Piano Scale Code

The old lesson room smells like cedar polish and dead ambition. My mother kept every theory workbook from childhood because Mercer women were always supposed to become impressive enough to be displayed, never wild enough to be believed. Tessa rips through the cabinets until she finds the battered blue scale guide with our initials on the inside cover.

Each major key is mapped to a family cluster from one of our old memorization games. C-sharp meant Weatherford because Tessa liked the hiss in the name. A meant Ashbourne. F meant Fenn. Nina must have learned the system from us during gala prep one summer when Tessa treated Harbor House staff like temporary younger cousins instead of payroll.

Leah taps the intervals on the tabletop while I translate. Family after family spills out. donor after donor. date after date. the years line up with hush transfers and Harbor House incidents so neatly it becomes obscene. This is no longer a rumor tree. It is a ledger with rhythm.

"There," Tessa says, stabbing a line with her finger. "Bishop Hale. Surgeon Flint. Senator Markell's brother. That's why the AG office keeps slowing. This isn't just Vivian's protection ring. It's half the people who sponsor breakfast prayers and trauma centers."

My mother stands in the doorway hearing enough to go still as stone. "If those names go public all at once," she says, "the town won't survive it."

I don't look up from the chart. "The town is not the endangered child in this story."

Nico arrives with an evidence scanner and the news that Owen has gone dark again. Phone off. counsel unavailable. campaign office evacuated. "Either he's hiding," Nico says, "or he's moving pieces we can't yet see."

Callum, standing by the window with his laptop, swears. "Or they've decided to start taking ours."

He turns the screen toward us. His shared-drive access just got scrubbed remotely. Every draft, photo archive, and donor-map backup has vanished in one sweep except the local copy on his laptop.

"They found the newsroom mirror," he says.