The Fixer

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  The inside of the nomination process.

  The inside of the White House.

  “Ivy hasn’t told anyone,” I said, thinking out loud. “Not the president, not the First Lady . . .”

  Henry clamped his jaw down, then forced it to relax. “You were right when you said that I needed to think about who I could possibly hand this information over to, Tess. If there’s even a chance that this goes as high as the West Wing, we can’t trust anyone. Not the police. Not the Justice Department. No one.”

  “So where does that leave us?” I asked.

  Henry’s chest rose and fell slightly with each breath. He was completely in control of himself in a way that he hadn’t been when he left the car. “I know where it leaves me. I’m going to figure out who had access to my grandfather before his so-called heart attack,” he told me. “And you’re going to go home.”

  CHAPTER 38

  By the time I got back to Ivy’s, it was dark. I let myself in the front door. The entire house was lit up like a Christmas tree, but there wasn’t another person in sight.

  “Hello?” As much as I just wanted to make my way up the spiral staircase and climb into bed, I doubted putting this off until morning would make the coming confrontation any easier. I’d taken off and ignored Ivy’s calls for hours on end. She wasn’t going to be happy about that.

  “Hello?” I called a second time. I walked back toward her office. The sound of my footsteps echoed through the otherwise silent house. Ivy’s office door was slightly ajar. I pushed gently on it. “Ivy?”

  The door opened. The office was empty. I hovered at the threshold, like a vampire waiting for an invitation. I should turn around and go. But I didn’t. I stepped over the threshold and walked slowly toward Ivy’s desk.

  It had been three days since I’d told Ivy everything I knew. She’d had three days to begin unraveling what was going on here. She’d been working, almost nonstop.

  The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination.

  If Henry had come to that conclusion, Ivy must have seen it, too. What had she been doing for the past three days? What had she discovered?

  What did she know?

  There was a thick manila envelope sitting in the middle of her desk. I hesitated for a second or two, then reached for it. Ivy wanted to keep me out of this, but I was already in too deep. Henry. Vivvie. This wasn’t some exercise for World Issues. It wasn’t a game.

  I opened the envelope.

  The first thing I saw was the edge of a photo. The second thing I saw was myself. Pictures. My brain processed what I was seeing. Of me.

  This wasn’t evidence. It had nothing to do with the case. My breath caught in my throat. I slid the photos out of the envelope. There were dozens of them: me at twelve, my hair falling out of a thick braid; at sixteen, behind the wheel of Gramps’s truck; elementary school plays; middle school dances.

  I didn’t even remember most of these pictures being taken. Gramps must have sent them to her. Thinking about my grandfather taking these pictures was enough of a punch to the gut. But knowing that Ivy had kept them? That realization knocked the wind out of me.

  “There.” In my memory, Ivy sits on the edge of my bed, and I sit on the floor in front of her. She fixes my hair into a braid. I lean back into her leg.

  She’d stayed with me for a few days, after our parents’ funeral. I’d almost forgotten that.

  My hand is woven through Ivy’s. Another memory came viciously on the heels of the first. Ivy kneels beside me. My free hand finds its way to her face. I pat her cheek. It’s wet. Why is Ivy crying? I burrow into her side. She picks me up, pressing my head to her chest, breathing in my smell.

  And then she hands me away.

  “Tess?” a male voice called my name. I stuffed the pictures back in the envelope and made my way into the hallway a second before Adam rounded the corner. He was moving quickly, long strides covering the space between us in seconds flat.

  “Are you okay?”

  I’d been prepared to let Ivy yell at me. I hadn’t expected to have Adam staring down at me, worry giving way to anger on his face.

  What did he have to be angry about?

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just needed some space. Where’s Ivy?”

  “You needed some space, so you went radio silent and took off.” There was an edge in his voice. He turned his back on me for a moment and ran a hand roughly through his short brown hair. “Of course you did.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

  “Call your sister,” Adam ordered, turning back around and pinning me with a glare. “Now.”

  I called Ivy. She answered on the first ring. “Where are you? Are you okay? Do you need me to come get you?”

  I didn’t think she’d stop asking questions long enough for me to respond. “I’m at your place,” I said.

  “Okay.” Ivy let out a breath and then repeated herself. “Okay. I’m on my way. Is Adam there?”

  I glanced up at Adam, who was tracking my every move, like I might take off again any second. “He’s here,” I told Ivy.

  She must have heard a hint of wariness in my voice, because the next thing she said was, “He’s a worrier. Try not to hold it against him.”

  I eyed Adam, whose even features were set into an expression of uncompromising disapproval. “Roger that.”

  Adam narrowed his eyes at me. “What did she say?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  I could practically hear Ivy rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. “Put him on.”

  I handed the phone to Adam. He took it. “As far as I can tell, she’s in one piece,” he said, then paused. “What makes you think I’m going to yell at her?” Another pause. “I don’t yell . . . fine. I’ll be on my best behavior until you get here. I won’t tell her that family doesn’t just take off, or that running away never solved anything.” Adam might have been talking to Ivy, but his sharp blue eyes were on me. “I certainly won’t tell her that if it were up to me, she wouldn’t be leaving this house again until she was thirty.”

  For a guy who’d met me only a handful of times, Adam did a good impression of my grandfather.

  He and Bodie are Ivy’s family. I didn’t know how long they’d known each other, or what exactly there was between them. All I knew was that while I’d been in Montana with Gramps, they’d been here with her—probably for years.

  Apparently, from Adam’s perspective, that made me family, too.

  “I’m not supposed to yell at you,” he informed me when he hung up the phone, the muscles in his jaw taut.

  “If it would make you feel better, I don’t really mind,” I offered.

  Adam’s eyelid twitched. “Of course you don’t,” he said with a shake of his head. “You do realize that completely defeats the point?”

  I was pretty sure there was no right answer to that question. “I was only gone for a few hours.”

  Adam fixed me with a look. “This isn’t a good time for you to go off the grid—not even for a few hours.”

  I thought about Ivy telling me to keep my mouth shut, about Henry pointing out that we couldn’t trust anyone—not the police, not the Justice Department, and certainly not the White House.

  “Ivy hasn’t told the president or the First Lady what’s going on.” I studied Adam’s face as I said those words. “The only way any of this makes any sense is if Pierce had reason to believe that he would get the nomination.”

  Adam’s poker face was even better than Henry’s. “Don’t take off again,” he ordered.

  He’s not going to tell me anything. With a curt nod to acknowledge his words, I turned to go upstairs.

  “This isn’t the time to jump to conclusions,” Adam called after me. His voice stopped me in my tracks. He measured his words, choosing each one carefully. “The president is rarely the most powerful p
erson in Washington, Tess. He’s part of a system, a cog in a machine.”

  “Are you saying you don’t think the president was involved?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Adam replied, “because Ivy told you to stay out of this. I am telling you to stay out of this.” The warning was clear in his voice. If he had to make me stay out of this, it wouldn’t be pleasant. “But if I was saying something, it would be that this isn’t simple. Power is currency in Washington. And you don’t always know who’s holding the cards.”

  He was saying that the president wasn’t the only one we should be wary of. He might not even be the most likely suspect.

  Not when there were people out there who made things happen behind the scenes.

  People like Adam’s father.

  That night, as I plugged my phone in to charge, I remembered the photo from the headmaster’s office. I pulled up the shots I’d taken on my phone. The first two were unusable, but the third one only had a minor glare. I zoomed in and studied the men in the photo: three in the back row, two in the front, one off to the side.

  Major Bharani. Judge Pierce. The Hardwicke headmaster. William Keyes. The fifth man, I didn’t know. And the sixth—he was standing slightly off to one side. The glare obscured his face, but the way he was standing, the general shape of his features—

  Familiar.

  I loaded the picture onto my computer and looked up every tutorial I could find on removing glare from photos. I cloned the picture. I adjusted the shadow. I played with the filters. The end result wasn’t pretty, but it was enough for me to confirm the man’s identity.

  Six men. Five I recognize. I walked through them one by one. The doctor who killed Justice Marquette. The judge who paid him to do it. The headmaster of DC’s most exclusive private school. Adam’s father, who makes things happen behind the scenes.

  And standing off to the side, staring straight at the camera:

  President Nolan.

  CHAPTER 39

  I spent the night at my computer, trying to track down anything I could about the picture—where it had been taken, when it had been taken, what the relationship was between these six men.

  No matter how thoroughly I searched the internet, I couldn’t find any other connection between Judge Pierce and Vivvie’s father. They lived thousands of miles apart. They’d gone to different schools, had different occupations. They weren’t even the same age. I couldn’t find evidence of the two men ever having been in the same place.

  Except for the picture.

  It was easier to connect Judge Pierce to William Keyes. The two men shared an alma mater. They were both on the university’s board of regents.

  In contrast, I couldn’t find any evidence of a direct link between William Keyes and Vivvie’s dad, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that a man who made things happen in Washington might be acquainted with all manner of White House staff.

  With the president, it was the reverse—it was easy to connect him with Vivvie’s father. The man was his personal physician. But Judge Pierce? All my sleuthing could turn up was speculation about who the Nolan administration’s nominee for the Supreme Court might be. Pierce’s name was one of many—and it rarely even came up.

  The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination. That thought dogged me until I fell asleep at the keyboard.

  The next morning, I printed out a copy of the picture and folded it in half, then in half again. I put it in my back pocket, then went downstairs. Ivy and Bodie were in the kitchen. Ivy had a cup of coffee in one hand and a small overnight bag in the other.

  “Going somewhere?” I asked her.

  “Arizona.” She downed the last of her coffee. “I hear it’s nice this time of year.”

  Arizona. Judge Pierce was from Arizona. I wanted to ask what she would be doing there but knew she wouldn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry to leave,” she said. “After yesterday—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No,” Ivy told me. “It’s not. The way you heard about Vivvie’s dad was not okay. What Vivvie is going through right now is not okay. The fact that I’m asking you not to tell anyone about any of this is not okay. I know that, Tess, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry about yesterday, I’m sorry I got you involved in any of this.”

  “Technically,” I said, “I got you involved in this.”

  “You Kendricks,” Bodie cut in. “You love your technicalities.”

  Ivy ignored him. “Bodie will be here all weekend,” she told me. “And if you need anything, you can call Adam.”

  Adam, whose father was in that picture.

  I glanced at the bag in Ivy’s hand, then punched a button on my phone and pulled up the photo. “Before you go,” I said, “there’s something you should see.”

  Ivy confiscated my phone. An hour later, Bodie handed me a new one. He’d inputted his number, Adam’s, and Ivy’s. I tried calling Vivvie, dialing the number from memory, but there was no answer.

  Ivy hadn’t been happy to discover the real reason behind my trip to the headmaster’s office. She wouldn’t discuss the men in that picture—or what, if anything, she thought it meant that Vivvie’s dad and Judge Pierce had apparently been in the same place at the same time. She just flew off to Arizona, taking the evidence with her. I was left with an empty house, a “driver” who kept one eye on me at all times, and a printed copy of the photograph, folded into quarters in my back pocket.

  Being grounded gave me lots of time to think.

  Monday morning, when I dialed the number for Vivvie’s phone, I didn’t really expect her to answer. When she picked up, my voice fled. I couldn’t even force out the word hello. Vivvie was on the verge of hanging up when I finally recovered.

  “It’s me,” I said. Once I started talking, words poured out. “I’m so sorry, Vivvie. I—”

  “Stop.” Vivvie spoke over me. “Just stop, Tess.”

  I stopped, then waited for the first blow to fall.

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  I could picture her face fighting against those words. I wasn’t sure if she believed them or not.

  “Are you . . .” I wasn’t sure how to finish that question. I certainly wasn’t going to ask if she was okay.

  “We’re burying him this morning.” Vivvie let those words drop and said nothing in the silence that followed them.

  “Do you want me to come?”

  There was another long pause after my question.

  “It’s supposed to just be me and my aunt,” Vivvie said. “And the honor guard. It’s a military funeral, but they want it quiet. Because suicides don’t look good.”

  Suicides don’t look good. The brutality of that statement made my stomach lurch.

  “I keep telling myself that I did the right thing.” I could hear Vivvie suck in a breath of air. “I keep telling myself that, Tess, and I almost believe it, but I need to know that this isn’t—” She cut off. “That it’s not just going to . . .” She couldn’t finish that sentence, either. “I need to know that my going to your sister matters, that it made a difference, that it wasn’t for nothing.”

  “It wasn’t.” I wished I could make this better for her. I wished I could give her something more than that. “Ivy flew to Arizona today. She wouldn’t say why, but it has to have something to do with Pierce.”

  On the other end of the phone line, Vivvie was quiet for so long that I thought she might have hung up.

  “What if my dad didn’t kill himself, Tess?” Vivvie’s question caught me off guard. “Ivy said this was dangerous. That’s why she wanted to keep you out of it.” The full force of her pent-up emotions crept into those words. “What if someone realized Ivy was looking into things? What if someone found out that she knew about my dad? If my dad could identify the people he was working with, he was a threat to them.”

  “Vivvie—”

  “Or what
if my dad told someone he was worried about getting caught? What if he got freaked out that the phone was missing, and he told someone? Pierce, or . . . or . . .”

  Or whoever else was involved.

  It had been easy for me to believe that Vivvie’s father had killed himself. With the phone missing, he had to have known things were unraveling. He’d lost his job at the White House. Maybe he even hated himself for hurting Vivvie.

  What I hadn’t thought about was the fact that Vivvie’s father wasn’t the only one who stood to lose something if he got caught. I hadn’t thought about the fact that he might have been able to identify the other people involved.

  He put a bullet in his own head, William Keyes had said, staring straight at me. And maybe Vivvie’s father had.

  But now that Vivvie had raised the issue, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe—maybe—he hadn’t.

  CHAPTER 40

  I got to school late. In English, I could feel Henry’s eyes on me across the room. In physics, he sat down at my lab table. The day’s experiment was on centripetal force.

  “You asked if I could find out where my grandfather was the night before his heart attack.” Henry’s attention seemed one hundred percent focused on the knot he was tying around a tennis ball. His expression gave nothing away: the very portrait of the dedicated student. “He was at a fund-raiser for the Keyes Foundation.”

  Keyes. As in William Keyes. Adam’s words echoed in my head. The president is rarely the most powerful person in Washington.

  “There were over four hundred attendees,” Henry said, testing the security of his knot. “Not to mention the waitstaff. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to slip something in my grandfather’s drink.”

  Poison the justice. Send him to the hospital. Have the White House physician declare it a heart attack. Have him operate. Twice. By the time the justice died, the poison would have been out of his bloodstream.

  The perfect murder.

  In my mind, I could still hear Vivvie telling me that she needed having gone to Ivy with her suspicions about her father to have made a difference. To mean something.