The deputy reached inside my Steinway, under the hammer for middle C, and pulled out the diamond ring, and a folded piece of paper in a childs handwriting.
It said: Mrs. Agnes, please do not let them find this until Daddy is here. I need somebody to know what he said to Mommy in the car.
Little Sophie stood next to me, holding my hand, shaking, and the deputy called out the front door for Mr. Langford not to get in his car.
It came out gently, the way it has to with a frightened child. Sophies mother had taken her ring off to wash her hands, and it had slipped behind the basin, and Sophie, scared of what her father was like when he was angry, had hidden it inside the one safe place she knew, the piano of the kind old lady who taught her, with a note, because she did not have the words any other way.
They searched a seventy-year-old piano teachers purse for a ring a little girl had hidden because she was more afraid of her own father than of losing it.
The ring was never stolen. But the note changed everything. The deputy did not arrest anyone that day. He made some quiet calls instead, and the right people began paying attention to what went on in the Langford house, and to a mother and a daughter who needed somebody to listen.
Sophie still comes every Tuesday at 4. Her mother brings her now, and stays for the whole lesson, and the two of them seem lighter than they used to. The middle C still sticks a little in humid weather. I will never fix it. It turned out to be the most important key on the whole instrument.