It was strange going to Léa's house instead of Lajoie's for an Order of the Nightingales meeting, and it was even stranger going without Moreau, but nevertheless, I stood outside of Léa's door that evening, whistling the opening to Bruckner's 7th symphony. I waited for a few moments, and eventually, she opened the door and let me in.

"Mattie!" Léa exclaimed. "It's good to see you."

"Good to see you too," I said.

"Where's Gertie?" Léa asked as she led me inside. Her house was in the same neighborhood as Sylvestre's, but the two homes bore little resemblance. The walls of Léa's house were painted in bright colors and covered in unusual pieces of modern art - if she had any family photographs, they weren't on display. She'd hardly even made an effort to tidy up before the meeting - there were books and letters scattered across her desk, stacks of sheet music on the floor, and a half-eaten plate of dessert on the table.

"She's still at the bookstore," I explained. "I offered to introduce her to the Nightingales, but she refuses to leave."

"That's a shame," Léa said as she reached over to her dessert plate and ate the last few bites of her cake. "I would have liked to talk to her. She said she was a physicist, didn't she?"

"Well, she works in the physics department at Cambridge," I said. "I'll admit that I don't really understand what she does. Something about astronomical data and atmospheric refraction..."

"How fascinating," Léa said. "Does she share your musical talent, by any chance?"

"Not particularly. I think she can play a passable rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on the piano, but that's about it."

"Well, I think you're still my favorite of the Brackenborough sisters then," Léa said with a smile. Before I could respond, someone started whistling the opening to Brucker 7, and Léa ran over to the door. "I'll talk to you later, Mattie," she said.

As Léa opened the door, I wandered around for a little while, if only to see who else was here. There were fewer people than usual at the meeting, and I wasn't sure if there was something else going on that night or if it was because of Lajoie's death. A few minutes passed by, and eventually, an older man with a gray beard approached me.

"Mr. De Villiers?" I said, hoping that I had remembered the famous conductor's name correctly.

De Villiers nodded. "It's good to see you here," he said. "It seems like a lot of people didn't bother to show up today."

"Well, I know Moreau is at an audition in Nantes," I said. "I don't know about everyone else."

"The Opera de Nantes audition?" de Villiers said. "I think Sabourin is there too. He thinks he'll get paid more in Nantes, but I'm almost certain that's not true. As for the rest of them, I think a lot of people are scared after what happened to Lajoie, and I don't blame them. It sure seems like this killer on the loose is targeting musicians."

There was a long silence, and then I said, "If you don't mind me asking..."

"I don't mind at all," de Villiers said before I'd even finished the question.

"...were you there when Lajoie died?"

"I was holding rehearsal - almost everyone was there already, and we needed to get started if we were going to finish on time. We'd barely started when we heard gunshots, and I told everyone to leave. I'm still not sure that was the best decision, and I have no idea how we're going to perform without Lajoie. He's our only tuba player, and he's been with the orchestra for years. We'll have to hold an audition, I suppose."

"That must have been terrifying, hearing those gunshots during rehearsal."

"It was, but I'm almost certain I know who did it, and soon, he'll be brought to justice."

"Who do you think it was?"

"Bertrand Sylvestre, of course," de Villiers said. "He hated Bergmann, and I don't know why he would target Lajoie, but he must have had his reasons. He covered his tracks well, but there has to be proof somewhere that he did it, so I've hired a private detective, since clearly, the police aren't doing their job."

De Villiers seemed completely certain that he was right, but I wasn't convinced. "How do you know that the same person committed both murders?" I asked.

"They were both killed in the same place," de Villiers said. "It has to be the same murderer."

Before I could respond, Léa stepped to the front of the room and said, "Could I have everyone's attention?" A few men in the back continued talking, but most of the Nightingales looked toward her. "Yesterday, we lost Pierre Lajoie, our Chief Nightingale," she said. "Like many of you, I miss him greatly, and as Deputy Chief Nightingale, I'd like to propose a toast to his achievements, everything he brought to the Order of the Nightingales and everything he did to enrich our lives as musicians and friends." She raised her glass and then said, "To Lajoie!"

"To Lajoie!" the rest of the Nightingales echoed.

"I'm sure Lajoie would have wanted us to carry on with our music, so does anyone have any pieces they'd like to share?" Léa said.

"I just finished a trombone quartet," someone chimed in.

"Ooh, can I play it?" one of the trombone players from the Paris Opera said.

The two other trombonists in the room also agreed to play, but we needed four to perform the piece. "Miss Valencourt, you used to play trombone, right?" one of the other singers said.

"That was a long time ago." Léa paused and then said, "I suppose I can give it a try though."

The four trombonists sight read their way through the piece, and although Léa was clearly the weak link in the quartet, she still sounded incredible. She was a woman of many talents, and I still couldn't quite believe that I'd managed to befriend someone like her.

After the piece was over, everyone applauded, and Léa immediately made her way over to me. "What did you think?" she asked.

"You were wonderful up there," I said.

"Thanks, Mattie," Léa said. "I'm just still so nervous - I don't think the other Nightingales like me very much..."

"How could they not?"

"I'm not Lajoie."

"Does that matter?" I said. "You're Léa Valencourt, and I think that's even better."

Léa and I talked for a while longer, and after the other Nightingales had left, Léa offered to walk me home. We headed to Île Saint-Louis first, and sure enough, Gertie was still in the bookstore, struggling through Les Mystères de Marseille with a French-to-English dictionary in hand. She barely noticed us when we walked in, and she didn't even bother to look up from the book.

"Gertie?" I said. "It's almost ten o'clock. The store's going to close soon."

Gertie sighed, purchased both the novel and the dictionary, and walked back to the boarding house with Léa and I. "It seems like most of the Nightingales think that Sylvestre did it," Léa said to me on the way there. "I can't imagine why. He's really not the sort of person to murder somebody."

I nodded. "It just doesn't make any sense," I said. "Then again, nothing about this case makes sense. For example, why would anyone want to murder Pierre Lajoie?"

Gertie was strangely quiet as Léa and I kept on talking about the mystery, but we couldn't come up with any definite conclusion. Everyone had an alibi, however flimsy, and no one seemed to have a motive. How were we supposed to solve a case like this?

When we arrived at the boarding house, I said goodbye to Léa, and the three of us went our separate ways. As I headed upstairs, I missed the sound of Moreau's violin echoing through the halls. It was strange how badly I wanted to hear the Mendelssohn violin concerto at that moment, and I promised myself that I'd ask Moreau to play it next time I saw him.

I spotted Bergmann's 10th Symphony sitting on my desk, and I stared at it for a while, still in awe of the fact that I had this piece of paper, Bergmann's final work of art. I hummed the melodies, and I dreamed of what this symphony could be, if only Bergmann had lived long enough to finish it. After a while, I took out a pencil, and I began to write. At first, I only sketched out chords, accompaniments, embellishments to what Bergmann had already written, but soon, I had a structure to build the entire symphony upon. I could take this half-written composition and make it my own.

I stayed up for a long time working on that composition, but just as I was about to go to bed, I noticed that someone had sent me a telegram.

Would you mind joining us for dinner tomorrow?

B. Sylvestre

I read it over and over again, wondering why Sylvestre had sent me this. I could ask him about it tomorrow, but nevertheless, it was strange. Why hadn't he just asked me in person?

It was yet another mystery to solve, but as I lay in bed, I wondered why someone else couldn't solve all of these mysteries for once.