I'll Sing for my Dinner (16 page)

Marcus and Myra lived in New York. She took me out to dinner the first night, then asked if I would like to go dancing. I had been too young to go clubbing when I toured before. Indeed, I was too young to go out drinking when I was in college in Baltimore. The only bar I had ever hung out in was the Roadhouse. So I said sure.

Myra was a man magnet, so I got to dance as much as I wanted. I was exhausted when we got back to the hotel at two o’clock in the morning. The next morning, I ate breakfast, set up the computer, and practiced while I waited for Jake to call. I was two hours ahead of him, an issue that would only get worse when I went to Europe.

When he called, I took off my clothes, purposely positioned the camera to aim at my chest, and answered.

“Hi Jake. I’m a mess. I miss you already.”

“Good morning to both of you,” he said, laughing. “May I speak to Cecily?”

I angled the screen up. “I thought you wanted to talk to me nude. Aw, no fair. You’ve got your clothes on.”

We chatted and he told me what was going on back in Colorado. I told him about going dancing the night before.

“Doing the whole nightclubbing celebrity thing, huh?” he said with a smile. “I’ll have to look in the scandal rags in the grocery store to see what you’re up to.”

“I don’t think any of the people in that club had a clue who I was. You saw the average age of the people at the concert in DC.” I hadn’t thought about how my going out might look to other people.

“Jake, you don’t mind if I go out, do you? I mean, you know I’m not looking to pick someone up.”

The way his face relaxed into the tender look that always made me melt gave me my answer.

“Of course not. Hell, I’m out at a bar every night. I’d feel guilty if I thought you weren’t having a good time because you were worried about me.”

The concert in New York felt better, to me at least. I was more comfortable, better rehearsed, and a lot more relaxed knowing that the harp section wasn’t going to make people get up and leave in droves. Even on a Wednesday night, we sold out, and again the reviews were fantastic.

Boston and Toronto went smooth as glass and as we flew over the Atlantic, I looked forward to spending a week in each of my favorite cities. There had to be some way to get Jake out of Colorado so that we could spend some time in Europe together. He said he’d never been there, and I longed to walk in Paris with him, to show him the English countryside, take a gondola ride in Venice—a romantic gondola ride. The only time I was in Venice, I watched a couple riding in a gondola, wrapped around each other, occasionally kissing, sometimes pointing things out to each other. I had wanted that with an aching a fourteen year old barely understood.

~~~

Chapter 19

Jake

When I got back to Greeley, I had some sleepless nights. I missed Cecily more than I could have ever imagined. I would wake up and reach for her, and sometimes panic before I was fully awake.

The fear was always the same, that a faceless someone had taken her away from me.

As happy as she was to see me in Washington, and as happy as she was to be performing again, the next night she thrashed and whimpered. I had become used to her nightmares, but after sleeping alone for a couple of weeks, it was jarring to see one of them seize her in the middle of the night. I held her close, and eventually she quieted. I thought the dreams might go away once she was through with the Feds, but obviously that wasn’t the case.

I never woke her when she was having her nightmares, but I wondered if that was the right thing to do. I wondered a lot of things. I did some web surfing with the new computer, and did a lot of reading about the drug gangs in Baltimore. I also read about rape survivors.

Jeri dropped into the bar one night when business was slow.

“I haven’t seen this place so quiet in a while,” she said. I noticed the same thing. When Cecily wasn’t playing we saw a drop in traffic and revenue.

“My star attraction is entertaining elsewhere,” I said.

She gave me an appraising look. “Star attraction in more ways than one.”

“Yes, I miss her.”

“Is she doing okay?” There was something in the way Jeri asked that made me pay attention.

“She’s doing all right. Why do you ask?” 

She shrugged. “I just wondered how she’s doing back out in the big bad world without Jake McGarrity there to protect her.”

“Why do you think she needs protecting?” I wasn’t sure what Cecily might have told Jeri, and I didn’t want to violate Cecily’s privacy.

“Come on, Jake,” Jeri said. “I may not be a psychologist like my sister, but I’m not stupid. She shows up here as a starving hitchhiker and then we discover that she’s a famous opera singer. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that something seriously screwed up happened to her. She isn’t an alcoholic or drug addict, so it had to be something else.”

Jeri took a long pull from her beer. “I’m probably stepping way over the line, but I’m guessing she was running from an abusive boyfriend. I looked her up on the internet, and she had a promising career. Then she completely dropped out of sight for two years, and the next time anyone sees her is when she walks into the Roadhouse. To me, that sounds like boyfriend problems. The kind of guy who locks a girl up and controls her.”

I looked at her, weighing what to say. Jeri’s older sister Connie was a psychologist and ran the Rape Crisis Center at the university in Fort Collins.

“Jeri,” I said, “her story isn’t something I feel comfortable sharing with people, but I won’t tell you that you’re wrong.”

She nodded. “Honey, I wouldn’t hurt her, or you, for anything. And you know I’m not one to gossip. Hell, there’s more damn gossip about me in this town than I can deal with sometimes. I hate it.”

We sat for a couple of minutes in silence.

“Jake,” she finally said, “I think you should encourage her to get some counseling. Don’t push it, but support the idea. There’s something eating at her inside. Sometimes I see her react to men like a rape victim would. That’s an incredibly private and crushing thing for a woman. But like I said, she strikes me more as someone who has been dominated and abused over a long period of time.”

I considered that. It fit in both with what I knew and what I had suspected before Cecily told me her story.

“Were you ever raped, Jeri?” I asked.

“Me?” she chuckled. “A guy I dated in college tried to rape me. Dumbass. I beat the shit out of him. I don’t think he’d ever dated a cowgirl before. But I knew girls who were, and I listen to Connie vent sometimes after a few drinks.”

“So you think that a rape victim and an abuse victim are different? In their psychology, I mean.”

“Yeah, they are. In some ways the same,” she said. “But a woman can be pretty stupid when a man convinces her that he loves her. And abuse doesn’t have to be physical. In some ways, psychological abuse can be worse.”

She bit her lip, then drained her beer. “May I have another one, please?”

I pulled her another beer and set it in front of her.

“Jake, other than Connie, I never told anyone about why I got divorced. I was losing myself. He hammered me verbally. All the time. Belittled me until I felt like I wasn’t worth anything. Made me do things and act the way he wanted me to. Finally, I rebelled. Connie helped me to figure out that he didn’t really love me, he loved controlling me.”

What she told me made sense, and gave me a context to understand what Cecily had been through.

I made a resolution that when she came home, I would try to talk to her about getting some professional help.

Cecily called me after each of her concerts. Considering that I didn’t get home from the Roadhouse until three in the morning, five o’clock East Coast time, that meant she was totally exhausted when I saw her in my computer screen. But she insisted that she wanted to see me, to share her triumphs with me.

And they were triumphs. I was able to read all the reviews on the computer, and the critics loved her. She was playing to packed houses and finishing to enthusiastic standing ovations. Marcus made plans to record the final concert of the tour in Vienna, and a CD would be released shortly afterward. Sales of her existing CDs, almost non-existent at the beginning of the tour, had skyrocketed.

She also called me on the telephone every day at ten in the morning Colorado time, but the late night times were what we both looked forward to. At the end of each late night call, she would open her bathrobe and say, “See what you’re missing, Jake? I miss you terribly. I love you.” And then she would sign off.

I was happy for her, glad that she was able to resume her career. In the back of my mind, I was also a little bit afraid. What if she became a big star again and didn’t have room for me in her life? Maybe I should just sell the damn bar and follow her around. At least I’d get to hold her at night.

It was unbelievable how much I missed her. She was all I thought about all day and all night. I had my plane ticket to Vienna, and found myself counting the days.

~~~

Chapter 20

Cecily

London. I had always loved London. Being there as an adult was even better. I had performed my program enough that I was comfortable with only practicing the harp for an hour a day, and we had one rehearsal scheduled with the orchestra I would play with. Myra and I went out clubbing at night, and one day we went to Oxford and Windsor Castle.

The success of my concerts in the States had a downside, however. I now attracted press coverage and paparazzi with cameras.

We had barely checked into our hotel in London when there was a knock on my door. Myra answered it and I heard her talking to someone. Walking into the living room of my suite, I saw a man in a dark suit shove past her into the room.

“Miss Buchanan?” he asked. “I need to ask you a few questions.” He looked back at Myra. “Alone.”

I felt a numbness start to invade my mind, but fought to maintain some kind of clarity.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m from the U.S. Embassy,” he replied, which didn’t answer my question.

“May I see some identification?”

He pulled out a little wallet and flashed something. All I saw were the letters FBI. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, hit Kerrigan’s number on speed dial, and tossed the phone past the FBI agent to Myra. With a startled look on her face, she caught it.

“Tell the man who answers what’s going on,” I said. Looking back at the agent, I told him, “I think you’re out of your jurisdiction. I’d like you to leave.”

“I don’t understand what you have to be afraid of, Miss Buchanan,” he said, stepping closer to me. He towered over me, trying to intimidate me.

“And I don’t understand why you’re here,” I answered. “I don’t know why the FBI would want to interview me in London.”

“It’s a matter of national security,” he said, stepping even closer. “You have information that you’re withholding. Quit playing games, Miss Buchanan. Your attitude isn’t winning you any friends.”

“Here,” Myra said, shoving my phone in front of his face. “Her lawyer wants to talk to you.”

He looked at the phone as though it was a snake, shot me a nasty look, then whirled and walked out, slamming the door behind him. I rushed over and locked it.

“What in the world was that about?” Myra asked.

I put out my hand and she handed me my phone.

“Mr. Kerrigan?”

Nothing. The phone was dead. I looked at Myra. “He didn’t answer,” she said. “I left a message on his voice mail.”

I smiled at her.

“Mind telling me what that was about?” she persisted.

“An old boyfriend,” I said. “The FBI has been trying to get me to talk to them. I just thought it was over.”

When I was in Washington, Kerrigan told me the FBI agent on Eddie’s payroll had been arrested. Three more were under investigation. And to have an agent show up here, it was obvious what he wanted to know about.

Kerrigan called later and I told him of the afternoon’s events. The dreams were bad that night, but different from what I had become used to. I was in Eddie’s apartment, and he sent me back to the bedroom to ‘entertain’ a special guest. I was lying on the bed when my biggest nightmare walked in and dropped his pants. Behind him, a line of men stood, waiting their turns. They all had Alejandro’s face. I woke up screaming.