by Roz Lee
He paid the named amount, plus a generous tip, and turned to the doorman. “Haven’t seen him? I hope he ordered enough for two.” He headed to the private elevator, turning before he stepped inside. “Don’t tell him I’m coming. I want to surprise him.”
When the car reached the top, Hank stood waiting in front of the elevator door.
Guy frowned “Damned doorman. I told him not to call you.” He brushed past him and headed to the kitchen.
Hank helped himself to the burgers and fries in the bag. “Jimmy is loyal to the almighty dollar. You should have tipped him better than I did.” He handed his uninvited guest a burger in a greasy paper wrapper. “Have one. I was going to eat them both myself, but I can share.”
Guy took the offered burger. “It’s the least you can do. I turned down lunch with a damned fine looking woman for you. You owe me a lot more than a cold, greasy burger.”
Hank took a big bite, chewed and swallowed. “How is Melody?”
“I suppose your damned nosy doorman told you I went to see her. Does he tell you everything that goes on in the building?”
“No. Only what goes on in regard to Melody. So, how is she?”
He took a bite before answering. “As I said, she’s a beautiful woman. Is she for real? I mean, she really is his daughter, isn’t she?”
Hank wiped his hands on a paper napkin. “Yeah, she is. She calls Sir Jonathan Youngblood, Uncle Jonathan. Can you imagine?”
After lunch, Hank led the way to the family room. Guy settled into the overstuffed sofa. “Why did you leave? Chad called me. They’re worried about you.”
Hank shifted to sit on the edge of his chair, hands clasped, elbows propped on his knees. “I was finished. I’d done my part. They can wrap it up without me.”
“You’re missing the point, Hank. Chad told me they were going to finish without you, but you walked out on a recording session and you didn’t tell anyone where you were going. It isn’t like you. They were concerned. Hell, after Chad’s phone call I was ready to put out an APB on you myself.”
Hank slumped back into his chair. “I’m sorry. I’ll call and let them know I’m okay. I just had to get away for a while.”
Guy nodded. “Did you know Melody was in New York?”
“No. I knew she was going to Boston, but it never occurred to me she would be here, much less in our building.”
“I think I’ll take her to dinner tonight to make up for ditching the lunch interview. Why don’t you join us?”
Hank crossed the room to the bank of floor to ceiling windows. Waves of heat made Central Park into a living impressionist painting. “Thanks, but no. I told her she could have as much time as she needs. If I show up tonight she would think I was pushing her.”
He thought about the track he’d just recorded. Yeah, he’d be pushing her soon enough as it was. “Hopefully, she’ll be in a better frame of mind in January. If not, I’ll probably lose her forever.”
“What do you mean by that? What’s happening in January?”
“I want you to promote the hell out of ‘Melody.’ The release date is January fifteenth, and it’s not negotiable. I want it on every radio station, in every market across the country.” He paced the room, thinking out loud. “I mean every market, Guy. Big and small. How are the plans coming for the tour?”
After talking business for nearly an hour, Hank walked Guy to the elevator. “Keep an eye on her for me, will you? She says she needs to be alone, but I want to know she has someone to turn to if she needs it.”
“I can do that. Wouldn’t she call on Sir Jonathan, though?”
“Probably. But just in case, make sure she knows she can trust you, too.”
* * *
Mel’s phone rang, startling her. Seeing Guy Nichols on the caller ID, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Did you find him?”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know over dinner tonight. How’s that sound?”
As soon as he arrived to pick her up for dinner, she peppered him with questions.
“Where is he?” she asked. “Did he say why he left the farm?”
“He didn’t say, just said he was fine and wanted a few days off. I guess the house full of people finally got to him. He sounded all right. I wouldn’t worry about him.”
Thank God.
“I’m glad he checked in with you,” she said as they walked to the elevator.
“Me, too.” He pushed the elevator call button. “Ms. Ravenswood, I owe you an apology for leaving you in a lurch this afternoon. I should have known he would call me, but I overreacted. I upset you, and I’m truly sorry. Can you forgive me?”
She stepped into the elevator. “There’s nothing to forgive, Mr. Nichols. You were worried about someone you love, and I understand that. Hank is lucky to have an agent who cares as much as you do.”
“Thank you. Please call me Guy. Mr. Nichols sounds so old.”
As the elevator bounced to a stop at the lobby level, she decided she liked Guy Nichols. “And you can call me Melody. I think we’re going to get along just fine, Guy.”
She stepped into the lobby. “Where are we going for dinner?”
His private car dropped them at a posh restaurant in the Meat Packing District. The Maitre d’ escorted them to a quiet table on the Mezzanine, where Melody could conduct her interview with a degree of privacy. Over a beautiful meal of Lobster Salad and Duck, she asked her questions. An hour later, the waiter removed her empty plate.
“Thank you for the wonderful meal,” she said, and sipped the hot chocolate she’d ordered for dessert. “You must come here often to receive such excellent service.”
Guy sipped his coffee. “I come here fairly often. Thanks to BlackWing, I enjoy a standard of living I never thought to aspire to. It was a lucky day when I ran across them. Don’t get me wrong. From a financial standpoint, I’ve been more than lucky, but from a personal standpoint, I’ve been blessed. I love those guys as if they’re my own boys. I’ve just got the one daughter, and they’re like sons to me, every last one of them.”
“Can I quote you on that?” she teased.
He sat up and, placing his forearms on the table, he leaned toward her. His face was solemn. “Yes, you can. And I’ll do anything to see my boys are happy. Anything. I think you can make Hank happy. If there is anything at all I can do to help you, you just let me know. Anytime, day or night. I’m here for you.”
“Thanks, Guy. I want Hank to be happy, too. For the record, I love him. If you talk to him again, you can tell him I haven’t forgotten what we talked about and assure him I’m working on it. He’ll understand.”
He sat back, relaxed once again. “I’m glad to hear that. He’s waited a long time to find the right woman. Whatever it is you’re working on if I can help in any way, don’t hesitate to call.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Mel arrived in San Diego on a beautiful, early fall day with no marine layer in sight. Her hired limo drove north along the sparkling coastline to the house she had rented on the La Jolla cliffs. After the crowded of streets of New York, she looked forward to the quiet of the coast for a few months. Most of the tourists had gone, the gold-flecked beaches would be empty except for the diehard locals and surfers.
The house turned out to be everything the realtor had promised over the phone. The Spanish-style architecture gave a lazy, laid-back feel to the property. Terra cotta roof tiles and beige stucco walls complemented the rugged coastal landscape. Lovely, well-tended gardens surrounded the house on all sides. They filled the yard with vibrant color and soft, sweet floral scents. The vanishing-edge swimming pool appeared to drop off the cliff into the ocean. Steep wooden steps descended the cliff face to the beach below if she wanted a more challenging swim in the cold waters of the Pacific.
She spent her first afternoon unpacking and getting to know the house she planned to call home for the next few months. She ate her dinner on the patio where she could enjoy the sound
of the surf and the mild ocean breeze. After the summer of controlled chaos in the recording studio and a few hectic weeks in New York, the solitude was relaxing. She lazed in the garden and watched the seagulls soar against the backdrop of sparkling ocean and the setting sun.
Her mother lived just up the coast in Encinitas in the same house Melody had grown up in. She called her mom to let her know she was fine and she would drive up to see her on the weekend. She wanted a few days to adapt to West Coast time and to establish her new work schedule.
Her time was hers to do with as she pleased. She swam in the pool in the morning, wrote for several hours. After lunch, she walked on the beach before returning to her computer for a few more hours of writing, stopping as the sun began to set on the western horizon. She loved the quiet backyard where she would sit and watch the sunset. After dinner, she returned to work, or if her creativity was low, she simply sat outside and listened to the surf crash against the shore.
The first week passed quickly, and to her surprise, she made remarkable headway with the book. Her only regret was Hank wasn’t there to share it with her. She thought of him constantly. Beneath her contentment swirled the ever-present loneliness and heartache of missing him.
As the weekend approached, she dreaded the visit with her mother. She’d always been close to her, growing up in what was for all intents a single-parent home. However, underneath the close bond lurked a festering undercurrent of distrust she needed to come to terms with. Her mother never wanted to discuss her father and never mentioned his death if she could avoid it.
Melody wanted to build a life with Hank. His parents’ marriage was by all accounts a model for the perfect life. Hers was anything but. In order to live with Hank in his bi-polar world of rock stardom and small town farmer, she needed to understand the forces driving her fears and lay those fears to rest.
She rented a car and made the short drive up the coast.
Nothing has changed.
The modest family neighborhood existed in its own bubble of reality, where children still played on front lawns and drove Barbie cars along the sidewalks. It was a neighborhood filled with PTA moms, scout leaders, and Sunday school teachers. The residents mowed their own lawns and tended their own flowerbeds. Everyone knew everyone else, and holidays were celebrated with bike parades and potluck dinners in the park around the corner.
Her mother knelt on a foam cushion, spade in hand, weeding the front flowerbed. She dropped the tool and her gloves, rushing to grab Melody in a huge hug. She returned the affection, genuinely happy to see her mother despite the serious reason for her visit.
They eased apart, and her mother took her by the arm, pulling her along behind. “Let’s go in and have some tea. I want to hear all about this Hank Travis who wants to marry you. I can't believe you'd get involved with a musician after everything I've been through.”
She stiffened at the mention of Hank’s proposal. She never should have told her mother about it in the first place. Her mother’s reference to her own suffering, with no mention of her daughter’s, hadn’t gone unnoticed either.
She forced herself to relax and allowed her mother to drag her through the house to the kitchen. She sat at the work island while her mother fixed a pot of tea. Melody hadn’t ever thought much of it before, but she realized brewing tea was a skill her mother probably picked up from her father. It was as good a place to start as any, and it might keep her mother away from the subject of Hank.
“Where did you learn to brew tea so well?”
Her mother, Diane Harper Ravenswood, finished pouring the hot water into the teapot before turning to her daughter. Her lips were thin, but she managed a slight smile. “You came here to ask me about your father, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I need to know, Mom. Don’t you think I’m old enough to hear the truth?”
Her mother sighed and placed the teapot, cups, and saucers onto a tray. She added a plate of homemade cookies and a crock of honey. “Let’s take our tea out on the patio. We’ll be more comfortable there.”
She held the door for her mother and followed her out. A trellis covered with wine-colored bougainvillea in full bloom shaded the area. Her mom poured the tea as neatly as any lady of the manor.
“Cookie?”
To be polite, she selected a cookie and set it on her plate. How many tea parties did Mom put on for my friends and me? Hundreds, at least. The memory brought a genuine smile to her lips.
“You’re remembering the tea parties, aren’t you? I used to love seeing you with your friends, all dressed up in your frilly dresses, playing at being grown up. Thanks to your summers spent at Ravenswood, you could put on a passable British accent your friends were always trying to mimic. I was sorry when you no longer wanted to have tea parties.”
Melody remembered bitterly why she’d quit having the parties. The one on her tenth birthday had been the last. “They were fun for a while.”
“Yes they were.” She sipped her tea and set the fragile cup back on the saucer. “What do you want to know, Mel?”
“For one, why don’t you ever call me Melody?”
“Your father named you. I wanted to name you something normal, but he insisted. When you started school, I knew if you went by your real name, it wouldn’t take long for someone to figure out who you were. Once that happened, you’d never have a moment’s peace, so I registered you in school as Mel Harper. Of course, the school principal knew who you were from your birth certificate. She didn’t want the notoriety for her school, so she agreed to keep it quiet.”
She sensed her mother was still holding back. At least she was willing to talk about a few subjects, but clearly, she wasn’t going to get much further today.
She rose to leave.
“Wait. I’ve got something for you.” Her mother left, returning a short time later with a stack of scrapbooks. “It’s time to pass these on to you. I started keeping clippings about Milton long before I met him. You can learn a lot about him and the kind of life he led by reading these. Don’t make the same mistake I did, Mel…Melody.”
She stared at the huge stack of scrapbooks, all filled to capacity and bulging with newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and photographs. Stunned, she said the only thing that came to mind. “Thank you. I’ll take good care of them and return them to you when I’m through.”
Her mom laid a hand on her arm. “They’re yours. Keep them.”
Mel loaded the binders into the backseat of her car. She pulled to the curb around the corner from the house and sat until she was steady enough to continue back to La Jolla.
Back at home, she sorted the scrapbooks into chronological order. It would probably take a year or more to read them all, she guessed. She changed her daily routine to include an hour or more each evening to pour through the books.
Her mother was thorough in her obsession. Diane Harper had been infatuated with her late husband many years before they met. Some of the clippings dated back to when her mother was in high school, and Hamilton Ravenswood had begun to make a name for himself in the world of Rock and Roll music. She’d saved articles and photos from every kind of print media. There were clippings from Rolling Stone, Tiger Beat, 16, and even Parade, the magazine insert in the Sunday newspaper. There were glossy, color magazine photos, and grainy tabloid clippings. Melody was overwhelmed with the sheer quantity as well as the fanaticism the collection testified to.
In many of the early photos, her father was in the company of one beautiful woman or another. She recognized many of them as actresses and models popular a few decades ago. Some still maintained a degree of success after all the intervening years. As she read, she jotted down names in the event she might want to interview some of them for the book she was more determined than ever to write.
She studied the photos, seeing her father as a young man just coming into his adult years, fresh out of Cambridge, and thrust onto the world stage. She lined up a few of the better ones in chronological order. It was easy to se
e the maturing process he’d gone through. From the first, almost shy, candid shots to the posed publicity shots, there was a natural progression of confidence and arrogance as his talent matured along with his celebrity. Undeniably handsome man, it was easy to see how her mother had become infatuated with him early on. How she became his wife was a mystery still to be solved.
One evening, she gathered several of the paparazzi shots of her father with various models and actresses and studied them closely. It took her some time to pinpoint what bothered her about the photos. Then it became clear. In all of them, Hamilton Ravenswood was not touching his partner. The women hung off, or leaned against him. His hands would be in his pockets, wrapped around a drink or anything but his date. The women gazed adoringly up at him, but his eyes were always on something or someone else. She scribbled down a few more names, certain she would interview at least a few of them to learn if what she’d noticed indeed had been going on at the time.
Hank’s biography neared completion, and the holidays were fast approaching. Not a day passed she didn’t think of him in a way that had nothing at all to do with her writing. She ached to be with him, to hear the sound of his voice, to touch him.
The day after Halloween, BlackWing announced their new tour. It was to begin in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day. The six-month long tour would stop in eighteen cities across the country, ending with Dallas in August.
Guy Nichols was doing his job, and doing it well. She couldn’t listen to a radio station, watch television, or drive on the freeway without seeing or hearing an advertisement promising tickets would go on sale January sixteenth. She was tempted to call Guy and ask who had chosen the date, the day after her twenty-seventh birthday, and seventeen years and one day after her father’s death. She was afraid she knew the answer to whom, and even more, the reason why.
She spent Thanksgiving with her mother, their relationship more strained than it had ever been. Mel dried the last pan her mother handed her and returned it to the cabinet. She leaned against the counter, waiting for the next one. “I’m going to New York next week. I’ve finished the book, and my editor wants it before Christmas. She asked if I could come and meet with her and some of the people I’ll be working with.”
