Melody Burning

by Whitley Strieber

  The People reporter got right to her blog and went all hissy, and, guess what, now my fans want my music as never before. Mom as the Wicked Witch of the West is laughing all the way to the bank. She staged that one brilliantly.

  If it’s to ensure my success, Mom isn’t afraid to make me hate her. She isn’t afraid to make my fans despise her. It’s an act so good that even I believe it.

  So, the Greek Theatre. I looked out off that stage and was amazed at how huge the Greek actually is. And get this: there were fans waiting for me when I came this morning for sound check—a couple hundred of them who had been hanging out there for hours just hoping to say hello.

  I was supposed to be driven right up to the stage entrance, so their wait would have been for nothing, but Mom made the driver stop, and I got out and hung with them for a while. Julius was so nervous that he practically exploded. A couple of guys gave me phone numbers. Everybody who had the CD of my first album got it signed in metallic blue ink.

  My fans made me feel better. Some of them look really fierce. Bikers. Gang boys. Go figure.

  For a few minutes, I didn’t think about him. But the second I was on that big, lonely stage, my mind went back to a torment of worry: Where is he? What’s happening to him now? Will I ever see him again? And when? Last night I lay awake in bed just wishing that he would somehow escape and I would hear his breathing through the wall again.

  If only I hadn’t been scared of him. If only I hadn’t complained to Mom, he would still be there and we’d have our little secret nest in the crawl space. No matter what happens to him, he will never return to life in the walls of the Beresford. I’ll teach him about the world; I’ll teach him everything he needs to know. I’ll even hire him. He can be a roadie, and I’ll get a tour bus, and we can live on it together between tours.

  It’s all a total fantasy, I know that. They will never let him out. The building will accuse him of all kinds of crimes, because Mom says the super told her he did robberies and all. I fear that our love will be, for him, a brief spark lost in the past. But for me, it will still be in my heart just as it is now.

  The one good thing that has happened is that my band is coming together. We had some strong rehearsals today, and I had the added fun of watching Mom suck her plastic cigarette when I did “Flying on Forever.” She hates that song the most because she thinks it’s about teen suicide. I don’t know. I just like being on the edge.

  I’ve thought up a plan to save my beautiful boy. I disguise myself and pretend I am his mother. Yeah, right.

  Another plan: I break into the juvie tank. I looked at it online, and this does not look impossible . . . for a professional safecracker or whatever.

  When I got home, I had a frozen burrito for dinner—bad girl, slap your hand—it was cheesy and delish. I also drank a beer, which was great until I discovered that Kaliber couldn’t put a buzz on a gerbil. Now that dear Dr. Singer has gone the way of all her other instant boyfriends, Mom has replaced his Chimay with something I could safely steal.

  Okay, girl, you have to get with the program and stop coming up with ridiculous plans because you need to do two things: First, find him. Second, get him out of there.

  I thought of calling our lawyers, but they would instantly call Mommy dearest, and then I would probably end up chained to my bed with duct tape over my mouth—except for rehearsals tomorrow and Friday, of course. And the concert. Oh, how amazing, the concert. The last one had, what, two hundred and fifty people? It looked great because the room was small. I know they call the Greek small, but that’s not how it looks to me. It’s this positive ocean and incredibly scary.

  I’m all over the place. This is happening because I can’t figure out a thing to do to help him. Except—what if I were to report him as a missing person? How do you do that? Is there a Web site? Or, no, you probably have to do it in person at the police station, which is where?

  What if I just go to the big juvie facility in East LA and say he’s my autistic brother? I’m his guardian, except I think you have to be twenty-one for that.

  Maybe the thing to do is go down to the parking garage, get in the Mercedes, and drive over there. Except I’ve had my license since my birthday, which was less than twelve months ago, therefore I can’t drive between eleven P.M. and five A.M.—thank you, California.

  I could take a cab. Get there, talk my way in, get visitation. I know it says on the Web site no visitation, but maybe it’s not all that cut-and-dried—you never know. Does money talk? Bet so.

  I pull down my hair, wash my face totally plain, then put on my dark glasses. I look sort of like a vampire who’s pretending to be me. I put on this Vincent Napoli lipstick, “It’s Not Me,” which is this sort of Goth-insane purple-black color. I hit my face with a bunch of white foundation, and now I look like some punk moron trying to do Angelina Jolie as if she was a punk moron.

  Okay, heavy disguise and I am gone. Mom left a while ago, so hopefully she’s reconnected with Dapper D or the Wolverine or whoever and is off playing house somewhere far away.

  Julius is on call. Do they have something rigged up that lets him know if the door is opened? Probably, so I have to move fast.

  I hit the hallway and run down four stories, then take the elevator, clever girl. As I go down, I hear the faint whoosh of the car beside this one going up.

  “A cab. I need a cab, please.”

  “And you are?”

  I lean close to the building attendant. Lower my glasses just a tad, look over them. “I’m Angie Jolie.”

  “Oh, wow! I mean, sure! Uh . . .”

  Angelina Jolie would, of course, never need a cab, but the woman makes the call anyway, and I go out and sit on one of the benches, hoping that Julius does not—“Hello, Mel.”

  “Hi, Jules.”

  “You goin’ out?”

  “Not to a public place, so you can go back to your room.”

  He sits down beside me. “We can take the Mercedes. I’ll drive you.”

  Actually, it might work if he doesn’t go apeshit on the spot. If I say the truth, either I’m ruined or I get my chance.

  “Will you take me to juvie in East LA?”

  “Where that streeter was taken?”

  “He lived here! This was his home!”

  “Whatever. Look, you got a thing for him, don’t you? Your mother already ripped me about it, although she had to admit that I’m not gonna be able to monitor the crawl space.”

  “Take me, Julius, please!”

  “You tell her we went to the Star Room, and it’s a deal.”

  “Will she believe that, Jules? That I would go there, ever? I mean, they do the foxtrot there.”

  “She won’t believe it. But she will believe me when I tell her it wasn’t some rock-’n’-roll pharmacy like M&M.”

  So I agree to say I went dancing the foxtrot, and we get in the Merc to go to the juvie facility.

  I am so incredibly happy until we arrive. Now what? What do I do—go in with my bodyguard and say I want to see a big blond kid with no name, the one who came out of the wall at the Beresford?

  As Julius stops the car, he tells me, “You will see some real sad stuff in there, Mel. Saddest stuff you’ve ever seen, so be prepared. And don’t bring me out a bunch of vagrant kids to feed, okay? Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  Boy, is this place BIG. Plus it feels all courtlike and scary, and I see cops bringing in these two sweaty fat monsters in handcuffs with torn up T-shirts. One of them has blood on him and looks like he could eat the Incredible Hulk for din-din, which maybe he just finished doing.

  I push the door open and there are these benches with kids sitting on them, and there is a big Latina beside her hunched-over daughter, who is crying, and Mom has a defiant look on her face, like her girl had to have been picked up by mistake or something. I hope that is true, but I bet it isn’t.

  I go up to a desk where there is a lady in uniform. She has a gun. Everybody in uniform here has a gun a
nd a billy club. This is not a nice place in any way.

  The lady is writing. She keeps writing. If I was a taxpayer, I’d be outraged.

  “Ma’am, I am trying to locate a boy who was brought in last night.”

  “Family?”

  “That’s the thing—we’re not sure. We read that he’d been taken from the Beresford and was unidentified.”

  She looks up. Now I wish I’d worn a nun’s habit, not this ridiculous getup.

  “Oh, man,” she says. “Melody McGrath!”

  Silence falls. I feel the eyes on me, all of them in the room. It’s as still as the air before a storm.

  “You know him, Miss McGrath? Because we got no ID on him.”

  “I may know him.” I feel like a bird that has just discovered it is in a cage.

  “Oh, hey, can you sign this for my son?” a guard asks. He has a napkin, which I sign with his Bic.

  “He went into the system,” the lady at the desk says. “He’s at, um—actually, I shouldn’t tell you this if you’re not family.”

  “We don’t know. If he’s autistic, he might be.”

  She gives me a this-is-weird look, then goes into bureaucratic mode. “They took him over to Willamette. The charges didn’t go with him, so he’s gonna get fostered.”

  I tell her thank you and turn and give two more autographs. The girl who was hunched over watches me with the most incredible longing, and I know what’s in her mind: “If only I was you.”

  Back in the car, I tell Julius, “He’s at Willamette.” Then I ask, “Do you know where that is?”

  “Silver Lake. But it’s a camp. They have visiting hours at those places.”

  “Will you take me?”

  “If your mom allows it, sure.”

  “Then forget it. Because she won’t.”

  “You have your live run-through tomorrow. When it’s over, we can do a detour.”

  “She’ll be in the car.”

  “She’ll be in the limo. I’ll come separately.”

  He can be such a doll, but when I really think about it, what will they do for me at Willamette that didn’t happen at Westview? They’re not going to help me. Going to these places isn’t the way to succeed, here.

  “Thanks, but let’s just forget it.”

  At home I lie back on my bed and think. He is in there. I am out here. He has to be very scared and confused. I mean, he doesn’t know much of anything.

  What if I could identify him for them? Find out his name?

  Maybe he has a place on the roof. That night he found me up there, he hid back in the shadows near the water towers.

  One second later, I am in the hall with my flashlight in hand. Julius is probably downstairs in his room watching me on a camera and saying to himself, “Doesn’t this kid ever stop?” Since I got caught with the boy, he has orders to check on my every move. (The hatch into the crawl space is gone, plastered over while we were in rehearsal.)

  I go to the stairs and up to the roof.

  It’s big and beautiful and easy to imagine that you’re on a magic carpet flying above this astonishing sea of lights. The Beresford is fifty stories tall and on a hill, so I think it’s about the highest building in downtown.

  I look for his place. It has to be small and well concealed.

  Up close, the air-conditioning towers are massive, and there is a humid, old-water smell to them. I’m not sure how building air-conditioning works, but up close this is really impressive and daunting. Could I get hurt getting too close? Is it electric? But no, it’s full of falling water.

  Back here, this is where he came out of, definitely.

  I shine my light along the opposite wall, which must be some kind of storage or equipment room. I see nothing . . . until I do. There, down there, is a long crease, black. Looks like a shadow until I go closer. Shining my light in, I can see that it’s like a low, narrow hatch. There is no handle, so I pull at it but I can’t get a grip. I push, but it doesn’t move inward. Then I slide my fingers along the edge, which is so fine that without the flashlight I never would have seen it.

  I push the top edge. Nothing. Then the bottom edge. It levers out a little at the top. I pull at the exposed sliver, and it comes down.

  To see in, I have to lie flat on the roof. I shine my light into this very small chamber. It’s maybe seven feet long, three feet deep, and three feet high. It’s like some kind of shelf with a cover on it. Could have been a space for drills and things.

  I’m highly claustrophobic, but I slide in anyway and look around. There are clothes stacked up at the far end, neatly folded. There are three bottles of water, an Evian and a couple of Poland Springs. There’s a half-empty bottle of fruit punch Gatorade. On the wall, there’s a picture of a woman. It’s color, an old snapshot, tiny and wrinkled like it came out of a little boy’s pocket, which I’m sure it did. She is thin, with blond hair like his. Standing beside her in the sunlight of another time is a happy-faced little boy, and I know with total certainty that it is him.

  I can see a story here, of loss and abandonment, and although many of the pieces are missing, I can also see the tragedy of it, the little boy deserted during his father’s murder, too scared to ask for help but smart enough to make this crazy, impossible place his home.

  Looking at his little bit of stuff—the few clothes, the threadbare blanket—and thinking of his deep, pleading eyes, I know I am falling for him in a big way.

  What I cannot see, though, is any sign at all of who he actually is. No name scrawled on the picture, no souvenir with an address on it, nothing.

  It’s so sad and so incredible. I turn over and grab his blanket, and I can smell him in it—the sadness of a boy alone. And I cry and I cry and I cry.

  CHAPTER 14

  On the third night of his captivity, Beresford was watching TV in the rec room at Willamette when he saw something that really scared him: a shot on CSI of a time bomb. It had a digital timer wired to three waxy, bright red sticks that looked like candles. For a moment he was confused, trying to recall where he’d seen this before. Then he remembered—there had been something that looked very much like it in the space where he’d hidden between two of the tanks in the Beresford’s fuel storage area.

  Before he could stop himself, he jumped up and cried out. He immediately stifled the sound, but not before a ripple of suppressed laughter filled the room. The other kids hated him. They called him “the vampire” or “zombie boy.” He dropped back into his seat, but his mind was racing and his breath came in gasps.

  He’d been focused on the kids since he arrived, on trying to figure them out. But this discovery devastated him. He had to get back to the Beresford. Somehow, he had to escape.

  There was no point in telling the staff. They’d just think it was another one of his crazy attempts to get out.

  He sat like a stone, staring at the TV but not seeing it. He needed a plan. Since his attempt to get out through the ductwork at Westview, they had kept him on tight lockdown, so he was in his own tiny cell at night. There was no way out—he’d explored every inch of it.

  Sometimes kids got to go with their families on weekend nights, and maybe there was some sort of opportunity. He approached Mr. Lopez, a monitor on duty.

  Finally Mr. Lopez looked up from the magazine he was reading. “Yeah?”

  “Can I go to the Melody McGrath concert tomorrow night?”

  “Whaddaya know, it talks! You ain’t got a family to be signed out to, and with an escape attempt in your record, no judge would give you a home date anyway, even if you had one.”

  “My name is Beresford McGrath. I told everybody that.”

  “So ain’t it strange that your momma, Mrs. McGrath, has no idea that she even gave birth to you? You can’t just make up an identity, kid. An identity comes with a birth certificate and parents who know who you are—and a school record. You ain’t got none of that. What you do have is a placement hearing coming up, so you got a court appearance Tuesday.”

  B
eresford returned to his seat. He had to get back—that was all there was to it.

  He knew that this place wasn’t all one building, and when you went from building to building, you were outside. They watched you, though, every minute, and anyway the rec room where he was now was in his dorm, so he wouldn’t be going out tonight.

  Mr. Lopez was looking at him. Why? What was he thinking? He could never tell if somebody was mad or not. He didn’t know how to tell. It was easy to insult people here, and maybe he’d insulted Mr. Lopez. But how?

  “Hey, kid.” Mr. Lopez nodded for him to come over, so Beresford went back to the desk.

  “If you got a pass, where would you go? Just to that concert?”

  At that moment, the bell rang and all the kids got up, suddenly very disciplined, heading for the wings of the building where the sleeping areas were. You could get a demerit for being slow on the bells.

  As they congregated in front of the door to the boys’ wing, waiting for it to be buzzed open, Beresford felt a hand slip around his waist. He jumped away and whirled around, but the faces of the kids behind him were all blank.

  Could they get into his room? They hit the door and rattled it whenever they got a chance. Only the staff had keys, but what did that mean around here? The kids really ran the place.

  Beresford went into his room and closed the door. With the familiar loud buzz, all the doors locked.

  In the silence that fell, the situation hit him so hard he had to gasp for breath. There was a bomb in the Beresford. Who might do this he could not imagine, but it was there, no question. When would it explode?

  He had to get out of here.

  He paced back and forth, back and forth, slapping the door, slapping the narrow window, back and forth, back and forth.

  Beresford thought about all the dogs and cats he comforted, the people who needed him, even mean old Mrs. Scutter—especially her, the way she was always falling asleep with lit cigarettes. He thought of Melody asleep in her apartment way up at the very top, and realized that when the explosion came, all the people on the top floors would be cut off and trapped.