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care of for me. All you have to do is talk to Vinnie.”

    I went through my mental Rolodex of the facts I’d learned about Mind at Large ever since I realized Damon was haunting me. The way I remembered it, Vinnie Pallucci was the band’s keyboard player. After Damon died he also wrote most of their songs.

    “You want me to walk up to a perfect stranger and talk to him about how you accidentally killed yourself?”

    “You’re not listening!” Damon drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “That doesn’t matter anymore. My songs, though…My music is the only thing that matters, you know?”

    I didn’t. Then again, I suppose no one who’s not a musician can really understand. Before I could tell him this, the movie ended and the doors at the far end of the theater opened automatically. There were people waiting to come in to see the next show, and I knew we couldn’t stick around. We headed for the doors opposite the crowd and ducked into the nearest empty hallway.

    “All I want you to do,” Damon said, “is to go tell Vinnie to stop stealing my songs.”

    “Isn’t that what attorneys are for? I mean, aren’t there copyrights or whatever on songs? Don’t people know which songs you’ve written?” I answered my own question. “God, there’s so much about you on the Internet, people who know every little detail of your life and people who interpret your lyrics and people who say you’re not really dead at all, just hiding on an island somewhere in the Pacific, or living as a Buddhist monk or—”

    “So you’ve been checking me out!” Damon rolled back on his heels and grinned. “You like what you see?”

    “I like being left alone.” This was a far better answer than the truth, which was more in linewith melting into a puddle of mush at Damon’s feet. “You won’t leave me alone. That means that whatever’s bugging you about Vinnie and the songs, it’s important. At least to you. So let’s get this over with, why don’t we. You tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you I don’t want to do it. Then you’ll disappear into a puff of smoke, and that will be that.”

    “It turns me on when a girl talks tough.”

    “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.” I shouldn’t have had to remind him, but then, maybe because he was from way-back-when, he wasn’t clued in to the whole equality-of-the-sexes thing. “And that’s not what we were talking about.”

    “It’s always what people are talking about!” Damon laughed. The sound tickled its way up my spine. “Politics, religion, the stock market, and the price of cantaloupes. It’s really all about sex.”

    He was starting to sound like one of his songs. Better to stick to the matter at hand, which, as far as I could remember, was the songs in question. “You want me to call your attorney?” I asked. “No problem. I can do that. I’m just not sure how I’m going to explain that a client who’s been dead for more than thirty years is wondering about copyright laws.”

    “Not the songs I wrote back then.” Damon shook his head. “The new songs. The songs I’ve been writing in my head since…well, you know, since back in ’71. Since the night I took that hit of orange sunshine.”

    Boy, for a guy whose lyrics were as full of death as Garden View Cemetery, he sure was reluctant tosay the word. I supplied it for him. “The night you died, you mean?”

    He didn’t confirm or deny, and I was tired of beating around the bush. “Are you saying that this Vinnie guy’s been stealing your songs even though you didn’t write those songs when you were alive? What, this is like E.T., phone home? Vinnie gets in touch with you and you sing him your songs and—”

    “No. That’s not it at all. Vinnie doesn’t just get in touch. He’s got this hold on me. He’s channeling me, that’s what he’s doing.”

    Chapter 3
    “Huh?”
    Okay, so it wasn’t the most probing question, but it was all I could think to say before I