They walked through the kitchen, past the bulletin board. The calendar pinned to it was still showing September, the gigs written in on the weekends. The message light on the answering machine was blinking. Emma hit the playback button.
Here was Tyler’s familiar voice. “Leave me a message, and I just might call you back.” Followed by a throaty laugh. Goose bumps prickled Emma’s arms.
There were a series of hang-ups and several increasingly angry messages from club owners and band mates, asking after Tyler. The last one was bitter and brief, from a woman. “Least you could do is call me, Tyler. I mean, come on!”
Leaving the kitchen, Emma walked toward the front of the house. She might not be able to remember what happened the night of the murder, but she had a clear memory of how the house had looked before then. What was different?
The hall table was in its usual place, Tyler’s keys in the old margarine tub where he always threw them when he was at home. Something was different, though. The walls had been scrubbed down—no—repainted a subtly different color. The hardwood floors had been sanded down and refinished.
The changes might fool most people, but they wouldn’t fool Emma, since the place looked better than it ever had while Tyler lived there. It was like she’d walked onstage, and found it set up for a different band.
“Somebody’s cleaned this place up,” she murmured. “Who would’ve done that?”
Emma padded down the hallway, feeling invisible. Like an actor with a walk-on part in a play. I’m a ghost in this house, she thought.
She turned aside, into the office. As she entered, the tiny hairs rose on the back of her neck, and she shuddered. Even the simplest animal—a lobster—can learn to avoid those places where it was hurt before. Hadn’t she read that somewhere?
Methodically, she studied the room. Her laptop was missing, and objects on the desk had been subtly shifted. She looked in the drawers and could see that the contents had been disturbed. There might be some folders gone, too.
“It looks like they searched the place,” she said, looking around for Jonah. But he wasn’t there. He hadn’t followed her in. After all that fuss about going in her place, now he seemed to be hanging back, so as not to intrude.
She turned to the bookcase to the left of the door and pulled out the shelf that hid the gun safe. The safe was locked. She entered the combination, but it still didn’t open. Apparently, the combination had been changed. Was Tyler’s gun still inside?
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like nothing had happened. Emma felt like her life had been rubbed out, like a stray pencil mark.
Emma walked on down the hallway, through the living room, to the conservatory. Pausing in the doorway, she scanned the room before she entered. It looked much as she remembered, except for what was missing. The wicker set with the peeling paint was gone, as were most of the lamps. The battered bamboo roller shade had been replaced and the drapes removed. The windows were the same style as before, but even without the daylight, she could tell they were new. For one thing, the windows in Tyler’s house were never clean. When she breathed deeply, she could smell a charred, burned odor.
Getting down on her knees, she ran her finger along the baseboard.
“Ow!” Yanking her bleeding finger away, she sucked on it. She’d cut it on a bit of broken glass.
“Emma?” Jonah stood in the doorway to the conservatory, shifting from one foot to the other.
Emma held up her bleeding finger. “I cut my finger on some glass. No big deal.” She stood. “Rowan said that this is where my father and the others were killed.”
Jonah glanced around. “You wouldn’t know to look at it. Somebody must have cleaned it up.” After a pause, he added, “We should collect your things and go. I don’t want to be here any longer than necessary.”
He’s as jumpy as a cat on hot asphalt, Emma thought. It was making her jumpier than she already was.
“All right, then help me bring up some things from the basement,” she said. She descended the stairs, apprehension prickling her skin. Halfway down, she paused, a shudder rippling through her. Something had happened, here on the steps.
She looked up at Jonah, two steps above her. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “This house is full of ghosts.”
He must’ve felt it, too, since he looked half sick to his stomach.
At the bottom of the stairs, she didn’t head immediately to her workshop. She stood and turned in a slow circle, looking for clues. It looked the way it always did. Maybe nothing bad had happened down here. Here was her bicycle, the tires a little flat. There was the washer and dryer, the laundry basket under the clothes chute that extended from the third floor to the basement.
Her workshop seemed undisturbed, familiar . . . the nearly finished guitars in their stands around the room, awaiting fingerboards, frets, and so on. The scent of shellac and wood glue was fainter now.
“What should I carry up?” Jonah asked, from the doorway. It was spooky, the way he just appeared like that. Like the devil, when you called him.
Emma nodded toward the clean room. “You’ll find my grandfather’s guitar collection in there. I already picked the best to bring from Memphis, so I want to take them all. The ones in cases, take them on up and put them in the van. The ones on display, there should be a case for each one in the storeroom. If you have any questions, give a yell.”
He nodded but didn’t move. He looked around the room, as if committing it to memory. “This is your workshop?”
“It is. Was,” she amended.
He gestured toward the guitars in their stands. “And you . . . you made those?”
“I did,” Emma said, brushing her fingers over the fret board of the one that was finished.
Hang on. She swiveled, looking around the room once again. Then, squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to re-create in her mind the way it had looked before. “That’s odd,” she said.
“What’s odd?”
“One of my guitars is missing,” she said. “I had two that were finished. I was playing one of them the night . . . the night all this happened. That one’s gone.”
For three heartbeats, Jonah said nothing. Then he cleared his throat. “Could it be somewhere else in the basement?”
“I don’t see why it would be.”
They searched the rest of the basement, anyway, including the coal bin. Nothing.
“Could it have broken, if . . . if there was a struggle?” Jonah asked. “Somebody’s cleaned up the place. If it was broken, they might have thrown it away.”
“I could have fixed it,” Emma said, fisting her hands. “I’m a luthier!”
“Well, I’ll start carrying,” Jonah said, turning away.
“I’ll be up in my room, packing some things,” she called after him.
At the top of the front stairs, she turned right, toward her father’s room at the far end of the hall. Past the main bathroom, where Tyler’s razor, comb, and deodorant still littered the sink.
The towel Emma had used to dry her hair still hung over the shower bar, and Tyler’s was wadded up in the tub, stinking of mildew.
Life, interrupted.
Emma had rarely ever gone into Tyler’s room. Since she didn’t really know what it was supposed to look like, it was hard to tell if anything had been shuffled around.
She opened Tyler’s closet and pushed through a forest of plaid flannel shirts. Blue jeans and T-shirts were piled on the shelf. All the wardrobe his life had required. On impulse, she pulled two flannel shirts from their hangers and laid them out on the bed.
Back in the closet, she pulled the cheap fiberboard storage boxes out of the way so she could get at the safe, and dropped to her knees. It took her two tries to get the safe open, her hands were trembling so much. She reached in, deep, and pulled out a bulky cloth bag, setting it on the floor beside her. Reached in again, and her groping hand found a much smaller bag . . . velvet.
That was it.
Closing the safe, she carried her findings back to the bed and set them down next to the flannel shirts. Picking free the knot that closed the velvet bag, she dumped the contents— something gold and glittery—onto the threadbare bedspread.
She scooped it up in her hand. It was a pendant on a gold chain. A flower with delicate petals that peeled back from a central spike, bracketed by clumps of berries. It looked familiar.
It was the same flower the Thorn Hill survivors had inked into their skin. Nightshade.
Emma looped the chain around her neck so that the pendant rested between her breasts, pleasantly warm.
She thumbed through several of the packets of bills. They were twenties and fifties. Half the stash was fresh and crisp, like it had never been touched. The rest had the look of money that had been accumulated over years, little by little. Not a windfall or payoff, but the result of months and years of blood and sweat and providing the bass-line heartbeat for a multitude of bands.
She looked around the bedroom, at the peeling wallpaper, the water-stained ceiling. Tyler could’ve used this money. Why didn’t he spend it?
She had no idea how much it added up to, and she didn’t want to take the time to do that math.
Emma opened the binder. A note was paper-clipped to the inside cover.
The money’s from me. I hoped you might use it for college, or to start a business, or buy a house. It won’t make up for what I took from you, but it’s what I can give you now. Don’t bother with the house . . . it’s mortgaged to the roof, and you’ll be too easy to find if you stay. My advice is: take the money and run.
I hope you’ll take the time to read over these old songs. Maybe learn a few of them. One thing you can say about the blues . . . it tells the truth, if you ever want to hear it.
P.S.: The pendant belonged to your mother. I thought you should have it.
Tyler
Emma flipped through the notebook. It was tablature for dozens of old blues songs and spirituals. Not a bass line, which she might have expected from Tyler. It was six-string guitar. Pages and pages and pages of guitar tablature and lyrics, all apparently handwritten by her father. Some were songs she knew, others she’d never heard of. This was her father’s legacy to her. The truth, if you ever want to hear it.