From where I stood just inside the front doors of the Rock Hall, I could look up at the glass structure that surrounded me and see the fat, white clouds that floated above the building. They weren’t the only things that attracted my attention. The place is, after all, a testimonial to everything innovative, fun and rebellious about rock and roll. I shifted my gaze from the great outdoors to the indoor funk. There was a display of huge guitars next to me, all painted in striking colors. Across from where I stood, two giant neon signs that had once been used as the backdrop to some group’s concert scenery were suspended high above the floor. Dangling nearby was a humongous hot dog (complete with bun and relish). This, I didn’t have time to wonder about.

My eyes on the brightly lit marquee that advertised the upcoming Mind at Large concert, I paid my admission fee and headed off on a ghost hunt of my own.

Easier said than done.

The hall is a maze of sound and color, and the more exhibits I wound my way through, the more lost I got. Fortunately, I ran across a guy wearing a Rock Hall shirt.

I asked for the Ancient History Department.

He gave me a blank stare.

Until I explained that I was looking for Damon Curtis.

Normal person that he was, he thought I was looking for the exhibit about Damon Curtis.

I left him to his delusion, followed his directions, and got down to business.

Turns out, Damon Curtis has one entire wall devoted to him, and nearing it, I slowed my steps and waited for the cleaning woman who was wiping down the glass exhibit cases to finish her work. She didn’t look like she belonged in the same class as the hall employee who’d directed me to the exhibit. Which is a kind way of saying that he was well-groomed and dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. And she…

The woman was wearing a pink and purple filmy skirt that skimmed her bony knees, and an orange T-shirt that was a couple of sizes too small. Maybe that was intentional; she had no figure to speak of, and with the shirt being that tight, it was impossible not to notice that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She was probably in her sixties, and believe me when I say this: It was a wise fashionista indeed who once advised women of a certain age to cut their hair. This woman’s hair was poker-straight and hung to the middle of her back. It was the color of a field mouse, shot through with gray, and it framed a long, bony face that on a good day might have generously been called homely. Her cheeks sagged. There were dark circles under her eyes. The overall impression was of a particularly sad donkey. Even if she was singing a Mind at Large song as she worked.

She took a last swipe at the glass case. That’s when she noticed me and stopped singing. Her eyes lit. “Death is my confidant,” she said. I figured it must have been a lyric from a Mind at Large song.

“Go death!” I gave her the thumbs-up but I have to admit, when she finished and walked away, I was more than a little relieved.

Dealing with my Gift was challenge enough. I didn’t need to throw odd living people into the mix.

Finally with the exhibit to myself, I was able to stand back and take in the overall picture.

DAMON CURTIS: AMERICAN IDOLATER is what the sign above the exhibit said. Displayed all around it in frames and in the glass exhibit cases that were now officially sparkling clean were bits and pieces of the rock star’s life.

Handwritten snippets of song lyrics shared space with album covers. A leather jacket that sported enough fringe to make a cowboy proud hung next to an old photo of the guys in the band standing with an older man. Compared to their shaggy tresses, his bald head stuck out like a…well, like a bald head. There were stage passes, concert tickets, and even some of Damon’s elementary school report cards on display. In the center of it all was a black-and-white photo of Damon, larger than life. I took one look and sucked in a breath. Stared. Oh yeah, and drooled just a little.

The one and only time I’d seen Damon, it was from a distance. I’d noticed that he was good-looking, of course. I would have had to have been blind not to. But there’s a difference between simply good-looking and oh-my-god.

Damon Curtis fit into the latter category.

He had dark hair, and it tumbled around his shoulders in the sort of arty disarray that made me think the picture had been taken just as he got out of bed.

I wondered what he was doing while he was in there. And who he’d been doing it with.

He had dark eyes, too. Even in the colorless photo, they looked like they were lit with fire.

His body…well…that was to die for.

He was standing in front of a window draped by gauzy curtains that diffused the sunlight until it was as soft as a watercolor. It caressed Damon from behind, outlining the tattered jeans slung low across his hips, his bare chest, and his slim, athletic body. There was a sprinkling of dark hair on his chest that arrowed down toward his waist, and a tiny tattoo of a star near his heart. Just over his left shoulder, the curtain was torn, and a stab of sunlight grazed the left side of his face and rushed toward the viewer like a comet.

It was hokey in a sixties, psychedelic-poetic sort of way. It was also self-indulgent, egotistical, and just about the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

The Rock Hall was chilly.

I was suddenly hot enough to self-combust.

I didn’t even realize I wasn’t breathing until my lungs screamed for air. The momentary oxygen deprivation shook me out of my stupor. I gasped, told my hormones to behave, and reminded myself that sexy or not, Damon Curtis was a big ol’ ghostly nuisance.

One I needed to deal with ASAP. Before he took up any more of my time.

“I’m here,” I said. There was nobody near the exhibit but me, but I looked around anyway, just to be sure no one heard and thought I was a loony. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to see me? To talk to me? Well, here I am.”

In spite of the way those shows on TV portray things, real ghosts aren’t much into grand entrances. At least not the ghosts I’ve run into. They show up. Just like that. And they look just like regular, living people, too. They’re not see-through. There’s no glowing aura around them. Actually, except that no one can see them but me and that they’re incorporeal and so can’t do anything for themselves that involves this world (like open doors or turn the pages of a book), the dead aren’t all that different from the living. Well, except for the fact that they’re dead, of course. And that if they happen to touch a living person, that person freezes like a Popsicle. I ought to know. My first dead client, Gus Scarpetti, had once pushed me out of the path of a speeding car, and just that bit of contact left me chilled to the bone for days.

Grand entrances aside, there was no sign of Damon Curtis.

Was this good news? Or bad?

I wasn’t sure, and while I digested it, I inched nearer to the exhibit to take a closer look.

Damon is a smarter-than-average little boy, the notation on his second grade report card said. But he sometimes has trouble controlling his behavior.

“Rock star in training,” I mumbled.

Your thesis shows a spark of originality. This was a note from his English 101 professor, written at the top of a paper about some Shakespearean play and displayed right next to a sign that said Damon had flunked out of college soon after he’d gotten this particular failing grade. Sadly, your ideas are often disjointed and not followed through to their logical conclusions. You have the tendency to rely too heavily on simile and metaphor even when it is not appropriate, and often your symbolism is ambiguous and thus, perplexing.

“That explains the songs that make no sense,” I told myself.

Medical Certificate of Death.

Though I am in the business of the dead (both at the cemetery and in my private investigator’s life), this next bit of memorabilia threw me for a loop.

I looked up at the photo of Damon Curtis that stood watch over his exhibit. As I might have mentioned, in it he was young and vital, as tempting as sin and very much alive.

I looked down into the exhibit case, at the facts about his death laid out in cold, hard terms by the Bureau of Vital Statistics.

Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself.

Cause of Death: heart failure.

Though my father is a doctor (I should say was a doctor, since he lost his medical license because of a little matter of insurance fraud), I had never aspired to follow in his footsteps. Still, it didn’t take a medical wunderkind to know that every death is ultimately caused by heart failure. One second it’s working, the next, nada. So this bit of info didn’t tell me much about Damon. The sign next to the death certificate, though, did.

On June 22, 1971, while in Cleveland on a Mind at Large concert tour, lead singer Damon Michael Curtis, age 27, died from an overdose of drugs. Though the Cleveland Police Department conducted an extensive investigation, they were never able to determine if the overdose was accidental or if, like the tormented souls who inhabited so many of his dark lyrics and his grim poetry, Curtis made the conscious decision to end his life. His parents, who lived on a farm in Illinois, were strongly religious. Throughout Mind at Large’s meteoric rise to fame, they refused to acknowledge their son’s stardom. After his death, they declined to take responsibility for the body or the burial. Damon Curtis was laid to rest in Cleveland, at Garden View Cemetery.

Laid to rest. But not in peace.

I thought this over as I moved on to the next part of the exhibit where some of those “dark lyrics” of Damon’s were displayed. The first of them looked as if it had been scribbled in the heat of inspiration. The words were written on a pizza box in green Magic Marker. The resulting song, the museum information card said, had sold more than two million copies in less than a month and catapulted Mind at Large past the Beatles, the Stones, and the Doors on the charts and into the forefront of the psychedelic pop movement.

“Dragon’s Breath.”

The song was popular way before my time, but I knew it, anyway. It was the one that had been playing on not one, but two radio stations while I was in the car earlier. Like it or not, the tune pounded through my head as I read the lyrics.

Lizard scales and devil’s wings.

Bloody, spoiled soul.

I’ll leave you, love, in your heat, in your sweat.

Sated, gorged.

My black butterfly body,

Wet from the chrysalis.

I wasn’t so sure about that whole lizard-scales-and-devil’s-wing thing, but similes and metaphors aside, I think I knew what was what when it came to the butterfly body in the wet chrysalis. No wonder the world knew Damon Curtis as an iconoclast. Back in the late sixties when “Dragon’s Breath” was recorded, the lyrics and the driving music that accompanied them must have put more peoples’ knickers in a twist than just Mr. and Mrs. Curtis back on that farm in Illinois.

“I’ll leave you, love, in your heat. In your sweat. Sated, gorged. My black butterfly body, wet from the chrysalis.”

The words tickled their way through me. That was because someone had whispered them in my ear.

It didn’t take a genius—dark or otherwise—to recognize the blistering, baritone voice.

“It’s about time you showed up,” I said, rethinking the whole grand entrances thing. But then, I guess a rock star would be more into drama than most other ghosts. “We need to talk about the way you’ve been bugging me.”

Only we couldn’t.

Because when I turned around, there was no one there.

I grumbled a curse Farmer Curtis and his wife would not have appreciated.

It was met with a chuckle that came from somewhere on my right.

But there was no one over there, either.

“Fine.” Just to show I’d had it, I emphasized my point by slapping a hand against the glass display case in front of me. “If that’s the way you want to be, have it your way. I came here to talk to you. But hey, if you’re going to play hard-to-get, I guess there’s nothing we have to say to each other. I’m leaving, and here’s the scoop. I’m not going to tolerate any more of your songs on the radio. And no more flat tires. So you might as well stop trying to get my attention. Nothing you do is going to bring me back here. You had your chance. You blew it.”

I stomped away from the exhibit without so much as another glance.

None of this helped soothe my temper. Annoyed, I moved through the museum, heading in what I figured was the direction of the escalator that would take me back to the first floor.

My bad luck, by the time I was halfway there, a long line of patrons was just heading into the exhibit area. They were part of a tour, and when they all stopped to gawk at the costumes that had once been worn by the likes of David Bowie and Elton John, I was trapped. I couldn’t get through them. I couldn’t get around them.

Never let it be said that I believe in stereotypes. There’s absolutely no truth to the fact that I have a low threshold of patience because I’m a redhead. Any right-thinking woman would have tapped her foot and mumbled at the inconvenience. Right-thinking woman that I am, I did just that.

None of which made them move any faster. When they were finally done ogling, they shuffled by. I flattened myself against the nearest display case to allow them to pass, a tight smile my only greeting.

Unshaken by my expression, a white-haired lady chirped at me, “Good morning!”

“Thanks, honey,” said the man behind her.

“So nice of you to let us by,” another lady said.

I scarcely spared them a nod. That is, until I saw the next person in line.

This was no senior citizen although, come to think of it, had he lived past 1971, he just about would be. He was dressed as he had been in the smokin’ photo, in tattered jeans slung low across his hips. His chest was bare, and though I hadn’t seen the detail in the photo, there was a delicate blue teardrop at one point of the golden star tattooed near his heart. He wasn’t as tall as I expected. When he paused in front of me, we would have been eye-to-eye. That is, if Damon’s eyes were on my eyes and not taking a long, slow look at my body.

For way too long a time, I was so mesmerized by the smoldering look, I was tongue-tied. Me! Ms. Cool in Any Circumstances. Ms. I Was Engaged Once and After My Weasely Fiancé Broke Up With Me, I Swore Never to Let Myself Fall Under the This-Is-Love Bullshit Spell Again.

Which was all good to remember. And not so easy to do.

Not when heat rushed up my neck and set fire to my face. And my legs suddenly felt as if they’d turned into Silly Putty. Then again, I’d never had this kind of up-close-and-personal encounter with a legend, living or otherwise. Maybe it was the whole rock star bigger-than-life-persona thing. At that moment, if Damon Curtis had asked me to run off to Africa, or fly to the moon, or drop down right there on the floor with him and—

The thought just about knocked me off my feet, and to get rid of it, I reminded myself that hot or not, this was one cold dude. One cold, dead dude.

If I was smart, I wouldn’t forget it.

I remembered my mission. And how I’d done my best to avoid Damon all summer. And ended up here at the Rock Hall anyway.

“Damon Curtis, you son of a—”

“No, not looking for that exhibit.” Of course, there was no possible way the man in line behind Damon could know there was a ghost standing between him and the person in front of him. He thought I was talking to him. “We’re looking for Elvis.”

“Ooo, Elvis!” Damon grinned. “That guy’s a god.”

“Not what we need to talk about.”

“It isn’t?”

I dodged both the question and the man in line behind Damon, who had asked it, and excused my way through the crowd. I didn’t bother to check and see if Damon followed. Now that he’d made contact, so to speak, I knew he wouldn’t disappear again. In fact, I was counting on it.

I ducked into a small theater where a black-and-white movie about the history of rock and roll played in a continuous loop. I was the only one in there, and I took a couple of seconds to orient myself. The walls and bench seats in the theater were black, and the video threw splashes of light and shadow against them. When Damon appeared next to me, the light flashed like a strobe against his bare chest.

“Last chance,” I said. I was talking about Damon’s last chance to tell me why he was bugging me, not my last chance to jump his bones. I told myself not to forget it. “No more hocus-pocus. We talk now, or we don’t talk at all.”

Though something in Damon’s expression told me he didn’t expect me to be so frank, he didn’t bite at my offer. At least not as quickly as I would have liked. His lips thinned with concentration, and, one dark eyebrow raised, he cocked his head, the better to study me. A laid-back hippie to the very end. And beyond.

“So talk,” he said.

“Hello!” Just to get his attention, I waved my hands in front of his face. “In case you forgot, you’re the one who showed up looking for me.” Whatever was happening in the movie playing behind me, the music got louder and the flickering speeded up. Light and shadow pulsed against Damon’s face. It was making me dizzy, and I plunked down onto the nearest bench.

“I don’t need any more clients,” I told him.

He sat down next to me. We were both facing the movie screen, and the play of light and shadow made Damon’s face look gray. “That’s not what I heard,” he said. “I hear that when it comes to special cases…well, there’s this dude who told me you’re an expert.”

Gus Scarpetti. It had to be. I was tempted to ask how Gus was doing, but rather than get off track, I stuck to the matter at hand. “Gus has been known to exaggerate.”

“He said you solved his case. And that other one, too. The one about the chick and that book of hers.”

“So you want me to take your case? No thanks, not getting suckered into a dead-end investigation again. Been there, done that.” I stood up and turned my back to the movie screen. Partly because it was less distracting to talk without the flicker of the video flashing in my eyes. Mostly because I needed to dispel the uneasiness that touched me like a clammy hand when I thought about the rest of what I had to say. “Every time I poke my nose where somebody thinks it doesn’t belong, people try to kill me,” I told Damon and reminded myself. “Not exactly my idea of fun.”

“Oh baby!” Damon reached out a hand. But apparently he knew how these things work. He stopped just short of grabbing my arm. “I can see why you’d be uptight. Peace out! I’m not asking you to do anything dangerous. What I want you to do, it’s easy.”

“Murder investigations are never easy.” I knew this for a fact, and I turned my back on Damon and paced to the other side of the theater. Another thought struck, and I spun around again. “You overdosed,” I reminded him. “That’s what that sign over at your exhibit says.”

“You read it, huh?” Damon stood and stretched. His body was lean, and he moved as smoothly as a panther.

I turned back toward the movie.

Damon came up behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to know it. The air changed. It didn’t get cold, not the way the ghostbusters on TV say it does when a spirit is around. Oh no. Suddenly my temperature shot up and my throat locked. It felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

“That sign you saw at my exhibit, it’s right about me overdosing,” Damon said. His voice skimmed my ear. “I was careless. Thought I knew my shit…but hey, I was jonesing. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been.”

“So it was an accident?” I’d already had one client with suicide issues. I was grateful Damon wasn’t another. My relief didn’t last long, though. I spun to face him. “But if you weren’t murdered, what do you want me to investigate?”

He stepped away from me, and suddenly I found it easier to breathe. “This has got nothing to do with me being…well…you know.”

“Dead?” If he wasn’t going to say it, I would.

As if I hadn’t spoken, he went right on. “It’s all about something that’s happened since. That’s what I want you to take 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 line with 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 to say 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.”