Jeffery Deaver - XO

“Was he still there, across the road?” Kayleigh asked, looking out, noting Darthur Morgan, vigilant as ever, in the front seat of the SUV, pointed outward.

“Who?” Bishop growled.

“Edwin.” Who did he think?

“Didn’t see anybody,” he said. Sheri shook her head.

Edwin-the first damn thing she saw this morning, looking out the window of her second-story bedroom. Well, his car, the big red car. That’s what she saw. Which didn’t make the sense of violation any less.

Kayleigh lived on the way to Yosemite and Sierra National Park, just where the area started to get interesting geographically. Across the two-lane road in front of her property was a public recreation area and arboretum, filled with rolling hills, jogging paths, groves of trees and gardens. The lot allowed twenty-four-hour parking, just the place for a sick stalker to perch.

She said, “He was there a while ago. Just sitting, staring at the house.” She closed her eyes briefly, shivering.

“Oh, my,” Sheri said.

“Well, nobody’s there now,” Bishop repeated distractedly, noticing a wad of tissues on the coffee table where Kayleigh’d been sitting with her iced tea and mobile, on which she’d called friends and family about Bobby’s death.

“Hey, sorry about Bobby, KT. I know you… I mean, I’m sorry.”

Sheri offered, “It’s terrible, honey. I feel so bad for you. For everyone.”

Kayleigh stepped into the kitchen, got a milk for her father and an iced tea for Sheri, another for herself too. She returned to the living room.

“Thank you, honey,” the woman offered tentatively.

Her father lifted the milk as if toasting.

“Daddy.” Her eyes avoiding his, Kayleigh said quickly, “I’m thinking of canceling.” It was easier to stare toward where a murderous stalker had been spying on her than to make eye contact with Bishop Towne.

“The concert?” The big man grunted. His ragged vocal style was not a function of any emotion, of course, but was simply because that’s the way he talked. No lilting tones, never a whisper, just a guttural rasp. It hadn’t always been that way; his voice-like his joints and liver-had been a victim of his lifestyle.

“I’m thinking of it.”

“Sure. Course. I see.”

Sheri tried to deflect what might be an uncomfortable moment. “If there’s anything I can do?… I’ll bring some dinners by. Tell me what you’d like. I’ll make you something special.”

Food and death had always been linked, Kayleigh now thought.

“I’ll think on it. Thanks, Sheri.”

The word “Mom,” had, of course, never been on the table. Kayleigh didn’t hate her stepmother. Either you were a woman of steel, like Margaret, her mother, and you fought with and-at times-corralled a man like Bishop Towne, or you took the residual prestige and the undeniable charisma and you surrendered. That was Sheri.

Though Kayleigh couldn’t blame her. Nor could she her father either. Margaret had been his first choice and, despite the others along the way, they’d still be together if not for fate. There was no one who could take his first wife’s place so why even try? Yet it was impossible to imagine Bishop Towne surviving without a woman in his life.

He grumbled, “You tell Barry?”

She nodded toward her mobile. “He was the first one I called. He’s in Carmel with Neil.”

Tall, fidgeting Barry Zeigler, her producer, was full of nervous energy. He was a genius in the studio. He’d produced some of the biggest hits of the nineties, when country got itself branded with the adjective “crossover” and began to transcend its Nashville and Dallas and Bakersfield roots to spread to mainstream TV and overseas.

If anybody had created a Kayleigh Towne sound it was Barry Zeigler. And that sound had made her a huge success.

Zeigler and the label hadn’t escaped the shadow of Edwin Sharp either, though. The stalker had inundated the company with emails criticizing instrumentation choices and pacing and production techniques. He never dissed Kayleigh’s voice or the songs themselves but argued that Zeigler, the recording techs and backup musicians weren’t “doing her justice.” That was a favorite phrase of his.

Kayleigh’d seen several of the emails and, though she never told anyone, she thought Edwin had a point on a few of the issues.

Finally Sheri said, “Just one thing. I mean-” A glance toward Bishop, sipping the milk he drank as religiously as he had once drunk bourbon. When he didn’t object to her getting this far, she continued, “That luncheon tomorrow-for the fan of the month. You think we can still do that?”

It was a promotion Alicia Sessions had put together on Facebook and on Kayleigh’s website. Bishop had more or less shoehorned Sheri into working on various marketing projects for the Kayleigh Towne operation. The woman had been in retail all her life and had made some valuable contributions.

“It’s all scheduled, right?” Bishop asked.

“We’ve rented the room at the country club. It’d mean a lot to him. He’s a big fan.”

Not as big as someone I know, Kayleigh thought.

“And there’ll be some publicity too.”

“No reporters,” Kayleigh said. “I don’t want to talk about Bobby. That’s what they’ll want to ask me.” Alicia had been deflecting the press-and there’d been plenty of them. But when the steely-eyed personal assistant said no, there wasn’t room for debate.

Bishop said, “We’ll control it. Set the ground rules. Make sure they don’t ask questions about what happened at the convention center.”

“I can do that,” Sheri said, with an uncertain glance toward Bishop. “I’ll coordinate with Alicia.”

Kayleigh finally said, “Sure, I guess.” She pictured the last time she had lunch alone with Bobby, a week ago. She wanted to cry again.

“Good,” Bishop said. “But we’ll keep it short. Tell that fan it’ll have to be short.”

Having conceded one issue, Kayleigh said, “But I really want to think about the concert, Daddy.”

“Hey, baby doll, whatever you’re happiest doing.”

Bishop leaned forward and snagged one of the guitars his daughter kept in her living room, an old Guild, with a thin neck and golden spruce top, producing a ringing tenor. He played Elizabeth Cotten’s version of “Freight Train.”

He was a talented, syncopated fingerpicker, in the style of Arty and Happy Traum and Leo Kottke (and damn if he couldn’t also flat-pick as well as Doc Watson, a skill Kayleigh could never master). His massive hands totally controlled the fret board. In pop music, guitar was originally for rhythm accompaniment-like a drum or maracas-and only in the past eighty years or so had it taken on the job of melody. Kayleigh used her Martin for its original purpose, strumming, to accompany her main instrument-a four-octave voice.

Kayleigh remembered Bishop’s rich baritone of her youth and she cringed to hear what he’d become. Bob Dylan never had a smooth voice but it was filled with expression and passion and he could hit the notes. When, at a party or occasionally at concerts, Kayleigh and Bishop sang a duet together, she modulated to a key he could pull off and covered the notes that would give him trouble.

“We’ll make sure it’s short,” he announced again.

What? Kayleigh wondered. The concert? Then recalled: the luncheon with the fan. Was it tomorrow, or the next day?

Oh, Bobby…

“And we’ll talk about it, the concert. See how you feel in a day or so. Want you to be in good form. Happy too. That’s what matters,” he repeated.

She was looking out the window again into the grove of trees separating the house from the road, a hundred yards away. She’d done the plantings for seclusion and quiet but now all she thought was it would provide great cover so that Edwin could get close to the house.