Trigger Warning: This chapter again deals with suicide and its aftermath / aftereffects.

Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Castle enjoyed the short walk to the deli he had visited the other day. The air was cold, but crisp, and the stately buildings sparkled in the winter sun.

He spent a few pleasant minutes chatting again with the elderly owners of the deli, got sandwiches and water bottles for himself and Beckett, and returned to Symphony Hall.

With the orchestra gone and the chorus not expected for another hour, it was quiet in the huge performance space, his footsteps ringing out dramatically as he strode down the center aisle. He slowed, letting the majesty of the concert hall surround him. This building was over a hundred years old and had seen countless performances ... and now one murder. Well, at least one; who knew what other secrets the old walls might be hiding? He smiled to himself, enjoying the thought.

Not to his surprise, he found Beckett in the library again, studying more violin music. She accepted the sandwich and water from him with a quiet word of thanks, and put aside her work to eat. Castle pulled out a chair and sat across from her at the large wooden table.

"I was thinking about how to identify our murderous soprano," he said as he unwrapped his sandwich. Beckett looked up, her mouth already full with her first bite, so all she could do was roll her eyes. He chose to take it as her cue for him to continue.

"I think our best bet is the little old ladies," he went on. "I noticed that there are a few older women in the soprano section who all sit together in a clump, and I bet they know all the gossip. They're the ones to ask. They'll definitely know which soprano has been losing auditions to Annabel lately."

Beckett swallowed her mouthful and said, "I'll leave that to you, Castle. I'm sure you can charm all the secrets out of the little old ladies." She smirked a little and added, "I'm warning you right now, though, some of those dames aren't as sweet and gentle as they might appear."

"I think I can handle a few elderly sopranos," he chuckled, and then, remembering, "Oh yeah! I forgot to add the new suspect to the diagram."

"Diagram?" Beckett questioned, watching with lifted eyebrow as he opened his briefcase and pulled out his notebook. Flipping it open to a page already filled with small boxes and circles, he carefully drew in a new box and wrote "JEALOUS SOPRANO" in small but neat letters.

Beckett leaned forward across the table to peer at the notepad. "What is that, an outline of the murder?"

"Yeah," he said, abruptly losing his train of thought as he looked at Beckett. The way she was leaning over caused her sweater's neckline to hang open, giving him a good look at the tantalizing curves of her breasts. He cleared his throat and averted his eyes, saying, "Uh, I was just trying to make sure I had all the lines of inquiry straight, since it was starting to get pretty complicated."

Beckett sat back in her chair - he wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed - and narrowed her eyes at him. "The homicide detectives use something like that in the precinct," she commented. "They have a whiteboard where they write it all out."

"Really?" He bounced in his chair at the thought. "That's so cool. I just based it on the way I usually outline my operas."

Beckett reached out and snagged the corner of the notebook with her fingertips, drawing it closer to her, studying it as she took another bite of her sandwich. Castle concentrated on his own food for a moment, waiting for her to comment.

At last she pushed the notebook back over toward him, saying merely, "So this is how you've been spending your time? Don't you have anything better to do?"

"Actually, I'm working on a new opera," he shot back, slightly stung. Her eyebrows went up again.

"Really? Another one in the Storm series?"

"Nope. This is something different," he said, and quickly changed the subject. "So, we have our three suspects, but we only have a plan for two of them. We need to figure out what to do about Brett the tenor and his illicit affair with Annabel."

"Alleged affair," Beckett corrected. "And what do you mean by 'we'? I keep telling you that neither of us should be poking our noses into this."

"Yeah, you do, but like I said, I don't listen," he replied cheekily. "Anyway, you don't have to do anything except point out which bass is Daniel the lawyer. Then I'll talk to him, and the sopranos." He made some notes on his diagram. "As for Brett, I guess we'll probably have to wait until tomorrow. He'll be here for the dress rehearsal so we can talk to him then." Seeing Beckett drawing breath to object, he quickly added, "Yes, yes, I said 'we.' Come on, Beckett, admit it, you're enjoying this investigation."

"It's not something to enjoy," she huffed. "A woman is dead, and we should be leaving it to the police. They know what they're doing, unlike us."

"Aw, that's not fair. We know what we're doing," he objected. "We're asking questions and gathering information."

"And jumping to conclusions and spinning wild theories," she shot back, but there was humor in her eyes, which drew a helpless grin to his face.

"Well, sure," he said agreeably. "Every good investigator has to start somewhere." He nodded toward Beckett's half-eaten sandwich. "Now finish your lunch, Beckett. We still have a rehearsal to conduct, you know."

She snorted and shook her head, but she picked up the sandwich and took another bite.

For a few minutes there was comfortable silence between them as they ate.

When Beckett spoke again, her tone was low and solemn, making Castle's breath catch in his throat even before his brain processed the words.

"Do you know why my mom killed herself?" she said.

He lifted his head to stare at her, and found her gaze fixed on her hands, clasped around the last remnants of her sandwich on the table.

"Because she had cancer?" he said hesitantly, not sure how to handle this unexpectedly melancholy moment.

Beckett moved her head up and down, the tiniest of nods. "Not just any cancer," she said after a moment. "She had throat cancer."

"Oh no," he let out, stunned. For a singer, there could be no worse news. The back of his neck prickled with horror at the thought of how that revelation must have felt: to Johanna, to her family.

"It was in her larynx," Beckett went on, still speaking in that low, measured voice, tightly controlled. "And the thing of it is, it was completely treatable. She would have needed surgery, but it was straightforward. The doctors gave her an 85% chance of survival." She looked up suddenly, and her eyes snapped fire. Castle gasped a little at the raw emotion he saw there, rocking back in his chair.

"God, Beckett."

"Eighty-five percent," she repeated harshly, her control breaking. "She would have been fine."

"But she wouldn't have been able to sing," he guessed, his heart twisting painfully. She nodded again, short and sharp.

"But she wouldn't have been able to sing," she repeated, confirming. "And she couldn't handle that." Anguish surged across her face again. "She chose music over me, my dad. We weren't enough. I wasn't enough."

"No," he burst out, involuntarily. The pain behind the words was almost unbearable. "No, Beckett, you can't think that way."

"It's the truth," she snapped, glaring at him, her eyes shining with unshed tears. "If I had been a better daughter. If I hadn't been planning to be a singer. She could have loved me more. She could have stayed."

"This is why you stopped singing," Castle gasped, feeling weak with horror and sorrow at the revelation. "Oh, Beckett." The wide table between them felt like a gulf he couldn't cross. He ached for the wounds she was still trying to heal, all these years later.

"I don't-" But Beckett cut herself off, blinking hard to hold off the tears, breathing deeply and carefully. He watched her pull control back around herself, consciously un-clenching her jaw, slowly lowering her hunched shoulders. She dropped the bits of sandwich and raised her hands to her face, rubbing fingertips hard over her forehead.

"Beckett," he said urgently, before she could have the chance to go on, to say something minimizing or self-deprecating - before she could close off the possibility. "I get it, Beckett, I do, but listen, you love to sing. I barely know you, but I know that." He was the one leaning forward now, halfway across the table, pushing himself into her line of sight, desperate to impress his words upon her. "You wouldn't have applied and been accepted to the vocal performance program at Juilliard if you didn't love it. They wouldn't have taken you just because you were her daughter - you had to have the talent and the passion. You had it back then, and that doesn't just go away. You still love to sing."

"You're right, you barely know me," she said, but there was no fire in it now. She wiped her eyes with her fingers.

"I know enough," he insisted. "I'm not wrong about this. You have an amazing voice, and singing is part of you. It's in your veins." He should stop. He should shut up, but he couldn't. "And I can see that-that you're still hurting from what your mom did. But you know what, you're stronger than she was."

Her head came up sharply at that. "What?" she said, a dangerous edge creeping back into her tone, but Castle, as usual, ignored it and forged on.

"Yeah, you heard me, Kate. If your mother wasn't able to see how important you were - if she didn't think she could go on living without music - she was weak." Abruptly he remembered Alexis's words: a parent should be stronger than that. He felt a strange stab of anger toward Johanna Beckett. The prospect of watching her daughter build a career as a singer, after her own career had been destroyed by illness, must have been agony for Johanna - he could envision writing a whole opera about that alone - but the solution she had chosen was no solution at all.

"She was weak," he said again, firmly. "What she did, that's not on you. It's not your fault."

She scoffed, looking away, and he thought, Stupid, Rick. Like she's never heard that one before.

"Stop it," she said, without heat. "You don't - I just wanted you to know, Castle, so you would understand what you're - what you're digging up."

"I do understand. I mean, I think I do," he amended, because what did he really know about these powerful emotions she was living with? "But I saw you singing along, Beckett."

"What?" She blinked at him, startled, almost like a deer in the headlights for an instant. "When?"

"Just now, during the rehearsal." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the stage. "When we did the soprano solos at the end, with the orchestra. You were singing along, or at least lip-syncing."

Beckett paused and bit her lip. "Castle..."

"You want to do it, Beckett. I might even go so far as to say you need to do it." He studied her for a moment. "You told Howard that we'll have a solution in time for tomorrow's rehearsal. Why did you say that?"

She sighed softly, started to speak, stopped. She chewed on her lower lip, and Castle subsided, suddenly slumping back in his seat, wondering if he had far too badly overstepped, and pushed her back into her shell. He closed his eyes briefly, berating himself for it.

"I'm close," Beckett's voice came into his ears, very low. "I just need a little more time."

He opened his eyes again and looked at her, but she wouldn't meet his gaze.

"Well," he said, carefully lightening his tone, "you have about twenty-four hours, Beckett. We'll have to tell them something at the dress rehearsal. So I hope that's enough time to overcome a decade's worth of personal trauma."

He held his breath then, not at all sure that humor had been the right way to go. But after a long moment, she flashed him a small wan smile, and he deflated in relief.

Beckett seemed about to speak again, but just then a young man appeared in the library doorway, his cheeks flushed pink from the cold, his eyes a little wild. "Kate! I have to talk to you," he gasped. From behind him, Castle could hear the sounds of the chorus members beginning to arrive for the rehearsal.

"Come on in, Jason," Beckett said, suddenly cool and utterly composed again. Castle stared at her, wondering how the hell she did it.

The young man stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. "It's about Brett. Brett Donovan."

Beckett and Castle exchanged a look. Aha, he thought, we're back on the case. He had to suppress a grin of excitement.

"What about Brett?" Beckett asked. "Oh, uh, Jason, you know Maestro Castle."

"Of course." Jason put out his hand. "Jason Butler, from the tenor section. It's an honor, sir."

"No, please, the honor is mine," Castle said, shaking Jason's hand. "But go on, you were going to say something about the tenor soloist."

"Yeah." Jason fidgeted, fiddled with the zipper on his jacket, clearly nervous. "Um. I heard a rumor that you guys had, uh, I mean, that people are saying Brett was arguing with Annabel just before she died."

"We did hear something like that," Beckett agreed cautiously. "Do you know more about that argument?"

"Yeah, uh, yeah." Jason couldn't meet their eyes. Castle looked at Beckett again, silently asking whether she knew what was up. She shrugged in response, and focused back in on the young tenor.

"It's okay, Jason, you can tell us. Is it something to do with the affair?"

"You know about that?" he gasped, looking stricken. "Oh God. Brett was right. He said you would think he did it."

"You've talked to Brett?" Castle asked. It came into his mind that this was probably one of the more difficult parts of a homicide detective's job: interviewing people who had information but who wouldn't, or couldn't, just come out with it. It was frustrating, but he knew that he and Beckett would have to be patient with the jittery young tenor.

"Well, yeah. Of course," Jason said, looking surprised. "I, he, well." He paused for a calming breath. "He told me that he argued with Annabel, on Tuesday, about the affair, and when he realized that she got ki - killed not long after that, he said that people would think he did it."

"Did he tell you what the argument was about, specifically?" Beckett asked. She spoke carefully, calmly, setting an example for the young man. Castle was struck all over again by how good she was at this: putting people at ease.

"Yeah, you know," Jason said, gesturing vaguely, "Annabel wanted him to tell his wife about the affair. She was tired of keeping the secret - it was really bothering her, because Jessica is her friend too. Brett's wife," he clarified, seeing their blank looks.

Annabel was friends with the wife? Castle thought. That was weird. "Maybe she should have thought about that before she started the affair then," he couldn't help saying. Beckett glared at him, but Jason just looked utterly confused.

"Wait, what?" the young man asked, his brow furrowing.

"What what?" Castle asked, equally confused. They both turned to look at Beckett, as if somehow she held all the answers.

"Annabel was friends with Brett's wife before the affair started?" Beckett prompted. Jason shrugged, still confused.

"Yeah, so? What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, you have to admit, if Brett was having an affair with his wife's friend, that does look pretty bad for him when she turns up dead," Beckett said, but Jason blinked and stared and blinked some more.

"What are you talking about?" he demanded. "Brett wasn't having an affair with Annabel, that's crazy."

"But you said-" Castle burst out, only to be interrupted by Jason again.

"No, oh shit, is that what you thought? Oh God. I get it, okay, I get it," he babbled. "Okay, but no, Brett wasn't sleeping with Annabel. He's been sleeping with me."

A lengthy moment of silence stretched between them as Castle and Beckett slowly assimilated this. Castle let out a long "Ohhh" as it sank in.

"Okay," Beckett said slowly. "Jason, I'm sorry, obviously we all confused each other. Let's start over, okay?"

"Sure," the young tenor nodded, fiddling with his coat again, still nervous.

"So," Beckett went on, "you and Brett were ... involved ... and Annabel found out."

"Right," Jason agreed quickly. "And he asked her to just keep quiet while he figured out what to do. But I guess she finally decided she couldn't stand keeping the secret from Jessica any more. So, on Tuesday, she said that he needed to tell Jessica by the end of that day, or else she was going to call her first thing in the morning."

Castle looked at Beckett. She met his eyes, and he could see that she was thinking the same thing he was: that this new information only made Brett sound more guilty. If Annabel had given him an ultimatum...

"Jason," Beckett said carefully, "after the argument, what did Brett do? Where did he go? Do you know?"

"Yeah, of course." The young man looked surprised. "He met up with me. That's why he was here in the first place, to pick me up when the chorus rehearsal ended. He didn't know that Annabel would be here."

"So he was with you that whole time?" Castle asked. "From right after the end of the rehearsal until..."

"Until about midnight," Jason supplied, blushing. "Yeah, uh, he was with me that whole time, at, uh," he blushed some more and mumbled, "at a hotel a few blocks away."

"Oh," Castle said. "Um."

"Okay," Beckett said, and Castle could only bring himself to look at her sideways right now, but she seemed amused. "Jason, thanks very much for coming to us with this. It's good information for us to have." She paused, and added, "You should probably tell the police about this, too. You can call them anonymously if you have to."

"Yeah. Uh, okay, I'll see if I can do that," Jason nodded. "Um, thanks." Abruptly he twisted the doorknob, pulled the door open, and fled.

Castle finally turned to look at Beckett, and found that she had her lips pressed together tightly, as if trying to hold back a grin. "What's so funny?" he demanded.

"Nothing. Nothing," she denied, shaking her head, clearing her throat. "Um, but at least it looks like we can cross off one suspect from our list, doesn't it?"

"Oh. Yeah." Castle grabbed for his notebook and studied it for a moment. "I guess Brett's alibi is pretty solid then." He picked up his pencil and drew a large X through the box containing Brett's name. "One down, two to go."

"And it's time for the chorus rehearsal to begin," Beckett added. "Come on, Castle, we've got work to do."