"I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Walworth is not available either," the young woman said in a business-like fashion. She sounded like a kid on her first job, Blake thought, trying to do the right thing and impress the boss. She had a pretty face, and short blonde hair; a pert smile crossed her face as she added, "Would you like to leave a message?"

She listened to the voice in her ear for a moment; a finger tapped a keypad under her left hand. "Let me read that back to you, sir, to make sure I have it correct. That's Martin Smith at Inside Hollywood, seven one four, five six eight, eight eight five eight, is that correct?" As she spoke, the words appeared on a computer screen in front of her.

"I'll be sure they get the message," she said after a moment. "Thank you, sir, and have a wonderful day."

She touched the keypad again with a finger, and turned her head to Blake. "You want me to print it out for you?" she asked.

"Why waste a perfectly good tree?" Blake smiled. "Just dump it, Wendy. Same for the other scandal sheets, but at least let me see the list of legitimate media calls. Getting very many?"

"Surprisingly, no," she grinned. "We are getting a few letters, though, although nothing like I expected."

"Fan mail?" Blake wondered. That really was the bottom line, after all.

"Some," she said, laying her head back against the pillow, but keeping the smile. "A little more than normal, but not much. Mom will have to tell you about that after she gets back."

Blake leaned back in his armchair and looked across at the young woman, who was semi-reclined on what always put him in mind of a dentist's chair. Hell of a thing to happen to her, he thought for the millionth time, looking at her, wearing something that resembled a hospital gown and covered with a light blanket. He'd been around on occasion when Wendy had to have her bedclothes changed. Her body was shrunken, shriveled, and useless; he'd picked her up and didn't think she could weigh as much as eighty pounds.

Not long after Blake had come to Spearfish Lake, Wendy had been a normal young teenager, out playing around with her boyfriend on a jetski with another young couple, each couple trying to spray the other with the waterblast. Somehow, someone had made a mistake, and the two had collided. The boyfriend hadn't survived, and Wendy had been left a nearly total quadriplegic. She had a little use of two fingers on her left hand, and that was all.

There were those who thought that Wendy's boyfriend had been the lucky one, but Blake knew better. After an initial period of shock and despair, which was to be expected, she'd turned her mind to making the best of what she had. Some people saw a person with a useless body as having a useless mind, but Blake was willing to bet good money that Wendy was the sharpest person in town.

That understanding had only come to him slowly, because he hadn't gotten to know Wendy very well the first couple of years after meeting her, and he had made the same mistake. That was a few months after the accident, back in the days when they'd first been organizing Jenny Easton Productions. Fan mail had always been a problem for Jennifer; they'd let Nashville-Murray handle it back then, and Nashville-Murray hadn't done a very good job of it. Besides, there was mail and business for Jenny Easton Productions that they didn't want Nashville-Murray seeing -- not even some twit in the mail room. The only answer was to do it themselves, and it was more than they wanted to do. Jennifer happened to mention the problem to their local attorney, and that they were looking for someone who wanted a home job a few hours a week. He told her that he didn't need to look very far. His legal secretary, Denise Carter, was having to quit to watch over her daughter; her older daughter had carried much of the load the past few months, but wanted to return to graduate school.

It had been a perfect fit. Denise could do the job and help Wendy whenever it was needed. Once they ironed out the kinks and transferred more responsibility to her, she made as much money from it as she had as a legal secretary. Even better, Denise had handwriting that was very close to Jennifer's -- even Blake couldn't tell the difference -- so she was able to personalize the responses when needed. These days, the Carter house was, for all practical purposes the Jenny Easton Productions publicity department, as least as far as routine items not directly involving record promotions went; much of that was handled by the distributor. All Blake or Jennifer had to do was drop by the Carter house every two or three days to deal with issues Denise couldn't handle or needed guidance on. They usually hung around an hour or two, so Denise could get out and go shopping or whatever, which was what she was doing right now.

It wasn't as if Wendy needed constant human attendance, because she didn't. Wendy was by now literally the most computerized person that Blake had ever imagined. She lay semi-reclined on that chair most of the time so she could breathe without a respirator, but surrounding her was a widely-capable voice actuated computer system that did a lot of the things that others would have had to do for her. Jeeves, as the system was called, was one of a kind, cobbled up from spare parts and odd bits of software, controlled by a relatively modest computer. Wendy's dad was a mechanical engineer; he and his friends at work were responsible for much of the system. Other parts of it came from Mark Gravengood at Marlin Computer, and Blake had played a part very quietly. He knew that Dan and Denise weren't wealthy people, so he'd told Mark that if any expensive commercial software or specialty coding was needed, to tell them he'd been able to scrounge up a demo copy or something, send him the bill, and not tell Dan and Denise about it.

Wendy was still snapping out of the shock and coming to terms with what happened to her in the first days they'd known each other, but as the months rolled by, she'd perked up. Jennifer and Blake liked to think that the careful, personal attention from the town's most famous citizen had helped a little to improve her outlook on life. Soon, they began to realize that Wendy was just as smart if not smarter than her older sister Carole, who had been a bright, if eccentric grad student.

In time, a lot of the publicity work shifted to Wendy, the parts she could handle, like the public phone number and public e-mail address for Jenny Easton Productions. That hadn't been enough to keep her agile mind busy, so the year before she had finished a book about her sister and Brenda Hodunk. Blake had used some of the contacts he'd developed over the years to give it a little nudge, and it had sold steadily if not quite on the best seller lists. Now, Wendy was hard at work on a fantasy novel, swords and sorcery in a magical kingdom; she'd consulted with Blake on a few issues where her heroine needed help with combat scenes.

These days, too, Wendy was widely cosmopolitan; she had friends all over the world, via the Internet; some of those were quadriplegics themselves. She'd never met her new boyfriend; he was in Australia, and in no better shape than she was. It seemed likely they might never meet face to face, but it didn't slow them down much. She was the absolute champion of a couple of online computer games, played almost universally against "normals." She was very widely read -- the Internet was involved with that, but Jeeves had a system that could turn the pages of books or magazines, although it wasn't up to handling newspapers without human intervention. Since Blake had told her weeks before of the story that was going to run sooner or later in the National Tribune, she'd been monitoring chat rooms and newsgroups to see what kind of feedback was there.

"E-mail?" he asked.

"That I do see," she smiled. "Needless to say, there are a few people who think you're the absolute spawn of Satan and think Jenny ought to drop you like a hot potato, but they're a very small, if loud, minority. It's pretty much that way in the chat rooms and newsgroups, too, when it comes up at all. Mostly, it doesn't."

"That's to be expected," Blake smiled. "I figured they'd be in the majority, though."

"No, in fact, a small minority," Wendy grinned. "There's a much larger group, still a minority, that's saying, roughly, 'Jenny, you're to be praised for leading your man from his sinful ways and onto the path God ordained.'"

"You're kidding!" Blake replied, eyes wide in astonishment.

"I think you've underestimated Jenny's fans, at least the ones who read the tabs," Wendy laughed. "The biggest category, of course, is those who refuse to believe the junk that's in them about you and her, saying you ought to sue them or something. Counting the last two together, the vast majority is supportive."

"Well, I'll be damned," he said.

"There are those who think that, too." Wendy replied dryly, but with a grin on her face. "But I think Jennifer will be pleased to discover that most don't. Really though, the response is light, and the article has been out a week. I expect it'll die out next week unless someone else picks it up."

"That was our main concern," Blake admitted. "We can ignore or laugh off the tabs. We can't do that with the legitimate media. If it gets picked up by the mainstream media, then there's cause to worry. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Anything else going on?"

"Lots," Wendy grinned. "Most of it on Harp Strings."

"How's that been running?"

"Universally favorable," Wendy said. "In fact, I haven't had one negative e-mail, and there are a number of calls that you really should return. I've seen things like, 'magnificent' and 'I didn't know you could do things like that with a harp.' I've been Googling around, searching for reviews. There aren't a lot, but I did print out a few. 'New and refreshing,' 'takes a Celtic harp where no harp has gone before,' Even that joker on the Times who pans everything said, 'impressive for a debut album.' From him, that's five stars."

"Yeah, I know," Blake grinned ruefully. "Even Jenny has never got a good word out of him. In fact, the best she's ever got is 'more of the same old triteness.'"

"It is a pretty impressive debut album," Wendy said. "The thing is, it's so new that no one quite knows what to make of it since there's not much to compare it to. How are the sales going?"

"Good," Blake said. "A little early to tell yet, but we're not displeased. We never hoped for much more than a niche market, maybe a limited breakthrough into the pop charts sometime, and we seem to be getting what we expected." Like the other Jenny Productions albums, the company didn't do the distribution directly, but handled it through a specialist distributor that carried a number of other small labels. Getting them behind it had been the key to getting it into the stores, and that much had gone all right. The trick was getting people to listen to it, and it would be a slow process to build a coterie of fans and regular buyers for follow-up albums. But from what he could tell, there was getting to be some odd airplay of tracks here and there, mostly on stations that handled esoteric music, rather than the top-40 stations. Good reviews didn't hurt. "How are orders doing through the web site?"

"Getting a few," Wendy said. "I think we need to be getting a web site up for Myleigh, even if it's not much more than an order form and a picture."

"Do it," Blake said. Wendy had done the Jenny Easton Productions web site ever since the beginning, not just monitoring it, but hand-coding the site -- well, mouth stick coding, in her case; her voice-actuated word processor just couldn't quite hack HTML. "Get her own domain name, but cross-link it to Jenny Easton Productions."

"I've already started," she reported. It wasn't a surprise to him; she was usually a step or two ahead of him in such matters -- if the word 'step' could be used in her case. "I should have it up this afternoon. Blake, what should we do about fan mail and e-mail? We're starting to get a significant amount."

"Forward it to her," Blake said. "Right now I think she needs a little confidence in what she's doing. She just doesn't see the big picture yet, and it's going to take her a while to learn. I'll get hold of her as soon as she's off this mini-tour, explain the system to her, and ask if she wants you to handle the routine fan stuff. I think she will once it gets to be enough to be a pain in the butt. She's not a pro, she has a day job that keeps her busy."

"I know," Wendy smiled. "You remember, I know her. She's . . . well, if people think Carole is eccentric, they haven't met Myleigh. But, she's a real interesting person. We've had some interesting discussions on the nature of fiction. She really is an expert on literature, and I've called her up a couple of times on problems I've been having with Enulf the Harper. She sort of got me thinking along that line in coming up with the story."

"How's it coming?"

"Slowly, but I wanted it to come slowly. It's intentionally intricate, and supposed to sound old-fashioned. It's not Myleigh's field, but she's offered to go over it and make comments when I get the rough done."

"I'm sure she'll be helpful. More than I am." Blake had read a few early chapters of Enulf, and got thoroughly lost in the complexity. Medieval magical fantasy just wasn't something he could get his mind around, although he knew a lot of people who did.

"I would kind of like your help on one thing," Wendy frowned. "Antigone has these feelings about Passcaglia, and they're not being reciprocated, because it's a woman-on-woman thing. Passcaglia is straight, and Antigone thinks she is. I'm having trouble getting the effect I'm looking for." She sighed. "One of the things I'm truly sorry about is that I never had the chance to experience it either way, since I know it's cost me some perspective. Blake, I know it's not the same thing, but I'd appreciate your insights."

"I don't know if I can be much help," he shook his head. "This is a love thing, right, not a lust thing?"

"Pretty much. Antigone knows she's drawn to Passcaglia, but doesn't understand why, or what she should do about it."

"Like I said, I don't think I can be a lot of help," he said, thoughtfully. "It didn't work that way for me. Back when I started, got active in the scene, it was all a lust thing. Fun, but I thought it meant something, defined who I was." He cocked his head, thinking for a moment. "Then, quite unexpectedly, I found love where I didn't expect to find it, and I discovered that sex just doesn't matter. It took me a long time to accept that, because I had the memory of all the old lusts fogging my thinking. Now they're just a memory. I don't want to say a bad memory, because there were some good times there, back when I was young and full of crap. But I grew up, more through Jennifer's faith in me than anything I did myself. Now, I wouldn't have it any other way. 'Cleave unto her only until death you do part,' is the way Lex put it. I'm perfectly comfortable with that." He sighed. "Look, I know that's not a lot of help, but write the scene. If there's no sorcery involved, maybe I can pick at it some, but I don't think I'm the person you should ask."

"You're right," Wendy smiled. "It's not the problem that Antigone and Passcaglia have, but I think I see how to write it now. Thanks, Blake."

"No, Wendy," he smiled. "Thank you."

* * *

Trey leaned back in the right seat of the Cougar and let his body go limp. He'd done most of the driving on this trip, but Myleigh had offered to spell him for a while on this long stretch. Maybe it was just as well; his mind was still at Interstate driving speed, and most of the last leg back to KC was two-lane roads. He'd have tried to drive at the speed he was used to, and the cops down here had a reputation.

Six shows in seven days weren't that bad. Oh, they were four hours of setting up, show, and the aftermath of each, but that was the easy part. The worst part was all the driving -- never less than a three hundred mile jump, and one time almost seven hundred. It didn't leave a lot of time for playing tourist. But it had been worthwhile; the car was lighter than it had been when they left, and the empty boxes that had once held hundreds of Harp Strings CDs were scattered in dumpsters all along the path behind them. "You know," he said to Myleigh, "It would be possible to make a living at this."

"Oh people do, I am quite sure," she said from behind the wheel. "And while this has been an interesting experience overall, I feel sure I would not care to make a life of it."

"Me either," he nodded. "I mean, once in a while, fine, but a life? I don't think so."

Myleigh smiled. "Once, Blake told the story of how he met Jennifer on a month-long bus tour of county fairs. He said that it was interesting for the first few days, but by the end of the month he was to the point where he hoped to never again in his life hear a pedal steel guitar. He said what really irritated him more than anything else was that he was a better musician than anyone else on the tour, but was working as a security guard."

"You know, I'd like to meet him and Jennifer sometime," Trey mused. "From the stories I hear from you and Randy, they sound like interesting people."

"Oh, indeed they are," Myleigh smiled. "I should never have gotten this far without their active interest and encouragement. Without them, I should be sitting in my apartment, playing Blue Beauty along to some music on the stereo, and never thinking that I should be performing before enthusiastic crowds."

"Ego tripping again, huh?"

"I fear so," Myleigh sighed. "I confess I cannot get over the feeling that I should be up in my apartment thusly occupied. Trey, when I hear responses like we have been getting, when I have writer's cramp from autographing CDs, it is sometimes difficult to remind myself that I am but a humble literature professor in real life, and am but temporarily masquerading as an entertainer."

"But you are one, Myleigh," Trey grinned. "'You can make those people dance, and maybe they'll be happy for a while.' You can't really ask for much more than that."

It had been a pretty good tour. There were a couple of places where the crowd had been small, less than a hundred, but fortunately, the rooms had been small, too, so the shows were very intimate, close to the audience, and it had left a warm feeling behind, if not great CD sales. The bigger shows had been a little harder to get going than they had experienced back at Marienthal, for some reason they couldn't put their finger on -- probably the fact that Myleigh wasn't "local talent" had something to do with it, but Trey didn't want to guess. After a couple of shows, they'd switched around the order, swapping the opening Dark Haired Rebel Girl with the more intricate, exuberant Inland Sea. That helped to showcase right from the front that this wasn't traditional harp music, nor was it the country music associated with the Boreal String Band -- this was something totally new, something that the audience had never heard before.

While Dawnwalker was universally appreciated, in their discussions in the Cougar they'd wondered if perhaps it wasn't a little too much of a cool note to end the show on -- past shows had depended on American Pie to leave the audiences walking out feeling happy. Myleigh suggested keeping it in order, but actually ending the show with another song that was a little more exuberant. Trey hadn't been sure what was coming, but that night she wrapped up with Tangerine Boogie, a Jennifer and Blake song that he'd never heard before. This was old-time, knock-'em back, in-your-face jazz that Myleigh could really belt out. American Pie actually seemed a little anticlimactic after that.

"I suppose not," Myleigh said. "In any case, I shall have some time to regain my composure. At least tomorrow, I shall turn back into a rather ordinary literature professor."

"There's nothing ordinary about you doing that either," Trey grinned. "You up for some music?"

"Always, my hero," she grinned. "Do you think you could play Number 5 again? I think there are one or two real possibilities on there."

"No problem," he said, reaching for the CD case. While they'd brought a collection of regular CDs on the trip, they hadn't listened to one yet -- all they'd played was a unique collection of never-released music from Jennifer and Blake's library. They were special CDs, made up by Blake in the last month of copies of things that he and Jennifer thought Myleigh might be interested in adding to her repertoire. There was some dynamite Jenny Easton music there, several albums worth, some of it going back years. They'd identified several tracks for Myleigh to try out. "I think I know the track you want," he said. "You want me to jump ahead to it?"

"No, just let it play," Myleigh said. "I'm not sure I care to listen all that carefully." She let out a sigh. "You know, I do envy Jennifer and Blake their songwriting talents. Perhaps it bothers me a little that I am just an extension of their talents. While I do dearly love some of their music, it is their music, and all I do is interpret it. Dark Haired Rebel Girl is the only piece on Harp Strings that is not theirs, and I find the timbre and tone of the piece notably different. That is perhaps a little disquieting. In the shows, American Pie and Baby Elephant Walk also add a different texture. In future albums, I hope that I may branch out a little with music selection, but I really had little choice in Harp Strings, considering the manner in which it was presented to me. I do hope someday that I can contribute something original of my own."

"You know," Trey said thoughtfully. "I think I agree. While they do have a wide range it all seems to somehow have that Blake and Jennifer touch."

"It's probably neither here nor there," Myleigh sighed. "I cannot say if there will be a second album, nor when it might be. The last time I talked with Blake, he and Jennifer seem satisfied with the sales, but I cannot help but wonder if he's just being optimistic for my sake."

"Their choice, I guess," Trey said. "But, like you commented the other day, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to rush out a second album until Harp Strings has been on the market for a while. I mean, as much as they have in their library they do space it out. On the other hand, I don't think I'd worry too much about the lack of your original music on Harp Strings. After all, Jennifer was an overnight success at the age of, what was it, nineteen? Twenty? It was ten years before she and Blake put out an album with one of their original songs on it, and it wasn't exactly a hit. Hell, even a third of Saturday Night was made up of covers."

"That's not the same thing," Myleigh said. "After all, I was to some degree involved in the development of the album. Remember that it was made with television in mind. They intentionally put in some familiar old-line country pieces that could appeal to that audience without getting rights issues too complicated."

"Familiar old country pieces like Pipeline?" Trey grinned.

"That was intentionally included as an old-line rock piece, to show the musical range of the band," Myleigh grinned. "Jennifer and Blake intended to accomplish a number of different things with that album, some of which are beyond my understanding. In any case, At Home and Back Porch were all original. Ah well, I shall discuss my misgivings with Jennifer and Blake when I see them this summer. I do not doubt that they shall have some good suggestions."

"They probably will," Trey said. "You know, after hearing you and Randy talk about them I sure would like to get to know them."

"Oh, I'm sure the opportunity will arise," Myleigh said, pulling out to pass a slow-moving farm vehicle. "I do look forward to spending time with them this summer. But, do you know my hero, I shall be missing you those months."

"I know," Trey said glumly. "I'm going to be missing you, too. Myleigh, would it offend you if I were to tell you I'm having second thoughts about Canyon Tours this summer?"

"You mean, not go to the Grand Canyon? Trey, I thought you did not want to miss that."

"I don't," he said. "I talked with Al on the phone, back before we left, and what with the time school breaks and all, I'm probably going to be on the wedding trip with you, Randy, and the others at least part of the way. What he said was that they're going to run the trip ahead slow, and the wedding trip a little fast, so both parties can get together for the ceremony. A few people who can't make the whole trip are going to join one or the other parties at Phantom Ranch, and hike out the day after the wedding. That gets most of the Canyon Tours people together in the same place at the same time for a day or two, along with the other guests. When they hike out, they're going to break up into the three summer crews."

"Yes, when I talked to Crystal last week she said that it was going to be a bit complicated, but that it had some good points. But, what is your thinking?"

"I don't know," Trey said, furrowing his brow. "I'm going to do the one trip in any case, and see how it goes, but I might just get Randy off to the side and see if maybe he needs some summer help running a shovel or something. That'd get me up to Spearfish Lake with you for the summer, or at least most of it."

"I confess, my hero, I should like to have you there," she said. "I have been coming to the conclusion that it would be lonely there without you. But you have made a commitment to Al, have you not?"

"Not really," he said. "He told me that I could take a trip or two and see how it goes, and if it didn't go he wouldn't have any problems with it. Really, that's where it stands. I plan on doing just that, seeing how it goes. But I'm beginning to wonder if the fallback position doesn't interest me more."

"My hero, though I should love to have you with me, I fear it would be a dull and tedious period for you, and I would hate to take you away from your summer of adventure."

"You've got my problem exactly," he nodded. "That's why I don't want to make up my mind just yet."

"Trey," she said suddenly, "Do you have any plans for after your graduation? I have not heard you discuss them in some time."

"Not really," he said. "I'm very much looking forward to the plans that we have after my graduation if you're still interested, but beyond that, well, I'm still thinking about it."

"You need not put those plans off, my hero," she said. "I thought I made that clear to you. In fact, there have been a myriad of opportunities on this trip, and I confess to a slight surprise that you have not shown interest in taking advantage of them."

"I still think we should wait, Dr. Harris," he said pointedly. "I know Dr. Hamilton has been watching us. What happens to me after the end of next semester doesn't really matter in that regard, but whatever happens, you're still going to be at Marienthal. I'm of the opinion that the best way to look like we're being honest is to be honest."

"Methinks you're being much too conservative, Trey," Myleigh smiled. "We are as far from Dr. Hamilton's eagle eye on this trip, as we would be in Spearfish Lake."

"Why take the risk?" he said. "Hell, I shouldn't have gone on this trip with you. It does look pretty suspicious. In any case, end of the year and it doesn't matter. I can wait."

"But then, I fear you shall soon disappear into the vast somewhere, and then where would I be?"

"I'm not planning on disappearing," he said. "There's got to be some job around KC. As far as that goes, I still have some eligibility on the GI Bill money. I've kicked around going over to UMo-KC and looking into the MBA program. Someone with an MBA can usually find a job better than collecting shopping carts at K-Mart."

"My dear hero," she smiled, "Your words have alleviated one of my greatest fears. Under those circumstances, I believe I can somehow manage to wait for December next myself. Were I not driving, I should give you a big kiss."

"Dr. Harris," he grinned. "You can pull off to the side, you know."

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