The Devil of Echo Lake (14 page)

When he returned to the apartment, she had dinner cooking on low heat, trying not to burn anything. At the sound of his key in the door, Marla the cat jumped off the banister and hopped down the first three stairs to greet him. Ally scooped the rice and stir-fry vegetables onto plates and lit a candle on a bookshelf in the living room. They didn’t have room for a kitchen table, so they usually ate sitting on the couch if Jake was home for a meal.

Tonight she'd borrowed a folding card table from their landlord, Sam, who lived on the first floor. It wobbled, but she’d wedged a cardboard shim under one leg and tossed a small tapestry over the tacky surface to serve as a tablecloth. She was setting the plates down on it when Jake topped the stairs and gave Marla a quick scratch behind the ears. The cat arched her back, and her tail floated up like a charmed snake.

Jake looked up and smiled, made a soft little sigh through his nose. “This is nice,” he said. He kissed Ally on the head and took a seat. She opened a beer and put it down beside his plate.

Before he could lift the bottle to his lips, the phone rang.

“Let the machine get it,” Ally said. But Jake was already reaching for the receiver.

The caller introduced herself as Danielle, Billy’s manager. After politely thanking Jake for all of his help so far, she asked, “So how are you handling Kevin’s death, Jake? It must be difficult for you, having worked so closely with him.”

“I only knew him for a few weeks, but yeah, it’s pretty heavy trying to process it. He was a good guy. Treated everyone with respect.”

“From what I gather, you earned his respect.”

Jake didn’t know what to say to that, so he asked, “Have you all decided who will be coming on for the rest of the project?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about.”

“I don’t know if I could recommend anyone,” Jake said, “I haven’t worked with many engineers yet.”

“The thing is, Jake, Billy takes some time getting comfortable with new bodies in the room when he’s writing. Kevin worked on the previous two albums, so it felt natural working with him again. But now, starting over with someone new when the material is in a vulnerable early stage, well… we’re afraid it could hurt the record.”

“Does Rail have someone in mind?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know, but
we
were thinking of asking you.”

“Like I said, I don’t think I could recommen—”

“Don’t be so dense, Jake. We want you to engineer.”

He felt as if someone had told him he had just won the lottery and all he had to do to claim the prize was swim across that little pool, with the sharks. He said, “But it’s Rail’s decision, isn’t it?”

“Ultimately, yes. But if Billy doesn’t feel comfortable with Trevor’s choice, he’d rather postpone the sessions. And if that happens, I think even the brass at Gravitas would let Billy have his way, considering what's happened. You seem unsure. Are you not getting along with Trevor?”

“No, I think we’re okay. I just don’t want to overstep my bounds. I wouldn’t want to engineer a record if the producer didn’t think I should be doing it.”

“Of course not,” Danielle said. “Let me talk to Trevor on Billy’s behalf. I’ll let him know that we’re very comfortable with you and that Billy doesn’t want to change the vibe. He doesn’t have to know that we discussed it with you. Billy says you’ve taken the wheel a few times already when Kevin needed a break. Are you up to it?”

“Yes. I could do it. I mean, we already have most of the sounds set up. If Billy likes what he’s hearing so far, I could keep running it.”

That seemed to be all Danielle needed to hear. “Okay,” she said. “Then between us it’s settled. I’ll speak with Trevor and Eddie.”

Jake hung up the phone and turned to Ally. “They want me to take Kevin’s place.”

She threw her arms around his neck and planted a kiss on his cheek with an audible smack. “Congratulations,” she said. “That was fast.”

“It’s not for certain.”

“They want you.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Weird, but kinda cool, huh?”

“It is. You should let yourself feel good about it.”

“It’s just a strange way to get your first gig.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“I know.”

“I knew you’d go places sooner than you expected.”

He kissed her, this time on the mouth. She studied his eyes and asked, “Are you excited?”

“Terrified.”

Ten

Rachel Shadbourne’s black nail-polished fingers fluttered over the dirty keypad of her cash register, ending with a swipe of her thumb across the ENTER key in the corner. The drawer ejected, she counted out change, slid the three discs of shit you couldn’t pay her enough to listen to into an orange Velocity Records bag, swung the bag over the counter—hooked on her finger as if it were indeed a doggie pickup baggie—and deposited it into the hands of the sorority girl customer with a big fake smile. She looked up at the line, sighed, and slapped the little silver bell on the counter as the next patron stepped up with a basket full of Country and Classic Rock. The bell was a joke anyway with Tupac pounding out of the house system at bowel-churning volume. Where the hell was Paul now?

She walked away from her register without so much as a word to the miffed-looking Baby Boomer holding out his plastic and stepped into the DJ booth where she cranked the volume dial down. She returned to the register and slapped the bell three more times, making it jump across the counter, then picked up her scanner gun, and fired the little red laser at each disc as if she meant to kill Garth Brooks, George Strait and Peter Frampton.

No one appeared in response to the bell. Of course not. Paul was probably downstairs in the basement where the Art Department kept shop, chatting with his guitarist, Andy, who spent his days applying his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree to the creation of the three dimensional Styrofoam signs that hung from fishing line throughout the store. For a moment, Rachel almost regretted ever having sex with Paul Yurgovich, or Paul
LeStadt
, or whatever he was calling himself this week in the Hemoglobin flyers he and his imps stapled to every telephone pole in Minneapolis.

Sure, he had stage presence, but after you got over how he looked under the red lights without a shirt, you couldn’t help eventually noticing that the music kind of sucked. And yet he didn’t seem to be reaching that conclusion himself in spite of the fact that even with his indie CD loaded in the first listening station you came to at the top of the escalator in the biggest record store in the only city where his band played regularly, it wasn’t selling at more than a trickle. He still strutted around the floor like a visiting celebrity, conferring with his band mates and avoiding the register at all costs, except to look up his own disc three times a day and see if it had sold another copy.

Rachel was a supervisor. She shouldn’t have to ring down a line like this by herself. Did he think their tryst had made him exempt from doing his job? Well she might have to let him know it wasn’t Hemoglobin she’d been listening to in her headphones when she hitched up her skirt for him in the break room that night. It was Billy Moon. And despite Paul’s well-toned body, it was also Billy Moon whom she had imagined sliding her thong down between her knees as she pressed the palms of her hands against the Employee Rights poster and closed her eyes, using her hips to teach him the tempo of the music in her private halo.

She guessed a better singer would have known the groove wasn’t one of his own. So he was in a band, so what? So was every other wage slave in the building from the grunts in Shipping and Receiving to Steve Singledon himself, their black-clad, more-salt-than-pepper boss who spent his weekends working on his drum chops and his beer pouch. Passion, she had learned after a short time on the retail front lines of the music business, was the most exploitable commodity on earth.

She hit the bell again, this time hard enough to send it bouncing off the counter and over the velvet rope that kept the cattle in a neat line. But she couldn’t prevent her train of thought from reaching the conclusion that Paul had exploited
her
passion for Moon by presenting himself as an adequate substitute.

She looked at the line again. It had grown. At this rate she was never going to get a spare minute to run downstairs to the magazine section and snag a copy of
Billboard
. Why couldn’t she have found out about the article before she’d taken lunch? Then she could have read it by now.

Ah, here was the poseur now, striding up to the checkout with that ever so serious look on his face, all purple hair and leather—the plastic name tag swinging from a black lanyard around his neck like a backstage pass the only indication that he worked here. He actually stooped to pick the little chrome dome from the carpet and set it next to his register before typing in his password and uttering a barely audible, “Help someone down here.”

When the line had disappeared, she noticed Paul starting to type his log out and stopped him in his tracks. “
Wait
,” she said in a tone she usually reserved for her roommate’s corgi. “You’re first ringer until somebody gets back from lunch.” And before he could begin arguing, she slipped into the stockroom to close the web browser she’d left open on the computer they were only supposed to use to check the CD database. Of course every employee in the place also used it to check their hotmail, and to surf porn and the assorted musical fetishes that had led them to the job in the first place.

This morning, like clockwork, she had pulled up the Lunar Sightings message board and tucked it behind the Velocity home page where she could refresh it obsessively every half hour or so when she ducked back here on the excuse of topping off her coffee. She was looking to see if any of her anonymous friends had any tidbits about the new album, already rumored to be in production. But there was nothing new on the board. Just the same old stale posts that had devolved into flame wars and lame attempts at wit by the end of last week, when there were three days of wild speculation touched off by a rumor that Billy Moon had been attacked by a pit-bull in Japan and that he had subsequently been seen wearing a scarf over his now mutilated face at his father’s graveside.

Rachel knew at least some of that was false—she had found his father’s obituary by a search of Long Island newspapers using Billy’s birth name (after striking out at asking the webmaster of billymoon.com for the name of a funeral home so she could send flowers) and the obit had mentioned cremation. So there was no graveside for him to be seen at. As for the dog story, she couldn’t know either way but she doubted it. Billy had been the subject of dark and violent rumors before.

And yet today’s rumor, the violent death of an engineer during the recording of the new album, would have fit the profile that Billy’s publicist seemed to thrive on. Wouldn’t that be big news for a spooky gothic rocker, an opportunity for some pre-release headlines? But no one on Lunar Sightings had made mention of it, and she wasn’t going to be the one to put it up there. If it were true, and there was no press release about it from Billy’s people, it could only mean that they were trying to keep the media away from him while he worked. Maybe only she and Karen had made the connection.

Rachel read the email again before closing it.

Sender:
[email protected]

Recipient:
[email protected]

Subject: Stalking on the Moon

Hey Rachel,

i’m gonna give you a tip today that i won’t post, because i think you might be crazy enough to actually use it. my way of saying thanx for the live mp3s. check out the new issue of Billboard, pg. 33. there’s an obituary for Kevin Brickhouse, who i’m sure you know engineered the first two discs, if you go through booklet notes with a magnifying glass like yrs trly. Says he died in a motorcycle accident while working at a studio in upstate New York near Woodstock. They don’t name the artist he was working with, but i'll bet you your used BM water bottle it’s him. remember that MTV music news blip in sept. that said he was going to be recording on the east coast after the tour? anyway, i just know it’s him. i can feel it. of course, with a member of their crew dead, they might have canceled the sessions, but you should check it out. i’d pack my camera and go with you if you really mean what you said about tracking him down, but i wouldn’t have an apartment or a job to come back to if i did. you MUST keep me posted if you do it. and get him to sign

something for me!

xoxo

Karen

Rachel closed the browser and walked out onto the floor, past Paul who was ringing down a small line and straight to the escalator, down to Magazines where the oversized cover of
Billboard
beckoned to her in its colorful header. She plucked it from the rack and waved at Matt, the brawny deadhead who worked this section, then retreated to the stockroom where she sat on a box and flipped to page 33. The article said everything Karen had paraphrased and nothing else useful, except maybe the names of the other artists Brickhouse had recorded.

She knew that
Eclipse
was recorded at Electric Ladyland in New York and
Lunatic
was done at A&M in L.A. Billy had never worked at a studio in upstate New York before, but obviously someone had recommended it. That could have been anyone. It could have been Trevor Rail. It could have been Brickhouse himself. These were the names she had to work with. Maybe she would get lucky.

She did a quick walkthrough of the rock department and found Steve Singleton having a hushed talk with Bobby, a clerk in his thirties, who did a good enough job when his medication was working. She paused to straighten some disheveled discs nearby and tuned into their conversation long enough to hear suave Steve telling flannel-clad Bobby that, no, he wasn’t fucking Bobby’s wife. Bobby was just being paranoid, and he regretted ever fucking her in the first place because it almost broke up his own marriage— it was months ago and Bobby was going to have to get over it.