Double Minds by Terri Blackstock Read Free Book Online Page B

hot. I ain’t crawlin’ in no dumpsters. I’ve paid my dues.” Rayzo ambled out toward his car.
    Gibson looked a little pale. “Well, guess I’d better get on it.” He took the stack of pictures and looked around for his keys. Eventually, he realized they were in his pocket. “I gotta go.”
    She suddenly felt the chill of vulnerability. She didn’t want to be here alone. “Do you think you’ll be back tonight?”
    “Doubtful. I have a lot to do. You’re not scared, are you?”
    She didn’t want him to know she was. She’d spent a lot of time proving to her family how independent she was. “Should I be?”
    “Maybe. You need to load that gun I bought you.”
    She hated guns, and when he’d given it to her for her last birthday, she’d kept it in the box, refusing to put ammunition in it. In fact, he had forgotten to give her bullets—or rounds, or whatever they called them—so the gun was useless, just as she wanted it.
    “Yeah, I still have it.”
    “Well, don’t be afraid to use it if anything happens,” he said. “You should get a dog.”
    “I don’t usually need one. I have a cop who sleeps on my couch.”
    She watched as he left, then turned the light back off and went to her room, changed into some sweatpants and a T-shirt, and slipped under her covers. She would leave the lamp on in the living room.
    She tried to sleep, but she dreamed of dead bodies, a brain-movie scored by a melody she’d never heard. When she woke, she was in a cold sweat. She went into the living room to see if Gibson had come in. The couch was empty.
    As she often did when she woke in the night, she went into her music room and fired up her computer. Opening her recording software, she picked out the melody she’d heard in her dream. Slowly, she began to flesh it out with lyrics—a song about the fragility of life, the sudden ending of innocence, the shock of a life ripped away.
    Though she attributed her gift of ideas and talent to God, she saw many of her songs through the eyes of a character named Lola, whom she’d created years before. No one knew about this alter-ego who lived out Parker’s emotions. She never mentioned Lola in the songs, but her quiet friend came to her at night in fits of brilliance and urged her to write songs that Serene could record. Lola had experienced divorce and brutal breakups, the death of a child, the grief of a mother. She had been so happy that she wanted to dance, had praised God so intensely that she could almost fly. She’d been suicidal, brokenhearted, grief-stricken, and abandoned. She had commitment issues, control issues, anger issues, and she battled loneliness and passion. She’d been in love more times than Parker could count.
    Lola was insecure yet confident, strong yet fainthearted, courageous yet unruly, and she always seemed to land on her feet. Lola provided Parker a way of holding her problems at bay so she could observe them from every angle.
    Tonight Lola had been treading through Parker’s dreams, and now the after-effect, the composing of a song that might be one of her best yet, gave Parker a little satisfaction. This one she would keep for herself, for her own CD. This one might actually put her on the map.
    By the time Gibson came in, scruffy, starving, and dying for sleep, Parker found that she was exhausted as well. She tossed Gibsona pillow, saying, “I didn’t sleep much at all. I can’t believe I have to go to work in three hours.”
    “Not today,” he said. “The building’s sealed. Nobody’s going there today.”
    Relieved, she went back to bed. She slept deeply for the next three hours.
    And then she woke with a grief she hadn’t expected and decided she needed to do something about it.

CHAPTER
    SIX
    Belmont University sat at the end of one of the major streets that made up Music Row. Belmont Mansion loomed in all its antebellum glory as the frontal piece of the campus on Wedge wood Avenue, along with a matching administration building