The Vanished Man

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 freestanding 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 ofthe 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.
    Yes . . . no. She just couldn’t tell.
    Then shrugging her broad shoulders, one of them sporting a tattoo of a snake in red and green, Alicia said, “Hm. Guess not. Whatever it was it’s gone now. . . . Okay, see you later. The restaurant at one?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    Kayleigh listened absently to the thumping of boots as she left and continued to stare at the black doorways.
    Angrily, she suddenly whispered, “Edwin Sharp.”
    There I’ve said his name.
    “Edwin, Edwin, Edwin.”
    Now that I’ve conjured you up, listen here: Get the hell out of my concert hall! I’ve got work to do.
    And she turned away from the shadowy, gaping doorway from which, of course, no one was leering at her at all. She stepped to center stage, looking over the masking tape on the dusty wood, blocking out where she would stand at different points during the concert.
    It was then that she heard a man’s voice crying fromthe back of the hall, “Kayleigh!” It was Bobby, now rising from behind the mixing console, knocking his chair over and ripping off his hard-shell earphones. He waved to her with one hand and pointed to a spot over her head with another. “Look out! . . . No, Kayleigh!”
    She glanced up fast and saw one of the strip