No Return: A Contemporary Phantom Tale (11 page)

Of course, when I got to my car I realized that I hadn’t gotten my parking ticket validated—no surprise, considering the circumstances—and had to pay for my lovely little episode in the offices of the Long Beach Opera. Price of humiliation, $6.50, thank you very much. Not to mention all the gas this pleasant trip had cost me.

Not until I had peeled out of the parking structure, popping the clutch from first directly into third and almost stalling the car in the process, did I allow the tears to flow. By that point the quick-falling dusk of late autumn had already come to the city, and it was dark enough that no one could see me weeping as I pointed my battered little car northward for the long drive home.

Erik had been expecting Christine to make at least one phone call when she returned home from her audition, so he was poised by the listening equipment instead of just waiting for Jerome to give him the digital files for review. The apparatus had been set up in a smaller secondary office that had once been a bedchamber, but of course it was furnished in the same discreet opulence as the rest of the house. Because the evening was already chilly, a small fired burned in the rose marble fireplace, lending a subdued light to the otherwise darkened room.

The green light indicator for an outgoing call began to flash, and he immediately picked up the headphones and settled them over his ears even as the red recording light turned on.

“Meg?” came Christine’s voice. She sounded shaky and faint. Then a long pause. “Okay—I guess you’re out. Can you give me a call if you get this tonight? I don’t care how late it is.” Another pause. “Talk to you later.”
 

He sat, considering, not bothering to remove the headphones. That hadn’t sounded good at all. The audition hadn’t gone well, then. He couldn’t comprehend anyone not recognizing what a marvelous instrument she possessed, but perhaps Christine was one of those unfortunate performers who choked at auditions. It happened.
 

The outgoing call light began to flash again, and he sat up straighter, wondering if perhaps Christine were trying to reach Meg by another number. It was a male voice that answered, however, one which Erik immediately recognized and despised.

“Randall?” Again that frightening little hitch in her voice.

“Yeah—Christine?” Even as a disembodied voice heard through a set of headphones, there was no mistaking the sharpened concern in his tone. “What’s the matter?”

A muffled sound in return.

“Are you hurt? Christine!”

A ragged breath. Then, “No—I’m not hurt. I just—I needed to talk to someone.”

“What’s wrong?”
 

Almost unconsciously, Erik’s hands clenched into fists. How he longed to be the one Christine had called in her despair, the one she instinctively sought for comfort.

She took another one of those halting breaths. “Oh, God, Randall—that audition was just a fake. Someone set me up!”

“What do you mean, ‘set you up’?”

“I mean that I thought I had an audition and drove all the way down there, and then—then—” For the first time she broke down into weeping, not loudly, but little wrenching cries that were somehow more painful to listen to than outright sobs.

To do him credit, Randall did not try to cover up the sound of her pain by murmuring platitudes or telling her to hush. There was silence for a moment on the line, broken only by the agonized sound of Christine’s weeping, a horrible moment in which Erik waited, hardly daring to breathe until she spoke again.

Finally she said, “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. You’re upset. It’s okay.” A pause. “Do you want to tell me what happened next?”

“Oh, God, Randall, it was so
humiliating
! I go to their offices—their
offices
, like a complete idiot! Who holds auditions in their offices?”

“Well,” he said reasonably, “you’d never auditioned for them before. How were you supposed to know?”

“No one holds auditions in their offices, Randall. A rehearsal hall, even the theater where the production is going to be held, which I should have known, if I’d stopped to think about the whole thing logically.”

“Well, we can argue about that later. What happened?”

“So I walk in and tell the receptionist I’m there for the auditions, and she gives me this look, like I don’t know what I’m talking about. So I show her the letter, and then—” Christine paused and took a breath. “Then she tells me that it had to be some kind of joke, that they’d cast
The Rake’s Progress
two weeks earlier!”

“Jesus.” Even Randall sounded shaken.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

Then Randall said, “Do you want me to come over?”

Erik tensed, waiting for her reply. If Randall went to comfort Christine, there was no telling how things might end up. Certainly their previous quarrel seemed to have been forgotten for the moment.

“No,” Christine said at length, and Erik closed his eyes, expelling a breath he hadn’t even noticed he was holding. “I really appreciate it, but I’m okay. I just needed to talk to someone.”

“Just someone?”

“I wanted to talk to you.” Another pause, but not as long as the ones before. “I’m sorry we argued.”

Interesting comment, Erik thought. She’d admitted regret for the quarrel but not guilt.
 

Apparently Randall didn’t notice the distinction. “I’m sorry, too. I was being a jerk.”
 

She made some sort of protesting sound, but Randall cut her off.

“No, really. Probably I bit your head off because I
had
just borrowed the money from my parents.”

“So your house is safe?”

“It is unless someone else in the assessor’s office screws up again—which I kind of doubt, since my dad has a friend of his in the D.A.’s office who’s offered to look into the matter. We’ll probably get the money back in the next month or so.”

This was news to Erik, but he hadn’t bothered to follow up on the matter of Randall’s delinquent taxes for the past few days. He’d been too busy with his preparations for Christine’s arrival in the house. Still, the outcome of the matter didn’t surprise him all that much. He’d assumed that Randall would be able to extricate himself from the situation without too much difficulty, and at any rate the object had been to throw some frustration the boy’s way, not to actually render him homeless.

“Thank God for that, at least,” Christine said.
 

“Well, I have to admit that I’m glad to not have that hanging over my head anymore. But this audition thing—this is just somebody being cruel.”

A brief silence. Then she said, her voice small, “Why would anyone want to do something like this?”

“Not ‘anyone.’ Someone. And I have a pretty good idea who.”

“Not—”

“Yeah, Carrie Gustafson. It’s not as if she’s made any secret of the way she feels about you.”

“But why? And don’t tell me jealousy—she’s a mezzo—it’s not even as if we’d be up for the same parts!”

Randall sighed. “Christine, I have to say I’m touched by your faith in the goodness of humanity, but since when have feelings ever been logical? Of course she’s jealous—you can sing rings around her, you’re much prettier than she is, and it’s obvious to everyone that you’re Dr. Green’s favorite student. That’s enough to piss off a spoiled brat like Carrie. I know her better than you, anyway—she’s been at USC for four years, and I’ve had to put up with her crap the whole time.”

“Okay, so let’s say I agree with your version of ‘why.’ But how?”

“Well, it’s pretty easy for Carrie to get her hands on official letterhead from the Long Beach Opera—” and here Randall paused for a second— “considering that her father’s on the board of directors.”

“Oh.”
 

“Exactly ‘oh.’ And God knows her father wouldn’t deny his precious spoiled darling anything she asked for.”
 

Then Christine said, with some heat, “What a bitch,” and Erik smiled to himself. He was always pleased to see flashes of the spirit he knew burned beneath her calm exterior.

“With a capital B,” Randall replied, and for some reason that made them both laugh.

“So I suppose,” Christine said, obviously considering her words, “that the best thing for me to do tomorrow is to walk into class like nothing happened.”

“Absolutely. It’ll drive her nuts—and she won’t be able to come out and say anything directly to you, because then she’d just be giving herself away.”

A small, wry laugh. “This actually might be kind of fun.”

“That’s the spirit. You know, I wasn’t going to be accompanying the master class tomorrow, but I think I’ll see if I can switch with Susan. I don’t want to miss the expression on Ms. Gustafson’s face!”

“Sounds like a plan,” Christine agreed. Then her tone grew more sober. “Thanks, Randall. Now I feel like I can actually sleep tonight.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” he replied, the quiet intensity of his voice belying the flip words. “Take care of yourself, Christine.”

“I will,” she said. “Good night, Randall.”

“’Night, Christine.”

And with that the line went quiet. The red recording light on the listening apparatus stayed on for a few seconds longer, then dulled to black.

Erik sat in the warm semidarkness of the office, unmoving for a moment, then slowly lifted the headphones from his ears. Unfortunate that the two should have patched up their differences so quickly, but he knew he would have been fooling himself to think they would hold a grudge for any length of time. Neither one of them had the darkness of spirit for that sort of behavior.

Whereas he, on the other hand—

Discarding the headphones on the desk, Erik punched the intercom on the phone. At this hour Jerome would most likely be in the capacious apartment over the garage that was one of the perks of his employment. Sure enough, the man responded to the intercom’s buzz almost immediately.

“Yes, sir?”

“Jerome, I need everything you can find on a Carrie Gustafson. She’s a senior at USC.”

“‘S-o-n’ or ‘S-e-n’?” Jerome asked.
 

“I’m fairly sure it’s the former. I don’t know if Carrie is short for something else.”

“I’ll check on it, sir. Anything else?”

“That’s all. I want her address especially.”

“Right on it, sir.”

Not bothering to reply further, Erik pushed the intercom button again, disconnecting the call. He had no doubt that Jerome would have the information for him by the time breakfast was ready. And then—

Then Ms. Gustafson would have every reason to regret the day she made Christine Daly the target of her spite. Yes, it would be most pleasant to give Carrie instruction in shame and humiliation. She would find that Christine was not quite so alone and friendless as she thought. It was a lesson she would remember every time she looked in a mirror.

Erik laughed softly. It was not a pleasant sound.
Thank you, Ms. Gustafson
, he thought.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to become Christine’s avenging angel!

Chapter 9

It was ironic that one of California’s most prestigious schools was located in L.A.’s most notorious slum. Only a few blocks from USC’s graceful stone and brick architecture and carefully manicured lawns stretched South Central, spawning ground of the 1992 riots, drive-by shootings, and gang warfare that continued despite the police department’s best efforts.

Not that Erik cared much for any of that. What did bother him was the fact that USC’s proximity to South Central caused the streets around the campus to be crawling with campus police and LAPD patrol cars.
 

He sat in the front seat of his rented Ford, a big white Crown Victoria that itself looked like an unmarked police car, waiting for the last light in Carrie Gustafson’s house to go out. It was now almost one o’clock in the morning; apparently one of her flatmates was a night owl.
 

The house was a carefully restored two-story Victorian in a street of gentrified homes that just bordered on the campus. It had been broken up into two flats, one up, one down. Luckily for him, Carrie Gustafson lived in the bottom flat. Alone.

Still, even though her lights had been out for almost two hours now, he had to wait until all was dark in the entire building. He could not risk being heard or seen. What he had planned would take only a few moments, but he was not going to take any chances.

There—finally, the last light had been extinguished. He glanced at his watch. One-fifteen. It would be at least fifteen minutes before it was safe to go in.

A pair of headlights turned down the street, moving at a leisurely pace. Erik quickly slumped in his seat, waiting as the car moved by with agonizing slowness. Had to be some sort of patrol car, although he didn’t dare sit up to take a look. The sound of its engine trailed off, and he raised his head cautiously, catching a final glimpse of red taillights before it turned the corner and headed down Jefferson Boulevard.

He sat up all the way then, pulled up the hood of his dark sweatshirt to cover the black ski mask he already wore, and drew on a pair of thin black leather gloves. His lock-pick set had already been stowed in the small black duffle that also carried a small pink plastic bottle. One last check of the time—one-thirty. Good enough.

Although he had parked across the street and partway down the block, he was still careful to shut the car door quietly and lock it with the key rather than using the remote lock. Those things were just too noisy, especially on a residential street after midnight.
 

Moving quickly without seeming too hurried, he crossed the street and then, when he got to the edge of the big Victorian’s property, he headed up the driveway, which was partially blocked by a dusty 4Runner and a robin’s-egg-blue New Beetle convertible—Carrie’s of course.

He resisted the impulse to stop and slash the tires, or at least let the air out of them. That wasn’t the objective here, and if nothing else his father had ingrained in him a love of German engineering, even if in this case the object in question looked more like a piece of Easter candy on wheels than an actual automobile.