One True Heart (8 page)

Beau Yates finished his interview at a radio station in Nashville before he finally answered an unknown caller on his private line.

“Yates here,” he snapped, hoping it wasn't some nut who'd found his number. He'd had to change phone numbers half a dozen times last year. Fans wanting to talk, wannabe songwriters insisting he listen, one nut who said he wanted to kill Beau because he thought Beau was singing about his sister.

“Beau”—the caller sounded official, all business—“this is Addison Spencer at the Harmony County Hospital. Your agent gave me your number. I hate to call, but your father has had a heart attack.”

He nodded, then realized the doc couldn't see him. “Hello, Doc,” he got out before her last sentence caught up to his brain.

She continued, “He's stable, Beau, but it was close. I thought I should call and let you know.”

Beau thought of saying that he'd lost his father years ago when his old man kicked him out, but he really didn't think the doc needed to hear about the past. For the first seventeen
years of his life Beau had been his father's favorite sinner to preach to. The older Beau got, the more his father found wrong or evil about him. But the sin he couldn't seem to forgive was Beau's love for country music. No matter how much he preached, Beau wouldn't give it up.

Dr. Spencer had been talking, but all he heard was her last sentence. “Your father won't survive another one.”

All the lectures Melvin Yates gave him during his teens now weighed Beau down like layer after layer of wool, smothering the life out of him. In truth, if he thought of his father at all, Beau thought of him in the past tense. Reverend Yates had been dead to him for years. Not one call. Not one letter. The first year Beau had made real money, he'd sent flowers with a note that said
Happy New Year
. The next day one of his friends said he'd seen the arrangement, pot and bow and card, out near the street next to the trash cans.

The silence on the other end of the phone finally brought Beau back to the present. “Thanks for calling and letting me know, Doc.”

Addison hesitated, then added, “One of the nurses said that in the few minutes he woke in recovery, he asked for you, Beau.”

Beau took a long breath, knowing what he had to do. “I'm on my way.”

The last thing he wanted to do was go back home to see his father, but deep down, he knew he had to. A few years ago he'd still been angry enough that he might have wanted to tell the old man off, but now, that didn't matter. There was no love—or hate—left, it seemed. All he could hope for if he went home was closure.

Dr. Spencer rattled off details he didn't understand. Beau wasn't listening. Memories were circling like trash in a windy alley. Wasted, dusty memories he'd spent his life running away from. All that was left between him and his father was a good-bye.

Two hours later he was on a private plane headed toward Harmony. The sun had been setting when they headed west, and it seemed to last for an hour as they flew toward it. Beau
had friends he could call or stay with, but he didn't want to talk to anyone yet. He'd go straight to the hospital, see his dad, ask his stepmother if she needed anything, and be back on the plane by noon tomorrow. He'd offer any help needed with the bills, but he wouldn't stand silent for another lecture. He'd had enough of those to last this lifetime and the next.

When the plane landed on a dirt strip, no one would be there to see a man in a black hat carrying only a guitar case climb off. Beau would step back into Harmony as silently as he'd stepped out.

A rental car was waiting when he got to the old hangar next to the strip. Keys under the right sun visor as he'd requested. Beau stashed his guitar in the trunk, climbed in, and started the car as the airplane taxied around to leave. The urge to jump out and run toward the plane was strong. He could be back in Nashville in a few hours. Back where he belonged.

Several guys in his band had offered to come along with him, but this was something Beau needed to do alone.

He drove slowly through the sleepy little town, seeing slices of his life hanging around like ghosts. The town had aged some, improved some, but he could still walk it blind and never miss a step.

There was no need to get a room. By the time he checked on his father and found something to eat, it would be midnight. He'd just find a quiet corner in the waiting room and sleep under his hat until morning. Then he'd talk to the doctor, thank her for letting him know, and return to his world. With luck, no one he knew here would see him and no fans would recognize him. Sometimes he felt like there were two versions of Beau Yates. The one he played for the public and the real one, shy and insecure as ever.

His dad was in the critical care unit, the maximum security of any hospital. Beau had to wait a half hour before they let him go in. He promised not to wake his father and said he'd stay just a few minutes.

When he entered the room, he stood in the shadows and stared at the man he'd once been so afraid of. His father was
older, paler, not near as frightening. Bruises and dark marks spotted his hands. His hair was noticeably thinner. The hum of machines almost blocked out the sound of his slow breathing.

Beau counted the seconds between each breath as if his father might stop at any moment and be dead. Reverend Melvin Yates would never go like that, Beau decided. He'd go screaming from the pulpit or demanding God's attention to his prayers. He'd never just quietly stop breathing.

Beau waited five minutes, counting the spaces between breaths, but nothing happened. The nurse stepped inside to whisper that the reverend's wife had gone home early. When Beau asked, she admitted that no one else had signed in to visit.

Then the nurse added that his stepmother hadn't wanted to leave his father's side, but she looked so exhausted the doctor had insisted and promised to call the moment there was any change.

Beau wasn't surprised. Twenty years of living with his father would exhaust anyone. The thing he didn't understand was why she had never left the old man. She'd volunteered to live in the wasteland around his father where nothing grew, not even love. Beau had always felt he'd been drafted.

Walking over to the bedside, he thought of covering his father's hand with his, but couldn't. No memory of ever touching his father came to him. No hand holding when he'd been small. No pats on the back. No touching Beau when he was afraid or sad. Somehow, now didn't seem the time to start.

Beau walked out of the room and asked if there was a cafeteria. He wasn't hungry, but it seemed as good a reason as any to leave. If he stayed around any longer he'd start feeling sorry for himself.

The cafeteria was closed, but vending machines lined the back wall. He bought a cup of coffee and a bag of chips and found a corner where anyone coming in this late wouldn't even notice him.

The chair by the smoky window was air-conditioner cold,
almost damp, but he barely noticed. He sat down and stared out the window into the night. For a moment he saw nothing, maybe because he expected to see nothing, and then his eyes adjusted. A table outside on the patio had been shoved against the glass, looking like it mirrored his table. A shadow of a woman sat on the other side of the table. If the sheet of glass hadn't been between them they would have been eating across from one another.

The woman wasn't aware of him as she stirred her coffee. Her head jerked up slightly now and then. She raised a napkin to her nose. She was crying. He couldn't hear her. She was no more than a shadow crying, but he saw her sorrow.

After a while, she left. Beau was careful not to look up as she stepped inside and crossed the area, now a graveyard of scattered tables and chairs. She gave no hint that she saw him, but sorrow flowed around her shoulders like a long gray cape.

He turned back to the window, thinking he could almost still see her outline in the night. Maybe she hadn't been a mourner, but the ghost of a newly departed soul. Funny, he thought, how your mind dances with strange thoughts when you're waiting for death to drop by.

As he always did when he talked silently to himself, a song began to whisper through his mind. It was so soft at first he could barely hear it, and then slowly the words began to fit together. A sad melody of a hollow man wishing any feeling, even sorrow, could reach him and the woman he watched crying, not for herself but for him.

Beau pulled a napkin from the box and began putting words to the music whispering in his brain. When he walked back toward his father's room, he took a side door out to his car. Deep in the night when the hospital slept, Beau sat alone in the small critical care waiting room and played his songs. They echoed softly throughout the hallways, but no one came by to tell him to stop.

Maybe they all knew that the famous Beau Yates was among them and the shy private Beau Yates needed to grieve the only way he knew how . . . through his music.

T
HURSDAY

H
ARMONY
C
OUNTY
J
AIL

Johnny Wheeler wasn't surprised when, on the third day of his incarceration, the deputy woke him from his afternoon nap to tell him he had a visitor.

He grumbled, a habit he'd developed of late. His lawyer had been by twice yesterday trying to bail him out, but the food was good and Johnny wasn't ready to go home. Once he got back to the farm, there would be a hundred chores to do from dawn to dusk, and then he'd spend the night trying to figure out why he was so terrible at loving someone. At least here, he could relax and read the book the fairy lady brought him.

His brother, Wendell, claimed he'd accidentally turned in Johnny for murdering Scarlet and had agreed to do chores until Johnny got out. So there was no hurry.

Johnny looked up at the deputy. In a strange way, they'd become friends. Maybe when he got out, if he ever got out, he and the deputy could go have a beer. “If my court-appointed lawyer finds a way to get me out, I'll shoot him.”

The deputy didn't look interested in the death threat. “It's not your lawyer, John; it's that girl with all the hair. I swear she smells like French toast.”

Johnny stood. “Brown eyes?”

“I guess. I wasn't looking at her eyes when she floated in. If I didn't get to pat her down I'd wonder if she was real.”

“Real pretty?” Johnny asked, thinking she also fit in the “real crazy” category. She was probably the last thing he needed in his life right now.

The deputy opened the cell and Johnny turned around to be handcuffed for the walk. He'd learned the routine.

“She's pretty, I guess.” Deputy Rogers was far too married with five kids to have enough single cells left for looking at other women.

Apparently all he was allowed to do was smell.

Rogers patted Johnny on the back, indicating Johnny should move forward, as he continued, “Your brother was talking about her last night at the bar and said he wouldn't kick her out of bed.”

Johnny swore. “My brother doesn't have a bed. He sleeps in a tree like all other buzzards. When I get out of here I'm going to have a few words to shove down his throat. My own kin telling the sheriff that I looked like I killed someone.” Johnny swore again. “I swear if I ever do commit murder, it'll be a sibling.”

The deputy held Johnny's arm tightly just above his elbow, as if he didn't quite trust the farmer. “John, how many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“One, and if you ask me, that is one too many. Wendell better start for the border now. If he's still around when I get out, he'll be talking out of his nose in no time because I'm going to shove all his teeth down his throat.”

“John,” the deputy whispered. “Stop making death threats. It's not the right thing to do while you're already locked up.”

Johnny didn't have time to say more. The deputy almost threw him into the visitation room. Conversations with lawmen were often ended abruptly, Johnny had learned recently.

He stumbled a few steps and then raised his head. There
sat his little fairy, looking as dingy as ever. Walking to his side of the long table, Johnny sat down thinking she was even prettier than she had been a few days ago, if that were possible. Maybe they could have a jailhouse romance. He'd heard of women who go for men behind bars. Right about now, with an allegedly dead wife and a brother getting death threats from him, Johnny figured he must look pretty eligible in the prison lover market. Of course, if Scarlet really was dead, he'd be available.

“How are you, Kare?” he asked. It wasn't exactly a pickup line, but then if he picked her up, where would they go?

“I'm worried, John. No one is listening to me about your innocence. I've consulted with the cards and called a ‘phone a spirit guide' hotline. I've even talked to my brother. It appears we are the only two people who think you're innocent.”

“What about Scarlet and Max?”

The fairy lady jumped up so fast he thought she might be levitating for a moment.

“That's it,” she said. “All I have to do is find Scarlet and Max, make them come home, and then you'll be cleared. I'm so happy I could kiss you.”

Johnny didn't get his hopes up, but he had to ask, “Does this mean we're dating?”

He'd expected a laugh, or maybe a yes, but Kare looked at him with those big brown eyes tearing up. “Oh no,” she cried. “Prison life is getting to you. The bars can sap your sanity. You've got to be strong, John. Don't worry, you've got me out here in the free world fighting for you.”

He tried to smile, but knowing she was helping frightened him more than the murder charge. He stood. “I need to go back to my cell.”

Now tears were running down her cheeks. “I understand. It's the one place you feel safe. Locked away from all the world. I've read about how not being free can imprison your mind as well as your body.”

Johnny walked back to his cell thinking that after meeting Kare Cunningham, if he ever did get out of here and divorce Scarlet, he'd move to his farm and become a hermit.