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.Natalie.She was a born entertainer, blessed with an uncanny ability to captivate an audience.Pretty soon, the vibration of stomping feet was making Zeke’s table jiggle.Watching Natalie, he suddenly got an eerie, inexplicable sense of impending disaster.His heart started to pound.His body tensed.The crazy thing was, he had no idea why.Perhaps it was a sixth sense kicking in to give him a vital few seconds of forewarning so he would be able to react quickly.Then he saw it—a slight shift of the sound-system platform suspended above the stage.He leaped to his feet with such speed and forward momentum that he sent his chair flying backward.Natalie turned her dark head to look at him, her brown eyes filling with question.Running toward her, Zeke thought, Oh, God—oh, God!It was as if everything happened in slow motion.Zeke had to cover only a few feet—six to ten, at the most—but it seemed to take an eternity.He saw the platform above Natalie break completely loose from the ceiling on one side, plaster raining so slowly downward that it seemed to float like feathers.Natalie glanced up, her face contorting with terror.Her guitar slipped from her hip and fell in a wide arc, the neck grasped in only one of her slender hands.Beyond her, Frank Stephanopolis jumped up from the piano bench, turned, and tried to run.Zeke saw it all unfolding before him like a scene in a movie.His boots impacted so hard with the floor with each running step that jolts went clear through his body.Trying to save herself, Natalie hunched her shoulders, threw up an arm to protect her head, and fled toward the edge of the stage.Not quickly enough.Zeke had no idea how much the speakers, amps, and framework weighed, but he instinctively knew that it was enough to kill anyone unlucky enough to be standing below.Natalie.In a last, desperate attempt to reach her before the platform collapsed on the stage, Zeke pushed off with one foot in a flying leap.He caught Natalie around the waist, carrying her along with him as he hit the steps and rolled.He heard screams and shouts, followed by a deafening explosion of noise.When Zeke and Natalie came to a stop, he rolled a final time to come out on top and hunched his body over hers to shield her from the falling debris.A two-by-four struck him across the back.A speaker fell beside them, one corner colliding sharply with his hip.Then, almost as quickly as it happened, the noise stopped, and a hush fell over the room.It lasted only an instant before chaos erupted.Running footsteps, screams and curses.Zeke lifted himself off of Natalie, frantically running his hands over her arms and legs to check her for injuries.“Are you all right?” he cried.“Are you hurt anywhere?”“Fine, I’m fine.What happened?” Even as she asked the question, she looked toward the stage and screamed, a long, high-pitched wail, followed by, “Frank! Oh, dear God! Frank?”Zeke sprang to his feet and ran toward the stage where Frank Stephanopolis lay buried under the demolished platform.Motionless.Even as Zeke tore at the boards and sections of blue plywood to reach the unconscious piano player, he yelled, “Someone call an ambulance!”Natalie despised speckled linoleum.Zeke’s sports jacket draped over her shoulders, she sat on the edge of a chair in the ER waiting room, holding a vendor cup of cold coffee between her hands, wondering vaguely how her life had become such a nightmare.Frank Stephanopolis was in surgery.He had sustained a serious head injury, several broken bones, and a crushed pelvis.The doctor who’d come out to see them a while ago said that the piano was all that had saved Frank’s life.The platform had crashed onto the Baldwin first, sparing Frank’s body the full impact of all that weight.Sharon Stephanopolis, Frank’s wife, sat huddled across from Natalie on an ugly green chair, her hair mussed, her eyelids smudged with mascara.She was a thin woman with a bony, angular face and dishwater-blond hair.Every once in a while, she glanced at her watch.“It’s been so long,” she said again.“Surely he’s out of surgery by now.”Natalie shook her head.“It’s been only forty minutes.Have faith, Sharon.He’s going to be all right.He has to be.”Sharon looked at her imploringly.“Why does something like this happen to someone like my Frank? He’s such a good man.He’s never hurt anyone.”Natalie felt as if a party balloon were being inflated inside her chest.Every time she looked into Sharon’s pain-filled eyes, the pressure increased.She wanted to say that the collapse hadn’t been intended for Frank, that it should have fallen on her.But if she so much as hinted that the collapse hadn’t been an accident, Sharon would ask a dozen questions.Natalie had no answers yet.Zeke had driven her to the hospital to be with Frank, and then he’d returned to the club to see what had caused the platform to collapse.He’d called her on the cell a few minutes ago, his voice taut with worry, to tell her that the eyebolts anchoring the sound-system platform to the ceiling had been cut nearly in two.Not an accident.That was all Natalie could focus on.Zeke hadn’t overreacted the other night after the burglary at the club.Someone had indeed sneaked inside and hidden until Jake and Hank left, and the place had been booby-trapped, just as Zeke had suspected.He’d only guessed wrong about the threat.Someone had spent all those hours compromising the eyebolts, expressly to make the platform fall during one of Natalie’s performances.After first hearing the news, Natalie had been frightened.Now she just felt furious.Frank.He might die because of her.He had two little boys and a wonderful wife.Sharon was right; he had never harmed anyone so far as Natalie knew.And now he was in surgery, fighting for his life because someone wanted her dead.How could this happen to a nice man whose sole endeavor in life was to create beautiful music for the pleasure of others?Why? The question circled endlessly in Natalie’s mind.She’d seen nothing significant inside Robert’s home.She had an insane urge to run outside the hospital and scream, “I don’t know anything, damn you! Leave me alone! Leave the people I love alone!” Worst of all, according to Zeke, the police were saying that the collapse had been an accident caused by too much weight on weakened supports.They believed the bolts had snapped under stress when people in the crowd had started stomping their feet.Zeke swore up and down that any idiot could see the bolts had been cut, but Monroe had just accused him of being an alarmist.Natalie felt so tired.So awfully, horribly tired.The events of the last week were a jumble in her mind.Before ending their conversation, Zeke had made her promise not to leave the ER waiting room alone.It was madness.Someone was trying to kill her.Things like this didn’t happen in Crystal Falls, yet it was happening.Her grand reopening had culminated in a grand disaster because someone wanted her dead.Natalie was staring into her coffee, pondering the absurdities of that when her mom and dad arrived.Naomi sat on one side of her, Pete on the other.Each of them curled an arm around her.Natalie looked at Sharon and felt awful.Frank’s wife was the one who needed family around her right now.Unfortunately, Sharon and Frank’s relatives lived clear down in Modesto.A half hour later, the surgeon came out to speak with them.Still dressed for surgery with a blue cap on his head, he sat beside Sharon.“He’s out of the woods now,” he began.“Oh!” Sharon covered her face with her hands and started to weep.“Oh, thank God.”The doctor patted her shoulder.“He was a very lucky man, Mrs.Stephanopolis.If he’d been standing under that platform, he wouldn’t be with us now [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]