Ghost Song

Ghost Song

Copyright © 2012 Sadie Montgomery

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any

information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

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views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover photo by Sadie Montgomery. The title of the photo is Chicago Night.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-2682-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-2683-5 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 5/24/2012

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

Afterword

Playlist

To Doug and Zach

Whose words and music are always with me

I cannot tell you the effect which that music had upon me. It seemed to command me, personally, to come, to stand up and come to it.

The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux

I write…I write, I compose what I can’t…can’t have. It is music, and it must be perfect, for that is the only perfection that I can ever have!

Phantom Death, Sadie Montgomery

CHAPTER 1

Memento Mori

Burnt-out punk singer in a mixed-sex band, that’s how Cara Friday imagined herself a few years down the road. She modeled her career on Erik Devon’s meteoric rise and vertiginous crash. From the age of sixteen, she had bought every CD, begged her parents to allow her brother to take her with him to any concert within a five hundred mile radius, scanned and purchased and clipped articles and photos from serious magazines like Rolling Stones, Q, Billboard, Spin, and Alternative Press to all the teen magazines she could get her hands on—Seventeen and Teen Voices—whether or not she could stomach their sappy stories or tasteless pandering to consumerism. She spent hours trolling the internet, sniffing out even tangential commentary on Devon or his music, downloaded so many images and YouTube videos that her parents swore to take her computer away from her if it crashed one more time.

She owed it all to Devon. Although Cara had always had a lovely voice and had been in choir every year since fifth grade, she had never expressed interest in taking up a musical instrument until she saw Devon play a two-minute riff on a special edition DVD included in his third album, Extreme. She was at an overnight party at a friend’s house, sitting alongside nine other fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls, all of them glossy-eyed and rapt, the music cranked up so loud that they could not hear themselves breathe. Later in interviews, she would swear that she picked up the guitar only to touch an instrument she could pretend had touched him. For her sixteenth birthday, her parents gave her a starter guitar from Schmitt Music and arranged for weekly lessons with a young man who played for their church. But it was watching and imitating Devon in her upstairs room each day after soccer that taught her to play the instrument as if it were another limb.

Low-hung, the guitar bisected his pelvis at an angle and shielded his groin, the neck jutting out in an obviously sexual way. In his videos and concerts, Erik Devon used the instrument as if it were an extension of his own body. When his left hand glided up and down, fingers dancing over the strings, no one in the audience missed the allusion. And if his performance on the guitar weren’t blatant enough, legs akimbo, guitar neck surging forward alive in his grasp, face contorted in a private grimace of excitation always bordering on completion, his voice was a phantom caress as if he had reached out with his very hands and slid them under the elastic band of the pink Friday bikini briefs Cara wore under her jeans.

For three years Devon and his band, Dead Dogs Howl, had held the charts, kicking every competitor out of the water. In those three years, Cara had grown up, lost her virginity in the backseat of her mother’s Ford Escort, earned a scholarship to the local university, won the battle of the bands two years running, and gotten her first tattoo. All the while, she shamelessly learned every Devon song and modeled her own original work on his chords, his lyrics—the ones that didn’t rhyme and didn’t even conform to the beat—and performed at the local sandwich shop, the art tech garage, the student hangouts on the state campus. In short, anywhere she could, with or without pay, with or without accompaniment, as a single or as part of a band. When she dropped her guitar—and nearly fell herself—down a flight of stairs and had to leave it at the music store for repairs, she sang a cappella, keeping rhythm with the palm of her hand on her thigh, rocking her head, wet hair slashing at her clammy skin. She sang her songs and Devon’s songs until she began to think they were their songs. For three years, she styled herself a Devon acolyte and dreamed that soon Devon himself would read her name in People Magazine and Alternative Press and send for her on his private Cessna to come to his billion-dollar home overlooking the sea.

Then three weeks before her twentieth birthday, her brother pounded on the door to her bedroom. It wasn’t even 7:00 a.m. Before she could cuss him out, Drew burst inside her room, in spite of the NO ENTRANCE sign clearly posted at eye level on the opposite side.

Turn it on, he said. He looked past her to the bedside stereo.

Creeped out, she didn’t argue as she usually did. Drew looked as if North Korea had launched a full-scale nuclear attack at the heart of America and the bombs were headed for the Chicago Loop, a mere thirty miles away from their home in Gary, Indiana.

What station? She leaned over and switched the mode to radio. She couldn’t remember if she had listened last night to WKQX 101.1 or WGCI 107.5—Alternative or Hip Hop. Her finger hovered over the scan button ready to switch stations if need be.

Doesn’t matter. It’s on all of them.

She watched her finger as it pressed the toggle for the tuner and the LCD lit up to 101.1. In mid-sentence, the velvet-voiced D.J. gave the final touches to the diminishing chords of Dark and Deep by Dead Dogs Howl. With her heart somewhere in her throat, Cara heard the dirge-like tone, the slow, even words the D.J. spoke.

…prophetic name. The authorities have confirmed the report of deaths…

What the hell is she talking about, Drew? Cara could not make sense of what was already coming clear in her mind.

Sh. Listen, Car. Drew’s eyes flicked from hers to the LCD readout.

…investigation is under way. Faulty wiring is considered likely, but several eye witnesses say that the pyrotechnics did not go off as planned. Other reports mention explosions. From what we have pieced together, the fire began when the two-story screen and lights display toppled forward onto the stage while the Dead Dogs were rehearsing, trapping the members of the band and many of the technical crew under the mass of steel and flames. Fortunately, the sprinkler system kicked in or no one would have escaped alive. Among technicians and staff, there are, at this count, five fatalities. Several of the staff in the maintenance crew did manage to get out of the burning building and were treated for smoke inhalation and minor scrapes and contusions resulting from the panic that ensued when several exits in the main arena were found to be locked. We sadly repeat, Erik Devon and the members of the Dead Dogs Howl are presumed dead.

Cara didn’t hear the rest of the broadcast. Drew had sat on the edge of the bed, and when she started to make strange strangled noises, he pulled her tightly against his cotton T-shirt, her ears muffled between his chest and the image of the Grateful Dead.

Two years ago, at Halloween, Dead Dogs Howl had held their annual concert in Detroit, and Cara had gotten to see them play. The story went that Erik Devon had been born on Halloween. For this reason, he often wore masks or painted his face with elaborate designs for the opening number of his performances. Since Detroit was the city where the band had made its first major impact on the music scene, it was here that Devon chose to celebrate his birthday party and to invite the whole world to blow out the candles. It had become a tradition that made local politicians break out in hives and forced the police department to call in reinforcements. However, truth be told, the concert siphoned off a good deal of what would have been unfocused and widely dispersed destruction. Halloween in Detroit had been marked by arson and street fights since the race riots of the 1960s. Devon put on a show that not only satisfied the need to be wild but gathered a large percentage of the would-be trouble-makers under one roof for several hours, late into the evening. The police deployed in the neighborhood had a much easier time handling the rowdy crowd as it dispersed than it would have had chasing random fires throughout the metropolitan area.

Due to some stroke of fortune, two tickets to the Halloween concert for seats in the front section just feet from the stage had landed in Drew’s lap. When his girlfriend split with him just two weeks before Halloween, Cara started her campaign to convince Drew to take her with him to Detroit for the concert. He resisted her siege until the day before he was to leave. Unable to put up with her nagging and begging any longer, he allowed her to accompany him on the ten-hour drive to Detroit.

Revved up on caffeine and sugar, they had taken their seats in the section directly in front of the stage. The concert began with a flash of pyrotechnics that momentarily blinded the audience. When Cara was able to see beyond the bright sparklers again, Devon stood, legs spread, guitar firmly in his grasp and already vibrating with the first chords of one of his mega-hits.

Cara could not believe her luck. He was directly in front of her.

The harlequin paint split his face down the middle, along the ridge of his nose, bisecting even his lips where the edge of white came flush against black. His disheveled hair fell across his forehead, disappearing against the dark face paint and reappearing again against the powdery white of the other half. He brought his lips close to the microphone as if he might swallow it. He opened his green eyes and locked them onto hers, and she opened her mouth and began to scream. She could feel the strain of her throat muscles, knew she must be making some kind of noise, felt the pressure building in her face, and the air burning her lungs. But her voice was overwhelmed by that of hundreds of others around her, all pulsing to the beat. If not for the amplifiers, the music would have been drowned out by the crowd’s enthusiastic reception.

Erik Devon was a legend, and she gazed up at him in the flesh.

A legend the way his fingers moved across the strings, a legend the smoky voice that melted the core deep inside each of those who had come to listen to him. She felt like an Alice that had been dropped and dragged down the rabbit hole a thousand times. The split between reality and fantasy had scarred over, and the two realms were indistinguishably locked.

Cara could not decide which side of Devon’s painted face was more attractive, more mesmerizing. It was as if two separate entities—bonded together along the vertical seam of his body by some horror of genetics—warred for possession of his body and soul. Each side of the painted mask gave off a distinct expression. His green eyes stood out as the only color in his face except for the white of his teeth and the deep red interior of his mouth that she could see as he sang.

He played his guitar as if he were in another world, but when he sang he looked out upon the audience as if he were looking only at you. Cara had felt stripped naked by that gaze.

For the hour and a half that Erik Devon had played and sung, she existed only as a part of the beating pulse of the crowd around her. Like the tattooed blond on Cara’s right with a spiked mohawk whose edges had been dyed lime-green or the goth with silver body piercings glowing against pale, consumptive skin and kohl-lined lips and eyes who stood just ahead of her brother, Cara danced in place with the ebb and flow of music, her body mimicking Devon’s. Her blood pounded in syncopation with the driving beat the drummer, Chris Cobbett, laid out under the guitars and vocals. Her head bounced, keeping time, and it was impossible to stop the rest of her body from moving in frenetic and animalistic gyrations, a puppet with strings that led directly to Erik Devon’s vocal cords. Cobbett’s assault on the drums had replaced her own heart beat. With every rise or fall of a chord, she felt her blood pull toward the sound. Steeped in adrenaline and vibrating inside the notes, she could feel the music as palpably as she might the gale-force winds of a midwestern twister.

Later on the ride home, in the dark, leaning against the passenger door, she had relived each moment of the concert, erasing from her memory everyone but herself and the man on stage. She heard, with the clarity of the CDs that she had listened to a hundred times, the songs Dead Dogs Howl had played that night at the concert. She moved forward toward the stage with the force of her imagination until she was one of those who had risen from their seats and rushed the row of guards who were hired to keep them back. Alone in the vast concert hall, she looked up to see Devon’s green eyes smiling down at her. His lips curled up in a smile, and then he sang the words she knew by heart. Silently she mouthed the lyrics with him.

Her brother had nudged her awake as the first rays of the sun glinted off the rearview mirror, a feeble reminder of the flashing lights at the concert.

What the fuck, Drew? Cara complained as the last images of her fantasy drifted away.

You’ve been humming the same damn tune ever since we hit the state line. Can you give it a rest already?

Cara gave her brother a sharp punch in the shoulder with her fist.

Shit! Watch it. You want me to run off the road? He gave her a mock frown. He shoved her playfully up against the door. So did you pick up any pointers?

Thinking about face paint. She rubbed her eyes and yawned.

Drew stared at her for a moment before looking back at the highway.

No way.

What?

"That’s his thing, Drew said. You don’t want to be a clone, do you? You got to do your own thing."

She made a noncommittal noise deep in her throat.

What you guys calling yourselves these days? Is it still ‘Deaf Dumb Bunnies’?

She had sighed and considered not answering him. He was just trying to get her goat. But they still had more than an hour before they’d come into town, and it was unlikely that she’d find her way back to the fantasy.

We can’t agree on one.

Run some of them by me.

Really? Because I don’t need any of your sarcasm today. I’m serious about this band.

Cara’s last band had been a mistake. Aside from her, only one had really known how to keep time. All in all, they were super geeks who got together to smoke pot and hit on the girls who came to listen to them play. She had picked the members of her current band with much greater care.

Drew put on his serious face and turned to her so she could see it.

Try me.

Cara looked out the window at the fields. Flat land, good old midwestern land. Boy, was it a bore.

Fallow Fields, she said.

Uh, it sort of sounds a bit grim, doesn’t it? Like you aren’t a good bet for plowing. Is that the impression you want to leave with your male fans?

She giggled.

Nah, I was just making it up as we went along. Seriously, we didn’t come up with much. Since it’s my band, my music, my idea, I sort of wanted to include ‘Friday’ in the name.

Drew shrugged noncommittally.

What? Think it’s too egotistical?

Not for me to say. But if you want the others to be as committed as you are, you might want to downplay the prima donna act.

OK. OK. I get it. She hadn’t really thought they’d go for any of the names she had strung together. Still, at this rate, they’d end up without a name and have to use a question mark on their posters.

The important thing is for you to concentrate on your music. You’ve got some nice songs.

Really?

Sure.

"How do you know?"

As if you don’t play them over and over again every damn night.

So you like them?

Yeah, sure. I think they’re great.

As good as Dead Dogs Howl?

Drew shifted in his seat before he answered. I hear you doing a lot of his songs, too.

Well, it’s pretty standard for a new group to do covers.

As long as you eventually find your own voice and do your own material.

"Someday, he’ll be singing my songs," she said.

Drew play-punched his sister on the forearm and gave her a wink.

That’s the spirit.

The next year, Cara would have returned to Detroit for the grand celebration had she not wrecked her mom’s car and been grounded for a month. She was eighteen at the time. But the accident had rattled her confidence, and she accepted her parents’ punishment almost with gratitude.

Cara had resolved not to miss the opportunity this year to celebrate Erik Devon’s twenty-sixth birthday in style. She had scouted for tickets months in advance until she found something in approximately the same section of the concert stadium. Front, center section had cost her practically every cent in her savings account, but she had paid PayPal gladly. She followed the trades and knew Dead Dogs Howl were to arrive four to five days ahead of the concert to rehearse and gear up for the crowds. Scuttlebutt online at the chat rooms said they’d be staying at the Atheneum Suites. Cara couldn’t afford a broom closet at that hotel, but she would stake it out the night before the concert, risking mugging and frostbite.

Plans had been that she would head out Friday after class and drive until she got there or drove off the road instead. Plans change, as her parents liked to point out. Drew had burst into her room that morning and awakened her to the news. The mental countdown to the big event had slammed to a standstill just two days before she was to leave, thoughts of careening down the interstate with Extreme playing at ear-splitting levels lingering in the fog of her last dream.

News of the tragedy had burned away all hopes of birthday candles and jack’o lanterns. Plans change, indeed. But this was worse than a change in plans. There wouldn’t be another time, another chance down the road, next year, next Halloween. No second tickets, no refunds for Erik Devon. That’s what had burrowed into Cara’s mind with every passing moment and had put down roots that continued to grow and branch out.

Erik Devon’s green eyes, closed forever. Erik Devon’s music, buried in smoke and ash.

Cara was in mourning.

After they had listened to the same broadcast three or four times, Drew had left for work and Cara had turned off the radio and sat comatose for nearly an hour. Only weeks of habit guided her through the routine of rising from bed and plodding into the kitchen. Her hand went for the yogurt without asking permission or considering the different fruit combinations. Fingers and mouth worked until the sweet-sour taste registered on her brain and she set the half-finished carton back in the refrigerator, spoon sunk at an angle, lid tossed aside on the counter. Without showering, she dressed in the clothes she had taken off and dropped on the chair in her room the night before, not even sniffing at the armpits to make sure they weren’t rank. The next few minutes were already a blank when she realized she was speeding down Cherry Street two blocks from home.

Had she looked both ways before she pulled out of the driveway onto the street in front of her house? She couldn’t swear to it.

The radio was always already on in her 1993 Geo Prizm. She switched stations yet again in search of more news, any news that could break through the numbing shroud that wound her tightly in its cocoon. Astronomy began at 9:45. She made a mindless calculation based on speed and distance. The laws of Physics were against her. In her experience, time and space on this planet were mercilessly straight and unbending. At the last minute, in a brief moment of clarity, she realized she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up going the wrong way on Interstate 80. At this rate, she’d have to circumnavigate the globe before she got to campus.

It was a scientific certainty that she would be late.

Again.

A glance in the rearview mirror and a quick jerk to the right had her sailing off the exit ramp. The blast of a horn drowned out the first few words of the announcer’s voice. Cara took the time to give the Taurus a flick of the middle finger and came to the intersection at the end of the ramp. Instead of making the left and returning to the expressway, to head for campus, she turned onto the city street and parked along the curb to listen…

Cara had missed Astronomy altogether, but she did have a chance to make her Music Theory class. She had lucked out and found a parking space right away. The classroom was at the other end of the hallway. But the hallway had stretched like an accordion telescope, and it would take light years to reach the door at the far end.

Cara, did you hear?

Reality snapped into place. Space came into sharp focus.

An impossibly thin brunette was at Cara’s elbow. Her bony fingers closed like a vice on Cara’s upper arm. Cara looked down and almost expected to see metallic digits cutting into her flesh. Sandy was an animated structure of nuts and bolts, steel rods and pulleys. Someone had welded her together out of odd parts in a car garage and threw on a thin veneer of human flesh. Sandy played bass on a guitar as steely and thin as herself.

Well? Did you? the brunette repeated.

Cara nodded. Suddenly the fact that Sandy Becker knew meant that it must be real. She had not been imagining the unimaginable. Her torpor bled away, leaving in its stead sheer panic. Cara pushed past Sandy and darted into the restroom marked Women. She barely made it to the stall before she heaved what was left of last night’s supper and that morning’s yogurt.

Sandy waited by the sinks, patient and quiet.

Pale, light-headed, Cara made her way to the sink, rinsed her mouth, praying Sandy would remain quiet. Water gurgled down into the plumbing system. Cara felt as if she were sliding toward the drain. A bit like Alice’s rabbit hole, but less bucolic, the drain beckoned as if it opened onto a whole other universe. Everything in her mind and body sagged, wanting to collapse like a red dwarf into a black hole.

I suppose you won’t be going, will you? asked Sandy. She blushed red when she caught a glimpse of Cara’s stricken expression in the mirror. Sorry. Sandy’s normal hard-as-tacks attitude had melted. Without it, the twenty-year-old sounded like she was thirteen again.

Cara didn’t answer. She bent her head and leaned into the basin. She cupped her hand several more times under the running water, rinsing her mouth and splashing handfuls of tepid water over her face.

What should we do? asked Sandy.

Two girls pushed into the restroom, took one look at Cara and Sandy, and nodded. Cara couldn’t help but notice that they, too, seemed subdued. They went to the far end of the restroom and took adjacent stalls. Cara could hear them urinate in unison.

That new place you told me about? The one where you got your belly button pierced?

Sandy’s hand went to a thin slice of midriff visible between the short top and the low jeans and teased the steel bauble in the rim of her belly button. The flesh around the piercing was still tender. She bathed it with hydrogen peroxide both day and night, more worried about infection than she’d admit.

Rudy’s? Sandy pushed away from the wall where she’d been leaning. Excited by the idea that was forming like cumulonimbus clouds above their heads, she spoke over any reply Cara might make. I know. We’ll get a piercing, you and I. It will be our tribute to his passing.

Sandy’s sudden enthusiasm made Cara want to return to the stall and pitch the inner lining of her stomach into the toilet. But, after all, wasn’t that exactly what she was thinking of doing?

In less than a month, she’d be twenty. She had promised her parents that she wouldn’t get a tattoo or have her body pierced until she was out of High School. Upon graduation, she had gone straight to the lower east end of town and gotten a small hummingbird tattooed on her left shoulder just below her collarbone. It had hurt like hell and gotten infected, making the hummingbird look more like a worm-infested crow with palsy. Fortunately, she had nursed it and the infection had cleared without distorting the colors and lines. But the experience had made her leery of getting another tat or a body piercing. Well into her second year of college, she was largely an untouched canvas compared to the crowd she hung with.

The toilets at the far end flushed, one right after the other, and the two girls came out and washed their hands in the sink. These days, everyone was health conscious. Warnings of the flu season had been drilled into everyone’s head. After drying their hands on too many paper towels—evidently the ecologists still had their work cut out for them—the two friends filed out of the restroom.

Cara watched them leave and then stared at her puffy red eyes in the long bank of mirrors above the sinks. These signs of grief would pass, but a tattoo or piercing would etch this moment in time permanently into her flesh.

Cara Friday, a memento mori in honor of Erik Devon and his music.

Let’s do it, Cara said as she rubbed the stiff brown paper towel over her face and dropped it into the trash.

Sandy’s eyes grew wide as saucers.

Rudy’s?

After class.

We’ll never forget this moment, Cara.

Cara was afraid her friend was right about that.

Get word to Jen and Bill. We need to practice.

Tonight?

No, Cara couldn’t bear it. It was too soon. Mourning took time. She headed for the restroom door and slapped it open with the flat of her palms. She could hear Sandy falling into step behind her.

A week from tomorrow. Get them to my place. And tell Bill he better have all his strings this time.

Bill had not had all his strings, but Sandy had driven him to Sam’s Guitar Emporium and sent him in to buy a packet. In the backseat of her Toyota, he fumbled at restringing the bass nearly poking Jen’s eye out with one of his tuning pegs. She hit him over his buzz cut with one of her drumsticks. They tussled for a few seconds until Sandy put the brakes on hard, which brought them flush up against the back of the front bucket seats. That quieted them down for the rest of the trip.

By the time they arrived at Cara’s garage, the guitar was strung and tempers were under control. Sandy and Jen got the drums out and set them up just inside the vacant side of the two-car garage.

Devon, Cara said. That’s all they needed. They knew the repertoire down to the order Cara wanted to follow. Bright Lights on a Dark Night, Extreme, Midnight, Dark and Deep, If… In honor of a legend.

They played hard, loud. For three hours. Jen’s arm muscles began to twitch even when not drumming. One of Sandy’s fingertips left blood on the frets of her bass. Cara’s voice cracked and scratched like sand paper across wood. Imitating from memory a solo on Devon’s YouTube version of You’re a Catastrophe, Bill pulled his string so hard that it sprang loose, flicked up, and stung his brow just above his eye. They were all out of breath and deafened by the silence.

That was awesome, guys.

Drew came up the driveway, his hand a visor over his brow as he peered into the dark interior of the garage. He had parked his car on the street in front of the house. To offset the costs of graduate school, Drew lived at home, like Cara, and worked as an assistant manager at a local retail store. Between his work and their complicated class schedules, Cara and Drew barely saw each other.

Heard you all the way down to Lexington.

Sandy loosened her nuts and bolts and tried to become a sex kitten. Cara was always shocked and mildly disgusted by what appeared to be a chemical transformation beyond her friend’s control whenever she was within ten feet of Cara’s brother.

As usual, they were embarrassed, as well as delighted, by Drew’s praise. They shuffled their feet, nodded their heads like hood ornaments, and mumbled under their breath. Sandy was the only one who didn’t fidget. She stretched her torso, allowing her short blouse to hike up over her bellybutton, and posed as if for a photo shoot. Even her silly grin seemed fixed in place. Drew was dressed in business casual with a clean, crisp collared shirt, dark jeans, no tie or jacket. He winked at Sandy as he made his way past the equipment to the door that connected the garage to the kitchen.

OK. OK. Get a grip, please. Cara clapped her hands twice to break the spell Drew always seemed to cast over her friends—especially over Sandy. You’d think we’d never performed before.

Jen did a drum roll to bring home the point.

This weekend we’re playing at The Grand. The lineup will be Freakin’ Freaks, us, and Tow Line. With that kind of competition, we should easily rule.

Freakin’ Freaks are pretty popular with the high school crowd, said Bill. Also the youngest, he was the only member of the group not yet in college.

Tow Line is a serious band. Freakin’ Freaks are OK, but they have four songs they do well and the rest is an approximation, said Cara.

Besides I hear they lost their drummer, said Jen. She would know. New to town and desperate to be in a band, she had played for Freakin’ Freaks the year before. She had met Cara in a music class at the state university, and they had hit it off right away. It was only a matter of time before Cara had recruited her for her own band. Since then, the Freakin’ Freaks had not had much luck finding a replacement that stuck.

I’m not sure we’re ready to launch Bill’s song, said Cara. Before Bill could protest, she added, I’m not doing ‘Once Upon A Time’ either.

That got their attention. They had been rehearsing Cara’s song for months. Most of what they played were covers—songs they knew would please the crowd, songs the audience recognized and responded to immediately. Launching new material—especially when it was their own—was always tricky. They could slip in a couple between covers without risking losing the audience. Recently they had considered shifting the balance a bit and were doing more and more of their own songs. They had all taken a shot at writing something new and original for the band. Only Bill’s and Cara’s had made it to the final cut.

So what are we doing? The same old, same old? Now that Drew had gone inside, Sandy was all steel again, the way Cara liked her.

No. We’re doing Devon.

Just Dead Dogs Howl? Bill asked.

Everyone gave him a look of exasperation. Like what else?

Cara nodded.

Cool, said Bill. Like a funeral or something.

A memorial service, dipshit, corrected Jen. Whatever you’re sniffing, you better stop.

That’s what I meant, said Bill, not the least bit offended.

Are we all onboard with this? asked Cara.

They knew his songs. It would be easy to fill their time slot.

We should advertise it. We’ll fill The Grand easily, said Sandy, already excited by the fantasy of lit candles and cigarette lighters ablaze in the audience.

No.

What?

We don’t want to let the word out until the day before the concert. We don’t want Freakin’ Freaks or Tow Line stealing our thunder. We’ll ask to go last. No one did Devon the way they did Devon. But they didn’t want their competitors to run the same slate. Cara would run the idea past the management. They’d see the advantage of putting them last in the lineup.

Cara knew the music the other bands played. They might include a few of Devon’s easier songs, like Dark and Deep and Dead On. But there was no way that they could get up to steam on any of the other covers in time for the performance.

They won’t know what hit them when ‘Extreme Action’ hits the stage. Jen made her point with a loud and rapid riff on the snare, ending with a sharp clip on the cymbal.

Cool, said Bill for the umpteenth time.

Cara blinked back a rebellious tear. Cool wasn’t exactly the point for her. But it didn’t matter that the others in the band saw this as a savvy business decision, a marketing ploy. She resisted touching the tattoo she’d gotten at Rudy’s. It burned under her T-shirt, a painful reminder of what had happened to Erik Devon and Dead Dogs Howl.

CHAPTER 2

Strawberry Fields Forever

On fire, Devon’s arm was blistering from the flames dripping down his sleeve. The blast had lifted him and thrown him across the stage floor that sagged and cracked beneath him. He fell two stories to the basement level of the building. He was sure he was screaming, but he could only hear the roaring of death and destruction above him. He rolled and writhed on the floor until the flames were smothered. He could not lie still. The pain seared away all but an animal need to escape. He rolled and crawled, rose to his feet, lurched forward, dropped to hands and knees, and crawled some more.

Sgt. Emery Hall, medic, crouched in the bushes near the path. PFC Clarence whined and buried his cold, wet nose under Hall’s hand. Flames shot up into the sky, and great billowing black clouds choked the air. Sirens had blasted for the past twenty minutes or more.

At ease, Private. The dirty bastards took out our helicopter. We’ll lie low until they send reinforcements.

Hall patted the golden retriever on the head. They had been out foraging. In Sgt. Hall’s cart were some old couch cushions they’d pulled out of someone’s trash and a number of pop cans from the public park that they would turn in for a deposit tomorrow. They had been on their way home with their booty when Hall heard the explosions and saw the fire.

Call roll, PFC Clarence, and check the ammunition.

The golden retriever sniffed the ground and then padded softly down the road toward the commotion. Sgt. Hall called in a harsh whisper for the soldier to come back, threatening under his breath a cut in rations and a court martial. Several minutes later, Hall spied Private Clarence nearly a block away, at the back of the parking lot that abutted a burning building. Nose to the ground, PFC Clarence’s tail brushed back and forth in a way that suggested either joy or excitement. Hall forgot military protocol, thinking perhaps that his soldier had found an abandoned treat they could share. Before the soldier could take off with it alone to gnaw under a distant tree, Hall scrambled after him. When he had almost caught the animal’s collar, Clarence slipped through a hole in the chain-link fence and ambled down, sniffing all the way, the grassy incline toward a water-filled ditch. Following Clarence, Hall squeezed through the hole in the fence and found himself on the perimeter of the battle scene. Continuing to call out, Sgt. Hall half-crawled, half-rolled down the steep embankment, nearly landing in the runoff from the fire brigade.

The ground was saturated. Hall quelled his natural antipathy to water. He knew that the rivers in Nam were rife with leeches and poisonous snakes—not to mention the Viet Cong patrols that regularly strafed the waterways. Only a fool went down to the water’s edge without cover.

PFC Clarence had found something. Sgt. Hall regretted that he had forgotten the cord in the cart at the top of the embankment and on the other side of the barrier. Normally the solider didn’t require a leash. To turn around now and climb up to get it would be exhausting. He was too tired. He should have gone to the shelter the army had set up on Clive Street. The food was warm and salty, just the way he liked it. But he had slept too late in the day. When he woke he realized that he’d never be able to wheel his cart the eight blocks in time to make the meal. At this point, his stomach churned, and his gut growled nearly as much as PFC Clarence.

If you’ve found anything to eat, Private Clarence, you bring it here, he demanded. Sgt. Hall couldn’t see what the dog’s body was blocking from his view. Clarence’s tail continued to twitch, and the head was still lowered toward the surface of the water.

Resigned to pulling Clarence by the collar, Sgt. Hall made his way along the edge of the ditch. His feet sank into the soggy ground. Private Clarence barked three times up in the air in the sergeant’s general direction.

Something large was nearly submerged in the shallow water.

Leave it, Private. We’ve run out of body bags.

So many dead bodies were carried off by the rivers in Nam.

PFC Clarence whined. Sgt. Hall hated to hear his soldier whine. It was unmanly. Grumbling under his breath, he took off the Birkenstocks someone had pitched into the trash just because the soles had been rubbed smooth. He laid them carefully to the side and rolled