FAREWELL GHOST
Larry Caldwell
Sinister Rouge
Copyright © 2020 Larry Caldwell
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
Cover design by: Lance Buckley
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
FAREWELL GHOST
PART I:
SELF-TITLED DEBUT
1
BADLANDS
Clay Harper saw the devil once. She was creeping down a long, dim corridor. And when her lithe animal figure halted at his locked door, when she smiled her vicious smile in through the peephole, Clay fell into a crouch and shut his eyes. It was the devil—he knew this well enough to never speak of it—but it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles that Clay met the devil in person.
It started with buying the house of a dearly departed rock star.
The realtor said the odds were against them. The house was so coveted, and harboring such terrible infamy, that there was always some millionaire buzzing the front gate. But Clay was an optimist, hopelessly so, and when they drove to the top of Via Montana Road, high in the hills over Burbank, his heart hammered. Just the fact that the property was on the market at the same time they were looking.…
88 Via Montana wasn’t the last house on the left or right, it was the last house period, built atop a steadily rising foothill where rocky ravines and resident hawks and coyotes took the land back from the human sprawl below. The road turned abruptly and terminated at a cul-de-sac—and wrought-iron gates that Clay knew from so many front-page stories. Gritty news photos come to life. Clay’s father, Peter, took one look at the high adobe walls, the security cameras, the castle-like turret rising over the trees, and groaned. “Looks a bit out of our price range, Vanessa.”
They had spent the better part of the day touring affluent L.A. enclaves—Encino, Silver Lake, Hancock Park—while Peter grew increasingly agitated with the price tags (“Isn’t all this going into the ocean with the next earthquake, Vanessa?”). And now this, the Boyle House… where thousands of people would have killed to live.
“It is steep,” Vanessa agreed. “Literally, figuratively. But since you’ll be working in Burbank, I’d kick myself for not showing one of its best properties.” There wasn’t much conviction in her voice; all day, she’d clacked around on uncomfortable heels, listening to Peter—a former law partner turned head of legal at a movie studio—bitch and complain, and now it seemed she was only humoring herself.
“Let’s take a look,” Clay said. “What’s it hurt, Dad?”
Vanessa made a noise in her throat and entered an access code on the key panel. A moment later, the yawning gargoyle face on the gate split in two and they were rolling up a shaded drive, past rows of sago palms to the main house where Rocco Boyle, frontman for the best band of his generation—or any other, in Clay’s opinion—had once lived.
Of course Clay wasn’t going to let on that he was a Rocket Throne fan. He played it cool as Vanessa showed off the Spanish Revival exterior with its dark-wood shutters and red roof tiles and dried-up fountain out front. Ditto, as she guided them through the five-bedroom interior, through arching doorways and under vaulted ceilings with crisscrossing beams, and all the while he was thinking, This was the room where Boyle kept his guitar collection (it was a little girl’s bedroom now); This was the hallway that Rocco’s modern-art friends painted (there was no evidence of it now, only several coats of mundane beige). And then they were upstairs, in the master suite, where Clay withdrew his phone and casually aimed it at the floor.
Vanessa saw what he was doing and warned that the owners had a strict no-picture policy. And Clay looked at her like she had rats in her hair, like he’d only meant to make a call and had no idea that they were standing over the spot where Boyle’s girlfriend had drawn her last breath.
Not until Vanessa had walked them past the summer kitchen on the back deck, the heated pool with its sun-blasted Neptune statue, and a small grove of fruit-bearing trees in the large yard beyond—features Clay could have recited himself, having read all the articles and books and conspiracy theories—did they arrive at the two-story, gable-roofed guesthouse in the back corner of the property.
“What’s in there?” Peter, a musical ignoramus, asked.
“Storage,” Vanessa replied, and Clay cursed the current residents without a sound. Blasphemy! “Although you could use it as an office, a gym, even another residence.” No mention that this had been Boyle’s home studio. That Rocket Throne had recorded The Disharmonic in there. Or that Boyle had sung all of the vocals in the loft upstairs.
The studio was called “the Generator,” and history had been made inside.
Tragedy too.
But Vanessa didn’t invite them in, didn’t offer even a Peeping Tom peek through the dark window. So Peter shifted his weight from one foot to the other and dared to ask the question. “Three million five,” came Vanessa’s reply, and Clay cringed. Except, for the first time all afternoon, his father didn’t feign a heart attack. His expressiondidn’t even change.
“There must be an acre and a half of L.A. property here, Vanessa. There’s a pool and a citrus orchard. A view of the entire San-Whatever Valley. So… what’s the catch?”
Vanessa’s freckled face was an open book; for a realtor she had surprisingly little guile. “Have you ever heard the name Rocco Boyle, Mr. Harper?”
Peter
