Abra Stone’s infant performance of a Beatles song is an early, domestic revelation of her extraordinary psychic ability: while she is in her crib, the piano break of Not a Second Time sounds perfectly through the house without anyone touching the instrument. What begins as a frightened search for a burglar becomes a deliberate test, and then a small, tender glimpse of Abra entertaining herself. The episode reaches the reader through her father Dave Stone’s later recollection to John Dalton, giving an intimate family memory the force of testimony.

A song learned before the performance

In spring 2002, Dave explains, Lucy Stone has played piano since grammar school. The family’s Vogel piano stands in the living room; Dave notes that the same room once held Abra’s playpen. For Christmas in 2001, he gave Lucy a book of Beatles songs arranged for piano. Abra had listened to her mother play while lying among her toys, and the adults read her smiles and kicking feet as signs that she enjoyed the music.

The song that most delighted Abra was not one of the collection’s best-known hits, but the B-side Not a Second Time. Dave describes its upbeat character and its piano-centered riff, unusual beside the guitar-driven sound of much of the Beatles’ faster music. During the instrumental break, the left hand picks out just twenty-nine notes. Dave stresses the tune’s simplicity: it was easy enough for a child to play, and, as he would discover, Abra did play it. His memory of her dancing feet supplies the first hint that the music has become something more than background sound: she bicycled her legs whenever Lucy played that number.

The first impossible performance

One night, Dave and Lucy were upstairs in bed reading while a weather report played on television. Abra was in her room, believed to be asleep. When Lucy asked Dave to turn off the TV, he used the remote; as the room went quiet, the twenty-nine-note piano break sounded from downstairs, perfectly played. Dave and Lucy feared that someone had entered the house. He had no gun, and his golf clubs were in the garage, so he took the largest book he could find and went down to confront the supposed intruder. He told Lucy to take the phone and call 911 if he shouted.

The search found no one. Every door was locked, and the cover over the piano keys was down. Dave returned upstairs and, without discussing what they suspected, he and Lucy went together to check on Abra. She was awake in her crib, simply looking at them. Dave’s recollection lingers on the knowing quality of her baby eyes, but the parents do not yet say aloud that the music came from their daughter. Their silence holds the moment between ordinary explanations and recognition: the evidence is unmistakable, but its meaning is difficult to speak.

Testing the sound

After they had a couple of nights off, Dave and Lucy made a plan. For the next three nights Dave slept on the sofa opposite the piano, keeping watch. On the third night, the music began as he was settling down. The piano’s cover was closed; he hurried over and lifted it. The keys were not moving. More than that, Dave could tell that the sound was not coming from the instrument at all. It seemed to issue from the air above it.

Lucy was already in Abra’s room. This time, rather than remaining stunned, she asked Abra to play the passage again. After a brief pause, the same music sounded once more. Dave was standing so close that the notes seemed almost within reach, yet no visible hand or moving key produced them. The test changes the episode from a baffling noise into a witnessed demonstration: Abra can reproduce the tune on request, while the closed piano and motionless keys rule out an ordinary performance at the instrument.

A lullaby, then silence

Lucy took Abra onto her lap and told her not to play at night anymore because the music was keeping her parents awake. That ended the nighttime performances, with one later exception: about three weeks afterward, Dave and Lucy heard the music again, much more softly, and this time from upstairs, from Abra’s room. The change in volume and location makes the final recurrence distinct from the earlier display above the piano.

Concetta Reynolds offers a simple reading of that last sound. Abra had woken and could not get back to sleep, so she played herself a little lullaby. The explanation does not reduce the strangeness of the earlier performance; instead, it places the power within the ordinary rhythms of infancy. The episode’s stakes are at once uncanny and familial: the music frightens Abra’s parents when it seems to announce an intruder, but its return can also be heard as a child soothing herself. In Dave’s later account to John, the carefully counted notes, the covered keys, the silent search of the house, and the final soft reprise preserve the discovery in stages—from alarm, through proof, to affectionate recognition.