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make us feel so much better.”
    “I’m glad,” Regan said, remembering Brigid’s mother, the fiftyish blonde glowing with pride when Brigid had sung at the party. “Should I call Brigid, then?”
    “I’d like you to speak to her manager, Roy, to make the financial arrangements. Let me give you Brigid’s number so you can give her a call, too. She’s on the tour bus on the way to New York from Branson, Missouri.”
    “What was she doing in Branson?”
    “Her band did a couple nights of shows there, replacing someone who had to cancel concerts. They figured they might as well take the job, since they were traveling anyway. Brigid’s pretty ambitious. She’s willing to work as hard as she needs to in order to make this album fly.”
    “Good for her. By the way, where is this guy’s house we’ll be staying at?”
    “Oh, yes. Let’s see. I wrote it down right here. Chappy’s Compound in Southampton.”
    “Chappy’s Compound!” Regan exclaimed. “That’s where Kit’s house is. Apparently there are old servants’ quarters he’s renting out to her group. I’d be spending time there anyway!”
    Austin laughed. “Perfect, then! I guess it’s Mr. Chappy who invited them. He sounds like a good fellow . . . so generous . . . very different from the usual sort you find about.”
    “Right,” Regan answered. But somewhere in the back of her mind she recalled Kit saying something about the whole setup being a little bit strange. “Mr. Chappy certainly sounds unusual,” she said with conviction.

5
    SATURDAY, JUNE 28
    A s the tour bus rumbled onto the Long Island Expressway, Brigid O’Neill looked out the window and smiled. It was great to be back in her home state, near where she’d grown up. And she was headed for the ocean, where she had spent many a summer day in her childhood.
    Raised in Brooklyn, Brigid and her parents used to go to Rockaway Beach in the summertime. They’d loved to ride the rough waves onto the shore, feeling the salt water washing over their bodies and pulling them in. Then they’d laugh over the unbelievable loads of sand that somehow found its way into every inch of their bathing suits. At night they’d go to Playland and ride the roller coaster and the bumper cars and eat cotton candy. Her father had usually ended up carrying a sleepy, sunburned Brigid back to the car. On these and other family trips Brigid and her father used to sing together. They’d make up crazy songs as they drove along.
    They were Brigid’s happiest memories.
    Sometimes it didn’t seem like that long ago, and other times it felt like another lifetime.
    Her father had died when she was thirteen. Her mother had decided that the best thing for them would be to go to Ireland for the summer and spend it with her family. They’d ended up going there every summer, leaving as soon as Brigid got out of school and her mother finished teaching the third grade. It was when and why Brigid had gotten to know Malachy so well.
    Brigid sighed. Daddy, I wish you were here to see me sing, she thought wistfully. On a big stage with an audience—not in the car! Smiling, she picked up the guitar next to her and started strumming. He had such a sense of humor, she was sure he’d have gotten a kick out of the lyrics to “If I’da Known You Were in Jail.” Or the song she’d written about one of her old boyfriends: “I miss you, baby,” she began to sing. “I miss the burned toast you served me in the morning. I miss the cheap wine you poured me at night. You had a way of blocking my vision so I couldn’t tell left from right. Oh yeah, baby . . .”
    Jeez, Brigid thought as she plucked on her guitar. In the seven years she’d been in this music business, she’d run into all kinds of nuts. She’d had to put up with so many sleazes, schemers, and con artists, when all she wanted to do was sing and play!
    Fueled by a desire to make music that was practically a life force for her, she had sung wherever she could get