The woman in the Polaroid was named Eleanor Marsh, and she was the grandmother of Captain Rodriguez of the Merrillville Police. Detective Delgado told me so in the quiet of my shop with the black cross on the white frame of the photograph between her fingers. I felt as though the floor had tilted. I had worked on that piano for six weeks without once dreaming what it hid, and now I stood in my own workshop with eleven Polaroids spread across my bench like a hand of terrible cards.
Delgado was thirty five, with straight black hair and a calm way of speaking. She said, “Mr. Kowalski, I need you to tell me exactly how this piano came to you.” I told her. A man of about seventy had come in a year ago March, carried by a pair of movers, paid five hundred in cash, given an address in Gary that turned out to be an empty lot. He had said the piano belonged to his late sister. He had been polite. He had called me sir. He had a mild, scholarly voice, and a way of washing his hands as he spoke, like a man in a surgery.
She asked if I remembered a name. I said he had given one, Alden Pryce. She wrote it down. She said, “That was the name of the piano teacher.” I stared. She said, “In the wills. Every one of them leaves everything to a Mr. Alden Pryce, of Hobart, Indiana, a private piano instructor. These women were all clients. They were widows in their seventies and eighties, living alone, with no children nearby. He gave them lessons for years. He became a friend. And then he became the heir.” She tapped the Polaroid. “And then they died.”
A piano is a patient thing, and what is hidden inside it will keep until the right pair of hands comes along to open it.
I could not speak. I thought of Mrs. Marsh, whom I now recalled seeing in the church choir at St. Michael years ago, a small woman with white hair who sang the alto line in a trembling, beautiful voice. Delgado said, “My captain told me about her last night. She died four years ago, in her sleep, at eighty one. The coroner called it natural. Her grandson was heartbroken. He found out afterward that she had changed her will in February, and left a hundred and ten thousand dollars to a man he had never met.”
She said the investigation had begun in the winter and gone nowhere. The wills were valid. The women had died of apparent natural causes. The man had vanished. “We had no way to link him to the deaths,” said Delgado. “We had no evidence. And now we have a piano.” She looked at the open case of the old Kimball, the ruined strings, the false panel. “He must have wanted to destroy the evidence. He poured corrosive on it to dissolve the photographs. But he overlooked the one place where the corrosive could not reach.” She smiled grimly. “The metal case.”
She was right. The Polaroids had survived because they were inside the steel box. The corrosive on the strings had been meant to eat through the false panel and everything behind it, but the brass screws, and the metal, had saved them. A man who had planned his crimes for years had been undone by his own thrift. He had used cheap corrosive. He had chosen an old piano. And he had trusted a piano shop to leave an abandoned instrument alone for a year, which anyone who knew me could have told him I would not.
The state police found Pryce in a retirement village in Sarasota, Florida, under the name of Alan Price, giving lessons to the wives of retired dentists. He was eighty one. When they came for him he was playing Chopin. They said afterward that he did not resist, that he even asked if he could finish the passage. His fingerprints were on the steel case. His handwriting was on the backs of the photographs. And the forensic accountants traced three hundred and ninety thousand dollars in estates through four banks to an account in his name.
The trial was in the autumn. The widows, those who could be located, were exhumed, and the toxicology reports revealed what the original coroners had missed. Four of the eleven had been poisoned with a slow acting compound, in tea, during the lessons. It had taken the prosecutors eight months to prove it. Pryce was convicted of four counts of murder and seven of fraud, and sentenced to life. The families of the women filled the courtroom, shoulder to shoulder, the old and the young, silent as a congregation.
The wills were voided. The estates were returned. Captain Rodriguez came to my shop in a plain suit the week after the sentencing. He stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands and said, “Mr. Kowalski, I never thought I would be able to thank anyone for my grandmother.” I told him I had only unscrewed a panel. He said, “You called the right people.” He asked if he might buy the piano. I told him it was ruined. He said, “I would like to restore it.” I told him it would take a year.
It took me fourteen months. I replaced the strings, the hammers, the soundboard, the case. I refinished the walnut by hand. And in the fall, on the Sunday before Advent, I delivered the Kimball to the church of St. Michael, where it stands now in the choir loft with a small plate on the lid that reads, In memory of Eleanor Marsh and her friends. On the first Sunday it was played, the pianist was a girl of twelve. She played slowly, a little unsteadily, and the whole congregation sang.
