Read Chapter 14: The Second Music Box

The piano bench was the only piece of furniture in the sealed room that they hadn’t touched. Elodie had catalogued the child-sized piano, the music box, the note from Bastien—all of it logged in her phone with the precision of a legal inventory. But the bench, with its cracked leather cushion and brass hinges gone green with age, had seemed too ordinary to matter.

She was wrong.

Dawn bled through the attic’s single dormer window as Elodie knelt before the bench, her fingers tracing the seam where the lid met the frame. Julien stood behind her, arms crossed, his breath shallow in the dust-thick air. Odette had refused to come back up the stairs after the séance, muttering something about thresholds and debts that Elodie hadn’t fully understood.

“You think something’s in there?” Julien asked.

“I think we haven’t looked.” Elodie lifted the lid.

Inside lay a tarnished silver music box, half the size of the first one, its casing dented and scored as if it had been thrown against a wall. A dried ribbon of black velvet was wrapped around it, knotted tight. Next to it sat a folded piece of paper, yellowed at the edges, sealed with a dribble of wax bearing the same downward crescent moon.

Elodie reached for the paper. Julien’s hand caught her wrist.

“Careful,” he said. “The last note we found didn’t exactly end well.”

She pulled free gently and unfolded the paper. The handwriting was elegant, feminine, and hurried—loops compressed, letters angling forward like someone running from something.

*They call it the wedding song. They are all fools. It was never for a bride. It was for my daughter. If you are reading this, you already know the truth: she is not gone. She is beneath the oak where the roots hold her close. Let the music find her. Let the house remember. —M.L.*

Elodie read it twice, then a third time. The signature narrowed her throat. “M.L.”

“Marie Leveau,” Julien said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“This isn’t a curse about a jilted bride,” Elodie said slowly, the pieces rearranging themselves in her head like a case file she’d misread from the start. “It’s about a daughter. A child.”

Julien stared at the music box. “Then who’s Louie?”

Elodie didn’t have an answer. She reached for the music box instead. It was cold in her palms, heavier than its size suggested, and when she turned it over she found a hairline crack running the length of the base. The winding key was bent at an unnatural angle, as if someone had tried to force it past its limit.

She turned it anyway.

The melody that emerged was the same—the same intervals, the same gentle lilt—but warped, slowed, stretched into something darker. The notes drooped and lagged, like the tune itself was drowning. Where the first music box sang a clean, almost cheerful version of the lullaby, this one played in a minor key that Elodie hadn’t heard before. It made the hairs on her arms stand up and the air in her lungs turn shallow.

Julien stepped back. “That’s wrong. That’s not—it’s the same, but it’s wrong.”

Elodie let the music play until the mechanism clicked and ground to a halt. Then she wrapped the music box in the black velvet ribbon, placed it back in the bench, and stood.

“I need to see someone.”

---

Dr. Annette Broussard taught musicology at Tulane and had a reputation for knowing more about New Orleans’ old songs than the city archives did. Elodie found her in a cramped office on the third floor of the music building, surrounded by sheet music, wax cylinders, and half-disassembled Victorian instruments. She was a small woman with steel-gray hair and eyes that missed nothing.

“A lullaby,” Dr. Broussard said, after Elodie wound the music box and let it play the distorted melody through twice. She had not touched it, only listened, her head tilted like a bird. “That’s what you have. An 1830s lullaby, likely French in origin. It was popular among Creole families with means.”

Elodie frowned. “I was told it was a wedding song.”

“Who told you that?” Dr. Broussard asked sharply.

“The family. The legend.”

“The legend is wrong.” The professor pushed her glasses up her nose and leaned closer to the music box. “Wedding songs of that era had a different structure—a call-and-response, a rising cadence at the close. This one falls. It’s a settling phrase, like *hush now, go to sleep*. I’ve seen references to it in plantation ledgers and children’s primers. It was played for infants.”

A child. Everything pointed back to a child.

Elodie thought of the name carved on the underside of the piano lid: LOUIE. She thought of the note in the piano bench, the words of a mother who called the tune her daughter’s song.

“Could the same melody be used for both?” Elodie asked. “A bride and a child?”

Dr. Broussard shook her head. “Not this one. The meter is too slow, too simple. A bride’s song would have been more elaborate. This was composed to calm an infant to sleep. If someone told you otherwise, they were either mistaken or lying to you.”

Elodie’s pulse quickened. “How many music boxes of this kind would have been made?”

“A dozen, perhaps. They were custom pieces. The engraving on the base—that crescent moon—marks it as the work of the Galvez workshop, a silversmith who operated in the French Quarter from 1820 to 1860. He kept precise records.” Dr. Broussard paused. “The records are in the historical society’s vault. If you want to know who commissioned this box, that’s where you’ll find the answer.”

Elodie looked at the music box in her hands. The bent key, the cracked base, the warped melody that turned a lullaby into something closer to a dirge. Somewhere in this city, over a century and a half ago, someone had ordered this box made. Someone had paid for it. Someone had broken it.

“One more question,” Elodie said. “If this melody was meant to calm a child to sleep—what would it do if the child was dead?”

Dr. Broussard’s face went still. When she spoke, her voice was quieter. “A lullaby isn’t just a song, Miss Marchand. It’s a promise. A promise that the infant is safe, that the world will hold it, that morning will come. If you play that promise to a child who never woke up…” She trailed off, then shook her head. “I wouldn’t play it again. Not until you know what you’re calling.”

---

Elodie made it back to the mansion by noon. The 48-hour deadline was already thirty gone.

Julien was waiting on the gallery, his face pale in the high sun. Behind him, the attic window—the one that had been broken from the inside—had been boarded over with fresh plywood.

“Did you find anything?” he asked.

Elodie held up the ribbon-wrapped music box. “The melody is a lullaby, Julien. A call for a sleeping child. Marie Leveau commissioned it. And she wrote that her daughter is under the oak tree.”

Julien took a step toward her, his eyes searching hers. “A daughter. There’s no daughter in any record. No Leveau daughters after 1835 died in infancy. I checked the parish records when we found the first note.”

“Then she was hidden,” Elodie said. “Erased. Deliberately.”

She pulled the folded paper from her pocket and pressed it into his hands. He read it silently, then looked up, something cracking behind his eyes.

“M.L. didn’t write about a bride because there was no bride,” Elodie said slowly. “The curse isn’t about a woman scorned. It’s about a child—a child taken, buried, and kept from the light. The music isn’t calling to the house. It’s calling to her.”

The mansion creaked above them, a low groan running through the timber like a held breath finally releasing.

Julien turned toward the front door and froze. The window in the attic—the one boarded over an hour ago—now stood open. The plywood lay on the ground below, torn apart as if by hands.

And drifting down through the broken frame, faint but unmistakable, came the lullaby.

It was the clean version. The sweet version. The one that promised a child that morning would come, sung in a voice that did not belong to any living throat.