House of Secrets - v4

by Richard Hawke

  President Hyland set his teacup aside and leaned forward in his chair. “I’d like to ask you something, Andy. You’re under no obligation to answer, but it’s something that has always perplexed me. It has perplexed a lot of people.”

  Andy nodded tersely. “Shoot.”

  “Precisely how many blind babies did Wyeth have to rape in order to become such a pariah in your father-in-law’s eyes? I just find it fascinating. For so many years those two were of such a piece.”

  “I can’t honestly tell you the whole history behind Whitney’s antipathy toward Chris,” Andy said. “I’ve never had any real discussions with either of them about it, and frankly, that’s worked for me. Old story. The politics got ugly and the friendship curdled. After Whitney resigned from the governorship he was counting on Chris’s support for his run for the presidency, and Chris essentially stabbed him in the back. I hated to see things between them degrade the way they did, but you know as well as I do, this is a rough business.”

  Hyland allowed a trace of a smile onto his face. “So I’m hearing.” The president straightened in his chair. Andy could practically hear the shift of gears. “So, then. What say we get on to you.”

  Andy gestured with his cup. “No time like the present.”

  “Here’s where we are, Andy. The most important thing for the nation right now is that we handle this change in the administration in a way that reassures everybody. Chris Wyeth has been a popular political figure for a long time. Nobody is arguing that Chris didn’t have superb qualities that more than justified his spot on the ticket. And that valedictory he gave this morning is certainly not going to hurt his brand equity one bit. There are plenty of people out there who don’t want to see him step down. But that decision’s been made. Our great fortune in having you in particular available to step into the job is the continuity it brings. You and Chris are already associated in people’s minds. In good ways, I mean. Your politics, your social connections. Your careers have been something of a complement to each other, so we’re going to be emphasizing this continuity. This is as close to not rocking the boat as we can get.”

  “I think I see where you’re coming from, Mr. President.”

  “Of course, what we don’t want is the continuity of scandal. I’ve been assured that you’re as clean as a Boy Scout.”

  Andy considered the details of his little sit-down with William Pierce the day before. Either the FBI director was keeping a few of his cards from the president, or Hyland was running a little bluff here to sound out Andy.

  Andy raised three fingers pressed together. “I’m prepared.”

  “Good. So as you know, we’re looking at Monday morning to make the announcement. That means by Sunday, of course, the word is out. We’ve already been in touch with your office about the Sunday shows. You’re not to do any of them. We’re quite firm on that. In fact, it might be best if you and your family were to be away for the weekend. Out of media range altogether, if that’s even possible anymore. Maybe you want to take that lovely wife of yours away for a little getaway. It’s likely to be your last crack at normalcy for quite a while.”

  Andy’s thoughts raced again to the night before and the look of betrayal that had settled onto his wife’s face. The number of ways it broke his heart was too great to tally.

  “I’ll think about that, Mr. President.”

  The wind was whipping hard, creating tiny whitecaps on the water. Metal umbrellas out on the pier trembled vigorously, the slicing wind setting off a low moaning sound. It was also stealing the stinging tears from Christine Foster’s cheeks, blasting them away the instant they appeared.

  Christine gazed across the river. The New Jersey skyline had nothing of note to offer. Christine felt like such a snob. Weehawken. Hoboken. Jersey City. She had lived on the river for what seemed like forever and had never bothered to get clear what was what across the river.

  Somewhere over there, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had fought their infamous duel. It was her brother who had first told her the story. Thomas Jefferson’s vice president and his unrelenting political nemesis had risen early in the morning and each ferried across the hard-running river in rowboats to play out the asinine ritual on the cliffs of Weehawken. Vice President Burr had killed Hamilton with a shot that had purportedly been outside the confines of the rules of the duel. Whatever in the world that meant. Killing is killing; where precisely rules found their way into the barbarity was something that escaped Christine’s way of thinking.

  Christine was seated on one of the green metal benches lining the waterfront. The heels of her feet were wedged up on the lip of the bench, her arms looped tightly around her knees. She’d left the apartment and come out to the riverfront walk an hour ago. At the moment, she could not conceive of ever getting up from the bench and going anywhere else. It wasn’t so much that the river or the modest New Jersey skyline was particularly jazzing; it was that Christine simply could muster no enthusiasm for taking any of the various next steps that life was presenting. If anything, she wanted to take steps that led backward.

  Christine tried to recall Peter relating to her the story of the Burr-Hamilton duel. She could not remember if Burr had finished out his term after the incident. Back in the day, did they allow for the victor in a so-called gentleman’s settlement to continue in office? Had history recorded a known murderer working in the White House? Christine’s gaze traveled the landscape across the river. She tried to imagine two little puffs of smoke. One distant body falling to the ground.

  She missed her brother. Sometimes thirteen years felt more like thirteen seconds, and this was one of those times. Christine recalled the exact feeling of hearing the news that Peter was dead. She and Andy had just returned from a weekend with friends out in the Hamptons; the message had been waiting for her on the answering machine. Her father had left it.

  “Your brother’s slow-motion suicide has finally ended, Chrissie. Your mother’s a mess. Give me a call when you get in.”

  Peter’s body had been discovered by his girlfriend on the bed in his cramped Hell’s Kitchen apartment. By the time his system had seized, the combination of vodka and barbiturate cocktails had long become the only steady ingredient in Peter Hoyt’s diet, rendering his bloodstream essentially useless. Whitney Hoyt’s bland pronouncement of slow-motion suicide, cold as it sounded over Christine and Andy’s answering machine, had been essentially accurate. Christine’s unfortunate brother had not so much gone off track during his short life as he had never really found his way onto the rails in the first place. Certainly this had been Whitney’s verdict on the boy, and this was one thing Christine would never understand: why her father had felt that he had to be so hard on Peter. Right out of the gate, the standards that Whitney had set for Peter seemed to have been specifically designed to be unattainable. From early on in his life, Peter had felt that his father was purposefully sabotaging his chances of ever achieving a satisfactory level of… anything.

  “If the son of a bitch wants me to fail so badly,” he’d once said to his sister, “I’ll show him just what a real fuckup can achieve. Maybe that’ll make the bastard happy.”

  Of course it hadn’t. It hadn’t made anyone happy, least of all Peter. After dropping out of college midway through his senior year, Peter had never gained traction on any path except those that led swiftly to dead ends. Peter had shared his mother’s exquisite bone structure, and before his purposeful defeats finally began to register on his appearance, his physical beauty had been nearly unsettling. Peter had readily used his extraordinary looks to his advantage — he was rarely without a delicious-looking female at his side. So many doors had been open to him. To the envious observer, Peter Hoyt should have managed just fine. There seemed no reason why his feet would have even needed to touch the cruel ground.

  But tell it to the boy. Peter had suffered.

  Not finding sufficient release from the suffering of his place in the world, Christine’s brother had sought to redo the che
mical mix within himself and see if maybe any of those concoctions could minimize the pain. Sometimes they had, but only temporarily. And ultimately, the various means of temporary release lost their capacity to lift Peter from his personal tortures. They turned on him, as he knew they someday would. When Christine heard the message about Peter’s death, she had experienced the heartbreaking strain between shock and gratitude — a sad thankfulness that her brother’s anguished life was blessedly over.

  Christine still missed him horribly. Lonely Peter. The person who had understood her best. Better, she often feared, than even Andy could.

  As Christine’s eyes rested, half-seeing, on the choppy Hudson, it dawned on her by degrees that what she might be fearing most about the seemingly inevitable plunge her husband was taking was that she was also going to lose him — Andy — in ways she just wasn’t certain she could accept. She was sick of the disappearing men. If Andy took on this job, to a much deeper degree than was already happening he was going to become phantom family. It wasn’t just the logistics of the two-city living; those she could navigate. It was the devouring nature of political power itself that Christine feared. She missed talking with Andy the way they used to in their early years together. Already, something fundamental had been quietly corroding. And she was finding no joy whatsoever now in confronting the abject certainty that she was about to lose even more of what she already had so little of.

  A black silhouette cut in front of Christine. She paid it no attention. Her eyes had ceased collecting data. A moment later, the thin black arc of a bicycle tire moved into Christine’s peripheral vision. Vaguely, she sensed it.

  “I thought that was you.”

  Christine looked up. At first she didn’t recognize the bicyclist. Not until he removed his helmet, releasing the coal-black curls.

  “Are you okay?”

  It was the sculptor. Michael. Formerly known as New Bear.

  “Hi. No. I’m fine,” Christine said.

  Straddling his bike saddle, the sculptor moved his bicycle closer to her.

  “No offense, but you don’t look fine.”

  A retort rose to Christine’s lips, but she let it die there. The young man moved the bike closer still. Christine closed her eyes. The sobs began.

  “You’re right. I’m not.”

  Christine hated Andy.

  She hated her father.

  She hated her mother.

  She also hated her brother. Right now, him most of all. She hated Peter for the simple fact of his being dead and not here to help her anymore.

  The sculptor had moved up directly behind her as she stood at the metal sink, mindlessly rolling a ceramic mug around in the rush of hot water from the spigot. His arms looped easily around her, and he gently took the mug from her fingers, leaning in closer. She felt his breath on the back of her neck.

  He placed the mug down in the sink and his hands disappeared, landing lightly on her shoulders. Strong hands. Of course they were. His thumbs circled slowly on the taut cord of muscle running down her neck.

  Christine’s chin lifted and she found herself face-to-face with a round mirror that hung above the sink. The artist’s studio filled the circle of glass: curved metal sheets, massive bronze pillars throwing back sharp copper light, giant-size lightning bolts slashing wildly at one another. The effect of so many ambitious twists of metal vying for space created an ethereal landscape. The floor was a film of rust-colored particles.

  Christine had fallen into a seriously dreamlike state — if not already out by the river where the young man had taken her gently by the elbow, then certainly in the catacomb of a building that held his showcase of alien structures. The sense of moving through fog had intensified as the two rode the cagelike freight elevator up the fourteen floors to the stranger’s studio, a disturbing clack sound echoing from the darkness with each passing floor. The elevator door was not so much a door as a mesh gate that opened north-to-south from the middle, reminding Christine of a large square mouth. When the two portions had clattered apart, she’d been unclear whether she was stepping out of the mouth or into it.

  Now she knew.

  The young man shifted his weight. He drew her away from the sink and began to maneuver her in a slow pirouette, until he had rotated her a full hundred and eighty degrees. Christine dared to look up into his face. From elsewhere off in the building, the clacking sounds she’d first heard while on the freight elevator continued to echo.

  Christine gasped, and he responded, sliding both his hands down along her hips and pulling her forward to him. He was lifting her as if she weighed nothing at all. She gave herself over. The toe of one of her shoes traced a trail on the floor’s reddish powder.

  They reached the white brick wall, and Christine lost her breath as her shoulders pressed against the bricks. She clutched at his back and he shifted his grip, bringing his face to her neck. Christine became aware of her thin skirt bunching at her hips, and a pair of assured fingers working their way past the elastic of her panties. From deep within her came a low moan. Her eyes fell on the battered teakettle that her host had set on the portable burner to boil water for tea. The kettle was burbling and spitting mutely, its whistle long since dead. She moaned again. This one was longer and more sonorous.

  And scary.

  “No!”

  Christine grabbed at his arms. With a tremendous effort, she pulled free from where she’d been headed and extricated herself from the handsome young sculptor’s grip. Tears rushed to her eyes as she batted at her skirt, getting it back into place. Her cheeks were on fire.

  “I’m… I’m sorry. I just—”

  Her body began to tremble. A wooden stool stood along the wall, and he helped her onto it. The tears continued down her face, and he soothed her. His touch — now — could not have been more light.

  “Shhhh, it’s okay. Everything’s fine. Not to worry, okay?”

  Christine’s head remained lowered. She would not look up at him. The rust-colored floor swam in her eyes. It was not all right. Her chest ached in a way she could barely recall it ever aching before. It hurt. It hurt horribly.

  Every person on the street knew exactly where she was coming from and exactly what she had almost done. Christine found her ability to put one foot smoothly and naturally in front of the other was pathetically impaired. The ball wanted to land before the heel. Every movement of her body seemed eager to betray her. Passing a large blacked-out window on Hudson Street, she paused and raked her hand through her hair. She wanted to address the image in the window, but all she could do was stare — horrified — at the stranger staring back at her.

  Christine did not register the presence of two police cars in front of her building. When Jimmy at the front door gave her a dark, troubled look, she felt certain that he knew already about what had almost transpired in the sculptor’s studio. Mysterious footage must have instantly made its way out into the world, and the doorman would never look at her the same way again. He used to think highly of the senator’s wife. Nice lady. That sweet little kid of hers. Now she was just some flat back flouncing home from her afternoon romp with sculptor boy.

  Christine rode the elevator with old Mrs. Ames and her Yorkie. The Yorkie knew. The disparaging look in his half-hidden eyes could not have been more evident.

  The elevator stopped at her floor, and she got off and saw the two policemen at her front door. They’re going to arrest me?

  One of the cops was black. He spoke first. “Mrs. Foster?”

  Christine moved down the hallway on undependable feet.

  “What is it?”

  The door was open. From inside the apartment she could hear Rosa’s voice, going at top speed.

  “Can you step inside, ma’am?”

  Her blood turned to ice. “What is it?”

  “Miss Christine!”

  Rosa was running down the apartment hallway toward the front door with her hands waving over her head, as if her hair were on fire. Christine’s hands flew to
her mouth.

  “Andy?”

  The cop answered. “It’s your daughter, ma’am.”

  Rosa reached the front door. She fell into Christine, pouring tears onto her blouse.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

  Christine was tumbling. Back into her nightmare. Was there to be no waking up? The worst words imaginable assaulted her mind, rebounding dreadfully inside her skull.

  God hates me. My daughter has been killed.

  At approximately 3:45 in the afternoon in New York Criminal Court Part Four, NYPD detective Megan Lamb raised her right hand and promised to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  At 3:47, leveling her finger at the well-dressed man seated at the defense table, she told it.

  “That man is an arrogant, abusive rapist and a murderer! He knew exactly how to exploit the vulnerability of—”

  The lead defense attorney leaped to his feet. “Objection, Your Honor!”

  Rolling her shoulders, Megan thundered right back, “Oh, I bet you object!”

  As a chorus of rumblings — and one “Right on!” — erupted from the onlookers, the judge’s gavel did a superb impression of gunshots.