Public Secrets by Nora Roberts Page B

one illuminating afternoon he sat in the woods with Stevie, listening to the music and the cheers of four hundred thousand. With the help of LSD he saw whole universes created in a maple leaf.
    Brian embraced Woodstock, the concept of it, the reality of it. His only regret was that nothing he had said had persuaded Bev to come with them. She was, once again, waiting for him. This time she waited in the house they had bought in the Hollywood hills. Brian’s love affair with America was just beginning,and his second American tour felt like a homecoming. It was the year of the rock festival, a phenomenon Brian saw as demonstrating the strength of rock culture.
    He wanted, needed, to recapture that towering high of excitement when success had been new, when the band, the unit of them, had been like one electric force smashing through the world of music and public recognition. Over the past year, he had sensed that electricity, that unity, slipping away like the sixties themselves. He’d felt it forge again at Woodstock.
    When they boarded the plane, leaving the faithful at Woodstock behind, Brian fell into an exhausted sleep. Beside him, Stevie carelessly popped a couple of barbiturates and zoned out. Johnno settled back to play poker with some of the road crew. Only P.M. sat restlessly by the window.
    He wanted to remember everything. It annoyed him that unlike Brian, he saw beneath the symbolism and statement of the festival to the miserable conditions. The mud, the garbage, the lack of proper sanitary facilities. The music, good Christ, the music had been wonderful, almost unbearably so, but often, too often, he’d felt the audience had been too blissed out to notice.
    Still, even someone as pragmatic and simple as P.M. had felt the sense of commitment and unity. Of peace—a peaceful trio of days with four hundred thousand living as family. But there had also been dirt, prolific and heedless sex, and a careless abundance of drugs.
    Drugs frightened him. He couldn’t admit it, not even to the men he considered his brothers. Drugs made him sick or silly or put him to sleep. He took them only when he saw no graceful way not to. He was in turn amazed and appalled at the cheerfulness with which Brian and Stevie experimented with whatever came their way. And he was more than a little frightened by the ease with which Stevie was quietly, and consistently, shooting smack into his veins.
    Johnno was more particular about what he pumped into his system, but Johnno’s personality was so strong no one would laugh at him for refusing to indulge in acid or speed or snow.
    P.M. knew personality wasn’t his strong point. He wasn’t even a musician, not like the others. Oh, he knew he could hold his own with any drummer out there. He was good, damn good. But he couldn’t write music, couldn’t read it. His mind didn’t run to poetry or political statements.
    He wasn’t handsome. Even now, at twenty-three, he was plagued by occasional outbreaks of pimples.
    Despite what he considered his many disadvantages, he was part of one of the biggest, most successful rock groups in the world. He had friends, good and true ones, who would stand for him. In two years, he had earned more money than he had ever expected to make in the whole of his life.
    And he was careful with it. P.M.’s father ran a small repair shop in London. He knew about business and books. Of the four he was the only one who ever asked Pete questions about expenses and profits. He was certainly the only one who bothered to read any of the forms or contracts they signed.
    Having money pleased him, not only because he could send checks home—a kind of tangible proof to his doubting parents that he could succeed. It pleased him to have it jingling in his pocket.
    He hadn’t grown up as poor as Johnno and Brian, but he’d been a long way from knowing the comforts of Stevie’s childhood.
    Now they were on their way to Texas. Another festival in a year crammed with them. He