Lost Melody (34 page)

“Okay. Talk to your mother first. I’ll
answer all your questions after you talk to her.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “I’m going to
Ravenswood to write it.”

“When?”

“I’m going to talk to Mom next week.
So, the first week of January maybe. When you see Hank, will you
tell him I love the gift, and I understand?”

He gathered her in a fatherly embrace.
“I will. Let’s go see if we can find a pot of tea in your lovely
kitchen.”

She clung to him as they walked back
the way they’d come, sharing the peaceful solitude of the
beach.

Chapter
Thirty-two

Melody checked the batteries in her
voice recorder and threw it along with several extra tapes into her
bag. To remind herself why she was delving into the past, she
wrapped an unsteady hand around the key hanging from a chain around
her neck.

I can do this.
I have to do this.

She took a deep breath, hoisted the
heavy bag to her shoulder, and grabbed her car keys from the hall
table. The most direct and fastest route to her mother’s house was
by freeway, but she chose the more scenic Highway 101—a small,
two-lane road winding along the northern San Diego County
coastline, through beach communities and a state park.

She drove with the windows down. The
fresh, salty sea air teased her hair and helped clear her
head.

Her attitude would set the tone for
the interview. She needed to focus and be firm in her commitment to
the project. She needed to set her personal issues aside and listen
with the ears of a reporter, not the frightened, lonely child still
living inside her.

Melody sat at her mother’s kitchen
table and pulled out her voice recorder and the note pad where
she’d written down her list of questions. She tried to put aside
the fact she was interviewing her own mother and focused on getting
answers.

Her mother sipped her tea and set the
fragile china cup back on the saucer. “What do you want to
know?”

“Everything.” Melody turned on her
recorder. “Let’s begin with your obsession with Earl Ravenswood
when you were in high school.”

Her mother’s eyes widened and she
paled. For a second, Melody regretted the harsh tone she’d taken.
The last thing she wanted to do was insult her and loose her
cooperation entirely.

Her mom reached for her tea, raised
the cup and set it back down without taking a sip.

“You don’t pull any punches, do
you?”

“I’m sorry, but you were obsessed. The
scrapbooks you gave me are evidence enough.”

She nodded. “You’re right.” She mopped
at the counter with her napkin then focused on something across the
room.

“I saw Milton on television.
RavensBlood had their first hit, and they were big news in the
United States. The local television station was at the airport when
they landed. That was before they had jet ways. They rolled stairs
up to the plane….” She closed her eyes and a smiled. “He stepped
out of the plane, and I fell in love with him.”

She sighed and looked at Melody. “It
was more than a teenage crush. I’d had plenty of those. What I felt
for him was different. I knew with every cell in my body he was the
man put on this planet for me.”

Hours later, her mother’s voice was
strained, and Melody was on information overload. That it all had
to do with her parents only made it harder to
comprehend.

“Let’s pick up again tomorrow
afternoon, Mom. Okay?”

“I suppose,” she answered.

Melody shut off the recorder and
closed her notebook.

“I love you, Mom. Thanks for talking
to me. I know it can’t be easy for you.”

“I knew I’d have to answer for my
decisions some day. I’m glad it’s you I’m telling. I know I can
trust you to preserve some sort of dignity for me.”

Melody smiled at her. “You can count
on it, Mom. I won’t lie, but I don’t have any desire to make you
into a pathetic figure. You weren’t, you know. Sometimes, we just
know when we see someone that they’re the one.”

Later that evening, Melody went over
her mother’s words. She had taken one look at Milton Ravenswood
when she was sixteen and had known he was the one. It was stupid
and impossible for a junior in high school to conceive of ever
getting close enough to someone like him, much less hope he would
see her in the same way. Nevertheless, she set in motion a plan
that would forever change her life—and his.

At seventeen, barely graduated from
high school, she’d set out to meet the then twenty-three-year-old
musician, using her adequate singing voice to open doors for her.
By a stroke of luck, she’d landed a job touring with RavensBlood as
a backup singer. Her parents had been devastated and disowned her
for publicly embarrassing them.

It hadn’t mattered to her mom—or to
the object of her obsession. Hamilton Earl Ravenswood fell as hard
for Diane as she had for him. It hadn’t been just her mother’s
obsession talking. Jonathan had confirmed her story months
ago.

So, she knew her parents' marriage had
been love match, but getting pregnant hadn’t been part of the
plan.

Melody had hours of tape where her
mother had described the whirlwind year she’d spent on the road
with the band. She related stories about the roadies, the groupies,
and the drugs and alcohol so many used to make it through the
demanding schedule of performances and media appearances. She
talked about the endless travel, hotel rooms, and constant demands
for her husband’s time. Their personal time together had whittled
down to those few precious hours in the middle of the night after a
performance and before the real world awoke. Then he’d done
interviews with the local media before the band boarded a plane or
bus and headed for the next venue.

She described the man she loved, his
sense of humor, his incredible talent, the passion he had for
music, his need to perform—to have that connection with an
audience. Through her mother’s words, Melody came to know her
father more as the man he had been, rather than the icon the media
portrayed him as.

Sleep eluded her. Images, thoughts,
and questions raced through her mind. There was much more to hear,
more truths to uncover, more roads to travel on her journey to
understanding.

The next day was more exhausting than
the one before. Her mother attempted to explain why she’d chosen
not to live with her husband and raise their daughter as a real
family. Melody tried to comprehend, but as the child who had been
denied daily contact with the father she loved, she found her
mother’s reasoning less than convincing.

“If you were going to let him sing to
me every night, why not just live with him? I don’t understand. If
you loved him as much as you say you did, what was the
problem?”

Her mother hesitated. “I couldn’t
stand it. I hated the traveling. I hated everything about the
business. I had a fantasy he would love me enough to give it up.
Maybe not music all together, but at least the touring. And we’d go
live somewhere, just the two of us. I realize how selfish and
childish it was, but I was just barely eighteen when I became
pregnant. When I told Milton and he insisted on marriage, I thought
he would quit then. But he didn’t… wouldn’t.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him I was leaving,
that I wasn’t going to raise you on the road. He argued, but he
knew I was right. That was no way to raise a child. He let us go.
He provided everything we both could possibly need, money, a
house…everything. Then, he wrote
that
song
and started calling every night to
sing to you.”

Melody reached for the teapot in the
center of the table and refilled her mother’s cup and her own. She
added a lump of sugar to hers and stirred.

“Why did you help him?” she asked. “It
began long before I was able to actively participate.”

“I loved him so much, and because of
the song, I was able to talk to him every day. He loved me, but I’d
become third in line behind you and his music.

“He used to sneak into town when the
band was on the West Coast. He’d come to the house after you were
in bed and watch you sleep.”

“I didn’t know….”

“Those summers you went to Ravenswood
when you were older? I stayed in a house a few miles away. He still
loved me, but he said it would only confuse you if you saw us
together.”

Did he love you, or did he
tolerate you in order to see me? How much of what you’re telling me
is your fantasy, and how much is reality?
“What happened the night he died?”

She had never heard her mother’s
version of the events, and knowing how much her mother had loved
Milton Ravenswood, she wondered at the lack of emotion in her
mother’s voice. The retelling was flat, a practiced recitation of
the facts, minus the part where she let her daughter’s birthday
party continue after she’d received the news of his missing
plane.

Had her mother withheld the
information in order to protect her daughter or to punish her
because her husband had loved Melody more than her? It was an
insidious thought, and one that had haunted her for the last
seventeen years.

It was me he was coming to
see. It’s my fault he’s dead. Do you hate me for taking him away
from you?
She couldn’t bring herself to
ask. Time to change the subject before she found out more than she
wanted to know.

“Why didn’t I have piano lessons? Why
didn’t you let me listen to music? Given your own musical
background and Daddy’s, I would think you would have wanted me to
explore my musical talent if I had any.”

Her mother surprised her again. “Oh, I
knew you had talent. I suppose you’ve figured it out for
yourself.”

Melody nodded.

“Music took Milton away from me. I
didn’t want it to take you, too.”

Melody reeled at the bitter and
pathetic tone of her mother’s voice. A pattern of manipulation for
selfish purposes had begun to emerge, and she wondered why she
hadn’t seen it before.

“I wasn’t going anywhere,
Mom.”

Chapter
Thirty-three

Ravenswood wasn’t the most hospitable
of places in the winter, especially for someone who had spent the
last few months in the tropical clime of San Diego. The manor
house, built in the eighteenth century, was cold and uninviting,
but Melody loved it all the same. Except for the few people
employed to keep the place from falling down, she had the house all
to herself. For six summers she could remember, she had run through
the hallways, followed her father like a faithful puppy, and basked
in his love and undivided attention.

At night, he had tucked her into bed
and sang to her.

She hadn’t been back to Ravenswood
since her father’s funeral. Her mother had refused to let her go,
even when Jonathan had offered to make the trip to San Diego and
accompany Melody. Mired as she had been for so many years in her
own guilt, she hadn’t argued. Seeing the place through the eyes of
an adult, she was capable and ready to understand the man who had
loved her so much.

She paused in the music room where
she’d spent so much of her time with him. Memories rushed over her,
and she crossed to the grand piano and sat on the padded bench. She
lifted the cover with trembling hands. The keys gleamed in the
light from the chandelier overhead. She tapped one key and another,
tentatively testing the instrument. She took a deep breath and let
it out. She began to play.

She experimented with random
melodies—anything that sprang to mind.

With the music came memories of summer
afternoons spent with her father sitting at the piano. Her small
fingers scrambled to keep up with his strong ones. They mostly
played children’s ditties, but occasionally he encouraged her to
try more complex arrangements. She realized they were his own
compositions, and she wondered if he had committed them to paper or
if they were forever lost.

Her days fell into a rhythm of
writing, playing the piano, and exploring the house.

Shortly after her father’s death,
Jonathan had moved into the house and taken over Milton’s office
for his own. He had stored all of his friend’s personal papers in
tightly sealed boxes in the attic. Every day she discovered
something new, and in little increments grew to know her father
better. By extension, she learned about herself, too.

Hank was never far from her thoughts.
Sleep came easier. Dreams of Hank had replaced the nightmares she
had experienced since her father’s death.

The more she learned about her father
the more it became clear why she had fallen in love with Hank. The
two men shared many common likes from their love of music to their
love of nature, reading, and business.

On a day she couldn’t get Hank off her
mind, a package arrived at Ravenswood. The small box contained a CD
and a slip of paper containing a short note written in Hank’s bold
handwriting.