Xo

daughter’s own peace of mind.
    Screw what mattered most to her, just having a simple life.
    Hm, she reflected. “A Simple Life.” Not a bad song title. She wrote it down, a few other phrases. Then she glanced at her watch. Alicia wasn’t due for another half hour. Kayleigh walked upstairs to her bedroom.
    Through her mind went a verse from the now infamous “Your Shadow.”
    You sit by the river, wondering what you got wrong,
    How many chances you’ve missed all along.
    Like your troubles had somehow turned you to stone
    And the water was whispering, why don’t you come home?
     
    Oh, what a time that had been, just sixteen, missing her mother so terribly, missing her baby, her father, just out of jail for the car accident, pressuring her to appear at some of his shows and launch her own career, which she wasn’t even sure she wanted. Overwhelmed, depressed. She’d driven to Yosemite by herself, gone hiking. And suddenly everything was too much for her. She’d looked down at the clear river and walked into it, on impulse. No plans, not really intending to hurt herself—or maybe she had been. Kayleigh didn’t know then and she didn’t know now. A minute later another hiker had plucked her out and sped her to the hospital. She was in danger more of hypothermia than drowning but not even much threat of that.
    Now Kayleigh sat on the bed and read once more the copy of Bobby’s letter, which expressed his desire that most everything he had go to Mary-Gordon, a few things to Kayleigh. She didn’t know if this was legal as a will but if she took it to a lawyer she supposed the news would become public about Mary-Gordon’s parentage.
    Bishop would explode. And the fans? Would they desert her? Kayleigh could honestly say that she didn’t much care about either of those happening, not in her present frame of mind.
    But there was also a chance that the girl herself would find out. She’d have to learn at some point, of course. But not now, at this age. Suellyn was her mother and Roberto her father. Kayleigh would never think about disrupting the girl’s life. She slipped the envelope away in her top dresser drawer. She’d work out something to make sure the girl received what her biological father wanted her to have.
    Yes, it was too late for Kayleigh when it came to Bobby and Mary-Gordon. But it wasn’t too late for the life she dreamed of. Find a man, get married, have lots of other babies, play music on the front porch—a few concerts now and then.
    Of course there was that little part about “finding a man.”
    Since Bobby, there’d been no one she felt really intense about. She’d been only sixteen then but she decided that the yardstick of love at that age was the best standard you could have, the purest, the most honest, the least complicated.
    A single note in her mind’s ear. A C sharp followed by five other notes, and they carried a phrase, “How I Felt at Sixteen.”
    She sang it.
    Good meter and there was a lot that rhymed with “sixteen.” That was a key consideration in writing music. What rhymed with what. “Orange,” for instance, was not a word you ended lyric lines with. “Silver” was tricky too, though Kayleigh’d managed to work it into one of the songs on her recent album.
    She sat down at the dressing table she used for her desk here in the bedroom. She pulled out a yellow pad and a few sheets of music staff paper. In three minutes she’d written the melody and a number of phrases and portions of the song.
    I still recall how I felt at sixteen.
    You were a king and I was your queen
    Love was so simple, way back when,
    I wish life could be like that again….
    When I was sixteen …
     
    Oh, Bobby …
    Kayleigh cried for a full five minutes. Then grabbed some more tissues and dried her face; she’d used nearly two whole boxes this week.
    Okay, enough of that….
    She cranked up the Bose iPod player, tapped the Loretta Lynn playlist.
    In the bathroom, she filled the bathtub, pinned her hair up and stripped, then sank into the deep water, listening to the album.
    It felt wonderful.

 
     

Chapter 63
    THEY HAD THEIR answer.
    Dance, Dennis Harutyun and Pike Madigan were in the tiny apartment of Alicia Sessions, and they were surveying the evidence they’d just uncovered. Cowboy boots, with needle-sharp toes, like those that made the prints behind Edwin’s house. And in the kitchen was neatsfoot oil for treating Alicia’s equestrian tack; Dance recalled her quarter