His Secret Past
He rubbed his hand back and forth in his short hair, leaving the front sticking up in messy points, and then looked at her, his head cocked to the right. “Matter of fact, why don’t you put that in your movie. Mason Star died. RIP.”
She held the club tighter, pressing her thumb into the grip. She needed Mason. What would motivate him? “People deserve to know what happened with the crash and afterward. They deserve the truth.”
“What?” He looked more engaged than he’d been.
“There’s more to the story of what happened. A story like that can’t be left untold.”
“I don’t know what you think you know. But here’s your truth. I’m not that guy anymore and digging all that up won’t do anything good for me or anyone else.”
“David Giles told me to ask you about the crash.”
Mason’s face settled, the light left his eyes. “You talked to him? No.” He shook his head. “Forget I asked that. I’m living here now.” He gestured around the pro shop, but she knew he meant Lakeland. “Five Star is history for me.” The corners of his mouth turned down, the not-quite dimples deepening, communicating disgust. About her? The crash? She couldn’t tell.
They’d misread him. He was slipping away. She had to think fast and find the right thing.
“Mason…” she started to say, but he shook his head.
“The last thing I need right now is for people to remember I was in a rock band.”
She noticed the protective hold he had on the Mulligans poster. “Your neighbors aren’t too thrilled, are they?” He’d called it his baby.
“You were at the zoning thing?”
“Stalking you. Sorry.”
“Witness to the execution,” he said wearily.
“I can help.” She put down the club and stepped off the platform. She tapped the poster, focusing his attention.
His eyebrows lifted. “You bribe zoning boards?”
“You and your charming smile were doing okay with the board. It’s the neighbors that killed you. Ms. Tidy Pants and the PTA brigade.”
His shoulders slumped. “Roxanne Curtis and her upwardly mobile assassins. If they’d come over and see Mulligans. Get to know us.”
“Watch the movie I make about it.”
“Watch the…?”
“You agree to speak on camera about the Five Star bus crash, I’ll make you a kick-butt film about Mulligans I guarantee will not only solve your zoning problems, it will have your neighbors eating out of your hand.”
“You guarantee?”
“Here.” She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and pulled out two DVDs in plastic sleeves. “Go home and watch these. Then call me and I’ll start making one for Mulligans right away.”
He shifted the poster and took the DVDs but didn’t look at them. “I appreciate the offer, Anna, I do. And I can honestly say I admire your confidence. But I’m not going to talk about Five Star. Not to you. Not to anyone.” He backed up, cradling his poster carefully under his arm. He put the DVDs in his pocket, though, she noticed.
“Can you at least think about it?” she asked as she followed him to the front of the store.
“I think about that crash every day.”
She’d meant the movie, but he’d misinterpreted her. Deliberately or not, she couldn’t tell.
When he turned left outside the shop, she let him go. She hoped that last offer had been the right one. The way he’d looked when she mentioned the zoning board made her think she had a shot at least. She never would have expected him to be as involved as he seemed to be in Mulligans.
She knew quite a bit about getting people to discuss things they wanted to keep to themselves. There was a time to push and a time to back off. Mason needed to stew over her offer before she gave him another nudge. And she needed to deal with the feelings he’d stirred up in her.
CHAPTER FIVE
MASON STARED at the screen. He couldn’t believe he’d ever been the kid who was standing center stage singing the hell out of “Stage Fright.” He’d been twenty when this movie, Five Star Rising, was shot. It was mostly a concert video, intended to support the Five Star Rising album during what ended up being his last tour. Tonight he was fast-forwarding through all the backstage coverage. Couldn’t stand to see the bottles and women and himself wasting his life as fast as he could.
He never watched this movie. Damn Anna for making him seek it out. He’d come home expecting to clear up some paperwork and get to bed, but he’d been too restless. Angry about the zoning board, pissed off at David and his e-mail and really mad about Anna’s offer. What the hell was David thinking talking to anyone about the crash? Telling her to come here?
Without the zoning fiasco, he’d never have given her offer to make him a movie another thought. But the hearing had been bad. He knew Stephanie would do her best, but people, not just Roxanne, a lot of people, were really upset. He used to be able to get people on board with his plans without even trying. But he’d lost something after Five Star. Now he couldn’t even get a suburban zoning board to leave him alone. The last time people turned on him and he couldn’t fix it, he’d lost everything. What if he couldn’t fix this and this time Mulligans was the price?
Anna had said her movie would save Mulligans.
But he’d have to talk about the crash. She’d said people wanted the truth about it. He’d never told the truth. He’d had his reasons then and he still thought he’d made the right decision. What did Anna know or think she knew? He was pretty sure he and David Giles were the only ones who knew what really happened that night. David had his own reasons for keeping quiet. If he agreed to talk to her, how much would he have to say? What would she be able to figure out?
Those questions had led him out to the video store and then here, to this place in his past where he didn’t like to go, thinking about the tour that led to the crash…and everything else that happened.
He had all the lights off and was sunk deep in the leather couch in the small room he and Christian used as a private family room above the common rooms where the residents ate communal meals several nights a week, did their laundry, conducted meetings and held functions.
This room had always felt safe to him. Seeing his old life in the midst of this real one was jarring.
Before he moved into Mulligans, Mason had never lived anywhere permanent. With his mom there’d been a string of trashy apartments and sketchy trailers. With Five Star he’d been a hotel nomad. He hadn’t had much furniture here at first, but after Christian moved in, he’d needed to fill the empty spaces. He’d hired a decorator because he hadn’t had the first clue about how to change a room into a home. He’d wanted Christian to feel normal and fit in, but Mason hadn’t known what “normal” looked like.
The couches and chairs were deep and comfortable, large enough to handle his tall frame and durable enough to resist the energetic boy Christian had been. The natural-cherry bookcases lining two walls were crammed with his books and CDs, Christian’s outgrown picture books and paperbacks, board games and puzzles.
Photos of him and Christian, their friends, Mulligans, everything he held close were framed in black metal and hung up on the third wall. He looked back to the screen when he heard the boy he’d been launch into the second verse.
“Stage Fright” was a cover but it suited his voice and had always set up the audience perfectly for Five Star’s own soaring ballad, “Live.” The screen flashed as the spotlight swung off him and out over the audience. In the brighter light, he caught a shadow and realized his son was standing behind him. He hadn’t heard Christian come in. He turned the volume down and the room fell abruptly quiet.
“You don’t think I’ve seen that before?” Chris stayed behind him.
Of course, Mason should have known Chris had seen the movie. But until that very second, yeah, he did think the kid wouldn’t have seen it. Sometimes parents were the dumbest people on earth, brains dulled by loving their stupid children too much.
“I never showed it to you.”
“It’s on Netflix.”
Was it too late to tighten the parental controls on Chris’s Internet connection?
He tried to think of something to say, but everything he came up with seemed awkward. He was half-afraid he’d blurt out something about ice cream again. Most of what passed for conversation between him and Chris these days was uncomfortable small talk strung together with uncomfortable silence, spiced up with occasional bouts of yelling.
He rolled his head on the couch cushion and saw that Chris hadn’t moved. “You want to sit?”
He was careful not to react when Christian came around the back of the couch and settled deep into the cushions next to him.
“Why are you watching it?” Christian asked. The movie ran on, Five Star’s music sounding small.
“I had a bad night. Zoning board. The neighbors put up a roadblock. Your friend Angel’s mom is the ringleader.”
“Roxanne Curtis?”
Mason held up a warning finger. “Do. Not. Say. That. Name.”
Christian grunted. “She’s just a woman, Dad.”
“Satan spawn,” he said, referring to Roxanne. Mostly.
Chris gestured toward the TV where the song was winding down. “So does this relax you?”
What was the word for the opposite of relax? “No.”
Christian kicked his sneakers off and moved the DVD case over so he could put his feet up on the table.
“I like this picture,” he said, holding up the Five Star Rising movie box. “Sort of doesn’t leave you a leg when you complain about my hair, though.”
Mason surprised himself when he said, “I hate that picture. The whole band hated it.”
On the screen Five Star kicked into “Live.” His younger self was holding the microphone close, singing with his eyes closed. He used to hang on to the stand like that when the spins got bad.
“Yeah?”
“See how the stylist put me so far out in front it almost looks like the rest of them are in a different room? Pissed them off. None of them believed me when I said I didn’t care.”
“You guys fought a lot.”
“I was a lot younger than them. They were together five years before I started playing with them.”
“Your mom met them, right?”
Slept with David Giles. He hadn’t known that until later. His mom had been fifteen when he’d been born—barely thirty when she met David. “She was waitressing at a bar they played when their singer quit. She talked them into giving me a tryout.”
He shrugged, pushing aside his uncomfortable memories. “Guess you and I got the bottom of the mom barrel. Too young. Too poor. It must have sucked for her.” Not as bad as being her kid had sucked, but close.
“Too bad there wasn’t a Mulligans for you guys.”
“Yeah.” Not that she’d have applied anyway. She’d enjoyed her addictions—booze, men, risk—too much.
“Want to turn it back up?” Chris asked.
“No,” Mason said with no inflection. He didn’t think he could stand to have Chris in the room with that. Watching the parts onstage would be bad enough, but the rest…
“How come you won’t talk about it with me?”
“I tell you about it all the time.”
“Just the crap, the drugs and the scary stuff and the fighting.” Christian gestured to the TV. “We never talk about what that felt like. You and your guitar and the audience. When I watch that movie it’s like I’m seeing someone who’s not even you.”
“You’ve seen it more than once?”
“Dad. Every guy in America who’s in a band has watched it more than once.”
That was depressing—he’d been so careful to keep Five Star out of Chris’s life.
What could he say that wouldn’t make the kid even more determined to take his shot with his own band?
He must have hesitated too long because Christian leaned forward again and picked up the plastic sleeve holding Anna’s DVDs. “What’s this?” he asked. “City at War?”
“Someone recommended it.”
“Huh.” Christian finished reading the back and then tossed the disk back on the table. “So you’re not going to tell me why you’re sitting here in the dark watching a movie about yourself that you had to rent and a documentary about Toledo public schools.”
“Detroit, not Toledo.”
Chris looked at him directly for the first time since he sat down, and the familiar anger was back. “Whatever.” Before Mason knew what happened, his son was off the couch and halfway out the door. “You can’t ever let anything go, can you?” Chris spat before he left the room.
“At least I’m not always pissed off!” Mason shouted just as Chris’s bedroom door slammed. He clicked the volume back up and watched as Five Star scooped up seventy thousand fans crammed into the aisles at Giants Stadium and carried all of them along through “Live” and straight into “Beating Down the Door” and “Dirty Sweet.”
He had no idea what he should have said to Chris. That he’d never felt better than he had when he was onstage with those guys and those songs and his guitar? That he’d been so drunk most nights that he wasn’t sure what was real and what he’d made up? That he didn’t watch this video because it made him ache, literally hurt, with wishing he hadn’t missed so much of it? That he wasn’t sure he’d done a good enough job, made Christian strong enough to resist what he’d find out there? That he’d never forgive himself if he let his boy go before he was sure he’d done everything right to protect him?
He hit the remote, cutting the credits off. He punched the open button on the DVD player and slid City at War in.
A haunting violin piece played over the opening credits, black-and-white footage of an inner-city neighborhood and then what could easily have been Lakeland but was most likely a Detroit suburb. Kids’ faces flashed by, on the streets, reflected in the windows of a school bus, and in classrooms and school hallways.
Mason settled back into the couch, arms crossed, prepared to find flaws. Nitpicking would suit his mood right now. Unfortunately for him, Anna’s confidence had been on target. By the time the forty-five-minute film was over, Mason would have been prepared to write a check to support the school bond if it hadn’t already passed by a seventy-three-percent margin.
Why did it have to be this person making the movie? He wanted to say no. But what if she could help save Mulligans? What if everything he knew to do and Stephanie and the rest of his team knew wasn’t enough and he had turned down the offer that could have saved them?
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