The Ex-Change novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Stage Rig

Jude's POV

The finale stage was a barge two hundred feet long, anchored a quarter mile off the villa's shore.

I stood on it at three in the afternoon with my guitar case in my hand.

It looked like a spaceship somebody had landed in a lake.

The deck had been painted white and ringed with lights.

Steel towers held a wall of screens at the far end, and a footbridge ran back to the shore.

Eight hundred empty seats climbed the hillside in the sun.

In the middle of the deck, flush with the boards, there was a square of black grating.

"That's the lift," said a stagehand, walking past with a coil of cable.

"Twelve-oh-five, two people rise out of the floor," he said. "Flowers, strings, a ring. Don't stand on it."

I stepped around it.

Callie came across the footbridge ten minutes later with her coat buttoned to the chin.

She was white to the lips, and she took my elbow.

"Vanessa was in the audio truck," she said, very low. "She came out holding a thumb drive."

"Whose?"

"The sound tech's. The clip was in the truck's board, and she was alone with it for twenty minutes."

They had carried the whole audio rig out to the barge at noon.

His desk was a folding table under a canopy at the stern, with a mixing board and a laptop on road cases.

He wasn't there.

I sat down in his chair and opened the laptop.

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