Page 46 of The Invisible Roommate

“I do.”

“Jack of many instruments,” she said.

“I started out with the organ.”

“No kidding! What else do you play?” she asked.

“That’s all. Organ, piano, guitar. Oh, and I can pick up the bass every now and then, but only if I have to,” he said.

“If you have to?” she asked.

Right. He’s not Gerard. He’s James. Normal Guy James who would never need to round out the sound on a song when their bass player got stuck in traffic on the way to a live radio performance.

“Ever play the dulcimer?” Regina asked. “I have one up in a spare room somewhere. Should we see if we can dig it out after dinner?”

Gerard agreed and then helped her set the table.

He scarfed down his meal with lightning speed—one, because there was a strong pull in his chest to get back up to Emory after their awkward morning, and two, because he’d always been curious about the instrument that pretty much defined the folk revival of the 1960s.

The staircase to the second level was rickety, and the railing offered little support, lurching in Gerard’s hand as if purposefully pulling away. Regina guided him down a long, carpeted corridor before hesitating. “Don’t mind the mess,” she said, before opening the door and flicking on the light to reveal a labyrinth of boxes—plastic boxes, cardboard boxes, hatboxes.

“Do you remember where in the room you might’ve put it?” Gerard asked, daunted by the clutter.

“I don’t even remember where I set down my reading glasses this afternoon. Pick a box, any box, and start digging.”

After five minutes, Gerard considered backing out, telling her that he’d return another time when Emory wasn’t upstairs waiting for him with a hot, home-cooked meal. Or had he skipped that after their uncomfortable encounter earlier?

A loud bang that could’ve only been Emory’s doing came from above.

Regina glanced up. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Gerard asked, sensing a sweat crop up on the back of his neck.

Shaking her head, Regina grumbled to herself before continuing the hunt.

Several minutes passed before a muffled expletive oozed into the room. “Did you say something?” Regina asked.

“Just muttering to myself,” he lied.

She nodded. “Funny, sometimes when I’m getting ready for bed, I swear I hear two sets of footsteps up there and two different voices.”

Unable to come up with a reasonable explanation, Gerard stared back, shoulders rising in the slowest, least convincing shrug.

“I know. I’m old. My senses are going and playing tricks on me on the way out the door.” She threw up her hands—what are you gonna do?

Immediately, another bang rumbled overhead like a thunderclap. Gerard toppled a pile of what looked to be unsmashable boxes, offering a hearty apology to cover it up.

“Be careful! Some of this stuff is valuable. I’ll polish it up and sell it one day,” she said, then laughed at herself. The booming, jolly sound could have only come from a woman who’d long ago accepted her faults. “Who am I kidding? Break whatever you want.”

In one of the boxes closest to the far wall beneath a haphazard stack of old photos, Gerard came across pages of yellowing concert memorabilia. A lightly torn flyer caught his attention. The bubbly, slightly slanted writing advertised Gerde’s Folk City—New York’s center of folk music. Stick figures held guitars in the margins. Unknown names comprised the lineup until toward the bottom, beneath a range of dates, was the duo that brought him to Iping Island in the first place: Hallowitz & Hart.

Uncertainty about what he was looking at turned to awe, fizzling inside his chest.

His digging grew frantic. More flyers. More pictures. Bent dust jackets missing their LPs. A worn-out concert T-shirt. Each piece of Hallowitz & Hart memorabilia made the fizzling in his chest morph into fireworks that exploded throughout his whole body.

Either Regina was a superfan, given they were the island’s only claim to entertainment fame, or he’d uncovered a truth that should’ve been extremely obvious from the moment he knocked on her front door.

Anxiety spiked his gut. Inadvertently, he’d found his way into the same room as his biggest musical inspiration. In the past six years, he’d hardly ever been starstruck, but in that spare room in a crumbling Victorian house, he felt seconds away from fainting.