After gathering her purse, Lara walked at a clipped pace down Main Street toward the restaurant two blocks away. The dress shop on the corner had closed a month before, leaving a vacant glass space with the bodies of naked plastic mannequins, legs and arms akimbo and piled in a corner like a crime scene. She was rattled.

What had just happened in there? It was clearly backmasking—recorded messages in an album that could only be heard when the song was played backward. Musicians did it occasionally, for effect. Famously, the Beatles did it in the song “Revolution 9”; listeners could hear “Turn me on, dead man,” which led to the whole “Paul Is Dead” conspiracy. As a kid, Lara was sent to church camp with Caren. On the first morning, after singing rousing versions of “I’m in the Lord’s Army,” the kids were served cookies and Hawaiian Punch and told how rock musicians were coding secret messages to the devil in their albums. Dutifully, the boys in the group pledged to offer their AC/DC and Led Zeppelin records for burning. When Jason heard that Lara needed to take some records to be destroyed at a camp activity, he never allowed her to go back.

But the song she’d just heard on that album did contain a recorded message that could only be heard when the album was played in reverse. Yet Lara had played that song hundreds of times and knew the sound had never been there before. And even if Tending had used it, backmasking was pressed into the vinyl and couldn’t just disappear as that song had.

No, the song had been a message for her.

Chapter 8

One of the two restaurants serving dinner until eleven, Delilah’s was busy. Lara perched herself on a pleather barstool near the door. Soon she was swirling a glass of Chardonnay the color of concentrated piss. It was some tart, shitty vintage, “fruit forward” they called it, probably from a box in Delilah’s giant fridge that would give her a headache in a few hours. Rubbing her neck, she thought a good night’s sleep was soon in order.

“Poor girl. Didn’t anyone warn you. The wine here is awful.”

Lara smiled at the sound of his voice, a hint of his deep Virginian Southern drawl coming through in the word wine. She turned to face Ben Archer. “What are you having, then?”

“Well, certainly not the wine.” Rolling up the sleeves on his crisp white dress shirt, he scanned the menu.

“How on earth do you fold those?” She reached over and tugged at one. “They’re like plaster slabs. Can I hang them in my house?”

“Oh, shut up,” he said, smirking. Unbuttoning the other cuff, he struggled as the fabric crunched. “It’s heavy starch, I’ll have you know, the Southern gentleman’s wardrobe staple.” He laughed, satisfied with the length of the sleeve.

“Where’s the uniform?”