Run Rose Run(48)

Ethan followed Ruthanna through her garden, his head foggy from lack of sleep. “No, ma’am. Nothing.”

AnnieLee hadn’t even let him bring her to Ruthanna’s last night the way he’d wanted to. She’d insisted on being driven back to her terrible motel, to a room that made Ethan’s humble apartment look like Windsor Castle, but she wouldn’t let him come inside. So he’d waited outside her door until he heard the locks click into place, and then he’d sat in his truck like a sentry until the sun peeked over the horizon.

It was strange to feel so fiercely protective of her, especially when he knew she didn’t want him to be.

“Does she think she can’t trust us?” Ruthanna asked.

“I’m not sure that’s the problem,” Ethan said. But he couldn’t articulate what he thought the problem was. There was something unreasonable, almost pathological, about AnnieLee’s refusal to answer any of his questions. She’d always seemed tough yet innocent. But was he misjudging her? She was certainly one of the most tight-lipped females he’d ever encountered.

“Those men last night—” Ruthanna began.

“They weren’t from around here.”

Ruthanna plucked a big pink flower from its stem and tucked it behind her ear. In the soft morning light, she looked as young and fresh-faced as a girl. “How do you know?”

Ethan shrugged. He couldn’t pretend he knew every tough in town, but he knew a lot of them. It came with the territory of late nights and liquor—and, no doubt, the Rusty Spur’s tendency to hire ex-cons and bad boys as bartenders and bouncers. “Instinct,” he said.

“So is our girl just in the wrong place at the wrong time? A lot? Or is there more to the story?”

Ethan took out his utility knife and began opening and closing it as they walked, an old, nervous habit. His friend Antoine had given it to him for his birthday when they were stationed together in Afghanistan, wrapping the gift in toilet paper and tying it with a spare shoelace. Two weeks later, Antoine was dead, killed by an IED in a dusty Kandahar street. Now the blade flashed and gleamed in the sunlight—a beautiful, lethal thing.

“Ahem,” Ruthanna said.

Ethan startled. It’d been a while since memories of his service had come on strong like that. “What? Sorry, Ruthanna.”

“I said, let’s get her out of town.”

He waited for her to explain what she meant.

She began to cut tall stems of hollyhocks for a bouquet, and she handed them to him as she walked. “I’m going to set up a meeting with ACD,” she said.

“Really?” Ethan said. ACD was a huge record label. It wasn’t based in Nashville, either, but nine hundred miles away in New York City. “I thought you said she should put out her EP, get good streaming numbers, and then look for a label.”

“Well, that was your idea, actually, and it was a pretty good one. But I want her to have more support right off the bat. I thought about calling Jody at BMH here in Nashville again, but she never sent the scout she promised. So I’ve reached out to the big guns, and they’ve agreed to a meeting with AnnieLee.” She poked Ethan in the side with a red-nailed finger. “And you’re going to New York with her, Blake—as chaperone.”

“Says who?” he blurted, regretting the words even as they came out of his mouth.

“Says me,” Ruthanna said, severing the head off a fading rose with a slash of her clippers. “Your boss. You got a problem with that?”

“I just…don’t think…” But then he stopped. What were his objections, honestly? Of course he’d go anywhere AnnieLee went. So what was the problem? He dug a toe into the soft grass. Was he worried that AnnieLee Keyes would go all the way to New York City with her big voice and her borrowed guitar and fail to win them over?

Or that she’d succeed?

And then she might leave you behind. The voice was so small he could almost pretend he didn’t hear it.

Ethan knew he didn’t understand the business, not the way Ruthanna did; he was only on its fringes. But he’d seen the way it could grind people up and spit them back out. AnnieLee seemed truly driven. But so had his friend Jake, who’d signed with Warner Music, put out an album that no one bought, and suffered such a crisis of confidence he nearly drank himself into an early grave.

Willie Nelson himself once lay down in the middle of Lower Broadway, considering the possibility that a car might roll over him. It was a tough business.

But Ruthanna seemed to have no worries about AnnieLee’s prospects.

“If she won’t tell us what’s going on,” Ruthanna said, “then fine. I don’t have to know.” She glanced down at her long, dangerous-looking nails. “I’ll deal with the professional side only. I was always extra good at that part.”

Ethan thought he heard a sudden note of sorrow in her voice, and he reached out and touched her shoulder. He could guess what Ruthanna was thinking: how she’d lost a daughter and then a husband, and now she was rattling around in a huge mansion alone, writing and recording songs that she didn’t want anyone but a handful of studio musicians to hear.

Some people said you should never meet your idols: you’d only see their feet of clay. But Ruthanna, as ornery as she could be, had never shown herself to be anything other than magnificent.