Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

It’s ridiculous the lengths I’ll go to when stalking a rare vinyl record. It’s the thrill of the hunt. Some quest for shipwrecks, gold, the Fountain of Youth, but for this woman, the treasure is rare vintage vinyl records. And I’d be willing to stand up in a room full of people seated on rickety folding chairs drinking rank coffee and confess out loud, “My name is Session Seabolt and I am a vinyl addict.”

On this Monday morning I’d left my record shop in Raleigh, North Carolina before daylight and headed west. Two hours into the drive I hit a torrential rainstorm that seemed to be stalking me. I had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as I leaned toward the windshield, squinting to negotiate the hairpin switchbacks up into the Great Smoky Mountains to the cabin of a fellow vinyl junkie, Darby Brenner. He called last night and rattled off a list of fifteen albums he’d decided he could let go from his collection — at a bargain price — among them the Yardbirds’ 1965 For Your Love, near mint.

As it happened, I’d had a call just last week from a collector in Philly. He’s a dead-serious Eric Clapton completist intent on owning every recording Clapton even plucked a string on. The Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos. Sideman stuff with John Mayhall’s Bluesbreakers, Delaney and Bonnie, Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band — everything. He’d asked me to keep a lookout for this exact Yardbirds album and hinted he might be persuaded to pay premium for it.

But I’d have made the trip anyhow. Darby Brenner and I have been friends since childhood. We’re both rock-band spawn. My dad is Sonny Seabolt, one of the founding members of Copper Hill, a Southern-rock band with many things in common with the Allman Brothers. Unfortunately tax bracket isn’t one of them. They did okay, enough for the guys to live comfortably now that they’re getting to be golden oldies. But Darby’s mother, Sarah, a. k. a. SuzyQ, was one of the two female members of the quartet Squares in Pairs. They made a mint. Though the band’s schtick was dressing like nerds, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and pocket protectors, Sarah didn’t carry the part over into her real life. She was a wild woman. As far as I know, Darby’s father’s identity remains a mystery even to Sarah.

My mother ran off when I was a toddler, so I was raised by a rock band — yet I survived. Darby was raised mostly by a housekeeper named Nadine Blackwell, but he survived too — and so did Nadine. In fact, she’s still looking after him. We were lucky to each have a parent who cared about us, even if their parenting skills were marginal. But we’d both had chaotic childhoods and now, pushing thirty, we’re like old combat veterans still sharing foxhole stories.

The seal on our bond is that we’re both hooked on vinyl. A couple of years back I gave up my career as a CPA for my dream of opening a vinyl-record store. I’m struggling financially, but so happy I fear any day I might break into a Marie Osmond medley right there in the middle of the store and embarrass myself. As for Darby, SuzyQ apparently felt some guilt over her substandard mothering and assuaged it by giving him an early inheritance. Upon his twenty-first birthday he became, if not filthy rich, at least somewhat soiled. And to everyone’s surprise, including Darby’s, he has a flair for business and quickly turned a small fortune into a bountiful one.

I laughed as I rounded a bend and Darby’s abode came into view. He still insists on calling it a cabin even though the original 700-square-foot structure he bought six years ago — along with half the mountain — has been swallowed up in the 3,000 square feet he’s added since. Now another wing was sprouting from the south side of the residence, excavation was under way for a pool, and the skeleton of a pool house was silhouetted against the brooding gray cloudbank.

By the time I pulled up in Darby’s driveway the rain had lost ambition and dissolved into a mist so fine it seemed suspended in the air. Before I’d even put the car in park, Darby was out the door from the central atrium he added last year and bounding out to shelter me with an umbrella. He crooked an arm around my neck by way of greeting and we headed for the atrium in lockstep. Darby only tops my five-seven by an inch or so and with his blond hair in a Beatlesque moptop and my own blondish pixie cut, we must have looked like grown-up Bobbsey twins.

“Glad you made it out,” he said, “sorry I didn’t arrange better weather.”

As I crossed the threshold, I marveled anew at the atrium. It was built in a lodge style with exposed beams and a river-rock fireplace that spanned an entire wall and tapered to the two-story ceiling. All very rustic, but this was Darby’s listening room and I knew he’d brought in an acoustic engineer to design the space. Just behind it was his private record library, a climate-controlled maze of shelves and bins filled with LPs, 78s, and 45s, the inventory catalogued only in Darby’s head.