Eighteen Acres

by Nicolle Wallace

  “What’s wrong?” Brooke asked.

  “Nothing. Do me a favor, and tell the kids and my folks I’ll be back in five minutes. I need to call Melanie about something.” Charlotte slipped out of the kitchen and into her study.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Melanie

  Nothing solidifies Washington’s status as the center of the universe like a presidential crisis. The restaurants on Pennsylvania Avenue buzzed with lobbyists, lawmakers, and reporters swapping the latest gossip about what would happen to Charlotte Kramer in the aftermath of her Bagram Blockbuster. In admitting that her husband was sleeping with a White House reporter and accepting the temporary resignation of her defense secretary, Charlotte was in uncharted waters.

  On top of that, Melanie was unable to convince the editors of the Dispatch to kill their story about an alleged affair between Charlotte and Roger. She’d exploited their reservations about the source, which everyone knew was Stephanie Taylor, but no one would acknowledge it publicly because of the long-held Washington tradition of protecting an anonymous source above all other considerations. And Melanie managed to poke enough holes in the veracity of Stephanie’s account by acknowledging that Charlotte and Roger were extremely close but never intimate. Three weeks after Charlotte returned from Afghanistan, a series of grainy photos of her and Roger hiking at Camp David accompanied a one-page story about “rumors of romance” buried deep inside the magazine. Bloggers and some of the seedier cable news programs devoured the sordid details, but most people in Washington were on scandal overload by that point. Besides, the affair between Charlotte’s handsome husband and the rising star at one of the networks made for far better television.

  Everyone in D.C. was glued to their BlackBerrys and cable news channels, and even the cab drivers were apprised of each new development in the crash investigation. Melanie was photographed and followed each time she ventured outside the gates of the White House complex. She started referring to the frenzy as the new normal and warned everyone on the White House staff to keep their heads down and mouths shut. She enacted a zero-tolerance policy on leaks and blackballed reporters from the White House briefing room who cobbled together hit pieces with unnamed sources. Melanie was determined to keep the White House complex a placid place, even in the midst of Charlotte’s political Armageddon.

  Some senior staffers chafed at Melanie’s strict new rules, but in the wake of the accident, Melanie was invigorated by a new sense of purpose. She was the only one on the White House staff who spoke with Charlotte’s full authority, and that made her more indispensable than usual. Lines of authority that had become blurred by three years of familiarity were sharpened by the shrinking of Charlotte’s inner circle. With Roger out of the picture, Charlotte turned to Melanie for everything.

  Charlotte and Melanie were spending so many extra hours together during the week that Melanie turned down Charlotte’s invitation to travel to Camp David for Easter weekend. Brooke and Mark would be there again, so Charlotte would be entertained and distracted, which meant that Melanie could get some work done.

  She was catching up on paperwork when she saw Brian’s number flash on the caller ID for her main line. She let Annie pick it up. They’d swapped e-mails and voice-mails a few times since she’d been back from Afghanistan, but he hadn’t asked her on another date.

  “Brian’s on the line,” Annie said, sticking her head in and smiling.

  Melanie reached for the phone.

  “No, don’t pick up!” Annie practically shouted.

  “Why?”

  “Wait a couple of minutes. You don’t want to appear too eager,” Annie said.

  Annie was well versed in all of the books about dating rules, and the results spoke for themselves. Annie usually juggled several suitors on the weekends, and there was always a different clean-cut male staffer loitering in Melanie’s lobby to talk to Annie.

  “Count to sixty,” Annie ordered.

  Melanie waited a full sixty seconds and then picked up. “Hi there,” she said.

  Annie smiled and left her office, closing Melanie’s door on her way out.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Good. I mean, considering,” she said, looking around her desk at the stacks of speeches, documents, and policy briefs awaiting her review.

  “Considering the world has gone to hell in a handbasket since I last saw you?”

  “Yes, that’s about right,” Melanie said, standing up to pace slowly in the space behind her desk, her eyes wandering among the framed pictures of herself with the various presidents she’d worked for.

  “How have you been?” Brian asked.

  Melanie contemplated saying something about how he would know if he had tried harder to find out, but she was the one who had ignored his last two e-mails. “I’ve been fine. Busy but good. How about you?” she said, smacking her head with her fist for her unpithy response.

  “Everything is good. Listen, I’m sure you’re working all weekend, but I wanted to see if I could buy you a drink tonight. I have to do the Sunday show tomorrow, and I have some work to do tonight, but I thought maybe around eight or nine, we could meet somewhere. What do you think?”

  Melanie contemplated blowing him off for not calling sooner, but she wanted to see him. She examined the upholstery on the sofa and matching armchairs in her office and noticed some fraying at the bottom.

  She heard Brian clear his throat.

  “That sounds good,” Melanie said, smiling and sitting back down behind her desk.

  “Should I pick you up at the White House? Or will you have made it home by then?”

  “I should be home by then. If for some reason I’m still here, I’ll shoot you an e-mail.”

  “How romantic,” he joked.

  “Would you rather I texted?”

  “How about an instant message? It just feels more intimate, don’t you think?” he said.

  Melanie laughed. “If you’re not careful, I’ll have Walter and Sherry retrieve you. There’s no telling what they’d do to you to verify that your intentions are pure,” she said, e-mailing Annie as she talked.

  “Meeting B tonight,” she wrote. “When does my NSC meeting end?”

  “YAY!” Annie wrote back. “NSC meeting goes for hours. I told them you could only stay until six.”

  “I like the idea of being fetched by your security detail,” Brian said.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  She laughed again. “I’ll meet you at my place at eight o clock,” she said.

  “Good. I hope we can pick up where we left off.”

  Melanie blushed and was glad he couldn’t see her. “Uh, yes, we do have some catching up to do.”

  “You’re funny when you’re flustered,” he said, laughing.

  “I’m not flustered,” she protested.

  “Yes, you are,” Brian said.

  “I’m not flustered. I’m busy.”

  “Flustered is more sexy than busy,” he said.

  She blushed again. “I will see you tonight,” she said.

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  She hung up before he could make her make her blush again. She looked at her watch and calculated how much time she had between the National Security Council meeting that she was now five minutes late for and Brian’s arrival for some personal maintenance. She picked up the phone and made an appointment to get her legs waxed.

  She hung up with the salon and tried to wipe the smile off her face before she grabbed her binder off Annie’s desk and ran down the flight of stairs to the Situation Room.

  All of the national security players in the Cabinet were meeting to discuss the parameters of the internal investigation Charlotte had called for in her address to Congress the week before. The strategy was for Charlotte to get ahead of the congressional investigations into the crash. Even though Charlotte had spent hours with the committee chairmen from the House and the Senate in the immedi
ate aftermath of the crash, the investigations were unavoidable in a politically charged election year.

  Charlotte had insisted on announcing her own investigation so she could present herself to the voters as standing on the same side as her political opponents in wanting to know exactly what had happened in the hours and minutes before Marine One was attacked. So far, Charlotte’s political survival skills had kept her one step ahead of the Democrats, but her charm offensive had its limits. She’d invited the different committee chairmen and their families to Camp David in the weeks since she’d been home, and she’d been filling Air Force One to capacity with members of Congress every time she left D.C. While these things smoothed her relations with Congress and made governing easier, it was clear that the Democrats who hoped to take her job in the November election smelled blood in the water. If they could lay blame for the helicopter switch at Charlotte’s feet, they could dismantle her advantage on national security issues and beat her in November.

  While a policy advisor from DOD droned on, Melanie looked over a stack of polling data Ralph had churned out the night before. Charlotte’s poll numbers on questions about her ability to relate to the problems of everyday Americans had leaped twelve points since her return from Afghanistan. Melanie thought it was a typo. Charlotte never polled well in that category. Women found her aloof, and men couldn’t get comfortable with the idea of a woman in charge of two wars.

  She e-mailed Ralph to get the verbatim responses, the detailed answers that respondents offered to the questions asked in the polls.

  He wrote back right away: “I came by earlier to point that out to you, but Annie said you were on the phone. There’s some puzzling stuff buried in the data. Her numbers are still bad, but there are bright spots. Seems the public feels sorry for her over the whole Peter and Dale thing, and others are rallying around her at a moment of crisis. Do you want to meet tonight to discuss?”

  “I can’t meet tonight. How’s tomorrow morning?” she typed, despite the fact that BlackBerrys were banned in the Sit Room.

  “I have church in the morning. How about one P.M.?”

  “See you then,” she responded.

  The poll numbers could be a fluke, and it wasn’t enough to change the dynamics of a national election, but it was the first piece of evidence she’d seen that the public was open to changing its mind about Charlotte.

  “Melanie, do you agree with the proposal DOD laid out?” asked the national security advisor.

  Melanie hadn’t been paying attention to the back-and-forth in the meeting in the Situation Room for at least fifteen minutes.

  “Uh, yeah, I think so. Do you mind recapping it? I was dealing with something for Charlotte,” she said.

  “We’re all dealing with things for Charlotte,” snapped the secretary of state.

  The national security advisor shushed her.

  “Sure. We decided to allow the Dems in Congress to appoint four members to the bipartisan commission. Then we’d allow the Republicans in Congress to do the same, and we would appoint the final four members. How does that sound, Melanie?”

  “Bold,” Melanie said sarcastically. “Why would the public give Charlotte political courage points if she stacked the commission with members of her own party?”

  “You’ll lose total control if you do it any other way,” the secretary of state said.

  “I’m sorry. Did you say we’d lose control?” Melanie said.

  “Yes. And you know that, Melanie, so I’m not sure why you’re resisting the consensus decision,” the secretary of state said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Madam Secretary, we have already lost control. Split the commission in half. The president wants this to be real. Half Democrats, half Republicans—two cochairs, one Dem and one R—and we’ll let the Congress pick all of its members,” Melanie said, pushing her chair back from the table.

  “Melanie, this is very constructive feedback,” the national security advisor said. “What time can you reconvene tomorrow to finalize this?”

  “I have to do the Sunday shows, and then I have a one P.M. and a four P.M., but I could do something after those meetings wrap up,” Melanie said.

  The secretary of state sighed loudly. Melanie ignored her and hurried from the Situation Room. She took the stairs to her office two at a time, grabbed her purse, and ran out to West Exec to where Walter and Sherry were waiting for her.

  “Can you drop me off at the Four Seasons?” she asked.

  “We’ll wait for you,” he said.

  “Thanks, Walter,” she said, pulling out her BlackBerry and scanning the messages.

  She made it home at seven-thirty and took a long, hot shower. Melanie dressed carefully in skinny black Calvin Klein pants that only fit after a few days of not eating and a fitted white blouse, and left more buttons unbuttoned than she would have if she’d planned to leave her apartment. She was barefoot, and her hair was still wet, when the doorbell rang at ten minutes before eight.

  “You’re early,” she said when she opened the door.

  “I know. And the sad truth is that I’ve been walking around M Street for the last twenty minutes, killing time before I came up here,” Brian said, smiling at her.

  “Really? You were just walking up and down the street?”

  “Yeah. Walter and Sherry drove by twice, which was when I decided to come up. I was afraid they’d pick me up for suspicious behavior or something.”

  She laughed.

  “So, how have you been? It feels like a lifetime ago when I was here last,” he said, smiling again, this time a little shyly.

  “I’m doing fine. There’s a certain order that sets in when things go this far off the rails, you know?”

  “Actually, I do. In a lot of ways, a crisis is easier to manage than sustained chaos, because you get everyone’s attention,” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said, remembering how easy he was to talk to and how much she enjoyed telling him things about her job.

  “How is Dale doing?” he asked.

  “I think she’s OK. Charlotte checks in with her doctors all the time,” she said.

  “Really?”

  He looked surprised, and Melanie reminded herself that he was a reporter tasked with breaking news about the White House. He was covering for Dale while the network figured out what to do.

  “What was the reaction at the network to the news about Peter and Dale?” Melanie asked.

  “There were a lot of ‘aha’ moments for people who suspected that something was going on with her but could never quite figure out what. She was always one step ahead of the competition on any story about the White House, and she didn’t seem to have any rapport with Charlotte, so it makes sense now. I think people might have figured it out if they hadn’t been so blinded by her looks and big-time scoops.”

  “What’s going to happen while she’s out?” Melanie asked.

  “There’s a mad dash to get her gig. Everyone in the Washington bureau is lining up for the White House job, and everyone in New York is lining up for her weekend anchor gig. It’s unseemly. It’s not like she died,” he said, shaking his head.

  “And you?” Melanie asked.

  “As you know, I’m helping out on the White House beat a few days a week and still figuring out the Pentagon beat. With the Taylor drama there, I’m not sure it isn’t as good a place as any.”

  “That makes sense,” she said.

  “I’m not going to push, but if there’s anything you feel comfortable talking about on the Roger and Charlotte front, I’m all ears. I’d love to understand what the hell happened.”

  “You know, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know exactly what happened.”

  “Everyone knows the administrative-leave thing was a trap—a very good trap but a trap all the same,” he said.

  Melanie smiled at him.

  “And the rumor over at the Pentagon is that Stephanie Taylor was behind the Dispatch story about t
he affair between Roger and Charlotte. Apparently, once Roger found out the story came from his wife, he moved out with his dogs,” Brian said.

  “It sounds like you’ve got perfectly good sources already,” she said.

  “Not really. I just don’t want you to think I’m trading sex for scoop.”

  “Who said anything about scoop?” she said.

  He laughed.

  “Can I get you a drink?” Melanie asked.

  “That would be great. I brought some wine,” he said, handing her two bottles. She went into the kitchen to open one of them.

  They sat on her balcony and talked until the bottle was empty. She stood up to bring out the second bottle. He hadn’t made any attempts to get her into bed, and Melanie was beginning to wonder if she’d missed her opportunity to be more than a well-placed source to him.

  When she came back to the balcony, he was standing and looking out toward the Potomac River. He walked toward her, took the bottle from her hands, and put it on the table. He took both of her hands in his and pulled her toward him. He wasn’t as tall as he looked on television, and her mouth was barely an inch from his. She felt herself melting into him, but she didn’t want to kiss him first.

  “Melanie,” he said in a very low, soft voice.

  “What?” she said.

  “I have wanted to kiss you since the first time we talked, but you were sitting in your fancy West Wing office with your dress unzipped,” he said, smiling at her.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she wanted someone to kiss her as much as she wanted him to kiss her.

  “And then, the last time I made it up here, the presidential helicopter crashed,” he said. He was kissing her neck now, and she was trying to keep her breathing even. “Melanie,” he said in a low whisper.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you think it’s possible that no one will need you for a few hours?” he asked.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Dale

  Billy, it’s a simple yes-or-no question. Do I still have a job or not?” Dale asked.

  “Dale, you have been through so much. Why don’t you focus on getting well, and we’ll figure out the work piece down the road—when you’re ready to come back?”