Fall From Grace: The Dance Thriller, Part 2

Twice As Much Intensified

U.S. Airways Arena
Landover, Maryland
Sunday, November 30, 1997
(10:45 pm)
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"A famous pregnant woman in the middle of a fucking concert doesn't just disappear, Marty!"

Mick Fleetwood was boiling with rage. He stood in the middle of Stevie's dressing room, surrounded by red roses, watching Lindsey pace the room like a maniac while Christine followed, desperately trying to get him to stop. Lindsey was a wreck, Sharon Celani had just joined them and was shouting at Marty too and already pulling out a cell phone to call Lori, the audience had been ushered out of the arena confused and required to show their identification before being ushered to the parking lots by security to have their vehicles checked, and Lynn Fleetwood was shouting at the head of security at the arena not to call too much attention to attract the media because Barbara and Jess didn't know their daughter was missing and Jess had a heart condition and she didn't think they needed to hear it on the news.

Pandemonium had officially set in.

It was John whose eyes discovered the piece of paper folded on the floor near the broom. He picked it up and read it as everyone took turns shouting over one another, and then passed it to Mick. He was mid-sentence telling Marty to go fuck himself when he became aware of the paper in his hand, and he read it out loud.

Stevie,
He will get away from from the sound of the woman that loves him, and thank God for that. I hope you enjoyed your roses.

"What the fuck, Marty? What does that mean?" Mick shouted. "How did we miss this? If we'd seen a note addressed to Stevie herself..."

"We were too busy looking at the flowers," Christine said, shooting a look to John.

Julie McVie stepped forward and chimed in with, "This is the first time the note has been addressed to Stevie, isn't it? The rest were to Lindsey and then to Marty, so that means she'd been working up to it, getting more and more brazen..."

"We have to keep this as small as we possibly can," said Sharon, flipping her phone closed. "The cops get involved, all kinds of lights and sirens and bullshit happen, and who knows how this woman's going to react!" She turned to Lindsey, who was still pacing, and put both hands on his shoulders. He stopped. "Lindsey! You are the only one of us who knows her. How insane is she here? I mean, is she a a violent person, does she seem to lack empathy or something...or...?"

"I don't know!" Lindsey exploded, his heart pounding out of his chest and his entire body feeling like it was on fire. "Look, she was normal when I knew her...and I didn't even know her...just had a few dinners and talked in the car about music and art and all...nothing deep or weird or like about life or anything...Jesus Christ, I don't even know her parents' names or if she has siblings or her favorite color and shit like that...I barely fucking knew her!"

"And yet she knows you enough to be carrying your child and sending all kinds of threats and following the goddamn tour across the United States because she wants to make Stevie disappear so you two can ride off into the fucking sunset!" Mick shouted at him, and it took all of what remained of Lindsey's sanity not to respond with a statement that would open up a can of worms the two men had agreed without words to keep closed since 1978 so they could remain friends and band mates.

"Mick, seriously, you've got to calm down," Marty said. "My men are out there and they're trying to figure out who was back here while the show was going on and..."

Mick cut him off. "Your men are not worth a damn now, aren't they? They conveniently missed a young pregnant woman with blonde hair who matches the description they have, waltzing into the restricted area and demolishing dozens of roses, then hanging around to drag Stevie off to God knows where!"

"You know what, Mick, give it a rest, okay, because..." But Marty didn't get to finish his sentence.

Lindsey came up to Mick and Marty in the center of the room, his arms stretched out on either side of him in a gesture meant to cool the argument on both sides. He said, "Look, the longer we stand here yelling about this, the further away they get." He took a deep breath in, and as he breathed out, "They could be anywhere by now."

Mick turned around to Lindsey and said, "Two pregnant women...how far could they possibly get?"

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(Somewhere in Maryland)

Stevie was holding a baby girl in her arms and looking into a full-length mirror. For a moment, she looked at the white silk robe she was wearing and thought she was on the sound stage filming the video for "Rooms On Fire", but there were no cameras or lights anywhere and Brad was nowhere to be found, so he was obviously not going to walk into the room and take the baby from her arms in the scene, she thought. She looked back into the mirror, and suddenly, it was not her own reflection she saw, but one of Robin, sitting in a rocking chair, a big blue blanket wrapped around a baby boy that she held in her arms. Stevie immediately reached out to touch Robin but was met with only the glass of the mirror against her fingertips, and as she bounced back, her baby girl had disappeared, and she gasped as Robin looked up from her baby boy's face.

"Hi, Stevie."

She jolted awake. The woman standing at the foot of the bed was not Robin. She had blonde hair and was considerably younger, and she was just as pregnant as Stevie was. She was holding a paper bag piled high with magazines and containers of food. Stevie held onto her baby with one hand and with the other, pushed herself to the foot of the bed.

Outside the window, she could see, it was beginning to snow. There was a parking lot visible through the window, the street lights were yellow and illuminating the snowflakes as they fell, and somewhere in the distance, someone's car radio was playing a song that sounded to her like Dionne Warwicke's "What The World Need Now Is Love". Stevie would have laughed at the irony if she wasn't so terrified.

She took a deep breath and promised herself she was going to remain calm. She was not going to start shouting or begging and risk Baby Robin's life, or getting to walk down the aisle to Lindsey in Hawaii, which they had decided upon months ago, before she'd known what was happening behind her back. She looked up into the blue eyes that reminded her a lot of Lindsey's except they were completely devoid of warmth or love.

"Hello, Kristen."

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