The Silent Soprano

Gianna Sorrentino has sung at St. Maron's every Sunday since she was eleven, and she has heard the building do something no building should do. When the parish priest is removed and replaced with a man who owes his collar to the Marino family, the pipes start holding a note, all day, like a breath that won't come out. Augusto Marino is sixty-two. He runs the family's arrangements, sits in the fourth pew on Tuesdays, and has never told anyone where he goes on Tuesday mornings. Gianna tells him about the note because he is the only person in her life who won't call her crazy and won't call her a saint. What they find in the building is a hundred years of debts paid in limestone, recorded by a structure that never agreed to keep a secret, and a young priest who has been selling the record to the government. Somebody is going to have to solve it. Gianna can sing it, if Augusto will let her.