Always Watching Read Free Page B

what happened. She’d need someone to talk to —
    A knock sounded on the door. I hurried toward it. “Yeah?”
    Carly Sanders, my favorite of Rayne’s three backup singers, opened the door before I could reach it. “Hey there, Shaley.” Tears had tracked through the blusher on her black face.
    “Hi.” My chest constricted at the sight of her large, kind eyes. Carly had a way of looking not at me, but
through
me, as if she could read my soul.
    She hugged me briefly but hard. “I came to tell you I’m going to pick up your friend at the airport.”
    “Oh, thanks. I was just going to find someone. Is the limo still here?”
    “Yes. Mick took care of it.”
    Funny how unsettled that made me feel. People were always “taking care” of details for Mom and me. Suddenly, I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to take care of my own friend.
    I wanted to find out who did this to Tom.
    Carly put a hand underneath my chin. “I’m so sorry, Shaley. How
awful
for you. I know what a friend Tom was to you.”
    Was.
    My face crumbled.
    Carly pulled me close again and patted my back, crooning like a mother to her baby. “Poor child. Jesus, help her. Only your power and strength can help Shaley get through this.”
    Carly talks as openly about God as Mom talks about publicity, but I’d never heard her pray for me before. It felt strange but good.
    I pulled back, wiping at the tears. “You’d better leave.”
    “Yeah.”
    I stepped into the doorway to watch her go. To the left of the threshold stood the ever-brooding Bruce, feet apart and arms folded. Solid as a mountain.
    “Hi.” I sniffed. “Didn’t know you were here.”
    Like Mick, Bruce had served in the Marines. His hands and feet are huge, his face all stark angles with deep-set brown eyes. With his blond hair in a ponytail and a trimmed goatee, he looks like a hairy version of Lurch from the old
Addams Family
reruns. Like Lurch, he rarely smiles.
    “I’m always here for you, Shaley.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    That new resentment stirred within me once more — irrational, but there it was. Mom and I, as well as the rest of the band,
needed
to be guarded. Especially now. But I didn’t want to be cut off from the world. I wanted to
do
something. I wanted to fight back against the evil that had happened to us.
    “You okay?” Bruce asked.
    I looked at the floor. “No.”
    He nodded. “I’m sorry. It’s a shock. Wish I’d found him instead of you.”
    Me too.
    I turned to look down the wide curving hallway. Carly was about to round the corner out of sight. From the other directioncame Jerry Brand, one of our bus drivers. He nodded kindly to Carly as she passed.
    Stage manager Pete Strickland, in charge of all logistics — traveling to a new venue, setting up, loading out — appeared farther down the hall and spoke to an officer. Pete’s thin lips and hooked nose had earned him the nickname
Hawk.
He was like a hawk too, always keeping an eye on everything that happened. Most likely he was now questioning when we could leave. He and the officer spoke for a moment before Pete turned to talk to Jerry.
    Memories of the yellow crime-scene tape tugged at me. On TV it seemed so benign. In real life it looked brutal.
    What was happening backstage?
    Was Tom still in Ross’s office, lying on the floor? I thought of all the crime shows I’d seen, people plucking stray hairs and pieces of lint from the body. Taking pictures, discussing the corpse’s temperature and position, theorizing how and when the murder had occurred.
    How cold and inhuman. He wasn’t Tom anymore; he was just a mound of evidence waiting to be hauled to the morgue.
    My stomach flip-flopped.
    Who
had done this to him?
Why?
    I leaned against the doorjamb, gazing at nothing, mounting anger mixing with my pain. Somebody had killed Tom. That person needed to
pay.
    And I was going to do everything I could — and more — to make sure that happened.
    Lifting my chin, I stepped into the hallway, set on