He nodded once and didn’t ask how I knew. He understood some people read rooms how he read scores.
The parlor smelled of gunpowder beneath the usual citrus and old wood. It was a scent that had no business in the room.
I reached out for the piano to steady myself and stopped. There, on the piano bench, was a folded sheet of music, centered precisely.
It had not been there before the shot. I would have noticed it.
That meant someone had been inside when the shot was fired.
I picked the sheet up with two fingers, already understanding that the careful placement meant something delivered, intendedto be read. It was cream-colored, heavy stock. They’d written the notes in a precise, unhurried hand.
“When the Saints Go Marching In.”
I knew it before I finished reading the first measure. You couldn’t grow up in New Orleans and not carry “Saints” somewhere in your chest, resting close to your heartbeat. This arrangement was off. The melody was intact, but transposed to a minor key.
I had grown up in the back offices of my mother’s funeral home in the Tremé, doing homework at a folding table while she processed paperwork for families who had come apart at the seams. “Saints” was structural for me. It began with loss and moved, measure by measure, toward something that wasn’t exactly joy but was a refusal of despair. When the key resolves and the brass section takes over, everyone who has buried someone feels the back of their throat tighten.
In a minor key, it would never resolve.
It would remain in the dark, circling.
In the bottom right corner, the anniversary date was circled in red. August 29, 2026. The twentieth anniversary of the Jackson Square moment, a concert Dominic had been designing for eighteen months. Circled carefully. Not slashed or underlined. Twelve days away.
“Luca.” Dominic’s voice was quiet and level.
I turned, crossed to him, and held out the sheet.
He took it. Studied it in silence while I listened to sheets of rain spattering the marble as they splashed through the broken windowpane.
He didn’t speak. He looked once more at the bullet hole, then back at the page. The pencil was still in his left hand. He set it on the piano lid with a quiet, definitive click and straightened.
“Call Celeste,” he said.
Notshouldwe, orperhaps we ought to. He’d already arrived at the necessary action. No performance of alarm. Dominic St. Clair had conducted through the AIDS plague years and through the aftermath of Katrina. Whatever fear lived in him had learned long ago to dress well and take a seat in the back.
I already had my phone out.
“The police—“ I started.
“Celeste. The police will manage the narrative. Celeste will solve the problem.”
He was right, and we both knew it, so I found her number and handed him the phone. I watched him carry it to the far end of the parlor, away from the rain coming through the broken glass.
I swept shards while he talked. My hands needed something to do, and the floor needed clearing. Dominic’s voice on the phone reached me, low and stripped of everything nonessential.
“Saints in minor.” A pause. “The anniversary circled.” Shorter pause. “Before the shot, yes.”
I heard one clear comment from Celeste through the phone. “I’ll make the call.”
Dominic returned my phone without ceremony. He stood near the Steinway. Not frightened.Interrupted.
“She knows someone,” I said. Celeste Boudreaux Hargrove had navigated New Orleans’ power structures for fifty years; she didn’t keep contacts so much as tend them. If Dominic needed help, Celeste would know whom to hire.
“She does.” He picked up the minor-key “Saints” from the piano lid and looked at it once more. His face gave nothing away, but his hands held the page with care.
He set it back down.
“Don’t touch the glass near the door,” he said. “Leave the bullet. Whoever comes will want to see it in place.”
