Constance (Constance #1)(70)

“Part of me is angry we never finished them. How messed up is that? My best friend died, and I’m upset about some stupid music.”

“I think that’s what we all do, though. Find ways to make sense of”—Con waved her hand vaguely in the air—“all this. For weirdos like us, it’s music.”

Stephie laughed and leaned against Con appreciatively.

Con asked, “Kind of on that subject, but do you know what happened to my notebooks or guitar? They weren’t at her husband’s place.”

“Yeah, sure,” Stephie said, pointing through the window. “In there.”

“Seriously?”

Con went into the live room and saw her things stored neatly under a table. She sat cross-legged on the floor. Reverently, she opened the case and took out the guitar. She tuned it and tried to strum a C chord, but it didn’t come out right. In her mind, she knew what to play, but her fingers struggled to follow along. Eventually, she got her fingers in place, but she had to look at her hand and tell each finger where to go, like a child learning her first chords. Or a clone remembering how to walk again.

Stephie followed her into the live room and sat at the bench of a world-weary Hammond B3 organ attached to a Leslie speaker cabinet. She listened while Con struggled through the chord progression of “North Dakota,” an old Lyle Lovett song. Texas country was the only kind of music her mother would tolerate, and Con had taught herself hundreds of old songs so she could practice without catching hell: Tish Hinojosa, Nanci Griffith, Townes Van Zandt, Terri Hendrix, and so many others. It was a surprise yet no surprise at all that she would return to them now to remind herself how to play. Always start at the beginning, her gamma had said, otherwise a body is apt to get lost.

Third time through, Con’s fingers moved less stubbornly. Stephie switched on the Hammond, holding the run toggle for ten seconds before flipping the start switch. She filled in around the edges of Con’s halting guitar with honeyed chords that gave Con the courage to look away from the strings and keep playing by touch and memory. Together, they began to sing, Stephie taking the Rickie Lee Jones part, her breathless, ethereal soprano blending with Con’s rougher alto. It felt like old times, and Con would have given anything to stay in the middle of that song forever. But when the end came, she let it fade away, tapping out the final syncopated rhythm—a castaway’s heartbeat—on the body of the guitar.

The room fell silent, neither of them wanting to be the first to break the spell. Con looked down at the guitar—her guitar—and felt vindicated at what it meant. Her original hadn’t been coming to Charlottesville because she was having an affair. Nor had she sneaked her guitar and music out of Levi Greer’s house because she was leaving him. She’d been coming to Charlottesville to record music with Stephie.

“So she just walked in the door one day?” Con asked.

Stephie laughed. “Pretty much. I was working the counter, and she strolled in like she’d been coming in every day for years. Said she’d married a guy in Richmond and wanted to make things right with us.”

That sounded like her old self—straightforward and direct. She missed that version of Con D’Arcy. “When was that exactly?”

Stephie thought it over. “A year, give or take.”

“And she was really over Zhi?” Con said, standing and putting the guitar back in its case.

“No,” Stephie said simply. “But I think she was starting to make her peace with knowing she’d never really get over it. Zhi had passed that New Year’s Eve, and she’d only met Levi a few days earlier. She talked about being in this moment when her grief was telling her that she had no right to be happy. How close she’d come to picking some stupid fight as an excuse to blow it up before it even got started. We talked a lot about that—whether we were allowed to move on. I know I don’t ever want to forget Hugh. He’s a part of me, part of this amazing time in my life. But he’s a part of my past. Elena is my future. I think Hugh would have liked her.”

“Do you have any idea why my original wouldn’t tell her husband she was coming here?”

“She needed to finish this music, but I think she felt guilty about it too. I’m a part of her old life. A connection to Zhi. I know she loved her husband, but everything was his, you know? His house. His stuff. His friends. They didn’t start a life together so much as she joined his life already in progress. I think that was partly why she reached out to me—to reconnect with something that was just hers.”

“Thank you for helping her,” Con said. “How did she seem to you at the end?”

“Couldn’t begin to tell you. We haven’t seen her since she stopped coming around six months ago, but she was sure as hell strange that last day.”

“Six months?” But the police had found her car in Charlottesville after her original went missing, and GPS records showed her making regular visits in the last few months. If she’d stopped visiting Stephie, then why had she kept coming? “Police think her husband killed her because she was having an affair with someone in Charlottesville.”

“Here? No way. When she was here, we worked.” Stephie thought back. “But that last day, she was anxious about something. She’d been traveling with her husband, so I was looking forward to getting back to work. Right away, I knew something was wrong.”