June 2016
Reynolds Campbell Navarro sat at a back table in an old, dark, down-at-the-heels music club-cum-pub on the Virginia side of State Street in Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia, nursing a beer and munching on a basket of buffalo wings and wondering what the hell he was doing here. His deliberately bored expression and casual pose were in direct contradiction to the tension that coiled inside him, tension that had not left him for the past month, ever since he’d fled Texas in the night with a price on his head and El Espectro’s goons looking for him. He’d driven away from San Antonio like the devil was on his tail, taking back roads and not breathing easy until he had put two states and twelve hundred miles between him and the devil’s minions out to kill him. He had been hiding out for the last month with his mother’s people deep in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. He’d spent the entire month ruing the day that he ever let San Antonio detective and old friend Sawyer Ellison talk him into going undercover with known drug dealers in a mariachi band and wondering how long it would be before he could go home to his life in San Antonio. Yet here he was again, about to do the same damn thing for the second time. Only this time he was on the DEA’s payroll, and he was supposed to investigate, of all things, a bluegrass and folk music club in Bristol, the tiny town that straddled the Tennessee-Virginia state line, and the Barstow family that owned it. “Somebody at Acoustics is as guilty as the Saucedas were,” Sawyer, now officially on loan to the DEA, had wheedled day before yesterday over his aunt’s secure landline. “One of those Barstows is dirty. I want you to go in there and find out which Barstow, and identify their source if you can.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Ren had argued.
“Same way you did before. Your Granny Campbell taught you to make their kind of music—go make music with them.”
“And why do I want to?”
“Come on, Ren. You’re good at this kind of thing. If your cousin and his sweetie hadn’t blundered into the setup, you’d have fingered El Espectro for us. And you need something to do. You can’t come back to San Antonio, anyway, at least not until we catch up with El Espectro.”
Well, hell. Why not? It beat sitting idle beneath his aunt and uncle’s feet for months on end.
Once he’d agreed, Sawyer had filled him in, and now he was about to go in and get himself hired as replacement guitar for Tommy Richards, whose murder last year outside a sex shop had been made to look random by the killers but that the DEA suspected was anything but. The DEA was concerned that, not only was there a pattern of drug distribution that followed the musicians’ travel schedule and a spike in use locally, but they had recently determined that Tommy’s widow, Kylie Barstow Richards, had an unexplained source of money feeding faithfully into an offshore bank account, money that she was in turn using to keep Acoustics in the black. They wanted Ren to work at the club and join the band, and hopefully identify the dealer or dealers and gather the same kind of evidence on them that he had the scumbags in San Antonio.
So here he sat, his fingers sore from the two days he’d spent brushing up on his skills on Granny Campbell’s old mountain dulcimer and his Granddaddy Campbell’s mandolin. Thankfully the old mountain tunes learned as a child on long summer evenings on the front porch of his grandparents’ mountain cabin had never faded completely from his memory, and the mountain cadence in his speech—that he mostly lost in San Antonio—had come back as well. With a spiffy set of false IDs under the name “Reynolds Joshua Campbell” and subtle highlights that took his light brown hair to a dark blond and eliminated any hint of his Hispanic heritage, he was ready for tonight’s nine o’clock interview and audition. Hopefully it would land him a job, as it was the perfect vantage point from which to finger another set of dealers. In the meantime, Kylie Richards was due to take the stage any minute for a forty-five-minute set on her mountain dulcimer before the bluegrass music began, and he wanted to hear her. According to the articles and pictures Ren had Googled, Kylie was not only beautiful, but one of the most talented mountain dulcimer players in the United States, a very big fish in a small pond—and if Sawyer was to be believed, a skilled smuggler and drug dealer as well. Ren’s curiosity burned. Why would a woman of her talent get involved in the drug trade? And how could he go about smoking her out?
The lights dimmed and the audience quieted. There was an expectant atmosphere in the room, and then a burst of applause as Kylie, taller and finer-boned than Ren had expected her to be, stepped onto the stage and over to a spotlighted barstool with a double microphone in front of it. She wore a simple, blue ankle-length dress and carried an hourglass-shaped mountain dulcimer, and as she turned to the audience with a shy, sweet smile, Ren felt his breath catch in his throat. The internet pictures had not done her justice. In person, her beauty was almost ethereal, with straight, white-blonde hair parted simply in the middle and hanging to her waist, the face of a Botticelli angel and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen. He stared, mesmerized, as she hopped up on the stool and strapped on the dulcimer and, without greeting or introduction, launched into the haunting melody “Midnight on the Water,” the fingers of her left hand flying over the dulcimer fretboard as her right strummed the rhythm. The rich tones of the small instrument filled the room as she held her audience captive with her magic.
She finished the number and the audience erupted into applause. Smiling shyly, she again without introduction began “Wild Mountain Flowers for Mary.” Ren shivered as her vibrant, almost bell-like soprano voice filled the room as she sang of devoted love denied. In the luxury of the dark he studied her, the thin, delicate arms and fingers that played so beautifully, the voice that came down from Heaven, the face of an angel, and he had to wonder.
Was Kylie Richards dealing drugs out of her nightclub? Had she ordered the murder of her husband? Was she a cold-blooded killer?
Did this sweet, seemingly innocent woman really have ice water running through her veins?
It was his job to find out.
It didn’t seem to add up—not really. But then, he was reacting to her on an emotional level, and he couldn’t let himself do that if he was going to find out what was going on.
Kylie finished singing and played another instrumental that had the audience, Ren included, tapping their feet. And then for a change of pace, she explained to the audience after thanking them all for being there, she played a classical piece, making the point that the dulcimer was not limited to playing simple folk songs. In the hands of the right player it could be used to make any kind of music. Ren watched with bemused admiration as she wove a spell in that dingy little club, charming and mesmerizing her audience as she made magic on the small instrument. But the Saucedas had made beautiful music too, he reminded himself as she hopped off the stool and took a bow, smiling from ear to ear as the audience clapped their appreciation. And the Saucedas had been as guilty as sin. He couldn’t let this angelic face distract him from his investigation.
Ren swallowed the last of his beer and followed at a distance as Kylie disappeared backstage. No one stopped him or even questioned him as he ducked into the hall beside the bar and walked past the restrooms into an area marked Private. He went past the small restaurant kitchen to the back of the old building. To one side in what looked like a break room, a young woman was tuning a banjo and a young man was warming up on a fiddle. Down the hall on the opposite side there was an open door to a fairly good-sized combination office and storage room, with shelves housing instrument cases and amplification equipment. Kylie was putting her dulcimer in a case and a fortyish-looking man with dark blonde hair and wearing a prosthetic left arm sat scowling down at what appeared to be a bank statement. They both looked up when he knocked on the doorframe. “Ms. Richards? Sir? I’m Reynolds Campbell. I heard at a jam session in Blountville that you’re looking for a guitarist for The Barstows, and I’d like to talk to you about the job. Or do you have time right now? Should we wait until after you’ve gone on tonight?”
Kylie and the man looked at one another. “Yes, we’re looking for a musician,” the man said slowly as they both looked him up and down. He glanced down at the watch on his right wrist. “There’s one more set by Jake and Timberlynn before we all have to go on. Come on in.”
Ren stepped in and extended his hand to the man. “Cooper Barstow,” the man said as he gripped Ren’s hand firmly. “Have you and Kylie already met?”
“No, we haven’t,” they said in unison. Laughing, Ren clasped her hand in his, the calluses on the ends of her fingers erotic to the bare skin of his palm, and her handshake surprisingly firm.
“Reynolds Campbell. I go by Ren.”
“Kylie Richards. Won’t you have a seat and tell us a bit about yourself and your musical background?”
Cooper sat back down in his desk chair and Ren and Kylie took the two facing him. He launched into his prepared cover story. He was new to the area, and he designed websites and worked from home, leaving him time for a second career a musician. While he talked, he surreptitiously studied the woman seated next to him. Up close, she looked older than she had on stage, closer to the thirty-four he knew her to be, but still young and somehow fresh and innocent and good, which was completely at odds with what the DEA suspected.
Yet, at the same time, she was all woman. Kylie stood just a couple of inches shorter than his own six feet with the kind of slender curves he had always loved. Her breasts were high and firm and her hips flared gently from a nipped-in waist. Her lips were full and it was all he could do not to lean down and steal a taste from them. And judging by the way she was sneaking looks in his direction, she might not mind if he did.
He could use that. He could use that mutual attraction to get closer to her and find out what he needed to know, even if it did mean walking a tightrope between his head and his libido.
He finished his cover story, saying that he’d grown up in Eastern Kentucky and learned his mountain and bluegrass music there, which wasn’t far from the truth. As a child he’d spent most every summer, even after his mother died, with his maternal grandparents, who were regulars on the jam session scene. “I play both the old-timey folk music from the nineteenth century and the traditional bluegrass like Del McCoury and Bill Monroe. And of course the more modern bluegrass like Nickel Creek and Allison Krauss.”
Cooper and Kylie looked at one another. “That’s good, very good,” Kylie said thoughtfully. “When we’re playing as The Barstows we play pretty much all bluegrass, but as you could tell from my set we do a lot of the old-timey stuff too, especially on the dulcimers. We’re trying hard to keep that old music alive.”
“Kylie’s a musical historian,” Cooper added proudly. “She’s catalogued thousands of those old tunes. So what else do you play besides the guitar?”
“I can play mandolin and the mountain dulcimer. Not as well as you, Kylie, but I can play one. Oh, I can also play a dobro if the band ever uses one.” He didn’t add that he could also play mariachi music on the guitarron and vihuela. They certainly didn’t need to know that. “Would you like me to strut my stuff a little?”
Cooper handed Ren a shiny acoustic guitar. Ren tested the strings, sharped the slightly flat D string, and launched into the guitar intro from Deliverance. He played a few bars of that and then picked the melody of “Cucharin’s Cross” and “Whiskey before Breakfast.”
“Can we hear what you sound like behind a dulcimer?” Cooper asked.
Ren nodded. Kylie fished her dulcimer back out and strapped it around her waist. “What all do you know?”
“Doesn’t matter if I don’t know the first verse. I’ll know the second. Just play something.”
Kylie thought a minute and Ren knew she was trying to come up with an unfamiliar song. And that she did, but Ren wasn’t boasting and by the second go-through he was weaving a subtle harmony around her haunting melody. “Good, really good,” she said as she played her last notes.
“Do you sing?” Cooper asked.
Ren nodded and launched into Woody Guthrie’s “Reuben James” in a very respectable tenor. He wasn’t surprised when Kylie chimed in on the second verse, and they finished the song together. Then she handed him her dulcimer and he obligingly played a lively Scottish reel. “You weren’t kidding. You really can play a dulcimer,” Kylie said approvingly.
Cooper handed him a mandolin and he demonstrated his proficiency there also. “So what do you think? Can you use me or is it back to the jam sessions?” Ren asked.
“Actually, you’ve come at an opportune time, because the gossip you heard was right on the money,” Cooper said. “Uncle Joe’s having surgery next week and his son Bradley will have to move from guitar to bass. And since we lost our other guitar player last year”—Ren could feel Kylie flinch beside him— “we have no one to play guitar for us. You’re good, so the spot’s yours if you want it. We pay by the performance.” He named a figure that wasn’t much but in all fairness was probably all they could afford.
“We have an active mentoring program for preteens and teenagers, hoping to inspire the next generation to keep the bluegrass and folk music alive,” Kylie added. “That’s on a volunteer basis but we hope you’ll want to be part of that also.”
“We also hold jam sessions on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, open to anybody with an instrument,” Cooper said. “Kylie, why don’t you come up with a playlist for Ren and email it to him? He can run through a few numbers with us tomorrow night before we go on. Glad to have you on board, Campbell.”
“Glad to be on board.” He nodded to Cooper and to Kylie. “Until tomorrow.” He caught Kylie’s eyes for just a moment, making no secret of his interest in her, before he stepped out the door.
Glad to have him on board, huh? He wondered just how glad they would be when he nailed Kylie, or Kylie and whomever, for using the club and the band as a cover to distribute drugs. Hell of a note, he thought as he clicked open the door of the instrument-hauling Mazda CX-5 his Reynolds Campbell persona was driving. He was lusting after their number one suspect and intended to use their mutual attraction to his advantage. And if he felt a little guilty doing so? Too bad. If Kylie was guilty of drug trafficking and of murder, she didn’t deserve one iota of consideration.
***
“I don’t like him,” Cooper announced as Kylie snapped a tuner on her mandolin.
Kylie looked up, surprised. “Then why did we hire him?”
“Because we need him, and because he’s good. I don’t have to like him to make music with him.”
“Cooper Barstow, at his charming best. So what is it about him that you don’t like?”
Cooper looked up. “Nothing specific I can put my finger on. But I have the feeling he’s hiding something. My spidey sense kicked in for some reason.”
“Your spidey sense works overtime. Now let me get this puppy tuned so I can catch some of Jake and Timberlynn’s set before we go on.”
“Maybe, but you need to be careful.” Kylie lifted her eyebrow and Cooper grinned wickedly. “He was looking at you like a hungry kid looks at an ice cream cone, and you haven’t lit up like that since Tommy.”
Kylie’s face fell. “And therein lies the problem, doesn’t it? Kylie’s shitty taste in men.”
Cooper’s grin faded. “Aw, Kylie, don’t take it like that. It’s not you. It was something about him. Something was off.”
“Whatever.” Kylie moved on to her two D strings. “Don’t worry. After Tommy’s screwing over, I have no desire for another man in my life.”
Thankfully Cooper didn’t argue with her. She caught the rest of Jake and Timberlynn’s set and then, for the next hour and a half, lost herself in the lively music of The Barstows, the family bluegrass band that Johnny, Lexi, and Joe Barstow had put together thirty years ago and that was now manned by a second generation of Barstows.
And tonight they were hot. Uncle Joe, the only original member of the band, tore up the bass as she on her mandolin and Timberlynn on the banjo played their version of “Dueling Banjos.” Jake’s fiddling brought down the house and even Bradley, who was the least enthusiastic of all of them, was making his guitar sing. And then there was Cooper, his rich baritone weaving the magic he was known for, shedding his shell of cynicism and finding his happy place in his singing. Oh, yes, Kylie lived for these moments, the pure and simple joy that they all found in making the heartfelt music they all loved.
But her thoughts again turned to Ren Campbell as she and Cooper locked up Acoustics and she got on the I-81 for the twenty-minute drive home. Yes, she found him appealing. He was the first man she’d felt that way about since Tommy died. Maybe six feet or so, his shoulders were broad and his hips narrow, and the bulge of muscles in his arms made her think he did more with his time than push a mouse. His blonde hair was wavy and could use a haircut, and his light hazel eyes sparkled with intelligence. His skin was pale with a smattering of freckles, which softened the fierceness of his jutting cheekbones, and his wide mouth was made for smiling. But it was the look in his eyes when he’d “strutted his stuff” that had reached out and grabbed her. He loved making music as much as she did. It would be easy to develop a thing for Ren Campbell.
But Cooper was right. Although Ren seemed like a nice man she could take at face value, she did need to be careful, especially if Cooper was right and Ren was lying about something. She had been lied to before, even more than Cooper realized. Cooper knew about Tommy’s cheating, but he still had no idea that Tommy had gambled away all of his and Kylie’s savings playing the ponies on the internet. And Cooper sure as hell didn’t know that his own parents had been living a lie. Hell, she hadn’t known it herself until the afternoon of Tommy’s funeral, when she walked into her living room and was confronted by the biggest lie of her life.
Kylie looked from the senator to her mother. “Just wh—who am I to you?” she whispered, her heart pounding in her throat. But she didn’t have to ask. She could tell by looking, exactly who she was to the senator.
“You’re my daughter. Hello, Kylie. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.”
And the story had come tumbling out. She had been conceived during her mother’s affair with the senator during one of Lexi and Johnny’s frequent bad patches. Collins had offered to do the right thing, but even then he was a rising star in the political world and marriage to a working class divorcée would have done him no good in conservative Tennessee. And Johnny, guilty of multiple transgressions of his own, agreed to raise her as his own child, and to his credit treated her no differently than he did Cooper. But Collins had never forgotten the child he made with Lexi, and given a chance to help her, he was more than happy to do so.
But there was a catch. The senator, while powerful, didn’t have much money of his own. But his wife came from old tobacco money, and as her husband he managed her affairs and had access to her wealth. Edna Wentworth was a proud and jealous woman and would not appreciate the fact that Collins wanted to help an illegitimate child from the past, so the help he was giving her would have to remain secret. Very secret.
“It doesn’t go out of this room,” Collins instructed them. “As far as the world knows, you’re using your savings to float the club. If Edna finds out, I’ll be down a wife—and the means to help you.”
She’d agreed, tearfully grateful that the dream of two generations would not go up in smoke.
And in doing so, she had become just as big a liar as the rest of them.
She despised all the lying. She despised her own lying most of all.
But what choice did she have, if she wanted to keep Acoustics afloat?
Deliberately pushing down the thoughts, she took the highway exit and pulled into the neighborhood she called home. The lights were on and Lexi and Brittany’s cars were still in the driveway, so she parked on the street and carried her instrument cases up the steep front sidewalk and unlocked the door. From the foyer she could hear three pairs of feet clogging to “St. Anne’s Reel” down in the music room. She took the stairs two at a time down into the basement, where Danny, Brittany, and Brittany’s ten-year-old sister, Bridget, were happily beating the floor with their clogging shoes. “Hello, Dan the Man. Girls, it’s after midnight. Does your dad know you’re still here?”
“Grandma texted him an hour ago,” Brittany said. “We brought our stuff to spend the night if that’s okay. Mom flew out tonight on another assignment for the network and we knew Dad was going to be late.” Cooper’s ex-wife was a traveling photojournalist and was gone more than home.
“Works for me. Where’s Grandma?”
“Making us all a midnight snack. And then we’re going to demonstrate the new steps Danny taught us tonight,” Bridget said.
“I’ll go help Grandma.” Kylie put her mandolin and dulcimer on the instrument shelf beside Danny’s big hammered dulcimer and headed back up the stairs, where she found her mother struggling to take a pizza out of the oven. “Here, Mom, I’ll get that,” Kylie said as she rescued the big, gooey pizza from her mother’s severely arthritic hands, the hands that had cost Lexi her ability to play any of her instruments. These days, Lexi made her living teaching others, and if she missed her place in The Barstows it didn’t show.
“Thanks. I should have gotten one of the kids up here.”
“No harm done. Did you all have fun tonight?”
“You bet. Hot dogs, a blow-‘em-up movie, some Xbox and now they’re down there dancing. Typical Tuesday night in the summer.” For whatever reason, probably because her mother was a hell of a lot of fun, the kids were still delighted to spend at least one night a week in her company. “When I texted Cooper, he said something about hiring a guitar. New guy in town. Is he any good?”
“Damn good. Best on his guitar, but Ren can play dulcimer, mandolin and dobro, too.”
“Ren?”
“Reynolds Campbell, out of Kentucky. He heard about us at a jam session the other night. Seems like a nice guy.”
“So tell me about him. Tall, short, good-looking, homely?”
“Tall, blond, freckles, good-looking.” Kylie cursed the blush that stained her cheeks.
“Attractive enough to interest my favorite lonely widow?”
“Don’t start, Mom. The last thing I need in my life right now is a man. Even if he loves making music as much as I do.”
“It’s in his eyes?”
“Yes. But still a complication I don’t need. And besides, Cooper doesn’t like him. Says he’s hiding something.”
“Aren’t we all?” Lexi tossed a wayward strand of her long red hair behind her back. “Besides, your brother’s a curmudgeon. Has been since he and Eileen divorced.”
“No, it started when he lost his arm in the war and it cost him his fiddling. He’s never gotten over that.”
Lexi held up her ruined hands. “He better.”
Kylie got out a stack of paper plates and the pizza cutter. “Damn, I wish we could tell him the truth about the senator and the money. It’s going to come out eventually, you know that as well as I do, and that will make him just that much more cynical.”
“We can’t do that,” Lexi said quickly. “You heard Collins. If his wife ever finds out, his marriage and your club are history. The fewer who know what’s going on, the better.” She reached out and gently ran her hand down Kylie’s arm. “You look tired these days, you and Cooper both. If you’d just let Collins help a little more, maybe you and Cooper could get the club profitable enough that you wouldn’t have to keep your day jobs. It’s got to be exhausting to teach full time and then do the club.”
“He’s already giving me too much as it is, and as far as our day jobs, teaching college music isn’t exactly the most stressful job Cooper or I could have landed. Besides, those kids sitting in front of us are a gold mine of talent.”
“Well, if you’re sure. So let’s go eat pizza with the bottomless pits.”
They killed the huge pizza and then the kids showed off their latest dance steps, and it was after two before she got Lexi out the door and the kids settled down. She took a shower and, just because she could, used the fancy security system Tommy had put in before his murder to check the outside and downstairs cameras. Nothing going on outside, and in the basement Cooper’s girls and Danny slept peacefully on the huge wraparound sofa she kept down there for just that purpose. Such good kids, she thought as a smile touched her lips. So sweet and so innocent and so genuine, without a dishonest bone in their bodies. So why couldn’t the adults be just as honest as the kids? Tommy had lied. Collins and Lexi had lied, and, yes, even Johnny had lied. And for a woman who supposedly valued honesty above all things, she was doing a splendid job of lying herself. And now Cooper thought Ren Campbell, the first man she’d been even remotely interested in since Tommy’s death, was hiding something.
She turned back the covers and turned off the light. Maybe Cooper was wrong, she told herself as she climbed into bed. Maybe Ren Campbell was honest, was what he presented himself to be. She sure hoped so. Because, in spite of her protestations that she didn’t need a man in her life, she would like to get to know Ren Campbell a whole lot better.