Ruthanna stared at him. “That’s some highfalutin poetics for nine a.m. Also, to be perfectly honest, she sounds depressing.”
Ethan rolled his eyes, and Ruthanna laughed at him. “She was hot, though, wasn’t she?”
“That’s not the point,” he said.
“Of course it is,” Ruthanna said. “What’d that old bird Tennyson say? ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’”
“Now who’s got the poetics?” Maya asked. “Also, I think that poem ends sort of tragically.”
“Seriously, Ruthanna, I’d think you’d care,” Ethan protested. “She’s good, and she was playing at the Cat’s Paw. That’s your bar, if you recall, and in my mind, that gives you dibs.”
Ruthanna got up from her window seat and slid across the kitchen in her gold velvet slippers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about dibs for. She’s not mine because she sang in my bar, you big oaf. I’ve got no interest in wannabe country singers, anyway,” she said. “I don’t care if they sing like angels or pick like Doc Watson. I don’t care if that girl was born with a Dobro in her hand and a harmonica in her mouth.” Ruthanna was on a roll now, and her sentences became lines of a song she was making up as she went. “I don’t care if she’s pretty as a daisy or if she can belt out the high notes in ‘Crazy,’” she sang.
Maya came in with her low, rich alto. “Ruthanna’s retired and she deserves to be lazy…”
Ethan started laughing—he couldn’t help it. “Are you two about done?” he said.
They turned toward him, grinning. “Probably,” said Ruthanna. “I can’t think of anything else that rhymes with lazy.”
“Jay-Z?” Maya offered.
“Look,” Ethan said. “I’m not telling you this for my own good. I’m just here to say that I think you’d really like this girl.” He patted Ruthanna on the shoulder. “She’s a lot like you,” he said. “Beautiful, talented…and mean as tobacco spit.”
Ruthanna looked at him in surprise, and he froze. Had he crossed a line? Ruthanna had a legendary temper, and few people could get away with talking to her like that. What on earth made him think he was one of them?
“I’m sorr—” he began, and then she threw a kitchen towel at him, hitting him squarely in the chest.
“For your information, I take all of those things as a compliment,” she said.
He let out a sigh of relief. “That’s good,” he said. “Because I meant them that way.”
“I still don’t care about your singer, though,” she said. Then her face brightened and she held up a finger. “Wait—I’ve got it: Martin Scorsese!”
“I thought you said you were done,” Ethan moaned, as Ruthanna laughed all the way down to the recording room.
Chapter
10
AnnieLee woke at dawn to the sound of voices. She was frigid and sore from sleeping on the ground, but she held herself perfectly still, not even breathing as she strained to listen. How close were they?
And more importantly, were they coming closer?
She could hear a man and a woman, the latter saying something about an “EDP” she’d talked down off a bridge the day before: “…couldn’t convince him I wasn’t the ghost of his dead aunt,” she said. “Dude was whiter than a bedsheet and he’s got a Black aunt? I doubt it. But being confused about who I was had to be the least of his problems, poor thing.”
They were definitely getting closer, and AnnieLee didn’t have to know what an EDP was to know that they weren’t just a nice couple out for a morning stroll. They were cops. She could hear the swagger in the male cop’s voice as he talked about tracking down a man suspected of holding up a Circle K.
AnnieLee quickly slithered out of her sleeping bag and tried to stuff it into her pack as she ducked into the bushes to hide. She was about to get down on her hands and knees to crawl deeper into the greenery when the man said, “Hold up there.”
AnnieLee cursed under her breath as she slowly turned around, straightening the backpack on her shoulders. Maybe they’d think she was out for a sunrise walk?
“Good morning, officers,” she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.
In the branches above her, a crow coughed out three loud, hoarse squawks. AnnieLee glanced up at the shiny black bird, bobbing near the treetop, and then looked back at the cops, who’d failed to wish her a good morning in return.