I gasp and start to cry. “Mommy! Rougey broke my?—”
But Rouge is behind me in a flash, covering my mouth. “Mommy isn’t here right now, Bianca. And our nanny is on the other side of the mansion. Neither of them can hear you. So crying isn’t going to do you any good.” She uncovers my mouth.
I wipe my eyes and sniff a few times. “Why did you break my Barbie?”
She grins. “Because you’re so much more than Barbie. You’re Bianca.”
I get up and grab a tissue to blow my nose and wipe the rest of my tears away. “Then what kind of games should I play? What are the grown-up games?”
She extends her hand. “Come with me down to the basement. I’ll show you.”
I get to my feet and follow Rougey, but as I do my left eyebrow twitches.
That’s weird. I’ve never felt that before.
Mommy sometimes has a twitch like that in her eyebrow. I asked her about it once. She said she just had too much coffee that day, but she looked a little scared when she told me.
She then got a phone call and learned that Daddy had been in a car accident. He was in the hospital, so she scooped me up and took me along. I never got to ask about her twitch again.
My eyebrow twitches a second time.
It’s probably nothing.
I’ll ignore it.
10
HARRISON
I knock on the door to Alissa’s room. Just as I thought, there was a small electric piano in the kids’ music room, which I promptly unplugged and dragged back up to my ward. It’s lightweight, so I didn’t need any help.
“Come in,” Bianca says.
I open the door and enter. Bianca is seated at the side of Alissa’s bed, right where I left her. She has a distant look in her eyes, but when she sees me she smiles.
“You found a piano!”
I take the piano to the other side of the bed and set it up on its flimsy stand. “It’s not exactly a Steinway, but it should help you decipher the code in the music box.” I plug it in and the keyboard lights up.
Alissa plays a few notes, her lips twisting at the tinny sound that comes out. “Not much, but you’re right. It’ll do. Can you hand me the music box?”
Bianca hands it to her, along with a piece of scratch paper and a pen.
She winds up the key and listens through the tune once more. She jots some notes down. She listens to it a few more times, each time writing a few more notes down. After five listens total, she shows us what she’s written, her lips pursed.
She sighs. “I’m afraid it’s nonsense. Maybe it’s just a broken music box. The cylinder is off-kilter or something.”
“Hold up,” I say. “That first word could be ‘ace,’ couldn’t it? Maybe it’s referring to me?”
“I don’t think so,” Alissa says. “The word ‘ace’ can be easily written in regular notation, since E is a musical note. It would be more obvious.”
I rub at my forehead. “Right. And this music box was in my car before I dressed as the Ace of Clubs, anyway. So it can’t be referring to that.”
“How are you sure some of the wrong notes are connected?” Bianca asks. “I see you put hyphens between some of them.”
“There is a measure of correct music between each set of wrong notes,” Alissa says. “If it is indeed a message—which, based on this, seems like a lost cause—it denotes three separate words.”
I stroke my chin. “Okay, but that composer you like. Shosta-heiney.”
