"'Dance, Dance, Dance,' of course," Mark replied with a grin.
"Silly me," Harley said to Susan as Mark, at center stage front, began the guitar intro.
She hung back through "Dance, Dance, Dance" and the Rascals' "Good Lovin'," finding her way musically through Mark's lead guitar work; Susan's bass, and the acoustic guitar, blending her voice with Susan's to play it safe. By the time they began "Twist and Shout," though, she was actually feeling comfortable and let herself insert a few guitar riffs here and there while she and Susan played around with the backup vocals. When the band swung into "This Is Dedicated to the One I Love," she knew for the first time in nine years the thrill of creating harmony, amazed at how well she and Susan worked together.
"Let's get our guest artist up front," Mark said into the microphone, reaching over and grabbing Harley's elbow, "and have her take the next song. Your choice," he told her as he traded places with her.
She felt Duncan's steady gaze from the audience and her confidence held. "Let's do the Jefferson Airplane's 'Somebody to Love,'" she told the band in an undertone. Mark's eyebrows shot up—wearing a turquoise blue 1950s Dior gown, she did not exactly look like a hard-ass rock-and-roll babe—but he didn't stop her.
Harley took a deep breath … and swung into the song … and was having the time of her life by the end of the first verse. It was great to feel a part of a band, their musicianship and energy feeding her own. She wanted to hurl herself into Duncan's arms and thank him for this joy with several million kisses, but she had a song and a set to finish.
The applause was rapturous as it washed over her. It felt almost—but not quite-as good as making love with Duncan. Grinning, she headed back to Susan and became aware that the rest of the band was applauding her too. It was so unexpected that she stopped dead and stared at them as if they were nuts.
"Let's have another from Harley Smith," Mark called out through the microphone he shared with Susan. "Any other surprises for us?" he asked Harley.
"That was surprising?" she said, puzzled.
"Grace Slick wouldn't dare cover that song again if she heard you, Miss Miller."
"Wow!" Harley said, blushing. Then it hit her. He'd said Miller. "Ah, shit!" she blurted out and then frantically covered her mouth with her hand. "How did you know?" she whispered miserably.
"Good guitar work is like a fingerprint—instantly recognizable. You combine that with that amazing color of blue eyes you've got, and it's just a tad obvious, especially when an old college friend clues you in," Mark replied with a grin.
"Ah-ha." She turned back to the center mike and took a deep breath. "Okay, gang," she announced, "this next song goes out to the loose-lipped senior rep from Colangco International sitting in our audience tonight. This one's for you, my little chatterbox." She began the guitar intro to "Secret Agent Man" and heard Mark burst out laughing.
She spent the rest of the set working with Susan, finding ways to use her Stratocaster to build off her bass work, exploring harmonies with her, loving that she could share her voice to create something even better. When Mark looked right at her and launched the band into "Devil with a Blue Dress," she laughed herself silly through the entire number. When he pulled her forward for one last song, she looked right at Duncan Lang and sang "Desperado," hoping he'd take its advice to heart and let her love him.
When the song was over, she asked the band to play something for her, left the stage, grabbed Duncan, and pulled him onto the dance floor. She molded herself against him, loving his heat and the strong beat of his heart as Mark began to sing Jim Groce's "Time in a Bottle."
"Thank you," she whispered as Duncan held her tight.
* * *
CHAPTER TWELVE
« ^ »
Even with the shower going full blast, Duncan heard Harley scream. Soaking wet, he leapt from the shower, snatched a handgun he had stashed in the cupboard under the sink, and burst into the sunlit bedroom, ready for anything. Except what he found.
Harley—wearing only panties and one of his green T-shirts—had her back pressed up against the wall. She was staring at the bed—at the guitar lying in the middle of the bed—with a look of horror.
"What is it? What's wrong?" he demanded.
She pointed a shaking finger at the black guitar. "It was country. My new music was coming out country!"
He would have laughed if he hadn't still been recovering from nightmare fantasies of Harley being kidnapped, Harley being electrocuted, Harley being poisoned by a blow dart. "Is that all?" he said, lowering the gun as he sagged against the doorjamb.
"Is that all?" she exploded. "You don't seem to understand. I was creating the music I've rebelled against my entire life!"
"And this surprises you?"
Harley uttered a strangled scream of frustration.
"This surprises you," Duncan conceded. He made sure the safety was on, leaned into the bathroom, and set his Browning automatic pistol on the counter. Then he walked over to Harley, led her to the overstuffed peach armchair by the terrace's double glass doors, and made her sit down. "Let's talk about arrested development," he said as he sat down on the matching overstuffed footstool in front of her.
"I'm gonna belt you, Duncan Lang," she retorted, shaking an angry fist at him.
He couldn't hold back a grin. She was definitely the most fun he'd ever had. "I think it's time for you to sit back and hear a few home truths."
She folded her arms mulishly across her chest. "I've got a couple for you: you're naked and you're getting the footstool wet."
"It's drip dry and so am I. Home Truth Number One: you're from Sweetcreek, Oklahoma, and your musical roots are country and rockabilly. Ah-ah-ah," he said, holding up a finger to halt the arguments waiting to burst out of her open mouth, "it's true and you know it. Home Truth Number Two: every teenager rebels against something in the status quo. With your musical soul, it was only natural that you rebelled musically and turned to hard-core rock and roll. Home Truth Number Three: Boyd Monroe arrested your musical growth by browbeating you into becoming and remaining the mono-dimensional and colorless Princess of Pop for nine excruciating years … and you are not sweet little Miss Jane Miller … and thank all the gods for that. Home Truth Number Four: nor are you Patti Smith, Grace Slick, Chrissie Hynde, or even Pat Benatar. Home Truth Number Five: Sweetcreek has been creeping back into your vocals more and more with every song you've sung these last seven days."
"It has?" she said in a small voice as she sat hunched in the huge chair.
"Yep. The way you sashayed through 'That'll Be the Day' last night was better than gazing into a crystal ball, Miss Harley Jane Miller. Home Truth Number Six: this holiday is helping you reclaim your true self, which means it's no surprise to me that you're also getting back to your country and rockabilly musical roots, which brings us full circle back to Home Truth Number One. Very neat, if I do say so myself."
She scowled at him. "You're still naked and you're still wet."
He stood up, leaned over, and kissed the tip of her slightly freckled nose. "I'm also right, and you know it."
"Yeah," she muttered, scrunching farther down in the chair, "but I don't have to like it."
Stubborn to the end. No wonder he loved her so much.
When he left the apartment a half hour later, Harley was still seated in the bedroom chair, arms folded across her chest, scowling. It was a good thing they each had work to do, or he'd be spending a very unpleasant Monday right about now. As it was, he had the pleasures of searching the Giscard Lear jet with a fine-tooth comb to look forward to. It meant distracting Louis and Desmond, again, but the team he had assigned to follow the French henchmen's every step was beginning to enjoy the challenge. It also meant putting up with his own company tail, which he had assigned to watch his back whenever he was out in public until the Giscard case was solved. He disliked feeling self-conscious all day long, but he disliked any violence enacted on his body even more.
"It's bad enough working o
ver the weekend," Emma complained as they walked up the narrow steps to the Giscard jet's side door, "but why do we have to be out here before eight?"
"The early bird catches the worm," Duncan said, stepping into the jet.
"The early bird catches hell from her fiancé."
"Your devotion to duty is admirable, truly."
"My devotion to duty is making Lam Ying devoted to cold showers!" Emma exploded.
"Oh dear," Duncan said, looking at Emma with honest concern. "Does your family know you're a fallen woman?"
Emma shook her head in disgust. "You are the most infuriating man, Sherlock."
"I have heard that song before, Watson. You start up in the cockpit, I'll start back at the tail, and we'll work our way to the middle."
"Holmes," Emma said, sighing heavily, "the police have been over this plane with everything from X-rays and fluoroscopes to the K-9 patrol. If there was something here, they'd have found it."
"But they didn't," Duncan said as he slid a stick of cinnamon gum into his mouth.
"Because there was nothing here for them to find!"
"Emma, the diamonds were safe and sound when Giscard's courier boarded this plane in Paris. They were gone when the diamond case was opened at the Bartlett Museum. That means they were either taken from the case while on this plane or they were taken somehow in the limousine on the drive to the museum, and I've already searched the limo and come up empty."
"You're going to come up empty today too," Emma sourly retorted.
"Look, if this is the scene of the crime, there's a good chance it will spark some brilliant deductive reasoning on my part that will lead us to the clues we need."
Emma sighed again as she headed for the cockpit. "You read far too many Sherlock Holmes stories in your impressionable youth."
An hour later, they had worked themselves to within seven feet of each other.
"Damn!" Duncan said, on his back as he investigated the bottom of a plush captain's chair.
"What is it?" Emma asked.
"Harley was right: I do love this job." He had found his life's work these last few days, even though it had been staring him in the face from the day he was born. Loving the family business. Knowing just the niche he wanted to carve for himself. It was the stuff of fantasy. It was unbelievable.
And it was true.
Amazing. It turned out he really did have a dream: to be the best private investigator going … and to share his life with Harley. The hell of it was, one was in jeopardy and the other impossible. She'd be leaving New York soon. And she wouldn't be coming back. He tried to distract himself from a sudden stab of pain by reexamining the bottom of the chair. "I wonder if I can convince Dad to open up a full-scale criminal investigations division in the company, and let me run it."
"On the day Glinda the Good Witch appears before you, swirls her magic wand, and tells you to tap your heels together three times, take me with you."
Duncan lifted his head and grinned at Emma. "Done."
Thirty minutes later he stood at the top of the passenger stairs staring out at the surrounding tarmac, the other private jets, and the hangars beyond. He and Emma had found nothing. Worse, he had not been struck by a brilliant stroke of deductive reasoning. He had come up more than empty. Four days ago his brother had stood on this very step and had taken possession of Giscard's black leather case. Was it empty then? Did the diamonds somehow vanish into thin air in the back of the Colangco limousine? Or was Giscard playing with their minds? Had he decided to use the Bartlett Museum's jewelry exhibit as a front for an insurance scam by sending his courier onto this plane in Paris with an already empty case?
"Um, Duncan?" Emma said from behind him. "There's an office with our names on it that's waiting for us."
"Sorry, Em." Duncan headed down the stairs, rerunning the surveillance videos he had studied over and over in his mind. Brandon had taken the case, walked down these stairs, taken three steps, and handed the case into the limo and to the two Colangco men waiting to guard it in the back seat. The guards and the driver were longtime Colangco employees and completely trustworthy. Duncan had handpicked them himself. Besides, Emma had investigated them under a microscope.
Brandon had walked back to his car and led the mini-caravan into the city. On the drive to the Bartlett Museum, the limo had been caught in some stop-and-go traffic, but no one had approached the car, no one had left the car. The limo hadn't even been stopped over a manhole cover for more than a few seconds.
"You're thinking too much, Holmes," Emma said as they walked through the small terminal. "Stop worrying at it like a dog with a meaty bone. Let your mind rest. That's usually when you get the answer you need. It worked for Albert Einstein—he preferred the shower method—and it can work for you."
"What do you think happened to the diamonds?" Duncan said, holding the glass door open for her.
"Every hypothesis I even half formed has been shot to hell by our surveillance tapes," Emma said, walking out to the taxi stand. "I'm beginning to believe it was either a case of astral projection or a sudden flux in the space-time continuum."
"That's a whole lot better than I've been able to come up with," Duncan said as he followed her into the back seat of a yellow cab. "I thought maybe the Tooth Fairy was a little tipsy on Thursday morning and got confused on her pick-up route."
Emma snorted. "So, do you still love this job?"
Duncan sighed and rested his head on the back of the bench seat. "Yeah. Turns out my parents were right all along. I am psychotic."
"Whatever works, Holmes."
He chuckled and squeezed her hand for a moment. "I'm going to get you that promotion if it kills me."
The cab dropped them off at the Sentinel Building. Duncan walked into his office, grabbed the Giscard diamond surveillance tapes once again, popped the first one into the center video monitor, sat down in his chair, and settled in for the long haul. He was missing something. He knew it. He felt it in his marrow.
But what the hell was it?
* * *
Harley had been scowling at her guitar for the last two hours, trying to blame it, trying to blame Duncan, trying to avoid some inevitable conclusions, and failing. With a groan, she pushed herself from the peach armchair and headed for the kitchen. Like her mama had always said: when in doubt, bake.
But even as she was punching and kneading the yeasty dough, she knew it wasn't enough. She had to be moving—all of her—if she was ever going to find any peace and reconciliation between who she had been, who she had wanted to be, and who she was, as a woman and as a musician. She waited until she had pulled the two loaves of bread safely from the oven, then she headed back to the bedroom to change out of Duncan's floured T-shirt and into her own blue T-shirt and jeans. Next she walked into the bathroom and grabbed for her hairbrush, but it was out of place. Just like she was feeling. She looked down at the counter, found her brush, ran it twice through her hair, and then headed out of the apartment. She took the elevator down to the lobby, walked out of the Sentinel Building, turned left onto Fifth Avenue
, and kept going.
She didn't glance across the street at the Henri Bendel shop. She failed to note the irony of the towering gothic spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral set right beside that tower of consumerism, Saks Fifth Avenue
. She was wrestling with home truths and thinking only how grateful she was to be moving, striding down the sidewalk, oblivious to the other people around her, her arms swinging, storefronts melting into each other as she passed, her soul trying to whisper some long-suppressed facts of life.
The whisperings came to a screeching halt when two men—two men who were not Desmond and Louis—grabbed her arms.
"Holiday's over, Miss Miller," said the refugee from a bad Godfather knockoff on her right.
They knew who she was!
"In you go," said the man on her left as they dragged her toward a brown American sedan.
Harley freaked. "Let me go!" she yelled, kicki
ng and biting and surprising the men completely. They let go of her just long enough for her knees to buckle. She sat down with a thump on the sidewalk, her heart thundering in her breast, and began singing "When the Saints Go Marching In" at the top of her lungs.
It was the only song she could think of.
The two men stared at her—and at the dozens of people up and down the sidewalk staring at them—in horror. Then they bolted into the car and it rocketed away down Fifth Avenue
.
Harley kept singing. She was a pro. Pros always finished a song when they had an audience. Vaguely she recognized that she wasn't thinking clearly, that reaction was setting in, that she was shaking.
She finished the song, stumbled to her feet, bowed, because the people around her were applauding, and numbly pulled the cellular phone from her purse. She had no idea that she had memorized Duncan's number until she heard the phone ringing and Emma's brisk voice answering.
"Colangco International, Duncan Lang's office."
"Emma," Harley said, her voice sounding strange in her ears. "Two men just tried to… Well … I guess you could say they tried to kidnap me."
"Oh dear God! Are you okay?"
"Scared to death, but unharmed and I think … safe."
"Where are you?" Emma's voice was tense, urgent.
"Um…" Harley looked around her, really for the first time. "I'm on Fifth Avenue
, almost at Forty-third Street
."
"Stay put. Keep a lot of people around you. I'll be right there."
But five minutes later, it was Duncan who leapt from the cab that had screeched to a stop before her at the curb. It was Duncan who grabbed her. Duncan who held her. He was shaking.
"Oh my God, Harley. Are you all right? Did they hurt you?"
Five minutes had given her enough time to get her nerves back in order. She cupped his taut face in her hands. "I'm fine, Duncan. I promise."
"God," Duncan said, wrapping himself around her and holding her tight, "I should never have left you alone. I should have been with you—"
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