FAREWELL GHOST Read online

  The footfalls reached his bedroom door… and continued down the hall.

  “Rocco?” Clay chanced, before fear could freeze his tongue.

  The steps paused. Retraced their way to his door.

  The knob rattled. The door parted from the jamb. Clay’s spit dried in his mouth, witnessing the black of the empty doorway. “I played for her,” he managed. “She dug our song, man. That outro blew them away, just like you said it would.”

  Straining his ears, Clay heard no response. Only footsteps, advancing into his room.

  “I didn’t come to celebrate ’cause Savy said it would take time to…”

  Clay trailed off. Something was wrong. Boyle had crept to the foot of the bed and the feel of his presence had changed. It wasn’t the calm spirit from the Generator, but something…

  Cold. Angry.

  Gooseflesh rose on Clay’s arms. Even if he had willingly accepted the idea of Boyle’s benevolent presence, self-preservation had warned him it was too good to be true.

  “Rocco, if you’re talking to me, I’m not picking it up. My antenna must be off tonight.”

  The guitar was slowly pulled from his arms. For a second, half a second, Clay considered resisting, then thought better of it. The Rickenbacker made a soft dragging sound as it traveled over his bedsheets. Clay watched it slip off the edge and plunk down on the floor, neck angled upward as though Boyle was pulling the guitar behind him. “Hey,” Clay tried, “if you want the Rick back in the Generator, I get it. From now on, I’ll—”

  Boyle flung the guitar at Clay’s window. It swung end over end and struck the pane with a heavy crunch.

  “No!” Clay jumped up, ran over. He was lifting the guitar from the desktop under the window, when something, a fist—cold, angry—struck him in the chest. Clay gasped and flopped backward, landing across his mattress.

  And he lay there as an unseen Boyle loomed over him.

  “Please,” was all he could manage.

  Boyle hesitated. Like he was deciding.

  In the next instant a stiff breeze pushed in through the new fracture in the window, and though Clay could see nothing in the dark, he sensed that the spirit was using it, riding the current out of the room and back into the hallway. Where the footsteps resumed their restless procession, echoing downstairs again.

  6

  LIVING WITH GHOSTS

  Peter didn’t come home that night, leaving Clay as solitary witness to the phantom steps. They traveled the house for nearly an hour after the attack, then faded, gradually, and did not return. Nevertheless Clay waited till dawn-gray found the spiderwebbed cracks in the window, till his swollen bladder threatened to burst like a water balloon, before he dared to leave his bed.

  The Rickenbacker was still lying face-down on his desk, no worse for the wear except for a fresh dent on its already battered body. Clay cradled it in his arms, testing the strings. The old girl wasn’t even out of tune.

  So what had that ghost-tantrum been about? In life, Boyle hadn’t been known for violent mood swings. Even the most sensationalistic biographies quoted road managers, audio engineers, the lowliest of luggage roadies about Boyle’s unpretentiousness temperament (never having a hissy fit if there wasn’t a bowl of brown M&Ms backstage; never telling an obnoxious fan to fuck off). But for a rock star who told the world he’d kicked his drug habit, then died with enough heroin in his system to kill a prize elephant—who’d professed in Rolling Stone to never being happier, one week before hanging himself—maybe emotional stability wasn’t a strong suit.

  Still, what the hell?

  Who’s to say it’s Boyle at all? Clay thought. Deidre McGee, his girlfriend, had been the one who’d died in the house. Maybe she’s funny about houseguests. In other circumstances, Clay might have laughed at the idea. Right now, though, it didn’t exactly rattle the funny bone. Right now, the Ganeks settling for a lot less than the house was worth was making sense.

  There was more lingering on these grounds than diehard fans.

  His body numb in the brightening morning, Clay drove into downtown Burbank and hit the first diner he saw, scarfing pancakes and waffles and French toast with great dollops of butter and ever-spreading reservoirs of syrup.

  When the local theater opened, Clay bought a ticket for the first available show and shut his eyes in the back row. It was some children’s flick—celebrity voices screaming at each other through animated animal mouths—and Clay snapped from his head-lolling slumber every time they broke into song. Finally, as two wayward Chuckwallas wrecked havoc on New York’s Fifth Avenue, his lights went out. He woke hours later, with almost the same exact scene playing; apparently the ushers had assumed he was either drunk or cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs because half the day had passed and no one had roused him from where he slouched, legs up like a dead spider.

  Whenever he was awake, Clay checked his phone. The result always the same: No calls from Savy. No calls from friends back east. No calls at all except from his father, who hinted at being home late again.

  Returning to the house in the afternoon, Clay noticed two carloads of fans shooting video through the gates and used them as excuse to swing a U-ey in the cul-de-sac and sped off again. What now?

  Where he ended up was Forest Lawn, resting place of L.A.’s celebrity dead.

  And what many there were.

  A ten-minute stroll among the tombstones found him at the manicured foot of Rocco’s and Deidre’s five-foot-high monument. Perched over the heaps of flowers and album covers and concert photos was a papier-mâché Rocco bust. On its base someone had written: rip rocco and deidre, your killer will get theirs.

  Long had there been a correlation between conspiracy theories and rock-star deaths, but never was it more apparent than with Rocket Throne fans, many of whom refused to believe their champion had died by his own hand. Because Boyle had seemed so much larger than mortality. Because Boyle’s playing and songwriting had been at the top of its game. Because the lyrics in The Disharmonic were so different from anything he’d previously written—the old angst-ridden tales of good people surrendering to temptation, falling victim to addiction, being plowed under by a hostile world, had been entirely abandoned on Throne’s final album, in favor of anthems of hope, of decent people rising from the depths of despair, finding love, victory in defeat, even the strength to make the world something better than it was. Because in other hands, such themes would have amounted to a lot of hippy-dippy shit, but with Boyle you believed he had marched to the teetering edge of ruin and concluded that life was indeed worth fighting for. Because it was easier to buy into a pulpy plot about an unidentified murderer who’d snuck onto his property and forced Boyle—a recovering junkie—to shoot heroin, then forced him to shoot a lethal dose of the same junk into his girlfriend’s arm and, without any evidence of struggle, went on to force Boyle to hang himself from the chandelier fixture.

  Some were even convinced it was Deidre who had done the killing—maybe Boyle had broken up with her and she’d strangled him, a man twice her size, then staged a typical rock/drug suicide before offing herself. It was easier, after all, to blame the Courtney Loves and Nancy Spungens of the world than to focus on the problems of the rock star himself. Harder to look at the terrible truth of Boyle’s brilliant, but tumultuous psyche, to realize he was capable of incredible highs and devastating lows—as illustrated so poignantly in his music—and that in the end the darkness had won out in him. Easier to buy into double murder than double suicide. Or simply to believe that the man, disillusioned with fortune and fame, had faked his death and was living the good life in the south of France or the Sonoran Desert, with Jim Morrison and Chris Cornell as neighbors and golf buddies.

  Because he was Rocco Boyle. Because he was fucking rock-n-roll, and that, of course, could never die.

  As a result, his Forest Lawn grave had been violated on three separate occasions (by comparison, Marilyn Monroe’s had only been dug up once and Bela Lugosi’s—two narrow plots over—never at
all). The third attempt, conducted by a trained DNA analyst, succeeded in reaching the coffin and removing a hair from the decomposed body; and the woman verified that yes, unfortunately, it really was Rocco’s corpse in residence; and she spent the next two years heartbroken in jail. Clay figured these were the same sort of souls who convinced themselves that pale-faced angels would save them or that the real zombie apocalypse would soon be upon them. Some people just needed to believe life was more exciting than it was.

  But staring at the B-O-Y-L-E etched into the high granite, Clay felt no such desire. He only thought of the flesh-and-blood man who’d died in the Generator and felt a little of what Boyle must have felt before the rope tightened, felt it rise high in his throat and squeeze on his larynx.

  But whenever Clay’s thoughts turned dark, it was always The Disharmonic he sought out. Now let’s all release our hate, dear friends; how this life started is not how it ends. Without that album’s uncanny optimism, who knew where he’d be? Clay wondered how many of Boyle’s fans felt the same. Because the music that had failed to save its songwriter had nevertheless saved countless listeners.

  In that hopeful spirit, Clay checked his phone one more time, then patted Boyle’s grave and went on his way.

  There were no footsteps that night, and Clay managed to slip into a deep slumber where not even dreams could touch him. It was only when someone cried out that his head jerked and lifted uncertainly.

  The moan came again. Not from a man’s throat, but a woman’s. Deidre. So it was her pacing the house.

  Was she in pain? Did she go through the hell of dying every night? Clay cracked his door and saw that the double doors to the master suite was now shut. If I could help her, show her I’m a friend… maybe we could coexist.

  The bare floor in the hall creaked under him, the way it had when ghost-feet walked it the night before. Clay was in touching distance of the doors when he heard creaking of another kind. If it had been anyone’s room but his father’s, he might have guessed faster. But if his parents had had a sex life, they’d thankfully kept it hidden. So when Peter grunted and said something out loud, something vulgar and helpless like “Fuckmenow, sweet-fuck-muffin!”, and a woman—who was definitely not Deidre—cried out in passionate reply, all Clay could do was backpedal in shock. And try to sneak away.

  But in that creaky hall, it was impossible for any soul to go unnoticed.

  So it seemed there were all manner of spirits haunting the Boyle House these days. The latest lured Clay downstairs with an irresistible aroma of frying peppers and garlic. It was the flower woman, of course. Estelle. The one who’d been carpet-bombing Peter’s voicemail. Guess the old man finally picked up, Clay thought. More than the phone.

  She was working the stove, wearing little more than Peter’s oversized Villanova sweatshirt. She heard Clay and turned to offer a shameless wink. “Told you I’d be seeing you again!”

  Since his father was nowhere to be found, Clay felt compelled to make small talk. Their conversation was interesting, if nothing else. Estelle—“Essie,” as she preferred—took one look at Clay’s Rocket Throne shirt and confessed to being a fan, despite the “awful, awful things” that had happened on this property, and a connoisseur of music in general. Her preference seemed to skew toward 80s hair-rock. “Crue. Halen. Snake. And Skid Row. Oh my God, Sebastian Bach is totally going to be my husband, he just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Scrubbed of makeup, with her tangled brown hair strangled in a scrunchie, she projected a sense of candor, of take-me-or-leave-me. And when Peter, her polar opposite, finally did appear, wearing his off-day dress shirt and khaki combination, along with a okay-you-got-me, I’m-a-primordial-horndog-just-like-you grimace, Clay thought, My mother isn’t a year in the grave and you’re screwing another woman—because she wants her job back?

  Peter felt his son’s rancor and left a breakfast-bar stool empty between them. A minute later, Essie delivered four perfect-looking omelets and climbed onto the buffer stool, ignoring—or failing to notice—the chilly quiet between the males on either side of her.

  With a captive audience, Essie steered the conversation, marching to a beat all her own. Clay tuned her out awhile, trying to enjoy the peppery spice of a rare home-cooked meal, and when he glanced back at her she seemed to be going on about amusement parks. Universal. Magic Mountain. Knott’s Berry Farm. “…man, we haaaaave to ride the Twisted Colossus,” she was saying, and Clay realized that “we” didn’t mean him and her, but her and his father—whose idea of a hot time was to read The Wall Street Journal front to back on Sunday mornings.

  “We will,” Peter insisted. “We’ll go today. Right now.”

  It was an amazing thing to witness. As little as Peter knew of his son, Clay knew even less about his father. The man hadn’t been putting in late nights at the studio at all. He’d been putting them in… in…—Oh, go ’head and say it!—…in Essie the Flower Lady.

  Clay stuffed omelette in his mouth to choke down his laugh. The odd couple disappeared upstairs to dress, his father reappearing minutes later in board shorts and a Tommy Bahama shirt that looked about as right on him as a leather jacket on the Pope; Essie dressed in her dress from the night before, a short, lavender-colored number that matched her apple-green heels. On their way out, Peter finally managed to glance in Clay’s direction. “Get some yard work in today,” he said, without a trace of irony.

  Should I trim the flowers or is that her job again? Clay wanted to ask. But his phone rang and he let it go, thinking instead of Savy, of his band fate.

  An automated sales voice spoke up instead, wondering how ready he was for an earthquake, fire, or flood? Insurance could help in the worst circumstances—

  Clay left the phone on the counter and slugged back upstairs, singing the opening verse of “Voices in the Dark,” projecting out across the echoey caverns of the house. “Indifference is the river of the world. What do you say when no ooone’s liiiistening?…”

  He reached his bedroom and the tune died in his throat.

  Someone had moved Boyle’s guitar. Clay had left it at the foot of his bed and now it was standing on his desk again, headstock leaning against the cracked window. His father wouldn’t have touched it. Had Essie? Too much of a coincidence. No, something was wrong, purposely wrong. Clay hesitated in the doorway, his vitals spiking with the suspicion of a prey animal.

  “Rocco?” Clay asked the sunlit room.“What’s with the Amityville treatment?”

  The moment drew on. Clay watched the motionless Rickenbacker, as if its fate were entwined with his own. “You’re making me nervous, man.”

  He waited.

  “Deidre?”

  Nothing.

  Clay cocked his head forward. “Are you here right now? I, I can’t hear you.”

  The door swung at him, fast.

  Clay threw a hand up and two fingers slowed the speeding wood, bending painfully, before the door struck his forehead, hard as a punch. Clay stumbled across the hall until the far wall caught him. Blood spilled immediately into his eyes.

  You didn’t hear me ’cause I haven’t been talking! Deidre shrieked back. Think you’re so clever? You stay away from us! You hear me, Rooster? STAY! AWAY! Or I promise you—I’ll kill you!

  7

  STONE THE CROW

  Whether it was a conscious decision or dumb luck, when Clay fled from Deidre’s ghost, he didn’t bother with the front door—and his waiting Jeep, whose gas pedal he’d have surely pounded down, never to return—but booked it instead for the back. All was a panicked blur, walls racing by, stairs receding underfoot like dominos, the French doors flying back, the overbearing sun blinding him; and when Clay next wiped the blood from his eyes, the Generator was right there in front of him.

  “Rocco!” he called into its shady interior.

  Silence endured long enough to jar his mind. What if Rocco had a talk with his girlfriend? What if she’d convinced him that Clay was more foe than friend?

  In th
e last year of their lives, there had been numerous accounts of Deidre influencing Boyle’s life. And even if they were generally positive influences—swearing off drugs, moving out of hard-partying Hollywood, insisting on a vegan-and-yoga lifestyle—there were plenty who accused her of Yoko Ono-ing the band. Even Hank Ooljee, who was typically smart enough to avoid the media, was quoted as saying that “Deidre’s affect on Roc is absolute.” So what if that was still the case? What kind of reception would be waiting for him here?

  …wonderin’ when you’d show, Boyle spoke up behind him. As before, the voice came from a long way off, but the words were clearer than they’d ever been. I figured you either homered with your girl or crashed and burned and didn’t want to fess up.

  Then Boyle witnessed the blood on Clay’s face and his tone changed. What happened?

  “Ask your girl,” Clay told him. “She’s been visiting.”

  Deidre? Boyle replied.

  “I recognized her voice from that Throne documentary—when she’s in the studio with you guys. Her voice is”—high and sharp—“distinct.”

  Deidre’s in the house?

  Clay pulled off his Rocket Throne shirt and pressed it to the gash in his forehead. “You didn’t know?”

  I knew from Dave and his family that she didn’t survive our last night together. But I haven’t been in the house. I didn’t know she… Now it was Boyle’s turn to sound shaken. No, I never considered…. His words fell away.

  “She’s there,” Clay said. “And I seem to remind her of someone named Rooster. That ring a bell?”

  Clay heard Boyle moving off, deeper into the room. Two words came back in reply: It does.

  “Who is he?”

  My old dealer. Deidre blames him for what happened to us.

  “For renewing your habit?”

  And he is to blame. At least some.