The Ghost Sonata Read online

  “Wendy doesn’t need to practice,” Gilda interjected. “She’s naturally talented.”

  Ming Fong fixed Gilda with a stare, as if she were calculating something in some computerlike portion of her brain. “Wendy will probably win the whole competition,” she declared with sudden forced cheer. “Wendy always wins.”

  Wendy squirmed. It was a compliment, but for some reason, she felt as if she had just been jinxed.

  “Of course Wendy will win,” said Gilda. “She can practically play Rachmaninoff ’s Third Piano Concerto with her toes. Besides, Wendy and I have big plans for that five large in prize money.”

  Ming Fong’s mouth became a small, flat line.

  “Gilda has plans for the prize money,” said Wendy.

  “What would you do with the five thousand pounds?” Gary looked up from his music, suddenly interested.

  “First, we’ll take a trip to Paris and update our wardrobes. Then we’ll probably travel through Europe, followed by a cruise,” said Gilda.

  “Whatever’s left over will go into our college funds,” Wendy joked.

  “Community college, of course,” Gilda added.

  “Devry University.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Gary. “Are the two of you playing duets together in the competition or something? Why would you split the prize money with Gilda, Wendy?”

  Wendy grinned. “That’s actually a very good question. I mean, shouldn’t the person who’s doing the performing get all the money?”

  “We’re splitting it because I’m Wendy’s official page-turner for the sight-reading competition,” Gilda explained.

  “Clearly you deserve half the prize money.”

  “Why does Wendy get her own page-turner?” Gary asked.

  “She has special needs,” Gilda blurted before Wendy could reply.

  “Wendy’s learning disabled?”

  Wendy snorted at this comment, and Ming Fong burst into surprisingly manic laughter. “Learning disabled!”

  “It’s not funny,” said Gilda, feeling, for some reason, that Ming Fong was laughing way too hard. “‘Special needs children’ is actually what they call learning-disabled kids in England.”

  Ming Fong and Gary were suddenly confused, unsure whether Wendy did, in fact, have “special needs.”

  “Anyway,” Gilda continued, “I’m kind of like Wendy’s personal trainer as well as her page-turner, right, Wendy?”

  “Completely wrong.”

  “That’s why Mrs. Mendelovich asked me to come with her to England.” Gilda eyed Mrs. Mendelovich, who was now gesturing even more broadly as she wandered farther away from her students.

  “Gilda wanted a cheap trip to England,” said Wendy. “That’s why she’s here.”

  “Don’t forget getting out of school for a week.” With a twinge of dread, Gilda remembered that her suitcase included a stack of books and homework assignments her teachers had piled on “so you keep up while you’re away.” Her English teacher, Mrs. Rawson, had been particularly grumpy about Gilda’s request for a week away from school in the middle of February and had given Gilda the extra assignment of keeping a detailed travel diary. Because her teacher had obviously expected a horrified response to this work, Gilda had done her best to cringe and look nauseated. Secretly, she thought it was the first interesting homework Mrs. Rawson had ever assigned.

  Gary looked at his watch. “Aren’t we supposed to be on the plane by now? The flight must be delayed.”

  As if on cue, a flight attendant’s voice blasted over the loudspeaker. “Passengers on British Airways flight number nine, please note we have a delay due to a mechanical problem. Our mechanics are working to resolve it. We expect a delay of at least fifteen minutes.”

  Throughout the room, passengers shot each other looks of exasperation and trepidation. “Mechanical problem? That doesn’t sound good,” they joked ruefully.

  Wendy felt an unpleasant, light-headed sensation. Everything around her seemed slightly blurry, paler than normal. She felt queasy as she noticed a red-haired girl and her mother staring at her from across the room with a little too much interest.

  “I’m surprised they actually told us it was a mechanical problem,” said Gary. “Everyone’s first thought is, ‘Oh no! This plane is going to crash!’”

  “It isn’t going to crash,” said Gilda confidently. “I would have gotten a psychic vibration if it was.”

  “Really?” Gary looked interested. “You mean, you always know when a plane is going to crash?”

  “Just the planes I’m on.” Secretly, Gilda felt a rush of anxiety. Gilda wasn’t at all sure she would know if the plane was going to crash. She simply felt certain that it would be far too mean a cosmic joke if, on her very first trip to England, her plane actually took a nosedive.

  Gilda noticed that Wendy’s face had taken on a greenish hue. “Hey—what’s wrong?”

  “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “Wendy, we both know that flying is probably safer than driving around in Detroit.”

  “It’s just—last night I had this horrible dream.” Wendy hesitated. She twirled a lock of hair around her finger, then examined the ends of her hair for split ends. She still felt that talking about the dream might make the disturbing images too real and powerful.

  “A dream about what?”

  Wendy sighed. “Well, I was alone, walking down a street. It was lined with a bunch of row houses and weird buildings, and then the next thing I knew, there were a bunch of practice rooms filled with pianos.”

  “So it’s about the piano competition.”

  “Wait—I’m not finished. I realized that someone I saw in one of the rooms—someone who was sitting there playing the piano—was actually dead.” Wendy’s voice cracked a bit on the word dead. She simply couldn’t bring herself to describe the way the boy had waved at her with an eerie recognition. For some reason, this was the scariest part. It was an image that held some crucial significance, but its meaning was something she would rather not know.

  Gilda felt a tiny tickle in her ear. A faintly cold sensation radiated through her spine.

  “Creepy,” said Gary.

  Ming Fong simply observed Wendy with an intense, expressionless interest.

  “So, what do you think it means?” Wendy asked.

  Gilda thought for a moment. She believed that her own dreams sometimes contained psychic messages or warnings, and there was definitely something very eerie about the dream Wendy had just described. However, Gilda wasn’t at all sure how to interpret it, and she didn’t want to make Wendy feel more scared than she already was.

  “Wendy, how did you feel when you were having the dream?” Gilda had read that one of the important elements of analyzing a dream was to consider the emotions evoked by the images.

  “I felt kind of alone, I guess—scared that something terrible was going to happen to me.”

  “Hey, why don’t I read your tarot cards?” Gilda suggested. “Maybe we can get some clue about what that dream means.”

  Throughout the winter, Gilda had been expanding her psychic skills by studying a book called The Mystery of the Tarot. She had even begun reading fortunes for friends and acquaintances during her lunch period at school, just to add some excitement to her school day. In addition to what she regarded as the uncanny accuracy of her fortune-telling, Gilda also found tarot card readings to be a great way to start conversations with people who had previously ignored her. So far, her only big error had been an attempt to make a boy named Craig Overcash (for whom she had harbored a crush for almost two years) believe that he would “soon have a new, strikingly attractive girlfriend who has psychic abilities.” Craig did find a new girlfriend, but she didn’t have psychic abilities. More importantly, she wasn’t Gilda.

  Wendy wrinkled her nose. “What if you give me a bad reading? Then I’ll feel even worse.”

  “I don’t give bad readings.” Gilda rummaged in her
backpack and pulled out her tarot cards. The Mystery of the Tarot advised keeping the cards “wrapped in a purple silk scarf and facing east,” but Gilda kept hers wrapped in a leopard-print scarf and stuffed in her backpack. She handed the deck to Wendy.

  “Now shuffle them and think about a question or problem.”

  Wendy shuffled the cards. She glanced up and again noticed the red-haired mother and daughter placidly staring at her, as if she were a television show they were watching. She squelched a strange urge to stick out her tongue at them.

  “Are you thinking about your question?” Gilda asked.

  Wendy nodded. As she moved the cards back and forth with her quick, lithe fingers, she thought about the dream and wondered what it meant. She wondered who would win the piano competition and whether she would perform well. She thought of her mother offering her the red dress: wish to win.

  “Okay,” said Gilda. “Now hand me the cards.”

  Gilda stood up and fanned out the cards on her seat. “Pick a card.”

  Wendy tentatively drew a card. Ming Fong and Gary leaned closer to watch.

  “Now place your first card face up on the chair so we can see it.”

  Wendy flipped the card to reveal an image of a young man sitting up in bed. He held his head in his hands in a hopeless attempt to dodge nine swords that soared swiftly through the air, directly toward his body.

  “See?” Wendy whined. “This is what I was talking about!”

  “That kind of looks like a bad card,” said Gary.

  “There aren’t ‘bad’ cards. The cards are just a mirror to show you what forces are at work in your life.”

  “Swords flying at you looks bad,” said Gary.

  “Wendy’s first card represents her current situation in life. You picked the Nine of Swords, Wendy, which means that fears are hanging over you, and you may be having sleepless nights.”

  “It looks like she’s going to be stabbed,” said Ming Fong.

  “Please draw your next card, Wendy.”

  The second card featured a picture of a monstrous-looking devil with large webbed wings and curly horns.

  “As I was saying,” said Wendy. “I would hate to get a bad reading.”

  Secretly, Gilda had to admit that this was one of the worst readings she had seen in some time. Nobody wanted to get the Devil card.

  “Does that mean she’ll become possessed or something?” Gary asked.

  “Bleaaaaaagh!” Wendy did her best horror-film imitation of a girl possessed by demons.

  “Yikes!”

  Gilda sensed she was losing control of the reading. “Gary, you can’t be so literal. The Devil card usually just means Wendy might be feeling trapped by something—maybe by another person—maybe by something else in her life.”

  Wendy leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Okay, that’s enough fun at my expense.”

  “Come on, Wendy. Just finish the reading.”

  “I’m done.”

  “But the next card will give you something important to ponder.”

  “The next card better give me something nice to look forward to for a change.” This time, Wendy reached for the opposite end of the fanned cards. The card she drew depicted a skeleton riding a horse and waving a black flag. On the ground beneath the horse’s hooves was a corpse.

  All four of them stared silently for a moment.

  “Wow,” Wendy whispered, suddenly at a loss for wry comments and jokes.

  Gilda knew that drawing the “Death card” didn’t necessarily meant that an actual death was predicted. All the same, there was always something unnerving about the image of that skeleton riding a horse. You couldn’t help but feel stirrings of dread when you drew the Death card. Gilda noticed a cold sensation in her hands. What, exactly, did this card mean? What if Wendy’s dream really did mean that some disaster was imminent? She reminded herself of one of the rules from her Mystery of the Tarot: “Try not to alarm the person for whom you’re interpreting the cards,” the book’s author urged. “Try to put a positive spin on the reading. Never say things like, ‘It looks like you don’t have long to live,’ or ‘Some dire calamity may soon befall you and your loved ones.’”

  “What we have here is the cute little Death card.” Gilda did her best to speak in a cheerful tone of voice. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that Wendy—or any one of us—will die soon. It might simply mean that something is coming to an end or changing.”

  Maybe your winning streak is coming to an end, a mean voice in Wendy’s head whispered. Maybe you aren’t up to any of this at all.

  “To be honest, I’m getting a little freaked out,” Gary admitted. “Do you think we should tell someone about these tarot cards?”

  “‘Excuse me, Mr. Airplane Pilot,’” said Wendy in a self-mocking tone of voice, “‘we just did a tarot reading, and now we’re scared this plane is going to crash!’”

  “But what if this is our one chance to say something?”

  Gilda suddenly wished she hadn’t offered to do the tarot card reading for Wendy after all. Gary had a point; if the cards were a warning about the flight, they should say something. “This plane isn’t going to crash,” Gilda declared, hoping that by saying the words with enough certainty she could make them true. She was going to England, by jingo, and no tarot card reading was going to stop her. “And Wendy, you still have one last card to draw.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. There’s no way I’m drawing another card after these three.”

  “But the last card is the one that tells you what you’re supposed to do about the whole situation. It could put the other cards in a positive perspective.”

  “Now boarding British Airways flight nine for London Heathrow Airport,” a smooth voice announced over the loudspeaker. Mrs. Mendelovich waved at them from across the room. There was no time left; they had to board the plane despite Wendy’s disturbing tarot cards.

  Gilda scooped up her tarot cards, and the four students grabbed their backpacks and joined Mrs. Mendelovich in line.

  Wendy again felt light-headed as she followed the red-haired mother and daughter down the dim, carpeted ramp leading to the plane.

  6

  Turbulence

  Gilda and Wendy shot each other horrified looks when they realized they weren’t seated together on the plane: Gilda was wedged between Gary and Ming Fong, and Wendy’s ticket had her seated across the aisle, next to Mrs. Mendelovich. “Wonderful!” Mrs. Mendelovich declared. “I seet next to Windy!”

  Pointing at Mrs. Mendelovich, Gilda mouthed a silent command to Wendy: “Ask her to switch seats!”

  “I CAN’T!” Wendy whispered in reply.

  “Cheeildren!” Mrs. Mendelovich stood up in the middle of the aisle, drawing the attention of everyone in the surrounding seats along with that of her students. “I want to teell you something—how very ploud I am of you today. You are my stars. You haf made me so ploud.” A tiny tear trickled through her black eyeliner into the folds of her skin. “You haf plepared and plepared and plepared. Soon you will walk onstage, seet down to play, and—my God! Pearfect.” Mrs. Mendelovich grabbed Wendy’s hand for emphasis. Wendy stiffened, and Mrs. Mendelovich gave her hand a little pat. “Each of you—like my own cheeildren—that is how ploud I am. I tell people: these three—the best I haf taught. The best! And maybe—one of you will ween.” She addressed these last words to Wendy, who suddenly wore a glazed expression.

  Gilda wished she were sitting closer to Wendy so she could make a joke about “weening the competition.”

  Gilda now understood Wendy’s conflicted sense of fear and admiration for her teacher. Mrs. Mendelovich’s big personality was both intoxicating and smothering. At the same time, Gilda found herself wishing that she were a more genuine part of this group—a true competitor rather than a lowly page-turner. What would it feel like to have somebody be that intensely “ploud” of something you had accomplished?

  “So, you are all ready for England?” Mrs
. Mendelovich asked the group. “You haf copies of your music, and scores all numbered for the judges? You haf your pajamas and underwears and toothbrushes?”

  Everyone nodded and stifled giggles at the word underwears.

  “If not—too late now!”

  Gary and Ming Fong laughed a little too uproariously at this comment.

  Mrs. Mendelovich was asked to sit down because a flight attendant had just begun to describe the safety features of the aircraft. Each of Mrs. Mendelovich’s students watched with rapt attention as the flight attendant talked about “floating devices” and “oxygen masks.” Gary actually scribbled some notes with a pencil.

  As the plane took off, Gary and Ming Fong both pulled down their serving trays and opened music books that were virtually black with complex little lines and dots of notation. Gilda watched as they tapped their fingers on top of their plastic serving trays, pretending to play invisible pianos. Clearly, neither Gary nor Ming Fong was going to offer much conversation during the long flight.

  “You missed a few notes there.” Gilda elbowed Ming Fong as she speedily drummed out the fingering of the Chopin “Ocean Étude.”

  “No—no missed notes.”

  Gilda pointed at Ming Fong’s music. “Right there, that patch of squiggly bits was a complete mess.”

  “Those are thirty-second notes, not squiggle bits. No mess—all right notes.”

  “Ming Fong, I saw your middle finger move right when it should have moved left.”

  Ming Fong frowned intensely at her music.

  “Gilda’s kidding, Ming Fong,” said Gary.

  “I was completely serious.” Gilda couldn’t help thinking that a big, juicy fight with Gary and Ming Fong might liven things up and make the time go faster. “Ming Fong was missing notes by the basketful.”

  “Crazy Gilda!” Ming Fong donned her headphones to listen to a recording. This put a quick end to the whole conversation and the possibility of an entertaining argument.

  Gilda peered across the aisle at Wendy, who was listening with an unintentionally nauseated expression as Mrs. Mendelovich described the quirks of one of the competition judges: “Professor Waldgrave, he is genius, but leetle crazy in the head,” Mrs. Mendelovich declared. “He loves nobody but his cat!”