1. Nude Descending a Skylight

I’m no detective. But when my beautiful neighbor came crashing through the skylight and landed, spread-eagle and naked, on my magnificent Bösendorfer grand piano as I sat playing my favorite Bach fugue—Well, I knew something was amiss.

    When I finally crawled, trembling, out from under the piano bench where I had ducked under the thud and crash, I was amazed at the damage to the piano.

    Eve didn’t look too good, either, as I shook the broken glass from my hair, and wiped the spattered blood from my shirt.

    “Jesus,” I whispered, my heart thudding as I went around the piano to get a better look.

    I started to lift the heavy lid, which had fallen atop her, when a pair of eyeglasses clattered onto the piano lid, slid off and skidded across the floor. I looked up, thinking something more might be coming, then realized how foolish that action was, and stepped back, head down.

    I waited a moment, studying under my lowered eyelids the scene before me: Two still, bloody legs thrust, knee-bent, from beneath the glass-littered lid of a grand piano; at right angles to the legs, an arm, outthrust upward, bloody and motionless as well. I had known immediately it was Eve from the flash of her trademark red hair I had glimpsed momentarily just before she hit. Now, ten seconds later, I could confirm her identity from the single visible hand and its eight rings. This was Eve’s hand, all right.

    I waited a moment for the pieces of skylight to stop falling. I felt sick from the sight, and from the powerful scent of her too-sweet perfume. Finally, after a moment of hesitation, I carefully lifted the lid. I had to hold it up as the brace had snapped under her impact. There, among the strings and wooden struts and steel sounding board of this fine instrument, lay the remains of Eve—herself once a fine instrument, in a way: Now she lay quite still, soaking wet, her torso and legs mottled with red marks, her hair tangled in sprung wires, her neck twisted half-around, her eyes open and lifeless.

    “Eve,” I whispered, and lowered the lid gently back on her. Feeling dizzy and nauseous, and still hearing the occasional tinkle of a piece of descending glass, I made my way back to the bench. There I sat down shakily, gripping the slanting piano to keep my balance. I rested my head against my arms on the music ledge a moment, catching my breath and getting my bearings. Finally I raised my head and saw, on the page of music I had moments before completed, red spots of blood scattered riotously among the orderly black notes. In the last measure of the piece three large dots of blood seemed to mark a new, deathly, final chord.

    That’s not the way Bach intended for this piece to end, I thought bizarrely, a little out of my mind. I glanced past the music and the piano lid at the outthrust legs, like a manikin’s.

    And that’s not the way she intended for her life to end, either, I thought. Although a lot of other people might have.

    I started to call my friend Kelley Cooper at home, then changed my mind: I phoned Ed instead, at the Station.

    “Indianapolis Police Department. Station 12,” he answered.

    “Ed. Lou.”

    “Professor, what’s up?"

    “It’s my neighbor.”

    “Eve?”

     "Yeah."

     "What about her?"

    "She dropped in."

    "So?"

    "Through the roof."