woodpecker?” asked a man seated on the staircase.
Mister Ridge had just come in the front door of our building. It was after three in the morning.
The man climbed to his feet and held out a badge: DETECTIVE FULTON, 19TH PRECINCT. He was left-handed.
He was called the woodpecker because he was a conceptual artist and his medium was wood. He spent all day up on that top floor of his with few ideas and a lot of lumber. Whittling it, sawing it, nailing it, maybe even eating it, who knew what conceptual artists got up to in the middle of the night?
“You’re Ridge, ain’t you? The piano player?”
Detective Fulton had two fingers missing from his right hand. He reported that Frobisher had put in a phone call to the police the night Rayne disappeared. Apparently, the building super actually had been concerned about her disappearance.
“You had a thing going on with the songbird, didn’t you?” Fulton poked a half-finger. “Frobisher told me. He said he saw you two come in and out together a few times.”
Mister Ridge didn’t deny it.
The detective wanted to look in our room; apparently, detectives also lived outside the clock. We had nothing to hide that hadn’t already been hidden. We took him up to the fourth floor and let him in. He looked under the bed and in the closet. He opened drawers. He picked up some sheet music and remarked that his sister could play. He never said what.
The detective’s hands were rough and old, the fingers callused. There was no music in those fingers, no art, no passion, only the cold of winter.
“If you ask me,” he said, “I’d say your songbird was murdered.”
We damn well did ask.
He showed us, up in Rayne’s room.
Across the floor ran a faint, parallel set of scuff marks, about two feet apart. They ran out into the hall, went along to the stairs, and then disappeared.
“Your songbird didn’t walk out of this room,” the detective said. “She was dragged out.”
Mister Ridge heard Rayne in his sleep. She was singing “Summertime” again. He tossed. One note was wrong. It was flat.
He woke up.
There was no singing.
He felt nauseous, and it wasn’t from the hit of the sweet syrup we’d given him an hour earlier. It was from the memory of our grip. An intense grip. Around a throat. The struggle, and then the slump.
On the bedside table stood the little wooden figurine of the bird. It was on/off red in the neon from across the street. Next to it stood a little wooden wolf.
Detective Fulton returned in the morning with two burly uniforms, and the three flatfoots got their hands all over everything: picking up, pulling out, prodding, and poking. They looked in all the rooms and under all the beds. They opened every closet and pulled out every drawer. They made so much commotion that the woodpecker came down out of his lair and sniffed angrily.
And they found nothing.
There were two rooms to every floor. The second on ours was retained by Carnaby, a traveling bible salesman who’d been out of town for a week. His was a room stacked full of the Good Word.
The floor above us, the fifth, the top floor, was the woodpecker’s domain. He lived in one room and used the second as his studio. We’d heard he’d knocked a doorway-sized hole through an adjoining wall to link the two.
Rayne’s room was on the floor below us, the third. She shared the floor with O’Neill.
One of the rooms on the second floor lay vacant, and the other was the domicile of old man Norwood: an Englishman, a writer, a veteran of the Great War, and a drunk. His hands were covered with cat scratches, and he’d been drunk since 1933. He didn’t even know there were other floors above him. His cat was a Persian named Ramses.
There were two rooms on the ground floor: Frobisher had the one with the connecting office, and the second was full of lumber, which belonged to the wunderkind on the top floor, whose only real claim to the arena of the arts was that he had once given Jackson Pollock a cigarette on 42nd Street.
The cops didn’t find Rayne. Their dirty fingers found nothing more than eighty odd years of dust, a half-chewed copy of The Naked and the Dead, bad plumbing, and Frobisher’s photographic studio in the basement. He took pinup pictures down there; we all knew that. And Frobisher was missing. Apparently, there were laws against taking photographs of naked women with their legs spread open. How about that?
We played “Summertime” that night as an instrumental. It gave my brother a chance to show off. He was good with that. Nobody wanted to sing it, anyhow.
Why the wrong note?
It had been eating me. Why would a dream sing one note off-key? What kind of subconscious message was that? What was Mister Ridge’s mind trying to tell us?
“Have you seen Frobisher?” the woodpecker asked. Apparently, woodpeckers didn’t sleep, either. It was after two in the morning, Mister Ridge had just come into the building, and he was at the foot of the stairs.
We hadn’t seen Frobisher. No one had. And the police would have liked to.
My brother and I helped the woodpecker carry some lengths of wood up to his studio; ordinarily, it was one of Frobisher’s duties. Mister Ridge offered. We hadn’t been up to the top floor, and we wanted to look.
On the way up the stairs, the woodpecker answered the question that everyone who had ever entered the building had wanted to know: Why wood?
“I lived in Paris for two years and learned how to paint,” he explained. “I came back to New York and rented a studio in Queens. I painted pictures of everything: sunsets, sunrises, naked women reclining, tables laid out with fruit, leather-bound books, and smoldering candles. And every time I finished a picture, do you know what my biggest problem was? How to frame it. Big frame? Small? Plain? Ornate? I undertook a journey of discovery to find the perfect picture frame and, after many months, I discovered what I had been truly looking for: The frame itself. The wood. It had been right there all along. Wood is natural, malleable, beautiful, and honest. You see, the frame is the most important part of the picture; it captures whatever you put inside it. It keeps it. It has more power and potency to capture and retain perfection than any pretty picture of a canal in Venice, haystack in a field, or bowl of rotting fruit on a table. From that day out, wood became my medium. I had found my artistic truth.”
The man was truthfully nuts.
And his studio smelled of soap.
His studio had the same dimensions and layout as our room, only it was stripped of furniture and was a forest of timber, with great abstract chunks of it laid about. And about the only thing these objets d’art looked truly in danger of capturing and retaining was wood rot. And yes, there was a hole in the wall leading into the neighboring room.
We left him.
Mister Ridge went back down to the third and to Rayne’s room. Her door was open. He went in and sat on the edge of her bed.
He stared at the photograph of the little girl.
He felt nauseous.
I clawed the edge of the bed. My brother did, too.
Mister Ridge knew he’d seen the photo before; he knew we’d been in Rayne’s room before he had supposedly gone into her room for the first time.
The sweet syrup don’t make the world so clear, or so fluid, or ordered.
He remembered a neck. He remembered my brother and me strangling.
He closed his mind to it.
He remembered Rayne’s face; her dark eyes. He wanted to remember that. Nothing else.
What had we done with her body?
He went back up to our room, and my brother and I did the thing with the needle. Mister Ridge took the hit. He lay on the floor and remembered her eyes. Her dark eyes. And her voice. And the taste of her lips. And the next morning she sang “Summertime” again. With a wrong note.
“I figure it’s either you or the drummer.”
Mister Ridge didn’t recognize the voice. He rolled onto his back; we were still on the floor of our room. The first stabs of daybreak slid through the window.
A man lit a cigarette—two fingers missing. He was seated on the edge of the bed. He blew out the match and tossed it onto the floor.
It was Detective Fulton.
“Both you and the drummer knew her,” he said. “You both worked with her. You were both intimate with her.”
How did he figure that?
On the floor next to my brother lay the needle and the other tools of the sweet syrup: the spoon, the cigarette lighter, the bootlace we used for a tie-off, and a little puffy ball of dirty cotton wool. My brother quietly hid the equipment in his pocket.
“You put a woman like that in a building with a bunch of men like you and, sooner or later, you’ll kill each other. Or her.”
Why?
“Because a woman like that never gives a man what he wants.”
I wanted to give the detective a smack in the mouth.
“O’Neill has a rap sheet. He did a nine-month stretch back in the ’30s on an assault charge. But my money is on you.”
Fulton pointed a half-finger.
“Six years ago, a wife beater was strangled in San Francisco. You were in the picture: a close friend with a passable alibi. The wife still speaks highly of you. The file is still open.”
Like I said, my brother had a temper.
“And you’re a heroin user. Most of you jazz heads are.”
The half-finger was still pointing.
“Why did you kill the girl?”
My brother and I helped Mister Ridge into a sitting position. He wanted another hit of the sweet syrup, but it wasn’t a sensible course of action in the present company.
“I also know that Carnaby, that bible peddler across the hall, peddles more than just the word of the Lord to the people. I’ve had people watching him since April. Did you know he disappeared off the map a week ago? I suspect he knew we were closing in. And Frobisher’s reporting the songbird’s disappearance gave us the probable cause to walk in and take a look through his sock drawer. Did you know that half of those bibles he’s got stacked up in his room are hollowed out?”
We didn’t.
“Is that what happened to the girl? Did she get caught up in his narcotics racket?”
She knew nothing about Carnaby.
Fulton shut up. Something had snagged his attention. He put his cigarette into his mouth. He got off the bed and walked over to the closet; the door was wide open, with Mister Ridge’s meager assortment of attire on display.
Fulton ran two fingers and a thumb up the spine of the doorway.
The closet was a walk-in kind. You could hang your clothes, throw in your hat and shoes, with room enough for a couple of boxes and odds and ends.
“Would you say that all the rooms in this building are identical in their layout?”
They appeared to be.
“How come the bible peddler’s room don’t have a closet?”
This thought was significant enough to propel the detective out into the hall and over to Carnaby’s door. He unlocked it; he had Frobisher’s master set of keys.
He went inside and over to the wall where the sunflower hung. He ran his hands over the wall’s surface. He found hinges. It wasn’t a wall. The door and frame to the room’s closet had been removed and a board had been put in their place to conceal the closet’s opening; suitably wallpapered over and with the picture hung. The detective’s hands sought a way to open it.
We had followed. We knew what he was looking for: Carnaby’s drugs.
“The songbird was just a distraction,” he said, intimately running his fingers across the green wallpaper.
We didn’t think so.
“A nickel and dime murder to fill up my time sheet. No one really cares what happened to her.”
We did.
“Carnaby’s narcotics racket is what we’re really interested in. The girl was just a pretty little thing that could hold a note.”
My brother grabbed the detective and slammed him against the wall and went for his throat. I had no option but to help; within a second, the detective would collect his senses and his hands would start fighting, or going for his gun.
My brother and I did the strangling thing.
Struggle.
Hold.
Hold tight against the struggle.
Hold long.
Slump.
Release.
Mister Ridge didn’t like what we had done.
We dragged the detective’s corpse away from the foot of the wall and we opened it. We knew how. We knew where the groove lay.
Hidden inside Carnaby’s closet lay a cornucopia of pharmaceutical delight: Benzedrine, laudanum, reefer, Turkish opium, the sweet syrup, and who knew what else?
And Frobisher.
Mister Ridge had forgotten about that.
He had been of a mind to hide the detective’s body inside the closet, but the building’s supervisor was already in there, and the air was going off fast.
Mister Ridge remembered: There had been an argument in Rayne’s room; we’d made Frobisher unlock it the day after she’d disappeared.
She hadn’t been in there.
Frobisher hadn’t liked being told what to do. And he’d said some things about Rayne that would have been better off staying inside his head. He’d said he’d have liked to have gotten his hands all over her. He’d said specifically where.
Mister Ridge remembered my brother and me at his neck. We had just about broken it. We had then dragged his body out of Rayne’s room and up to our floor; Carnaby’s secret closet had been the perfect hiding place for it.
I gathered up some more of the sweet syrup for Mister Ridge and put it into my pocket.
Two bodies inside the closet would smell it up even worse; they’d smell it down in the street. We put the wall panel back into place. There was a furnace down in the basement, which was an even better idea.
It was daybreak; no one was awake in the building. We dragged the detective out of the room (Mister Ridge noticed the faint scuff marks his heels left behind). We dragged the body down the stairs and, on the way down, Mister Ridge began to remember that we had gone this way before.
He thought of Rayne.
It was the most logical thing to do to get rid of a body. Burn it. Why store it in a closet, when you could simply drag it down to the furnace and burn it from existence?
Mister Ridge’s head throbbed: Why had we strangled her?
We dragged the detective across the concrete of the basement and up to the boiler, and I opened the metal, soot-black furnace door.
There was already a body inside. The smell of it was overpowering.
It wasn’t Rayne.
It was Carnaby.
He and his nicotine-stained fingers had been in there for more than a week. Unburnt. Mister Ridge remembered that we had needed to buy some accelerant. He remembered there had been an argument with Carnaby about the sweet syrup and its price.
The cops hadn’t looked in the furnace. They’d come down to the basement, found Frobisher’s photographic equipment and proof sheets of pretty little things and had quit. Anyway, they’d been looking for the man’s drugs, not his corpse. Or the corpse of a pretty little thing that could hold a note.
Mister Ridge turned away. He slumped to the floor next to the dead detective and his brain burned.
Why had we strangled her?
What had we done with her body?
Mister Ridge cried.
I didn’t know the answers, either. The sweet syrup messes with the clock and the memory of us all.
My brother reached into his pocket and brought out the needle and other tools. I reached into mine.
We did the thing. We all loved the thing.
None of us wanted to think about what might have happened to Rayne, the sweetest girl we had ever known. A girl we’d have given our life for.
Why her?
Mister Ridge took the hit.
He was as far down as he could go.
He lay on the cold concrete floor of the basement and dreamed of our angel.
But he didn’t hear her singing. Instead, he heard a typewriter. Clack, clack, clack. And then old man Norwood telling his cat to get off the sofa. The sounds were faint, but distinguishable. They were from a room two floors above; traveling down through the plumbing, down through the guts of the building.
The pipes!
Mister Ridge sat up.
Dreams didn’t sing wrong notes.
We helped him climb to his feet. Raw instinct took him up the stairs, all the way up to the fifth floor, and I knocked on the woodpecker’s studio door.
There was no answer. It was locked. My brother punched it open, and we went inside.
There was no one in the studio.
We went through into the adjoining room. There was no one there either; there wasn’t even a bed, just a table and chairs. Where did the woodpecker sleep?
My brother gripped me. He was as desperate as I was. We could feel Mister Ridge’s blood pumping.
The daybreak sun struck strong through the windows and cast streaks of yellow through the rooms.
For a moment, all was still.
Silent.
And then the voice of the angel…“Summertime.”
It wasn’t a dream. Rayne was singing, and she was somewhere on that floor. Mister Ridge walked about the two rooms, trying to work out where.
He quickly determined her voice was coming from above. And supposedly only the roof was above floor five, but it didn’t sound at all like she was up there, outside. She sounded as though she was inside the building.
The sunflower.
There was no closet in the woodpecker’s studio. There was just a wall: green wallpaper and the sunflower. My brother and I found the grooves. It was the same score as down in Carnaby’s room: a wallpapered wooden panel on hinges. My brother and I pried it open, and Rayne’s voice became louder. Inside the closet lay a narrow staircase that went up to another floor.
Mister Ridge climbed the stairs.
The next floor up was a world of wood; a nonexistent floor between floor five and the roof. The windows were a series of slots of stained glass, architectural flourishes at the top of the building. They let in daylight and, caught in the shafts of the morning yellow, stood the angel. She was dressed in her red dress and red heels. Singing “Summertime.” And it was. And she was dirty, and her dress was dirty. And she was in a cage, a large wooden cage built into the room, floor, attic, or whatever the architect had labeled the place. And the woodpecker lay asleep in his bed in front of it, dreaming a contented sleep as his songbird greeted the new day, caught and kept in his perfect wooden frame.
Rayne saw us. Her dirty hands gripped the wood of the cage’s bars. The wrong notes had been on purpose. She’d hoped we’d hear. She’d been waiting.
We woke the woodpecker.
We made him unlock the padlock keeping Rayne captive.
She stepped out.
There were no words; just two musicians and the unspoken knowing of where the song was going.
Rayne’s hands tore strips from her dress, and she gagged the woodpecker. My brother and I led him into his cage, and we nailed his hands to the floor. He didn’t like that.
We put the padlock back in place.
We put the sunflower back on the wall.
We left the building.
Rayne was free; she was back on the wind. She flew from the city, and we flew with her.