The Secret Inside the Grand Piano

I scanned the workshop’s shadowed clutter, the cassette clenched against my palm. My heart battered my ribs with wild, uneven force. “We’re watching this now,” I said. “Tell me you have something that can run it.”

Leo gave no reply. He pivoted toward the workshop’s deepest corner, his headlamp cutting across stacked crates and abandoned tools. Beneath a mound of stained canvas, he found what he needed.

He seized the edge of a thick tarp and yanked it away. Dust erupted into the air, dry and gray, and I buried my face in my sleeve as it caught in my throat.

An old audiovisual trolley stood underneath. A boxy CRT television occupied its upper shelf, its glass face dull beneath years of grime. Below it waited a black VCR, broad and outdated.

“This was left behind when the theater switched over to digital equipment,” Leo said. He dragged a tangled cable from behind the television. “No idea whether this room still gets power.”

He lowered himself beside the cart and pushed the plug into an outlet along the wall. Nothing happened at first. Ten endless seconds stretched between us.

Then the television gave off a thin electronic squeal. Static snapped across the screen, washing the workshop in a pallid blue light.

“Hand it over,” Leo said, extending his hand.

I paused with the cassette above his palm. I wondered whether I could endure seeing Lily in the final minutes before everything came down. The thought tore through my chest with a pain almost sharp enough to make me fold in half.

But I placed the tape in his hand. He fed it into the VCR, and the machine drew it inside with a heavy mechanical click.

“Third channel,” Leo murmured. He rotated the television’s plastic selector.

The screen bucked through snow and warped horizontal lines. For an instant, there was only distortion. Then the image settled into focus.

I gasped and lifted both hands over my mouth.

The stage filled the monitor. Our stage as it had been nineteen years earlier, untouched by decay, before ruin became the only thing I could see when I remembered it.

The fixed camera made everything flat and faded. Its cheap lens reduced the colors to weak shadows. Yet the figure standing in the center of those boards was unmistakable.

Lily.

She wore the enormous gray sweatshirt she loved over her rehearsal clothes. Her dark ponytail sat crooked behind her head. With her hands planted on her hips, she stared upward as though waiting for music to begin.

“Oh, God,” I whispered. My legs seemed to lose their strength as I moved closer. I reached toward the thick screen, wanting to touch her though she was nineteen years beyond reach.

She looked so real that I nearly expected her laugh to burst from the silent footage. In my mind, I caught the faint sweetness of the strawberry shampoo she had used that morning.

“Check the time,” Leo said. His voice had gone hard and controlled, as if professionalism was the only thing holding him together.

I looked to the glowing numbers in the lower corner. They read 09:14 AM.

“The collapse was at nine-twenty,” I said.

Onscreen, Lily stopped watching the ceiling. Her head swung toward stage right, toward the heavy curtain and the darkness beside it. She walked a few paces and raised one small hand, pointing into the wings.

“What does she see?” I asked.

The camera had been positioned to show the entire stage, leaving the edges blurred and poorly lit. I strained to make sense of the shifting darkness near the curtain.

A man emerged from behind its velvet folds.

Marcus.

He wore a dark suit. In one hand, he carried a metal crowbar.

Cold flooded my blood. Air would not come into my lungs. I could only stand there and watch.

Marcus paid Lily no attention. He crossed directly to the huge support pillar holding the stage-right rigging. A diagonal steel brace ran from the pillar to the floor, the temporary reinforcement described in the addendum.

He crouched beside it and wedged the crowbar beneath the bolts anchoring the brace to the boards.

“No,” Leo breathed, recoiling from the monitor. “He’s taking out the anchors.”

I watched Marcus force his weight down on the bar again and again. The recording was blurred, but his violent movements left no doubt: he was wrenching the bolts from the weakened wood.

Lily edged nearer. Her lips moved on the mute film, forming a question for him. She was asking Marcus what he was doing.

He never turned toward her. He drove the freed brace aside with his foot, and it jerked loose from the pillar. The towering beam now stood with nothing supporting it.

Marcus let the crowbar fall, then hurried offstage and vanished from the camera’s frame. Lily remained alone, staring at the discarded brace. The timestamp had changed to 09:18 AM.

Two minutes remained. “Shut it off,” I choked, turning away. “Leo, turn it off now.”

Leo struck the power button. The television popped into blackness, and the workshop was left with only his headlamp’s weak glow. I had seen Marcus deliberately remove the support that failed beneath Lily.