“For now,” he says.
“For now,” I agree. “Then I’ll come and challenge to see if I can win it back. Someday.”
“Someday soon,” Steinberg says. He gives me a barely perceptible wink before walking briskly back to Claire to whisper in her ear.
Claire looks back at me, and I give her a little wave of encouragement as she slowly gets up and shifts her music onto my empty stand, the red spots of embarrassment on her cheeks almost matching the red in her hair. I keep my head up and look straight ahead as the rest of the row realizes what’s happened.
I sit motionless through warm-ups and Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, a piece that I’ve played a thousand times before. The fingers on my left hand twitch as they sit mostly unfeeling, weakly mimicking every single note of a piece that I know deep down I may never play again. As the music from the orchestra cascades over the small room, I start to feel the now-familiar break from reality as a memory begins.
Strong hands hold me up by my arms as my legs buckle. My face is wet with tears as I struggle to get the image of a broken Alessandra out of my mind. Signore Barone speaks to the policemen who crowd the rooftop in a language I’ve come to recognize as English, his eyes shining with tears as he points his finger repeatedly in my direction. They begin to jerk me roughly toward the stairs, their faces masks of disapproval and contempt as I begin to comprehend what’s happening.
“I did nothing wrong!” I cry, panic filling my body, but the men holding me up obviously do not understand my pleas. “It wasn’t me! Please, won’t somebody listen? Won’t somebody listen to what really happened?”
“It can’t be!” Paolo cries, rushing through the door and onto the roof, pushing past us as if we are invisible. “They say she has fallen! Where is Alessandra?” His face is filled with pain and disbelief as he rushes to the crowd surrounding the edge of the roof, below which she lies broken and bloodied. He peers over the side of the building, then falls to his knees, his hands over his face and a guttural, keening sound coming from his throat. “She is not gone! She can’t be gone!” he cries over and over, rocking back and forth with the rhythm of his words as Signore Barone puts a protective hand on his shoulder.
“Somebody help me!” I cry, but my words are useless as I am dragged roughly to the doorway. Paolo glances up as the door closes, his eyes gleaming with hatred.
I look around the music room as the last notes from the Overture fade away, still filled with the panic I’d experienced that night on the roof. Alessandra died falling off the roof, and I was accused of doing it. My memories don’t go further than the stairwell, but I somehow know after that night in that lifetime, I never played the cello again.
“It’s just so incredible,” Rayne says, taking a bite of the apple we swiped from the kitchen and pulling her books out of her backpack.
“Which part? The part where I lived in San Francisco over a hundred years ago? The part where I saw Alessandra dead? Or the part where I get hauled off by the police because they think I did it?”
I had to tell her. I know that Griffon said that we have to be careful, but this is Rayne we’re talking about. And I’m not telling her about the Akhet or the Sekhem, just about Alessandra. I can’t get the image of her lying on the ground out of my head. It took me a lifetime to remember it, and now I can’t manage to forget.
“You aren’t a murderer,” she says. “That I know for sure. You can’t be truly evil in one lifetime and then like you are now in this one.”
“So now you’re an expert?”
“Yes. I am. At least when it comes to this kind of thing.” Rayne opens her calculus book, but stares off into the distance. “I wonder who I was in a past life. Maybe Cleopatra. Or Amelia Earhart. That would have been cool.”
“Not everybody is a famous somebody,” I say. “I think most of us were just ordinary people doing ordinary things.”
“Well, somebody had to be famous in the past. Why not me?”
I manage a weak smile. “If anyone was famous in a past life, it would be you.”
“Thank you.” She gives a little bow. “If this all happened at some fancy house party, don’t you think there would be a lot of publicity? An Italian musician falling off the roof of a famous mansion would probably make the papers. I know they had papers back then. Do you have a clue when it was?”
“All I’ve seen is a ferry dock and some horses and carriages,” I say, starting to feel excited. “The late eighteen hundreds, maybe? Before the earthquake anyway, because everything still looked pretty good. There probably were a lot of papers back then.” I look at her. “It might have been in one.”
“Maybe we can look it up online,” Rayne says.
“Not everything is online,” I say. “There’s no way anyone is going to scan hundreds of years of newspapers. But they must have old copies downtown at the big library. Anytime someone needs to find something like this in the movies they end up in the basement of a library, searching through old yellow newspapers.” I look at her, hoping she’ll come with me. “How much homework have you got?”
“Not so much that I don’t want to go on a field trip right now.”
We usually go to the library by my house, so the last time I was at the new one downtown was on a field trip for the big opening back in ninth grade. As we walk through the doors and into the main space, I look up at the ceiling looming several stories above us.
“Jeez,” Rayne says. “I forgot how big this place is. It’s like one of those inside-out hotels where all of the rooms look out over the lobby.”
I stare at the flimsy-looking railings several stories up. “I sure hope they keep the newspapers in the basement.”
“How can I help you?” the librarian at the main desk asks as we approach. She has short, dyed black hair and a nose ring. Trust us to get the only emo librarian in town.
“We need to see some old newspapers,” Rayne tells her.
“How old?”
Rayne looks at me. “Um,” I say, realizing I have no idea where to start. “Somewhere between 1870 and 1906.”
Emo librarian raises a pierced eyebrow. “That’s a pretty big time frame.”
“You don’t have any?” Rayne asks.
“No, we do,” she says. “We have some in the history room on the sixth floor, and there’s microfilm in the magazine and newspaper room on the fifth. It’s just a lot to look through.” She tilts her head. “Is there a reason you didn’t want to look online?”
“They have newspapers online?” I ask. I can’t look at Rayne because I know what she’s going to say.
“Sure,” she says. “At the CDNC website.” She writes down the URL on a piece of scrap paper. “It’s really cool. You can search the entire database using any terms you want, and they scan every page. It’ll save you a ton of time.” She points to a row of computers along one wall. “If you have a library card, you can use the computers here.”
“Thanks,” I say, taking the paper with me.
“Not like they’re going to scan in hundreds of years of newspapers,” Rayne says, mocking me.
“I know, I know,” I say. “Don’t push it.”
I grab my library card out of my wallet and punch the number into a vacant computer. As soon as we get to the home page for the CDNC, I stare at the empty search box for the San Francisco Herald. I don’t have a clue where to start.
“How about with the Pacific Coast Club?” Rayne suggests.
I slide over. “You type it in,” I say, my right hand moving involuntarily to the splint on my left. Typing is another thing that isn’t going very well at the moment.
Rayne looks at all of the links that come up on the site. “Everything here is after 1910. Didn’t you say it was called something else back then? The door guy said it that day. The Something Mansion?”