Xo (Kathryn Dance 3)

And more of those clicks and taps from nowhere.

"Kayleigh?"

She turned quickly, trying to hide her slight jump, even though she recognized the voice.

A solidly built woman of around thirty paused halfway across the stage. She had cropped red hair and some subdued inking on arms, shoulders and spine, partly visible thanks to her trim tank top and tight, hip-hugging black jeans. Fancy cowboy boots. "Didn't mean to scare you. You okay?"

"You didn't. What's up?" she asked Alicia Sessions.

A nod toward the iPad she carried. "These just came in. Proofs for the new posters? If we get them to the printer today we'll definitely have them by the show. They look okay to you?"

Kayleigh bent over the screen and examined them. Music nowadays is only partly about music, of course. Probably always has been, she supposed, but it seemed that as her popularity had grown, the business side of her career took up a lot more time than it used to. She didn't have much interest in these matters but she generally didn't need to. Her father was her manager, Alicia handled the day-to-day paperwork and scheduling, the lawyers read the contracts, the record company made arrangements with the recording studios and the CD production companies and the retail and download outlets; her longtime producer and friend at BHRC Records, Barry Zeigler, handled the technical side of arranging and production, and Bobby and the crew set up and ran the shows.

All so that Kayleigh Towne could do what she did best: write songs and sing them.

Still, one business matter of interest to her was making sure fans--many of them young or without much money--could buy cheap but decent memorabilia to make the night of the concert that much more special. Posters like this one, T-shirts, key chains, bracelets, charms, guitar chord books, headbands, backpacks ... and mugs, for the moms and dads driving the youngsters to and from the shows and, of course, often buying the tickets, as well.

She studied the proofs. The image was of Kayleigh and her favorite Martin guitar--not a big dreadnought-size but a smaller, 000-18, ancient, with a crisp yellowing spruce top and a voice of its own. The photo was the inside picture from her latest album, Your Shadow.

Him ...

No, don't.

Eyes scanning the doors again.

"You sure you're okay?" Alicia asked, voice buzzing with a faint Texas twang.

"Yeah." Kayleigh returned to the poster proofs, which all featured the same photo though with different type, messages and background. Her picture was a straight-on shot, depicting her much as she saw herself: at five-two, shorter than she would have liked, her face a bit long, but with stunning blue eyes, lashes that wouldn't quit and lips that had some reporters talking collagen. As if ... Her trademark golden hair, four feet long--and no, not cut, only trimmed, in ten years and four months--flowed in the fake gentle breeze from the photographer's electric fan. Designer jeans and high-collared dark-red blouse. A small diamond crucifix.

"You gotta give the fans the package," Bishop Towne always said. "That's visual too, I'm talking. And the standards're different 'tween men and women. You get into trouble, you deny it." He meant that in the country music world a man could get away with a look like Bishop's own: jutting belly, cigarette, a lined, craggy face riddled with stubble, wrinkled shirt, scuffed boots and faded jeans. A woman singer, he lectured--though he really intended to say "girl"--had to be put together for date night. And in Kayleigh's case that meant a church social, of course: the good girl next door was the image on which she'd built her career. Sure, the jeans could be a little tight, the blouses and sweaters could closely hug her round chest, but the necklines were high. The makeup was subtle and leaned toward pinks.

"Go with them."

"Great." Alicia shut off the device. A slight pause. "I haven't gotten your father's okay yet."

"They're good," the singer reassured her, nodding at the iPad.

"Sure. I'll just run it by him. You know."

Now Kayleigh paused. Then: "Okay."

"Acoustics good here?" asked Alicia, who had been a performer herself; she had quite a voice and a love of music, which was undoubtedly why she'd taken a job for someone like Kayleigh Towne, when the efficient, no-nonsense woman could have earned twice as much as a personal assistant for a corporate executive. She'd signed on last spring and had never heard the band perform here.

"Oh, the sound is great," Kayleigh said enthusiastically, glancing at the ugly concrete walls. "You wouldn't think it." She explained how the designers of the venue, back in the 1960s, had done their homework; too many concert halls--even sophisticated ones intended for classical music--had been built by people without confidence in the natural ability of musical instruments and voices to reach the farthest seats with "direct volume," that is, the sound emanating from the stage. Architects would add angular surfaces and free-standing shapes to boost the volume of the music, which did that but also sent the vibrations in a hundred different directions. This resulted in every performer's acoustic nightmare, reverberation: in effect, echoes upon echoes that yielded muddy, sometimes even off-key, sounds.

Here, in modest Fresno, Kayleigh explained to Alicia, as her father had to her, the designers had trusted in the power and purity of the voice and drum skin and sounding board and reed and string. She was about to ask the assistant to join her in a chorus of one of her songs to prove her point--Alicia did great harmonies--when she noticed her looking toward the back of the hall. She assumed the woman was bored with the scientific discussion. But the frowning gaze suggested something else was on her mind.

"What?" Kayleigh asked.

"Isn't it just us and Bobby?"

"What do you mean?"

"I thought I saw somebody." She lifted a finger tipped in a black-painted nail. "That doorway. There."

Just where Kayleigh herself had thought she'd seen the shadow ten minutes before.

Palms sweating, absently touching her phone, Kayleigh stared at the changing shapes in the back of the hall.