Arthur didn't sleep much that night.
At two in the morning, he got up, very carefully, the way the cardiologist had shown him, and went down the hall to the spare room where he kept his business papers. It took him an hour to find the shoebox. Fritz Albrecht had taught him to keep everything, every bill and every receipt, because a tuner who can't prove what he charged is a tuner who gets cheated.
So Arthur had kept the envelopes.
All thirty-two of them. One for every May since 1995. He laid them out on the spare bed in rows, in order, under the lamp.
He'd never really looked at them before. He'd opened each one, cashed the money order, and dropped the envelope in the box. Now he looked.
They were all plain white drugstore envelopes. All postmarked Pine Hollow, Ohio. All addressed to him in Zanesville.
But they weren't all addressed in the same hand.
From 1995 to 2018, the handwriting was round and soft and a little old-fashioned. A woman's hand. A schoolteacher's hand, almost, with big loops on the capital A in Arthur and a little circle instead of a dot over the i in Gaines.
In 2019, it changed.
From 2019 to last May, the addresses were in block capitals. Square, careful, pressed hard into the paper. The printing of somebody who'd filled out a great many forms in his life, and had never once been taught to write pretty.
Arthur sat on the edge of the spare bed and looked at the two rows of envelopes for a long time.
2019.
He thought about a front room he hadn't been in for eight years. A Kimball upright. A woman on the sofa humming "In the Garden," with a plate of pound cake on her knee, who'd asked him every single April how much he was charging the church, and laughed when he told her, and said, "Arthur Gaines, you are a terrible businessman."
He called Ruth Ann Mercer at eight in the morning. Sam had given him her number.
"Mrs. Mercer, I need to ask you something that's none of my business," Arthur said. "Did June Whitaker put a little circle over her i's instead of a dot?"
Ruth Ann was quiet on the line.
"She did," she said finally. "She taught piano lessons out of her front room for thirty years, Mr. Gaines. She wrote every one of her students' names on their lesson books that way. I've got one in my files. She taught my nephew." Another pause. "Why?"
Arthur told her.
When he was done, Ruth Ann didn't say anything for a while.
"I'll call Sam," she said. "But I think you'd better be the one to ask Earl."
Arthur's grandson drove him down on Saturday. His doctor had said no driving. He hadn't said anything about riding.
Earl Whitaker answered the door in his sheriff's jacket, on his way out. He saw Arthur on the porch, and the shoebox under his arm, and he stopped.
Then he stepped back and let him in.
The front room was the same. The sofa, the lace curtains, the Kimball upright against the wall, with its lid closed and a framed photo of June on top. There was a thin layer of dust on the lid, as if it hadn't been opened in a long while.
Arthur set the shoebox on the coffee table and took off the lid.
"I'm sorry, Earl," he said. "It's not my business. But I've been cashing your money orders for eight years, and your wife's for twenty-four before that, and I'd like to say thank you to somebody's face."
Earl sat down on the sofa. It was a while before he said anything.
"She found out in 1995," he said finally. "What you were charging. You told her yourself, sitting right there. She said a man that good shouldn't be working for gas money, and Pine Hollow couldn't pay him what he was worth, and she wasn't going to let either one of those things stop the kids from learning on a piano that was in tune." He looked at the upright. "So she paid you out of her lesson money. Every May. She made me promise not to tell. She said you'd quit coming if you knew."
"I might have."
"After she passed, I found her notebook. In the piano bench. Arthur, May, it said, with the amount. Every year, in pencil, going back to 1995." Earl's voice was steady, but his hands weren't. "So I kept on. It seemed like the least I could do. I just couldn't stand to hear that piano without her in the room. That's why I asked you to skip us."
Arthur nodded slowly.
Then he got up, and went to the Kimball, and lifted the lid.
"I'm not supposed to be on my feet long," he said. "But I can do this one sitting down. If you'll let me."
Earl looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded.
Arthur's grandson brought in the tool case. Arthur sat on the piano bench with his tuning hammer and his felt strips and worked for two hours, slowly, one string at a time, by ear. The A had dropped.
Everything had dropped. Eight years of silence will do that to a piano.
While he worked, people came.
Ruth Ann first, with a pound cake. Then Sam and Lorraine Doyle.
Then Dot, and Hank, and Walt, and half the Liars' Table, and three of June's old piano students, grown up now, who'd heard from somebody who'd heard from somebody. They stood in the front room and the kitchen doorway and didn't say much.
At noon Arthur played a C major chord, and listened to it ring, and nodded.
"Lorraine," he said, and got up off the bench.
Lorraine Doyle sat down and played the first line of "In the Garden."
Earl stood by the window. On the second verse, Dot started to sing.
Then Ruth Ann. Then the rest of the room, standing shoulder to shoulder around June Whitaker's old upright, singing a hymn in a front room in Pine Hollow, while Earl stood by the window with his hand over his eyes.
Arthur sat in June's chair by the sofa and listened, and every note was true.