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“Champagne!”

4
    A T TWO IN THE morning, the sprawling, low-roofed houses along Sandpiper Lane were dark. He stopped the Triumph by the little palm again, and got out into wind as relentless as yesterday morning’s wind but colder. The little palm rattled its fans. Far down the road, around a bend, a solitary streetlamp shone. Here it was very dark. He looked up. No moon. Not even stars. He went up the driveway toward the black bulk of the house. Leaves and pods crackled under his feet when he stepped up into the front-door recess. The eucalyptus smell was musty.
    From his key case he chose one slim shaft of metal after another. The third worked in the lock but the door wouldn’t open. There must be a dead bolt. He found his way along the side of the house, feeling with his hands. The brick was rough. He shuffled and went slowly. Twice he stepped up into the spongy yield of mulch in planters to test windows. Both were fastened. At the rear of the house was a roofed, screened patio. Its door was locked, would have been easy to open, but he didn’t open it, figuring the door into the house itself would be bolted.
    He went around front again, to the garage door. The padlock gave easily. Holding its pitted coldness in his hand, he turned and looked up and down the street. No one. He dropped the padlock into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket, bent, and lifted the garage door just enough to be able to slip under it. Inside, in the smells of dusty tires, grease, gasoline, he let the door drop shut softly. He put his face close to the dusty little pane. No one. He risked probing the darkness for a second with the beam of a penlight. Nothing lay for him to stumble over on his way to the house door. He switched the light off and went to the door. It was not locked. He stepped up and into the house and closed the door behind him.
    He stood braced for bad smells, death, decay. He didn’t smell anything like that. The air was warm. Westover or Lyle had forgotten to turn off the thermostat. He went toward the front of the house. He felt rather than saw a large room open to his right. As if blind, he walked a slow step at a time, silent on carpet. He groped out with his hands. He bumped furniture. Something flimsy and metallic fell with a delicate clatter. He waited. No one had heard. His hands found curved, polished wood. A piano? What he wanted to find were curtains. He found them. Drawn across their windows. He thought he remembered that from yesterday morning.
    He risked using the penlight again. The curtains were drawn on all the windows. What he had mistaken for a piano was a harpsichord. On its closed top lay a flute and an oboe. Dust muted the shine of their wood, their metal. What he had knocked over was a music rack. There were two more, each with music open on it. He righted the fallen rack. Printed on the cover of the music was Anton Reicha: Strings, Woodwinds, Continuo. He set it on the rack, which trembled with its weight. He touched a key of the harpsichord. It sang sweetly. The harpsichord had two manuals.
    He listened. He followed the penlight’s thin beam into all the rooms, closing the curtains, switching on lights. No one—alive or dead. One room was a den, an office—desk, typewriter, files. He left that to look at bedrooms. There were four. In two, the beds were unmade. Over one hung framed photographs, eight-by-tens, six of them, in two rows. He recognized Wanda Landowska in beaky profile at a keyboard. He peered at the signature on another photograph. Igor Kipnis—another harpsichordist. Bookshelves stood in this room. On them, elaborate stereo equipment shouldered record albums, untidy heaps of music, books about music, composers, performers. Nothing distinguished the other bedroom. In both, clothes lay folded in the chests of drawers, clothes hung in closets. Shoes. Luggage.
    There were three large bathrooms lined with mirrors, but only one had the look of having been in use. Pressure cans of shave