Read Chapter 29: Preparing the Final Performance

The backstage air tasted of dust and solder. Julien knelt at the foot of the stage, a small soldering iron in his hand, reattaching a loose cable to the footlight strip. He hadn’t looked up when Élodie entered. That was fine. She didn’t need him to look.

She dropped her coat on a spare chair and pulled the libretto from her bag—the one she’d spent the last hour scribbling over, margins dense with pencil. “I marked the changes,” she said, her voice careful, professional. “The aria in Act Two becomes a duet—not sung together, but in echo. She sings a line, and the chorus answers from off-stage. As if the past is responding.”

Julien set the iron down and stood, wiping his hands on his trousers. He came over and took the libretto from her, flipping to the page she’d flagged. His thumb moved over her cramped handwriting. “The echo effect—musically it works. But what about the visual? We can’t show her ghost. The investors won’t buy tickets for a séance.”

“No,” Élodie agreed, “but we don’t need to show her. We need to make them feel her.” She tapped the stage. “The second half of the duet is sung from the wings. No one sees who sings it. Mademoiselle Delacroix has agreed to stand by with a dimmer on the house lights, so the moment feels suspended. The audience won’t know if it’s live, or a trick of the acoustics. They’ll know something has happened to them.”

Julien studied her face a moment too long. The tension between them was still visible, but it had softened at the edges. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I’ve thought about everything except the one thing that matters.”

“Which is?”

“Who pays for it.” She pulled a folded sheet from her back pocket. “I found this in the seam of Céleste’s old dressing room, behind the mirror frame. I was pulling off the broken glass shards when the corner caught my eye.”

Julien unfolded it. The paper was yellowed, creased where it had been tucked into the frame. The script was elegant, the ink brown with age.

*To whoever finds this: I have hidden what was rightfully mine, not for greed, but for protection. Auguste gave me jewels I refused to wear, gifts from patrons I refused to acknowledge. When he learned I meant to leave, he barred the door to my room, and said my voice belonged to him alone. So I hid what he gave me, in a place he would never look — where the walls hold the songs I will never sing.*

*Let the house that stole my voice pay for its own survival.*

*— C. L., 1902*

Julien read it twice, slowly. Then he looked up, eyes brighter than Élodie had seen them in days. “Where the walls hold the songs—she’s not speaking figuratively. She’s telling us where.”

“Inside the walls,” Élodie said. “But which ones? The theater has three hundred feet of internal wall space, most of it buried behind paneling that’s been replaced twice since 1902.”

Julien’s jaw tightened with the beginning of an idea. He walked to the stage right wall and laid a flat palm against the plaster, tapping gently, listening. “She trained at the Paris Conservatoire. She would have had the building plans memorized—the location of every cavity, every chase. In the original construction, the walls in the dressing rooms were hollowed out to hide the rats and the drafts. They were double-skinned.”

Élodie felt a pulse of hope. “Your restoration notes—do you still have the original architect’s cross-section?”

“Copies,” Julien said, already moving toward the worktable in the corner, crouching over the stack of rolled drawings tied with twine. “I made negatives from the municipal archive. Wait—I remember this.”

He unrolled one big sheet toward the floor, weights at each corner. The paper sagged, warped with age, but the lines were clean. The theater’s cross-section, layer by layer. Julien ran a finger along the east wall, tracing the dressing rooms on the second floor.

He stopped. His finger rested on a small gap in the double-wall space between Céleste’s former dressing room and the storage closet adjacent. The gap was unusually deep—a foot and a half where the rest of the wall had only three inches.

“There,” Julien said, tapping the spot. “If she hid anything, it’s there.”

“But that wall—wasn’t it sealed in the renovation of 1948? The wood paneling, the electrical rewire, they blocked access to the old spaces.” Élodie knelt beside him, staring at the gap on the paper. “To reach it, we’d need to open the wall from inside the closet. Remove the paneling, work through the back face.”

“Which we can do tonight,” Julien said. “The demolition vote is tomorrow morning. If the consortium wins, we lose access at dawn. This is our only window.”

Élodie held a breath, weighing the risk. If they were caught opening the walls, it would confirm Beaumont’s accusations of vandalism, of unsafe conditions. But the confession was already public. And tomorrow, no one would care about preservation if the wrecking ball was the only outcome.

“Then we do it,” she said. “But we do it together.”

Julien paused, the soldering iron still in his hand. “Élodie, about the other night—when I said what I said about you acting alone. I didn’t mean—“

“I know what you meant.” She cut him off gently. “You were scared. So was I. But we don’t have time to be scared now. We have a wall to open, a letter to prove, and a performance to save.”

He almost smiled. “And a ghost who might be listening.”

As if summoned, the faint sound drifted from the sealed room above—the music box lullaby, starting and stopping, as if a child’s hand were catching the winding key. The melody hung in the dusty air, then fell silent.

She looked up toward the ceiling. “She’s waiting.”

They worked by the dim work lamp for the next hour. Julien used a chisel to pry the paneling in the storage closet, revealing the old lime plaster behind, brittle and cracking. He tapped, listening. A hollow section answered. He switched to a flashlight, and the beam revealed the shape of a cavity—not wall framing, but a deliberate box, built with herringbone brick, as if someone had constructed a safe without a door.

“Damn it,” Julien muttered. “It’s mortared shut. We’ll need to break the brick.”

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes, carefully. Or five, if we don’t care about noise.”

“Noise,” Élodie said, “and the meeting with Madame de la Roche is tomorrow night. If we fail here, that performance is the only thing that can buy us the evening. Do it carefully.”

Julien began to pick at the mortar, a slow, methodical work. Élodie held the flashlight steady, watching dust rain down from each strike. The music box above had stopped, but she felt a presence climbing through the building toward them — not Céleste’s cool presence, but the child’s, the thing that had never been freed.

A sharp crack. A brick came loose, followed by another. The opening widened, and Julien reached inside, flashlight held between his teeth. His fingers touched something solid. He pulled out a flat brass box, blackened with age, hinged, with no lock—a jewelry case.

He set it on the floor. Élodie knelt beside him, breath held. Together they lifted the lid.

Inside, nestled in velvet gone to powder, lay a dozen pieces—diamond brooches, a sapphire necklace, gold bangles, a tiara of small pale stones. The light caught the gems, but Élodie’s eyes went to the folded paper tucked beneath the tray. She lifted it out, unfolded it.

It was a deed, signed in the hand of Auguste Vautour’s grandfather, transferring ownership of the Théâtre Lumière to “Céleste Laurent, 1902”—then crossed out, a note in the same hand in the margin that read *rendered invalid upon her disappearance.* But beneath, in Céleste’s own ink, small and fierce: *But I never disappeared. They buried my name instead.*

Élodie looked up at Julien. His eyes were wide, his hand trembling around the flashlight. “If we can prove this deed, if she was the rightful owner, then the debt was never the theater’s—it was theirs. The jewels aren’t treasure. They’re collateral for taking what was always hers.”

The lullaby above resumed, louder this time, as if a child were now humming along.

Élodie’s phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: *A gentleman named Julien left a message asking us to clarify the consortium’s vote. We can meet at sunrise. — Beaumont’s solicitor.*

Julien stared at the screen. “I didn’t send that.”

The lullaby stopped.

Élodie looked at the deed, then at the phone. “Then who did?”