Except he had.
“Anything else, Mrs. Tollner?”
“Does it look hopeless?”
Now the lawyer was the one pausing. “We’ll probably need to be creative in crafting our defense. I’ll be in touch.”
Creative. What did that mean?
She then took a deep breath and began making calls to the family.
They were, of course, difficult — impossible conversations, largely because she had no answers to the rapid fire and frantic questions friends and family and co-workers of Robert asked.
She then called the jail and learned that Robert was still in the prison hospital. He remained unresponsive. He wasn’t able to talk to anyone. He was, however, still compulsively humming.
Beth disconnected and slumped on the couch. A moment later she sat up, as if jolted from a nightmare.
She’d been thinking of the four notes Robert had been humming in repetition. She realized she’d gotten the order of them wrong, starting with what would have been the third, not the first note. Not A-D-D-E.
What Robert was really humming was “D-E-A-D.”
The bell rang and Beth opened the door to admit Joanne Post.
In the driveway her husband, Edward, a lean, handsome man of around forty, sat in his work truck, JP Designs stenciled on the side. He owned a landscaping company.
Beth waved to him. The couples had been close for the past year, ever since Joanne and Ed had moved here from Virginia. He waved back.
She closed the door and the two women walked into the living room. Robert’s sister was a tall, lanky woman, a lawyer for a firm that did environmental law. Her salt and pepper hair was cropped short. Joanne was an avid runner and today she wore orange athletic shoes, as well as jeans and a navy sweatshirt.
The women embraced and Joanne wiped a tear with her index finger.
Beth adjusted a log in the fireplace — she’d found fires comforted her at frantic times like this. Joanne sat on the couch next to the crackling blaze and warmed her hands. Beth brought in mugs of coffee.
The sister asked, “How is he?”
“The doctor, from the jail? He called. He was nicer than I thought he’d be, I mean, he’s also a guard, when you think about it. He said Robert’s still in some kind of fugue state. He told me they don’t use the word ‘breakdown’ anymore — it’s not specific enough — but it fits in Robert’s case since there’s no particular category they can put him in.
“What do you know about the insanity defense?”
“I do real estate,” Joanne said, shrugging.
“But from law school? You must remember something.”
Joanne looked off. “I think it’s that you can’t be tried if you didn’t understand the nature of what you did. Or if you can’t participate in your defense.”
She added there would be motions for a mental evaluation. A doctor picked by them, one picked by the prosecution, and a judge-appointed third psychiatrist. This would take some time. “Are you thinking of insanity for Robert?”
“This is going to sound strange at first, but hear me out.”
She told Robert’s sister about the curse of the Midnight Sonatina — the composer’s murder of the priest and his suicide.
She then went online and found the article she’d been reading earlier, when she got the call from Sandra Altman. The women sat next to each other and read:
The professor returned to London, where a chamber group there added the Midnight Sonatina to their repertoire. It was at one of their concerts that the sonatina was associated with yet another horrific crime.
After the premier performance, one of the concert goers, upon returning home, began acting strangely: it was reported that the man simply stared at his wife for minutes on end and when, unnerved, she summoned friends over, the man went into a rage and he stabbed her to death. He’d complained to friends earlier that he suspected his wife was having an affair.
The man’s lawyer presented a novel defense to the court — that he’d been driven momentarily mad by the sonatina. Upon examining him, physicians disagreed over the diagnosis. Some reported that he was indeed moved to temporary madness by the piece, while others asserted that he was feigning.
A renowned physician testified on his behalf, stating that if music has the power to move us to joy and sorrow, why cannot a piece move us to rage and even murder — beyond our control?
The judge found him guilty, but, because the doctor’s argument was persuasive, spared the defendant from hanging.
Joanne said, “What, claim that he was possessed by a piece of music? You know that can’t happen.”
Beth was an academic and approached life according to the scientific method. Of course there was no such thing as a curse. The supernatural did not exist.
But she said, “Hypnosis is real. What if, instead of a swinging watch, a string of notes could put you under, let you act out your impulses?”
“Claiming he was hypnotized into delusion?”
Beth nodded and added about his humming the four notes. What they spelled.
“Jesus,” Joanne whispered.
“The lawyer said we needed a creative defense.”
“That’s pretty damn creative.” Joanne thought for a moment. “Maybe there is some basis for it. What if it happened other times? Somebody hearing music and losing their mind temporarily.”
“If it is temporary.” Beth choked on a sob.
Joanne took her hand. “He’ll get better. We’ll get the best doctors we can.”
Beth wiped the tears. “Let’s get to work.”
Sitting, hunched forward at the glass-topped coffee table, each looked over her own laptop.
“First,” Beth said, “let’s go the broadest we can: Sound inducing impulsive behavior. Not necessarily music.”
It was possible, they learned, to, yes, induce hypnosis via sounds, though it seemed generally to be true, too, that being hypnotized could not turn otherwise upstanding people into criminals.
“It’s something,” Joanne said. She jotted references and websites on a legal pad. “What about military marches?” she suggested.
Nothing, though, suggested that martial music affected the psychology of soldiers, other than inspiring them into battle.
Discouraging.
Joanne kept searching. “Here’s a YouTube video of the Salem Players. I want to see if anybody commented on it.” The piece played softly. Given the computer’s tiny speakers, it didn’t sound nearly as eerie as it had last night.
“And?” Beth asked.
“Nothing helpful. Just like ‘Cool Piece.’ ‘Where are you playing next?’ ‘Love your hair!’ Stuff like that.”
Beth watched the energetic performance for a moment and then had a thought. She placed a call to the venue and learned the musicians were at rehearsal, but were presently on a break. She was put through to the conductor.
“Hello?”
Beth identified herself and said, “I was at the concert last night. First, what an incredible performance.”
“Why, thank you, Mrs. Tollner,” the man said in his lilting British accent. He added modestly, “The hall is acoustically marvelous. How can I help you?”
“I’m a professor and I’m doing some research.”
Both were true, in a way.
“I’m curious about the Midnight Sonatina.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know if anyone in the audience has ever had an odd reaction to the music?”
“Odd reaction... You mean those stories that it drove people mad?”