He didn’t move.
I groaned and marched over to where he stood. “Come on,” I said. “At least we can sit down over there.” I was talking about the flat stone behind Damon’s headstone, but I don’t think he knew it. When I looked that way, he didn’t.
In fact, as I closed in on him, I realized he wasn’t looking at anything at all. His eyes were blank and glassy. He was staring straight ahead into the dark.
“Hello!” I waved my hands in front of his face. “Earth to Damon! Anybody home?”
His voice was as flat as his stare. “You don’t have a joint, do you?”
Had he bothered to look my way, he would have seen that my smile bristled. “Even if I did, you couldn’t smoke it. You’re dead, remember?”
Damon winced as if he’d been slapped. “Of course I remember,” he said. “Let’s go. We’ll talk in your office.”
“I don’t want to go all the way back to my office. Come on.” I moved toward his grave. “I’ll bet that big stone is still warm from the sun this afternoon. We can sit there.”
“Or not.”
I was halfway to his grave, and I turned to see Damon hadn’t budged an inch.
And that’s when it hit me. Like the proverbial ton of bricks.
I sucked in a breath of astonishment. “You’ve never been here, have you?” I asked him. “You’ve never seen your own grave. That’s why you’re so reluctant to get close. You’ve never—”
“I—” Damon’s shoulders rose and fell. “No, I never—” He looked away, and when he turned to me again, there was a glint in his eyes, as if he was just daring me to prove him wrong. “My things are at the Rock Hall,” he said. “I stayed with my things.”
“Your things are at the Rock Hall, sure. But your body is buried here.” I listened to my own words and had another aha moment. “You do know you’re dead, right?” I asked him.
“I know it.” Damon’s voice was a growl. “I’ve known it all these years. It’s just—”
“That there’s a difference between knowing something in here…” I pointed to my head. “And admitting it. In here.” I pressed my hands to my midsection.
His silence was all the proof I needed that I’d hit the nail on the head. My anger dissolved beneath some other feeling I couldn’t name. It slammed into me, right about where my hands were clutched.
“Come on,” I said, strolling back to walk alongside him. “You don’t have to look at the grave alone, I’ll be with you.”
Damon drew in a breath and let it out slowly. Just as slowly, we inched toward the headstone where his name was engraved. Without the ghostbusters’ flashlights, it was too dark to see much of anything, so I grabbed one of the candles from the makeshift shrine and held it in front of the letters etched in granite.
“Damon Michael Curtis.” His finger followed the light, skimming over the words as he read them. “I guess this makes it official.”
It did, and although he’d had more than thirty years, I gave him another minute to get used to the idea.
I took a seat on the flat stone and watched as he studied the stone with his name on it. “It was a good life,” he said. “I had one hell of a time.”
“And now?”
When he looked at me, the glow of the candle flame flickered in his eyes and made them spark. He looked very much alive. He wasn’t, and when he rounded the headstone and came to sit at my side, I reminded myself not to forget it.
“My life was one constant happening,” Damon said. “I got a buzz from performing. And expanding my mind. I loved the women!” He tipped his head back. Whatever he was remembering, it made him grin. “Man, life was a trip! Now…” His smile faded. “I’m bored, Pepper. I’ve been bored for more than thirty long years.”
I could have come back with a smart-aleck comment about sex and drugs and rock and roll, but the look of quiet desperation in Damon’s dark eyes stopped me.
It also helped me make up my mind about taking on his case.
“Then we’d better do something about it,” I said. I thought back to everything he’d told me that afternoon. “It sounds like we need to start with Vinnie.”
“Vinnie Pal, right. If we can stop him from holding my spirit on this plane, I can pass to the Other Side.”
Let’s face it, in theory, this sounded reasonable enough. But on closer examination, there were gaps in Damon’s logic.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I said, “it’s not like I don’t believe you or anything. But I can’t believe Vinnie can just call you and you go whooshing over to wherever he is. If it was that easy, everyone would do it. You know, people would keep loved ones with them. Or somebody would figure out how to make famous scientists and doctors stick around so they could keep doing all the good things they were doing while they were alive. Shit, my mom would have hung on to Louise, her cleaning lady, long after the poor woman was dead. Mom always said no one could clean a bathroom like Louise.”
“But if you told people it was possible, that they could call up the power and do exactly what Vinnie’s doing, do you think they’d believe you?”
Damon’s voice was thoughtful, and it made me think, too. “They’d say it was bull. They’d say it was nutso. Like believing there’s such a thing as—”
“Ghosts?”
I had come to accept my Gift, even if I wasn’t one hundred percent comfortable with it. “I used to think I was crazy,” I told him.
“You mean the first time you ran into one of us.”
I nodded. “I thought it was because I hit my head on Gus’s mausoleum. After that, that’s when he started showing up.”
“Then you realized that it was true. That it truly is a Gift.”
My laugh was skeptical. “Not a Gift I want.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Damon twisted so that he was facing me. “But you should be totally stoked! It’s wild, what you do, talking to the dead. And a girl as smart as you—”
“Smart? Yeah, right.”
As if it would help him see me better, he narrowed his eyes. “You don’t think you’re smart?”
“I think most people see my body. Not my brain.”
“Your body…” We were sitting close, so when Damon skimmed a look from my face, down my neck and lower still, I swore I could feel the heat. “You’re awesome,” he said, and he made it sound like it wasn’t any big deal, just the honest truth. “But come on, every guy you meet must realize that there’s more to you than just a dynamite body. You’re smart and you’re funny and from what I’ve heard, you’re not afraid of anything. You took on the mob for Gus.”
Before Damon could see that my cheeks were on fire, I turned to look the other way.
“Come on, little girl, crave the possibilities.” They were the lyrics to the most famous of all the Mind at Large songs, and Damon didn’t say them, he sang them. His voice was a rumble that tickled my skin with a feather’s touch. “Laugh and run, naked in verdant meadows, drunk with your power.”
When I turned back to him, I had every intention of making a smart-ass comment about not being a fan of oldies. A better plan than begging him to find a way for flesh-and-blood me to get it on with his ectoplasm. I would have done it, too, if I didn’t find Damon’s mouth just a hairbreadth from mine.
“You’re dead,” I told him and reminded myself. It would have been more convincing if my voice didn’t choke behind the sudden ball of anticipation that tightened my throat. “We can’t—”
“Oh, but if we could!” He backed away, and though there was a smile on his lips, I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were filled with regret. “So what’s the deal with this guy who wants to date you?” he asked.
It took me a second to remember to breathe. And another before I had any idea who—or what—he was talking about. Quinn. I dismissed the whole thing with a lift of my shoulders. “Just a guy.”
“And you’re not interested?”
“I am, but—”
“He’s not your type
.”
“He is, but—”
“You’re afraid to get hurt.”
I would have liked nothing better than to argue this point with him, but it was kind of hard considering that it was true. Rather than lay my pathetic love life out on the line, I opted for the quick-and-dirty explanation. “I was engaged once,” I said. “He called it off.”
“And you’re going to let that stop you from enjoying every second of your life?” Damon laughed, but not like it was funny. More like he couldn’t believe what a dope I was. “Believe me, you’re hearing this from somebody who knows. Grab every bit of life you can hold on to and never let go. Enjoy yourself, girl. You only go around once!”
“And if it turns out to be the wrong thing to do?”
He grinned. “Right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the doing.”
I wasn’t so sure. I’d done the doing and all it had done was do me in. “Joel is a weasel,” I said, though why I thought it important to point this out, I’m not sure. “All he left me with is emotional baggage.”
“Then you should be sending him a dozen roses to thank him.”
When I looked at Damon in wonder, he laughed. “Don’t you get it, baby? The emotional baggage, that’s what it’s all about! It’s what gives us our edge. It’s what propels us through this lifetime. Without it, you’d be an empty shell.”
“A happy empty shell.”
“Are you telling me that you wish he would have stayed around?”
Instead of answering right away, I thought about the last time I’d seen Joel. That morning, I’d gotten a voice mail from our florist saying that she was sorry we wouldn’t be working together and reminding me that, so close to the wedding date, there was a fifty percent cancellation fee. Baffled, I’d stopped at Joel’s office to tell him about the weird call. I was just in time to hear him on the phone, telling the harpist who was scheduled to play at our reception that we wouldn’t be needing her services after all.
“He’s a liar and a creep.” I knew this in my bones.
“And that’s why you wanted to marry him?”
“Of course not! I wanted to marry him because…”
Try as I might, I couldn’t remember why I wanted to marry Joel Panhorst, and when I admitted it, Damon’s smile was sleek. “Screw this new guy,” he said. “Get it out of your system.”
“You’re a true romantic.”
“Romance is for books. This is real life.” Damon rose to stand in front of me.
Call me shallow, but looking at the zipper on those tight leather pants while we were having a conversation about screwing and getting guys out of my system didn’t do much for my self-composure. I stood, too. “You’re cynical,” I told him.
“You’re scared to take a chance.”
“You’re awfully nosy considering none of this is any of your business.”
“I know better than you do. After all, I’m dead.”
“And you think—” He hadn’t come right out and said it, but then I suppose an artistic type like Damon would never simply lay things on the line. We were back to the whole simile and metaphor thing, and I was left to read between the lines again. “You took that overdose because of a woman.”
His eyes flashed “I told you, it was an accident. Believe me, I never took a woman that seriously. Not any woman. I just screwed them all to get it out of my system.”
“Did it work?”
“No.”
I hadn’t expected him to be so blunt or so honest, and I wasn’t prepared for any more of his advice. I knew it was better to stick to my case. “Is that why Vinnie is stealing your songs? Was he jealous? Maybe you messed with some woman you shouldn’t have messed with?”
He shrugged like it was no big deal. “She was his wife. He got over it. That’s not why he’s channeling me. He wanted to get rich.”
“Did it work?”
“Oh, come on!” Damon paced off into the darkness and back again. “Mind at Large was as big as they get. As big as the Stones or the Doors. Bigger than the Beatles for a while. Without my songs, no way they could have stayed on top of the charts that long.”
“Which still doesn’t explain how Vinnie makes it all happen.”
Damon scraped a hand through his hair. “It all started back in sixty-five or sixty-six,” he said. “We were touring in California. That’s when we met Melicant and Badnor.”
“They were a rock group?”
“They were witches.”
“Whoa!” I put up a hand and backed away. “You’re creeping me out. Are you saying—”
“That we dabbled in magic. Sure. All of us. We tried a few spells and hosted some pagan gatherings. Most of it was mildly interesting; some of it was mind-blowing. But it turned out to be like everything else. After a while, it got old. We all lost interest. Except for Vinnie.”
“He’s using witchcraft to make you write his songs?”
“Not witchcraft. Not exactly. At least not the kind of witchcraft we played with. Vinnie was best at it, see. We did it for fun and to see women dance naked around bonfires.” He gave me a wink. “Vinnie, he was a true believer. He went a step further.”
I swallowed hard. “You’re talking black magic?”
When he moved, Damon’s white shirt shimmered like starlight. “I guess that’s what you’d call it. Whatever it is, he’s wicked good at it.”
“And you want me to tell him to stop?”
“I want you to tell him that whatever happened between me and his old lady, it don’t matter anymore. He’s got to let me leave. Before…” As if there was electricity sparking through them, Damon flexed his hands. “I can’t be in the world and not be part of it,” he said. “Not for much longer. It’s killing me.”
“You’re already dead.”
“It’s killing my spirit, Pepper. Don’t you see it?” He held his left hand in front of my face, and for the first time, I noticed that it looked a little different than the rest of him. I could almost see through it. “If I can’t cross over soon, I’ll disappear completely. Not in this world. Not in the Other World. Will you help me, Pepper?”
I didn’t have a chance to say I would. An SUV coasted down the hill. The ghostbusters were back.
“Nothing up there at the monument,” Brian called out to me before any of his compatriots piled out of the car. “We didn’t see that other group of ghost hunters you talked about, either. We figured maybe they headed down here, so we thought we’d give it another shot. Have you seen anything?”
I refused to look at Damon. “Not a thing.”
“But something’s going on!” Stan’s face glowed with excitement. He pointed his Geiger counter right at Damon. It crackled like a son-of-a-bitch.
Brian signaled to Angela to start taking pictures. Her flash went off in my eyes and blinded me. “Here, grab this.” He shoved an electronic thermometer in my hand. “Get a reading.”
I did. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness again, I saw that the spot where Damon stood was colder than the surrounding area. I flicked off the thermometer. “Not a thing,” I told Brian. “And I wouldn’t hang around here too long if I were you. Security makes its rounds here in another few minutes. We should all get going.”
Damon got my message. While the ghostbusters were stomping around calling out readings to one another and looking as excited as can be, Damon walked off into the dark.
Stan’s Geiger counter stopped making noise. He turned it off, then on again, just to see if it was working. “What happened?”
I shrugged and headed for my car and, funny, I wasn’t feeling nearly as negative about this case as I had been that afternoon.
Not even the idea of talking to a guy who was really good at black magic discouraged me.
The afterglow of all Damon had told me radiated from my smile. I was smart and I was brave and I never quit.
“Come on, little girl, crave the possibilities.” I sang the tune under my breath as I got in my car and pulled away. �
��Laugh and run, naked in verdant meadows, drunk with your power.”
I was already up the hill and out the side gate that led back to the real world when the lyrics to the rest of the song hit me and caused my temperature to soar.
“Open to me. Give your body. Your soul. Your love. Your all.”
Chapter 5
The next morning, I was still on top of the world.
Who could blame me!
I was smart. I was pretty. I talked to the dead and the dead talked back. Sometimes, they even sang.
Tombs of Endearment Page 6
