Xo

championed. The singer had invited Dance to her big concert Friday night in Fresno. Though a dozen years younger than Dance, Kayleigh had been a performer since she was nine or ten years old and a pro since her late teens. Funny, sophisticated and one hell of a writer and entertainer, with no ego whatsoever, the woman was mature beyond her years, and Dance enjoyed her company very much.
    She was also the daughter of country music legend Bishop Towne.
    On the two or three occasions when Dance had come to Kayleigh’s performances, or visited her in Fresno, bearlike Bishop had lumbered into the room with his thousand-pound ego and the intensity of somebody as addicted to recovery as he had been to cocaine and liquor. He’d rambled on about people in the Industry—spoken with an inflected capital I : musicians he knew intimately (hundreds), musicians he’d learned from (only the greats), musicians he’d mentored (most of the present-day superstars) and musicians he’d gotten into fistfights with (plenty of those too).
    He was brash, crude and overtly theatrical; Dance had been enthralled.
    On the other hand, his latest album had tanked. His voice had deserted him, his energy too, and those were two things that even the most sophisticated digital massaging in the studio can’t do much about. And nothing could rescue the trite songwriting, so different from the brilliant words and tunes that had made him a hit years ago.
    Still, he had his faithful entourage and he was in bold control of Kayleigh’s career; woe to any producer or record company or music venue that didn’t treat her right.
    Dance now entered Fresno proper. Salinas Valley, one hundred miles to the west, was known as the nation’s Lettuce Bowl. But the San Joaquin was bigger and produced more and Fresno was its heart. The place was a nondescript working town of about a half million. It had some gang activity and the same domestic, robbery, homicide and even terrorist threats that you saw in every small urban area nowadays, with the rate a bit higher than the national average for all crimes. That inflation, she surmised, was a reflection of unemployment—hovering here around 18 percent. She noticed a number of young men, living evidence of this statistic, hangingout on hazy street corners. Dressed in sleeveless T-shirts and baggy shorts or jeans, they watched her and other cars pass by or talked and laughed and drank from bottles swathed in paper bags.
    Dust and heat waves rose from baking surfaces. Dogs sat on porches and gazed through her car at distant nothingness and she caught glimpses of children in backyards jumping happily over trickling sprinklers, a questionable if not illegal activity in perpetually drought-plagued California.
    The satellite got her easily to the Mountain View Motel off Highway 41. It had no such vista, though that might be due to the haze. At best, she deduced, squinting east and north, were some timid foothills that would eventually lead to majestic Yosemite.
    Stepping into the brittle heat, Dance actually felt light-headed. Breakfast with the kids and dogs had been a long time ago.
    The hotel room wasn’t ready yet but that didn’t matter, since she was meeting Kayleigh and some friends in a half hour, at one. She checked her bags with the front desk and jumped back into the Pathfinder, which was already the temperature of a hotplate.
    She punched another address into the GPS and dutifully headed where directed, wondering why most of the programmed voices in sat-nav were women’s.
    At a stoplight she picked up her phone and glanced at the incoming call and text list.
    Empty.
    Good that no one at the office or the children’s camps had contacted her.
    But odd that there was nothing from Kayleigh, who was going to call that morning to confirm their get-together. And one thing about the performer that had always impressed Dance: despite her fame, she never neglected the little things. In fact, in life, and performances, she seemed to be utterly responsible.
    Another call to Kayleigh.
    Straight to voicemail.
     
    KATHRYN DANCE HAD to laugh.
    The owners of the Cowboy Saloon had a sense of humor. The dark, woody place, giddily cool, had not a single cowboy artifact. But life in thesaddle was well represented—by the women who rode the range, roped, branded and punched cattle … and did some fancy six-gun work, if you could believe the poster showing an Old West version of Rosie the Riveter shooting bottles off a fence