Alissa chuckles. “Shostakovich.”
“You said he used the German system to spell out his initials, right? The notes he uses in that code are D, S, C, and H. But S and H aren’t notes on the musical scale.”
“Not in our system, no.” She strokes her chin. “In the German system, the note we call B is H, and the note we call E-flat is Es, because the flat is an S in German instead of the little symbol we have that resembles a lower-case B.”
“Okay, so what if the first four notes at the beginning of the tune, the ones that indicate the Shosta-whatsit motif, mean that we’re supposed to use that system?”
“Worth a try,” Alissa says. She rewrites the notes again, this time replacing the B’s with H’s and the E-flat with an S.
She shakes her head. “Still nothing.”
Bianca wrinkles her nose. “Well, he had the word ‘head’ followed by ‘HS.’”
“Head… High School?” I suggest. “Like a principal?”
“Still doesn’t explain what on earth the first few words could mean.” Alissa bites her lip. “And does a high-school principal have anything to do with what we’re doing? Have you met anybody who matches that description?”
“No.” I pace a few steps. “Damn it. Maybe this is a dead end.”
“Hold on.” Bianca touches her finger to her eyebrow. “I think we’re on to something. We just have to think harder.” She closes her eyes. “Whoever planted this in your trunk probably thought we were close to figuring out what Rouge is up to.”
I nod. “The cooler of hearts.” Then a lightbulb. “Wait! The last word. Could it be ‘hearts?’”
Alissa widens her eyes. “Oh my God. The tenth symphony. How could I be so stupid?”
“What about the tenth symphony?” I ask.
“It’s the same symphony that Shostakovich uses his DSCH motif in. There’s another musical code in the third movement. A code honoring a fellow composer, Elmira Nazirova, with whom he had a lifelong friendship. He likely had a romantic interest in her. The theme he wrote around her name and the DSCH motif tangle with each other throughout the movement.”
Bianca blinks. “But that name can’t be spelled out with musical notes, either.”
“Precisely. Shostakovich combined German and Italian notation to write her name out. The notes as we know them spell out E-A-E-D-A. But the Italians don’t use letters for notes. They use the solfège syllables, like in The Sound of Music.” She sings the scale. “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do. C is Do, D is Re, and so on. Combining the Italian and German notation, the musical theme spells out E-La-Mi-Re-A, which is much closer to Elmira’s name.”
“And this woman has to do with our code because…?” I ask.
“Because we can replace the D and the second H—formerly a B—in the last word of the puzzle with an R for Re and a T for Ti, spelling out the word ‘hearts.’” She erases the letters and presents us with the newest version of our code.
“All right!” Bianca says. “We have the last word.”
“I think we do,” Alissa says. “Unfortunately, the first two words are still nonsense, I’m afraid.”
I pace the room. “Do you think this was trying to tell us about the hearts we were going to find? An extra push in the right direction? If so, it’s a little late. We already found them on our own.”
Bianca sighs. “That could be the case… But it still doesn’t explain the first few words. I don’t see how they could be twisted around to say something like ‘find the hearts in the ladies’ restroom.’”
I scratch at the side of my head and glance back toward Alissa. “But you mentioned that there were a few other bits of the tune in the music box that were wonky. But they weren’t wrong notes.”
Alissa raises her eyebrows. “Right. I was so hyper focused on listening for the wrong notes, I forgot about the other elements.” She winds the teapot once more and listens through. “Okay, right. The first thing that’s off is the extra beat of nothing, even before the first wrong note is played. There’s an awkward one-beat pause that throws off the waltz rhythm.”
“And there was something else,” I say. “A note that was too long.”
“Right. A four-beat note in waltz time. Shouldn’t be possible. A whole note. And that occurs before the F.” She erases her notes and then writes everything down, including a few new symbols I recognize as the quarter rest and the whole note in music notation. “This… This might be something.”
“The…Zac of Hearts?” I wrinkle my nose.
“That can’t be it,” Alissa says. “The quarter rest looks more like a J than a Z to me.”
Bianca’s jaw drops. “The Jack of Hearts.”
