I roll my eyes at the TV. There's no way the couple on the reality show purchased the cheaper home they were presented with. The top tier one was gorgeous, akin to a mansion tucked away in the mountains. It fit every description they gave. So what if it was a little more than their budget? They'll need to renovate the cheaper one anyway.

"They're smart," Emi says. "That's the one I would've chosen."

"But the bathrooms are terrible," I argue. "Unless they want to go to the facilities in a time machine, they need to redo the walls and tiles to not look like the 80s."

Emi shakes her head and looks back at her music. Presumably, the neighboring guests have gone to sleep by nine o'clock, so she's doing the next best thing to practicing—reviewing her music. I'm grateful that we can't play late in the evening. It gives us an excuse to watch TV, a rare occasion since we don't have cable.

A preview for the next show flashes on the screen. The hosts are going to help preserve a weathered farmhouse. I flip to the channel display, scrolling through the other programs that are on right now. I'm more into the luxury shows, ones that reflect a world different from my own.

Nothing else catches my interest, so I turn the TV off. I lean against my pillows for a moment, the remote loose in my palm, trying to figure out what to do.

"You going to bed?" Emi asks.

I'm about to say 'why not,' when I remember something. "No. I think we should take a look at the next Silverenn score."

"Can't we do that tomorrow?" Emi groans. "It's late, and I don't feel like analyzing music."

My eyes drift to the quartet piece in her hands. "You're analyzing music right now."

"I mean, deciphering clues in music. I'm still not sure if we should keep pursuing the treasure."

"The police won't believe us unless we have tangible evidence that we aren't crazy." And if I don't stumble onto treasure soon, it's hello bankruptcy.

"What makes a random, supposed 'treasure' good evidence of mafia activity?" Emi asks.

"I don't know," I mumble. "At least it's something." I lean over the side of the bed, pulling the scores from my viola case, then scoot over to make room for Emi, who sits cross-legged beside me as she peers over my shoulder.

"'Thrice the four completes, amen. Words appear in ring of ten,'" I read from the beginning. "We're looking for a title that has 'T' and 'W.'" Shuffling the pages around, I find 'The Wistful.'

"The piece is in F minor. I'm assuming 'B flat' is the chord we're looking for," Emi says.

I direct my gaze at Emi. "We should never assume anything."

"What else could the fourth mean?" She reaches into the desk, her hand returning with a pencil. "B flat is the fourth chord in F minor. Hence, we need to mark all the B flat chords in the music."

I grab a pencil from my case. Emi takes the first two pages while I take the second two. When we finish, we spread the four pages out across the bed.

"The B flat chord appears more than three times during the piece," Emi says slowly.

"Yeah. But only three of those times matter." I squint at the music, eyes trailing across the bars until I reach the final line.

The final line. Three measures before the end, there's a C7 chord followed by an F minor chord. Then, it switches to the B flat chord before finishing on a high F.

"Emi, the piece ends in a Plagal cadence," I say.

"Also known as the amen cadence!" Emi finishes.

Just to be sure, I grab my viola, excitedly plucking the measure. The measure sounds like the ending of a traditional hymn, saying "ahhh-mennn."

"I just spotted another one on the first page," Emi says, excitement inching into her voice. "And another on the second!"

"Thrice the four completes, amen!" I exclaim. My eyes drop to the clues again. "'Words appear in ring of ten?'" Emi just squints at the music. I lightly pencil in the note names of those three measures. "Maybe it's an anagram. The notes F-Bb-F make up the first measure..."

"F-Ab-C for the second measure, then Bb-C-Ab-F for the final measure," Emi concludes.

We stare at the letters gleaned from the three measures.

F-Bb-F F-Ab-C Bb-C-Ab-F

"Can you make an anagram using that?" I wonder aloud.

The AC rattles in the background, disrupting my concentration. I would think there's a reason why the sequence is broken up into three different measures. Perhaps they are initials of something?

Wrinkles crease Emi's brow. "Sounds kind of like a phone number."

I stare down at the three measures, the ten notes.

Ten. Ten notes, phone number, a phone rings, ring of ten.

"Oh my gosh, Emi! I think you solved it," I say.

"Huh?"

"There are ten letters in the three measures, mimicking the separations within a phone number. When we call someone, we're going to ring 'ten' numbers." I quickly calculate the phone number. Each scale note is assigned a particular number, or scale degree, depending on the piece's key signature. To calculate, I write out F minor's note sequence:

F1-G2-Ab3-Bb4-C5-Db6-Eb7

"We need to call 141-135-4531," I say after a moment.

Panic flashes in Emi's eyes. "Are you insane? We can't call that number."

"Why not? It's part of the treasure hunt."

"But..." Emi rolls off the bed to grab her phone, then rejoins me, thumbs at work on her screen, tapping something into the search bar. Seconds later, she shakes her head. "Cerise, phone numbers are unlikely to last, like, forty years."

"Unlikely, but not impossible." My brow furrows.

"Ten digit phone numbers didn't even become standardized until more like the two-thousands," Emi continues. "Even if Silverenn created this treasure hunt in the eighties, I don't see how she came up with a ten-digit phone number."

"Let me see."

Over ten minutes pass, just reading about the history of telephone numbers in the United States.

"It seems to me," I begin at last, "that some highly populated cities in the US had area codes back in the late eighties and nineties. So it's possible that Silverenn got a ten digit phone number and hid it as a clue in her treasure hunt."

"Well, even if it was a valid phone number at one time, it's probably out of commission at this point."

"True." An idea pops into my head. "But wait, weren't there telephone books back then? We can just look up the telephone number and see who it belongs to."

Emi turns her phone off and faces me. "Okay, first of all, we're not going to look through every single telephone book in the country to find this phone number. Second of all, what are we going to do once we have the person's name? That won't tell us their current contact information, unless you plan to drive to whatever address is listed alongside their phone number and hope they still live there. Also, a fact-to-face meeting with a potential mafia member is probably inadvisable."

"Fair point..." I open a search engine again, typing in the area code number. I scroll through pages of results to find one that might tell me which area the area code correlated to in the 1980s.

Emi stares over my shoulder for several minutes. Finally, she huffs in frustration. "I'm going to bed."

She crawls onto her bed, shutting the light off. Light from my phone sears my eyes in the sudden darkness, and I quickly turn the brightness from ninety-three to zero. The blue light continues to burn my eyes, but I can't stop searching now.

From the other side of the room, Emi groans and rolls over, rustling her comforter and sheets. Minutes pass. My eyes squint harder at the light as it grows increasingly irritating.

Finally, I find my answer. The area code was for some county in New York. I begin the next step of going onto the library of Congress website and searching up telephone books from the 1980s and 90s.

"Ugh!" Emi exclaims. "Can you please go to bed?" I don't respond. "Come on, the light is disturbing me."

I sigh, then crawl out of bed and start lacing up my new sneakers. Sitting up in bed, Emi turns the light on, casting a dim yellow glow on the green carpet.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Going outside so the light won't disturb you."

"That's not safe." Emi looks up at the ceiling. "Just give it up. You can look for the name in the morning."

"No." The mysterious phone number will burrow into the deepest corners of my mind, and I'll go crazy all night, thinking about it.

"Ugh, fine. Where are you in the search?" Emi reaches for her phone on the bedside table, then crosses over to sit on my bed. I text her the link to the phone book I'm currently looking through.

"I'm scrolling through all the phone numbers to find the person's name," I explain.

Emi stares at me for a second. "Why not use find and replace?"

"I tried that. It won't let me."

"Even if you download it as a PDF?"

A few beats of silence pulse through the room. I resume reading through all the phone numbers, since they're organized by last name, not in numerical order. Then Emi exclaims,

"I found it!" I look up to find Emi grinning at me. "It belongs to Harriet Whitfield."

"Harriet Witfield. No 'h' in her last name." I search up her name. Lots of results show up for 'Harriet Whitfield,' but I manage to find only one Facebook account under the name 'Harriet Witfield.' "She works at Mill and Stone bakery in Manhattan," I say. I deflate slightly. We can't drive all the way to New York looking for her.

"Wait a second," I say, thinking out loud. "We can just call the bakery tomorrow and see if we can get a hold of her."

"Is that a good idea? What if she's affiliated with the mafia?"

I think for a moment. "If you're worried, maybe we can find another phone to use."

"It's not like there are payphones on the street."

"No. We just have to get creative, and some sleep. Now that this is solved, I think I'm ready to go to bed."

Emi whacks my arm. "You just don't give up, do you?"

"Nope." I drop the music and pencil back into my case.

"Too bad you can't have the same dedication to your viola playing."

I pause, staring at the wall. Then I turn, shoving Emi's shoulders. She wobbles and falls to the floor with a thump. She glares up at me, but for some reason, a smile twitches on her lips.

"Okay, fine. Maybe I deserved that. But just know that you can be a very good violist when you want to be."

"Are you comparing me to other violists or other musicians?" I half expect her to make a viola joke, but she doesn't.

"Good compared to all musicians." She stops resisting the smile, allowing her face to light up for a second before wiggling under the covers on her bed. "Good night. See you in the morning."

Now I smile. I reach over and flick the light off, snuggling under my own comforters. It doesn't matter that it was eighty degrees outside earlier. Hotel, or Motel, rooms are always cold to me. And the weight is comforting, hence the name a comforter. Its warmth envelopes me, lulling me into a deep sleep.