XO

drugs-like that friend of yours Mr. Bobby Prescott.”

Sweat poured, her skin crawled. “This is hopeless, Edwin. You don’t think ten thousand people are going to be looking for me?”

“Maybe not. They might think you ran off with somebody you realized loved you and cared for you. They’ll still be thinking Alicia was behind it all, killed Bobby and tried to kill you.”

Was he that far removed from reality?

“But even if they are looking, they aren’t going to find us. They think we’re in Monterey, hiding out. Two hundred miles away. This bitch I went out with for a while told them that’s where we’d be. I knew she’d turn me in. I set that up a long time ago. We’re completely alone here… On the drive? There wasn’t a single helicopter or roadblock all the way from Fresno. If they thought we were headed here, they could’ve shut down Forty-one in a minute. No, Kayleigh, they’ll never find us.”

“You put this all together… to, what? Win me over?”

“To make you see reason. Who else would go to all this trouble, except somebody who loved you?”

“But… the congressman? I don’t understand.”

He laughed. “Oh, yeah, that was interesting. I learned a lesson there. I’ve stopped posting things online. That’s how Simesky found out about you and me. You didn’t believe me when I said the whole world was trying to exploit you.”

You and me…

“But something good came out of that. I did see somebody outside my house on Saturday night. It was Simesky or that Babbage woman but at the time I thought it was just kids. But that got me thinking. I’d set it up so that it looked like Alicia had been spying on me. I planted some evidence that’d make the police think she was the stalker. Sometimes it’s lucky how things work.”

Then Edwin grew impatient. He looked at her hair, her breasts, her legs. “Well, come on. You know what it’s time for.” He glanced toward the rumpled bed, beside which was a Bose iPod player. “You see that? I’ve got fifty of your concerts I recorded. I have a nice recorder. I saved up to buy it. We’ll play your concerts while we, you know…” His face blossomed with concern. “Oh, don’t worry. Yeah, I recorded them but I never sold the songs or shared them with anybody. It was just for me… and now for us.”

“Please, no, Edwin. Please.”

He stared at her hair, then leaned against the kitchen sink. “You shouldn’t be so… you know, standoffish. I did you a favor. Fred Blanton was a shit who stole your music. And Alicia, well, she probably did want your career. And Sheri? Oh, please. You deserve a better stepmother than her. She’s a store clerk who got lucky with Bishop. She’s not worthy of you, Kayleigh. They deserved to die. And Bobby? All he wanted to do was fuck you.” And once more he stared at her, awaiting confirmation of her infidelity.

Then he seemed to control himself.

She said, “At least, let me clean up? Just a shower please. I don’t feel comfortable like this.”

“I don’t think so.”

She snapped, “And you say you’re Mr. Today? Bullshit. I just want to take a fucking shower and you won’t let me?”

He frowned. “All right. Only don’t say words like that. Don’t ever say words like that again.”

“All right, I won’t.”

“You can take a shower. But you know I have the only keys and there’re no weapons here. And all the windows are barred.”

“I figured that. I really just want to clean up.”

He undid the cuffs and she rubbed her wrists.

Shoulders slumped, she walked through the narrow space into the bathroom.

“Oh, Kayleigh. Wait.”

She stopped and turned. He was awkward. Was his face reddening? “About that woman I was telling you about. The one in Seattle. You don’t have to be jealous. It wasn’t serious between us. I never slept with her. Really. Honest.”

Kayleigh could see he was lying but what shocked her was that he seemed honestly to believe that his fidelity was important to her.

He smiled. “Hurry back, love.” And he walked into the bedroom to wait.

Chapter 75

EDWIN COULDN’T DECIDE which of her songs was his favorite.

But then he realized that that debate was a clunker, another of his mother’s terms. It was like you didn’t have a favorite kind of food, you liked everything (well, he did, at any rate-he would have weighed three hundred pounds if Kayleigh hadn’t been in his life to keep him trim).

He clicked the air conditioner on a little higher-with the camouflage tarp covering the trailer it was beastly hot inside. But he still kept the temperature warm. Kayleigh, he’d noticed before she headed to the shower, had been sweating. The beads on her skin had turned him on even more. He imagined licking her temples and scalp and grew even more aroused. It had been okay fucking Sally, with Kayleigh Towne’s voice singing through the speakers, but this would be a thousand times better.

The real thing.

Hey, that was a pretty good title for a song. “The Real Thing.” He’d mention it to her. He had this idea that they could write songs together. He’d come up with the words and she’d write the melodies.

Edwin was good with words.

He thought again: Wedding afternoon. Not wedding night. Afternoon.

That was pretty funny.

That got him wondering if she’d ever made out with anybody when she and her family had lived here. There was that line in her song where she referred to “a little teenage lovin’,” at the old house, which had made him absolutely furious when he’d first heard it. Then he remembered Bishop had sold the place when she was about twelve or thirteen. And because she was a good girl he doubted that she’d done anything more than kiss a boy and maybe do a little petting, which nonetheless also stabbed him with jealousy.

Bobby…

He hoped the fucking roadie had felt a lot of pain as he died. At the convention center he hadn’t screamed as much as Edwin would have liked.

Edwin listened to the running water, pictured her naked inside the shower. He was growing hard. He remembered the article in Rolling Stone about her.

Good Girl Makes Good.

And he decided to relent.

He’d forgive her for fucking Bobby. He’d ask her again and insist she be honest. He had to know but whatever she said, he’d forgive her.

He stripped his shirt off and kneaded his belly. Still a bit of excess skin from where he lost all that weight. But he’d kept the fat off, at least.

Anything for Kayleigh.

Should he take a shower too? No. He’d taken one that morning. Besides, she’d have to get used to having him on top of, or behind, her whenever he was in the mood, whether he was clean or not.

She was his wife, after all.

He turned on the radio and caught the news. It seemed the police hadn’t gone with the innocent interpretation of Kayleigh’s disappearance. Pike Madigan’s voice was explaining solemnly about the kidnapping and alerting people that it was likely that Edwin Sharp and Kayleigh Towne were on their way west, heading toward the Monterey area.

“We don’t know the vehicle they’re in, but go to the website we’ve set up and you can find Sharp’s picture.”