Then Kayleigh thought suddenly: no fucking way.
I'm fighting.
She grabbed the vanity stool and ripped off the Laura Ashley padded covering. The furniture was five pounds of hard wood. Not much but it would have to do. I'll lure her up here and bash her head in.
Kayleigh moved to the door, listening. She took a firm stance, gripping the stool like a baseball bat.
Then her phone rang.
Squinting at the screen. The number was vaguely familiar. Wait.... It was Edwin Sharp's! She recalled the number from the label of the redwood tree toy he'd helped Mary-Gordon pick out.
"Hello, Edwin?"
He said tentatively, "Hey, Kayleigh, listen. I'm almost there. Alicia asked me not to call you, just to come over. But, I don't know, what's this all about? Is it some kind of settlement thing? I don't want anything from you. It wasn't your fault what that guy with the congressman did."
And with a heart-shaking jolt, Kayleigh understood. For whatever reason Alicia had set up Edwin. She'd asked him here too and was going to make it look like he killed her.
"Oh, Edwin, there's a problem."
"You sound funny. What's the matter? I mean--"
"Stay away! Alicia's here. She's going to kill me. She wants to--"
A pause. "You're not, like, serious?"
"She's setting you up. She's here now."
"I'll call the police."
She said, "I did. They're on their way."
"I'm five minutes away."
"No, Edwin, don't come here! Go to Bradley Road, the minimart. Stay there, stay with people. That way nobody can blame you for whatever happens."
It was then that Kayleigh smelled smoke.
Edwin was saying something. She ignored him and turned her ear toward the door. Yes, the crackle of flames was coming from downstairs.
No, no! My house, my guitars! She's burning them! Like Bobby and the file sharer and Sheri, she's going to burn me too.
"Kayleigh, Kayleigh?" Edwin's voice rose from her phone.
"There's a fire, Edwin. Call the fire department too. But don't come here. Whatever you do."
"I--"
She disconnected.
And the bitter, stinging smoke began to seep under the bedroom door.
Chapter 64
THE SMOKE AND flames were growing.
Love is fire, love is flame....
My house, my house, Kayleigh thought as tears of sorrow, of pain from the smoke, of fear rolled down her cheeks. My guitars, my pictures.... Oh, this can't be happening!
The door was hot to the touch now and outside the window, reflections of the flames from downstairs flickered across trees and the lawn.
Kayleigh debated. Where was Alicia? She couldn't stay downstairs in the flames, of course. She'd probably left.
Well, fuck her. I'm saving my house!
Kayleigh ran into the bathroom and grabbed a fire extinguisher, years old but, according to the gauge, still charged. She unlocked the bedroom door and eased it open. The fire was concentrated in the hallway on the ground floor and on the stairs themselves, the carpeting. It gave off thick clouds of astringent smoke from the flaming nylon. Sparks zipped through the air. Kayleigh caught a full breath of the foul stench and retched. She lowered her head and got a breath of more or less clean air, another. She stood. The fire wasn't out of control yet. If Alicia had left she could put out enough of it to get to the kitchen, where there was a much bigger extinguisher. And the hose in the garden.
She eased out.
Just then a huge bang from downstairs resounded through the house, a flash in the smoke. A bullet plowed into the door near her head. Two more.
Screaming, she dove back into her room and slammed the door, locked it. Kayleigh decided she had no choice but to risk a twenty-five-foot jump to the ground. Would she break her legs and just lie there in agony until Alicia shot her? Would she get speared on the fence and bleed out?
But she wouldn't burn to death, at least. Running to the window, she flung it open and looked out toward the road. Not a single flashing light yet. Then she gazed down, trying to judge angles and distances.
She found a place she might land, just past the fence. But then she saw, at the exact spot she'd land, Alicia's shadow, moving back and forth, almost leisurely. She was at the front door and probably anticipating Kayleigh's jump and aiming at that very spot.
Shadows ...
Kayleigh sat down on the bed, grabbed a picture she had of Mary-Gordon and hugged it to her chest.
So, this was it.
Mama, Bobby, I'll be with you soon.
Oh, Bobby ...
She thought of the song she'd written for him years ago. "The Only One for Me."
More tears.
But just then another gunshot resounded from downstairs.... Then two or three more. Kayleigh gasped. Could the police be here after all?
She ran to the window and looked out. No, no one was here. The driveway was empty, except for Alicia's truck. And there were no flashing lights on the horizon.
Two more shots.
And from downstairs, a voice calling her name.
A man's voice.
"Kayleigh, come on, hurry!"
She opened the door cautiously and peered down.
Jesus! Through the smoke she could just make out the form of Edwin Sharp, beating down the flames on the stairs with his jacket. Alicia lay on her back, on the marble of the hallway, eyes gazing up, unseeing. Her face was bloody. She'd fallen onto a patch of burning wood floor and her clothes were on fire.
Kayleigh understood: Edwin had ignored her warning and continued to the house anyway.
"Hurry!" he cried. "Come on! I called the fire department but I don't know when they'll be here. You have to get out!"
His slapping at the flames wasn't doing much to stop the spread, though he'd beat out a narrow path down the stairs to the ground floor.
She made her way along this now. He was pointing into the den. "We can get out that way, through the window!"
But she said, "You go! I'm going to fight it."
"No, we can't!"
"Go!" she shouted and turned the small extinguisher on the flames.
Edwin hesitated, coughing hard, and returned to flailing away with his jacket. "I'll help you."
She gave him a smile and called, "In the kitchen, there's another extinguisher. Beside the stove!"
Choking, Edwin staggered through the arched doorway and returned a moment later with the extinguisher, much bigger than Kayleigh's, and started to douse the flames too.
With a horrified glance at Alicia's burning body, Kayleigh ran out the back door and returned a moment later with her garden hose. She began attacking the stubborn fire as Edwin, next to her, blew bursts of foam from the big extinguisher. They both retched and coughed and tried to blink away tears from the smoke.
The singer and her stalker held their own but only for a time. Soon Edwin's extinguisher ran out and an outrider of fire melted her garden hose.
Too late ... no! My house.
But then sirens sounded and outside the evening darkness filled with flashing lights as the first fire trucks arrived. Men and women in their thick yellow outfits hurried into the house with hoses and began battling the flames. One fireman bent over Alicia's body, no longer burning but smoldering badly, and felt for a pulse. He looked up and shook his head.
Another ushered Kayleigh and Edwin toward the front door and they staggered outside. Kayleigh made her way down the stairs into the yard, coughing and spitting the terrible bits of soot and ash from her mouth. She paused on the lawn and vomited painfully. Then she looked back, realizing that Edwin was lagging behind.
She saw him on his knees on the porch. His hand was at his throat. He lifted his fingers away and looked at them. Kayleigh saw the digits were dark but not stained with soot, as she'd thought. Blood was flowing from a wound in his neck.
Alicia had shot him before he wrestled the gun away from her.
He blinked and looked at Kayleigh. "I think ... I think she ..." His eyes closed and he collapsed backward on the wooden deck.
Chapter 65
KATHRYN DANCE WAS sitting next to Kayleigh Towne on the steps of her house. They were bathed in a sweep of colored lights, blue and red, with flashes of white. Beautiful and troubling.
The young woman was diminished, her posture collapsed--chin tucked, shoulders slumped. She was smeared with Edwin Sharp's blood, from trying to staunch the bleeding. In kinesic analysis Kayleigh's carriage could be read as defeat and acceptance, the goal of every interrogator. But the pose was also an indication of exhaustion or disbelief.
P. K. Madigan was directing the FMCSO's crime scene team in their search of the house, and the fire department was making sure there was no chance of the flames sprouting up again.
"I don't understand any of this," Kayleigh whispered.
Dance explained what they'd learned about Alicia and found in her apartment. "And in her truck? There was a Baggie filled with things she stole from Edwin's rental. She was going to plant them here." Dance then explained the why. "There was a note too. She'd forged your handwriting and did a pretty good job of it. If anything happened to you, you wanted her to take over the band."
"She asked Edwin here tonight too so it'd look like he'd killed me. He gets arrested and nobody believes him when he claims he's innocent."
"Exactly."
Kayleigh rubbed her face; her jaw tightened. "Alicia wanted to be me. She wanted fame and money and power. That's what this fucking business does to people. It twists them, seduces them. I'm sick of it! I'm so sick of it." She looked toward the medics. "I told him not to come. I knew he'd get blamed if anything happened. But he came anyway."
As some EMTs got Edwin into one of the two ambulances, another approached them. "Agent Dance. Ms. Towne ... Mr. Sharp's lost a lot of blood. We've stabilized him as best we can but, I'm sorry to say, it's not looking good. We have to get him to the hospital for surgery as soon as we can."
"Is he going to live?" Kayleigh asked.
"We don't know at this time. Was he a friend?"
Kayleigh said softly, "In a way. He's a fan of mine."
Chapter 66
TWO HOURS LATER, a tired-looking surgeon, a South Asian man in green scrubs, walked slowly down the bleached-lit hallway of Fresno Community Hospital toward the waiting area.
Dance looked at Kayleigh and together they rose.
The man didn't seem to know whom to deliver the news to: the famous Fresno singer or the tall woman with the gun on her hip. He spoke between them as he said Edwin Sharp would survive. The blood loss was bad but he would ultimately recover fully. "The bullet missed the carotid and his spine." Edwin would be coming out of the anesthesia now. They could see him for a few minutes if they wanted.
They found the recovery room and stepped inside to find Edwin staring groggily at the ceiling.
"Hey," he mumbled. "Hey." Blinking. "Feels like it did when I had my tonsils out." His voice didn't seem to be affected; he spoke softly, though, and a bit garbled. And he seemed completely drained.
Kayleigh said, "You look pretty good, all things considered."
Though the bullet hole would be fairly small--about nine millimeters, of course--the eggplant-colored bruise extended well beyond the thick bandage covering the wound.
"Doesn't, uhm, you know, hurt much yet." He studied an IV drip, probably morphine. He added, "And I'm getting some pretty nice pills after I'm out, the, uhm, doctor tells me. The doctor, you know.
"I'm getting discharged tomorrow." He had a loopy grin on his face and for once the smile wasn't the least bit weird. "I thought I'd be here, you know, for a week. Maybe more than a week." His eyelids dipped and Dance wondered if he was slipping off to sleep. They then opened once more. "A week," he repeated drunkenly.
"I'm glad you're feeling better," Kayleigh said. "I was pretty worried."
He frowned. Speaking slowly: "Didn't bring me flowers, I notice. No flowers. Afraid I'd misinterpret it?" Then he laughed. "Joking."
Kayleigh smiled too.
Edwin's face grew somber. "Alicia ... what was that all about? Did she go crazy? I mean, Alicia. What happened?"
Dance said, "She was going to kill Kayleigh and plant some things she got from your house so you'd get blamed for it. She forged a note saying that Kayleigh wanted Alicia to front the band."
"She did that? Killed Bobby Prescott too? And attacked your stepmother?" Edwin asked.
Kayleigh nodded.
Then, echoing the singer's comments of a few hours earlier, he added, "She did it ..." Focusing again. "She did it to be famous. Everybody wants that, I guess. It's like a drug. Like writing Harry Potter, being Daniel Craig. They want to be famous."
Her eyes damp, Kayleigh whispered, "I don't know what to say, Edwin.... What a mess this's all been."
He tried to shrug but winced from the pain.
"You didn't need to come to the house, Edwin. I told you it was dangerous."
"Yeah," he said, maybe being sardonic, maybe not quite grasping what she'd said. He was really drugged.
"What happened back there?" Dance asked.
He tried to focus. "Back there?"
"At Kayleigh's?"
"Oh, at Kayleigh's ... Well, she told me about Alicia and the fire so I called the fire department but I couldn't stop. You told me to stop, right?"
"I did."
"But I couldn't. I kept going to the house. When I got there I parked on the shoulder, so Alicia wouldn't see me. I went through the trees and got to the house. The kitchen door was open and I saw Alicia by the stairs. She didn't see me. I tackled her. She was really strong. I mean, you know, really. I didn't expect that. The gun went off before I got it away from her. She jumped at me and I shot her. I didn't think. I just pulled the trigger. I didn't even know I got shot. All I remember is we were trying to put the fire out, you and me ... and then I woke up here."
His eyes closed slowly then leveraged open and he looked at Kayleigh. "I was going to mail you something before I left. There's a card. I was going to send you a card. There's a present inside too. My jacket. Look in the pocket. Where's my jacket?"
Dance found the garment in the closet. Kayleigh fished through the pocket. She extracted a stamped envelope, addressed to her.
"Open it."
She did. Looking over her shoulder, Dance noted the silly drugstore card with a mournful-looking dog on the front, the balloon above its head reporting, "I'm 'Dog-gone' sorry."
Kayleigh smiled. "And I'm sorry too, Edwin."
"Look in the tissue."
She opened the square of thin paper; inside were three small guitar picks. "Oh, Edwin."
"I got a deer antler in this pawn shop in Seattle. I made them out of that."
"They're beautiful." She showed them to Dance, who agreed.
"I ..." His eyes floated in an arc around the room and he remembered what he was going to say. "I sent them to you before but you sent them back. I mean, somebody sent them back. But if you want, you can have them now."
"Of course I want them. Thank you so much. I'll use them at the concert. In fact, I'll thank you in person for them there."
"Oh, no. I'm headed back to Seattle. I was packing up when Alicia called." A wan smile.
"Leaving?"
"Better for you, I think." He laughed. "Better for me too, you know. You think a famous star kind of likes you, then next thing some crazy people want to use you to assassinate a politician and some psycho's stolen your trash to frame you for murder. Never thought being a fan could be so dangerous."
Both Dance and Kayleigh smiled.
"Think I'm ... think I'm ... better off in Seattle." His head eased toward his chest and he muttered, "It's not as hot either. It's really hot in ... it's hot here."
Kayleigh smiled but said earnestly, "Edwin, you can't drive like this. Wait a couple of days. Please. Come to the concert if you're feeling up for it. I'll get you a ticket front row cen
ter."
He was fading fast. "No. Better. It's better if I ..."
Then he was sound asleep. Kayleigh looked over the picks and seemed genuinely moved by the gift.
She and Dance then left the hospital. They were in the parking lot when Kayleigh gave a laugh.
The agent lifted an eyebrow.
"Hey, you hear the one about the blond country singer?"
"Tell me."
"She was so dumb she got dumped by her stalker."
Chapter 67
THE DAY OF the show.
The band had arrived from Nashville at nine a.m. and come straight here, the convention center, where Kayleigh and the crew were waiting. They got right to work.
After a couple of hours Kayleigh had called a break. Backstage she had a tea and called Suellyn, then spoke to Mary-Gordon; she was going to take the girl shopping that afternoon for a new dress to wear to the concert.
After she disconnected she picked up her old Martin again and practiced a bit more with the picks that Edwin had given her.
She liked them a lot. Top flat-pickers, like Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Tony Rice and Bishop Towne, would never use big flexible triangles; the real virtuosos used small, hard picks like these. Kayleigh was more a strummer, but she still liked the control that--
A voice startled her. "How's the action?" Tye Slocum asked, appearing silently from nowhere, despite his size. His eyes were on the instrument.
Kayleigh smiled. The guitar tech was referring to the height of the strings above the fret board. Some guitars had a bolt or nut that could be turned to easily alter the action. Martins didn't; to make that adjustment required more effort and skill.
"Little low. I was getting some buzz on the D."
"I've got a saddle I can swap," he said. "I just found some bone ones. Real old. They're pretty sweet." The saddle, vital to a guitar's tone, was the white bar on the bridge that transmitted the sound from the strings to the body. Acoustically the best material was hard ivory, from forest elephant tusks; soft ivory was the next best--from large African elephants. Bone was the third best material. Both types of ivory were available--some legally and some not--but Kayleigh refused to use ivory and wouldn't let anyone in her band do so either. Tye, though, had good sources for vintage bone, which produced a sound nearly as good.
A pause. "Just wondering: Is he going to be mixing tonight?" A glance toward the control platform in the back, where Barry Zeigler sat with hard-shell earphones on, hands dancing over the console.