A Note Before Dying

Book One in the Mara Solomon Series

Adam Cole

Part six

(C) 2020 Adam Cole

Published by Nuncici Press, an imprint of Adam Cole Works LLC

Taking a breath, as if, against his own better judgment, he was about to suggest something utterly ludicrous, the Detective said, “It occurred to me that you might be useful to this investigation, seeing as how it involves musicians.”

“In what way, useful?” she asked. 

“We’re investigating the death of the harpist Reanne Adastra.”

Stupid bitch.  The thought came unbidden to Mara’s head.

“Oh, crap.”

“You were a fan?”

“She was…a friend,” Mara said, shaking her head.  The last of them.

“I’m sorry,” said the Detective.  “I had no idea.  She seems to have been abducted from her apartment three nights ago, apparently while she was practicing.  Someone reported her missing yesterday.  This morning we recovered her body from the middle of the Swann Preserve, under a bridge by the South River.”

Mara blinked once, gasping.  It said a lot that Mara was only finding out from the police.  The image of her friend came to her mind, the face ghastly, water-logged.  Mara put her hand on the desk to keep from reeling.  

You stupid bitch.

“What can I do?” she whispered.

“Well,” the Detective said, pulling a file from a drawer full of carefully stacked papers and photographs.  His fingers found something large.  “I was wondering if this means anything to you.”

He handed across a photocopied folio.  It was a ditto of four pieces of manuscript paper, handwritten, upon which were the scrawls of a recent composition of some kind.  Mara took the booklet in her hand and gazed down at it.  Upon the top it read, “Swansong for Harp.”

“This looks like it could be one of her transcriptions,” Mara said after looking at it for a second.  She gazed hard at the notes.  “I’ve never been that good a sight-reader.  A problem with my eyes.  I could probably pick it out if you have a piano.”

The Detective restrained a laugh.  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry, it’s…uh…being tuned.”  He smiled at her, but he was uncertain if she took his remark as the joke it was.

“May I borrow this?” she asked, holding the ditto up.  “There’s not much I can tell you until I play it.”

The Detective shrugged.  “You’ll have to fill out some paperwork, but I think we can arrange it.”

“No pun intended,” Mara muttered, gazing across the notes on the paper.

Detective Randle missed the joke entirely.

Back in her office, Mara stared up at the photocopied manuscript paper, the handwritten scrawl of notes dotted across it like a strange constellation.  It was hard for her to read music quickly…something had always been wrong with her vision.  Words were better than music notation, and given enough time she could work out a piece well enough to play it competently.  But the kind of all-over-the-place eye tracking of a good sight-reader was impossible for her.  Carefully, painstakingly, she began to play the notes from the beginning.

The piece was very dissonant, like some kind of Schoenberg composition, very harsh and unmelodic.  Was it a twelve-tone piece?  Serial compositions were carefully constructed and took a long time to write, but the haste with which these notes seem to have been written out suggested a complete lack of forethought.  

Lack of forethought wasn’t one of Reanne’s character traits.  Was it a transcription of another composer?  Dallapiccola?  John Cage? 

And then, at the very end, as a strange coda, were four c’s in a row.  Dum dum dum dum.  About as tonal and non-Schoenbergian as you could get.

“What were you thinking about?” Mara asked the ghost of Reanne Adastra.

More about A Note Before Dying

Mara Solomon is a musicologist, not a detective.  She has no idea that she’s about to take on a murder case.  

In an unexpected visit to the Decatur Police Station she discovers that her estranged friend, the harpist Reanne Adastra, has been brutally beaten to death, her body left to rot in the South River.  The only clue to the movie seems to be a piece of music, scrawled by Adastra before her death and left behind.  The police have no idea what to make of that.

But Mara thinks she knows.

Adam Cole is the host of TruerMU where he interviews celebrities and up-and-coming musicians and creatives.  His guests have included Shawn Mullins, Liberty Devitto and Rick Beato, among many others.  A jazz and classical pianist, Adam’s numerous fiction and non-fiction titles engage readers with the truth about music.  Visit Adam at www.acole.net

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