“Then she knows. Get the pillow,” said my son in the dark of my bedroom, and from the closet shelf, where the little black recorder sat with its red light burning behind the cracked door, I heard every word of it, because I was not in the bed.
I was lying on the couch in the front room under three quilts, wide awake, with my cell phone in my hand and my thumb on the number nine. When I heard the sound of the bedroom door swing open and the stunned silence that followed, I pressed the other two numbers and whispered my address.
The police came in four minutes. The officers had told me, when I called, to stay where I was, and I did, though my heart was pounding so hard that the quilts shook. I heard the front door open. I heard the heavy boots in my hall. I heard Holly cry out, and Darin say in a loud, breathless, ridiculous voice, “We were just checking on her. She wanders.” An officer said, “Sir, put the pillow down.” I lay there under my quilts, an old piano teacher, and I started to cry.
They found me on the couch. A young woman officer, named Nguyen, knelt down and took my hand and asked if I was hurt. I said I was not. I said there was a tape recorder on the shelf in the closet of my bedroom, and that she would want it. She went and got it herself, holding it carefully in both hands like a sleeping bird. She pressed rewind with a gloved finger, and then play. And the voice of my son came out of that old Panasonic as clear as a bell, saying every word.
A woman who has taught the same piece of music to forty years of children knows the value of one clean recording and the power of listening twice.
Darin was handcuffed at the foot of my own stairs, in front of his nine year old son, who had come down in his pajamas rubbing his eyes. Jaxon stood on the bottom step and looked at his father, and then at the officer, and then at me. I held out my arms, and he ran to me. I covered his ears with my hands, as I used to do when the neighbor mowed during lessons. I told him that everything was all right, that Grandma was fine, and that he was a good boy. I said we would play the Minuet in the morning.
There was more on the first tape than I had realized. When the detectives listened to it, with headphones, over the course of that week, they found three separate conversations, all in the same flat voices. They found talk of the pills, of the window, of the amount that the house would bring, which was three hundred and ten thousand dollars. They found a second talk about a man who owed Darin money in Evansville. The prosecutor called me the best witness she had ever had. I said I had only practiced my scales.
Holly spoke first. She came into the interview room on the third day and said she could not sleep. She said that she had not wanted to do it, that she had gone along with her husband because she was afraid of him. Darin was in debt for gambling and a failed business. He had been counting on the house for a year. Holly pleaded to a lesser charge, and gave evidence against her husband. In the end he pleaded guilty to attempted murder. The judge was not gentle.
I did not go to the sentencing. I did not need to. I stayed at home with Jaxon and the piano, and we practiced the Minuet in G eleven times in a row, until he stopped rushing the third bar. The social worker who visited me, a thoughtful woman with a canvas bag, had arranged for my grandson to live with me, since his mother was in no condition to care for him. She wanted to know if I was willing. I said that I was seventy two years old and had never been more willing in my life.
We had the old furnace replaced, and the windows sealed. The neighbors came by with casseroles, and the women from the church formed a schedule for visits. A young man from the hardware store installed a security system with a camera over the front door. I let him. But I also kept the old Panasonic on the piano, just as it had always been, with a fresh tape in it, and a Post it note on the lid in my own handwriting that says, Always check the red light.
Last night, after the lesson, Jaxon sat on the bench beside me and asked whether I was afraid anymore. I thought about it. I said that I was not afraid of things that I could name, and that the bad thing had a name now, and a place. I told him that I was only afraid of the day he would stop practicing. He laughed. He played the Minuet again, perfectly, slowly, with his small straight back. And the little red light on the recorder glowed the whole way through.