Chapter Seventeen

“ENTERTAINMENT BUZZ HAS been following the ongoing drama surrounding singer Bonnie Rae Shelby which began with her abrupt departure from the stage last Saturday night. Just a recap, Bonnie Rae’s inner circle called police in the early hours of Sunday, February 23, after they were unable to locate the star. Cash, credit cards, and personal items were also reported missing from the vicinity, heightening concerns that someone was involved in the disappearance of Miss Shelby, and that she might not have left the premises of her own free will.

Later sightings paired Miss Shelby with this man, an ex-convict named Infinity James Clyde. Clyde was incarcerated for armed robbery six years ago, and recently resided in the Boston area. He was last seen the night Bonnie Rae Shelby disappeared from the TD Garden in Boston. Police have contacted his mother, Greta Cleary, who still lives in the area, and have said she is cooperating with police. Police contacts say Ms. Cleary claimed her son had a job offer in Las Vegas, but close friends of Infinity Clyde’s mother say she did not see him before he left and was hurt and surprised by his sudden departure.

Miss Shelby’s manager, Ms. Raena Shelby, claims her granddaughter, Bonnie Rae Shelby, did not know Infinity James Clyde before that night, making these sightings very troublesome.

We have since had reports of assault, theft, an impounded vehicle owned by the ex-con containing Miss Shelby’s clothing and items stolen from her dressing room at the TD Garden the night of February 22, as well as a bizarre confrontation at a small bank just outside of St. Louis—”

I flipped the television off immediately. I didn’t want to listen to the rest. We were in a miniscule Oklahoma town in a roadside lodge that was actually a series of little individual red cabins not too far off the freeway, and we’d made the mistake of turning on the TV the moment we were settled in the room. The newscaster was cut off mid-sentence, and our stunned silence immediately filled the void. But her words hung in the air as if she stood there between us, waiting for us to defend ourselves. And the words weren’t the worst part.

They’d shown stock footage of me singing, signing autographs, and waving at fans. But they showed mug shots of Finn. The pictures of him in an orange jumpsuit facing both forward and in profile, with numbers stamped across the bottom, made him seem dangerous, like he was an escaped, armed convict on the loose. His hair was short in the pictures, and he was younger, but it was undeniably him.

“This is gossip. It’s just gossip, Finn,” I whispered. “There’s no meat in it. Shows like that take bits and pieces of what they think they know, and they try and stitch it together so it seems like they’ve got a real story.”

Finn nodded woodenly, but his face was drawn and his lips were pressed into a tight line.

“Do you know how often I’ve seen stories like this? Not just about me, but about friends and acquaintances in the industry. Sometimes, there isn’t a shred of truth to be found in any of it. And eventually? The story just disappears. No apologies, no recants. They just move on to someone else.”

But Finn still didn’t respond. And I felt a sudden rush of anger, so swift and so alarming that I almost gasped at the intensity. I placed a hand on the wall to steady myself.

“You haven’t done anything wrong, Finn!” I made myself whisper so that I wouldn’t shout. “I haven’t done anything wrong! I just wanted to be left alone for a little while. You helped me. We haven’t hurt anybody. We haven’t done anything!”

Finn looked up at me, and the expression on his face was so discouraged I wanted to slap him. I wanted to wipe the sorrow from his eyes, to slap the sadness away. I wanted to make him angry like I was. Anger was so much better than grief. Instead, I fisted my hands in my hair and repeated myself, the words coming out much louder than they had before.

“We haven’t done anything!” I wanted to run from the room, and shout those same words to anyone who would listen, but as suddenly as my anger had appeared, it morphed into fear. I’d so enjoyed my brief hiatus from caring, but my interlude with ambivalence was apparently over. All at once, I’d never been so afraid in my whole life. Not when I stood on a stage for the first time in front of thousands of people, not when Minnie got sick, not when her cancer came back. Not after I fell forward into the fog on a bridge in Boston. Not ever.

There was no way we were going to survive this. And I wasn’t talking about life and death survival. I wasn’t talking about incarceration. I wasn’t worried about the police. We really hadn’t done anything wrong. But we weren’t going to survive. Us. Finn and me. Bonnie and Clyde. The two of us. I wasn’t going to be able to keep him. He wouldn’t want to stay.

I ran into the bathroom and slammed the door, shedding my clothing in a frenzy, as if removing them would ease the panic that was coursing in my veins. My chest felt tight, incredibly so—so tight that I couldn’t breathe, and I wondered if I was having a heart attack the pressure was so intense. I flipped on the shower and stepped under the spray before I checked the temperature. The blast of icy water shocked me, distracting me from the vice around my heart for several welcome seconds, but as the water warmed, the fear came back, and I moaned at the simultaneous pressure and pain.

I thought I heard the door open and close. Not the door to the bathroom. I would have welcomed Finn, even in the state I was in. But it was the door that led outside. Finn had gone.

HE RAN AS fast as he could for the first fifteen minutes or so, up and down the streets of the little town, the little blip on the map that he couldn’t even remember the name of. All he knew was they were hugging the northern border of Oklahoma, more than five hundred miles from St. Louis, Missouri, where they’d started their day. And Bonnie was back at the motel, crying in the shower where she didn’t think anyone could hear her. He’d wanted to step beneath the spray with her, damn the world, damn them all, and just be with her. That’s what he’d wanted to do. But instead, he had pulled on his shorts and running shoes and fled out into the cold, quiet streets trying to purge the fear that warred with his desire for the girl who cried for him and confounded him, and made everything so much more complicated than it had to be. And none of it was really her fault. He understood that. But fault or no fault, the situation still existed.