My name is Rosa. I’ve cleaned the seventh floor of the Aurelian Hotel for six years, and for six years I’ve been told the same thing: never touch Room 714. Its door is sealed with a brass padlock and a strip of wax, and even the manager won’t say why.
Tonight I heard a piano.
It came softly from behind that door, a slow melody, uneven, like someone practising the same phrase over and over. I told the night guard. He laughed and said the pipes make noises.
Then Mrs. Vance, the owner’s wife, came down the corridor in a gold dress with two guards, her heels clicking on the marble. ‘You have been disturbing my guests,’ she said. ‘You’re finished.’
I said nothing. I took a small brass key out of my apron, the one I had found taped beneath a service cart, and turned it in the padlock. The wax cracked.
Mrs. Vance’s face lost all its color. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Stop right now.’
The door swung open on a room frozen in time. Dust sheets, a grand piano, a stack of sheet music in a girl’s handwriting, and on the wall a portrait of a smiling young woman.
‘That is Elena Vance,’ I said, reading the small plate. ‘Your husband’s first wife.’
‘She died in this hotel twenty years ago,’ Mrs. Vance whispered. ‘He told me she left.’
On the piano lay a small envelope addressed to ‘Whoever finds this room.’ I opened it with everyone watching. Elena had written that she was not leaving. She was ill, and she was afraid of what Mr. Vance would do with the hotel after she was gone.
She had left the deed to the building, signed and notarised, in the piano bench.
The two guards looked at each other. One of them took off his cap.
Mrs. Vance sat down on the piano stool with her gold dress spread around her and began to cry. Mr. Vance arrived thirty seconds later, and the sound he made when he saw the open door is something I will never forget.
The building belongs to Elena’s sister now. She kept me on. Room 714 is a music room, and every Thursday a girl of twelve plays the phrase from the sheet music to the empty hall.
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