The Signature (A Perfect Forever Novel)

by Ward, Susan

  Morgan crushed out his cigarette and instantly lit another, while Devon hurriedly committed his words to paper.

  “I had a Lear jet at LAX. I could have flown her anywhere. I offered to. But she trusted no one. You’ve got to live this kind of life to understand what a difficult thing trust is. She knew damn well that all it would take is one dumb bastard selling her out to the tabloids for the money to see the gig done. They would drag her back or—worse—Nick would find her. Krystal was in contempt of court. She’d be the one behind bars. And where would Katherine be? With Nick. Crazy, coked-up Nick, who hated them both. Krystal Stafford had to disappear if she and Katherine were to have a chance. So she did it on her own from a phone number scribbled on a scrap of paper a paralegal had pressed into her hand while she left court that final day.

  “I asked her not to do anything until we could think it through once more. I loved Krystal. I had a gig and I wanted her to stay, to lie low until I got back. The night she left, I was in Seattle. No note. No goodbye. Just gone. I haven’t heard from her since.”

  Devon stared at Morgan, fascinated, wondering why this man was telling him all this. Where was he going with this? Why tell all now?

  “If Nick was that bad, why didn’t she tell her side of the story?” Devon asked suspiciously. He looked at the pictures Morgan had scattered on a coffee table. They were horrifying. If this were true, how the hell had Krystal Stafford, who lived in the public eye, kept this hidden? “Why wasn’t this made public? She had more than ample opportunity. A hundred reporters would have killed for the chance to put her story in print.”

  “Tell her story?” Morgan repeated as if he’d lost track of their talk. “What the hell do you think she did, every day in the damn courtroom? She said flat out that she feared Nick would kill her and that she feared for Katherine’s safety, as well.”

  Katz lit another cigarette, trying to reorganize his thoughts. “The judge lectured Krystal that if she were afraid, then by all means she could leave the country, but Katherine Stafford couldn’t leave with her, without Nick’s consent. That if she attempted to leave with Katherine, she would be violating a court order and be charged accordingly. They treated her fear like it was some perverted joke her lawyers had invented to win her custody case.

  It didn’t matter that Nick beat the crap out of her. He’d never been abusive to Katherine. Not once. There was no cause to terminate Nick’s rights. I can’t tell you how many times I came up here to find Nick tearing up the furnishings and threatening Krystal. He was obsessed with her, and she knew if she didn’t go into hiding she’d be dead. He said it all the time that he would kill her, and later he tried. She took his threats seriously.”

  Morgan rubbed his palms into his eyes and let out a weary sigh. He moved about Krystal’s living room with an ease of familiarity, pouring himself a scotch before lifting the bottle to Devon in silent offering. Declining, Devon watched him silently, as he took a long pull on his drink and settled back into his chair.

  “You’ve got a crazy country here, Howard. A year ago Nick went to jail for two months for punching a man in a bar. He spent six more months in court-ordered rehab. He’s been clean ever since. He’s been back in the studio for a month, and rumor is there’s enough left of his drug-fried brain that he’s almost human. A regular John Q. Citizen again. When Krystal screamed for help no one heard her. But when one drunk slob gets punched in a bar, the system stands on its ears and deals with the menace. If that’s your justice system, you can have it.”

  “Deeply moved as I am by your eloquent insights,” Devon said dryly, “I’m still not clear why you’re telling me this.”

  For the first time, Morgan looked indecisive. He studied Devon at length before he answered.

  “I did a gig in Portland two months ago. After the concert, I took off on my bike for a little R & R. To check out the local scenery, so to speak...” To get laid, Devon thought silently. “...and I held up in this little town. I spent the night there, in a room with a bottle of JD. I was so drunk when I left, I almost missed it.” He fumbled in his shirt pocket and pulled free a long yellow ribbon with a shiny gold charm on the end. “It was tied on the bars of my bike. No note. Nothing. Just this silly unicorn that I almost missed.”

  Reluctantly, Morgan allowed Devon to lift the charm from his hand. “Women probably leave you gifts all the time. What’s so damned important about this?”

  “Women don’t give me charms, Howard,” Morgan laughed in his self-jeering way. “Bikini panties. Love letters. Nude photos. Not unicorns. I’ve only known one woman crazy about unicorns. Every city we went to, she hunted the shops, looking for something new, something interesting to add to her collection. She loved the unicorn, a mythical creature, a symbol of innocence and purity. So appropriate, if you know Kryssie. There were times I felt I lived in a colony of the damn things.”

  Morgan’s calm, almost prosaic tone belied the pain of his memories. Fighting to understand him better, Devon asked, “You think Krystal left it for you?”

  “I know she did,” Morgan stated with unflappable certainty. “The ribbon. It smelled of her. Understand? She wanted me to know she was all right.”

  “Did you look for her?”

  Morgan’s laughter was harsh. “And have half the Oregon press on her before I could find her? How long do you think I could have hung around even in nowheretown before someone noticed and started to probe?”

  He said the words flatly, his tone self-mocking and without pomp. Morgan in Oregon would have made news. Morgan anywhere was news. Devon wondered what it must have felt like to know he was so close, but to have to walk away. He sensed Morgan still loved her.

  He was only just beginning to fathom what it must have felt like for Morgan not to know if Krystal was okay, what had happened in the two years since they had parted ways, or if she needed help. The loss. The unknown. The unfinished tangle of their life together which had ended without so much as a goodbye.

  A tangle he invited Devon into, with purpose, he thought. The questions that needed to be answered. The questions Devon would want answered if he were in Morgan’s shoes. Was that the reason he was here?

  “Where were you when you found this?” Devon asked.

  “Coos Bay, Oregon.”

  “What makes you think the lady wants to be found, Morgan?”

  “I don’t think she does. She would have knocked on my door that night if she had wanted me or anyone to find her.” His broad shoulders rolled forward in a lazy shrug. “She may not want to come back to LA. Maybe she knows that Nick has taken the cure, that it’s safe, and that he isn’t the drug-crazed bastard he was back in those days. Maybe she’s finally found what she was always looking for. She was never happy here, a unicorn trapped in a dark and self-serving world. Her true ambition had always been to teach children. I bet Krystal is somewhere teaching kids.

  “I only want her to know that she can come back if she wants to. That if she comes back, we can work things out, with the court, with Nick, with everything. Enough has changed in the two years she’s been gone that she doesn’t have to fear Nick. He’s worked both the drugs and Krystal out of his system. His lawyers are prepared to drop all kidnapping charges against her if she just comes back. I wouldn’t be talking to you now if I thought there was any danger to Krystal. I can’t get to her, Howard. The media would latch onto me like a dog with a bone if I tried. And I haven’t got your bloody First Amendment privilege to hide behind if I can’t get the deal with the authorities to let her off without prison time. I want someone to make contact with her, let her know her options, and tell me if she’s all right. There isn’t anyone but you I can trust with this.”

  The words anyone but you seemed to hang in the air between the two men. That Morgan had chosen the media as his instrument, to make contact with Krystal, was a case of strange bedfellows to the extreme. And that was what this man was after. Bringing Krystal back. To himself. To the unfinished business of their life together.
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  “My attorneys came up with the idea of you. Krystal’s story would be a nice follow-up to your series of articles. You have a way of rousing the moral outrage of the masses with your writing. Your writing about it may help my lawyers with the negotiations. The authorities aren’t being cooperative. It might help them save face so we can end this. They won’t be so eager to slap her behind bars with the full story out, stirring the righteous indignation of the voting public.”

  Devon had quite a few thoughts about that. He could think of one judge, in particular, who would toss Krystal Stafford in jail, righteous indignation or not, and who was itching to get his hands on Devon Howard’s hide. Just because the first amendment had worked once in his favor, he couldn’t depend on it with this. There would be too much heat from this story. If he wrote a story that revealed he had knowledge of her location, there were striking odds that Devon would go to jail.

  All this in mind, Devon never considered not writing the story. Unwillingly, he admitted that he was as fascinated as the next man by these two larger-than-life personalities. Krystal Stafford: Morgan’s unicorn. What sort of woman would he find when he located her?

  * * *

  Devon’s thoughts came rushing back to the present after he heard a door slam. With his camera in hand, he went to the sliding glass door. Through the viewfinder, he followed the child across the yard, every now and then his fingers pressing the shutter button.

  When she stopped at the fence between their yards, pulling her tiny body up on a cross board, Devon lowered the camera. The smile on her face told Devon that he’d been spotted. She quickly deposited something atop the support post and then waved at him before dropping back down onto the grass.

  By the time Devon reached the fence, she had retreated back inside the house. Opening the gaily decorated lunch bag she’d left for him, he found inside three homemade gingerbread men. Laughing softly, he turned the bag, studying the pictures she’d drawn in crayon with painstaking care. He smiled as he read the neatly printed note: My name is Katie. What’s yours?

  He’d been wondering all afternoon how to approach Krystal Stafford without putting her on the defensive. He’d never anticipated this. Help had come to him yet again from a source as unlikely as the first.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Krystal sat at the workbench in her garage, rubbing the aching flesh of her lower back as she listened patiently to The Rage’s latest creation. They were a four man rock band of local high school boys that Fritz had thrown into the bargain a year and a half ago—he’d agreed to convert the back storeroom into a studio.

  Before then, Fritz had grudging allowed the boys to practice their music in the back of his store after hours, receiving from their collective mothers a small fee for the space. When opportunity to break free of this deal turned up in the form of Krystal, Fritz had jumped on it. After all, she seemed to like that sort of music, and she did have a way with troublesome youths.

  For the modest sum of twenty-five dollars a month, she allowed them use of her garage three nights a week and gave freely of her services, hoping she could mold their raw but unmistakable talent into something promising.

  She tried to hold her tongue until they finished. If she interrupted them, tempers were apt to explode. Typical musicians, Krystal thought, as she tried to map a strategy of how to approach Jason with her latest bit of advice. They were never too pleased to get it.

  “So what do you think?” Jason asked.

  He was always polite when these discussions began, and yet somehow they always turned into all-out war.

  Obviously, he was enormously pleased with their latest accomplishment. The school board was apt to run her out of town if that was how they played after she’d badgered them into hiring the band for this year’s prom.

  “I think that Coos Bay isn’t quite ready for that.”

  Mike, the drummer, laughed and deftly tossed his sticks into the air. Of the four boys, he was the most receptive.

  “We’re on the cutting edge of something new,” Jason countered, already preparing for an all-out argument. “Post-Seattle Grunge!”

  “I’m all for new,” Krystal said, not taking the bait of his argumentative tone. “But if you can’t dance to it, what’s the point? Your classmates aren’t going to the prom to be wowed by a fifteen minute guitar riff, Jason. They’re going there to dance. This is a paying gig. Don’t you want the money?”

  “If they can’t get what we’re going for, that’s their problem.”

  Brave talk, but these three boys together on their best day couldn’t pull together a dime. They needed the money. Jason had payments due on the equipment. Ego had no place in this.

  “The Japanese have a saying: Less is more. Try a little less. Your material is good, Jason, but no one can hear that because you’re trying too hard to overwhelm them with technique.”

  “Americans have a saying too: Those who can, do…those who can’t, teach,” Jason shot back belligerently. He held out his guitar to her with a smirk. “If you’ve got a point to make, teacher lady, then make it.’

  So we’re back to that again. “I’m not saying that you’re not good, Jason. You know you are. But it’s not worth a darn if it kills what the band is trying to accomplish. I couldn’t even hear Ronnie’s vocals!”

  “That’s what I thought. All talk. It’s easier to criticize than to do it. You teaching-types are all alike!”

  She pushed up from her stool. “Do it your way, Jason. You will anyway.”

  She had almost escaped when Ronnie stopped her. “Mrs. Dillon, if you’ve got an idea on how to make this better, why won’t you show us. We all know that you can play. Lord knows we could use the help. And the prom is only a month away. Talk isn’t going to help us to hear the sound you’ve got in your head. You’re worried they won’t pay us. We need the dough.”

  That from Ronnie. In the year and half she’d been working with the boys she couldn’t recall him saying more than two words to her when the band was together. He was afraid Jason would discover that she privately taught him piano four days a week and that he’d applied to Juilliard.

  “Really, Ronnie, Jason is right. I teach music. That’s all. I’ll leave the creating to you guys.”

  “Go ahead, Teach. Show us what you’ve got,” Jason insisted snidely.

  Staring at the boys, she knew they’d reached an impasse if she backed off now and the collaboration between them would be over. She’d no longer have even the grudging respect Jason showed her. She wasn’t ready to give up on The Rage.

  They were such a meaningful undertaking for her to risk. They only needed someone who believed in them, who could help shape and guide their talent to make successful. Just as Morgan had helped her.

  Lifting the guitar from Jason’s hands, she nodded in acceptance. She dragged her stool near the boys and hit the amplifier power with her toes.

  “The problem isn’t what you’re playing, Jason, it’s how,” she said haltingly, wondering how she had let the boys bait her into this. “Your music is very good. But you force it. You run through the music instead of letting the music run through you.”

  Her hands slid up and down the neck of the guitar, absorbing the feel of the harsh strings beneath her fingertips. It was one thing to sit patiently on the sidelines, trying to teach someone to play; it was quite another to be part of the creation of music and jam with a band again.

  Her teeth sank into her lower lip, partly in agony, partly in fear as she began to play.

  “I hear it slower, Jason. Nothing sappy,” she told them. “More like making love when you have plenty of time, instead of rushing through it.”

  These were not your average highs school boys; she didn’t need to temper her talk. It was the kind of stuff they said when they thought she couldn’t hear them. They’d been in and out of trouble since the cradle. Music was hopefully what would keep them from prison. They were bad boys. She was the closest thing to a virgin among them.

  “I lo
ve this part, Jason.”

  Midway through, the other boys hurried to join in. They were playing with her. She couldn’t think of a greater compliment from those three. Carried away with the pleasure, she began to sing Jason’s lyrics.

  When they finished, Mike gave a low whistle of appreciation while Tommy stared at her, dumbstruck. Ronnie was shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

  “Where’d you learn to play like that?” Tommy asked.

  She stared down at the guitar, her fingers nervously fiddling with the tuning pegs. She said, “It’s your music, Jason. I just let it sell itself.”

  “Less is more,” Mike said, brazenly winking at her.

  Jason looked totally out of sorts. His expression seemed to scream: How the devil did you do that?

  Grudgingly, he admitted, “Mrs. D, you were...”

  He seemed at a loss for words.

  “I think the word you’re looking for is magnificent,” came a rich, masculine voice.

  Krystal and the boys all turned at the same time. There in driveway stood a man. It was obvious that he’d been watching for quite some time and had heard her playing with the boys.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said pleasantly, though he made no move to leave. “I can wait until you’re finished.”

  Krystal stared at him. There was something familiar about that voice that put her senses on alert. Suddenly, she remembered where she’d seen his face before. He was the man she’d collided with at Fritz’s. The one who thought he knew her. The one who didn’t know Mozart from a Tom-Tom song. What the devil was he doing way out here? Why would he have followed her?

  “I’m afraid you are interrupting,” Krystal answered abruptly. “This is a private rehearsal.”

  The smile he bent her could have charmed a nun. “I’ve been listening to you all night, and then my curiosity got the better of me, so here I am. You see, I live right behind you. In the Miller house.”