The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  “You wouldn’t,” he told her. He understood what drove her, because the same thing drove him. Passion. Imagination. The burning need to create so he could make what he loved real in the world, and so other people could see it, understand it, and believe it the way he believed it. The way she believed it. “That won’t ever be you,” he added. “You’ll make it.”

  And he meant it. When he looked at her, he could see her standing in front of a hundred thousand screaming fans, singing her heart out.

  That was when she smiled at him – the smile he’d never seen before, so pure and intense and fierce it was like looking straight into the sun. “Silver Obsession,” she said, like these were the two most important words in the world.

  He raised an eyebrow, uncertain what she meant, and her smile, impossibly, got brighter.

  “That’s what I want to call the band. I haven’t told anyone yet.”

  But you told me, he thought, and held the moment in his heart.

  He always had a pen or a pencil with him, but at that moment he didn’t have any paper. They had napkins left over after their feast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chips, store-bought cookies, grapes and soda, though, and he took one, spread it out on the lid of the cooler in which they’d brought the picnic and started to draw her.

  He wanted to capture her smile. The confidence of it. The joy. The sheer exuberant desire.

  In a few lines, he had her long hair curling around her shoulders, the gleam in her eyes, and that glorious smile.

  “Let me see,” she demanded as he bent over his work, and after he finished the sketch and scrawled his initials and the date at the bottom, he handed it over to her.

  “That’s wonderful,” she whispered. “You’re amazing.”

  And that, too, he held in his heart. The day, the time, the light, the smells of the world around them at the moment she said it.

  And later, he kissed her for the first time. Then, with his penknife, the two of them took turns commemorating the kiss – and the many that followed – by carving their initials into the maple tree beneath which they’d had their picnic.

  “Should we add a heart?” she asked him.

  “The tree’s too small. Cutting through the bark to do a heart would wrap most of the way around the tree and kill it.”

  “Oh, we can’t do that!” She thought for a moment, then carved a little “4EVR”, right underneath their initials.

  And he realized she’d left him enough room to add an arrow to run through it. It wasn’t traditional. But it was theirs.

  Standing wrapped in his coat in the bitter cold, he shook off the memory of that summer afternoon, the joy he’d felt at finding the girl of his dreams and discovering the two of them shared so much.

  That had been then. This was a different time – hollow and grim, with the snow again threatening.

  He wanted to think she’d meant that 4EVR. He wanted to believe that he still mattered to her the way she mattered to him. But he didn’t see any footprints leading through the snow to their spot in the woods. Had he misunderstood her note?

  He didn’t think so. He set off along the snow-covered path, watching for her through the gloom.

  She might have come in by a different path. She might be waiting by their tree.

  Some part of him wanted to think she’d be there with a picnic basket. Some part of him would have happily sat on the frozen ground eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chips.

  After five years of silence, Brandon was probably right about her. Mike was, perhaps, ridiculous in wanting to still believe in TJ.

  But seeing her again the night before showed him this: he had never stopped loving her. Instead, he loved her more.

  Have a good reason for having abandoned me, he thought, willing her to hear him. Have a good reason for breaking my heart. I’ll forgive you anything, if only I know you didn’t forget me.

  The path down to their place was long, but he covered it without any awareness of the passage of time. Hope, he mused, shortened journeys well.

  He saw the little clearing where they’d shared their first date and, in the dim light, that was all he saw . . . at least at first.

  Then he realized someone had pinned a white square to the tree where they’d carved their initials.

  When he was close enough, he saw the only well-known artwork he’d done of TJ, preserved in a bigger plastic bag.

  It was the watercolor she’d used for the front of her first – and last – indie album cover.

  He took it down.

  Beneath it lay devastation, and he found himself shuddering.

  TJ + MK >>>--4EVR---> had been hacked and slashed and burned. The damage was not recent; bark was growing in over the blackened, scarred wood.

  Those scars spoke of rage.

  Not his rage. And he couldn’t imagine TJ ever doing that. Who had hated her? Or them?

  Without warning, hairs on the back of his neck lifted, and he knew someone was watching him. He looked around slowly, not wanting to startle whomever it was.

  On the side of the hill, across the stream, he saw TJ. And in the instant he spotted her, snow started to fall.

  She was still dressed too lightly for the terrible weather. She looked . . . fragile.

  He realized he’d never thought of TJ as fragile before.

  She stared at him for an instant. Didn’t wave. Didn’t speak a word. Instead, she turned and fled.

  “Wait!” he shouted, but the falling snow started coming down harder and muffled his voice. “Dammit, TJ, wait for me! I’ll help you.”

  But she didn’t wait, and he realized that he couldn’t hope to get across the stream to catch her – the water was high and fast, snow-melt that flooded the stream with muddy, dangerous run-off.

  The weather needed to get colder, he thought. Or warmer. With the temperature where it was, just above freezing, the conditions were right for a blizzard.

  He held the watercolor, forcing himself to ignore the memories of the day he’d done it, and turned it over.

  “He hid his secret here,” she’d written, her long, heavy letters like scars on the paper.

  And he looked back to their tree.

  Hid a secret by their tree?

  No. She’d brought him to the tree to show him the burns, the scars, their initials and their little arrow destroyed. And she’d used the first drawing to get him there. She would use the second drawing to take him to . . .

  Oh, God.

  . . . The barn.

  Her father’s barn.

  He never wanted to face her parents again. He remembered standing on their doorstep the day after TJ went missing.

  Her father had answered the door, recognized him, and said, “Get off my property before I shoot you.”

  “TJ’s missing,” Mike told him. “She disappeared from her tour bus yesterday. None of her band members saw her go, and none of them is sure where she might have left the bus. All of her belongings, including her guitars, were still on the bus when it got to Cincinnati. The bus made three stops, and no one saw her at any of them. Everyone assumed she was sleeping in the back.”

  “She’s not missing,” her father said.

  “You know where she is? She’s all right?”

  The older man’s face had turned a dull, dark red. “She hasn’t been all right since she met you. But I know where she is. Theresa Jeanne sent her mother an email saying she met a rich Argentinian gentleman, and she was leaving her unhappy life to go be with him.” He started to close the door.

  “She’d never do that!” Mike said. “I love her and she loves me. She would never just take off without letting me know where she was going!”

  TJ’s father had glared at him. “What did you expect? You turned her into a whore, living with you without marrying you. You encouraged her to waste her life and her intelligence on music. You kept her away from college and the work she should have done, becoming a nurse like her mother and taking care of the sick.” He st
ared dully at Mike. “You destroyed her. She was a good girl, and you turned her into trash like you.” And with that he had closed the door in Mike’s face.

  During the long months after, when Mike gave up everything to try to find her, neither of her parents would even acknowledge that he existed. They had no interest in her, either. Didn’t search. Didn’t question. Didn’t even think it odd that she’d abandoned the guitars into which she’d poured her soul since she was a kid.

  And now she was leading him back to her father’s barn.

  He closed his eyes.

  He’d never believed the Argentina story. He’d never thought TJ’s parents had made it up, though.

  Now? Now he had doubts. He hid his secret here, she’d written.

  What secret, Mike wondered. And who hid it?

  TJ was twenty-one. She stood in the barn behind her parents’ house. TJ and Mike had been living together for six months at that point, and Mike had come to the conclusion that heaven on earth was a real possibility.

  Except for this moment of insanity. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” TJ grinned at him, the smile that always took his breath away. “You know the album cover I like. That Melissa Etheridge one.”

  Mike held a pad of ten-by-ten sheets of watercolor paper, his portable easel, brushes, paints, pencils. He sighed. “Yeah, I know the one. Topless, back to the camera.”

  “Yeah. Only I want mine with the bales and the old barn boards on the sides, the hill over there where the sun comes up as the backdrop. I want more shadow and contrast, and a lot more color. And on the album back, I want the front view of me.”

  He looked at her and shook his head. “That’s going to get the album banned.”

  “It’s going to get the album covered in a brown paper wrapper, and that brown paper wrapper is going to send sales through the roof.”

  He sighed, and she laughed. “Look, half the world has ’em, and the other half wants to see ’em, and it isn’t like you’re doing some cheesy snapshot. Having your artwork on the cover and your name and studio in the credits should help you, too.” She gave him a woebegone look. “Silver Obsession is good, dammit. But no one’s listening. This topless cover? This is just a stunt, and I know that. But if they buy the album, most of them will listen to it at least once. And I think if we can get them to listen just once, we can keep them. I’ll risk taking my shirt off for that.”

  Silver Obsession had been playing little bars for two years. And they were really good, but TJ wasn’t patient, and wasn’t willing to wait for someone with connections to wander into one of the lousy gigs they could get. Along with entering band battles and auditioning for better gigs, she was taking their music directly to listeners every way she could.

  He suspected she was right about the impact a double-sided topless cover would have, too. God knows, he loved to look at her.

  When her parents saw the album, though, and recognized his work on the cover, they were going to kill him. Kill her, then kill him. Hunt the two of them down like ravening wolves after a brace of plump, juicy rabbits.

  TJ didn’t share his worry. She assured him her folks were all bark and no bite. And she loved her parents’ old barn. She wanted him to paint the picture there, not in his studio with fake boards and contrived lighting.

  He set up, and she stripped off her shirt and turned her back to him. Held her guitar in her right hand, by the neck. Lifted her chin, tossed her long hair, and planted her feet, in their six-inch spike-heeled patent-leather pumps, shoulder-width apart.

  Her jeans were tight, worn thin in places, her skin was gold blushed with peach as the sun came over the horizon, and his heart caught in his throat.

  His, he thought. She was his. “More to the right, and lift your arm just a little,” he told her.

  She adjusted, and the full curve of her right breast, underlit by the dawn, came into clear, glorious view.

  He did a few quick lines with pencil and started painting, catching the luminous, fleeting colors of the day’s first light with desperate speed, marking out the shadows of her spine, the wild tangle of wavy, windblown, coffee-brown hair, the curve of her shoulder.

  Mine. Mine. Forever mine.

  In twenty minutes, he had enough of the picture – he’d be able to finish it back at the studio.

  He dragged his easel in front of her and off to the side, and pinned the second ten-by-ten sheet beside the first.

  “Don’t move,” he told her, and started drawing.

  He’d captured her outlines, and the brighter, fiercer sunlight tossed across her exquisite curves when he heard the rhythmic crunch of footsteps on gravel coming down the path.

  From the weight and the stride, it was going to be her father.

  He stared into her eyes, and saw the defiance there . . . and he shook his head. I have enough, he mouthed, and pointed to her shirt lying on the bale of hay beside her. She frowned, but he wasn’t going to be party to World War III. He dumped the paint water in the dirt, covered the watercolors, and folded up the easel with the paintings still pinned in place.

  He could finish both paintings in the studio that was the other half of his two-room rental.

  She pulled her shirt over her head; he sat on a bale and started sketching her into his sketchbook. Her father came around the path, sucked in air in surprise, and said, “What the hell are you two doing here?”

  TJ said, “Hi, Dad. We’re using the barn as the backdrop for my first album cover.”

  “You don’t get to be here,” her father said. “And you don’t get to call me ‘Dad’. I don’t know you anymore. You spit on your family when you turned your back on everything we believe in, when you chased after this life of drugs and sex and sleaze. You gave up on us when you moved in with that bum. Leave. Now.” He paused, gave her a long, sad look, and shook his head. “And don’t ever come back.”

  She’d stood unblinking, unmoving beneath her father’s onslaught. Mike could see she was shocked. Stunned. But when her father finished, she lifted her chin and smiled at him – the tight, wounded smile Mike only saw on her face when she talked about her parents.

  “We’re on our way. You’ll never see me again.”

  Mike studied the man, half a foot taller than him, probably eighty pounds heavier, with muscle built from a lifetime of daily hard work.

  If Mike hadn’t loved TJ, he could have liked her father. Admired him. The old man had endured a life of hardship and struggle to free his children from the pre-dawn risings, back-breaking labor, and constant demands that defined his existence. He’d worked himself to the bone to give each of them security and comfort.

  But the man was throwing away the one kid he had who didn’t want to be secure. And that broke Mike’s heart.

  TJ’s father couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see her talent. Her brilliance. Her fire. He refused to see that she was the kid most like him, the one stubbornly capable of carving her place in the world with her bare hands and her ferocious persistence – jamming her flag into the hard earth and calling that place her own.

  Mike pulled into the drive now, wondering if TJ’s father still wanted to shoot him.

  The old farm looked grimmer in winter, Mike reflected. Skeletal, dry, bleak.

  Mike peered through the worsening snowfall into the darkness. That was then, this is now.

  The path that led to the barn was covered with packed, well-worn snow – even during storms, the animals still had to be fed and watered and tended. No lights were on at the house, but if no one was home right then, they would be soon. He needed to be quick. Get in, get out.

  TJ had walked up that path with Mike after her father told her never to come back. Mike never saw her cry about it. He knew she did though because sometimes he’d catch her with her eyes swollen and red, and he’d realize it was her mother’s birthday. Or her brother’s, or one of her sisters’.

  But she’d said she’d never go back and, as far as he knew, she
never had.

  She chose instead to fight her fight, to live her life, to build her empire. She’d wanted to make the world fit her.

  Except that right as she was gaining traction, she vanished.

  And now?

  He wasn’t sure she’d be waiting for him in the barn. He just knew the barn had something to tell him.

  His secret, TJ had written.

  Inside the barn, he smelled hay and manure, heard animals moving heavily against each other, breathing deeply, lowing softly. He was startled by how warm and familiar it all was.

  This place had been TJ’s childhood. Horses and cows, hard work and long hours.

  She’d told him she loved it. Liked riding the horses through the woods, liked brushing them and cleaning their hooves and smelling the sweet feed when she poured it into their buckets. She liked watching the spring calves chasing each other around the fields. She’d loved the old structure, the stables and pens, the huge storage areas above.

  She hadn’t wanted to make farming her life, but of all her siblings, she was the only one who had loved the farm, and who hadn’t been eager to get away.

  When she was ten, she’d made a private corner up in the abandoned west side of the loft, hidden behind bales of hay. She’d kept books and a pillow and a sleeping bag up there. She’d shown Mike her hiding place once, well before the day her father told her never to come back. When she’d talked about her hideaway, Mike watched her eyes light up.

  “Mom and Dad don’t go up there because this side of the loft only has a rickety ladder, and the loft on the other side has stairs. In the summer, I used to drag my guitar up there, and take food and extra batteries for my flashlight, and I’d spend as many nights there as I could. It’s the best place in the world for reading on rainy days. Best place to stretch out and do homework. Best place to hang out with the barn cats and play with the kittens.”

  He’d suggested another thing it might be the best place for, raising an eyebrow, grinning wickedly.

  That was one of the few times she’d flat-out turned him down. “The loft is sacred,” she’d said. “This is the place where I was a kid. Where I read every book I ever loved, and listened to the radio and practiced the guitar until my fingers bled. This is the place where I wrote my first songs, and where I dreamed big dreams.”