Normally, this little mystery would have occupied my mind for the rest of the evening, but it was the Swing score that held all my interest.

I stared at the Photostat’s white notes on a black background and found the staff where I’d written the lead tenor sax part of Swing. What would they spell if I read those notes a whole tone lower?

The answer, I was both disappointed and yet far more relieved to learn, was nothing. Gail had simply been playing a musical game with “A Bach Ache,” and the game had ended there.

I flipped the pages. Swing had sounded so credible when Gail had played it for me on the piano in her room. Maybe it was my orchestration that had caused all the laughter.

I looked over one section where I’d opted for the keyboard to take a solo cadenza, rather than orchestrate and transpose it for the wind instruments. Perhaps the whole piece should have stayed that way. Still thinking a whole tone lower, I read, in my mind, C#-E-F-A-C-A-D-E ... I stopped and reread the last six notes.

They spelled facade.

Was that just coincidence? I looked around the page and could find nothing. Then I remembered to substitute H for B-natural and B for B-flat, in accordance with Gail’s “Bach Ache” code.

Yes, there in the trombones, no more than two bars from the word facade, was the word cache. I turned the pages. There again. In the bass. Beach.

Oh, of course. Trombones, piano, and bass are all instruments written in concert pitch. Their parts don’t get transposed. But sax and trumpet parts are transposed. If there was a message hidden within the entire chart, you’d need to bring all the notes back to one common key, the way they’d been in Gail’s original Swing composition for the piano. Undoing—“unexploding,” really—what I had done to the piece as its orchestrator. Only then would you bring the entire arrangement down a whole tone.

Yes, it would be laborious, but nothing a few copyists couldn’t accomplish in a day or two at most, working with what would have been (were it not for my Photostat) the only form of Swing now in existence: the individual music parts, the ones the Pan-Pacific Orchestra had played that afternoon. You’d take each part and copy it into a blank score, transposing those instruments that needed to be transposed, until the entire piece was in the same unified key. You’d reduce that down to a piano score and then transpose the entire piano part down a whole tone (as Gail’s “Bach Ache” key to the code had indicated) and you’d have all the correct notes.