At seven, Bob pushed back from the table and was quickly off. Lara heard the door shut behind him as she climbed into the chair and wheeled up to the control desk. She thought that she was probably one of the few DJs who didn’t like the sound of her own voice. Her vocal cords sounded as though they’d been run over with sandpaper. “Smoky,” they called it. Pulling her blond hair into a ponytail, she swallowed hard as she pressed the MIKE button and turned up the volume, then pushed the STATION ID button at the top of the hour.
99.7 K-ROCK played the deep or obscure tracks on an album, not just popular “top 40” songs, except for three hours each Sunday night when she’d play punk and new wave—Bauhaus, Television, the Cure, the Slits, Concrete Blonde, and House of Love. The college kids would call her and beg her for the Ramones and the Violent Femmes—always the Femmes. Lara laid out her first hour of songs, something she liked to do, although a lot of on-air talent chose songs on the fly.
First up was a Led Zeppelin two-set. She placed “Achilles Last Stand” on turntable one, turned the knob to the CUE setting, and set the needle on the track. Then she pressed the START button. The turntable belt wound the record slowly until she heard the beginning chords of the song. When she detected the first few notes, she hit the STOP button, rotating the record backward with her fingers until the vinyl made a growling noise at the opening chords. She repeated the ritual with “How Many More Times” on turntable two.
Lara activated turntable number one. The song melted perfectly into the fading chords of the station jingle. She flipped the window blind and stared out into the road. Enough cars were still going down the hill at this hour to cause a small traffic jam, but they would thin in the hours to come. Perhaps it was the loneliness of the job, but Todd was never far from her thoughts when she was locked in the radio studio.
She kept looking at the phone, hoping to see it blinking, almost willing it to do so. She supposed she could enchant it to ring, but there would be no one on the other end. If Todd was going to contact her anywhere—if he could contact her—it would be here. When she’d worked the midnight-to-six shift, he often called to check up on her, worried about her locked alone spinning records. But her father had been right: Just as with Peter, there had been no sightings of Todd. Christmas had come and gone, Valentine’s Day, his mother’s birthday—all points when everyone had thought he’d call. Despite his abandoned car being found, his credit cards had never been used. Like Peter Beaumont, he’d simply vanished.
Always, she scrutinized the final moments she’d seen him. They’d taken on mythic status, like a collection of valuable missing jewels. She’d combed through every minute, every word, gesture, and movement, looking for something that would provide the key. What had she missed?
Thinking back now, she couldn’t recall the last image of him. When she thought about the moments in her life—the defining ones that had truly mattered—how much did they really add up to? For her, maybe ten hours in a total lifetime? Was that a lot or a little? She didn’t know. But that moment. That was the one.
It had seemed so ordinary, almost pedestrian at the time. If only she could have stopped herself from sliding into the driver’s seat and glancing at him so briefly, before backing her car out onto the road. She was so focused on the road ahead of her, the life in front of her, that she didn’t stop and absorb that final image of him standing in his driveway. It had been her biggest regret.
Seeing her father tonight made her nostalgic for a Dangerous Tendencies album. Normally, she didn’t play Jason’s records—his music was saved for his own show—but “The One I Left Behind” was her favorite of their songs. Sliding Tending, the band’s debut album, out of its battered paper sleeve, Lara placed it on the turntable, flipped the knob to the CUE setting, and then carefully set the needle on the vinyl groove for song number three. As she wound the disk backward, something odd happened. She picked up tones. Is it a song? It was definitely a song. Usually, the backward cue sound was pure garble that resembled a warped tape, but tonight she heard the beginnings of a perfect guitar intro.
That was impossible.
“I am definitely hearing things.” She inhaled loudly and restarted the record until she heard the song start and positioned her hands on the record, stopping her fingers. Finding the start spot, she swallowed hard then wound her hand backward. Again, instead of dissonance, soft guitar chords echoed through the cue in the sound booth. She kept the rotation going steady, standing up so she could get a good angle above the turntable. Finally, after thirty seconds of winding, she heard a man’s voice begin to sing.
You said I didn’t know what I wanted,
That I didn’t know about love.
“What the fuck?” Her hand froze. She stepped back from the turntable.
Moving quickly, she flipped the switch on the reel-to-reel tapes. The station could run on the four tape machines passing off songs to each other as if on autopilot, so she wouldn’t have to worry about the sound board for now.
She pushed through the booth and out into the office, searching through drawers for a tape recorder. She found the one she was looking for, but when she hit the PLAY button it was dead. Finally, she grabbed Jason’s guitar and ran back into the booth. Cuing up the record again, she repeated the process. The song was still there. She located the notes on the guitar and played the melody, repeating the
