No Return: A Contemporary Phantom Tale

by Pope, Christine

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Copyright Notice

  Author’s Note

  It’s often a struggle for a writer to decide whether or not to revise an earlier manuscript. The general school of thought is that you finish a book, release it into the world, and then move on to the next project. However, after a good deal of wrestling with the idea, I decided to go ahead with a revised and updated version of this novel. It was originally written in 2005, which might not seem that long ago, but the world has changed a good deal between now and then, and I wanted to reflect some of those changes to make the book seem more current. Also, during those intervening years, I began writing seriously as Christine Pope, and began to amass a decent backlist of work. It somehow didn’t feel right to me that No Return was out there under a pen name I couldn’t claim as mine, and that’s why the novel now has “Christine Pope” on the cover (which has also been revised and updated).

  Whether you’re new to this story, or coming back to it to see what changes I’ve made, I hope you enjoy it and take it in the spirit of loving tribute in which it was intended. The Phantom’s story has always held a special place in my heart, and this is just one interpretation of the classic tale.

  Christine Pope

  January 2012

  Chapter One

  Someone is watching me.

  The feeling of wrongness had been there awhile, tickling the back of my mind for several days, but this was the first time I could remember the sensation taking any kind of coherent shape.

  The thought that immediately followed, naturally, was, Of course someone’s watching you. You’re a singer, for God’s sake. But I somehow knew the wrongness hadn’t come from the intent eyes of the watching directors for whom I’d auditioned, or even from the patrons at the restaurant where I worked part-time as a waitress and was occasionally required to stroll between the tables and sing popular opera to give the place “atmosphere” (George, the owner’s words, not mine).

  I paused, key still in the lock to my front door, and gave an uncertain little glance over my shoulder. The street was quiet, baking in the heat of the usual October onslaught of the Santa Ana winds. The gales had subsided some time earlier that afternoon, but the heat remained, implacable, solid as a hot wave from an open oven door. It was too early for the neighborhood children to be home from school, and too warm for the usual Spanish chatter at the mailboxes that was usual for the stay-at-home mothers on my street at this time of day. The air hummed with the sound of overworked air-conditioning units.

  I turned the lock and went inside the bungalow. It smelled of overheated Murphy’s oil soap and a faint lingering trace of patchouli, underlaid with what I always thought of as “old house smell”: the scent of aged wood and generations of perfume and smoke. The bungalow had been built in the early teens—was in fact located on a historical landmark—and made up in charm what it lacked in conveniences. I couldn’t run the bathroom heater and the toaster oven at the same time without blowing a fuse, but the bungalow had lovely oak floors, built-in bookcases in the living room, and a real stone fireplace.

  I laid my few pieces of mail—the dreaded electric bill, a flyer from the theater department at school—on the coffee table and pulled the chain on the ceiling fan. The blades moved slowly at first in the hot air, but at least the draft they created broke up the oppressive heat somewhat. At this point a room air conditioner was something I dreamed of when reading the sales circulars that got deposited in my mailbox every Tuesday.

  Luckily, I’d already formed the habit of keeping my shades drawn, more to keep out the heat and light of the hot weather than for privacy’s sake. I sat there in the warm semi-darkness, feeling alone at least for the moment. There were no watching eyes here, as far as I could tell.

  The bungalow was tiny, one small bedroom, an even smaller bathroom, and a kitchen that was more of an afterthought than anything else. The living room alone was a decent size, although it was crowded with my loveseat (I’d found out very quickly that a sofa was out of the question), a drop-leaf table against the far wall, and my grandmother’s ancient spinet tucked into a corner next to the table.

  “Not a lot of places for a serial killer to hide,” I said out loud, then smiled, mocking myself. It was just stress. Stress could cause feelings of paranoia—at least I had a vague recollection of reading something to that effect in a freshman psych course. Not to mention that carrying a full course load while working thirty hours a week and going to auditions on the side was probably enough to make anyone crazy.

  The message light on my answering machine was blinking. I reached over to the file cabinet that doubled as an end table and pushed the button.

  Meg, of course.

  “Christine, I know you’re at class right now, but is there any chance you could take my shift tonight?”

  I wondered why Meg even bothered with a part-time job—half the time I picked up her shifts anyway, which was why a gig that had started out as fifteen or so hours a week had slowly mushroomed into closer to thirty. Meg didn’t really need the job but had taken it to “give her more practice singing in public.” She had a good voice but was lazy about showing up for class and even worse about work; during the year I’d had known her, Meg had been on academic probation the entire time, and even now, with graduation looming (at least for me), Meg seemed airily unconcerned about the whole process. Of course, if she had to go a fifth year it would not be the end of the world—with an architect father trying to assuage the guilt over his divorce by piling money on his daughter and a mother who worked as a producer at a local television station, the cost of the whole thing was a non-issue. Whereas I was scraping by on a patchwork of scholarships and grants that covered tuition and some books but certainly not necessities such as a place to live and something to drive, even a car as makeshift as my battered but still breathing Honda Civic.

  I had a paper on mid-nineteenth-century Romantic composers due on Monday, but today was only Wednesday, and I didn’t have to work until Saturday night, so I knew I could take Meg’s shift without too much trouble. It meant yet another day of delayed practice, but my next recital was still two weeks off, and the electric bill just happened to be due next Tuesday. It wasn’t much of a contest.

  Besides, I thought, as I picked up the phone to leave a message on Meg’s cell, if I were at the restaurant working I wouldn’t be here, startling at every noise and certain that a whole gang of serial rapists was lurking out on the front porch.

  He picked up the photo, certain that the girl couldn’t be everything Jerome had reported, but the image was promising. Just a quick, surreptitious shot from his assistant’s iPhone, it was a little blurred, frustratingly dim, but it showed enough. The subject had apparently paused as she left the restaurant, stopping to push a stray strand of hair away from her eyes—the winds had been strong two nights ago
. Her face was illuminated by the street lights and the heavy wrought-iron light fixture that hung above the entrance to L’Opera. She was fair, her oval face surrounded by a cloud of curly dark hair, the features in the photo grainy but obviously regular: large eyes and a full mouth separated by a straight nose. She wore a plain white shirt and narrow black pants that outlined her slender body.

  “And her voice?”

  Jerome straightened even more, if that were possible. “Classically trained, coloratura. Very lovely.”

  He set the photo down on the leather blotter at his desk. How long had he waited for this chance, this one fulfillment of dreams and desires he could no longer explain even to himself? He ached to hear her, to see her delicate features before him, unblurred by an unfriendly camera. He took a breath. Not yet.

  “Anything else?” Of course he knew that Jerome had more to report, but he also knew that his assistant preferred the give and take of question and answer, not a simple regurgitation of facts.

  “She’s a senior at USC.” Jerome paused, tapping away on his iPhone. “Twenty-three; she had to wait a year to start because her scholarships weren’t all in place, so she worked as a waitress. Orphaned—her parents were killed in a car accident when she was fifteen, so she lived with her paternal grandmother after that. The grandmother passed away a few years later, and Christine had to sell the house they lived in to cover medical expenses.”

  “And where is she living now?”

  “Still in Pasadena.” Jerome wouldn’t allow himself to smile, but it was apparent he was somewhat amused by the irony of it all. “Less than two miles from here.”

  Two miles, he thought, and felt his own lips twist in the closest approximation of a smile he could make. Two miles in terms of geography, but it might as well have been two hundred when it came to economics. Her shabby little bungalow was in a heavily ethnic working-class neighborhood where one could go blocks without hearing a word of English; his home stood in a world of faux Norman chateaux, replicas of Mediterranean villas, and substantial Craftsman homesteads that bore as much resemblance to Christine’s tiny bungalow as her battered Honda did to the sleek new S-Class parked in the driveway outside. To think that she had been here all this time. . . .

  “I need a recording, Jerome,” he said finally. “I want to hear her.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  He knew that a recording would only give a blurred, half-accurate impression of her, much like that one indistinct photograph, but it would be a start. Jerome could be trusted with certain things, but while not completely ignorant he was unaware of certain subtleties of the vocal art.

  “Not at the restaurant, though,” he continued. “There would be far too much background noise. Perhaps from one of her classes, or a recital, if she has one coming up.”

  Jerome typed something into his iPhone. “Very good, sir.”

  For quite a while he’d been under the impression that Jerome could do perfectly well without his newest electronic toy, but he’d refrained from comment on the matter. If it helped Jerome feel that he was something more than a glorified errand-boy, so be it. At least he could trust the man to be completely discreet, and discretion was needed here above all else. Of course, Jerome was paid very well to carry out his duties seamlessly and quietly, but it was still something to feel that he had at least one person in the world he could trust.

  “That’s all,” he said finally, and waved his hand.

  Jerome nodded, secreted the phone in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, and left the room.

  He pushed the heavy antique chair back from his desk and stood, then went to the damask draperies that framed the window and pushed one aside. Outside, the gardens wilted under the heavy autumn heat, despite nightly soakings by a carefully orchestrated sprinkler system. A few brave roses still clung to their stems, bright flashes against the green of lawns and shrubs. He squinted at the light that poured into the room, then shook his head, letting the drapery fall from his fingers. Better to stay in the dark, in these carefully climate-controlled rooms, where, if he never looked outside, he could believe it was winter, or nighttime.

  The heavy antiques in the room had come to him with the house, and he had never had the slightest desire to change any of them. They suited him, suited the shadows and dark to which he clung, shrouded from the outside world. To his neighbors and the few family members who remained, he was practically a ghost. And since his world had formed itself around him so perfectly, barricaded behind his wealth the way his home was barricaded behind high stone walls, he had never bothered to alter any of it.

  Until now.

  Chapter Two

  “Christine.”

  I looked up, not wanting to meet my professor’s eyes. Dr. Green was watching me carefully, voice mild, expression calm, but those dark eyes of his were disappointed.

  “Do you really think a performance like that is up to recital standard?”

  Thank God this had been my one hour of private tutoring for the week. I would have been mortified if I’d sung like that in front of the other students in my senior class. As it was, I found it difficult to stop beating myself up mentally long enough to reply, “No, Dr. Green. It’s just that I had to work double shifts—”

  He held up a hand, forestalling any further explanations. Most likely he viewed them only as excuses. “I know that most students these days need to work to make it through school. But if you allow a part-time job to take over your life, then you have no business being in this class—or pursuing a career in music.”

  The words were cruel, but true, I knew. If I only had the discipline, I’d be practicing far into the night, after I returned home from work. But exhaustion usually drove me straight into bed after my shift was over. That familiar choking feeling rose in my throat, and I swallowed, hard. If I dissolved into tears in front of Dr. Green, I knew I might as well pack it in and give up on my dreams of singing forever.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Green,” I said at last, after I was reasonably sure that my voice wouldn’t betray me—at least any more than it already had. “I’ll tell them I can’t do more than twenty hours a week. I’ll be ready.”

  He studied me for a moment, the worry lines between his brows seeming deeper than they had a few minutes ago. “Christine, I know this has all been difficult for you—”

  “I’m fine, Dr. Green,” I said, knowing that the last thing I needed right now was words of sympathy. I admired Dr. Green greatly and knew that he was genuinely concerned about me, but sometimes compassion was harder to bear than cruelty.

  “Mmm.” He hesitated, appearing to pick through the words he wanted to say and finding them all lacking. “I don’t say this to many students, Christine. You have one of the finest pure instruments I’ve heard. But talent isn’t enough. Without practice, dedication, hard work, all you have is potential. And that’s not what casting directors are looking for.”

  There being no real reply to that, I said only, “I know, Dr. Green.”

  Again he was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I think that’s enough for today. Concentrate on the middle section, and we’ll see how you’re doing tomorrow.”

  I took the dismissal as gracefully as I could and nodded, then retrieved my canvas satchel and shoved my score into it. “Thanks,” I said, and turned to the door without looking at him. I wasn’t particularly thankful, and I knew he knew it, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to say at that point.

  A glance at my watch told me that I’d only used up half of the hour-long practice time I’d been allotted. Funny, it had felt much longer than that.

  This was my last class of the day, so it was time for the murderous slog up the 110 Freeway through downtown L.A. back to Pasadena, and I wasn’t looking forward to getting into the crunch at five-thirty instead of six. Even a half-hour could make a huge difference in the chimerical beast that was the Los Angeles freeway system. At least it had cooled down somewhat over the past couple of days. Sitting in bumper-to-bu
mper traffic in ninety-degree heat with no air conditioning would have been enough to push my already frayed nerves over the edge.

  I had barely looked up from my watch before I almost collided with a man who stood outside the rehearsal studio. He was studying a small tabloid-size poster someone had tacked up to advertise the senior master class autumn recital. “Sorry,” I said automatically.

  He looked at me swiftly, eyes sharp behind a pair of dark glasses, and I almost took a step back. That stare was far too penetrating, and as unexpected as it was unwelcome. Then it seemed as if a shutter closed down over his features, and he smiled. “No problem.”

  “Well, as long as I didn’t smash your foot or anything…”

  “All intact.” He continued to smile, but I was not reassured.

  Eager to keep moving, I manufactured a smile of my own, gave a little nod of acknowledgement, and hurried off down the sidewalk, not wanting to look back.

  The strength of my reaction surprised me a little. Sure, the guy “creeped me out,” to use one of Meg’s favorite phrases, but I couldn’t exactly say why. He did look a little out of place—I would have put his age at around forty, probably—but schools were full of “nontraditional” students these days, whatever that meant. He didn’t look like a student, though. His air was too polished, his clothes too good. Possibly a grad student, although they usually had an even worse air of poverty than the undergrads.

  I shook my head. Jumping at shadows again. Like you don’t have enough to worry about already.

  George, my boss, was going to flip out when I told him I could only work twenty hours a week. And how I was going to make expenses on that amount of money, I had no idea. I had a small, tightly guarded hoard of money in a savings account, all that was left from the sale of my grandmother’s house, but it probably wasn’t enough to get me through the rest of the school year. I’d thought about getting a roommate, but my place was so small I didn’t even have room for a cat, much less an actual person.