For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, just when I’d been about to pick up Charlie so that I’d have her in my arms, a single far-away piano note reverberated from within the parlor.

A small gasp escaped my lips. A week ago, I might have been more shocked by the sound. But the note was too similar to the one I’d heard the other day when I’d come home to find my angel on the mantel. Though I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Erik in the last dream if he’d been the one to move the figurine, I now had to assume it was him. He’d confirmed his had been the form I’d glimpsed under that sheet, so wasn’t it safe to assume he’d been the one to play the piano note?

As though in answer, the note sounded again. Low, long, and resonant, it reverberated through the room. Still, its ringing didn’t fill the space like the out-of-tune note that day had. Instead, beautiful and mellow, it seemed to come from . . . somewhere else.

“You hear it, don’t you?” Charlie asked, giving my arm a tug.

I glanced down to her, into those big eyes that begged for reassurance and for some sign that she wasn’t alone in her experiences anymore.

“I hear it,” I told her, my voice shaking.

“It keeps going,” she said, her own voice calm and wondering.

Erik. Could it be he’d heard me whisper his name? What was he trying to tell me? Something, apparently, that couldn’t be said in a dream.

“Charlie,” I whispered. “I want you to stay right here, do you understand?”

She nodded, her hand relaxing in my grip, as if the repeating note held some kind of hypnotizing power over her.

Stepping away from my little sister, our hands parting, I drifted into the parlor, my steps slow and measured. I kept my gaze locked on the covered piano. Muffled, the repeated note seemed to come through the walls while also resonating from the area in which the piano sat. Except that, broken and ruined, the piano under the sheet could not have produced such a sound.

I stopped in front of the instrument, my eyes scanning the seat and the covered keyboard, searching for any sign of movement. There wasn’t any, though.

“Erik?”

All at once, as if in speaking the spirit’s name I had dispelled him, the sound stopped. I waited for the note to begin again. When it didn’t, I let my hand, trembling, drift toward the cloth covering the piano. One tug was all it took for the drop cloth to fall, revealing the skeletal and wrecked thing that, like the rest of our house, had once, long ago, been something majestic.

“Erik,” I said, softer now because I didn’t want Charlie to hear me talking to no one. “If that was you . . . can you give me a sign?”

Nothing. Except . . . a new sound. That of gentle ticking.