Read Chapter 4: The Manager's Burden

Vautour’s office smelled of pipe smoke and old paper, a stale sweetness that clung to the back of Élodie’s throat. He sat behind a desk the size of a coffin lid, its surface buried under ledgers and loose receipts, and he did not ask her to sit.

“You’ve been here four nights,” he said. Not a question.

Élodie folded her hands behind her back. The locket was warm against her collarbone beneath her blouse. “Three, Monsieur.”

“Three.” He rubbed his temples with two fingers, smearing a faint streak of dust across his brow. He was a thin man, all sharp angles and jittery energy, the kind of frame that made you think he’d once been heavier and had worried the weight off. “And in those three nights, you’ve found… what?”

She considered lying. Julien had been clear about discretion — they were asking questions about a woman who had been erased from every record, and one wrong word could cost them whatever fragile access Delacroix had granted her. But Vautour was watching her with those hooded, intelligent eyes, and she had the sense that he already knew the answer.

“I found a locket,” she said. “Behind a mirror in the costume wings.”

Something flickered across his face — fear, or recognition, or both. He reached for a glass of amber liquid on the corner of his desk and drank.

“Behind the mirror,” he repeated, setting the glass down with a trembling hand. “And what was in it?”

“A photograph. And an inscription.”

He was silent for a long moment. Outside, a distant rumble of traffic filtered through the grime-caked window, muffled and underwater. Then he stood, walked to the door, and locked it.

“Show me.”

Élodie’s pulse quickened. She hesitated, then unclasped the chain from her neck and held the locket out in her palm. Vautour did not reach for it. He stared at the tarnished silver oval as though it might bite him, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone hoarse.

“My grandfather managed this house until 1924. Delacroix’s father before that. When Céleste Aubry vanished — the night of her final performance — my grandfather was the one who had to clean out her dressing room.” He swallowed. “He kept a ledger of everything removed. Every costume piece, every scrap of sheet music, every personal item that was left behind. One entry reads: *Locket, silver, engraved 'CA.' Returned to donor or discarded.* The donor was never identified. And the locket was never seen again.”

Élodie closed her fingers around the silver. “Until now.”

“Until now,” Vautour echoed. He returned to his chair and sat down heavily, all the nervous energy draining out of him at once. “I’d hoped you were just another singer with romantic notions about ghosts. That’s easier to deal with.”

“What do you mean, hope?”

He laughed, a bitter, barking sound. “Mademoiselle Marchand, do you know why I allowed Delacroix to give you those keys?”

“He said the voice that sang with me proved I had some connection to the theater’s history.”

“The voice that sang with you,” Vautour repeated, tasting each word. “Do you know how much money this theater owes? Not to the banks — they’ve already written us off. To private creditors. Patrons who bought boxes a century ago under the impression that they were buying immortality. Renovation loans taken out by my grandfather, then my father, then foolishly by me, each of us believing we’d be the one to turn the house around. The total debt is enough to buy a small château.”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with me.”

Vautour leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his eyes suddenly sharp and pitiless. “The theater is three months from demolition. The city has approved the permit. A developer wants to turn this into luxury apartments, and frankly, the creditors are so eager to see the project move forward they’ve agreed to forgive half the debt if we vacate by June.”

Three months. Élodie felt the floor shift beneath her. She had known the theater was dying — the rot in the rafters, the peeling gilt, the chandelier that hung at a dangerous tilt — but dying was a slow word. Demolition was a guillotine.

“Why tell me this now?”

“Because you’ve found something that should not exist,” Vautour said. “And because I’m terrified that if the wrong person learns what you’ve found, the demolition will be moved up. The developer has been very clear that this property carries a taint. A curse, if you believe in such things. Every attempt to sell it has fallen through at the last moment. The buyers claim the theater makes them uneasy — bad dreams, unexplained noises, a feeling of being watched. One architect resigned midway through his survey, citing a ‘chronic inability to concentrate.’ The project has been delayed twice because of it.”

“So you think Céleste Aubry is trying to stop the sale.”

Vautour’s mouth twisted. “I think my grandfather believed she was trapped here. He used to say the theater had swallowed her whole and was still digesting. He refused to renovate the stage floor because she was buried beneath it — not literally, he’d say, but close enough.” He shook his head. “He heard her. On the anniversary of her disappearance, every year, he’d lock himself in his office and drink until he couldn’t hear the singing anymore. My father thought it was grief. I thought it was guilt.”

“Guilt for what?”

Vautour didn’t answer. He looked past her, toward the window, and for a moment he seemed older, folded in on himself like a paper lantern burned from the inside out. Then he straightened and pulled a heavy ledger from the bottom drawer of his desk.

“This is my grandfather’s record of the 1903 season,” he said, sliding it across the desk. “Delacroix’s grandfather kept the official house records, but my grandfather kept his own notes. There are annotations in the margins — observations, suspicions, things that never made it into the official archive.” He tapped the leather cover. “There’s a page about Céleste Aubry’s final performance that I’ve never shown anyone. Read it. Then tell me if you still believe she left this theater of her own will.”

Élodie reached for the ledger. The leather was cracked and worn, the pages yellowed and soft at the edges. She opened it to a page Vautour had marked with a ribbon of black silk.

The handwriting was small and precise, the ink faded to a sepia brown. It was dated 12 November 1903, and it began, without preamble:

*Aubry sang Casta Diva tonight with more force than I have ever heard from her. The house was full — the finest audience of the season. But in the wings I saw her count the exits. She was always a nervous performer, but this was different. This was a woman calculating escape routes.*

*I asked her after the final curtain whether she was ill. She laughed and said she had never been better. Then she said, “They’ll remember tonight. They’ll remember me when this house is dust.” I thought it was the drink talking. She did not drink.*

*At midnight, she was gone. Her costumes were found in a pile on the stage, as though she had stripped them off where she stood. Her dressing room was bare — no personal effects, no letters, no music. Only a silver locket on the dresser, which I recorded as “donor unknown” because I did not know whose name to write.*

*But I know whose name I should have written. I saw the man who gave it to her. He sat in Box One every night of the run, and every night I heard her sing to him alone. He was older, well-dressed, foreign. He came with no companion, no introductions, and no one ever learned his name. He was there on the final night, and I saw him leave through the stage door during the last scene, before Aubry’s final aria. She sang it to an empty box.*

*I did not report this. I did not report many things. I believed the house would protect its secrets. I pray now that I was wrong.*

Élodie’s throat was tight. She read the passage twice, then a third time, her finger tracing the final line.

“She wasn’t trapped,” she said slowly. “She was waiting.”

Vautour raised an eyebrow. “Waiting for what?”

“For someone to find the locket. To read this.” She looked up at him. “She’s been trying to tell us something for a hundred years. And we’re the first ones who’ve listened.”

Vautour’s expression was unreadable. He was silent for so long that Élodie began to wonder if she’d said something wrong. Then he reached across the desk and placed his hand over hers — a gesture so unexpected that she flinched.

“Three months,” he repeated. “The wrecking crew arrives the first of September. Whatever Céleste Aubry needs you to hear — you have until then to hear it.”

He withdrew his hand and stood, unlocking the door in a single fluid motion. The gesture was a dismissal, but as Élodie passed him in the doorway, he caught her elbow.

“One more thing,” he said, and his voice had dropped so low she had to lean in to hear it. “The night my grandfather died — 1952, the anniversary of her disappearance — he woke up and said she had finally stopped singing. He said the house was quiet. He said that meant she had finished what she was waiting for.”

Vautour’s grip tightened on her arm. “But she’s been singing again every night for the past three weeks. And so has the tenor. That started the night you walked into the audition.”

He released her elbow and stepped back into his office. The door clicked shut between them, leaving Élodie alone in the corridor with the worn ledger pressed against her chest and the locket cold against her skin.

From somewhere in the depths of the theater, faint but unmistakable, a soprano voice began to climb toward a high C. It was the same line she had heard every night — the recitative from Norma’s transition — but tonight it sounded different. More urgent. More deliberate.

Three weeks, she thought. The singing started when I arrived.

And I’m the one she’s been waiting for.

The high C hung in the air, impossibly long, impossibly pure, and Élodie knew without looking that when she returned to the stage that evening, the phantom rehearsal would be waiting for her. She tucked the ledger under her arm and walked toward the sound, feeling for the first time that she was not investigating a mystery but answering a summons.

The singing stopped abruptly, as it always did, but in its place she heard something new: the unmistakable sound of a chair scraping across the floor of the locked dressing room at the end of the hall. As though the ghost had just stood up to greet her.