Page 64 of Symphony for Lies

He wasn’t online. I didn’t expect an immediate response, but just knowing someone would take the situation seriously made me feel slightly less alone.

Still, the unease didn’t fade.

I sat there, curled up against the lockers, my mind tangled in too many thoughts to make sense of them.

After a long moment, I looked at the music notes again.

It was a short, repeating sequence: E, G, A, F, E.

A scale, and not a random one. My brain began to decode it, mapping each letter to its place in the alphabet.

E was five. G was seven. A was one. F was six. E again.

That gave me the sequence: five, seven, one, six, five.

If I shifted them by a cipher I’d learned as a child, it spelled out something else.

“I’ll see you…”

My blood ran cold.

“…in my next performance...”

The note slipped from my fingers, and my whole body shivered.

The killer… knows me. And he was here. There was no denying it.

I forced myself to stand.

I needed to tell Linda.

She was typing away at her computer in her office, looking even more exhausted than usual. When she noticed me, she didn’t stop typing but acknowledged my presence with a slight nod.

“Sorry to interrupt. But I need to report something.”

I exhaled shakily before I explained the note and my suspicion that someone had broken into the clinic.

Linda stopped typing in an instant, her brows pulling together in concern. “We have security cameras.”

I nodded.

“We installed new ones recently. Let’s check the footage.”

I followed her down the hall to the security office. Jeff wasn’t there, but my boss had full access to the surveillance system.

At exactly eight p.m. on the footage, every single camera cut to black for fifteen minutes.Then, all the cameras flickered back to life.

My stomach dropped.

It wasn’t an error. Someone had hacked the feed.

Linda slumped in the office chair, rubbing her temples.“This is bad. A lot of weird things have been happening lately. And now this? Someone was here. That settles it. I’m hiring security.” She turned to me. “We also need to report this to the police.”

“I already did,” I admitted.

“Good. But please be careful.”

“I will.”