Leo laughed, nervously. Then he googled.

It started with quiet chords in the middle of the night—soft, melancholic phrases in B minor, drifting from the case even when Leo was in another room. He’d rush in, and the sound would stop. But the keys would be wet, as if someone had just been playing. Once, he found a reed split perfectly in two, lying on the floor in the shape of an arrow pointing toward his laptop—which had a new tab open on his browser: the Yamaha serial number lookup page.

Leo emailed the archivist. The address bounced.

And someone—or something—had been waiting forty years for the right person to come along and type the serial number into a lookup tool that was never meant for the public.