Walking After Midnight (46 page)

„M-I-T-C-H-K-I-L-L-E-D-M-E-“

„I knew it! I knew it!“ her mother screamed. „Didn’t I always tell you Mitch did it?“

„
T-H-E-M-O-N-E-Y-B-E-L-O-N-G-S-T-O-N-O-O-N-E-T-A-K-E-I-T
–
“ „I don’t care about the money!
Deedee, I love you!“

„
I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-T-O-O-M-O-M-T-A-K-E-T-H-E-M-O-N-E-Y
–
“

„Where are you? Are you in Heaven? Are you with God’s angels, my baby?“

„Don’t cry, Sue!“

„
T-A-K-E-T-H-E-M-O-N-E-Y-A-G-I-F-T-F-R-OM-M-E-T-O-Y-OU
–
“

„Are you with the angels, Deedee?“

„Keep your fingers on the pointer, Sue!“

„I-M-O-K-A-Y-M-O-M-T-A-K-E-T-H-E-M-O-N-E-Y-I-L-O-V-E
–
“

„The pointer’s slowing down!“

„Deedee, don’t go!“

Deedee could feel herself weakening. By sheer strength of will, she finished:
„Y-O-U.“

And then she was sucked away into the deepening twilight.

This time she surfaced, not through any will of her own but because the maelstrom spit her out, on a glaringly bright stage. TV cameras crowded the wings and were mounted on platforms in the middle of the audience. The crowd, clapping from the plush seats, was a faceless, eager blob. A man walked out on that stage, shook hands with another who had just finished singing and playing the guitar. As the guitar player exited, Deedee recognized him: Jerry Wood, up-and-coming country star.

A sign in hot pink neon against the maroon velvet curtain at the back of the stage solved the riddle of where she was. It read:

NASHVILLE LIVE.

Deedee realized she was about to witness Hallie Ketchum’s live singing debut, before a national television audience yet. Immediately she took stock of her atoms. If only she could summon the strength she’d had before, she would help Hallie out.

Where was Hallie? In the wings somewhere, no doubt. Deedee searched but couldn’t see her anywhere.

Maybe in a dressing room…

She found Hallie there, slumped over her dressing table, her face resting in a sea of cosmetics jars and brushes and cotton balls. Electric curlers were in her blond hair.

She was dead. Deedee knew, with a deep, abiding sense of certainty, that her soul had left her body just moments before.

Two lines of a white powder and a razor blade on the glass tabletop nearby told Deedee the story. Frightened by the prospect of singing before a live audience when she must have known she wasn’t the stuff of which stars are made, Hallie had turned to drugs to bolster her courage.

Instead she had died.

Just then Deedee felt it – the invisible tug that was drawing her back in.

There was a knock on the door. „Three minutes, Miss Ketch um.“

The tug was stronger. Deedee resisted, staring at the inert body. Was there nothing anyone could do?

Suddenly Deedee saw the light.

It was like nothing she had ever seen before, a beam of pure white light, radiating warmth, drawing her toward it. It shimmered down through the ceiling, healing, beatific, promising an eternity of joy.

The stairway to Heaven. She had made it.

Deedee glanced back at Hallie Ketchum’s slumped body, and suddenly she understood that she was being offered a choice: Heaven or Nashville.

Deedee hesitated. She glanced at the light. It drew her like metal shavings to a magnet.

„One minute, Miss Ketchum.“

As suddenly as that, Deedee knew she couldn’t go. The only heaven she wanted was right here.

Honky-tonk heaven for a honky-tonk angel.

Deedee felt a surge of heat and had the unsettling sensation that her atoms dissolved.

Then, suddenly, she was inside Hallie Ketchum’s body, trying it on for size, so to speak, lifting her head and staring with interest at an unfamiliar face that was now her own.

Not bad, she thought, and with fingers that were surprisingly steady began to pull the curlers from her hair.

47

It was Saturday night. Hallie Ketchum was onstage at
Nashville Live,
wowing the audience with her powerful rendition of her hit song „Agony.“

Meanwhile, in a country cemetery not far away, two old women, one occasionally wiping tears from her eyes, knelt beside a grave. Clad in dark sweatsuits with black scarves tied around their heads, they used gardening trowels to turn back the sod and a few inches of dirt from one side of the grave.

Finally a trowel uncovered a small plastic garbage bag tightly bound with tape. The women looked at each other, and pulled it out of the earth.

One woman tore at it with shaking hands and looked inside.

„Dot, it’s just like Deedee said! There’s money in here!“

„Keep your voice down, Sue! And keep digging!“

An hour later, they had unearthed a small mountain of identical bags and were busily engaged in patting the sod back down over the grave.

„Dot, there must be millions here!“ There was awe in the shaky voice.

„Shhh! Don’t tell anybody!“

„Should we keep it?“

„Deedee said it was all right to. Deedee said it was for us….“

The two women looked at each other and simultaneously nodded. Then they began the task of hauling their loot to the ancient Plymouth parked on the dark country lane not too far from the grave.

On another road in Nashville, Steve drove through the darkness toward the house he had once shared with his ex-wife. Things were looking up. Of course, there was the small matter of a threatened lawsuit from the kid whose ‘55 Chevy had ended up in a thousand pieces at the bottom of a smoky mountain gorge. Then there was the van driver, who’d been unconscious and bloody but not dead in the Harmon Brothers’ parking lot, who woke up insisting that he was just an innocent bystander, not involved at all, and yelling about filing assault charges against the man who broke his nose. And there were a few cynical law enforcement types who were convinced that he was hiding the missing fifteen million in cash. Until the money was recovered, he expected to be kept under careful scrutiny.

But none of that was important. His daughter was sound asleep in the backseat, curled around her new Pekingese puppy, which fortunately was sleeping too. Beside him, head resting contentedly back against the seat, face turned away so that she could look out at the stars shining far above, sat the love of his life.

Summer must have felt the weight of his gaze on her, because she turned her head and smiled at him.

Steve was suddenly very conscious of being surrounded by the warm glow of happiness, so unaccustomed an emotion to him that it was as tangible as the heat of an electric blanket.

Unbidden, he thought of Mitch. Did I ever know you at all, old friend? he wondered. And wondered too why, of the three of them, childhood pals Steve and Deedee and Mitch, he was the only one who’d been granted the gift of continued life.

Then he glanced again at the two people who meant all the world to him, felt the weight of happiness in the car, and had his answer.

He could almost hear Mitch saying it: Winner take all, babe.