Page 3 of Call Back

His smile as wide as his face, Alvin came bustling back in, only to immediately leave with another stool. At least we’d both get a seat.

When he finished tuning, Colt glanced up at me with a twinkle in his eyes. “Showtime.”

Even though I was irritated to be roped into this, I couldn’t ignore the butterflies of excitement in my stomach.

Colt held the door open for Trina and I, then perched on the stool and strummed a few chords. Still a little reluctant, I sat down beside him. Trina stood facing us, so excited she was practically jumping up and down, our fan base of one.

“What do you want to do?” Colt asked. “Our set from Friday night?”

Part of me didn’t want to sing at all. Four weeks ago, I’d been onstage in New York City, living my dream. Now I was a street performer.

But the entertainer in me won out. “Sure.”

He started Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now,” the first song we’d sung together last week, a few nights before our debut at the Kincaid. I chose not to reflect on the fact that he’d pulled me onstage to sing as a distraction after I stumbled upon Walter Frey’s dead body—the second murder victim I’d found since moving back to Franklin. The first time, I’d ended up as a person of interest in the police investigation, and Colt had—rightly—deduced I was terrified of it happening again.

I started singing the first verse of the song. Colt quickly joined in, and I lost myself in the music. In less than a minute, Colt and I were singing the chorus to each other, and my heart felt lighter than it had in days.

I could almost forget that I’d nearly been killed by a Nashville dentist, Geraldo Lopez, the man who had likely murdered my father.

I could forget that nearly a million dollars’ worth of gold had been stolen from my apartment—gold my father had possibly embezzled from one of his financial clients.

I could forget that I was staying with Brady Bennett, a Franklin police detective who had let me sleep in his bed for the past three nights. Or that he had neither pushed my boundaries nor asked anything of me.

I could forget that I’d arranged to meet Walter Frey the night of his murder. He and my father had set up a meeting the night of my father’s disappearance, and I’d hoped to ask him about it. Instead, he’d been murdered outside of the bar where he was supposed to meet me—something Brady hadn’t included in the report on Frey’s murder.

I could forget that Brady’s best friend, Owen, another Franklin detective, had likely hidden facts about Walter Frey’s death. And that he’d lied about the events leading up to Dr. Lopez’s death. He’d saved me, but he was hiding something.

I could forget that my brother Roy had a deep violent streak and not only hated me, but he was beating his sweet wife, Belinda.

I could forget that my mother was dying from cancer—a fact that, at her request, I had hidden from nearly everyone around me.

Most of all, I could forget that ten years ago I’d run away from my high school graduation party, sought shelter from the rain in an abandoned house, and found myself in the middle of a real-life nightmare. A man had murdered a woman in front of me, and he’d carved a mark into my leg with a hunting knife so I would never forget the price of telling. And I hadn’t—I’d suppressed memories of the traumatic event so thoroughly they’d only begun to resurface after my return to Franklin.

I could even forget that my attacker was still watching me, texting me on occasion to remind me of the importance of keeping everything that had happened in that dark, dank basement a secret.

All that was here in this moment was me, Colt, and the music—and I felt like I could breathe for the first time in days. We sang for thirty minutes, gathering a huge crowd on the sidewalk before we were done, and Alvin knew what he was doing apparently, because more customers went into the boutique during our performance than in the whole, admittedly short, time I’d worked there.

So I was feeling pretty good until I looked up and saw a man in the back of the crowd with a baseball cap pulled low to partially hide his face. He was facing me, and while I couldn’t see his eyes, a slow smile lifted the corners of his mouth when he realized I’d noticed him. It wasn’t the kind of smile I was used to getting from men—there was something menacing about it. Knowing.

My heart skipped a beat and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Could he be the man who’d held me captive ten years ago? He’d worn a hood, and I’d never gotten a good look at his face.

Without thinking, I started toward him, but another man was headed toward me, and the expression on his face told me I was about to meet with another kind of reckoning.

Detective Owen Frasier.

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