Nowhere in the room could I find a trace of a single note of music that had come “from the pen of Gail Prentice.”

Tucked at the bottom of the last crate that I inspected, in a slim folder secured by a thin red ribbon, I did at least find one handwritten composition: a short piano piece about half the length of Gail’s original Swing, though it was clearly not in her hand. The notes were clumsily drawn and the pages’ many layers of erasures and rewrites made it murderously difficult to read, but no correlation has ever been proven between musical genius and good penmanship.

I took the piece over to the piano. I was very curious to hear how it sounded, because its title was Self-Portrait and its composer was Adeline Head.

The one part of the piece that wasn’t sloppily written was its opening musical statement, a pleasantly plaintive little fanfare of seven solo notes that were quickly repeated in a sturdy chorale setting. For this part of the song, Adeline’s notation seemed assured. It quickly segued, sloppily on the page if not on the keyboard, into a poignant waltz in a minor key. It was not particularly modern and perhaps a little too Romantic for 1940, but as an ètude at a music-composition student’s first recital, it would have been nicely received.

While playing a busier passage, one that Adeline probably felt depicted her passionate side, I stopped abruptly and returned to the opening bars. I suddenly realized I already knew the simple theme that began Adeline’s Self-Portrait.

I had orchestrated it. In Gail’s Swing.

In fact, I had been so surprised by this unusually consonant theme in the midst of Gail’s harmonic pandemonium that I’d voiced it for the entire band in unison. It had been reprised again toward the end of Swing, like the last call for reason before madness ruled.

And yet here was the exact same musical statement at the beginning (and end) of Adeline’s little tone poem as well.

If Ada had been angered that her faultlessly conventional composition had lost out to Gail’s lawless musical mayhem, imagine her rage when she discovered that Gail had stolen a principal theme of hers, placing it not once but twice in her own work. The chance of repetition of the identical theme in both works exceeded the laws of probability.

Why would Gail have committed such needless plagiarism? There was nothing magical or mystical about Adeline’s opening melody. It had all the exotic qualities of a door chime.

Unless, of course, it was Adeline who had stolen the theme from Gail. But Gail had said that Ada didn’t get to hear Swing until after the competition was over. That’s when Adeline had given Self Portrait to Gail, and asked her if she could study the piano score for Swing.