Every Song He Stole Was Mine novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Guide Vocal

Jude plays the old session with her flat second note and offers help with no contract, then Dax's lawyer serves a restraining order that locks her out of her own notebooks.

Gold Line Records had a glass lobby and a security desk, and the guard at it knew my face.

"Ms. Ellery," he said. "Mr. Ransome is expecting you. Fourth floor."

Tilda came with me, because Jude's text had said tell no one but your friend.

I wore yesterday's jeans and his charcoal jacket.

His office was smaller than I expected.

There was a battered desk, a wall of shelves with reel boxes stacked up to the ceiling, and a mixing board in the corner with a coffee cup balanced on it.

Jude stood up when we came in.

He had not shaved.

"Thank you for coming," he said. "Sit. Please."

"Why am I here?" I asked.

"Because I think you wrote Paper Sparrow."

He said it plainly.

My throat closed up.

For six years nobody had said that sentence to me.

"I think you wrote every track on it," he said. "I've thought so for a long time. I couldn't prove it, and I wasn't going to accuse my biggest artist on a feeling."

"What changed?" Tilda asked.

"Last night changed it."

He went to the mixing board and pressed a key.

A speaker came alive, and a voice came out of it, a woman's voice, thin and a little hoarse.

It was singing the first line of track four.

It was my voice.

"That's from the multitrack session," Jude said. "It's a guide vocal. Someone laid it down so the band could follow the melody. Dax's own vocal goes on top, three weeks later."

I listened to myself sing a melody I had written at our kitchen table.

On the second note, I went flat.

"There," Tilda said, and pointed at the speaker, then at me. "You always do that."

"I always do that."

"Every demo you've ever sent me."

"The engineer on that session put a note in the file," Jude said. "Guide vocal, J.E., not for release. I kept every session from that album. Nobody asked me to, and nobody knew I had."

"Why did you keep them?"

He rubbed his jaw.

"Because Dax once told me he wrote Paper Sparrow in forty minutes in a hotel room. Then I watched him try to rewrite one line on a live show, and he could not."

"Dax can't write," I said.

It was strange to say it out loud.

I had known it for years and never said it to anyone, not even to myself.

"I need more than a guide vocal to win this," Jude said. "A guide vocal proves you were in a studio. It doesn't prove you wrote the song. I need your notebooks."

I shook my head.

"They're in his studio, in a cabinet at the house. He changed the locks last night."

"Then we get them out."

"How? He has lawyers. I have a closed bank card."

"I have a studio at the end of the hall with a bed in the back room," Jude said. "You can use both while we work this out."

"No," I said.

Tilda looked at me.

"I'm not saying no to the help," I said. "I'm saying no to the contract that's about to come after it."

Jude's mouth moved, not quite a smile.

"There's no contract."

"There's always a contract."

"Not this time. I'll put it in writing, right now. You sign nothing, you owe me nothing, and I don't touch a note of yours."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because the last time somebody trusted me with a song, I let it sit in a drawer," he said. "I won't do it twice."

I did not ask what he meant.

He took a legal pad from his desk and wrote three lines on it in black ink.

He signed it, tore the page off, and handed it to me.

No contract. No claim on any song. Joanna owes Gold Line nothing. J. Ransome.

I read it twice.

I folded it into my pocket.

"All right," I said. "I'll use the studio."

"Good."

"I'm not signing, and I'm not sleeping in your back room. I'll go home with Tilda at night."

"Fine."

He sounded almost amused.

"One more thing," I said. "You stood up in that ballroom. You told your own artist's guards that nobody touches me. He's going to punish you for that."

"He can try."

"A distributor owns 40 percent of your label. If Dax walks, they'll push you out."

"Then he's going to find out how much of a label I actually own," Jude said.

Tilda grinned at him.

I think that was the moment she decided she liked him.

My phone buzzed.

It was Dax's lawyer, a man whose name I had never been allowed to learn, and the message was one line.

Be advised that you have been served.

The elevator dinged in the hall outside.

Then there were footsteps, and the guard from the lobby, who sounded much less friendly than he had ten minutes ago.

"Mr. Ransome? There's a man here from Mr. Kingsley's attorney."

"Send him up," Jude said.

A man in a gray suit walked into the office with a thick envelope.

He did not look at Jude.

He looked at me.

"Joanna Ellery?" he said. "This is a restraining order barring you from the Kingsley home and from the studio at 20 Mill Street. A hearing is set for Monday."

He put the envelope on Jude's desk.

"Mr. Kingsley asks that you stay away from his property. And he asks me to say that if you go near it, he will have you arrested."

Then he turned and left.

I stared at the envelope.

My notebooks, my six years of work, were behind a door I was no longer allowed to open.

Jude picked the envelope up and weighed it in one hand.

"Monday gives us two nights," he said.

"For what?"

"For whatever we do next."

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