Read Chapter 2: The Unwelcome Guest

The hotel lobby smelled of lemon polish and old money. Elodie had chosen the Maison Royale for its proximity to the French Quarter and its distance—six full blocks—from the Fontenot mansion. She’d barely spoken to the clerk, barely registered the bronze elevator cage or the flocked burgundy wallpaper. Her mind was still back on that porch, still hearing the piano.

She dropped her bag on the bed, pulled out her laptop, and went to work.

The Fontenot estate was a tangle of legalities that made her temples throb. Three generations of trusts. A codicil dated 1957 that Elodie suspected was forged by a drunken notary. A disputed boundary line that abutted the Lafitte Greenway. And at the center of it all, Julian Bellerose, listed in the court filings as “occupant without title.” Her client, the Fontenot Development Group, had been very clear: the property was to be cleared within ninety days.

Morally clear, she thought. Legally, it was a swamp.

She drummed her fingers on the keyboard and pulled up the parish property records. The mansion had been built in 1859 by Émile Fontenot, a sugar baron who’d made his fortune on the backs of enslaved people and then, in a rare act of contrition, had freed them a decade before the war. His wife, Clarisse, was the daughter of a French opera singer. They’d had no children.

The line had died with them—or so the records claimed.

Elodie leaned closer to the screen. There was a gap in the ownership records, a forty-year stretch in the 1920s where the title went quiet. No sales, no probate filings, no tax assessments. It was as if the house had fallen off the grid. She made a note to check the city archives in the morning.

A knock at the door made her jump.

She crossed the room and peered through the peephole. The fish-eye lens warped his face, but she recognized the sharp cheekbones, the dark hair falling over his brow. Julien Bellerose. He was wearing the same rumpled shirt from earlier, and he looked like he’d walked all the way here in the heat.

She opened the door but didn’t step aside.

“How did you find me?”

He tilted his head. “You’re a lawyer. You used your card at the front desk. The concierge was very forthcoming.”

Elodie crossed her arms. “That’s a privacy violation.”

“So is trespassing on a man’s property to serve him an eviction notice.”

Fair. She didn’t give him the satisfaction of a smile. “What do you want, Mr. Bellerose?”

“I need you to leave town.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Tonight. Get in your car, drive back to Atlanta, tell your clients the deal is dead. I’ll make it worth your time.”

“You can’t afford this property,” Elodie said flatly. “Your tax records show you haven’t paid a cent in years. My client’s offer is more than generous.”

Julien’s jaw tightened. “The money isn’t the issue.”

“Then what is?”

He glanced down the hallway, as if checking for eavesdroppers. When he looked back at her, his eyes were darker, more urgent. “You heard it. Earlier. On the porch.”

Elodie felt a chill rise along her arms despite the warm evening. “I heard a piano.”

“No one has played that piano in seven years.”

“The locks were old,” she said, though she didn’t believe it. “Maybe a radio—some kind of automated system.”

“There’s no electricity. The Fontenot mansion has been off-grid since Hurricane Katrina. No power lines, no generator. I checked every fuse box in the house when I moved back. The wiring is dead.”

A beat passed. Elodie thought of the music—the way it had curled around the columns like smoke, how it had seemed to come from inside the walls rather than through them. She pushed the memory aside.

“Then you have a squatter,” she said. “Or a ghost. Either way, it’s not my problem. You’re out of time, Mr. Bellerose. If you don’t vacate voluntarily, I’ll file for a motion with the court tomorrow morning. You’ll be removed within the week.”

He took a step closer, and for a moment Elodie felt a flicker of something—not fear, exactly, but the sense that she was standing too close to a live wire.

“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “It heard you. And now that it’s heard you, it won’t stop.”

“The music box? You mean the piano?”

“The house, Ms. Marchand. The house knows when someone hears the music. It was silent for seven years because I was silent. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t bring anyone here. I let it sleep.”

His hand came up, fingers brushing the doorframe. Elodie noticed the trembling in his knuckles, the faint sheen of sweat at his temple. He was afraid. Genuinely, bone-deep afraid.

“And then you showed up with your papers and your boot heels on the porch,” he continued, “and you heard it. And now the music is back.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Elodie said, but her voice came out thinner than she intended.

“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “That’s what I thought too. That’s what I told myself. That maybe I’d been mistaken. Maybe it was a neighbor’s stereo, a car radio, something reasonable. I’ve been telling myself that for seven years.”

He looked up, caught her eye. “But you heard it. And I wasn’t with you when you heard it. So there’s only one explanation left.”

The air between them seemed to thicken. Elodie opened her mouth to argue, to point out how insane he was, when—

A note.

It drifted through the open window behind her, thin and distant as a dream. A waltz. Three-quarter time, hesitant at first, as if the pianist were still warming up. Then the harmony resolved, and the melody began in earnest—slow, lilting, achingly familiar, though Elodie couldn’t say where she’d heard it before.

She watched Julien’s face go pale.

“No,” he breathed. “No, no, no.”

“That’s coming from your house,” Elodie said, confirming it for herself. “Six blocks away. And we can hear it from here.”

He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the window, darting, searching. He took a step back from the door, running a hand through his hair.

“It’s never done that before,” he said, and his voice cracked on the last word. “It’s never followed me. I thought—if I stayed away, if I didn’t listen—I thought it would leave me alone.”

The music swelled, impossibly clear despite the distance. Elodie could hear the individual notes now, the way they danced over a minor key, the sorrow coiled beneath the waltz.

She looked at Julien, and for the first time since she’d met him, she saw something besides stubborn arrogance. She saw a man trapped in a story he didn’t fully understand.

She reached for her jacket.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his eyes snapping to her.

“We’re going to your house,” she said. “Right now. While the music is playing.”

“No.” He grabbed her wrist. “You don’t understand what you’re asking. It wants you to come. It’s using the music to bait you.”

“Then it will be very disappointed to receive a lawsuit instead.” She pulled her arm free. “Look, Mr. Bellerose—Julien. I’ve been an estate lawyer for eight years. I’ve seen contested wills, family feuds, curses invoked over grandfather clocks and silverware. I don’t believe in haunting. But I do believe in cause and effect. That music is coming from somewhere. And if someone is living in that house without your knowledge, they are a squatter, and I can have them removed.”

He stared at her for a long, searching moment. The music continued to drift in through the window, impossibly clear, impossibly sad.

“You’re not going to leave, are you?” he asked.

“I’m not going to leave,” Elodie confirmed.

A strange expression crossed his face—reluctant resignation, perhaps, or something she couldn't name. He reached out and pressed his palm flat against the doorframe, as though anchoring himself.

“Fine,” he said, his voice rough. “Then you’d better hear the rest of it. The part they didn't put in the records.”

Elodie waited.

“Clarisse Fontenot was a concert pianist,” Julien said. “She and Émile died in the same night, in 1883. She in the master bedroom. He in the garden below her window. The official record called it a murder-suicide.”

He paused.

“The unofficial record says the music never stopped playing after she died. That the house kept playing her songs. And that every person who inherited the Fontenot estate—every single one—died within seven years, listening to a waltz they could never name.”

The melody rose to its final cadence, a chord that hung in the air, unresolved. And then, silence.

Julien let his hand fall from the doorframe.

“I’m the fourth,” he said. “And my seven years were up last month.”