Chapter Eleven #2
Beau loosened the noose and slipped it over his head. He boosted himself out of the hole and onto the platform, stood, and flipped shaggy blond hair out of his eyes.
“Who’s next?” he asked the onlookers.
The onlookers burst into laughter. Belle didn’t laugh with them. She didn’t find Beau’s prank funny. Not to say that Adam and Grady hadn’t deserved it, but while they might, she didn’t believe that she did. Her heart was still racing.
Belle wasn’t big on sharing emotions, and life in foster care, where she was reliant on the benevolence of others, had trained her that a meltdown was something best done in private.
She shouldered her way through the tight knot of people, her passage unnoticed.
She passed Pearl and Linda, who wasn’t tall enough to see the drama on the scaffolding unfold and looked more bored than psychologically damaged.
Belle had forgotten to tell Pearl that Linda had gone into the woods by herself, but she’d do that later.
Right now, she needed to work out her irritation with Beau.
She met Jayce tying his horse to the hitching post in the shady silhouette of the mercantile. Here was another source of irritation. She and Beau could agree to be friends. Why was it so hard for her to say the same thing to Jayce?
She ran her palms up and down the side seams of her skirt and braced herself. She could do this. She was in the right mood.
“Jayce. I’ve been meaning to have a private word with you,” she said, determined to see this through, once and for all.
“Hey, Belle. What’s going on?” He craned his neck to see past her head to the people milling around in the street farther down. “Did they finish the gallows? What did I miss? They didn’t try it out yet, did they?”
He sounded so disappointed that Belle’s last straw split down the middle. She was trying to have a conversation with him, and he was more worried that he’d missed a hanging.
“They did. But if you hurry, I think they’re taking turns now,” she said.
Jayce missed the sarcasm completely. His attention was firmly affixed down the street. “Thanks.”
He strode off, not quite running but close, and just like that, she was forgotten.
Friend zoned by one man and taken for granted by another…
Which forced Belle to the unpleasant conclusion that of the two of them, Jayce wasn’t the one dull as dirt.
And the possibility that she was the one dull as dirt did not make her happy.
*
Beau
The expression on Adam’s face when Beau opened his eyes had been worth every inch of nerve it had taken to allow that noose to be fitted around his neck.
Watching Adam hang half the town was fun, too.
It was a bit like the dunking booth at a county fair, except no balls were thrown and the dunking was guaranteed.
By the third hanging no one was paying attention to Beau anymore, so he looked around to find Belle.
He wanted to gloat about how he’d pulled one over on Adam, and she’d appreciate the humor.
He couldn’t find Belle, however. Disappointment mopped up a lot of his self-satisfaction. He hoped she hadn’t missed it. Having to explain it to her wouldn’t be the same as her witnessing it firsthand.
He was about to go find her when he overheard part of a conversation between Adam and Grady. They were discussing ways to hide the rope attached to the harness, and this was a conversation in his best interests not to miss.
“The hanging rope is one-inch hemp,” Adam was saying. “The harness rope is quarter-inch nylon. We could thread the nylon rope through the hemp.”
Grady tapped his lower lip. “Or maybe use metal staples. The nylon rope could be threaded through those on the outside of the hemp.”
“It works just fine the way it is,” Beau said. “Why not let the client use his imagination?”
Adam gave him the same look he got from Belle when he said something stupid. “He’s paying a million dollars for this experience.”
Holy crap. Yes, Beau supposed a million dollars was worth accidentally hanging a man, especially since Adam had plenty of places to dispose of the body, so a friendly reminder might not be remiss. “He needs a country singer, too, though. Am I right?”
“You aren’t wrong,” Adam said, although his enthusiasm was lacking.
A firm hand came to rest on Beau’s shoulder. A graying head entered his line of vision.
“Speaking of country singers, what music do you have planned to perform for our guest?” Mavis asked.
The older woman and her weird Davy Crockett attire made Beau even more nervous than his run-ins with Adam. He always felt as if she could see inside his head and wasn’t above using the information against him.
What she’d see now was a big, empty void.
He had no music planned and was feeling more and more trapped.
Country had ruined him. He’d played nothing original since his win on Diss Cord, and he’d begun to believe that most of his original work prior to that had been garbage.
Otherwise, it would have gotten him on the show instead of a reworked Mel Tillis tune.
He didn’t want to do covers of country greats for the rest of his life, no matter how much money it made him. He didn’t want to buy songs written by other people. He wanted to play his own music. He had his own stories to tell.
But he’d lost the ability to tell them.
“Maybe you’ve been trying to write the wrong music.”
He hoped Belle was wrong. He couldn’t keep on reinventing himself if he wanted to sustain a career.
“I don’t recall seeing a contract to sing in any of the paperwork Benny says that I signed,” he said, because he didn’t react well when he was nervous, and why not piss Mavis off, too?
“You were suffering from avian flu.” Mavis patted his cheek.
The gesture didn’t give him warm, fuzzy feelings of comfort. Not at all.
“Don’t stress too much about it if you don’t have anything prepared. You’ve got two weeks to pull something together.”
“For the price we paid your agent, it had better be something spectacular,” Adam said. His gaze cut to the gallows. “If you know what I mean.”
Beau thought he did.
“I have an idea,” Mavis said. If she’d also gotten what Adam meant, Beau couldn’t tell. He had no idea whose team she was on. “How about you give us a preview after the church service this Sunday?”
That was a terrible idea.
“On a Sunday?” Beau tried to look pious. “What would Benny think?”
“Think about what?” Benny asked, and Beau jumped.
For an old guy, he was fast on his feet. Quiet, too. Except this was the second time today that Beau had been caught off guard, so maybe his hearing was going—not an unusual thing for a musician.
“Beau’s worried about singing country on a Sunday,” Mavis said.
The wattle on Benny’s skinny throat jiggled. “Take out any references to drinking and hanky-panky and change all the swear words. You’ll be fine.”
Rewriting other people’s songs was a step, although not in any direction Beau wanted to go.
But he had a decision to make. The people of Burning Scrub were conspiracy theorists and cultists.
They also operated a business that appeared to be philanthropically inclined.
Money went into the county’s coffers. Overall, they were harmless idealists.
Also, with one or two possible exceptions, he liked them.
But he liked Belle most of all. He liked her a lot.
She was thoughtful and kind and all the things that were good in a human, and she’d made it clear she’d like him to do this.
Would it hurt him to do this one country performance, for her sake if for no other reason?
He could always work in some of his own material and see how it was received.
And what David Draiman did to a Paul Simon song gave him ideas for mixing things up.
Because despite his fondness for Belle, giving in without a fight was not in his nature. Whatever Burning Scrub had paid Leon for this performance was nowhere near a million dollars.
“I’d be happy to sing for you on Sunday. I could use the practice,” he said.
Adam eyed him with suspicion. Before he could ask any questions, though, Jayce jogged up to him. He wore the exact same outfit as Beau—button-fly jeans, boots, and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up—and yet Jayce looked like a cowboy whereas Beau looked like a country musician. Depressing.
“What did I miss?” Jayce asked, just as Grady threw the lever on the gallows and sent Maverick, a local trapper and fur trader, to his doom. The crowd cheered.
“Darn it.” Disappointment washed across Jayce’s face.
“Would you like a turn, too?” Beau said to him. “Grady’s already hanged most of the town and he’s running low on victims.”
Mavis, Adam, and Benny were no longer listening. Beau turned to see what had caught their attention.
A lone figure emerged from the same woods path Beau and Belle had taken for target practice.
A woman. She wore one of those massive hiking backpacks complete with a bedroll and what looked like a small tent.
She carried a rifle hooked over her shoulder with a thin leather strap.
Hiking boots, tight jeans, and a sleeveless T-shirt said twenty-first century, not eighteen hundred.
She’d tied a windbreaker around her waist by the sleeves.
She had a long dark ponytail, and as she approached, Beau saw she was a decade or two older than she’d appeared from a distance because of a dynamite figure.
Her face was what really made him take notice.
She was blue-eyed and very beautiful, despite being late forties or early fifties.
She was what his friend Joe, who liked older women, called a MILF.
She looked very familiar. Familiar enough that Beau’s stomach gave a queer little lurch, as if he’d eaten something that didn’t taste right, and he wasn’t sure how it would sit.
This was exactly how Belle was going to look in twenty years if she took good care of herself.
Everyone had noticed the woman by now and gone silent. For Burning Scrub, buried deep in the mountains, strangers wandering into town weren’t exactly an everyday occurrence.
The woman reached the small gathering. Blue eyes took in the gallows and the period costumes, and she didn’t so much as blink—as if a Western theme park was an everyday occurrence for her.
Her focus shifted to Mavis and Benny, so Beau stared at them, too. Mavis’s face had hardened to stone. Benny’s wattle twitched, but that might have been caused by a gust of dry air that spun up some dust.
The woman walked up to Mavis. She eased her arms out of her pack and let it slide to the ground at her feet. She smiled, and once again, Beau saw a shadow of Belle.
“Hello, Mother,” she said.