FAREWELL GHOST Page 3

  The woman was in her forties, but dressed younger—and the way her turquoise dress clung to her was hard to ignore. Clay wondered if it wasn’t one of Boyle’s groupies, who’d somehow missed the news of his death. Six years ago. Curious, he shifted into Drive and rolled up beside her.

  “Are you Mr. Harper?” she asked immediately. The tanned hue of her skin seemed as unnatural as her affable tone.

  “Technically, yes. But I think you’re looking for my father.”

  The woman rested her fingers on his open window, her long nails painted a shade of bubble-gum pink that matched her dress and car. She leaned in and Clay could smell an alluringly fruity perfume wafting from her cleavage. “Do you think he’d give me a minute of his time?”

  “Well, his schedule is pretty hectic—”

  “I was hoping to convince him not to fire me,” the woman blurted. “I’ve been caring for the flowers and succulents on this residence for the last… several years? I’d like to stay on. Times are tough, and I could really use the rent money.” Her fingernails moved from the door to Clay’s forearm. “Do you have any idea why he doesn’t need me anymore?”

  Clay did. It was the result of an arrangement he’d made himself. Until Clay found a job or gave in to the pressure of taking college courses, he had agreed to be the caretaker of their new property, mowing the grounds, picking the fruit, dumping chlorine in the pool, and the like. Peter had readily agreed, having run his own handyman business while putting himself through law school. They settled on a weekly salary and Clay had assumed he was taking jobs away from gardeners and pool boys with a hundred other clients. He had never thought someone’s rent was hanging in the balance. That’s why you’ll never write a song for the masses, Fiasco Joe persisted. Poseur. Rich boy. Fake!

  “I’m sorry,” Clay told the woman’s nails. “We just went in a different direction.”

  The woman’s spine tensed, but she managed to keep her smile. A good sport, if nothing else. “Any chance you put in a word for me, handsome?”

  “I don’t know if it’ll do any good,” Clay admitted. And guilt stabbed at him, as if he was rejecting her as arbitrarily as Fiasco Joe had rejected him. “But I’ll give you my father’s cell number, so you can state your case.”

  The woman leaned in and pecked Clay on the cheek, leaving a lip-print that matched her nails. “I’m Estelle, by the way. And I’ll be working for you soon, baby. You watch.”

  He was in the shower, singing a decent a cappella of Rocket Throne’s “Elaborate Monster,” when he shut the water off and heard the guitar again.

  Clay wiped the moisture from his ears and slid the bathroom window open. The steam poured out as the strings drifted in. The player was in the back yard again.

  He dressed quickly. It was after eleven, but Peter was still at his new office, so Clay didn’t bother tiptoeing downstairs. He had programmed the alarm panel to arm itself and tonight the zones were lit red. Then how did they get in? Were there weaknesses along the perimeter wall? Faulty sensors? Clay didn’t like the idea of an obsessed fan knowing more about the grounds than he did.

  Still, there were motion lights everywhere, and the exterior yard sat fully in the dark. Had the mystery player skirted those as well? The answer came with disturbing clarity, and in a voice too calm to be Clay’s own: It’s because this place is haunted. Just like the Dark Hollywood tour says it is.

  Before finalizing purchase of the house, Clay and his father had discussed the creep factor inherent in living where a famous person and his girlfriend had died. The idea hadn’t bothered either of them. They had lived on a historic block in Philadelphia, where a lot more than two people had drawn their last breath, and truthfully Clay only believed in an afterlife because it was easier to think of his mother as an invisible angel than decomposing bones in a cemetery.

  Now? Alone in Rocco Boyle’s house, with all that dark waiting outside? Even a skeptic could falter. Is it any easier to believe someone breached the alarm system and wandered through the yard without setting off a single light?

  Clay disarmed the zones in the backyard, but left the walls and gate active. His father owned a gun, a Taurus .38, but where it was among the Tetris stacks of unpacked boxes, or if he even still owned it, Clay couldn’t say. Ditto for their German-crafted set of steak knives. Really, the only weapon Clay could muster at that moment was his own laptop. The Macbook was lightweight, but capable of delivering a blow. And it was either that or the lemonade pitcher.

  Clay grabbed the computer and stole outside before he lost his nerve.

  The guitarist was plucking the same open strings as he, or she, had the night before. Low E, A, and D (Clay knew that much). Thrum-Tum-Tee. Then back up the strings, Tee-Tum-Thrum. Thrum-Tum-Tee, Tee-Tum-Thrum….

  Hypnotic in its repetition.

  And from the back deck, there was no mistaking where it was coming from this time.

  Clay had been in the Generator several times already, but never at this hour and never alone. Remembering how a sharp voice had startled Savy’s friends, Clay shouted, “Hey! You!”

  The guitar fell quiet.

  A flesh-and-blood intruder after all.

  “You’re trespassing. You need to leave.”

  No immediate response from inside the guesthouse. At which point Clay thought, Those were open strings. They were playing one-handed.

  So then, dear friends, what was in their other hand? An ax came to mind—and not the kind that did Metallica solos. Clay could picture its long handle, its decapitating blade. His hair was still wet from the shower, and when a drop fell down his shirt, he jumped wildly.

  Just as he was turning tail to call the cops, something else occurred to him: “Savy? Joe?” It seemed a reasonable hypothesis, considering their presence the last time he’d heard the strings. Maybe they’d a guitar stashed in the underbrush.

  The open strings started up again, mocking him. Thrum-Tum-Tee!

  “If you’re going to break in, the least you can do is play ‘American Rapture’.”

  A whisper came back in reply. One voice. Alone. Fiasco Joe or a drifter or a disgruntled ex-gardener who knew a loophole in the security.

  And before Clay knew what he was doing, he surged ahead, laptop held up like a 21st century flyswatter, triggering the motion lights across the yard. Fuck it, I’ve faced worse. Whoever was in there would never be as terrifying as a devil smiling through a peephole.

  Hinges squealed as Clay shoved the Generator open.

  All was black inside. Nothing moved in the large space. No one here but us ghouls, Clay thought. But something changed in the air as he stepped across the threshold. And the guitar abruptly changed its tune. Playing chords. A riff Clay knew well. Anyone with working ears knew it. “American Rapture” was the anthem that had launched Rocket Throne to stardom. The unseen guitarist played it quickly, perfectly, answering the challenge.

  Clay’s hand froze over the light switch. What he was afraid of finding in that moment was not an ax-wielding Manson chick. Because what if it wasn’t an intruder in his midst at all, but someone who belonged here? A previous occupant. The man who’d built this house in the scrub of a dead-end road. Rocco Boyle, swinging from the chandelier fixture like he had on the night of his death, his neck fatally locked in the vice of the noose, legs kicking, tongue wagging as it turned purple-blue—but his hands still pounding away on his guitar. A performer to the end.

  The very idea made Clay step away. And he might have escaped—if his backward momentum didn’t carry his hand up the light switch.

  Electricity filled the Generator’s single, naked bulb.

  And the guitar quit with the light. The room was empty. The boxes and workout equipment and what-not that he and his father had tossed in here sat flush against the walls—impossible for someone to hide behind. Which left one place.

  Clay crossed the bare planks and stood at the bottom of the stairs leading to the loft. Spores of dust swirled up into the darkness above. “Alrigh
t,” he said, hating the shake in his voice. “I call a truce.”

  He waited, ready to hurl the computer at anything that came rushing down at him.

  Nothing did. Would he have to go up there? It seemed that every time he should have been retreating his feet were pushing forward.

  The strings started up behind him.

  Clay gasped, spun.

  No. It wasn’t coming from behind him. Or above him. But below. At his feet. Under the floor. Clay shuffled, locking on to where the sound was strongest, near the middle of the room. Dave Ganek had parked his Harley on the spot and a skid mark still graced the floorboard—as if Ganek had once heard something himself and gone screeching away.

  Clay tested the board with his toe, felt it wobble. Don’t! his mind hissed. But he was already laying the laptop aside. The guitar grew steadily louder as his fingers pried the plank up.

  Though when he finally lifted it free, quiet fell over the room again.

  Clay stared, the dust settling over his hunched back.

  In the six inches of crawl space beneath lay one of Rocco Boyle’s guitars. A Rickenbacker 370. Fireglow paint job, custom humbucker pickups, sharkfin inlays. Its vintage body scarred, dented, and beaten to shit from Boyle’s intense playing. And even before Clay touched it, he knew this wasn’t really happening. Couldn’t be. The guitar was an electric, requiring amplification for its sound to carry. Even an acoustic would have had trouble broadcasting up through floorboards, a closed door, the night, and a closed bathroom window. He was dreaming.

  Then pinch yourself, end it.

  But even that might not do the trick. Since pinching yourself was such a cliché, Clay believed he could goose himself in his sleep, feel the pain, and keep right on dreaming, convinced now it was reality. He needed something else, and quick, before his excitement overran his logic. So he lifted his right foot and, without thinking, drove his heel down on top of his left.

  The pain was stark and immediate, burning through every tendon and vein like electricity through a highly conductive line. Clay cursed and hobbled for the nearest wall. “No fucking way am I asleep,” he grunted. Only reality hurt this much.

  Then he limped back and teased the guitar though the opening. A cord was attached, and when he pulled, a miniature battery-powered amp skittered into view like a fish on a line. It was a Marshall the size of a tissue box, and it was on. Clay liberated that too and carried the whole jumble over to Peter’s weightlifting bench.

  Was the thing malfunctioning? How long had the amp been on?

  “What do you want from me?” Clay asked.

  Above, near where the lone bulb hung, he heard the whispering again.

  He clutched the guitar and didn’t look up.

  He didn’t run either. Though Clay couldn’t explain why, he was no longer afraid.

  A neon-green pick was wedged into one of the Rickenbacker’s tuning pegs; Clay pried it loose and strummed the strings.

  3

  GENERATOR

  His fingers played the Rickenbacker lightly at first, like he expected the strings to snap loose and lash his face. Then, with more feeling, and more—until he was bringing his hand all the way up to his ear and driving the pick down as hard as he could. The guitar was real. The weight of its body assured him so, its beauty too, far nicer than any he’d owned (his Wilsson was a toy in comparison). Exactly the type of axe Clay had envisioned owning while fronting a successful band. And it deserved a better fate than being buried in a crawl space.

  But was it Boyle’s? Had the man stowed it under his home studio for superstitious reasons, the way a ballplayer might wear pink underwear while swinging a hot bat? Or had someone—Ganek?—left it there as a memento? And had then, what, forgotten to nail the board down?

  Either way, Clay thought he’d hang on to the guitar and amp till someone showed up to claim it.

  The whispering did not occur again, so the only thing haunting him was the idea that he’d been thinking about this very guitar at the music shop today, and now it had materialized underfoot. There was something exhilarating in not being able to explain that.

  He tried “Louie, Louie” and “Blitzkreig Bop”—marveling at how the strings were still in tune after so many days (months? years?) of neglect—before graduating to Rocket Throne hits like “Face the Music” and “All Goes Dark.” After that, Clay dusted off a few songs he’d written himself—though they paled so completely to Boyle’s material, he quit them right away.

  At some point, Peter’s Mercedes returned home. He must have assumed Clay was asleep (his son’s nocturnal nature yet another thing he knew little about) and that the preset on the alarm had failed a second night, because he re-armed the remaining zones before going to bed. Which meant Clay couldn’t enter the house without setting off the bells and whistles. Which, considering his father’s fanatical love of REM (not the band), meant that Clay was locked out for the night. Which suited him fine. He played the Rickenbacker without pause, fiddling with note progressions until he stumbled on a riff he had never heard before. He married the riff to a chorus with a catchy hook, and within an hour had fleshed out a new song. “I like you,” he whispered to the strings. “If you have other secrets, I’d love to hear them.”

  By the time the sun was peaking over the Verdugo Mountains, Clay’s fret fingers were raw and he had one song polished with another in the works.

  His father finally emerged on the back deck, stretching his arms and yawning with the moan of a Cro-Magnon thanking the clouds for making the sun again, and Clay left the Generator to join him.

  “You’re up early,” Peter said, skeptical of the fact.

  “Getting in the habit,” Clay replied. “It’s better for a groundskeeper to do his chores before the heat of the day, don’t you think?”

  “It didn’t sound like you slept at all last night.”

  Clay hesitated. “Oh. You heard me playing?” The mini-amp was only a single watt and he’d kept it at half volume.

  “No. But I couldn’t miss your pacing around the house. Up one hall, down another, upstairs, downstairs. If I wasn’t so exhausted, I’d have chained you down.”

  “Pacing,” Clay echoed. “Right.” Stopping short of saying it: There was no one in the house but you, Dad.

  They were halfway through breakfast, Clay having made bacon and eggs on the outside grill—for no other reason that he’d never cooked outdoors before—when their intercom buzzed. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” his father grunted. “It’s not even nine in the morning.”

  Peter stalked into the house to tell their would-be solicitors that the castle was closed, but he recommended the Dark Hollywood tour for “its complete accuracy and shameless profiting off other people’s tragedies,” then returned with a puzzled look knotting his forehead. “They say they’re friends of yours. Two guys and a girl.”

  Now it was Clay’s turn at the intercom. A surveillance screen, linked to the gate camera, showed Savannah and her companions—not Fiasco Joe or Spider, but two other males, one of them either very short or a child.

  Parting the gargoyle, Clay scrambled out to her. “My brothers were giving me a lift to work,” Savy said, by way of greeting. She was wearing clothes significantly more conservative than their last meeting—khaki pants and a dark green polo with the words knickerbocker stenciled over her breast. Her skin was the color of milk meeting coffee in the morning sun. “There’s a trail nearby where we watch the sunrise. I was worried it was too early, but we could smell bacon burning.”

  “Well, the cops do have a firing range nearby.”

  The older brother snickered, and Savy smiled, glad to see Clay didn’t mind her pop in. On the contrary. After the debacle with Fiasco Joe, he’d wondered if he would ever see her again. “This is Mickey,” she told him, pulling her younger brother into a headlock. The kid was maybe ten years old, and undersized at that, but he carried himself with a mature intensity; a scale-model adult with eyes that were openly, and accurately, suspiciou
s of Clay’s intentions. “And this ugly one here is called Mo.”

  The older brother pounded Clay’s fist and gestured quickly as he spoke. “It’s Guillermo. But my sister likes to think of me as a stooge, so Mo it’s gonna be.”

  Mo’s weathered appearance suggested the last decade had not been gentle. He was simultaneously young and old. And Clay knew the telltale signs from the addicts he’d encountered in rehab: Hollow eyes, skin the color of a bad pear, the exaggerated gesturing. Guillermo was using—meth, and whatever else he could get his hands on. More, with the Christian cross tattooed on his neck, it was likely he’d taken a serious stab at redemption and failed.

  Savy seemed to sense Clay’s judgment and stiffened. Not so much in embarrassment of her brother, but out of shame for him. “Anyway,” she said, “I heard what my douchebag of a bassist did at the store yesterday, and I want to apologize. Fiasco has a bug up his ass for people with more brainpower than him—which is basically everyone.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Clay said, though he was relieved that Savy also considered Fiasco Joe a Cocksuckers’ Club official member.

  “The invitation’s still on,” Savy told him. “To jam. If you still want.”

  “Great.” Clay shoved his fists into his pockets to keep from pumping them in excitement. “And since you’re here, how about I show you around?”

  Mo snickered and clapped Clay on the back like they were already friends. “Thanks for taking the hint, my man.” He started up the driveway ahead of everyone. “Let’s go see the house that rock built.”

  Clay gave them the same tour that Vanessa had given him. Proving her merit as a Throne fan, Savy correctly identified each of the rooms as Rocco Boyle had known them. At the master suite, Clay knocked and poked his head in. His father was nowhere to be found, so he ushered his guests inside and they stood over Peter’s Moroccan throw rug in reverent silence. “Based on the police photos, Deidre’s body was here,” Clay said.