She sipped her water and watched the tables filling up quickly. Claire Belfort obviously had a reputation. Anyone could fill the club on Saturday night, but it was Tuesday, and that meant the crowd was coming to see her. Serena had been ready to assume that Boni’s money had paved the way for his daughter’s career, but now she wasn’t so sure. The Limelight was a dive, but the people who came to the shows knew music.
At nine o’clock, Claire’s band took their places. It was a typical country arrangement, with fiddle, bass, drums, and steel. The lights went down in the showroom, and overhead cans lit the stage. The band opened with a keening, melancholy tune, and Serena recognized it immediately as one of her favorite songs: “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” a bitter elegy about the plight of Kentucky coal miners. Serena had heard Patty Loveless sing it, and Patty was a tough act to follow.
Then, from offstage, she heard a smoky voice wrapping itself around the lyrics and weaving all the pain in the world into the music. Claire’s voice could have stood up to the demands of the blues. It was strong and filled with emotion, but with a nuance in her expression that Serena had only heard in the most mature country singers. She sounded a little like Allison Moorer, with a voice so sorrowful and hypnotic that Serena found it arousing to listen to, and irresistible, like one of the Sirens.
Claire walked into the light from the corner of the stage. She kept singing, as applause erupted and then turned into a hush as people listened to the song. She had long, strawberry blond hair, with wavy ends that swished around her shoulders. Her face was angular, with hard edges and dimples in her cheeks, and a small birthmark in the hollow of one dimple that made her face both imperfect and attractive. She had piercing, intelligent blue eyes. She wore an untucked pink silk shirt, with its top three buttons undone, black pants that clung to her slim legs, and razor-thin stiletto heels. Light glinted on her gold hoop earrings.
She came to the very front of the stage, directly above Serena, singing a poignant story about a grandfather in the nineteenth century who went back into the coal mines to feed his family, only to die there like so many others. The music was haunting. Serena found herself staring up at Claire on the stage, enraptured. Their eyes met, and a strange, electric sensation passed between them. Serena passed it off as her imagination, but it felt real and intense.
When the song ended, with Claire whispering the last few lines over and over like a ghost, Serena found herself on her feet, applauding. She saw the flush in Claire’s face and the way she thrived on the energy of the crowd.
Claire moved on to another country ballad and followed it with a rockabilly foot-stomper, then a medley of bluegrass covers. All of them were sad songs, with lyrics about loss and surrender and death, the kind of song that would ring false with a lesser singer. Claire brought them to life, made them real and sorrowful. In every tragedy she sang about, she found an inner longing that Serena could relate to and remember.
Her eyes kept coming back to Serena. Speaking to her. Teasing her. This wasn’t Serena’s imagination. When they looked at each other, Claire’s lips would crease into a small smile, not of humor or irony but of kinship. It was almost as if Claire were singing to her. Or that was how it felt.
Serena found herself being seduced.
It was a sensation from long ago that she hadn’t felt for years. She wasn’t drinking anything but water, but she felt drunk anyway. The music and smoke made her light-headed. Claire’s voice felt like soft hands on her body, and Serena felt naked and exposed.
It was electrifying.
An hour later, Claire opened her dressing room door with the same dark smile. Her skin glowed with sweat from her performance. Her eyes, seeing Serena, were bright and curious.
“I’m Serena Dial,” Serena told her. “I’m a homicide investigator with Metro. I’d like to talk with you.”
Most people folded and became putty hearing what she did. They started spilling years-old secrets. Claire just arched an eyebrow to show her surprise and opened the door a little wider, so that Serena could squeeze past her.
The dressing room was small and dreary. Yellowing linoleum stretched across the floor. The ceiling was made up of water-stained foam panels, and aluminum pie pans on the floor caught occasional drips that plinked like music. There was a sleeper sofa on the right and a card table with several chairs around it. Hangers holding Claire’s costumes dangled from a clothes rack on wheels. She had a refrigerator, a sink, and a bathroom at the rear.
Claire gestured to the sofa and the card table. “Take your pick.”
Serena sat in one of the card-table chairs.
“Can I get you a drink?” Claire asked. When Serena shook her head, she added, “I guess it would be bad form to offer a joint to a cop.”
Serena laughed. Claire retrieved a bottle of water from the refrigerator and slouched into one of the other chairs, her long legs stretched out, her elbow on the table. She opened the water bottle with slim, delicate fingers. “Serena Dial,” she said. “Great name.”
“Thanks.”
Claire leaned over and combed her hand through Serena’s black hair. “I love your hair, too. What do you use?”
Serena told her, feeling embarrassed that it was just a cheap shampoo.
Claire nodded and rocked back in the chair. “I guess detectives don’t talk about those kinds of things. You’re tough, right? Detectives are tough. Shouldn’t you be fat and wear a bad suit, instead of being gorgeous?”
“This is my after-hours look,” Serena said with a smile. “During the day I’m fat and wear polyester.”
Claire smiled. “Did you like my show?”
“I thought you were amazing,” Serena told her honestly. “Why aren’t you in Nashville?”
“What, this isn’t glamorous?” Claire replied. She caught one of the drips from the ceiling in her hand. “I don’t do this for the money, and here I can sing whatever I want, whenever I want. In Nashville, people would want to control me.”
“Like your father,” Serena said.
Claire pursed her lips. “Yes, like my father. Am I supposed to be impressed that you know about him? It’s not a secret.”
“But you don’t advertise it.”
“No, I don’t. He probably likes it that way, too. Is that why you’re here? To talk about Boni?”
Serena nodded. “In part.”
“What’s the other part?” Claire asked, taking a drink of water.
“To tell you that you might be in danger.”
“That’s intriguing,” Claire said. “Will you be the one to protect me?”
“This isn’t a joke. Two people are dead.”
Claire nodded. “I never said it was a joke. But why would anyone want to kill me? Because I’m Boni’s daughter? We may be estranged, Serena, but someone would have to be a fool to do that. I know my father, and you’re a cop, so I guess you do, too. Boni would eradicate them. Torture them. They’d wind up in a cornfield like Spilotro.”
“I don’t think whoever is doing this cares about that.” Serena explained about the deaths of Peter Hale and MJ Lane, and the connection that had brought the detectives back to the forty-year-old death of Amira Luz. She added, “Have you ever heard of Amira?”
“No” Claire said. “Boni never mentioned her. But I wasn’t born until later that year.”
“How about Walker Lane?”
“I know of him, of course, but that’s it I wouldn’t have been able to tell you he had anything to do with my father.”
“Why are you and your father estranged?” Serena asked.
Claire didn’t answer. She put her bottle of water between her lips and drank again. Then she took one of Serena’s hands in hers and turned it over, palm upward. Serena didn’t pull away. Claire used her middle finger to lightly trace a line down along Serena’s palm to her wrist. Claire’s finger was moist from the condensation on the bottle.