Part 3 — Katie Plays Again
The voice on that tape belonged to Joyces father. She said so before the deputy asked, with her hand tight on the basement railing. Mr. Halvorsen taught piano on Tuesdays out of a studio on Pine Street for twenty-six years, and the whole north side of Stevens Point learned scales on his upright. Joyce could hear him count in her sleep.
Deputy Brandvold sat on my step and listened to the whole first reel with his head bowed. It was only a lesson. A ten-year-old girl played the C scale, stumbled on a trill, and laughed. At the end, her teacher said, Wonderful, Katie, and I will see you next Tuesday. Her little voice answered, Thank you, Mr. Halvorsen. My dad is coming to pick me up.
That last sentence cracked the case open. It took the sheriffs cold-case office three days to find the 1979 file. Katherine Vogel had not been taken by a stranger. Her father, Karl, separated from her mother after a bitter custody quarrel, had been refused visitation by the court, and he had driven to the studio that Tuesday in a blue Plymouth and simply taken her home with him.
He left the state that night. He changed his name, moved his daughter to Oregon, and told her that her mother had died of a sudden illness. Mrs. Vogel waited forty-five years for a little girl who was alive and well, growing up four states away. She never gave up the piano or the hope, and she had the tapes made so she would never forget the sound of Katies hands.
The recordings were Mrs. Vogels, not Mr. Halvorsens. She had asked him to tape each lesson so she could listen at night. After Katie disappeared, she walled the reels into the bottom of the piano, afraid her husbands family would throw them out. The photo on the pine board was her own, kept safe with the tapes and a prayer.
A mother can keep a daughter alive for forty-five years in the only way she has left, by never letting the music stop.
With the tapes and a school photograph, an investigator ran the name through state records. Katherine Vogel was a music teacher in Eugene, Oregon, called Kate Lindgren, fifty-five years old. Her father had passed away in 2011. She had known nothing about her mother. When the detective phoned, she was silent for a minute and then asked, quietly, whether the piano was still in tune.
A Wisconsin judge corrected her records in the spring, restoring her birth name beside the name she had grown up with. No one was charged. The statute had long since expired, and her father was gone. What mattered was the house on Maple Street, which Mrs. Vogel had left to Katie in a will that her nephew had been searching for since the summer.
Kate came to my basement in April, with her husband. She walked slowly around the walnut upright, running her fingertips along the keys, and sat down on the bench. She played the C scale, the same one from the tape, and stumbled at the trill, and laughed exactly the way she had at ten years old. Joyce cried into a dish towel.
We moved the piano to Maple Street on a Saturday, with Stan and four neighbors, and I only said the words Joyce does not allow once. It sits in the front room now, in tune, with the thirty reels in a cabinet beside it. Brynn still gets her lessons there, once a week, from a teacher who says she has never heard a nine-year-old play with so much heart.