On the first night of the shoot, the film crew used Amos Lockhart’s door as their starting mark.
For nineteen years Amos has tuned other people’s pianos and lived in 3C of the Ropewalk, a converted rope works on the Savannah River whose third floor is a single corridor a fifth of a mile long. In January a production called Seven Bells filmed there for six nights. The morning after they wrapped, a call sheet was pushed into his door. Two weeks later the woman he loved left for Charleston, and he didn’t turn the sheet over for nine months.
On the back, under the advance schedule:
Day 7 — TBD — Pickups (The Tenant)
His neighbors have explanations. His sister has a doctor’s number. The condo board has a camera. And Amos, who has spent his life listening for the place where two notes almost agree, can no longer tell whether he is hearing the building, his grief, or himself.
A literary horror novel about grief, a building, and the oldest question in a tuner’s trade: is it the instrument, or the ear?
