A quick glance at his phone informed Jake he was late. Five minutes late. Stuffing the phone back into his shorts pocket, he spied Debbie sitting at the only outside table that was in the shade.
“Hi,” greeted Jake when he reached the small round table. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Good to see you, Jake,” said Debbie, rising to give him a hug. “Thanks for agreeing to this. I was so sorry to hear about Rich.”
“Thanks,” said Jake with a sigh. “What can I get for you? Coffee? Soda?”
“Tea would be lovely,” replied Debbie.
“Iced?”
“No,” she said with a smile. “Earl Grey if they have it.”
Nodding, Jake promised to be back in a few moments.
Having placed their order, he returned to join Debbie, taking a seat opposite her.
“They’ll bring it out,” he explained as he laid his sunglasses down on the table. “I ordered some Danish to go with it. The pastries from here are awesome.”
“Favourite haunt?”
He nodded, “I used to buy my morning coffees here when I worked at the pizza restaurant before the band took off. I brought Lori here on our first date too. My kids love their donuts. I guess we’re still regulars.”
“Jethro did say he’d picked somewhere you’d be comfortable with,” revealed Debbie as she set her phone up to record their interview. “I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”
“I’ll be honest,” admitted Jake, running his hand through his sun-bleached hair. “I’m dreading this. I’ve not really spoken to anyone about all of this.”
“I’ll be gentle with you,” promised the English journalist with a warm smile. “If you need a break or want to stop, we will.”
“Let’s just see how this goes,” he suggested as the waitress brought their drinks and pastries.
“Deal,” nodded Debbie. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” sighed Jake before taking a mouthful of his coffee.
“Rich’s death came as a tremendous shock to the entire music community and I can’t begin to imagine the emotions you and the rest of Silver Lake have been going through,” began Debbie, her English accent soft and filled with compassion. “What details of that can you share? Did you have any inkling the last time you saw him that anything was amiss?”
“Hindsight is always a beautiful thing,” replied Jake slowly, trying to form his answer in his mind. “I last saw Rich at my daughter’s birthday party. Everyone was at the house. We’d had a great day. It was Lori who saw him last. She walked him out to the car. He said he was heading off to drive to his sister’s in Florida. Lori has said she felt as if he knew he was saying goodbye. She’s quite intuitive when it comes to things like that.” Jake paused, took a mouthful of coffee then continued, “I got a call on July 3rd from Maria, Rich’s sister, asking if I’d heard from him. She’d expected him the day before but he hadn’t arrived and she couldn’t reach him on his cell. We all knew he’d planned to take a few days to drive to St Augustine. I wasn’t really that worried by her call but it kind of ate away at me. Next day, July 4th, we spent the day with Maddy and Paul. Maddy threw a 4th of July party out at their farmhouse. Rich was on my mind all day. That night I got a message to say the police in Gatlinburg had found his car. We got a call late on the Monday night to say his body had been recovered.”
As he’d spoken, his voice had grown quieter and his hazel eyes had filled with unshed tears.
“With the beauty of hindsight, were the signs there?” asked Debbie softly.
Jake nodded. “As soon as I heard where his car had been found, I knew.”
“Why?”
“When the band were on their way to North Carolina on the last leg of the tour, we passed a sign for Gatlinburg. Rich told me a story about camping out in the Smoky Mountains as a kid. Talked about a valley where you could watch the sun set. Said he wanted his last view of the world to be watching the sun set from a rocky ledge looking out over that valley.”
Jake paused to take another mouthful from his coffee. He watched as Debbie wiped a tear away from her cheeks.
“You ok?” he asked quietly. She nodded so he continued, “As a band, we’ve talked it through. We all knew he was struggling. We’d all reached out. He was still blaming himself for the crash that killed Gary. He’d broken up with his girlfriend. We knew as we played those last few shows that he was finding things tough. He was drinking more than usual. He was keeping his distance. We have our suspicions that he may have been abusing certain substances. There’s no proof of that but we all had a feeling something was very wrong. It had been a long tour. We were all tired. All anxious to get home to our families. It gets kind of cosy on the Silver Bullet after a while. We all needed our own space. Could we have done more? I don’t know. Perhaps. We all tried.”
“So, what now? What does the future hold for Silver Lake?” asked Debbie. “The video you released the other day mentioned a memorial show.”
“That’s something that the fans are pleading for. Something the record company and our management want,” replied Jake, choosing his words carefully. “We owe it to the fans to give them their time to say goodbye but each of us has to have some time to come to terms with the loss first. I can’t say when it will be scheduled for. I just don’t know. Right now, none of us could pull off a Silver Lake show. I tried to play a couple of songs
