The Fixer

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  The president wasn’t dissuaded. “You’re resourceful. If there’s a skeleton in his closet, I want to know.”

  Whose closet? I wondered. I flashed to the First Lady saying that Justice Marquette’s death was an opportunity, tragic though it may be. Was the president already working on digging up information on possible replacements?

  “If there are skeletons,” Ivy said coolly, “will I be burying them or exposing them?”

  This time, Peter Nolan gave her his most presidential smile. “Let me have a chat with the party leadership,” he said, “and then I’ll let you know.”

  And just like that, the president was gone.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t take Ivy long to turn the full strength of her attention on me. “You want to tell me why you skipped your afternoon classes?” She crossed one arm over the other and tapped the tips of her fingers against her elbow, one by one. “Or where you went?”

  I went to see a girl who thinks her father murdered Justice Marquette, I thought. Out loud, I opted for: “Not really.”

  Ivy pressed her lips together, like if they parted, she might say something she would regret. “You know that you can come to me, right?” she said finally. “With anything, at any time.”

  Maybe I believed that, and maybe I didn’t. With Ivy, it was always the maybes that hurt me most. Vivvie asked me to keep this secret. I concentrated on that. Until she’s sure. Until we have proof.

  There was no maybe about that.

  “Are Supreme Court justices normally treated by the White House physician?” I asked.

  Ivy blinked once, twice, three times at the change of subject. The question had caught her off guard. “No,” she said finally. “They’re not. But Theo wasn’t just a justice. He was a friend.”

  Not just Ivy’s friend. The president’s friend, treated by one of the military’s most highly decorated physicians.

  “Is everything okay?” Ivy asked me.

  I pushed past her into the house, my heart pumping like I’d just run a marathon. “Sure,” I told her, lying through my teeth. “Everything’s fine.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The next day, Vivvie was back in school. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail on her head. Makeup covered the bags under her eyes. She did a fighting job of looking normal, like everything was fine.

  I wondered how blind the rest of the school had to be not to realize that she wasn’t.

  The two of us didn’t have a chance to talk before classes started. In English, she kept her eyes locked on the board. She wouldn’t even look at me. In physics, we were assigned to work in partners.

  “We’re supposed to calculate the coefficient of friction,” Vivvie said, busying herself with pulling metal discs out of a plastic bag. “We’ll need the angle of the ramp . . .”

  “Vivvie.”

  She looked up at me. I held her gaze but didn’t say anything, willing her to remember that, for better or worse, she wasn’t in this alone.

  “I got the phone.” She said those words so quietly, I almost couldn’t make them out. “He’d thrown it out. I went through the trash.”

  Her hand shook as she set one of the metal discs on the scale. On the other side of the room, Henry Marquette was doing the same thing. Vivvie tried very hard not to look at him, but she couldn’t keep her gaze down. I reached out and steadied Vivvie’s hand.

  “You’re okay,” I told her.

  She reached into her bag and slipped out a flip phone. Her hand wrapped around it so tightly that her knuckles strained against her skin. “Nothing is okay.” For a moment, she pulled the phone close to her body, but then, like someone ripping a bandage off an open wound, she thrust it across the table toward me, forcing her grip to relax, finger by finger. I closed my own hand around the phone, feeling the weight of it.

  “Girls.” The teacher stopped by our table. “No phones.”

  I dropped the phone into my blazer pocket before he could move to take it from me. “What phone?”

  The teacher pointed his index finger at me. “Exactly.”

  The class passed torturously slowly. We did the work. But all I could think about was the phone in my pocket and the fact that on the other side of the room, Henry Marquette kept sending narrow-eyed glances at Vivvie and me.

  “As it turns out,” Asher told me, slipping behind me in the lunch line, “it is possible that I do know someone who might be able to get information off a disposable cell phone.”

  “Even if the phone has been wiped clean?” In between classes, I’d checked the call log and contacts. Both had been cleared.

  “My contact is . . . let’s say, resourceful,” Asher told me. “Nothing electronic is ever truly deleted.”

  “Asher.” Henry Marquette cut between the two of us. “Any chance you’re actually intending not to skip out on your remaining classes today?”

  “That’s Henry’s way of saying he thinks you’re a bad influence on me,” Asher informed me. “Given the high bad influence standards set by yours truly, I’m pretty sure that’s a compliment.”

  Based on the steely expression on Henry’s face, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t.

  If only he knew. Asher excelled at acting natural. From his tone, you would have thought he and I had been plotting a high school prank, not discussing how one went about pulling deleted information off a disposable phone.

  Henry had no idea just how bad an influence I was.

  “I’ll meet you in the computer lab during free period,” Asher told me.

  I started making my way to the courtyard.

  “Tess,” Henry called after me. On his lips, my name sounded like a nonsense word, one he’d condescended to saying and thought about as much of as flapdoodle or flibbertigibbet. “A moment?”

  What if he knows? My heart announced its presence in my chest, beating viciously against the inside of my rib cage. Of course he doesn’t know, I told myself. There was no way he could.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Henry came to stand next to me. “I understand Emilia hired you to keep Asher out of trouble in my absence.”

  Emilia. Not Vivvie. Emilia. The knots in my stomach relaxed, just slightly.

  “Emilia tried to hire me,” I corrected, forcing myself to respond to what he was saying instead of what he wasn’t. “She also tried to bribe me, and I’m pretty sure that threatening me into compliance might have eventually been on the table.”

  Henry took his time with his reply, spacing his words apart, giving each its own weight. “Regardless, as it happens, I am no longer absent.” His green eyes narrowed slightly. “Whatever you’re doing with Asher, you can stop.”

  Henry Marquette hadn’t wanted Ivy at his grandfather’s wake. He hadn’t wanted me around his little sister. And he didn’t want me fixing Asher.

  “Hate to break it to you,” I replied, “but Asher’s a big boy. He can make his own decisions about who to hang out with and who’s a liability.”

  At the word liability, Henry’s expression shifted slightly. He hadn’t expected me to see things from his perspective so clearly. “I know what your sister does, and I know the kind of destruction she leaves in her wake.” Henry’s voice was perfectly pleasant, but the glint in his eyes was anything but. “If you want to fashion yourself into some kind of high school fixer, fine. But stay away from Asher.”

  I probably should have been insulted that Henry was so convinced that he needed to protect Asher from me, but given what Asher and I had planned for that afternoon, I couldn’t help wondering if he was right.

  CHAPTER 25

  Asher’s contact met us in one of the smaller computer labs. She seemed about as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” Emilia gave her brother a look.

  “Is this my kidding face?” Asher asked her.

  Emilia glared at him. “It’s the only face you have.”

  “And what a face it is,” Asher agreed jovially. “Now, about that memory c
ard reconstruction . . .”

  “Do I even want to know where you got a burner phone?” Emilia asked. Asher opened his mouth to reply. “Don’t answer that,” she told him before swinging her attention over to me.

  “Can you do it?” I asked Emilia flatly.

  “Can I?” she repeated. “Yes. Girls qualify as an underserved minority if you’re applying to a STEM field.” At my blank look, she rolled her eyes. “Science, technology, engineering, math? Have you even thought about college applications?” She held up a hand. “Don’t answer that, either. I could do this. That doesn’t mean I will.”

  She folded her arms over her waist. “I told you I’d owe you if and only if you agreed to keep my brother out of trouble for just a few days. Let’s do a brief accounting, shall we?” She began ticking items off on her fingers. “In the time since he’s made your acquaintance, Asher has skipped school, committed grand theft auto, and threatened to rearrange John Thomas Wilcox’s face.”

  I turned to look at Asher. He hadn’t threatened John Thomas in my presence. Asher shrugged and then turned back to his twin. “Tess did get me off the chapel roof,” he volunteered helpfully.

  “For which she has my undying gratitude.” Emilia’s voice was dead dry. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, some of us like to use our study period to actually study.”

  She turned. Asher gestured at me to say something.

  “I’ll owe you.” Those words grated, but they had the desired effect. Emilia turned back to face us.

  “One favor, no questions asked, whenever and wherever I ask it of you.” Emilia gave me her sweetest smile and held out a delicate hand. “Deal?”

  Gritting my teeth, I took her hand, feeling like I’d just signed on the devil’s dotted line. “Deal.”

  Half an hour later, Emilia handed the phone back to me. “Voilà, and you’re welcome—in that order.”

  I took the phone and pulled up the restored call log. All the ingoing and outgoing calls were linked to the same two numbers.

  “Any way to tell who these numbers are registered to?” I asked.

  “Unless the owner of that phone is a complete moron,” Emilia replied, “I’m guessing those numbers belong to other disposable cell phones.”

  “One way to find out.” Asher plucked the phone from my grasp, and before I could stop him, he’d hit call. He switched the cell to speaker and set it on the counter.

  This is a bad idea. I reached for the phone, just as a computerized voice filled the air. The number had been disconnected.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. If Vivvie’s dad had been smart, he would have destroyed this phone—not just thrown it away.

  Emilia stood up and stretched slightly, like a gymnast preparing to tumble.

  “Tess?” Asher nodded to the phone in my hand. “There’s still one more number.”

  This is still a bad idea. But putting myself in Emilia’s debt had also been a bad idea. Letting Vivvie fish this phone out of her father’s trash had probably been a very bad idea. Not going straight to my sister with Vivvie’s accusations almost certainly was.

  I brought my thumb to the phone’s keypad, scrolled down, and hit call before I could change my mind. This time, the phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. I didn’t put it on speaker. My hand tightened around it with the fourth ring. I could feel my heart beating in my stomach.

  No one is going to answer. Whoever Major Bharani was talking to on this phone, they’re long gone. That was what I told myself, right up to the point when someone picked up.

  “I told you, you’ll get your money when I get my nomination.” The voice was male, deep and velvety with an American accent I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Whoever he was, he wasn’t happy. “Don’t call this number again.”

  The line went dead.

  “Any answer?” Emilia asked, unable to keep the curiosity from her tone.

  I cradled the phone in my hand for a moment, then flipped it closed. “No.”

  Asher met my eyes over his sister’s head. He wasn’t buying that answer. I didn’t expect him to.

  You’ll get your money when I get my nomination. The words were burned into my brain. I’d wanted Vivvie to be wrong. I’d wanted this to be a mistake.

  Clearly, however, it wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 26

  “The process for appointing a judge to the Supreme Court is an involved one. It starts with the president and his staff vetting candidates for the nomination. Who can they get past the Senate? Who best serves the party’s needs?” As Dr. Clark lectured, I thought of the president telling Ivy to dig for skeletons in someone’s closet.

  I tried not to think of the voice on the other end of the phone line.

  You’ll get your money when I get my nomination.

  “Eventually, the president selects a nominee, typically one who shares his broader ideological viewpoint. Once appointed, the only way a justice can be removed from the bench is impeachment—and no justice has been so impeached since 1804. As a result, Supreme Court appointments have the potential to dramatically change our legal and political landscape for decades.”

  As the class wore on, we got a brief overview of some of the biggest cases the Supreme Court had ever taken on. Voting rights. Segregation. Women’s health.

  “The president’s nominee eventually goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Dr. Clark continued. “During the hearings that follow, the nominee is questioned on everything from their record to their personal life. The committee then issues an assessment. A negative evaluation might send the president’s team scrambling for a new nominee. Eventually, to get a confirmation, the would-be justice will have to be confirmed by a majority vote of the Senate.”

  Dr. Clark leaned back against her desk. “It probably won’t come as a surprise to most of you to hear that long before the nomination goes to the floor, lobbyists and special interest parties will already be attempting to sway votes, one way or another.”

  Lobbyists. Special interest. She was speaking a language that was foreign to me, but for many of my classmates, it was their native tongue. I understood only that there were a lot of reasons for different groups to want—or not want—a person on the Supreme Court.

  I tried not to think about the fact that there were probably just as many reasons to want a Supreme Court justice dead.

  There were two numbers on the phone’s call log. I couldn’t stop the gears in my mind from turning. One of the numbers had belonged to the man I’d talked to. And the other?

  That one was a giant question mark.

  “For the next two weeks, you and your partner will be playing the role of the president.” Dr. Clark began handing out an outline of our assignment. “You’ll be researching candidates, putting forth your own nominee. Think of it like March Madness, but instead of putting together a bracket, you have your eye on the prize, and instead of winning a championship, the appointee instantly becomes one of the most powerful individuals in our country.”

  I took the sheet someone passed me and stared down at it. There were dozens of names on this list: possible nominees to research.

  “Mr. Marquette.” Dr. Clark lowered her voice as she came to Henry. “If you would prefer an alternative assignment . . .”

  “No,” Henry said, his posture almost supernaturally straight, his face giving nothing away. “This will be fine.”

  “You know something,” Vivvie said the second we settled in the back corner of the room to “brainstorm” for our project. “I know you know something. You have that look on your face.”

  I tried to think of a way to catch Vivvie up to speed without hurting her. That way didn’t exist.

  “There were two numbers on the phone.” I stuck to the facts, as bare-bones as I could make them. “We called both of them.”

  “We?” Vivvie leaned toward me, her eyes wide and panicked. “Who’s we?”

  Her voice carried. Several other students—and Dr. Clark—turned to look our way. Vivvie lowered her voice again.
“Who’s we?”

  I broke it to her that Asher had overheard her—and that his twin had been the one to retrieve the call log for us. Vivvie weathered that blow, pressing her lips together and bowing her head.

  “What happened when you called the number?” she asked quietly, looking up at me through impossibly long lashes. She must have known, from the expression on my face, that the answer wasn’t good. She gripped the paper in her hands so hard I thought she might tear it.

  “The first number was disconnected,” I said, pitching my voice as low as I could.

  “And the second?”

  I told Vivvie what the person who’d answered had said, verbatim.

  “So we’re dealing with what? A person who’s hoping to get the nomination himself? Or someone who has a candidate in mind?” Vivvie stared down at the paper in her hands—the list of names.

  “How are we doing here, girls?” Dr. Clark came to stand beside us.

  Vivvie forced herself to snap out of it. She smiled brightly, an expression so sweet it could make your teeth ache, and so utterly artificial that I wanted to cry. “We got distracted,” she said, sounding like a copy of a copy of the happy, chattering girl I’d met that first day. “But, hey, procrastination is the mother of invention, right?”

  Dr. Clark bit back a grin. “I believe that’s necessity,” she said, studying Vivvie a bit more closely. “Are you sure you’re okay, Vivvie?”

  “Great,” Vivvie replied forcefully. It hurt me just to hear her say it.

  “In that case,” Dr. Clark said, “I’m going to suggest you two switch partners. Procrastination, I am afraid, is the mother of nothing but more procrastination.”

  Before I could object, Dr. Clark had steered Vivvie in the direction of a new partner and brought someone else back to work with me.

  “Do you two know each other?” Dr. Clark asked.

  Henry Marquette looked about as happy with this development as I was. “We’ve met.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Partnering with Henry Marquette on a project devoted to choosing a replacement for his grandfather, while harboring suspicions that his grandfather had been murdered so that he could be replaced, was not what one would call a highlight of my day.