Mr. Throop—Havilah—was the one up front playing the piano badly. But at the very least he did it with style, which was far more than you could have said for Rylee. Rylee (whose last name no one was entirely sure of) wore a kind of warped mask of death when she’d played, her face contorting in unseemly ways as she got the instrument to produce sounds that no instrument was ever intended to produce. You quickly got the sense, listening to her, that she’d stumbled onto something brilliantly awful. You got the sense that she was channeling the spirit of Rezsô Seress, or one-upping him, beating out that Hungarian suicide song with a song to drive everyone mad. It wasn’t that anyone had ever asked her to play, or even implied, vaguely, that perhaps she might play; more often than not it was an impossibly sudden thing, with her one minute not playing the piano and the next sitting maddened on the bench, producing unbearable noise from the device. People cut her off when they saw her headed there—they’d step in her way, spill things on her, trip her, even employ minor incendiary devices. Nothing seemed out of the question. But somehow she managed, every so often, to appear at the machine. With her at the helm a piano ceased to be an instrument and became a machine, bloodthirsty and without remorse, the emotion drained out of it. You could never tell when she was coming and going. Sometimes you’d be a place where you didn’t even know there was a piano—a park, a swimming pool, a friend’s house—and then all of a sudden this noise would lurch out of nowhere and you’d spin around, and there Rylee would be, hunched over a piano. Always out of nowhere. And then she was simply gone. Always just like that.

Except for that last time, when the police in riot gear broke through the doors and dragged her out, her what they call kicking and screaming all the way.

Maybe it was how they carried her, or their stealth and speed, but no one really believed they were police.