The Fixer

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Ivy nodded. I started to say something, but she cut me off. “He was right to tell me to go, Tess, and the rest of it? That’s not on Gramps. Not calling, not being there—that’s on me.” Ivy let out a long breath. “I couldn’t be your sister anymore, Tess, and that is on me. When I got back here after that visit, I threw myself into my work. I made enemies, and I told myself that you were safer if I kept my distance.”

  I knew without asking who one of those enemies was. “William Keyes.”

  If Ivy noticed the note of apprehension in my voice when I said that name, she gave no sign of it. “We had a disagreement. He went after someone I cared about. It didn’t end well, and I told myself that you would be safer if I stayed away.”

  “You wanted to protect me.” From my own grandfather, I added silently. From the man I went to in order to save you.

  “I wanted to protect you,” Ivy repeated, then she closed her eyes and bowed her head slightly. “That was what I told myself. I told myself that I was doing it to protect you, but God help me, Tess, if I’m honest—with myself, with you—I think I was really protecting me.” When she opened her eyes again, they were full of self-directed anger and grief. Whether or not I could forgive her, she’d never forgive herself for what she was about to say. “Seeing you, talking to you, loving you wrecked me. You said once that I didn’t know what it felt like to feel helpless, to have other people making my decisions—but I do, Tessie. Because I let Mom and Dad decide, I let Gramps decide, I let them take you—and I swore I would never let that happen to me again.”

  Ivy was my age, I thought. She was my age when she met Tommy Keyes, my age when she got pregnant with me. I’d known that, objectively, but somehow, I’d never thought of Ivy as young or scared or fallible. She was Ivy Kendrick. She wasn’t supposed to be any of those things.

  “I guess I always thought,” Ivy said softly, “that if I was strong enough, if I was formidable enough, if I was successful enough—I could be enough. For you. I thought that if I became this person who could take on the world, then I could take care of you.” She shook her head—at her past self, maybe, or to snap herself out of it. “When I came to Montana that summer, Tess, I thought I was ready. I really did. I was going to give you everything. But Gramps called me out, and he was right, Tessie. I wasn’t doing it for you. You were thriving. You were happy. And I . . .” The words got caught in her throat, but she forced them out. “I was your sister. I was never going to be strong enough or successful enough. There was never going to be a right time to tell you. You were happy. And you deserved to be happy.”

  I’d never heard her sound as fierce as she did saying those words. You deserved to be happy.

  “So you left me there,” I said, the emotion in my voice an echo of hers.

  “I left you there, and it broke me. It shattered me, and I didn’t know how to go back.” Ivy was quiet for a moment, then forced herself to continue. “I left you there for you, but I stayed away for me. I have made so many mistakes, but that?” Ivy shook her head again. “That’s the one that never goes away. I thought, when I brought you here, that I could make up for it, that I could be whatever you needed me to be.”

  That was my cue to say something. I was supposed to tell her that it was all right, that I understood, or that it wasn’t ever going to be all right, and that I was never going to understand.

  “Right now,” I said instead, “all I need you to be is alive.”

  I knew now why she’d left. Why she’d stayed away. Eventually, we’d have to deal with that—but not tonight. After the past few days, I didn’t have it in me to feel anything else. I was so sick of being sideswiped by emotions. Just this once, I needed something to be neat. I needed simple. I needed to just concentrate on the fact that she was alive. She was here.

  I can’t do this with you right now, Ivy.

  “I thought Adam might be my father,” I said abruptly. As far as subject changes went, that one was effective.

  “He’s not,” Ivy said immediately.

  I met her eyes. “His brother was.”

  Ivy froze for a moment. “Now I know what Bodie’s always talking about,” she said finally. “It is freaky.” I thought she’d stop there, but she didn’t. “Tommy was . . . exciting.” It took her a moment to decide on the word. “He was motion and emotion. He never stopped moving, never stopped feeling. He was stubborn and loyal and never once thought about the consequences of anything he did.”

  “So I get that from him.” I meant that as a joke, but I couldn’t keep from thinking the words again. I get that from him.

  Ivy reached for me. I let her squeeze my shoulder, then turned to the photos tacked to the wall. “What’s all this?” Another subject change—this one less successful than the first. Ivy’s lack of response pinged on my internal radar. “Ivy?”

  I gestured to the photos on the wall. Judge Pierce. Major Bharani. Damien Kostas. The case was over. So why was Ivy down here, staring at pictures of these three men?

  “It’s nothing,” Ivy said, standing up and moving to take the photographs from the wall.

  “Right,” I said. Nothing wasn’t keeping Ivy up at night. “Tell me.”

  Nothing good had ever come from Ivy keeping me in the dark. Maybe she was starting to see that, or maybe she was too worn down to fight me on this. She drew her hand back from the first photograph, leaving it pinned to the wall. A second later, she started to speak.

  “After Kostas got word that his son had been pardoned, he let me go.” Ivy shuttered her eyes, and I knew she was thinking back to that moment. “He was coming out. He wasn’t a threat. He wasn’t armed. He was turning himself in, so why shoot?” Ivy looked down at her hands. “We’re talking trained hostage negotiators, Tess. There’s no way they should have taken that shot.”

  She turned back to the wall. To the photographs. The judge. The doctor. The Secret Service agent. “Kostas killed Bharani when he became a liability,” Ivy said. “Kostas killed Pierce when he reneged on their deal.”

  I heard what she wasn’t saying and gave life to the question myself. “So who killed Kostas?”

  Who had fired that shot? A member of the SWAT team, presumably, but—

  “Who killed Kostas?” Ivy repeated, interrupting my thoughts. “Or,” she added, “who gave the order?”

  Ivy’s gaze went to the conference table. On it, there was a notebook, and on the notebook, there was a list.

  Names.

  I thought back to a conversation I’d had with Henry. There was another number on that disposable phone, he’d said. That means there is at least one other person involved.

  At least.

  I’d thought, multiple times, that we were either looking for someone who could have poisoned Henry’s grandfather or someone who had the power to usher Pierce’s nomination through. It had never occurred to me that we might be looking for both.

  “You think there might be someone else,” I said. Ivy neither confirmed nor denied those words. “Kostas killed Vivvie’s dad because he was becoming a liability, but once Kostas’s son was pardoned . . .”

  Kostas had told me that he didn’t expect to get out of this. He’d talked about being honorable.

  Kostas was a liability, I thought, unable to keep the possibility from taking root in my mind. Maybe the Secret Service agent had been shot by an overzealous SWAT agent. Or maybe someone on the SWAT team had instructions to make sure Kostas didn’t leave that building alive.

  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.

  Kostas didn’t have the kind of power. And when I’d asked him if Pierce was the one who’d arranged this whole thing, he hadn’t replied. He’d stilled, an unreadable expression on his face.

  Not because he was thinking about Pierce. Because he was thinking of someone else.

  “Pierce was made aware of my problem,” I told Ivy. “That’s what Kostas sai
d to me. Not that Pierce figured it out, not that Pierce masterminded the whole thing. Pierce was made aware of my problem.”

  By who? My mind went to the phone that Kostas had snapped in two. It was a flip phone, obviously a disposable. So who had the number? Who was calling?

  My eyes traveled back to Ivy’s list. There were maybe a dozen names on it, but I only saw one.

  My paternal grandfather’s.

  “You said you cleared William Keyes,” I told Ivy, a feeling of dread taking up residence in my stomach. “You said Keyes was the last person who would have wanted Justice Marquette dead.”

  Ivy flipped the notebook closed before I could get a look at the other names. “Nothing for you to worry about,” she told me, squeezing my arm again. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  CHAPTER 65

  A judge. The White House physician. A Secret Service agent.

  Once Ivy put the thought in my head, I couldn’t keep from coming back to it. Were all the people responsible for Theodore Marquette’s death dead? And if not, who was still out there?

  Judge Pierce had stood to gain a nomination.

  Vivvie’s father had done it for money.

  Kostas had done it for his son.

  If there was someone else—someone whose role had been ushering the nomination through, someone whose calls Kostas had been avoiding—what had that person stood to gain?

  I didn’t speak a word of those thoughts to Henry. Or to Vivvie. Our lives were slowly getting back to normal. That first Monday back at Hardwicke, the gossip mill ran full force. Ivy’s name had been released as the hostage. Everyone wanted the inside scoop—but I’d managed to do a pretty good job dissuading people from asking me questions.

  I was, in general, pretty good at dissuading.

  I knew things were dying down when a student approached me claiming that someone was sabotaging her grades. No one outside of Vivvie, Henry, and Asher knew about my role in getting Ivy released, but there was no escaping the persistent belief that if you had a problem at Hardwicke, Tess Kendrick was the person to see.

  A week to the day after my last text from William Keyes, I received a second. He’d held up his end of our bargain. It was my turn to hold up mine.

  “Are you okay?” Vivvie asked me, the question taking me back to the way she’d asked, over and over, my first day at Hardwicke.

  “I just received a royal decree from my grandfather that he’s picking me up after school,” I said. The word grandfather felt foreign on my lips, like maybe I wasn’t saying it right. Gramps was my grandfather, but William Keyes? He was one of the wealthiest men in the country. He was a kingmaker, a powerful enemy, a powerful friend.

  His name was on Ivy’s list.

  “What exactly did you promise the old chap?” Asher fell in beside us in the hallway on our way to the exit.

  “Besides a press conference announcing my existence to the world?” I asked, giving no visible clue to where my thoughts had really taken me. “Weekly dinners, giving him a say in my education, letting him set up a trust fund for me, and—” I mumbled the rest of it.

  “Did you say changing your last name?” Asher asked.

  “You said once that your sister and Keyes didn’t get along.” Now it was Henry’s turn to join the conversation. “I do hope that was an exaggeration.” The two of us weren’t friends, exactly, but we’d been through something—he’d sat by me when I’d been waiting for news on Ivy; I was the only person he’d ever told about his father.

  Sometimes, when I caught him staring at me, I thought maybe he knew my secrets, too.

  “Not an exaggeration,” I told Henry. “When Ivy finds out I went to William Keyes for help, when she finds out what I promised him . . .”

  That would have been an ugly conversation no matter what. But given that Ivy was still staying up nights, locked in her office, given that she thought there was another conspirator out there and my grandfather’s name was on her suspect list—she was going to kill me.

  We hit the front corridor. Asher pushed the door open. “Ladies,” he said with a gallant half bow, “after you.”

  I stepped out into the sunshine and stopped dead in my tracks. There was a limo waiting at the curb, and standing just outside the limo was William Keyes. The man the First Lady said excelled at holding a grudge. The one I’d been told was ruthless and dangerous. The one who valued family, who wanted a legacy.

  The one who looked at me, across the pavement, with a hungry look in his eyes that told me that legacy might be me.

  “Will you remember us when you’re fancy?” Asher asked me. I shoved him to one side. All around us, students were slowing to look at Keyes. It wasn’t the limo that attracted their attention. It was the man.

  Asher’s sister honed in on the four of us like a missile zeroing in on its target. “That’s William Keyes,” Emilia told Asher. “What is William Keyes doing here?”

  Henry, Asher, and Vivvie all darted their eyes toward me.

  Asher was the one who broke the silence. “Have you met my friend?” he asked Emilia. “Tess Keyes.”

  Emilia stopped dead in her tracks. Asher had spoken just loudly enough that several people overheard him. My good old buddy John Thomas Wilcox looked like he’d swallowed a worm.

  Note to self, I thought, kill Asher. But a second later, I had bigger things to worry about, because apparently Bodie hadn’t come by himself to pick me up today.

  Ivy had come with him.

  “Incoming,” Bodie coughed, and that was all the warning I had before Ivy swooped down, intercepting me before I made it to the limo and the man who was standing there.

  “Tess,” Ivy said calmly.

  “Yes?”

  “What is Adam’s father doing here?”

  I looked to Bodie, who gave me a look that said, oh so clearly, that I was on my own.

  “What is Adam’s father doing here?” Ivy repeated.

  There was no way to sugarcoat it. “Apparently, he’s giving me a ride home from school.”

  We’d acquired enough of an audience that Ivy lowered her voice. “And why would William Keyes do that?”

  “Because he knows,” I said. “About Tommy. About me.”

  Ivy had to have suspected that was what I was going to say, but that didn’t keep her nostrils from flaring slightly the moment I said it.

  “We needed a pardon.” I said the words below my breath, so low that no one but Ivy could hear them. “I did what I had to do to make sure you came home alive.”

  I didn’t regret it. No matter who—or what—my paternal grandfather might be, I couldn’t regret it.

  “Ivy.” William Keyes stepped forward and greeted Ivy with a cat-eating-canary smile. “You look well.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him.

  He smiled. “I’m picking my granddaughter up from school.”

  Ivy forgot about keeping her voice low. “I want you to stay away from her. You have no legal standing—”

  “I’ll stay away from her when she asks me to stay away from her,” William Keyes replied.

  Ivy looked at me. “Theresa,” she said, her voice low. “Tess Kendrick. Tell him.”

  His name was on that list. But there were other names, too.

  “I gave him my word,” I said. This was the bargain I’d struck: the kingmaker’s presence in my life in exchange for saving Ivy’s.

  It was a deal I would make all over again.

  “In this business,” Keyes told Ivy, still looking altogether too satisfied with himself, “your word is the most valuable asset you have.”

  He gestured toward the limo, and I stepped toward it.

  “What’s your endgame here?” Ivy asked the man she’d once worked for. “What do you want with my daughter?”

  “The same thing I’ve always wanted, dear,” William replied. “An heir.”

  Unlike the rest of us, he made no move whatsoever to lower his voice. All around us, my fellow students were buzzing.

&
nbsp; “By the way,” the man who made kings told Ivy, “her name isn’t Tess Kendrick. She’s changing it—to Tess Kendrick Keyes.” He smiled smugly. “There’ll be a lovely profile of her—and her courageous father, God rest his soul—in tomorrow’s Post.”

  For once, Ivy was speechless.

  Nearby, someone snapped a picture of the three of us on a cell phone. Keyes opened the door to the limo. With one last look at Ivy, I climbed in. My paternal grandfather climbed in beside me.

  “Ivy’s going to kill me,” I said.

  “You’re a Keyes,” he replied smoothly. “We excel at thinking five steps ahead. I’m sure you can handle it.”

  As the limo pulled away from Hardwicke, I could see Ivy’s mind racing, looking for a way to undo this—and quite possibly plotting my immediate demise. I thought about Justice Marquette and the likelihood that there was a fourth player who’d gotten away with his part in the murder.

  I thought about the fact that the person in question might be sitting beside me in this car.

  And then I settled back in my seat and responded to his assertion that I could handle it. “I can try.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, this book would not exist without the wonderful team who helped bring it into being. First and foremost, thank you to Catherine Onder, for seeing the potential in this book and working with me to make sure it lived up to that potential. I owe you a huge debt of gratitude (as do Vivvie, Henry, and Asher—not to mention the book’s plot!). Major thanks are also due to Anne Heltzel, who helped me take this book from its first revision to its final draft. Anne’s input was invaluable (and delivered on an extremely tight timetable to boot!).

  I’m blessed to have worked with my incredible agent, Elizabeth Harding, on fourteen books now. As always, Elizabeth, I am so grateful for your help and support at every step in the process. Thank you also to Ginger Clark, whose passion for this project never failed to humble me and bring a smile to my face, and to Holly Frederick and everyone else at Curtis Brown for all their hard work!