He bowed, then turned and walked away.
Parker and I watched the agent’s retreating figure.
We turned again to the screen. The news helicopter hovered over the scorched hillside and the camera zoomed in on the charred skeleton of the car.
The reporter said it was a Lamborghini.
“Just imagine that,” Parker said.
“What?”
“This is probably him, Stella. The man who was behind everything. And he's just gone down with a Lamborghini as his funeral pyre.”
“A wise man told me, recently,” I said, “that justice isn’t confined to the tip of a judge’s pen.”
Epilogue
Angela Roseau sauntered down to the office in the basement, relishing the tranquility that dusk brought.
It was Friday and she had the Georgetown townhouse to herself. Her husband and two of his cousins had taken off that morning for a four-day escape to the private Caribbean island owned by a long-time family friend. A boys-only adventure. Wives would only be a distraction on their deep-sea fishing outings, he’d said.
Her husband had an aversion to anything resembling work, and that had worked in the favor of their relationship. If the Roseau name were to advance during his lifetime, it would happen through her. He was content with that. As a result, he was reliably discreet, and deeply loyal to her.
Whether those not infrequent, wives-excluded activities included some form of female participation, she could not say. She had certainly made it clear to Steve at the start of their marriage that if he planned to be like his father in seeking outside companionship, she would not behave like his mother and tolerate decades of being Mrs Roseau in name only while he flaunted the drawing power his family’s fortune had for starlets and assorted desperate females.
As far as the world knew — and as far as she chose to believe — he was a faithful husband.
And a good husband.
What she appreciated most of all was that, apart from her chief of staff, he was the one person in the world in whom she could confide. It was a relief to be able to share her exploits with someone who understood her completely and supported her fully.
Yet, there were parts of herself that she held back. Some things ran just too deep to untangle from her heart and release to another.
In the Tudor style office, she pushed aside a false oak panel to get to the safe behind it. After dialing the combination, she took out two thick, leather-bound journals and a fat, gold pen.
She settled at the large glass desk, which was bare, except for a Tiffany lamp that cast a soft, amber glow in the deepening darkness.
Her palm ran over the smooth, dark brown surface of the older of the two books. She had no need to open it. She was familiar with what filled the pages between the two sturdy covers. It was enough for her to touch the journal for a lifetime of memories and their attached emotions to flood through her.
Somewhere close to the middle was a page on which she had written words she had re-read hundreds of times over the years. She knew the first sentence by heart.
Last night, I met the man who holds the key to my destiny.
Bill Mahler had not been the handsomest or the wealthiest bachelor at the dinner party at which they’d been introduced. According to the “pillow ambition” her mother had instilled in her – by which women ascended in the world through an intelligent choice, and allurement, of a partner – she should have ignored him.
Yet, something had stirred in her when their eyes had met.
The strange mixture of tension and ease she’d felt in speaking with him, and which she had recognized from his somewhat uncertain manner that he, too, had felt, had told her this was no ordinary connection.
He was ambitious and had made great strides in his business. The first few hours they had spoken had been enough to fill her with a desire to be at this man’s side as he forged ahead. She saw herself having and raising his children, and supporting him in everything he did.
And he had wanted the same; everything that happened between them had told her as much.
What a shame it was that Fate had stepped in and had forced him to choose between his desire to feel fulfilled as a man by being with her, and his desire for fulfillment as a business titan.
But Bill didn’t want to choose. It was the height of his conceit and ambition that he thought he could have both.
Angel Roseau sighed involuntarily.
In her mind, she saw the wild-eyed creature he had been as he sat on the sofa at her Chelsea apartment pleading with her to go along with his plan. They would call off their engagement and he would marry another woman. And he would divorce his wife as soon as his wealthy, ailing father-in-law passed away. He figured it would take two years; maximum, four.
He didn’t want her to wait for him; he’d asked her to wait out his marriage with him.
A meaningless marriage of convenience, he’d called it.
For her, that was untenable. He was asking her to remain in the shadows, a mistress longing for her lover’s divorce so she could finally take the place on his arm as his wife.
“I was not born to live in the shadows,” she had told him.
She had forced him to choose.
He didn’t choose her.
It wounded her deeply.
But ambition knows ambition. She understood his choice, even as her ears burned as he said his goodbyes. Yes, she understood his choice completely, although it took years for her to forgive him fully.
Her words to him had rung in her ears for weeks after: “I was not born to live in the shadows.”
And when she eventually crossed paths with Steve Roseau, who was reluctantly set to take on the family tradition of running for Congress and seemed interested in her ideas about campaigning, it felt right.
Gradually, her mother’s pillow ambition gave way to Angela Roseau’s resolution against living life in the shadows. One son and three miscarriages later, life took a dramatic turn for the couple.
To the surprise of many hangers-on who had surrounded Steve Roseau for years, his young wife commandeered a place at the helm of his campaign and ushered him into the Capitol. He endured what he privately swore would be his single term, which was bearable only because he intended from the very start to bow out of politics and support his wife as his successor.
Half-way through Steve Roseau’s term, the death of a Louisiana state legislator created an opening that Angela Roseau seized upon to make her political debut. A stint in the state legislature would give her the credibility to eventually take up the place vacated by her husband in the US Congress
When candidate Roseau stood at the podium for the first time listening to the applause and seeing the thousands of faces eager for someone to lead and represent them, she dared to think that she was meant to fill the role.
Not just in the corridors of the Capitol, but, eventually, at another famed Washington, D.C. address, as well.
And why not?
She knew she was as smart or smarter and as tough or tougher than the male politicians of her cohort who would be vying for the highest office in the land, in years to come. Anatomy alone distinguished her from them. For her, that was not a justifiable basis on which she should be excluded from a job that she knew she had all the aptitude and skills to master.
How uncanny it was, now, that Bill Mahler, in his passing, seemed to have played such a key role in her destiny, after all.
His death had set in motion a train of events that had brought her to this moment. People and circumstances had fallen into place. And now she was on the cusp of achieving the greatest desire that she harbored.
It had taken altogether too long for a woman to come so close to
holding the reins of power in the most powerful nation on the planet. And now, it was all open to her. Opportunity had knocked, and she had said, “I am ready. I am worthy.”
Almost surgically attached to her smart phone at most times, she rarely touched a pen, except in two circumstances — when her signature was needed to make a document official, and when the intimacy of her journal compelled her to set down her deepest thoughts in longhand.
She opened the newer of the two books, and the nib flew across the blank page:
Friday, March 11
My mother fled the confinement of a religious and deeply dysfunctional home, shortly after turning seventeen, and her shadow never crossed the threshold of a church, ever again. Nevertheless, I still think of her as a profoundly spiritual person.
She saw the operation of a divine hand at work in everything around her, from the rising and setting of the sun, to the ebb and flow of the tides, and the birth and death of every living creature.
So many years after she’s gone, I remember two of her observations as particularly astute.
The first concerned destiny. In her understanding of life, a divine will offered each one of us a greater and a lesser destiny. She would say that what may seem to small, finite minds as chaos in an irrational world is often the spiritual alignment of people and circumstances in a manner that manifests destiny.
“There’s no such thing as luck, neither good, nor bad,” she would tell me. “There’s only Life presenting a moment of opportunity and asking you whether you have prepared yourself to make good on your greater destiny.”
The second observation my mother made was that the world has a habit of underestimating women.
Many men, and even some women, fail to appreciate the ambition to a greater destiny that may throb in the heart of a woman. They do not see a woman’s potential because they look at all women through the lens of the limitations they place on the female of our species.
“A smart woman will use this to her advantage,” my mother would often tell me.
People’s lower expectations allow such a woman to fly under the radar, quietly growing in wisdom and strength, until the moment arrives when she can strike, and claim her higher destiny….
********
A NOTE FROM ALEX: Thanks for picking up a copy of Run, Girl, Run. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much I enjoyed writing it. Hey, visit my website and sign up for my mailing list so you can be among the first to know when my next book is available and receive lots of cool, free stuff. You can join me at: www.AlexCFranklin.com.
On a final note, reviews are crucial to allowing other readers to discover books. I would deeply appreciate if you would tell other readers why you liked Run, Girl, Run by reviewing it at: Amazon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I feel so grateful for the wonderful people in my life who gave me tremendous encouragement and support, and enabled me to bring this book into being.
For various reasons, not everyone can be named, but you know who you are, and you know you have my eternal gratitude. First and foremost, to the all-important five of “the original six,” I say heartfelt thanks: you have been my rock and this book would never be in readers’ hands if it weren’t for you guys.
It would be remiss of me not to mention a few others for their special contribution to this project. I must thank Ramsey Hart, former Canada Program Coordinator at MiningWatch Canada, for his input and advice, and the same goes for the “boys in blue,” especially Greg and Gary from the OPP and the Ottawa Police Service. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. B.-F. for steering me in the right direction and helping me shape vague thoughts into realistic dramatic elements of this story.
My beta readers, editing team (Janice and Cindy), and proofreader, Donna Rich, are absolute gems, as are the book launch team. Thank you for your patience and the skill and loving dedication to your profession that you brought to this project to help a first-time novelist put out a debut that is the best that it can be.
And last, but not least, I must say deep and sincere thanks to you, dear reader, for taking a chance on this Alex C. Franklin, whom you would not have heard of before. As I sat down to write, my intention was to craft for you a tale that would give you hours of pleasure and would leave you itching to call up someone to talk about it. I hope that this is the start of a long and rewarding relationship for both of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © G.S. Bellamy
Alex C. Franklin is a Canadian author who has had a life-long love affair with words and literature. Alex was a newspaper reporter and magazine writer for over two decades and covered politics and business, among a wide range of other subjects. Over the years, Alex made detours into television reporting and radio talk-show hosting, but the pull of the written word never waned. Now retired from journalism, Alex has finally got around to the childhood dream of publishing a novel, and promises that this debut, Run, Girl, Run, will be “the first of what, hopefully, will be many thought-provoking and entertaining books that you just can’t put down.”
Run, Girl, Run: A Thriller Page 46