A Fistful of Rain

For David Hale Smith

My agent, my advocate, and my dear friend

In a heart there are windows and doors

You can let the light in

You can feel the wind blow

When there’s nothing to lose

And nothing to gain

Grab a hold of that fistful of rain —Warren Zevon

PROLOGUE

This is the song I can never write.

There has been rain, and clouds like blood blisters have parted to a startling blue sky. The water, now in puddles in the street and clinging in drops to blades of recently cut grass, shines with the sudden sunlight, creating a glare that hurts the unshielded eye. Late afternoon, and there is a chill, but it’s not enough to drive the girl and her mother inside, because they are working together in the driveway. There is newspaper spread out over oil-stained concrete, two paring knives, and a black felt-tip marker, used to make the design. The pumpkin has already been lobotomized with a jagged zigzag cut, imperfectly executed by eleven-year-old hands. Seeds and guts are piled in a heap.

The girl, with pumpkin innards sticky on her hands and deep beneath her fingernails, works ferociously, trying to make the perfect face. She imagines the work completed, with a candle burning inside, knows how it should look when everything is done. But her hands frustrate her, refusing to execute the design in her mind, and in her impatience, she makes mistakes.

The mother encourages and cautions, urging the girl to watch what she is doing, to not lose the knife, to not press too hard, to get it right because there’s no second chance. The mother separates the pumpkin seeds into a shallow bowl as she speaks, saying that they will toast them later, then sprinkle them with salt. They will make a good snack, she tells her daughter.

The front door opens, and the brother steps out, pulling on his jacket. He ignores his sister and his parent as he passes them, a teenager too old for Halloween now that he is too old to wear a costume. He carries the tension of the home in his shoulders and back, and grunts the barest acknowledgment to his mother when she demands he be home for dinner. The girl doesn’t look up from her work, battling with the knife, trying to cut the perfect toothy grin. She hears her mother complain softly about that boy and the trouble he gets into, but the refrain, like so many others in the child’s life, has become background noise, and doesn’t penetrate.

And so they work, daughter and mother, crafting a face that once was used to ward off spirits, but instead will beckon strangers to their door.

Then there is a new sound, the motor in the garage as the opener grinds to life, and the girl looks from her work over her shoulder, to see her father behind the wheel of the truck. He is waving his hand with a cigarette between his fingers, saying something lost behind the engine, and there is anger on his face. In the cab, beside him, as far as he can be without leaving the confines of Detroit Steel, is her brother, everything about him wishing he was somewhere else. When the girl looks at him, the boy looks away, but not soon enough to hide the water in his eyes.

The mother rises, wiping her fingers on her jeans, telling her daughter to gather her things and to get out of the driveway. Her father has come home, he has had a hard day, she tells her daughter. He is tired.

The girl thinks that every day is a hard day for her father, that every day he is tired when he comes home. But she doesn’t speak, because she is feeling something familiar, and when she feels it, she knows it’s best to stay quiet. It’s an ephemeral sensation, less distinct than fear, and she has come to recognize the feeling as her friend, because it speaks of danger. She gathers her pumpkin in both hands, begins to carry it from the driveway to the porch.

She hears her father’s voice above the truck’s, louder now, and she almost relaxes. His shouting is another part of the background noise, and the girl who smells autumn and rain and pumpkin knows that were he closer, were she in the truck with him, she would smell beer behind his cigarette. Her mother responds using words that regularly earn her brother detention at school. There is the creak of a door opening and the slam of it shutting again, and her brother’s voice joins, but not for long.

The girl is setting the pumpkin on the porch when she hears the pickup’s engine rise to a roar, as if shouting to drown her mother’s curses. She hears the sound of tires spinning freely on wet asphalt, but only for an instant. She hears the stainless steel bowl of pumpkin seeds clatter over concrete as a tire brushes it, and she hears her mother’s voice stop, as if pulled from her body and thrown aside.

The engine falls silent.

The girl feels weightless and dizzy, and doesn’t remember turning to look at what has happened. She doesn’t know if she is running or walking or floating to the entrance of the garage. She cannot hear the sound of her father emerging from the cab of his truck, and she cannot hear the words her brother is shouting at her as he takes her shoulders and tries to turn her away.

Most of all, she cannot hear the sound that her mother is making, caught between wheel and the ground.

When she looks down the length of the driveway, she sees a spread of blood merging with the rainwater in the gutter.

The sunlight vanishes behind a freshly loaded cloud.

It starts to rain again.

CHAPTER 1

The hangover was waiting for me when the plane from Sydney landed in Los Angeles. Which was as it should be, because I’d started drinking in the Red Carpet Club, and hadn’t stopped until well after the International Dateline.

The looks the flight crew and fellow passengers rifled at me when I got off the plane had me thinking I’d been a less-than-model passenger, that I’d perhaps done something mortifying, but no one said a word, and I wasn’t about to ask. There was no vomit drying on my clothes that I could see, and I still had my pants on right way round, so whatever it was, it couldn’t have been that bad.

Certainly it couldn’t be any worse than what I’d left behind in Australia.

The vise really began tightening at each temple as I was waiting to pass through customs, and it was a bad one mostly because I was still tagging after the drunk pretty closely. The world was dull and dizzying, and maybe that was why I got pulled from the line, but then again, maybe it wasn’t. I took it without protest, just the way our manager, Graham Havers, had taught each of us in our little band to take it. Celebrity status has perks, but it also means that there’s always someone looking to take you down a peg or ten. It’s not as if musicians—or more precisely, musicians who play “popular music”—are known for living a Seventh-Day Adventist lifestyle.

The search was thorough, and the agents were, too. They asked if I had any contraband, specifically drugs. They asked it repeatedly, trying to trip me up. They had me turn out my pockets. They shook out my jacket. They patted me down. They even tore open my packet of cigarettes, checking each tube of precious nicotine to make certain it was filled with tobacco, nothing more.

When they’d finished with my bags I started to take off my shirt but the supervising agent stopped me, saying, “What are you doing?”

“Isn’t this what you want?” I asked. I impressed myself by not slurring. “I mean, isn’t this what, you know, what you want?”

His eyes went to flint. “No.”

“Oh,” I said, and tucked back in. “Well, then, my mistake. Right? My mistake?”

“I’d say so.”

I got my things together and he held the door for me out of the little examination room, letting me pass through. I impressed myself again by not wobbling.

“I’ve made a few,” I told him.

“I’m sorry?”

“Mistakes,” I said. “I’ve made a few.”

I had to stop in a ladies’ room before switching terminals, and I gave until it hurt. When I emerged, there was a photographer waiting outside—he must have picked me up coming through customs—and he shouted my name when I emerged.

“Mim! Bracca! Hey! Gimme something I can sell!”

I got my hands up before I heard the whirring of the speed-winder, one to shield my face, one to let him know just what I thought of him and his Minolta, and then I was shoving through clumps of fellow travelers, and that was the end of the encounter, such as it was. It made me feel a little better; if he ever bothered to develop the roll, he’d have some lovely close-ups of the calluses on the fingertips of my left hand, and of the middle finger on my right.

The flight was delayed due to fog in San Francisco, which has happened to me more times than I can remember, and which never makes any sense each time it does. I’m flying Los Angeles to Portland, why the hell does fog in San Francisco factor into that equation?

Between that and the security I was on the ground another six hours before boarding. I sucked smoke in the Cigarette Ghetto near the gate, an outdoor area ringed with stone benches and overflowing ashtrays, wishing I had one of my guitars with me. Of the five I’d taken on tour, four were being shipped back separately. The Telecaster was traveling as luggage. I spent most of the wait dozing, the kind of drunken nod-off that’s punctuated by alarming jerks of the head as you realize you might have slept through something important.

Somehow I managed to get on board at the right time, and once I was safely in my new seat, I fell asleep—or more precisely, passed out—again. I missed the safety spiel, which was probably just as well, because I had a dim memory of getting maudlin during it on the last flight. It wasn’t like I was denying myself lifesaving knowledge; I’d flown so much in the past year that I’d suffered nosebleeds from all the recycled high-altitude air.

It was the jolt-bounce-slide that accompanies every wet-weather landing in Portland that woke me, and I came to cotton-mouthed and with the headache worse than ever. I was finally sober, but I still wasn’t certain that was a good thing.

The terminal was mostly empty, and filled with the strange muted sounds that airports and hospitals share in the dead hours. I stopped at the restroom again, gargled with water from a drinking fountain, and by the time I was actually walking the concourse, I was doing it alone. The kiosk near the security checkpoint had an LED reader, and it welcomed me to the Rose City, Portland, Oregon, and told me it was 1:16 in the morning Pacific daylight time, on October 22, a Monday.

That seemed important to me, but before I could remind myself why, my eye caught something else, locked behind the secured gate of a closed newsstand.

The new issue of Rolling Stone, face out on display, between stacks of People and Entertainment Weekly. Nice cover photograph, typical crap Stone fare, vibrant color, big logo. Three twentysomethings standing on a rugged beach, wind snapping hair and fabric. Two women, one man, all of them staring at the lens, all with their own expressions.

Vanessa front and center, wearing her stage outfit, the outfit she wanted the world to think she wore every day, and not just during a gig: black leather pants that took her ten minutes to pull on; white half-tank with a small mushroom cloud parked between her breasts, cut off above the navel, revealing the stomach of someone who had starved herself for two days before the shoot; black bra straps showing a calculatedly feminine touch of lace; bright red lipstick highlighting her pout, leaning in at you, one hand in her hair, as if about to make an offer no red-blooded male could refuse. She can’t be older than twenty-four, you think, looking at that shot. Truth is, Van’s creeping up on thirty faster than she’d care to admit. If the wind has made her cold, it’s not like she’s noticed.

Over Van’s right shoulder, Click, the self-proclaimed token black man of Tailhook. Lean, looking someplace in his mid-twenties, head shaved, eyebrows pierced, tattoos visible creeping up the sides of his neck from beneath the collar of his Portland Winterhawks team jersey. His blue jeans torn as if they’re one wash away from losing the key thread, the one thread that’s holding that decrepit denim together. On his feet, mismatched Chuck Taylor All Stars, red on the right foot, green on the left. Each hand balled in a fist, like he’s ready to fight, but not eager. Like he’ll trade blows if that is what’s expected of him, nothing more. No malice on his face, just a trace of apathy, or maybe boredom.

And over Van’s left shoulder another woman, black ringlets styled like dreadlocks framing her face. Brown eyes on you, mouth closed, looking like she’s afraid she might swallow a bug. Lines of small hoops running from earlobe to cartilage on each side, starting big enough to fit a thumb tip, ending small enough that maybe a Q-tip wouldn’t slide through. Standing on a rock to give her a much-needed boost in height, so that with the assist in elevation her head is almost but not quite level with Click’s shoulder. Black tank top revealing blue-black tattoos on each arm—right side a tribal band, left a howling wolf. Baggy olive-drab cargo pants, and black Doc Martens. Made up to appear as if there’s no makeup at all. Her arms crossed over her chest, only because she doesn’t know what else to do with them when there’s no guitar for her to hold.

Me.

Christ.

My bags were spinning lonely on the carousel when I went to claim them, and I put the strap to my duffel over my shoulder and took my guitar case in my hand. The flight case the guitar had traveled in looked none the worse for wear, but I was still relieved to have the Tele back in my possession. There’s no one I’d take a bullet for, but I’d jump in front of a bazooka to save my Telecaster.

Once outside I lit a smoke, then looked for the car. I didn’t see it anywhere, and was starting to get peeved when I realized that there wasn’t going to be one waiting, this time.

It bothered me that that bothered me.

So I went to the cab stand instead, where a Rose City Taxi driver was already opening his trunk in preparation for my fare. I put my bags in the back, laying the guitar case on the top, and the driver went around to his door, and I went around to mine. It was cold and raining, light but steady, and it felt nice. I stood there with the door open, enjoying the weather, and it was then that I realized why October 22 mattered, why it was significant.

It was the day we’d left on our tour.

It had taken me a year to come home.

Almost.

As it happened, a man with a gun kept me from my bed for a little longer.

CHAPTER 2

He waited until the cab had pulled away, until I was up on the porch and out of the rain.

I set down my bags, began searching my duffel for my keys. The lights inside were off, and that annoyed, but did not surprise. Mikel was supposed to be keeping an eye on the place, but my brother had his own home, a condo in the northwest part of town, and certainly wasn’t obligated to sleep at my house. Making the place look lived-in would have been nice, though.

So I was on my haunches, searching my bag for a set of keys I hadn’t used in months, and with the rain, I didn’t hear him coming up behind me at all.

“Excuse me?”

It sounded strange, muted, but it also sounded familiar, and in the moment before I turned my head, it didn’t worry me. I’d heard that nervousness before, a thousand times, the timid question posed by an awestruck fan: Is it really you?

I’d found my keys, and straightened up, turning, trying to hide annoyance and find my pleasant meet-and-greet face. I said, “Yeah, look, you’ll have to forgive me but I just got home and . . .”

Then I stopped, because I was facing him, and I wasn’t liking what I was seeing one bit. Best I could figure, in a strange neuron click of clarity, was that he wasn’t just a fan.

He was a stalker.

He had longish hair, dirty blond, and green and brown cammo pants and a black sweatshirt with a hood, but the hood was down. His face was vaguely familiar, the way all faces smear together when you’ve seen millions of them from stages all around the world. He seemed big to me, but everyone seems big to me, and when I’m surprised on my porch by a strange man, that’s always going to be factored in for free.

He also had a gun, and that just added to the whole effect.

It was so utterly surreal, all I could say was “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

The man raised the gun, to point it at my head, and said, “Come here.”

My response was instinctive and contrary, and if I’d thought for a moment, I’d never have said it.

“Hell no,” I told him.

“It’s not a choice, bitch.”

He started coming forward, and the whole strangeness of it ended abruptly, and it became terrifying, instead. I went for my door, which was stupid and I fumbled it, jabbing my key pointlessly at the lock and missing. Then he was on me, and I heard the keys drop as he rammed the gun into my neck, wrapped his bare hand around it. The gun felt blunt and cold, and his grip felt hot and wet, and the cloud of fear that had been gathering coalesced into real panic.

“You come with me now,” he hissed into my ear. “Or I’ll blow you away.”

The only coherent thought I had then was that I was going to die, probably horribly, and that it wasn’t fair because I wasn’t even supposed to be here, I was supposed to be in New York City, and if Van hadn’t handed me my walking papers I would be, and then I wouldn’t have to be raped and murdered on the steps of my own home.

“Please don’t do this,” I said softly, and it didn’t sound pathetic to me, just sincere.

His answer was to pull me away from my door and off my porch. He turned me, walked me down the path from my house to the street, between the big apple trees in the front yard, to the sidewalk. Every house was dark, and there was no motion but us and the trees that shivered in the falling rain.

It seemed to me that I could probably scream for help once before he killed me, and that didn’t seem like a very good option at all.

Cars were parked along the curb, neighbor vehicles, and he walked me across the street, past a beat-up Chevy to a big Ford truck. The truck had a hardtop over the bed, something to keep it closed and dry, and he told me to open it, and then he told me to climb inside.

“Please don’t do this,” I said again. “You really don’t want to do this.”

“You don’t know what I want,” he said. “You better just hope I don’t want all of it. Get in, all the way to the back, then turn around.”

I had to go on hands and knees to get inside. The bed was lined with a hard black plastic, and the sound of the rain hitting the hardtop was loud. When I reached the far end I turned, watched as he moved his gun into a pocket, keeping his hand on the grip. He looked away from me, back across the street, as if checking on my house, and I could see he was trying to work something out, and I figured that was probably good for me, because if he already had a plan, I wasn’t going to have a chance at all. Not to say I had a chance to begin with, but to tell the truth, my fear had begun to ebb, as if it couldn’t keep up with the bizarreness of it all.

I wondered if I’d really sobered up, or if I was still drunk.

The man returned his attention to me, and when he spoke, the fear came back in a cascade.

“Give me your clothes.”

“They’re not your size,” I said, meekly.

His sweatshirt stretched around the barrel of the gun as he thrust it farther in my direction. “You think I’m joking? You think this is some fucking joke, you split-ass bitch? Get out of your fucking clothes.”

I just stared at him. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“You want me to hurt you? You want me to hurt you and do it myself?”

I shook my head. The muscles in my jaw were starting to tremble.

“Do it. Now.”

It took effort, and it took me finding a justification, it took me telling myself that this couldn’t be what I thought, that he wouldn’t do this here, not in the back of his truck parked two doors down from my own home, that there had to be something else he was after. Something more than his power and my humiliation.

He wouldn’t do this here.

Even so, my fingers copied my jaw the whole way, numb and clumsy as I fought my boots, my belt, my buttons and zippers. I struggled out of my clothes, and I thought he would leave me my underwear, but he wanted that, too. The hardtop trapped the cold, seemed to increase it, and it made me shiver.

When I was naked, he reached in and took my clothes.

“Lie down and don’t move,” he said, and then he slammed the gate on the truck.

I heard the driver’s door open and close, felt the vibration run through my skin. The engine started, the smell of exhaust in the trapped space. We lurched into motion.

I closed my eyes, and wished I was home.

It was dark and still raining when the truck stopped and the engine died. I heard the driver’s door open again, heard the footsteps splashing around to the back of the vehicle, then the key scraping the lock. The gate came down.

“Get dressed and get out,” the man said, and threw my clothes at me.

Surprise didn’t stop me. I dressed, fast, not bothering to tie my boots, just getting covered and then sliding along the bed. I dropped off the gate, onto the street, looking around, and as soon as I was out, the engine started again. I could see the man behind the wheel as he pulled away, and he wasn’t looking back.

It seemed like all of me was shaking, and for a moment, I was sure I would fall, that my legs wouldn’t hold me. I felt the rain on my face, and I searched the darkness, trying to find some sense of where I was.

I was right where I’d started.

CHAPTER 3

My front door was unlocked, and I blew through it, slammed it shut behind me, throwing the locks and switching on the hall light. The alarm panel on the wall said that the system was in reset, and I stabbed at it, desperate to get it to arm, but it refused to change its message. My guitar case and duffel were both in the front hall, and my keys were on the table beside the door. I didn’t understand, and I didn’t try.

The phone in the kitchen gave me a dial tone, and I called 911, and tried to be coherent. I said things like “gun,” and “naked,” and “truck.” The dispatcher told me someone was on the way, and told me to stay on the line, and I thought that was fine and dandy, because the phone was cordless, and that meant I could get a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the pantry and put some of the drink into me.

That helped, but not much.

The white cop’s name was Dunn and the Asian cop’s name was Watanabe, and they were the ones I spoke to, because they were the first to arrive, coming in two different cars and reaching my door within thirty seconds of each other. They were by no means the last, and within ten minutes of the call, I had seven officers of the Portland Police Department swarming in and around my house, moving throughout the neighborhood.

Dunn sat me in the kitchen and asked me to tell him exactly what had happened, and I did, I told him all of it, as best as I could, as coherently as I could. When they’d arrived, both he and Watanabe had worn looks of earnest concern, even excitement.

When I was finished, the looks were gone.

“Were you hurt?”

“No, not . . . not really. Scared out of my mind, but not . . . you know, not hurt.”

“He didn’t assault you?” Watanabe asked.

“No. He made me give him my clothes, but that was all.”

“If we took you to the hospital, would you consent to a doctor running a rape kit?”

“No, what? Why? He didn’t rape me, he didn’t touch me. He never touched me after he put me in his truck.”

“He put you in his truck, he made you strip, he drove you around, and he took you back here?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Dunn asked, “Can you describe the truck?”

“It was a Ford, a big one.”

“What color?”

“Blue, maybe green? It was dark.”

“You didn’t see the license?”

“It was an Oregon plate, that’s all I know.”

Dunn spoke on his radio to someone, telling them that they were looking for a big Ford truck, blue, maybe green. I didn’t hear the response he got.

“And you say your things were inside when you got back?” Watanabe asked. “Is anything missing?”

“No, not that I can tell. I haven’t had a chance to look.”

“But it doesn’t look like anything’s missing?”

“No, but I haven’t had a chance to look.”

“I understand that.” He glanced around the kitchen. “It doesn’t look like there was a break-in.”

“It happened outside!”

Dunn and Watanabe nodded.

“When was your last drink?” Dunn asked.

“I had a drink, I had a drink when I was on the phone with the dispatcher person.”

“Before that?”

“I told you,” I said, and I really did try not to sound shrill, but I was seriously starting to fray. “I’d just gotten home, I’d been on tour. I just got back from Australia.”

“You were drinking on the flight?”

“That was hours ago!”

“How long have you been on tour, Miss Bracca?” Dunn asked.

“A year, almost exactly.”

“And this house has been empty all that time?”

“No, I’ve been home a couple times, and I had my brother checking on the place.”

“What’s his name?”

I hesitated, then figured if my brother had done something so bad they knew who he was, they’d certainly already know his name.

“Mikel,” I told them. “With a k and not a c and an h. But I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“We’re just trying to be thorough.”

“My brother didn’t force me to strip in the back of a pickup truck!”

“We’re not saying he did.”

“You’re saying you think I’m making this whole thing up.”

“There’s no physical evidence here, Miss Bracca,” Dunn said. “There’s nothing missing, you don’t appear to have been injured; in fact, you maintain you weren’t. We’ve got cars out in the neighborhood, they’re looking around, but all we’ve got right now is you, and frankly, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“I’m not making this up,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

“You’re describing a kidnapping, that’s serious stuff. And then what looks like the start of a sexual assault. But it doesn’t track, it doesn’t execute.”

I stared at the cops opposite me. “Why would I make this up?”

“We’re not saying you’re making this up.”

“There was a man with a gun, he made me take off my clothes—” But Watanabe interrupted me, holding up his hands, trying to soothe. “Miss Bracca, we’re taking a report, and we’ll put out a description for this guy, have a car stay in the area. But this doesn’t really sound like a stalker, or even a break-in. It sounds like maybe, just maybe, this was a guy thinking he had a mugging or something, and then he realized who you were, and he realized how far over his head he’d gotten.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“We certainly believe that you believe something happened,” Dunn said.

“So that’s it?” I asked after a second.

“We’ll file a report,” Dunn said, and from his tone I could tell he was moving into wrapping-up mode. “Keep an eye out, and there’ll be a patrol in the area. You should have some detectives calling you to follow up tomorrow.”

“And that’s all?”

“Miss Bracca, I understand your frustration. But there’s really no evidence of any crime having been committed.”

I nodded, not because I agreed. It wasn’t enough to say that I’d been terrified and humiliated, and trying to convince either of them that it hadn’t been just some mugging gone wrong, that it had been a stalker, seemed suddenly like a very egotistical claim to make.

And I was tired and out of cigarettes and still feeling a little hungover. The clock on the VCR was telling me it was four minutes to five in the morning. That just made it all seem even more surreal.

They were on their feet, and I realized they’d already said good-bye. I got up and shook each of their hands at the door, and they gave me new smiles, not professional now, and they each told me it had been a pleasure to meet me.

“Love the new song,” Watanabe said. “ ‘Queen of Swords,’ I just love that song.”

“It’s a great tune,” Dunn added.

I was too drained to be angry, or even annoyed. Cops come to my house to take a report, they turn it into a fan event.

“Thanks,” I said, and smiled right back at them, the way I always do when the people I meet stop being people, and turn into fans. “Thanks a lot.”

They left me alone, real happy to have met a rock star.

CHAPTER 4

For a minute after the cops pulled away, I just kept watching the street from the living room window. Rain was still falling lightly, my apple trees drooping from the weight of the water. Not much more to see beyond that. Silhouettes of parked cars in front of houses still sleeping, and a darkness that was heavy and wide. Irvington has few streetlamps.

The house creaked, then went silent again. It was a new noise to me, and I had to think it through before deciding that it was nothing to be alarmed about. My home had been built in 1923 in what was called locally the Portland craft style, and which I supposed up in Seattle was referred to as the Seattle craft style. It was barely two stories, a portion of the attic having been converted into the master bedroom with a bath. There was another full bath on the ground floor, near the guest room, and then the kitchen and the living room, some pantry space. The basement had been finished when I purchased the place, and I’d left detailed instructions on how I wanted the space converted into a music room, but I didn’t know if the contractors had done as asked. I didn’t feel much like finding out.

I’d closed on the house only two weeks before the tour had begun, and since then had been home only three times, the longest for a stretch of seventy hours back in July. We’d returned for a show out at the Gorge, about ninety miles east of Portland, one of those multiband, all-day affairs hosted by the local alternarock station. The gig had sucked, but those radio-hosted megashows always do—too many bands all vying for the limelight, and never a chance to get a decent sound check, so you never know what you’re going to be stepping into. When you play live and loud, there are monitors set up on the stage—essentially small speakers—positioned so the musicians can hear themselves. Kinda crucial.

That day the monitor mix had been awful, and after the sixth song the jackass on the board still couldn’t get it right, and we had no idea how we were sounding, but each of us was pretty certain “awful” might come close. Van finally stormed off the stage after “Broken Nails,” giving the finger to everyone in the audience.

The crowd had loved us anyway. They’d have loved a mechanical monkey clapping cymbals.

But that had been almost four months ago, and between travel, setup, and the show, I’d been in my home only long enough to sleep and do laundry, and even that had been difficult, because the contractor and the electrician and the plumber all wanted to talk to me about the work I was having them do. I’d barely even seen my brother, spending most of my remaining time with Joan and Steven.

Which was what made me remember that Steven was dead. Not remember, really; more, bring back the reality of it, solidify the fact. Claimed by that modern classic, complications brought about by cancer of the throat and mouth.

I felt supersize guilt. I hadn’t talked to Joan since the day after he’d died, since I’d told her I wouldn’t make it to the funeral. I’d have to see her. I’d have to explain myself.

I already knew that I wouldn’t be able to.

The headache was still with me, though now I didn’t know if it was from the drunk, the lack of sleep, the pure terror of the truck ride, the frustration of the police, or all of the above.

The house creaked again.

Maybe it hadn’t been a big deal, maybe the cops were right, it was just a mugging gotten out of control, a criminal biting off more than he could chew, then not knowing what to do with the leftovers. A mistake, nothing more. Maybe the thought that I would be stalked at all was ludicrous. I wasn’t the one pouting and preening onstage, I wasn’t the public face of Tailhook. That was Van, always was, always would be. If anyone was looking to sniff a pair of panties, they’d go after hers, not mine.

I didn’t want to be alone.

I let the curtains drop back over the window and grabbed my coat off the bag still in the hall. It took me a minute to search the drawers in the kitchen before I located my car keys in the back of the knickknack drawer, along with my garage opener. I couldn’t remember where anything was, and that only made me feel all the more disconnected with the space, all the more anxious to get out.

The garage was off the side of the house, pushed back about twenty feet from the street, freestanding, and my Jeep was where I’d last left it. Mikel might have used it, but he had his own car, so I figured he’d left mine alone. I climbed in and tried the engine, and the battery was weak on the ignition, but it caught after a long crank. The tank read just below half. I backed down the drive, switched on wipers and lights, closed the garage door after me, and headed the twelve blocks to the Plaid Pantry on Broadway, telling myself I would get some cigarettes and that was all.

The lot was illuminated and mostly empty, and I parked right out front. The clerk behind the counter looked up at me from his reading as I came inside, eyes on me all the way to the wall of refrigeration. I spotted the beer and pulled at the handle, but the door didn’t budge, locked.

“Not until seven,” the clerk said.

I glared back at him and he shrugged and resumed his reading, and I gave the door another protest tug, then got myself a can of Coke, instead. Portland goes dry from two-thirty until seven in the morning, no alcohol can be sold, and trying to convince the clerk to make an exception wouldn’t work, no matter who I was. Portland PD is serious about its alcohol enforcement, if not about its stalker laws.

Paid for the soda and two packs of Spirits, and it took the clerk until he was handing me my change before he raised an eyebrow and asked if he knew me.

“Where’d you go to high school?” I asked.

“Grant. You go to Grant?”

“No, I was over in Hawthorne.”

“Huh.”

“Oh, well,” I said, and went back out to my car. I opened one of the packs of smokes and lit a cigarette, then decided I still wasn’t going to go home, so I got out of the car again and went to the pay phone next to the entrance, trying to decide who I should call. Joan was pretty much straight out. Foster mother dispensation would get me a lot, but the guilt payback would be brutal, and I couldn’t do that to her.

So I started dialing Mikel’s number, thinking that, at the very least, I could determine whether or not he was renting out my home to any of his more disreputable friends.

It took four trills before he answered.

“Mikel? It’s Mim,” I said.

“Mim?”

“Your sister.”

He cleared his throat, coughed, rustled. I imagined him switching on the lamp, wondered if he was sleeping alone, or if Jessica was in bed with him. “Jesus, it’s not six yet. What time zone are you in?”

“Your time zone. Listen, brother dearest, and understand I ask this only because the cops put it in my head, but do any of your dope-fiend buddies own a big Ford pickup, maybe green, maybe blue?”

“Cops?” he asked, immediately alarmed.

“Yes, they wear uniforms and carry guns and—”

“I know what a cop is.”

“And I’m very proud of you for that. Answer the question, Mikel.”

“I’m not sure what the question is.”

I spoke slowly. “Do any of your drug-taking, dope-dealing, party-all-night friends own a big Ford pickup?”

“No. Why the hell are you even asking?” He coughed again, then added, “Wait, did you say you’re in my time zone?”

“I’m at the Plaid Pantry on Broadway and Sixteenth. Cold, tired, in the rain, and frankly still scared out of my mind.”

“What happened?” The hint of annoyance that had crept into his voice disintegrated. “Mim, are you okay?”

“I got home tonight and some guy pointed a gun at me and he made me get in his truck and . . . and it’s fucked up, it’s seriously fucked up, and I called the police, and they didn’t believe a word I said—”

“Go back inside,” Mikel said. I could hear him moving, getting out of bed. There was nothing else in the background though, so I guessed that meant he’d been sleeping alone. “Go back inside and wait for me, all right? I’ll be right there.”

“I’m all right now,” I said. The lie didn’t even sound believable to me.

“You’re always all right. Go back inside, I’ll be about ten minutes.”

“Mikel,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

It took him closer to fifteen minutes before he parked his Land Rover beside my Jeep. I’d spent the time drinking my Coke and smoking my cigarettes, standing by the pay phone, and when Mikel hopped out he was wearing a scowl, but he didn’t say anything until after he’d wrapped me up in a big hug, and I gave it right back, pressing my nose into his chest. I hugged back harder than I meant to at first, but it felt good and it felt safe.

“I told you to wait inside.”

“And I always do what you tell me,” I told his chest.

He let me go and looked me over, showing me the worry in his eyes. Mikel is three years my senior, just touching thirty, and every day he looks more like I remember our father, big and strong. We have similar features, but I got my mother’s body type, which makes me pretty small. Mikel’s got straight black hair and an angular face, blue eyes, broad shoulders. He looks like he could be in construction or some sort of physical labor, but that would require too much work, and one thing Mikel hates is work.

When pressed, he tells people that he’s in computers, doing Web design and software work, but that’s only half-true, and certainly doesn’t earn enough for a Land Rover. What earns enough for the Land Rover is selling pot and X and coke to the hip urban professionals who live on the west side of the river. He doesn’t use. He doesn’t take anything stronger than caffeine, ever. But he’s more than happy to sell.

He was dressed very Gap casual, hastily assembled, a sweater and corduroys.

“You should have waited inside,” he said.

I shook my head, not wanting to explain my reasons, not wanting to say that the clerk had figured out who I was, and that had I gone back into the store I’d have been trapped in twenty minutes of pretending to be nicer than I really am. Maybe it was selfish, but maybe I was entitled a little bit, and it wasn’t something I wanted to defend.

Mikel sighed, world-weary with his sister’s strangenesses. “What happened?”

“Not here,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it here. I want to sit down someplace warm and drink coffee and feel safe.”

“You have breakfast?”

“They fed us on the plane, just before we landed in L.A.,” I said. I didn’t add that I’d thrown it up shortly thereafter.

“You up for some Strong Bread?”

“The one on Sandy. Not the one near your place.”

“Why not the one near me?”

“Because I get recognized more at the one near your place.”

“Poor little princess,” he said, but he said it with a smile, and I wasn’t sure what was teasing and what wasn’t.

CHAPTER 5

The sky was lightening, but the rain was still falling when we reached the Cameo Café. I parked behind him about a block from the restaurant, and we scurried from the wet into the warmth and noise. On weekends it can take up to an hour to get a seat at the Cameo, especially in good weather, but even though it was noisy inside, the restaurant wasn’t full, and Mikel and I got a table near the back. It’s cramped inside so that when it’s really hopping, even someone of my size feels that she has to walk sideways to work her way between the tables, but once you get a seat, it’s pretty comfortable. The grill is right behind the counter, so all conversation is accompanied by the sizzle and smell of cooking food.

One of the Korean women who run the place dropped menus in front of us and gave us cheerful good-mornings along with two mugs of watery coffee. I drank mine greedily, as Mikel doctored his own cup with cream and sugar.

“So what happened?” he asked.

It was harder to tell it to him than it had been to tell it to the cops, maybe because I knew how he’d react to certain parts. I told him about my stalker who the cops were certain wasn’t a stalker at all, and he listened, fiddling with his silverware and watching me intently the whole time. His face tightened when I told him about the back of the truck, but it smoothed when I told him what the police had said.

“They don’t believe me,” I finished.

“I’m not sure I do, either,” Mikel said, slowly.

“How can you say that? Jesus Christ, Mikel! The guy could have raped me!”

“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but why didn’t he?”

“I don’t believe you just said that.”

“Stop being such a Drama Queen and think about it. It doesn’t make much sense, does it, Mim? You said your stuff was on the porch, yet it’s inside when you come home? You say you got kidnapped and stripped at gunpoint, but you don’t have a mark on you?”

“Would you rather that I’d called you from the fucking hospital?”

“Mim, you’ve been lying your whole damn life. You can’t expect me to take this one at face value.”

I got up, but he reached out for my wrist as I was squeezing around the table, taking hold, his fingers digging into me.

“Don’t run away from me,” Mikel said.

I yanked free. My voice was tight when I spoke. “I’m not lying. I’m not a liar. It happened. And I’m not going to sit here and have you tell me it didn’t.”

Mikel glanced around, then back to me. “For someone who doesn’t want to be recognized, little sister, you’re making a very big scene. Sit back down.”

I checked, saw that he was right, that heads had turned my way and were staying there.

“Sit down, Mim.”

“You’re a bastard.” I sat down.

“I am well aware of your feelings about our father.”

“You’re more like him every day,” I said.

It was a bald-faced lie, but it scored a point, and it forced silence for almost a minute.

“You said the alarm was off?” he asked.

“Not off, in reset.”

“See, that I believe.”

“Oh, just that?”

“Well, that’s my fault.” Mikel looked at his menu, then back to me, embarrassed.

“How is that your fault?”

“I had it shut off in August.”

“I was out of town and you had my damn alarm shut off?”

“The contractors kept setting it off when they were working.” He sat back, getting defensive. “I’m on the contact list. Whenever it went off, I got called.”

“Because you’re supposed to be looking out for me!”

“I was looking out for you. Every time there’s a false alarm, there’s a fine, Mim. It went off six separate times—that’s over two grand in fines—before I called and had it disconnected.”

“But they finished, the contractors finished.”

“Yeah.” He frowned. “I forgot to have it reactivated.”

I stared at him, and then the waitress came and we each ordered breakfast, Mikel asking for the Korean scramble, and I asking for the Strong Bread pancakes, which are full of all sorts of wholesome grains which are supposed to make you strong, at least according to the menu. They also sell Strong Bread by the loaf, but it’s harder to justify putting syrup on a loaf of bread, so the pancakes were the better choice.

The waitress left and Mikel excused himself, telling me he’d be right back, and then he headed outside. He was pulling out his mobile phone as he went through the door. It didn’t mean he was working a sale, but I couldn’t help assuming that he was.

I drank a second cup of coffee and half a glass of apple juice and tried not to be angry at Mikel. But when he came back to the table I was still feeling sulky.

“Sorry about that,” he said, taking his seat.

“Business good?”

“Wasn’t business.”

“Doesn’t answer the question.”

He shrugged.

“You should stop.”

“Why? To protect your good name?”

“Maybe to protect yours,” I shot back at him. “You’re gonna get caught, and you’ll end up like Tommy.”

“I’m never going to end up like Dad. I don’t drink, I don’t use, and I’m pretty fucking smart, if I may say so myself.”

“Smart would be not dealing.”

He looked at me pointedly. “See, and I’d think smart would be not using.”

“I don’t use.”

“You’re still drinking.”

“Look, if you’ve got somewhere to be, I don’t want to keep you.”

“Mim, you’re being an ass.”

“I wouldn’t want you to miss an opportunity,” I said.

“Now you’re being a passive-aggressive ass.”

“I just don’t want to inconvenience you.”

He stared at me for a long moment. Then he raised his hand, leveling his index finger.

“Rock Star!” Mikel bellowed in his best evangelical imitation. “I know thy name, demon, and it is Rock Star! Begone from this place!”

A couple people at the counter heard him and glanced over at us.

“Stop,” I said.

Mikel turned in his seat, as if trying to find a waiter, raising a hand, snapping his fingers silently. “Pardon, garçon? A bottle of Cristal, if you please?”

“Knock it off, Mikel.”

“A dozen white roses with which to adorn her hair.” He turned back to me, really amused, the grin making creases around his eyes. “The purest mountain spring water to bathe her fair and adored flesh.”

I tried to glare him into silence, to really ratchet it up, but his smile did it, and I cracked, started giggling. Our plates came and I poured syrup on my pancakes and Mikel dumped most of a bottle of Tabasco on his scramble, and I waited until the waitress had departed before speaking again.

“I’m not a prima donna,” I told him.

“You want me to cut that for you? I’d be happy to slice it into perfectly uniform bits, then feed them to you with a caviar spoon.”

“You don’t even know what a caviar spoon looks like.”

“For one such as yourself, such a failing on my part is inconceivable. I shall throw myself into traffic at once, of course.”

“But who will I get to cut my pancakes?”

He laughed again. “Okay, I’ll let you feed yourself. But if Vanessa asks about the syrup, I’m telling the truth.”

“Fuck Vanessa,” I said, with sincere bile.

Mikel stopped his fork halfway to his mouth. “What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“So why should I rush out and fuck Vanessa? Not that I’d mind, of course.”

“She sent me home.”

“You’re not back on a break?”

I shook my head, used my fork to cut a not-very-uniform piece of pancake. “They’re in New York. She’s replacing me with Oliver Clay.”

“Who’s Oliver Clay?”

“You haven’t met him. He’s a session guy, out of Seattle, we used him for backing tracks on ‘Energize’ and ‘Tomorrow-Today-Tonight.’ He’s taking my place for the rest of the tour.”

Mikel ate a bite, then a second one, studying me. I pushed my pancakes around, suddenly not wanting them.

“At least I don’t have to worry about Van telling me to watch my figure,” I said.

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing, I told you.”

“You have a fight?”

I shook my head.

He set his utensils down, leaned forward, lowered his voice. “Mim?”

“It’s exhaustion,” I said. “They’re making the announcement sometime today. Saying that I’m taking the rest of the tour off.”

“Exhaustion.”

“Yeah.”

“Miriam?”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

He didn’t move, keeping his head close, and I kept looking at my plate, at the islands of pancake and the sea of syrup. I knew what it was he was thinking, I knew he suspected. He quit drinking in his late teens, and I could feel his judgment, and I thought about calling him a hypocrite.

We finished eating, but the conversation went shallow, mostly Mikel asking questions about the tour. We’d hit Japan before Australia, with two nights in New Zealand in between, and he was curious about Christchurch. He knew a couple of software people who’d had protracted stays in New Zealand while working postproduction on a series of films, and apparently all of them had raved about what a great place the country was.

“Nice crowds,” I told him. “Nice hotel. Venue was cool, very modern. Great acoustics. I broke three strings on the Tele the first night and had to finish the second set using my alternate, but I don’t think anyone but me and Fabrizio noticed.”

“Fabrizio?”

“My guitar tech. Nice guy. Fat little guy. But nice.”

“That’s all you can say about New Zealand?”

“That’s all of New Zealand that I experienced. If you want more, I can try to remember the hotel room décor and what I ate for dinner each night.”

We finished eating and the check came, and I snatched it before Mikel could, and he tried to go all big brotherly on me.

“Give it.”

“No.” I dug around in my jacket for my wallet.

“Give it here, Miriam.”

“Are you rich?”

“I’m comfortable.”

“Yeah, well, I have been told that I am stinking rich,” I said. “My treat.”

It was hard for him to argue with that. We paid and went outside, and the rain had stopped. The sky was the color of a muddy sheet. Mikel waited while I lit a cigarette, then asked what my plans were.

“Home,” I said. “Sleep.”

“You sure you want to go home?”

“Don’t know what else my choices are. I mean, I either go home, or I never go home, right?”

“I’m just asking if you’re up to it.”

“I’m upper to it now than I was before I called you. Daylight makes it better, I think. I should probably do some shopping, get some groceries in.”

“I’ll keep you company.”

I glanced at him suspiciously. “Overprotective much?”

“Only when you let me.”

“Mikel.”

“Let me keep you company,” he said gently. “We’ll go shopping, I’ll go back to your place with you, I’ll look around, we’ll call the Scanalert people and tell them to turn your system back on. It’ll make me feel better.”

I thought about protesting, but didn’t really want to. I didn’t want him to see that I thought he was being really sweet, either, so instead I shrugged and headed back to my Jeep, telling him I wanted to go to Fred Meyer. He followed me down Sandy Boulevard, and when I checked in my rearview mirror, I could see him behind his wheel, watching my progress and the traffic, all the while talking on his mobile phone. He caught me looking at the light and gave me a grin.

I grinned back and shook my head. For all his many faults, I adore my brother.

He almost makes up for our fuck-awful parents.

We stopped by the bank first, so I could get some cash out of the ATM, and I checked all my accounts, not just my savings. It was the first time I’d actually seen my balance in months, and I was a little surprised at the numbers. According to my checking balance alone, I was maybe a very rich girl, indeed.

The machine only let me withdraw four hundred dollars, and I took it to the Fred Meyer on Broadway. Freddy’s is a mammoth combo-store, groceries and clothing and household supplies, and a couple of them even have electronics and jewelry departments, and I’ve never been in one when it wasn’t busy, no matter what time of day or night. Freddy’s also has the slowest checkers in the world, which doesn’t help things. But for one-stop shopping in the Portland metro area, it can’t be beat.

We were there about an hour, getting everything I needed or might need to reactivate my life at home. It would have taken less time, but I got cornered early in the cereal aisle by three teens, two girls and a guy who should have been in school. Either the news hadn’t broken yet or they hadn’t heard, because they immediately started looking for Van and Click, as if we all three did our shopping together.

I asked them their names and introduced them to my brother. We talked about how amazing Van and Click were, and then I told them that I had to get back home because it was past my bedtime. They laughed.

“You’re my favorite,” one of the girls told me. “You kick total ass.”

They went away, toward baking supplies. Mikel was smiling slightly.

“It’s not a thing,” I told him.

“You can be very nice when you want to be. Very gracious.”

“They’re not asking for much.”

“Suppose that depends on where you’re standing.”

I dropped two boxes of shredded wheat in the already full shopping cart. The baking supplies aisle was down below our position on cereal, and I could see the three kids picking out bags of chocolate chips. One of them was looking back at me, speaking to the others, and she waved when she saw my look, so I waved back, then turned away.

“I’m twenty-six,” I told Mikel. “I own a house, I could buy five or six others just like it. I own more guitars than I could ever need, more amps than I can possibly use, I’ve got a platinum American Express card life. I don’t have to look at the prices when I’m shopping for groceries at Fred Meyer, because they will never stock something I can’t afford.

“That’s all because people like them like Tailhook enough to pay eighteen bucks for an album, or eighty for a seat at a concert, or twenty for a forty-five-minute compilation of very bad, very overproduced music videos.”

Mikel was listening, his head down a little, as if to keep it closer to my own. When Tailhook had left on tour, we’d been popular, but nothing like we were now. Our third album, Nothing for Free, had just been released, and we didn’t have any idea how it would do. Certainly neither Click nor I had ever been stopped while doing our shopping. It had happened to Van, but only rarely, and only at home, because we were, by and large, a local band.

“Never bite the hand that feeds you,” Mikel said.

“Not even that.” I glanced back down the aisle, saw that the three of them had gone. “You want to know what that was all about?”

“They wanted to tell you how much they like you.”

“Yeah, but do you know why?”

“It’s a way of saying thank you?”

“That was about how they want to be my friend. They shake my hand and tell me their names, and I tell them mine, just to remind them I’m a real person, too, that we should act like real people act when they first meet one another. And then it’s small talk, weather, music, movies, shit like that.

“Then there’s the pause—and there is always the pause, Mikel—the moment when there’s nothing else to say, because they’re done, and they’re waiting for me.”

“To do what?”

“To say something like, hey, you guys seem totally cool, why don’t we go get a pizza together. Or, hey, you know what would be fun? Let’s go back to my place and watch DVDs. They want to be more than fans. They want to be special to me, and that’s when I offer them my hand again, and I say thank you so much for saying hello, and have a very good life. Most of the time, they go away happy.”

“Most of the time?”

I started pushing the cart again, heading to dairy. “Sometimes they don’t get the hint. Sometimes they get cranky—‘you wouldn’t be where you are without me.’ Or ‘you love all the attention, don’t pretend you don’t get off on it.’ But maybe ninety percent of the people who stop me, all they want to do is say, hey, thanks.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Mikel said, after a couple seconds. “I couldn’t keep it up.”

I was trying to decide between low- and nonfat milk. I went with the skim, placing it next to the cereal, so they could get used to each other’s company.

“You should see Van do it sometime,” I told him. “She’s very smooth, always smiling. I’ve seen her in a Virgin Megastore signing autographs for six hours straight, no breaks, no pauses. Always makes eye contact, always says, ‘May I sign that for you, please?’ and then always says, ‘Thanks so much for coming to see us.’ She’s better at it than I will ever be.”

“You seemed pretty smooth to me.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s nice of you to say so.”

We filled the back of my Jeep with the groceries, and when we got back to my house, I put the car in the garage. We unloaded the bags into the kitchen through the back door, and while I sorted and stored my purchases, Mikel took a wander through the house. I was still at it when he came back into the kitchen, and he picked up the phone and used his PDA to find the phone number for Scanalert, and I heard his half of the conversation. He had to give them his name and then a password—“Renderman”—to verify his identity, and then requested that they switch the system back on. He hung up happy.

“Done,” he said.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. They just throw a switch or something.”

We finished with the unpacking, making light conversation. I finally remembered to ask about Jessica, and he told me that they had stopped seeing each other during the summer, that he was going with a girl named Avery now. I felt bad that I hadn’t known about the switch, and he told me about the new girl, and how she was a dancer, and how much he thought I’d like her.

“You need a dancer for a video, you should get her,” he said.

“I’m not in the band anymore,” I reminded him. “Even if I was, I wouldn’t have any say in it.”

“You could talk to Van.”

I shrugged, thinking that the way Mikel went through women was just another residual of our shared childhood. I couldn’t remember ever having had a romantic relationship that lasted more than a month myself, and the only one that lasted that long had been almost ten years ago, during high school. But Mikel’s news sobered me; it had looked like the thing with Jessica was serious.

I’d bought beer even though Mikel had given me the hairy eyeball while I was doing it, and as I put the last of the six-packs in the refrigerator, he dropped the bomb. It was probably part of the reason he’d insisted on accompanying me, and he must have been waiting from the moment we’d finished breakfast, but it had taken him almost three hours before he could do it.

“Tommy’s out.”

I stared at my newly stocked refrigerator shelves, at a box of Land O Lakes butter. I wasn’t certain I’d heard him right.

“What?”

“He’s out,” Mikel said. “Got out three months ago.”

I did the math in my head, closing the refrigerator door. “That’s not right, he’s supposed to be in for another five years.”

Mikel had been folding the paper grocery bags, making a stack of them on the counter. He smoothed the last one down, shaking his head.

“Paroled?” I asked. “If he was paroled there should have been a hearing, Mikel. I should have been notified. I should have been able to attend.”

“He wasn’t paroled,” Mikel said. “He’s out, he’s done. All finished.”

“He was supposed to do twenty years.”

“There’s this thing, it’s called a buy-back or time-served or something like that. For every day of good behavior in prison, the state takes a certain amount off your sentence. It’s how they deal with overcrowding.”

“That’s not right.”

“He did fifteen years, Mim. That’s a long time.”

I was practically spitting. “Fuck that. Mom’s still dead.”

“And he’s still our father.”

“No, my father’s dead.”

“I’m not talking about Steven—”

“Good, you better not.”

He took a soft breath, looking away from me. I waited, then decided I didn’t want to wait for what he might have to say, and found my cigarettes. I lit one and flicked angry ash into the sink.

“He’s been staying with me, Mim. He’d really like to see you.”

“He’s what?”

“He didn’t have a place to stay. He’s staying with me until he can get on his feet.”

“Ex-con Tommy living with my drug-dealing brother? Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s not like that. I’m just helping him out. He’s having trouble finding a job, you know, with the economy the way it is.”

“Hard to get a gig when you’re an alcoholic killer,” I said. “I’m really torn up for him.”

“He was in prison for fifteen years for what he did,” Mikel said. “He’s not the same man he was when it happened, he’s not the same man he was when we were in that house.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe it’s time you stopped inventing history, Miriam, and saw Mom a little more for who she was, rather than this sainted martyr you want her to be. Maybe you ought to give Tommy the benefit of the doubt.”

“You saw it happen,” I said, softly. “You saw it, too.”

“I know that, but—”

“You saw it, too!” I screamed at him.

It pushed him back a step, surprised him. I smoked more of my cigarette.

“He’d like to see you, just to talk with you.” Mikel picked up his keys from where they were lying on the counter. “I think if you can give total strangers twenty minutes at Fred Meyer, then he’s not asking all that much.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I’ve got shit to do, you’re tired, and I don’t want to get in the way of your drinking.”

“Hey, fuck you, big brother.”

He started down the hall, to the front door. “I’ll give you a call tonight or tomorrow, to check up on you. You might want to call Joan, let her know you’re back.”

I caught up with him at the front door, as he was moving onto the porch.

“He’s staying with you?”

“I told you already.”

“Right now, Tommy’s there right now?”

“I don’t know about right now. He’s been picking up construction work where he can, so he heads out pretty early.”

“Do me a favor? When you see him?”

“What?”

“Make a point of telling him I hope he burns in hell,” I said, then slammed the door on him.

CHAPTER 6

I cracked a beer, then fetched my flight case from the hallway. The alarm panel said the system was “ready,” so I armed the system, and when the panel sang its three-tone alert, I actually felt safe and tight in my house. Then I took the case down to the basement, to the music room.

The contractors had done as I’d asked, sealing the windows and replacing the entry door with a heavier, reinforced version. There was padding now down over the concrete, and acoustic tile on the ceiling, and my gear was there, too, my amps and other guitars—the ones that hadn’t come on tour with me—and my keyboard. In a pinch, the space could serve as a passable recording studio.

I worked the combination on the flight case and snapped the locks up, then checked the Tele. It had traveled fine, secure in its bed, dry and happy and cool to the touch. It wasn’t my first guitar and it wasn’t my newest, but it was my favorite electric. Leon Fender and George Fullerton started making Fender guitars in 1950, and their first model was called the Broadcaster, but they had to change the name because the Gretsch company made drums also called Broadcaster. They renamed their guitar the Telecaster, and it’s been pretty much the same instrument ever since; the only real difference you find is in the quality of workmanship and materials, who did the building, what was used to construct the guitar.

My Tele was made in 1954, body of ash, neck of maple, black pick guard, still fitted with its original hardware, a gift from the label after Nothing for Free went gold in the U.S. They’d given Van an emerald and gold necklace from Tiffany, and Click a set of Keplinger snare drums. The Tele was almost fifty years old, now, and to this day I’ve never met an electric that plays as sweetly. It had the original pickups, but the input jack had been replaced, and the fingerboard refretted, a custom job that made it less collectible but let it play like butter under my fingers. Fabrizio did some other minor work on it while we were on the road, as well. Before each show, he would string every one of my guitars, replacing the old ones with the new. He was utterly tone-deaf, and relied on an electronic tuner, and each and every time he handed me a guitar, it was perfect. I’d fiddle with the tuning heads just for show, but he and I both knew it was garbage.

Holding the Tele and thinking of Fabrizio, I realized that Van hadn’t even given me the opportunity to say good-bye.

I put the guitar in its stand, next to the Gibson SG, got out the soft cloth and gave every instrument a wipe-down, then put the case and cloth away in the storage closet. I had to move a couple boxes to make room, and when I was shoving things around, one of the boxes tumbled. Copies of the press kit from Nothing for Free spilled onto the floor, black-and-white photos of the band sliding across one another like a monochromatic tide. I swore a lot and bent down, trying to gather them all together again. There were another three boxes in the closet just like the one I’d toppled, each filled with the same promotional material, and I still had no idea on earth why they’d been sent to me rather than our manager, Graham.

Things back in their place, I headed upstairs. The beer was dead, so I exchanged it for a fresh one in the kitchen, drank it while I smoked another cigarette, looking out the window at the backyard. The lawn was more crabgrass than anything else, and the rosebushes all needed a desperate pruning. Maybe I could get a recommendation for a gardener from one of my neighbors.

I finished the cigarette about the same time I finished the beer, so I opened another two, then dragged myself upstairs to my bedroom. I put both beers on the nightstand. The bedroom smelled of fresh carpet and the hint of fresh paint, and, again, carpentry, but nothing more. The pictures on my bureau were all the same. There were three of them—a small picture of myself with my mother, taken at one of my barely remembered birthday parties, when I’d turned either five or maybe six. Another one, larger, of me and Mikel, taken a couple years back at a bar. The last one a backstage shot taken here, at the Roseland Theatre in town, after a Tailhook show, of me standing between Steven and his wife, my foster mother, Joan. In the picture, I’m shining with sweat and holding a bouquet of flowers, and Joan and Steven each look like they’re proud enough to burst.

I unpacked my bag, throwing my dirty clothes in the laundry basket and my clean clothes in their drawers. I undressed, took a beer with me into the shower. I stayed under the water long enough to finish it, got out when it was empty, and dropped the bottle in the trash. There was condensation on the mirror, and I swiped at it and stared at my reflection, seeing my mother. She’d been a small woman, too, and for some reason I couldn’t conjure a memory of her hands ever being warm. She’d been thirty-two when she died, barely six years older than me, and showing more age than she should’ve, thin-faced and already creasing.

No wrinkles on me yet, nothing that would take three hours in a makeup chair to hide. I looked myself over, checking from every angle I could manage, and remained pretty pleased with the results of my survey. I hadn’t been vain before meeting Van, and I didn’t like to think I was, now, but being with her for so long had taken its toll. We’d been a band for less than a month when she shared with me her Thesis of Rock Stardom, which essentially came down to this—for guys, it’s how you sound first, then how you look; for women, it’s how you look, then how you sound, and even then, it’s more about how you look. It was fine if Click wanted to chow on cheeseburgers and sit on his can watching TV, she’d say; you and me, girlfriend, we’ve got a date at 24-Hour Fitness.

I wondered if the man with the gun had liked what he’d seen. I wondered if he’d gotten off on it, and then thought I was probably damn lucky he hadn’t.

And for a second, I wondered if any of it—the man with the gun, the back of the Ford, the drive around for nothing—had happened at all.

Mikel was wrong about a great many things, and he certainly was no authority on trust or The Truth, but he was right in at least one respect: I am a hell of a liar.

I’m so good at it, half the time, I don’t even know I’m doing it myself.

I came back to my reflection, the water still on my skin, and began toweling off. Honestly, I thought I looked pretty good. Hell, I thought I looked better than pretty good, I thought I looked great, and I told my reflection as much, and then added some unkind things about Van and vanity and how it was appropriate that the one was named after the other. I wasn’t quite sure which one I meant, but I was very passionate about the whole thing, and my reflection, if anything, seemed even more sincere about it than I.

There was another beer waiting, and I went to keep it company, and a little later decided that there were more downstairs, and I could have a couple of those, too. I thought about putting on some clothes or a towel and then decided, my house, my rules. I negotiated the descent okay, and I made it to the kitchen just fine, but I had some trouble getting back up the stairs.

Actually, I had a lot of trouble getting back up the stairs.

I remember making it to the bedroom. I remember a bottle breaking on the bathroom tile. I remember that there was blood, and that upset me.

I don’t really remember much more than that, honestly.

CHAPTER 7

I suppose what happened in Sydney started in Christchurch, but it probably started long before that. And the sad thing is, the Christchurch gig was amazing, maybe because so much had threatened to go wrong.

We’d played in a smaller venue than expected, only three hundred people at capacity, and the hall had been crammed, completely SRO. The audience stood shoulder to shoulder, the air-conditioning on the fritz, and the stage monitors that we use to hear ourselves play had suffered what the head sound tech called an Apollo 13. By which he meant a catastrophic failure he had no idea how to fix.

Given all of these things, we should have stunk on ice. But it was a small stage, and we used it, and Van and I danced around the lip and clambered all over Click and his kit, and we improvised, and we played like hell, but most of all, we had much fun.

God, we had so much fun.

And when it’s like that, the audience knows it, and they don’t care that the only fresh air is coming in through the opened windows and the propped doors, they don’t care that they’re getting bumped and knocked from every direction, they don’t care that their feet are killing them. They want the music, the show, and when they get it, they’re someplace else, someplace better.

Those nights are magic.

They called us back three times, and at the end of the third encore they were still on their feet, and making so much noise that applause and cheering chased us all the way to the green room. Graham was waiting, and his expression confirmed it; we’d blown the doors off the place.

“This is it,” he said, rushing from Van to Click to me, handing a towel and a bottle of water to each of us. “This is the memory I’m keeping, the one for my deathbed. This is my moment of triumph.”

We shared in our glory between gulps of water, laughing, praising, remembering the moments of brilliance, the near-disasters, the fantastic saves. Graham ran the circuit, slapping shoulders and pouring drinks. I’d finished one of my fifths of Jack Daniel’s onstage during the show, but the rider in my touring contract specified two to be supplied at each venue, and Graham handed me the remainder without my even having to ask. My rider also specified two liters of Arrowhead water and a carton of American Spirit Yellows, hinge-lids. I liked the fifths because they were easy to carry and easy to stow onstage. The Arrowhead normally got finished while onstage, too, like it had this night. Of the cigarettes, I’d keep a pack or two, then give the rest to the crew.

“Mimser,” Graham said when he gave me the bottle, “I’m calling Prudential, fuck that, I’m calling Lloyds of London first thing tomorrow, on my honor, I’m calling them and insuring your hands! I saw smoke tonight, smoke coming from those strings.”

I laughed around the mouth of the bottle, fell into a chair. Graham leaned in and smooched my sweaty forehead, then headed for Click. Click was halfway through rolling himself a cigarette, and when Graham uncharacteristically gave him a hug, tobacco went spilling out of the paper and onto his lap, and I laughed again, Van joining, too.

“The hell are you on, man?” Click demanded.

“A beer, a beer for the beat.” Graham was spinning around, searching for a bottle. Click’s rider was the simplest of the three of us—he’d specified nothing but a carton of Bridgeport India Pale Ale, and he’d done it as a joke, because it was a local Portland microbrew, and he figured to give the promoters a headache. It did, I’m sure, but there was always a carton waiting for him. He was sick to death of the stuff.

“Nah, I’m good with water, Graham, and you need a tranquilizer.”

Graham whipped around again, clapping a hand down on each of Click’s shoulders, once more disrupting the rolling process. “This is the love, Click, and you must accept it. You were outstanding tonight, you could have gotten the dead to their feet the way you were playing tonight.”

“You are so high,” Click told him.

“On life!” Graham said, gave Click one last pat and moved, finally, to Vanessa, where she was sprawled in a chair, her shoes already off, finishing her second bottle of water. Her rider specified that the water be Evian. It also specified a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, a bottle of Glenlivet, and a dozen fresh-cut red and white roses. She’d drink the water, but never drank the alcohol. She wouldn’t give it away, either; she’d dump the contents either down the drain or down the toilet, and once or twice I caught her using it as a perfume.

The roses normally figured into the encore, when Van would go to the edge of the stage and give a couple to whoever had caught her eye during the show. It was the code—a fresh young male carrying a couple roses, red or white, got access backstage, and often access to even more than that.

Graham opened a third bottle of Evian for her, swapping it out for Van’s empty, then crouched down beside the seat, his hands in front of him, cupped, as if he would catch whatever she might spill. Van took another swig from the bottle, then looked to Click, then to me, grinning. She was still a little out of breath from our close, and perspiration still shone on her arms and face. She looked at Graham and the grin got bigger.

“You may praise,” she said, regally.

Click and I laughed, and Graham didn’t miss the cue.

“I think a shrine, Vanessa. A shrine dedicated to you, a shrine befitting a goddess. You have ruined Christchurch for the next girl, there is no one to follow you.”

“You were practicing that one,” she said mildly.

“I was. I was, but I think it captures the essence.”

“It wasn’t bad.”

“I’ll swap you insurance for a statue,” I told Van.

“Fuck that, I’ll take either of yours for the walking dead,” Click said.

Graham got to his feet, looking at all of us, touching one hand to his breast, faking the wound to his heart. “All I do for you, and yet you mock. Do I not care for you? Do I not provide for you? Do I not love you?”

We all told him that yes, he loved us very well, indeed, and we laughed more, and set about getting cleaned up and ready for the first wave of backstage passes and VIPs. As our manager, Graham is required to be our greatest advocate, but even his hyperbole knew some bounds; seeing him like this, tonight, was different, and only reinforced the sense of triumph.

The parade of visitors started, and we played nice with them all for another hour or so. Most of the flock went to Van, but Click and I had enough attention that we couldn’t duck out without being rude. You never know who’ll be coming backstage; we’ve had politicians and movie people, we’ve had local celebs who act like we should know them, and people who’ve won contests who act like we shouldn’t. Sometimes someone from the label shows, or someone hooked into the Big Money, and they’ve got to be treated like insiders. So it’s part of the job, to be nice backstage, and after a show like this one, it’s even easy, and pleasant.

The last were two girls, late teens, with passes won at a local record store, and Click and I did our best to keep them engaged, getting them to talk about themselves, as Van finished with her clump. Then Graham was at the door, telling us we had to get back to the hotel, and I walked the two girls out, giving them a handshake, thanking them for coming. Graham went with them down the hall, to make sure security got them out the rest of the way without trouble, and that left one person alone, outside, a good-looking white kid in his early twenties, holding three white roses.

“Hey, you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

He actually checked over his shoulder to see if I was possibly talking to someone else before giving me an answer. “Pete.”

I nodded and stepped back, searching for Vanessa, who was getting the last of her things together. “His name is Pete,” I told her. “He’s waiting outside.”

She grinned at me, a little caught, a little conspiratorially, and I thought what the hell, it’s been a good night, I’ll make it easy.

I leaned back out into the hall. “Hey, Pete—we’re getting ready to go back to the hotel.”

“Oh,” he said. He did a bad job of hiding disappointment.

“You want to hold on a minute, you could probably ride back with Van.”

It took him a second to parse it, to trace the thread to its inevitable conclusion. Then he said, “Oh,” again, but this time it was far more enthusiastic.

“Be a second,” I said, and closed the door.

“Thanks,” Van said.

“Cute.”

“God, yes.”

“He a keeper?”

She shrugged, pulling her bag onto her shoulder. “I’ll let you know in the morning.”

Pete was enough of a keeper that he was at breakfast the next morning in the restaurant, looking dazed to be seated between Van and Graham. Click was there, too, but I didn’t realize I was running late until I saw our tour manager, Leon, with them, as well. I caught the last of the day’s marching orders, and then Van told Pete to go with Leon. I downed some orange juice, listening to their idle talk.

“Well?” I asked Van.

“Throwing him back,” she told me.

I nodded and switched to coffee, doctoring it with way too much sugar, just for the added jump start. Click was working on an omelet, and Graham was futzing with his PDA.

“You hungover?” Van asked.

“Just a headache,” I told her.

“Not coming down with something?”

“No, just a headache.” I looked closer. “You’ve got a hickey.”

Click and Graham both focused on her, and Van’s hand flew to the side of her neck, alarm all across her face. Then she saw me grinning and picked up her butter knife, making a stabbing gesture.

“Not funny, Mim!”

“No, especially if he’s not a keeper.”

“Shut up, drink your coffee.”

“Yes, my mistress.”

Graham stowed his PDA, pulled out his briefcase, and started distributing photocopies.

“Came this morning. You are looking at a mock-up of the article that will run next week in Rolling Stone. Complete, I might add, with an image of Tailhook on the cover.”

Conversation stopped for most of a minute as rustling paper and moving silverware took over the audio. The packets were ten pages, including a copy of the cover photo, stapled together, black-and-white. I skimmed, more interested in combating my headache than finding out how good or bad I looked, but Click and Vanessa both put full attention onto theirs.

“I’m ‘The Body,’ ” Van announced after a moment. “Me, body.”

“Not just any body,” Graham said. “The Body.”

“This’ll be in color?”

“That’s what I’m told. The article is mixed, some b/w, but your shots are color.”

“The body?” I asked.

Van showed me the page she was looking at, a picture of her relaxing in a chair, head craned back but turned toward the camera, laughing and stretching. Her belly was bare, showing the hoop through her navel, the tone of her muscle. Not overtly sexual, but attractive. It was captioned with the words “The Body.”

“Which makes Click?”

Both Click and Graham answered. “ ‘The Spine.’ ”

I went to my copy and flipped through. The picture had Click from the waist up, wearing his Winterhawks jersey, looking straight on at the camera with his hand-rolled cigarette drooping from a corner of his mouth. His smile in the shot was amused at the attention.

I flipped to what they said about me, and when I saw that I’d been labeled “The Brains,” I laughed out loud. Then I saw the picture they were using.

I wasn’t certain it was me at all for a couple of seconds. I just didn’t think I looked like that, that I could ever look like that. The second thing was that I had no memory of it being taken, no recall of the moment when the camera turned on me to catch me in the pose.

It wasn’t a studio shot, it was a candid, probably taken during the two weeks the interviewer had been in our shadow, and it looked like I was backstage someplace, alone, sitting on one of the metal gear boxes. Before a show, or maybe after, because I had my concert clothes on, the cargo pants and the tank top. The Tele in my hands, eyes closed, my head back, not exerting myself, just relaxed, just playing, maybe even singing. Light on me and shadow all around.

I’d never looked that good, that sexy, in all my life.

“Pretty hot,” Graham said. “Pretty hot, indeed.”

“You look three seconds from orgasm,” Click observed.

“You’ve never seen me three seconds from orgasm. How would you know?” I told him.

“My imagination is active. It looks entirely sexual, it looks like you’re getting off.”

“Were it that easy.”

“You’ve had a long-term relationship for a while now, haven’t you?”

I held up my right hand. “Yes, the five of us are very happy together.”

“That is a picture that will be on lockers,” Graham told me. “That is a picture that gets reprinted, Mimser. That is a picture that immortalizes a rock star.”

I wasn’t sure what I felt about that.

From the look on Van’s face, she wasn’t, either.

The second night in Sydney, all of us—the band, the crew, everyone—went to a party at a club called Home. The party was thrown by the label, celebrating not just the Rolling Stone cover, but also the debut of our new single. “Queen of Swords.” It had entered the Billboard Top Fifty at twenty-two, as they say, with a bullet, and it was a big fucking deal, because it meant we’d finally smashed out of the alt-rock circle, and now had a genuine mainstream hit on our hands.

I was drunk when I arrived at the party, having polished off the second fifth of Jack in the limo on the way over, and Graham had to shepherd me across the floor and to the VIP room before he could get to the serious business of glad-handing the reps. I stayed on a couch, watching pretty girls and handsome men and avoiding conversation, and at some point someone handed me another bottle, and I got to work on that until I couldn’t work on anything anymore.

Sometime later, Graham helped me into my hotel room, got me onto my bed and the boots off my feet and the wastebasket by my head.

“Just put it in the goal, baby,” he told me.

The next day was hell.

We had a live set to be played on local radio, and that had to be canceled, but there were two television appearances to do, and there was no way out of those. Graham had slept in my room, dozing in the easy chair by the desk, and every time I’d woken to vomit or use the bathroom, he’d been there.

The first television spot was live, for an audience, and when I saw myself on the monitors, I knew the makeup chair hadn’t been enough. I looked awful, and even though my hands knew what to do, Van froze me out during the set, and even Click kept his distance. The worst part was that after we’d finished playing “Queen of Swords,” the host wanted time with Van in the chair, and that meant that Click and I had to stay on the stage, beneath the lights. It took supreme effort to keep from being sick again.

Then we changed studios and did another set. This one went a little better, but not much.

As soon as we were finished, Graham carted me back to the hotel, and put me back to bed. The good news was that we had the night off. The bad was that we were flying to New York in the morning, to do an MTV gig, and that we were all supposed to meet in the lobby at six.

I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might be sober by then.

I was, but not enough that I realized what I was seeing when I reached the lobby the next morning. I had my bags and my flight case for the Tele, and I came out of the elevator and into the lobby with the dawn just starting to stream in through the hotel’s windows, bouncing harsh off the marble floor. Beyond the service counter there was a little sitting area, and they were all already there, Van, Click, and Graham, seated around a little coffee table.

Click saw me making toward them first, and he reached out and tapped Van’s bare knee through her torn Levi’s, said something. She and Graham both looked my way, standing up, and Click followed to his feet a second later, slower.

None of them had any bags visible, and I supposed it could have meant that they’d already loaded them, but even as I thought that, I knew it wasn’t the case. A weird tightness crawled across my chest, as if trying to squeeze, but from the inside, and I could feel my heart beating, not like it was faster, but as if it had suddenly grown larger, as if each pulse threatened to rupture my chest.

Van had one of her trademark tank tops on, a black one with a silver logo in its center. The logo was an image of a stylized, almost Art Deco, woman, standing in a swirling G, and beneath the letter was the word “Girlfiend.” It was the name of a lesbian boutique in Los Angeles, on La Cienega, though Van didn’t wear the shirt because she was advertising a preference; she wore it because it made the boys crazy. Her skin was clear and her eyes were bright, and her hair professionally unruly. She hadn’t bothered with makeup, and when she smiled, her lips seemed to almost pale away against her face.

“Mim,” she said, and for a moment I thought that I could get forgiveness without asking. Then the smile went away, and I wasn’t going to see it again.

“This is ominous.” I tried to make it sound flip. It didn’t.

“We’ve got to talk about some changes.” She was watching me closely, not quite staring, but really focusing. Then she gestured at the seat that Click had vacated and added, “You want to sit down?”

I looked at Graham, but Graham wasn’t having any, focusing instead on the leather portfolio he was holding in his hands. Click barely gave me eye contact before looking away to Vanessa.

“You’re canning me?” I directed it at Van, trying to keep my voice strong. It came out too loud, and bounced around the lobby. Early risers glanced our way.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Van motioned at the chair again, then fell back into hers.

I stared at her, but she was only giving me her profile now, facing the empty seat. Neither Graham nor Click made a move or a sound.

I had to set down my bags to take the chair, and it was clumsy, and humiliating.

Van waited for me to get settled. “You were really fucked-up yesterday.”

“Are you canning me?” I asked again.

Van shook her head slightly, as if to say that I had her wrong, that wasn’t what this was about at all. “Been a long tour, Mim.”

“Why won’t you give me an answer?”

“Gonna be even longer, now that we’ve added all those European dates.” She glanced past me, around the lobby. Out the windows, you could see the harbor and the opera house. “I’m not sure you’re up to it.”

“What—I don’t even understand what . . . what are you saying, Van?”

She focused on me again. “Your drinking’s way out of control.”

Heat flared in my cheeks and neck, and I realized the humiliation I’d been feeling had simply been the orchestra tuning up, going through their scales. We’d hit the overture now. I opened my mouth and couldn’t find my voice enough to respond.

“We’re worried about you.”

“You bitch,” I said.

“Mim, you were so drunk the second night in Melbourne you barely made it through the encore.”

“My playing stands,” I said. “My playing is solid, this is not about my fucking playing!”

“You don’t need to shout.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this! You didn’t have shit to sing before I came along, you were an actress with a rhythm section, that’s it! Now you’re cutting me loose because I drink? At least I’m not chasing dick onstage, Vanessa!”

She pinked up, and maybe was rethinking her choice of setting for the scene. “What I do in my time has never gotten in the way of the band.”

“You’re full of shit,” I said. “This isn’t about my drinking, that’s just your fucking excuse. This is about that fucking Stone piece, that’s what this is about.”

“What?”

“You don’t want me eclipsing your light. You don’t want anyone looking past you and your bass to see me on guitar.”

“Jesus, are you still drunk? You’re not threatening me, Mim, and you never have. You can’t, it’s not in you. I’ve never argued that you weren’t the better musician, the better writer. I’ve never pretended that wasn’t the case. But if you were up front, Tailhook would never have come this far. Because even though you can play like fire, you’re a crap showgirl.”

“Fuck you—”

“This is about the band!”

The shout shut me, and everyone else in the lobby, up.

Van wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, lines digging in around her eyes. “Graham has a check for you. What you’re owed from the last four gigs. He’s got a ticket for you, too, back home, the flight’s in a couple hours. I’ve talked to A&R and the label, and they know the situation, and I’ve told them that we’re replacing you for the rest of the tour.”

“You tell the press that I got canned because of a drinking problem, I will personally run a truck over you first chance I get.”

“Jesus, Mim, I’m your friend, I would never do that!” She shook her head slightly, as if she couldn’t believe I could be so hurtful. “There’ll be a statement, saying that you’re wasted from the tour, that you just need some time off. We’ll be back home in June, and we’ll talk then, see if we can’t give it another try.”

I stared at her, disbelieving. Graham had come over to my side, was crouching down on his haunches, opening the portfolio. He took two envelopes and tried to hand them to me, and when I wouldn’t take them, dropped them in my lap. He murmured something to me, but I didn’t hear it.

“You’re really doing this,” I said to Van.

“It’s done.”

“Who’re you replacing me with? You replacing me with Birch? That beanpole son of a bitch?”

“Birch is busy.”

“Who?”

“Oliver Clay. He’s meeting us in New York day after tomorrow. That’s when we’re making the announcement.”

The urge to cry was sudden and almost irresistible. “No, no way.”

“It’s Clay.”

The finality in her voice was clear, but I tried one last time. “Don’t do this to me, Van. Please don’t leave me behind.”

“You’ve got a flight to catch.” She stood up. “We’ll have your gear sent on as soon as we’re back in the States.”

I just sat there, watching as she walked away, toward the restaurant off the lobby. Graham followed close behind her, casting me a pitying glance. Click came around behind me, and put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a brief squeeze. Then his hand was gone, and when I looked up at him, he was walking away, too.

I felt the weight of everyone in that lobby staring at me as I got my bags together and went outside to catch a cab.

CHAPTER 8

The sunlight came, assaulting me. It pulled at my eyelids, trying to scratch my corneas, and when I rolled to get away from it, my right hand lingered, not ready to come with me. I pulled, felt pain slicing through skin, and forced myself to look.

I was in bed, my bed. There was blood all over the pillow next to me, and my palm was stuck to it, flat. I lifted my hand, watching as the pillowcase followed the motion, and then the fabric ran out of play, and I was lifting the pillow, too. The pain came back. I gritted my teeth and pulled again, and the weight of the pillow peeled the accidental bandage free. Fresh blood began leaking to the surface.

The rhythm sections of several collegiate marching bands were working on a quick time in my head. When I tried to sit up, they went batshit, really going nuts. My stomach didn’t appreciate it, either, and told me it wanted to leave, now.

I went to the bathroom and threw up, mostly dry heaves, and something that looked like it wasn’t meant to actually be outside of me. When it was over I leaned back against the counter, staring at the shower stall, feeling shaky and hollow. The room smelled of vomit and stale beer, and there were shards of broken glass on the floor, and smears of blood. A bath towel was in a lump by the door. Blood had dried in mud brown on the white terry cloth, and I had a feeling it wouldn’t ever come out.

Seeing the towel reminded me of my hand, which was still seeping. I reached up and pulled another towel from the rack, and just that left me breathless and queasy again. I wrapped my hand with the towel, went back to staring at the shower stall door. There was no water visible on the glass, and I tried to use that as some sort of benchmark for how long I’d been out. A while.

I was wearing a pair of sweatpants I’d forgotten I owned, and a T-shirt. There was some blood on the T-shirt, on the right sleeve, which I figured must have gotten there when I’d pulled the thing on. I couldn’t remember doing that, but I couldn’t remember trying to clean up spilled blood or getting into bed, either.

Somewhere, downstairs, the phone started ringing. There was a phone up here, too, but I didn’t hear it. I was in no hurry to find out why. I was in no hurry to move.

I just wanted to curl up on the floor and die.

It was evening when I woke again, and I was cold from the tile, but this time my first urge wasn’t to throw up, so that qualified as progress. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and it was almost dark. I sat up and heard glass tinkling as I brushed it with my leg. My head throbbed, but it was endurable, though maybe this lack of illumination helped. My eyes didn’t take long to adjust, and when I thought they and the rest of me were ready, I pulled myself to my feet using the counter, then picked my way to the light switch by the door.

The downstairs phone was ringing again. Or maybe it was ringing still.

Using the light from the bathroom, I made it to the switch in the bedroom, and turned that one on, too. Drops of dried blood peppered my new carpet, recounting my travel from bathroom to bed, and then the return trip. I perched on the edge of the mattress and unwrapped the towel from my hand, slowly. It stuck, like the pillowcase had, but not as much, and there was almost no fresh bleeding when it came free.

The downstairs phone went silent, and I looked for the upstairs one, to find out why it hadn’t been participating, and discovered that I’d yanked the unit free from the cord at some point. Maybe it had been in response to it ringing. The other option was that I’d tried to make a call or four, and the thought of what such conversations would have been like almost sent me back to the bathroom.

After a while, I got up and found some slippers in the closet. I put them on and made my way downstairs, to the pantry. In the corner, I found the dustpan and brush.

It took me most of two hours to clean up the mess. When I’d finished, I had the broken glass out of the bathroom, the tile cleaned, the sheets on the bed changed, and the towels in the trash. I used the towels to cover all the empties I’d gathered. There were ten of them, not counting the broken one.

While I was cleaning up, the phone started ringing again. If someone wanted me badly enough, they could come and get me.

I took another shower and put a real bandage on the cut in my palm. The laceration didn’t seem to have been so deep as to require much more than that, but once I had the bandage in place, I curled my hand, as if I was holding my pick, just to see if I could still do it. It ached, but I could still play.

I got dressed in clothes I hadn’t worn for over a year, and discovered that I’d lost more weight than I’d thought. It’s hard to eat well on the road, and I hadn’t been nearly as religious about it as Van had, so it was kind of surprising. As I was tightening my belt, I realized that I was famished.

Back downstairs, I looked in the pantry again, at the shelves freshly stocked with boxes and cans I’d purchased with Mikel, and I didn’t see anything I wanted to cook, let alone eat. I dug through the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen until I found the Yellow Pages, then found the listing for Kwan Ying’s, picked up the phone to dial. The voice mail tone was active, but I ignored it and ordered dinner. I ordered Szechwan chicken, veggie lo mein, veggie spring rolls, hot and sour soup, won ton soup, and an extra side of white rice. The guy who took my order asked if I was entertaining.

“I used to be,” I said.

After he confirmed that I’d be paying in cash, he hung up, and I did, too, then picked up the phone again and called the number to retrieve my voice mail. Voice mail makes getting messages easy when you’re on the road, and I’d used it a lot in the past year.

The recorded lady told me that I had seventy-eight messages.

Just for kicks, I played the first one. The recording said it had been left “yesterday,” which didn’t tell me when today was, but made me nervous.

“Hi, Miriam, this is Jamie Rich, I don’t know if you remember me. I did the piece on Tailhook for Spin last April, we had dinner at Canter’s in L.A. I’m calling to see if you have anything to add to the statement Vanessa Parada and Click released this morning regarding your hiatus from the band. You can call me back at—”

I fast-forwarded through the rest of it, deleted it, and then hung up again.

Only seventy-seven of those left to go.

I ate my dinner, such as it was, in the front room, listening to Mark Knopfler’s Sailing to Philadelphia. All I could really manage was half of the hot and sour soup, and a little white rice. I finished with a cigarette, listening to the whole album through, then hoisted myself and put the food in the fridge before returning to the stereo. I swapped discs and loaded all five slots with Dire Straits, the albums in chronological order up to Brothers in Arms, then climbed back on the couch and shut my eyes.

I started crying sometime during Telegraph Road.

I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of Making Movies.

I woke up to the doorbell ringing, and new sunlight coming through the blinds to warm me. I tumbled off the couch and stubbed my toe on the coffee table and swore and hopped into the hall, and the doorbell sounded off again as I was trying to disarm the alarm.

“Hold your fucking horses,” I shouted, and punched the last digit and heard the cheerful bleat and yanked the front door open, ready to tell whoever it was to go to hell.

Which worked out fine, because it was Tommy.

CHAPTER 9

“Hello, Miriam,” Tommy said. When I didn’t respond, he added, “I was hoping we could talk.”

He’d been almost my brother’s age now when he’d been sent away to prison, and he was still so big I had to look up to see his face, even though I’d grown and he seemed to have shrunk. His black hair had taken on a lot of gray, and it was in his stubble, too, along his jaw and chin and above his mouth. His eyes seemed smaller, heavier, and there were a lot more wrinkles and creases on him, but they didn’t sag, as if he’d earned them while on a diet. He was wearing canvas work pants, and work boots, and three shirts; a white T-shirt visible under a half-buttoned Pendleton flannel, covered by a thicker, quilted flannel, open. A pair of leather work gloves were stuck through his belt, riding at his hip, and a pack of Camels was resting in his T-shirt pocket.

I stared at him, the surprise already drowning in my anger, then stepped back and pushed the door open the rest of the way, gesturing to let him inside. He hesitated, then stepped over the threshold. After I closed the door, I put my back to him and made for the kitchen.

Tommy followed, looking around as he came. I ignored him, set to making coffee, measuring grounds and adding water. The clock on the microwave said it was 8:11 A.M.

“I didn’t wake you, did I? I didn’t mean to wake you.”

My cigarettes were on the counter, so I shook one out and got it going, turning to keep an eye on him. He’d made it as far as the kitchen table, and was looking out the window into the backyard.

“You’ve got a nice home.” It sounded a little cracked when he said it, as if his throat was parched. He turned his head to look at me, to see if he could get a visual response since I wasn’t giving him an audible one. When I still didn’t speak, he added, “This is a very nice place. Nice neighborhood, too.”

I took some more smoke off my cigarette, staring at him. The coffeepot was nearly full, the pump inside wheezing the last hot water into the basket. I turned away to get myself a mug.

“Mikel told me that I shouldn’t come by without calling first, that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” my father said. “I left you a message, but I guess you didn’t get it.”

The coffeemaker gave a dying gasp, pushing out the rest of the water, then rattled. I flicked some ash into the sink, then poured myself a cup. When I looked again, he’d taken the same seat Mikel had on Tuesday, his hands in front of him on the tabletop, one cupping the other.

“It’s just that I was nearby. I got a job today, starts at nine, this construction site on Sandy. They’re doing a renovation. Since I was in the neighborhood, I thought it wouldn’t be too bad if I stopped by. To say hello. To see my girl.”

My cigarette had died, and I ran the tap to kill the last of the embers, then dropped it in the trash under the sink. I lit another one.

“No ashtrays, huh?”

I drank some of my coffee.

The chair squeaked as he turned in it, dropping his hands back into his lap. He drew himself up with a breath, as if strengthening a resolve.

“I’ve heard your music, you know,” he said. “Mikel has both of your albums—”

“There are three albums,” I said.

The surprise was visible on his face, not that there was an album he didn’t know about, but that I’d bothered to speak in the first place.

“I don’t . . . I never imagined that you would have a gift like that.” He raised his hands slightly, as if showing their potential, as if they weren’t his but were mine. “You remember that Silvertone we got from Sears? I guess that wasn’t a good guitar, but you did like it, you’d sit on the couch and pluck on it for hours.”

“It was a piece of shit,” I said.

“We ran it through the hi-fi, you remember that? To get it to sound through the speakers, because you wanted an amp. The noise was awful. I thought your mother was going to throw us both out of the house.”

I glared at him, trying to make him see that he’d crossed a line, that he’d crossed it a while back. Tommy lowered his hands, looked away.

“I just didn’t know,” he said. “That you could play those instruments and write those songs. And sing, too. You sing.”

“Van sings. I do backup.”

“Yes, I understand that, but there are a couple of songs where you’re singing, and she—Vanessa?—is backing you up, too. I like those songs a lot.”

“I can’t sing very well,” I told him.

His mouth worked slightly, and his head sort of shook and nodded a little bit at the same time. “Well, I liked those songs, the ones where you were singing.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said.

The sarcasm hit him like a whip, and there was a brief instant where I saw something flicker in his eyes. Then it died away, and he looked like he had before, sad and lost, like I’d just kicked a three-legged puppy.

“I just . . .” He took a breath, started again. “I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did to you, or your brother, or most of all, to your mother. I don’t drink anymore, I don’t take drugs anymore. I don’t do those things that I used to do anymore. I know you’re a grown-up woman, now, and I know you’re famous and I know you’re successful. But you’re also my girl, and I want you to know that I’ll try to be your father again, if you’ll give me the chance to do that.”

“You’re not my father,” I said. “My father’s name is Steven Beckerman, and he died three months ago. He was a musician and he was a singer, and he died from aggressive cancer of the throat. He died unable to do the one thing that made him totally happy. My father taught me how to sing and he taught me how to read and write music. My father taught me how to play guitar, and I still have the first one he ever gave me, and when I play it, I hear him, and that’s his legacy, that’s what he taught me.

“All you ever taught me was how to drink.”

He was silent for several seconds. “I can teach you how to stop.”

“Why the fuck are you even here, Tommy?” I demanded. “Did you really figure you could show up and I’d say it was great to see you, all is forgiven? You killed her. You fucking killed her. Mikel may believe your bullshit, but I didn’t then, and I sure don’t now.”

“It was an accident.”

“I want you to leave.”

He had more he wanted to say, it was all over his face. But whatever he saw in mine kept him from trying again, and he got up from the table. I walked after him to the front door.

“You know, I barely remember that day,” Tommy said. “I was so drunk I barely remember anything that day until I was in the emergency room, looking at Diana as they pulled a sheet over her face.”

“Shut up.”

“What I’m saying is that you may be right.”

“Just shut up, Tommy.”

“Miriam, what I’m saying is that for fifteen years, I’ve thought every day about you and Mikel and that accident.” He was blinking rapidly, as if there was grit in his eyes. The strain was making his voice climb little by little. “I don’t want you to forgive me. I can’t even forgive myself.”

“Then what the hell do you want? Is it money? Is that why you’re here?”

He looked horrified. “What? No—”

“I’ll tell you what, Tommy. I’ll go and write you a check right now, this very moment, if you can look me in the eye and stop lying long enough to say that it was murder, that it wasn’t accidental. None of this, I can’t remember, none of this, I was drunk.”

“Miriam—”

“What do you say? Thirty grand, would that do it? Just pulling a number from the air. I can go higher.”

He stared at me.

“Fifty,” I said. “Fifty grand, right now, you tell me you murdered her, you fucker.”

Tommy reached for the door, headed out. The sunlight was bright, and made me wince. He started across the porch.

I stuck with him, feeling the cold of my porch on my bare feet. “Sixty,” I said.

At the end of the walk, he made a right, heading down the block. There was an old gray Chevy parked at the curb, and I thought it was his, but he kept going past it. He’d shoved his hands in his pockets, lowered his head. A wind had risen, tearing leaves from branches up and down the street.

“Eighty, Tommy!” I shouted after him. “Eighty, all you have to do is say it!”

He kept walking away from me.

“I can go as high as a hundred,” I said, but it was more to myself than to him.

My father disappeared around the corner. He hadn’t looked back.

CHAPTER 10

Her life was saved by rock and roll.

Here’s how.

An ambulance came and took my mother and cops came and took Tommy, and our neighbor, Mrs. Ralleigh, came and took Mikel and me. In her living room across the street, she tried to get me to stop crying, tried to get Mikel to say something, anything. She was an elderly African-American woman who lived alone and would bring us fresh squash and green beans from her garden every fall, and her home smelled strange to me, both antiseptic and greasy all at once.

I kept trying to get up and run back outside, and Mrs. Ralleigh had to keep blocking me from the door, finally wrapping me in her arms and holding me on her couch until I stopped struggling and surrendered to sobs alone.

More cops arrived, and we watched them from the window, Mikel and I, working in the rain. There was one not in uniform, and he crossed over to us after a few minutes, knocking on the door. Mrs. Ralleigh went to answer it, and then they came back together.

“This is Detective Wagner,” Mrs. Ralleigh told us.

Detective Wagner sat down opposite us, balancing a notepad on his thigh. He was using a chewed pencil to write with, and I could see he’d made drawings, too, what I know now were diagrams, trying to place positions, but then, I thought they were just doodles. I couldn’t tell how old he was; he was ages younger than Mrs. Ralleigh, who I’d always thought was over a hundred, easy.

“Alice says that your name is Mikel,” Detective Wagner said. “And that your name is Miriam, but that everyone calls you Mim.”

Mikel didn’t respond, just kept staring toward the window. I nodded, tried to wipe my eyes. I still had tears coming, and they weren’t stopping. When I followed Mikel’s gaze, I could see a man taking pictures of my father’s truck, of the driveway, of the stainless steel bowl.

“I need to ask you both some questions. Will you let me ask you some questions about what happened?”

Nothing from Mikel, and again I nodded, and the detective came and sat next to me, gave me a pat on the arm, and started to write in his notepad everything I told him. His handwriting was very bad and I couldn’t read anything on the paper. Mikel never said a word, and I was rambling, talking about trucks and jack-o’-lanterns and pumpkin seeds and yelling. It didn’t matter. Wagner knew what had happened, he’d known it from the moment he entered Mrs. Ralleigh’s home, maybe before.

Just like he knew that even as Mikel remained silent and I couldn’t shut up, my father was already under arrest for the murder he’d committed.

Mrs. Ralleigh walked him to the door, leaving us in her front room. She and Detective Wagner talked before he left, and I caught bits of it, not trying to overhear, unable to avoid it. Words like “testify” and “trial” were used.

It wasn’t until then that Mrs. Ralleigh asked if my mother was dead. The question made me angry, the answer so obvious. When Wagner confirmed that she had died on the way to the hospital, that my father had been arrested in the emergency room, I heard Mrs. Ralleigh say a prayer.

Then she asked, “What do I do with them?”

“We’re trying to determine if there’s family,” Detective Wagner said.

“No, no, there’s no one. Diana, she told me that last year, around Thanksgiving. It was just the four of them.”

“Someone will be by.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“I can keep them for the night. But I’m . . . I just don’t have it to keep them for longer. I’m too old.”

“Someone will come by. Just keep them here for a couple more hours.”

Then the door shut, and from the window I could see Detective Wagner as he went down the walk, back into the rain. The cops were still working across the street. He started talking to some of them, then used the walkie-talkie in one of the police cars. He glanced over to Mrs. Ralleigh’s house once, and he saw my brother and me in the window.

He turned his back.

We were placed with our first foster family a week later.

I was eleven. Mikel was fifteen. Our father had murdered our mother, and now we were going to live with people we had never met before.

There was no way it could end well.

The Larkins were sweet people, good-hearted, born-again. They wanted it to work. The problem was they already had six kids, and two more with the designation “troubled” was just too much. I was easy. I just wouldn’t speak unless there was no other alternative. At least I wasn’t acting out, yet.

Mikel was acting out all over the place.

He’d been honing his “troubled youth” act even before our own family had been dissolved, and when we were placed with the Larkins, he went pro. If there was trouble, he’d find it; he got into fights, he stole money, booze, even a car. He robbed Mrs. Larkin blind, taking cash out of her purse when her back was turned, then disappearing for days on end. He got arrested three times, the last for a felony assault, and that was the one that did it; he ended up getting sent to Hillcrest, a juvenile facility outside of Salem.

Tommy had already been sentenced and sent off to the Oregon State Penitentiary at that point. He’d taken a plea, and that decision avoided a trial, which was a good thing, since a trial would only have served to make us all look like the Gresham White Trash we truly were; ignorant, barely literate, and certainly a burden on society. Two kids who were unremarkable at school, one of whom was already building a record; a mother with a string of arrests for drinking and disturbances; a father responsible for a record of his own, alcoholic, known to take drugs, unable to hold down a job; a history of State visits, monitoring the status of the kids; police reports on various domestic disturbances; emergency room bills leading to a conclusion of domestic violence.

So my mother was gone, my father was gone, and now Mikel was gone. The world had shifted onto an insane axis, and everything I’d been sure of turned out to be wrong. The only thing I could say was true was that I’d seen my family disappear entirely over the course of eight months.

So I did the inevitable, and picked up where Mikel had left off.

Three weeks after Mikel went to Hillcrest, I didn’t come home after school, and that was the final straw for the Larkins. When I was finally escorted back to their home at four in the morning, I was drunk, with a Portland police officer at each shoulder. I’d gone home with a friend and stolen a fifth of Early Times from her parents’ pantry, then lied and said I was going back to the Larkin home. Instead, I’d gone up to Mount Tabor Park and gotten shitfaced. Someone who was nice had found me passed out while walking their dogs and called the police.

All the kids were in bed, but Mrs. Larkin was up, and I remember the look on her face when she answered her door. Her eyes were swollen almost shut from crying and she took me from the officers and gave me a hug like I was one of her own. She didn’t ask where I’d been, she just thanked the cops, told them that Mr. Larkin was out looking for me, driving around, but that he’d be back soon.

She put me in the shower, got me cleaned up and into a nightgown. Then she brought me to the room I shared with her two eldest daughters and put me in bed. She knelt beside me and kissed me on the forehead. The other girls were awake, but pretending not to be.

After Mrs. Larkin left, one of the girls said, “You’re not very nice.”

She was right. I wasn’t very nice. There wasn’t anything I could say to that.

Less than a month later I was moved to a new family, named Quick, outside of Salem. The move upset me; I was terrified Mikel wouldn’t be able to find me.

The Quicks were middle-aged, with the father working for the state government, and the mother one of those über-moms who can juggle three Tupperware parties while organizing the school bake sale. They had two boys, both older than I was, one of them just sixteen, the other fourteen. Upon my arrival there was a family meeting where they all told me they understood things had been hard, and that they were willing to try if I was. I told them that I was willing to try, and they said that was good, and it lasted about three weeks, and then the brothers decided that since I wasn’t really their real sister, maybe they could do some of those things they’d been hearing that boys do with girls.

It started with the older brother, Brian, urging the younger one, Chris, to put his hand down my shirt. I didn’t know what he was after until he had his hand on my breast, at which point I shoved him, hard, and he fell down, hard, and hit his head on the corner of the bed and started howling. Mrs. Quick scooted in to find out what the commotion was about, and I told her, and she confronted Chris, who promptly denied it. Brian, standing by, backed him up, and told his mother that my attack had been unprovoked.

Two to one, I lost.

If that had been the end of it, I might have been able to take it.

It wasn’t.

Realizing that they could get away with it, Brian and Chris proceeded to see just how far they could go. One of them figured out how to pick the lock on the bathroom door with a flathead screwdriver, and soon I was taking thirty-second showers. We’d be watching television and the moment a parent left us alone, Brian or Chris would grope me, or poke me, or, on one occasion, expose himself to me.

And I would shout at them to stop, would shout for someone to believe me, and Ma and Pa Quick would tell me that I needed to stop acting out, to stop trying to get attention. I needed to be a good girl, they told me. I needed to behave.

So that’s how this is going to work, I realized, at which point I decided to hell with them. If this was what doing my best was going to get me, they could have my worst, and I gave it to them with both barrels.

That day I came back to the house because I thought Mrs. Quick was going to be at home like she’d said she would be, and I’d be protected. I was in the living room dropping my backpack when Brian and Chris came out of their room and told me they had something to show me.

“I don’t want to see,” I said.

“You do,” Chris said. “You do.”

“Just come in here,” Brian said. “We’ve got something we want to show you.”

It was the way he said it, it turned something in my stomach to lead. Precognition or instinct or something else, but I knew that if I ended up in their room, it would be very bad for me.

I grabbed my backpack and started for the door, and Brian moved to cut me off. Then Chris was coming in at my right, and they were grabbing me and pulling me and I was shouting and kicking and fighting.

“Grab her pants,” Brian shouted. “Grab her by her pants!”

They dragged me, screaming and struggling, after them. Laughing. Like it was funny. I’d lost one of my sneakers, and my jeans were slipping down because of the way Chris was yanking on my pant legs, and I could feel the rug burning my back because my T-shirt was being pulled up by the friction on the hall carpet.

“C’mon, quit fighting!” Brian was shouting at me. “We’re gonna fuck, it’ll be fun!”

I kicked and pleaded, and it didn’t do any good, and then suddenly both boys had let me go, and were staring over me, gone absolutely quiet. Looking like they’d seen their own death, the color just gone from their faces. I twisted and rolled and looked where they were looking.

Their father stood at the end of the hall, holding his jacket in one hand, his briefcase in the other. He’d been in the military, still had the haircut. Black hair with gray scattered through it, as if it was coming in a strand at a time, with no rhyme or reason.

The muscles jumping in his neck.

“What are you doing to Miriam?” he asked them. He set down his jacket and briefcase without taking his eyes from his boys, then moved to where I was on the carpet, lifted me to my feet.

Brian tried to answer. “Nothing, sir, we were just—”

“I heard,” their father said. “I heard everything you said.”

“But—”

“Don’t move. If you move before I come back, God as my witness, I will put you both into the hospital.”

Their father put a hand on my elbow, turned me back toward the kitchen. He set me in a chair at the table. There was perspiration on his upper lip. His hand felt like it was shaking when it let me go.

“Stay here,” Mr. Quick said.

I nodded.

He was removing the belt from his waist as he went out of the kitchen.

When he returned, the belt was again at his waist, and he was carrying a suitcase and my missing sneaker. He told me that he would get the rest of my things later, but for now he was taking me to a hotel, because he didn’t think it was fair to keep me under the same roof as those boys after what they had done, after everything that had happened. He told me that his wife would stay with me if that would make me feel more comfortable, and he told me that he was so very sorry.

Two days later I was placed with a new family.

When I left the Quicks, all I wanted was a place to stay, to be safe, and all I expected was another one of fate’s split-finger fastballs right to my head. I figured if I remained with the new family, whoever they were, for more than six months, it would be a miracle.

The new family was named Beckerman, Steven and Joan.

I was with them for almost ten years.

They had a room ready, and the first thing that made me feel like this was going to be a good thing was that it wasn’t decorated in pink. It didn’t have stuffed animals on the bed. It was a girl’s room, not a princess’s.

And it had its own stereo, a real one, not a boom box, but an old four-component Denon unit, tuner, cassette, CD, and LP, hooked to two brand-new bookshelf Bose speakers. There were headphones, already plugged to the output jack, and it was like they were sending me a message—this is yours, use it whenever you want, but remember that we’re here, too. No cautions about volume. Just, here’s the headphones, knock yourself out.

Steven repaired instruments for a living, mostly tuning pianos. Joan taught music at various high schools throughout the Portland district. After hours or on weekends, they gave private lessons. Each of them called those things their jobs, what they did to keep the roof over their heads from leaking. Their jobs, not their work.

Music, that was their work.

They did it together, and I blame them both equally.

June, and school had ended, though I was scheduled for summer school in just a few weeks, a desperate attempt to bring me back in line with my classmates. I’d been with Steven and Joan just shy of two months, and the time hadn’t been easy, because as much as I liked the room they’d made for me, I sure as hell didn’t trust them. The longest conversation we’d had so far had concerned how I could get a letter to my brother, and if I could go and visit him soon. The answers were yes and no; I could write him all I wanted, but Mikel wasn’t allowed visitors for the time being.

So for two months, I’d been quiet and self-absorbed, testing their boundaries, stealing their cigarettes, and getting more chores heaped on me as punishment. I wasn’t as bad as I’d been with the Quicks, but I was getting ready to escalate.

They’d done their best to weather it. They’d seen me poking at the various instruments around the house, fiddling the keys on a trumpet, striking notes on the Steinway. Both of them had asked me if I had any interest in playing any of the instruments they had around. The flute, for instance, or the violin, or the clarinet, or the piano.

“No,” I’d said.

A lie. But the last time I’d played an instrument had been when I was ten, and though I could still remember the thrill of it, I remembered the rest, too. The weakness of my hands and the failing of the guitar; Tommy’s impatience with my inept fingers; my mother’s annoyance, her telling me that I shouldn’t play so loudly until I could at least play, you know, well.

It is impossible to practice an instrument quietly. Music, by its very definition, must be heard.

Dinner was finished, and I had cleared the table, doing my appointed chores. I finished drying the last of the dishes just as Joan was pouring coffee for herself and Steven. They both looked at me, the kind of look that always made me nervous. They looked pleased, and that had to mean that I’d done something wrong.

“Go to your room,” Steven told me. He was smiling.

So was Joan.

“Why?”

“Go to your room and see.”

Stupid games, I thought. Stupid people. Don’t know anything about me. Don’t know who I am or what I want and don’t even care.

Making it as clear as possible with body language that I was doing them a big favor, I went to my room.

The guitar was on the bed, resting in an open case.

“Yours,” Joan said. “Do whatever you want with it.”

Steven added, “We’ll be downstairs.”

They left us alone.

It was a used Taylor acoustic, scratches on its body, gouges in the wood around the pick guard. The steel strings seemed to float just above the mahogany neck.

I sat down beside it on the bed and just stared at it, trying to figure out if I wanted to be bought this easily. It wasn’t as sophisticated a thought as that, of course, but that’s the only way I can think of it now.

The Taylor won out in the end.

I picked it up, held it the way I had seen Steven holding his guitar. I put my index finger on a string, it was the sixth string, the low E, and I struck the note.

I went downstairs with the guitar held in both hands, by the neck, and found Joan and Steven in the piano room, sitting side by side on the bench. Steven was smoking a cigarette and singing softly along to what his wife was playing, and then she saw me and let the notes trail off, and his voice followed.

I pushed the guitar out in front of me, toward them, and said, “Show me how.”

Joan laughed, and Steven got up and went to get his acoustic, and we settled on the couch, and he started to teach. It was just after nine when he began, and he knew what I was after; he didn’t talk about chords or sevenths or octaves or diatonic scales. He explained only the barest facts that I needed, just enough to get me playing notes that combined to make music that I could recognize. He showed me everything he was doing on his guitar, never touching me or mine, letting me mimic him. I was clumsy and awkward and my fingers kept slipping. My back ached from this strange new posture, the muscles in my neck throbbed because of the way I was craning my head, trying to watch both of my hands at once. The steel strings dug channels into my fingertips. My left hand, my fretting hand, cramped up.

“Stop,” Steven said. “Take a break.”

So for five minutes I stopped, massaging my hand, amazed at the blood on my fingertips, blood on the strings.

“It hurts,” I told Steven.

“Your fingers’ll get used to it,” he said.

I picked up the Taylor again, and he made me review everything I’d learned so far, and it still didn’t seem like I was learning anything at all. It just seemed like we were playing with the guitars, having fun with each other.

Joan came back and announced that it was past one, and that she was going to go to bed.

“You go on up, hon,” he said. “Mim and I are going to work at this a little longer.”

“Don’t stay up too much later,” she told us.

“We won’t,” I said.

We were up until dawn.

CHAPTER 11

After Tommy left, I spent the day getting my life, and myself, back in order. Just checking through the now over a hundred voice mails took most of an hour, and almost every message was like the first had been, reporters wanting a story, demanding a comment. Near the end there were separate calls from Click and Graham, each wanting to confirm that I’d made it home safely. It bought them some grace, but not much.

There were two messages from Mikel, each left Wednesday, one in the morning and one that evening, check-in calls, much like Click’s and Graham’s. He left his mobile and asked me to call him back, and I didn’t. It was clear to me that he’d told Tommy where I was, maybe even had told him it was safe to visit, and I was pretty fucking angry at my big brother.

I rewarded myself with a late lunch of cold Chinese food, another beer, and a trip down to my music room. The nice thing about playing in the basement was that I could play volume. I fed the Gibson through the VOX AC-30 and wailed on that for a while. It’s a great unit, classic tube design, and it plays soft pretty well, but when you crank it up you get a lovely, shimmery sustain on the notes, as if the amp is breathing. I wasn’t playing anything in particular, just noodling. I switched to one of my Strats after a while, trying to emulate some of the Knopfler I’d heard the night before, but my left just doesn’t have the strength his does, and I can never get the same pop from the strings.

The cut on my palm opened again, and I shut everything down and went upstairs to change the bandage, and that’s when I saw it had grown dark.

I also saw that my front door was wide open.

It wasn’t like I went straight to panic, but I sure as hell accelerated to nervous. The alarm was off, had been throughout the day, ever since Tommy’s visit, and I gave myself a mental kick for not having reset it.

I froze, straining to listen. Vague traffic sounds from the street, and the echo of the notes in my head, and now my heartbeat. But I didn’t hear anything from the house, didn’t hear anyone moving around upstairs.

Had I locked it? I couldn’t remember if I’d locked it after Tommy had left. If I hadn’t locked it, it was just possible that the door could have opened on its own.

No, it wasn’t.

I slid forward and shut the door slowly, turning the knob so it wouldn’t click when the latch struck, and looking over my shoulder the whole time, thinking that if it was the stalker, I didn’t want him coming at me by surprise. But I didn’t see him, I didn’t hear him.

I suppose a different woman would have headed to the kitchen for the biggest knife in the rack, gotten herself all set to go hunting, geared herself up to reclaim her home or some bullshit. Someone maybe a few inches taller than me and a few pounds heavier, or who had taken lots of classes in self-defense or martial arts. A different woman would have assessed this situation, would have decided to be sure if her home had been invaded, and then would have gone on to kick ass and take names.

That woman sure as hell wasn’t me, and it didn’t look like she was going to drop by for a visit, either.

I had no illusions; if it was the stalker, he had a gun. There wasn’t anything in my knife rack to beat that. Even if there was, I wouldn’t have the first clue how to use it. And somehow, I didn’t think plugging in the Tele and blasting some diatonics would save my skin.

But if I could trap him inside while I was getting outside, that wouldn’t hurt.

The alarm had a thirty-second exit delay once it was armed. After that, the motion sensors in the hallways would be active, and anyone moving inside would trigger the system. Anyone trying to get in or out would trigger the alarm. At which point the Scanalert people would call the cops.

So if there really was someone lurking around my bedroom and rifling through my lingerie, I could trap him. If he stayed put for those thirty seconds, I’d own his sicko ass.

And thirty seconds, that was enough time for me to get the hell out of Dodge.

I put my thumb on the “arm” button and held my breath for the three seconds it took before the tone chimed and the countdown beeps started. As soon as they did, I bolted. My coat was on the kitchen chair, my keys were on the counter, and I grabbed each without breaking stride, then flew out the back door, slamming it behind me, making straight for my Jeep and keeping time in my head.

At eighteen beeps I was behind the wheel, and by twenty-seven I was screeching out of the driveway onto the street, and when I reached thirty and the alarm was armed, my headlights were splashing across the front of my house, over the fence and trees and the door, and I saw no one, I saw nothing.

“Got you, motherfucker,” I said.

Then I saw him, pounding at an angle across my neighbor’s yard, heading away from me in a desperate run. He was in the puddle of my headlights for barely an instant, and it wasn’t long enough to be sure, but I thought it was the same guy, the same stalker, and I floored it down the street, trying to catch him. So what if he had a gun? As long as he kept heading away from me, I could run the bastard down.

His lead was enough that he beat me to the corner and he flew across the street without hesitating, and my lights caught him again, and again I thought it was the same guy, the same stalker, but he’d shaved his head, now, the long hair gone. I tore into the intersection after him, and there was a horn, shrill and to my right, and I slammed my brakes to keep from colliding with a blue Honda. I hit the horn and screamed some pretty crude outrage, trying to get around the Honda, but there was a Lexus SUV behind me now, and I couldn’t go that way, either, couldn’t do anything but watch as my stalker raced over a lawn, pulled himself over a fence, and disappeared into the darkness of a neighbor’s backyard.

Just like that.

I drove aimlessly for twenty minutes, then found myself on Hawthorne, turning onto one of the side streets. It was just past ten when I pulled up outside the only place that had ever made me feel truly safe. There was a gentle glow from the north side of the ground floor, from one of the music rooms. It made things easier, but it made things harder. If the house had been dark, I probably would have just stayed in the car for a few minutes, then turned around and gone to a hotel, if not home.

I climbed out of the Jeep and cut across the lawn, then up the steps to the door. The porch had been redone while I was away; the last time I’d been by, it’d been the same rotting and sagging boards that had been in place for one hundred years. Now there was new cedar planking, and a new railing to match. The porch swing was still where I remembered it, though, and a puddle of rainwater sat beneath it, a couple of leaves sodden in the water.

There was piano audible through the door, and I listened for a second. Beethoven, and while I couldn’t name the piece, it was Joan on the keys, and she was playing the way she did when she played for herself, and not an audience or a student. I pulled back the screen door and rang the bell, and the music stopped abruptly.

The door opened a fraction, then wider when she saw it was me, and Joan stood there, looking tired and a lot older than the last time I’d seen her.

“Miriam. This is a surprise.”

I stepped into the hall. “I’m sorry it’s so late.”

“It’s all right, of course it’s all right. I didn’t even know you were back in town.”

“I got back early.”

“You must have done. Last time I talked to Mikel, he said you’d be on the road until June. I thought if I saw you at the holidays, I’d be lucky.” She closed the door and put a hand on my shoulder, already leading to the kitchen. “I’ve got some coffee, from Peet’s. The kind you like, but it’s decaf, if you want some.”

“No trouble?”

“It’s already made, honey. If it was trouble, I wouldn’t offer.”

That was a lie. If it was trouble, she’d have done it anyway.

Joan poured us two mugs, then put sugar and milk in mine before handing it over. I took a sip as she watched.

“Good?”

“Just perfect,” I said.

“Good,” Joan said again, but softly. She moved her mug from the counter to the kitchen table and took a seat, watching me.

The kitchen felt the same, looked the same, but for some cosmetic changes. There were still fliers stuck to the corkboard with thumbtacks, the poster for her Chicago recital in 1972. There was the framed picture of her and Steven and Chet Atkins still hanging by the door, and another, only a couple years old, of the two of them standing with Benny Green. There was a new one, too, not really a picture, but a framed one-page article on Steven and me from Guitar Player magazine, the “Pickups” column. It was maybe two years old, now, just after Scandal.

Joan saw me looking at it, didn’t say anything. Her hair was a little more silver than the last time I’d seen her, eclipsing the brown, and it was shorter, only to her shoulders, when she’d used to wear it halfway down her back, in a braid. She was wearing casual clothes, baggy corduroys and a wool sweater, but the sleeves had been rolled back, to keep out of the way of her playing. She was wearing her glasses, not her contacts.

“You cut your hair,” I said, as I moved to join her at the table.

“After the funeral. Why didn’t you come home, Miriam?”

I didn’t know how to give her the honest answer, so I gave her the one I’d used before, over the phone, when I told her I wouldn’t be back for the memorial. I said, “We were shooting a video. I couldn’t get out of it.”

If Joan’s look had been disapproving, the look she’d given me when I was sixteen and had stayed out past curfew, it would have been easier. But now, it was like she couldn’t be bothered, and she nodded her head, maybe not believing me, but maybe not caring. She withdrew her hands, sighing.

Then she reached back and turned my palm up. “What happened?”

“Nothing, I cut it on the tour. Broken glass backstage, I picked it up and there you go. Cut myself. It got reopened somehow, I haven’t had time to change the bandage.”

“It’s not too deep, is it?” Concern made her look even older, even more tired. “That’s not why you’re back, because of your hand?”

“I’m . . . I needed some time off. Van and Click are still touring, they’re going to finish out the schedule.”

“I’m getting the first-aid kit.”

“It’s not a deal, Joan.”

She retrieved the metal box with its scratched white enamel paint and brought it back to the table, flipping it open and telling me to keep my hand still, then began unwrapping the old bandage. When my palm was revealed she used some cotton and antiseptic to clean the dried blood away. Her fingers were long and very strong, pianist’s fingers, with neatly trimmed nails. The second knuckle on almost every finger was slightly swollen, going arthritic. Steven used to massage her hands after she’d been playing for a while.

“Thanks,” I said.

She murmured that it was all right while she tore the wrapping on a fresh square of gauze. “Looks nasty.”

“It’s just a cut.”

“You should have someone look at it, honey. You don’t want it to turn into something that threatens your playing.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” I lied.

She used some strips of cloth tape to hold the gauze down. “You’re as bad as Steven was.”

I moved my look from her hands tending mine to her face, saw the bitterness. Steven had suffered from the sore throat for months before he’d been willing to see anyone about it, and even then, only because he’d started bringing up blood in the morning. By the time the cancer had been found, the only possible treatments for it had been devastating and, ultimately, futile ones. No one ever said so, at least not to me, but the feeling was that he’d just waited too long.

“I’ll go to a doctor tomorrow,” I said. “I promise.”

Joan closed the kit and said, “You’re a grown woman, you’ll do what you like. You’re home until June?”

I grinned. “That’s the plan.”

She didn’t buy it. “Who’s filling in for you?”

“Oliver Clay. You don’t know him, out of L.A. He’s good. He’s not me, of course, but he’s good.”

The joke didn’t even get a smirk. “Did you and Vanessa have another fight?”

I shook my head. “I just wanted to come home.”

She started to frown, then stopped it before it could take hold, deciding to let this matter drop, too, which wasn’t really like her. My coffee was getting cold, and it felt like it was cold in the house, too, as if the furnace wasn’t working.

“I heard ‘Queen of Swords,’ ” Joan said, after a moment. “You’re doing things with the instrument that Steven would have been thrilled to hear. It’s very accomplished playing.”

“He wouldn’t have thought it was too glib? I kept thinking he’d have told me I was being glib.”

“No, he would have been very proud of you. Steven was always very proud of you.”

Pressure came thundering hard behind my eyes, and my head began to ache, like I had a migraine. I wanted to say that I hadn’t come back for the funeral because I’d been angry and scared. I wanted to say that if I could do it again I would do it right, I would be there for her. That I would know how to say good-bye to the man who, as far as I was concerned, was my father, more than the man who’d given me my genes.

But I hadn’t, I’d chickened out and hidden in the Beverly Hilton behind all the bottles I could find.

Joan was looking at the clock on the stove, and getting to her feet, saying, “I’ve got to get to bed, sweetie. I’ve got to teach tomorrow, and I have to get up early.”

I started to nod, then blurted, “Can I stay? Just in the guest room or maybe up in my old room, please?”

She stopped, looking surprised. “Of course you can, hon, if that’s what you want.”

I nodded again, more vigorously, feeling shamefully young.

Joan came around to my side of the table, dropping down on her haunches and putting her hands on my arms. It created strange nostalgia, as if the moment now could have been a moment ten years ago, with me in pubescent misery and Joan offering all the maternal guidance she knew how to give. She put a hand on my cheek.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”

I tried to open my mouth and say something coherent, but there was just too much to say, all of a sudden, and none of it could come out. All I could do was shake my head and try to explain that I didn’t want to sleep in my house alone, and she told me that she understood, and that I was always welcome, and that I should always know that.

“You’re our little girl,” Joan told me.

The sting of guilt stayed with me to morning.

CHAPTER 12

When I came down in the morning, Joan was already up and preparing to head to work. She looked very proper for school—navy slacks and a cream blouse, the uniform of a woman ready to fill fresh young minds with the infinite possibilities of music. She pressed a mug of coffee into my hands, then went back to loading sheet music into her book bag.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked.

“Fine. You’re teaching all day today?”

“Fridays are busy. I’m at school until three-thirty, then lessons until eight.”

“I was thinking of taking you to dinner tonight. We could go to that Lebanese place you like, Riyadh’s?”

“Tonight won’t work, honey,” Joan said, pulling the bag onto her shoulder. “I’ll be exhausted. But tomorrow’s a Saturday, and the only lessons I have are done by three. We can have dinner after that, if you like.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“That would be fine.”

I nodded, dumped the rest of my coffee out in the sink. She waited for me, and we walked outside together. It was clear and cold, but there was no wind, so the chill didn’t hurt.

The old Volvo was in the driveway, and as I walked her to it, I asked, “You’re okay? Do you need anything?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I’ve got plenty of money, now. I’d be happy to spend buckets on you. It’s the least I can do.”

She unlocked the door to her car, then stopped, holding the keys, looking at herself reflected in the window. I knew I’d said the wrong thing.

“I don’t want charity,” Joan said. “That’s not what we ever wanted from you.”

“That’s not what I meant, Joan, I’m sorry—”

“Steven asked for you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Would it have been so much to come home, Miriam?” she said. “Just for one day?”

“I couldn’t.”

“That’s a lie. You didn’t want to.”

“I was filming—”

“That’s the excuse. You were his daughter, Miriam.”

Joan opened her mouth, ready to say more, to say what came next, but she abandoned it, shaking her head slightly instead. She climbed into the Volvo and tossed her bag across to the passenger’s seat, then followed it herself. She fitted her seat belt, then the key, but didn’t start the engine.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Over dinner.”

“I’ll call,” I told her.

She nodded and started the engine, and I watched as she backed out of the driveway, then went to the Jeep. When I reached it, I turned around and looked back at the house.

It was still big and worn and old and wonderful, and yet it just didn’t feel the same inside, and I understood enough to know it wasn’t only because Steven was gone. Nothing is constant, nothing remains, and the things we rely on go so quickly, quicker when you try to keep them, it seems.

In that house I’d had happiness for a while, but it had gone, and I wasn’t going to get it back.

I stopped for breakfast at this fresh juice and crêpe place near my house and ate, trying to decide if I was being brave or stupid heading home. Whichever it was, I pulled up just before nine to see Mikel’s Land Rover parked out front. He saw me from the porch and followed the Jeep around the side of the house as I pulled into the garage. He was still going with the Gap casual look, wearing a duster that gave the whole thing a funky cowboy feel.

I got out with a scowl, ready to tear into him about Tommy, on top of everything else, but as he moved to meet me I could see that he was really upset. He got a folded piece of paper out of one of his pockets and was thrusting it at me.

“When did you pose for this?”

“Pose for what?”

“This, dammit.” He was still trying to get me to take the folded sheet, and tension was in everything, in his words and in his movements. I hadn’t seen him act this way for years, not since before he went into Hillcrest, and it made me nervous, because it reminded me of how Tommy could be. “I got it this morning, one of the Web guys I know e-mailed it to me.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a picture of you, Mim, what do you think it is? I’m asking if you posed for it.”

I took the paper, unfolding it to its eight and a half by eleven, expecting one of the pub shots, or maybe the one from Rolling Stone.

That wasn’t what I got.

It was color, a little pixilated, and I suppose it might have been possible to find it flattering in some way, but whatever way that was, I didn’t see it. It explained perfectly why Mikel was so upset, though, and why he’d been waiting outside my door with it burning a hole in his soul. There are certain things that, I suspect, outrage any sister’s brother.

Naked pictures of her circulating on the Internet probably tops that list.

There was no question that it was me, and even though the background was blurry and out of focus, I wasn’t. The picture was snapped at an angle, as if from a slight elevation, and I was totally naked, full frontal onto the camera, but not looking into the lens. Both of my arms were up, like I was stretching, and my hands went out of the frame at the top of the shot. My head was canted down, as if I had just seen something on the floor, and it hid enough of my expression that I couldn’t tell what I’d been feeling at the moment of capture. My mouth was open, as if I was speaking.

If the picture itself wasn’t humiliating enough, someone, perhaps the photographer, had added some postproduction work. A blue border surrounded the image, thicker at the top and bottom than at the sides. In the space above the picture, in red letters, were the words MIRIAM BRACCA OF TAILHOOK. At the bottom, also in red letters, were the words WET, WILLING & WAITING.

The caption more than the image did it, made my face flush hot, and some of that heat leaked into my voice.

“Where did this come from?”

“Off the Internet someplace, one of those naked-celebrity Web sites. Did you know about this, Mim?”

I stared at the picture in my hand, shaking my head. There was nothing in the image that helped me place it in time and space, nothing to tell me where it had been taken, or when. It looked a little like a dressing room, maybe a venue someplace from the tour, but I couldn’t tell, and I sure as hell didn’t remember parading around a backstage anyplace in the nude. The best I could say was that I’d shaved my legs and pits fairly recently before the shot had been taken.

“It’s on the Web?” I asked.

“It’s all over the Web,” Mikel told me, taking the picture back. “It’s on newsgroups and Web sites, you know it is. Shit like this breeds on the Net. I’m asking again, did you pose for this, Mim?”

“You think I would?”

“It looks posed, Mim.”

“It’s not posed, Mikel! It’s a fucking Peeping Tom shot!”

“Dammit, if you’re lying to me again, I swear to God I’ll put you through a wall! If you did this, if you got shit-faced and let some little fucker take happy-snaps of you, you tell me right now!”

The accusation was worse than looking at the picture, and I felt the heat in my cheeks intensify. “How can you even ask me that?”

“Because you’re out of control! Because you do stupid shit and then when it’s too late you pretend it never happened! And this is serious shit, Mim, this is out there, right now, don’t you get that?” He took a couple of deep breaths, crumpling the photograph in his hand. His grip had turned his knuckles white. With his free hand he reached for my shoulder. “Let’s go inside.”

I didn’t move until he’d let go of me, then walked dumbly down the driveway and around to the front of the house. The alarm started beeping as we came inside, and I tabbed in the code, and it beeped its A-C-E tone and then went silent. Mikel shut the door after himself, and I reached around him to lock it again, and he trailed me into the kitchen. I went to the back door, to look out into the yard, and lit a cigarette. In the reflection on the glass, I watched Mikel smooth the picture out on the counter, facedown by my toaster, so neither of us had to look at it.

“Could you have been drunk?” Mikel asked.

I made him wait before I said, “No.”

“If you got drunk and don’t remember—”

“That wasn’t taken while I was drunk, Mikel.”

“How do you know?”

“I’d remember.”

“Sure you would. If you didn’t pose for this, if you didn’t let someone photograph you with your permission, then this isn’t just a picture of my baby sister naked. This is some fucker spying on you, that’s what this is.”

“I didn’t pose for it!” I shouted at his reflection, then turned and gave him the rest face to face. “Will you get that? None of us do shit like that! Hell, not even Van, and Playboy offered her a couple hundred grand to reconsider not four months ago.”

He frowned, thinking. “Can you tell when it was taken? Or where?”

“I don’t know! Maybe a dressing room someplace, but it could be a hotel room. I can’t even make out the fucking background, how the fuck do I know where it was taken?”

“I think that was done on purpose. Looks like somebody used a Gaussian blur to break up the rest of the image around you.”

“A what?”

“It’s a graphics effect, real easy to do if you have Photoshop or another program like that. Just takes the image and messes it up. Mostly it’s done as an artistic effect.”

“That’s not art.”

Mikel looked at the paper lying on the counter, then grimaced and flipped it over again. “You should talk to a lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer.”

“Sure you do.”

“No I don’t.”

“You must.”

“If I do, nobody told me.”

“Then call Van or Graham and find out, because you definitely need some legal advice, little sister.”

I moved to the sink, flicked ash down the drain. It seemed like I’d finally caught my breath. Mikel didn’t say anything, probably looking at the picture again while trying not to look at the parts of it that were me, and just the thought of it got my heart racing once more. How many people had seen it already? How many people I didn’t know, and—God Almighty—how many that I did? Jesus Christ, what if Joan had seen it? Or Tommy?

For a moment, just for a moment, I thought I was going to vomit.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said, turning to face him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I get kicked out of the band and I come home and there’s a man fucking stalking me and last night he’s in my house—”

“He came back?”

“—and now you’re showing me a picture of myself that maybe people all over the world have seen.”

“Did you say he came back?”

“Last night. I think it was him. I don’t know anymore. I’d been in the basement and the door was open and I set the alarm and ran, and then I saw this guy running down the block, but I didn’t really get that good a look at him. It looked like the same guy, he looked the same, but the hair was different.”

“Different how?”

“He’d shaved his head.”

Mikel scowled. “Motherfucker.”

“I don’t understand this! I don’t understand why this is happening to me!”

The scowl held for a moment longer, and then Mikel seemed to hear me, and it smoothed. “You’re famous, Mim.”

I shook my head.

“You are, and the sooner you admit that to yourself, the easier you’ll find it is to deal with this stuff.”

I pointed at the photograph. “How am I supposed to deal with that? How am I supposed to go outside? Fuck that, how the hell am I supposed to get onstage, thinking that maybe everyone in the audience has seen how I trim my bush?”

He winced. “See, that’s something I didn’t want to know.”

“It’s not funny!” I screeched.

“No, I know it’s not.” He came forward, put his hands on my arms. “Look, call a lawyer, okay? Get some legal advice.”

I caught my breath, then nodded. Mikel gave me a hug, and I took it, but it didn’t make me feel much better at all. I asked him if he wanted me to make coffee or anything, if he wanted to stick around, but he said he had to get going. He left the copy of the picture, saying that the lawyer might need it, and he gave me a kiss on the top of my head, and went out.

I locked up again after he went, then picked up the phone and dialed Graham’s mobile number. I wasn’t sure if he was in London yet, or if maybe they were in the air, or maybe even still in New York.

The phone rang twice before he answered. “Havers.”

“Graham? It’s Mim.”

“Mim,” he said, and he made the one word sound ominous. “You’re home safely?”

“I’m home. I need some help, Graham.”

“Mimser.” He sighed, an echo on the phone. “You know I’m doing everything I can, baby, but Van’s made up her mind—”

“It’s not about Vanessa, Graham. I need to know, do I have a lawyer in town, here in Portland? Or does Tailhook, at least, have someone I can talk to about something?”

Caution caved to concern, probably more for Tailhook than for me. “You in trouble, sugar?”

“Do we, Graham?”

“Of course we do, he’s been on retainer for two years now. Weren’t you wondering where five percent was going every month?”

“What’s his name?”

“What’s this about, babe?”

Normally I didn’t mind the “babes” and the “sweeties” and the “honeys” but right now it made me want to reach through the phone and throttle him. “It’s about naked pictures of me on the fucking Internet, Graham! Now will you give me the goddamn name and the goddamn number for this goddamn attorney?”

There was a pause, and I was getting angrier, thinking he was trying to determine if I was full of shit or not, then realized he was pulling the listing up on his PDA.

“Fred Chapel,” Graham said, then rattled off a string of digits. I didn’t have a loose piece of paper anywhere, so I ended up writing the number on the back of the picture. “This is just about you? Nothing about Van or Click?”

“No, Graham.” I snapped it at him. “I’m the only one who’s being humiliated.”

“Hon, I’ve got to ask—”

I hung up, then started dialing Chapel’s number.

The receptionist transferred me to Chapel as soon as she had my name, and without my having to ask. So even though I didn’t know who Fred Chapel was prior to five minutes ago, at least I was assured that he and his staff knew who I was.

Fred Chapel came on the line and greeted me like we’d spoken just yesterday, instead of never.

“Miriam, what can I do for you today?”

“I’m in Portland, I don’t know if you heard about that.”

“Yes, Graham told me. How are you feeling?”

“Can I come and see you?”

“Is it urgent?”

“There are nude pictures of me being sold on the Internet.”

“Are you getting a percentage?”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“It was a serious question.”

“Wouldn’t a percentage require my permission? And if I’d given permission, do you think I’d be calling you?”

“Can you be here in twenty minutes?”

“I can be there in ten,” I said, but I was lying.

I was there in eight.

CHAPTER 13

Chapel’s office was near the PSU campus in downtown Portland, on the other side of the Willamette from where I lived, just off Market Street. I pulled into the parking garage just before ten and then rode the elevator up to the offices of Chapel, Jones & Nozemack. The offices were nice, comfortable and quiet, and the receptionist behind the desk was extremely pretty, and she recognized me the moment I came in, giving me a big smile.

I wasn’t even at her desk before she was speaking into her headset, saying, “Mr. Chapel? Miriam Bracca is here to see you . . . yes, sir, right away.”

“You took my line,” I told the receptionist. “Now I don’t know what to say.”

She looked immediately and sincerely apologetic. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“You can head on back.” She indicated the interior door, still giving me the big smile.

“I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Just left and down the hall. You can’t miss it.”

I thanked her and went through the door and left, and down the hall. There were framed posters on the wall, and four of them were Tailhook related—our covers and the European version of the tour advertisement. There were also a couple movie posters featuring actors and directors and writers who lived in the Rose City, and a promotional poster from last year’s Rose Festival. Apparently Chapel, Jones & Nozemack were a civic-minded firm.

The office door was ajar, and I knocked on it before pushing it open further, sticking my head inside. The last lawyer’s office I could really remember spending any time in had been the Multnomah County District Attorney’s, and Chapel’s office bore about as much resemblance to that as fish do to penguins. It was clean and bright, with a chrome desk and black leather chairs and black modular filing cabinets, and two walls were windows, giving a view of the river and the eastern sprawl of the city. I could see Mount Hood in the distance, snow-covered and sharp against the sky. The tinting on the window made the heavens look touched with green.

Chapel came around his desk to greet me, extending one hand while using the other to pull his headset off. The headset looked better suited to Mission Control than the legal profession. Fred Chapel himself was maybe in his early forties, but that was a guess, and maybe not a good one, because nothing else about him really indicated a specific age as much as a lifestyle. He was wearing blue jeans that looked either well cared for or brand-new, and a bright multi-colored sweater, and black leather walking shoes that I knew had to have come from Europe, because that was the only other place I’d ever seen them. His face was smooth and tanned, which meant he either spent a lot of the winter out of town, or under a lamp someplace, and his teeth were very white, and he smiled like he’d known me forever and was always glad to see me.

“Mim, please have a seat,” he said. “You want something to drink? Coffee or water?”

“No. Thanks.”

He dropped back into his chair, smiled. “Graham called about three minutes after you did.”

“Did he?”

“It’s a Tailhook issue as much as it’s an issue for you.”

“I’d think it’s more for me.”

“He said you’d say something like that. But you’re still part of Tailhook.” He extended an open hand. “Did you bring it?”

I hesitated, then pulled the folded sheet from my pocket and handed it to him. Chapel unfolded the paper and looked it over, then raised his gaze past it and looked me over in much the same way, and though there was nothing reductive or objectifying in the gaze, I couldn’t look at him while he did it, and so settled on the view of Mount Hood out the window instead.

“Is it possible that the photograph is a fake?” Fred Chapel asked. “Could someone have edited your head from a publicity shot and then grafted it onto the body of someone else?”

“It’s me.”

“You’re positive?”

“If it’s a fake, they’re working from an original,” I said, shrugging out of my jacket. His look was quizzical, then turned to slight alarm as I began pulling off my overshirt.

I let him worry while I got my arms out of my sleeves, leaving the shirt around my neck, revealing the tank I was wearing beneath. I turned in the chair, left and then right, showing him each of my arms. “The ink’s the same.”

“You’ve had shots showing the tats,” he said, musing as I got my shirt back in place. “Could be whoever did this just edited the tattoos, as well. Doesn’t seem likely, though. Can I ask where you got this copy?”

“My brother gave it to me this morning.”

“Did he say how he got it?”

“Someone e-mailed it to him.”

“Your brother has friends e-mailing him pictures like this of his sister?”

“I think this was a friend asking if he knew about this, rather than saying, hey, your sister’s got a great rack.”

He didn’t smile. “Do you know where the friend got it?”

“Mikel—that’s my brother—said it was off of some pay site, one of those ones that does naked-celebrity pictures.”

“Do you know the name of the site?”

I shook my head. “But I can give Mikel a call, he’ll know.”

“Maybe later. One of my assistants is looking on-line right now. When he gets back to me we’ll want to determine if the sites are the same. Let’s assume for the time being that the picture really is of you, and not a fake, then.”

“I’ve never posed nude for anyone,” I said.

“Never?”

I just looked at him.

“Maybe for a boyfriend, for fun? Or as something romantic between the two of you?”

“You’re confusing me with Vanessa. She’s the one with all the boys. I’m the one who sits in the hotel room with a guitar in her lap and crap on the TV.”

Chapel grinned. “You’re keeping your sense of humor, that’s good.”

“Am I? I’m not trying to be funny.”

“Can I ask you some questions?”

“You mean more questions? Sure.” I freed a cigarette and stopped myself from lighting it long enough to get a nod from him.

He took an ashtray from a desk drawer and slid it over to me. “You have any idea when or where the picture could have been taken?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been in over one hundred hotel rooms this past year, easy. It’s not a dressing room, I’m sure of that. I can’t remember ever being totally naked in a dressing room. In my undies, yeah, but not in the buff.”

“So you think it’s from the tour?”

“It must have been.”

“Do you take drugs?”

The question surprised me, but only a bit. “I did a few on tour.”

“You understand why I’m asking?”

“You’re worried that there might be pictures of that, too.”

“I’m not judging you here, please understand that,” Chapel said. “This is all confidential, between us, unless you tell me you’re going to commit a crime. That happens, I’m obligated to act.”

“Not planning on it.”

“Always good to know. So this is between the two of us. But I want to be prepared if more pictures surface, maybe showing things you’d rather the world didn’t see.”

“I never did drugs alone,” I told him. “Parties sometimes, or with Click, but never alone.”

“What about sex?”

“What about sex?”

He gave me the professionally reassuring smile. “I hear you rock stars get a lot of it.”

“I’m not one of them.”

“You never took a groupie backstage or back to your room?”

“Wasn’t my thing. Van’s thing, sometimes Click’s thing. Never my thing.”

“Are you gay, Mim?”

I stared at him.

“Like I said, I’m not judging. Just asking. I told you Graham called.”

I fidgeted, feeling the heat come back, rising along my neck. “Yeah.”

“I asked him a lot of these questions, too, just for background. He says he remembers you taking a groupie back to the hotel when you were in Montreal. He remembers it because it was the only time he can recall it happening. He also remembers it because it was another woman.”

“I don’t remember doing anything like that.”

“It’s important, because if you took someone back to your room, I’m less inclined to think that’s a setup, rather than you going with a groupie to her house.”

“Well, it never happened,” I said. “So you don’t really need to worry about that.”

Chapel stared at me, then nodded slightly, as if willing to let it go for the time being. “All right, could the picture have been taken with your permission and you just forgot about it?”

I crushed my cigarette out, lit another one. I didn’t want to get bitchy, but I felt it, and I knew it was in my eyes.

“I understand you drink pretty heavily,” Chapel said. “That’s why you’re on hiatus.”

“That’s why Van says I’m on hiatus.”

“I understand that there were a couple of instances on the road where you passed out.”

“I never missed a gig. I never couldn’t play.”

“Would you call it passing out or blacking out?”

I snorted smoke at him. “There’s a difference?”

“When someone passes out, they don’t do anything else. When someone blacks out, they don’t know what else they might be doing.”

“Sometimes I black out,” I admitted.

“So it’s possible you could have had a blackout on the road and someone could have taken these shots then?”

“No.”

“You sound awfully certain considering that you wouldn’t be able to remember.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because when I drink like that, I drink alone. Consequently, I black out alone.”

That stopped the questions for a few moments. Chapel’s hand went to the folded photograph on the desk, almost idly, caressing the edge with his fingers. Then he leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk.

“These are our options as I see it. Further action, or possible action toward prosecution, will require discovering who took the picture, and how. I can get a TRO against the Web site, as soon as it’s identified.”

“TRO?”

“A temporary restraining order.”

“I don’t want temporary. I want it stopped for good.”

“A TRO is the first step in any injunction, so we’ll have to start with that. It won’t be a problem, you’ve got multiple grounds—appropriation, right to publicity, public disclosure of private facts, even emotional distress. The TRO will force the site to take the image down. Then there’s the issue of damages.”

“I don’t want money. I want it stopped.”

“I understand. But there’s the issue of where the photograph came from, how the site acquired it. Until we know who took the picture, we can’t move against them. And if they have multiple images, we could have the same problem, but at a different site. I can contact the Portland PD, let them know about this. Oregon has a specific statute for this kind of crime, the ‘Video Voyeur’ statute—a lot of states have yet to address this issue specifically, so we’re ahead there. We can even contact the FBI, since this is obviously an interstate activity.”

There was a new tone in his voice, not a lack of confidence, but almost a hesitation, a lack of conviction.

“You don’t sound certain,” I said.

Chapel made a slight shrug. “We talk to law enforcement, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s local or federal, we’ll get publicity. As soon as that happens, this picture will be everywhere, we’re talking millions of people around the world seeing it. A TRO won’t stop people from e-mailing it to each other.”

I just sat there, trying to fathom a million people looking at the picture. It was too abstract to be humiliating. Sitting opposite Chapel when he looked at the photo was one thing; a million teen boys at their computers was something else. But then I thought of those three kids at the Fred Meyer, the way they’d looked at me then, and the way they would look at me now.

It hit me that I was totally helpless, and I opened my mouth to tell Chapel as much, but then there was a knock at his office door. I turned in my chair as another man leaned through the doorway. He was younger and dressed a little more formally than Chapel. He gave me a glance, then looked to Chapel.

“Fred? You should check your e-mail.”

“You find the site?”

The man glanced my way again, as if he couldn’t help it. “Two of them. You should check the e-mail. I’ll be in my office.”

He pulled the door gently shut after him. Chapel was already clicking his mouse, focused on his monitor. I felt the same slow-motion-can’t-stop-it-something’s-wrong feeling coming on me, the way it had when I’d entered the lobby in Sydney to see Van and Click and Graham all waiting to give me my walking papers. My hands were trembling, the way they never trembled before a gig.

“How bad?” I asked.

He frowned at the screen. I got out of the chair, started to come around his desk. Chapel put a hand up, as if ready to swivel the monitor away from me, but I was already at his shoulder, then, and he dropped the arm, conceding.

The pictures were open in a viewing window on the monitor, side by side, and it took only an instant to realize why his instinct had been to hide them from me, only an instant to realize just how bad it was.

What stung was the pose—hand on my hip, hips cocked to the side, pouting. It would have been a convincing mockery of a Van pose, if I’d been clothed and not holding a bottle of beer. As it was, it looked like I was giving the photographer an eager show.

The border—again the blue and red motif—once more named me as Miriam Bracca of Tailhook, but this time the caption read HERE SHE CUMS AGAIN.

It was Picture Three, though, that was like a punch in the stomach.

I was lying on my back, on a bed, the sheets mussed beneath me, and again I was totally naked. The shot was from above, as if the photographer had straddled my body, looking down. My eyes were half-closed, my mouth slightly open, my hair a mess, and some of it hung over my eyes, but not enough to disguise my features. My right hand extended up above the pillows and out of the frame, with the shot cropped just above my knees.

My left hand was resting between my thighs.

The caption read COME MAKE PUSSY PURR.

Chapel hadn’t moved in his chair, hadn’t even turned to look at me, but I put my back to him, anyway, trying to find something else to see. Mount Hood didn’t help; it didn’t matter where I looked.

Me with my hand between my thighs. Me with one hand between my thighs and the other over my head, and what’s next, a shot with me taking it from behind?

I put my head against the window, closed my eyes. The glass was cold and a relief against my skin.

So now I’m a whore, I thought. Now the world thinks I’m a drunk and a whore.

Graham and Click and Van would see these pictures, they’d see them, the people at the label would see them, the reporters and the photographers and Pete from Christchurch and the groupie from Montreal. Joan’s students would see these pictures, would trade them back and forth in e-mails, maybe print them out, maybe bring them to school. Would they tell her? Would they laugh? Would she see them, too?

“Miriam—”

I shook my head. I didn’t trust my voice, I didn’t trust that I could tell him to be quiet, to go to hell. I was thinking of Steven and how at least he couldn’t see his daughter like this, wouldn’t know that the world had seen it, too. God in heaven, even I thought it looked like I was doing myself, that damn pose, that left between my legs, my right above my head, I might as well have been arching into it—

“Miriam—”

I snapped back, launched myself at the desk, grabbing past Chapel for the mouse. I clicked in vain, frustrated, tried to find a way to do what I wanted, but I couldn’t make the computer go, and Chapel had to reach for my arm, saying my name again.

“Mim. Calm down.”

I shoved the mouse, stepped back, pointing at the screen, at the third picture.

“I’ll close them—”

“No!” I snarled. “No, no, my arm, dammit, my arm, in the picture.”

Chapel looked at me, utterly lost.

I jabbed my index finger at the picture, at my right arm, extending out of the frame. “There!”

He looked from it back to me, then again, bewildered. “I don’t—”

“Bigger! Make it bigger!”

Chapel hesitated, but only for a second, then took the mouse and began clicking. He surrounded my arm, clicked again, and it filled the screen. Glorious full color, my arm.

With blood just barely visible, seeping out from beneath it.

Chapel turned, confused and concerned and hoping for an explanation, and I just couldn’t talk. The only thing I could give him was my right hand, palm up, the bandage Joan had put on me still wrapped around it.

He looked from my palm to my face, still not getting it, and he said, “I don’t understand—”

“Home,” I managed.

CHAPTER 14

There were three of them, from a firm called Burchett Security: a woman in her early thirties who looked strong and intense and never spoke and frankly scared me; a man in his late twenties who reminded me of the sailors who’d attended the Tailhook shows we’d played in San Diego; and Richard Burchett himself, who was perhaps in his mid-fifties, light brown hair a little shaggy, beard and mustache trimmed, in Levi’s and cowboy boots and a St. Louis Cardinals fan shirt.

Chapel told me that they were professional, thorough, and discreet. He told me they knew what they were doing. He told me to trust them.

Burchett and his crew used gadgets that they held in their hands and gadgets that hung from their belts and gadgets that they slung over their shoulders. They wore headphones and waved magic metallic wands. They dismantled outlets and fixtures and searched moldings and pictures and unplugged appliances and utilities. They moved furniture and lifted rugs, and every time they found something, they used a little pin with a hot pink plastic flag on its end to mark the location.

They’d used twelve of those pink plastic flags before they were through.

Chapel sat with me on the back porch while Burchett and his crew did their work, and that was when I told him about my two stalker incidents.

“You were abducted at gunpoint and you didn’t think to call me?” He looked like he was on the verge of a seizure. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I didn’t fucking know you existed,” I reminded him.

“Tell me you at least called the police.”

“They thought I was full of shit. They didn’t go so far as to actually say it, but it was pretty evident that that’s what they thought. They told me it was probably a mugging gone wrong or something like that.”

“A man points a gun at you, puts you in the back of his truck, strips you, and they call that a mugging gone wrong?” Chapel shook his head.

“They wanted me to go to a doctor, have a rape kit done.”

“Did you?”

“I wasn’t raped. The only time he ever touched me was to get me into the truck.” I thought about it for a couple seconds, then said, “Maybe that’s why, you know? He wasn’t about me, he was about the cameras. Maybe that’s what he was doing, why he was in the house last night.”

“Maybe, but then why the whole bit with the truck and the clothes the first time?”

“I don’t know.”

“You called the cops after last night?”

I shook my head.

“You should have called the cops as soon as you were out of the house.”

“They didn’t seem to take me real seriously the first time.”

“You should have called them, anyway.”

“So we’ll call them now.”

“You could, but with the discovery of the cameras, we’ll have the same situation we were talking about at the office. Unless you’ve changed your mind about the media.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then we don’t call the cops at this juncture. We’ll see what Rick finds, take it from there.”

I didn’t say anything, and he went back inside, to follow Burchett and his people around, leaving me alone. After a few minutes I went down to the music room and grabbed the Taylor, then returned to the porch. It seemed best to stay out of everyone’s way.

I played for a bit, but nothing sounded right, and after a while I gave up. Once I started thinking about the pictures again, about all the people who had seen them, and all the people who would see them, and it was enough to start me feeling good and sorry for myself, and it almost brought tears.

But it brought a memory, too, of being maybe seven or eight years old on a late summer afternoon, the coolness of our tract home in Gresham. Tommy, still in his work clothes, caked in a mix of dried sweat and cement dust. He’d bought a six of Coors and a pack of Marlboros, and dropped himself on the couch to smoke and drink and listen to music on the hi-fi, and I was sitting with him, my head against his chest as we listened to Gordon Lightfoot singing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

And Tommy had gotten all weepy at the end of the song, and I’d asked him why someone would make a song like that, about something so horrible and sad.

“Because sometimes making a song about something sad is the only way to understand it,” he’d told me.

It made me wonder if Tommy ever had a song he wanted to write.

Chapel and Burchett came outside together a little before three that afternoon to give me the joy.

“We’re done with the sweep, miss,” Burchett told me. “If you want to see what we’ve found?”

“Not if I’m going to be photographed doing it.”

He grinned big. “Made sure that won’t happen, miss.”

“You should see,” Chapel told me. “It’ll help you decide what you want to do next.”

I had several ideas of what I wanted to do next, but I kept them to myself, since mostly they consisted of violence and alcohol, not necessarily in that order. I got off the steps and dusted my butt off, then nodded for them to lead the way.

We went through the kitchen, where Burchett’s colleagues were packing their gadgets into shiny metal containers not unlike my flight case. The scary woman watched me as I followed Chapel and Burchett, and I wondered what her problem was, then wondered if it was that she’d seen the pictures, and so didn’t ask.

Burchett led the way to the music room in the basement, and we started there, working the same path they’d presumably taken in their search. He pointed out each pink flag, even though they were easy enough to spot. It was an alarming education.

One flag in the music room. One flag in the downstairs bathroom, in the medicine cabinet over the sink, so that anyone looking—or grooming—in the mirror would be seen. One flag in the downstairs guest room, positioned so it could catch anything or anyone that happened onto the futon. Two flags in the kitchen, presumably in case things got exciting while I was fixing a late-night snack. Two more in the living room. Two in the master bathroom: one of them angled to catch anything happening in the shower or tub; the other one, and Burchett was impressed by this, set in the outlet between the mirrors over the sinks.

The last three flags were all in my bedroom. One directly over my bed. One in the wall just over the headboard. The last one in the outlet by the bureau, to catch me in the mornings when I picked out my day’s lingerie.

“And you know what the irony of this is?” I said to them, standing in my bedroom, looking at all of the little flags. “I fucking hate pink.”

Chapel smiled thinly, but Burchett laughed out loud.

“Fred says that some pervert pulled a gun on you when you got into town Monday morning. Says he got you into his truck and had you give him your clothes, that right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you think that same guy was in your house last night?”

“Maybe, I’m not sure.”

“Any sign of a break-in?”

I shook my head.

Burchett scratched his beard, craned his head back to look around my bedroom again. “You started renovating about when?”

“When I left on tour.”

“And they finished when?”

“Last month, the beginning of September. I’m not positive of the date.”

Burchett looked at Chapel. “That’s when this was done, Fred. Our pervert must have gotten himself onto one of the crews working here, maybe working with an electrician. Hell, he could be the electrician. Gives him access to the whole house, lets him wire everything just the way he wants. He probably got a copy of the house key from the contractor or someone.”

“Then why the hell did he do all that stuff Monday morning?” I asked.

Burchett reached for the Leatherman on his belt, snapping out the Phillips head, then leaned past me and began unscrewing the cover to the outlet by my bureau. Chapel and I waited, watching. It didn’t take him long, and he hummed while he worked. Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire.”

When he removed the cover, he pointed to a portion of the wall, just above the lower outlet. There was a black smudge on the paint, a teardrop shape.

“Scorch mark,” Burchett told us. “The camera shorted. He must have been trying to replace it.”

“And if he’d been listening for news of when she was going to return home, he’d have known she was on her way,” Chapel said.

“But he got me outside,” I said. “He wasn’t inside.”

Burchett began replacing the plate over the outlets, his brow furrowed. “Maybe there were two of them, working together. You get one in the house when you come home, the other is outside waiting. He sees you, panics, thinks he can’t let you go inside. That would explain why he dropped you off here when he was through. All he wanted to do was keep you occupied for an hour or so.”

“There’s the little detail where he had me strip for him.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t touch you, right? And if he has your clothes, you’re less likely to make a break for it, irrational modesty being what it is. He takes your clothes, you’re going to stay put until the danger is so great your modesty comes second. For most people, by the way, the point when their modesty stops being first is normally right after too late.”

“Could the partner be the one you saw last night?” Chapel asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. But if one of them was fixing the camera Tuesday morning, then why’d he come back last night?”

“Well, could’ve had another short, maybe. Might’ve forgotten something, something that he thought would incriminate him.”

“Or maybe he wasn’t here to work on the cameras,” Chapel said.

Burchett frowned at him, then glanced at me. He looked embarrassed, and it took me a second longer to realize why, that he’d been thinking the same thing Chapel had, but hadn’t wanted to say it.

So I said it for them both. “You think last night he came here to rape me.”

“We don’t know that,” Burchett said, replacing the Leatherman in the pouch on his belt. “Got one more thing to show you.”

“I think I’ve seen enough.”

“We’re almost through.” He smiled reassurance at me, then opened my closet and stepped inside, sliding my clothes down along the rod and revealing the access door into the attic space. He shoved it open and crawled through, then called back for me to follow. I ducked and shimmied after him.

It was dusty and dim, the only illumination the sunlight slanting through the small vent at the front of the house, and it smelled of insulation and wood and stale air. Cobwebs hung off the rafters, and I swiped at them uselessly as I got to my feet. There was just enough room to stand, hunched, if you were short like myself or Burchett. Chapel, when he came through, stayed on his knees.