Red, White, and Blue

by Laura Hayden

  She tried to return his smile, but it turned into a yawn. “I’m not ready for morning, Frank. Not yet.”

  His expression broadened, perhaps at being called by name or perhaps because she had Buster in tow. “Some days, morning comes awfully early. I believe the president is downstairs in the main kitchen.” He bent down a little in an effort to make himself a smaller threat to Buster, who looked somewhat wary. “Is this the infamous Buster we keep hearing about?”

  “It is indeed.” She tugged slightly at his lead. “Buster, sit.”

  Buster, still excited from the unexpected car ride, sat reluctantly. When Frank offered the back of his hand for Buster to sniff, her dog took one whiff and decided the man was definitely friend rather than foe. A second later, Buster had forgotten any suspicions he had and pulled against the lead in hopes of better reaching the man to offer undying affection.

  Frank scrubbed Buster on the head. “Ferocious guard dog you got there, ma’am.”

  “You know what they say—kill them with kindness.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Then he’s definitely a killer.” He straightened, evidently deciding that he had to return to his protective duties. “Have a good day, Chief. You too, Buster.” He held open the door for her, giving her a nod as she passed by him.

  They entered the building, immediately turned to the right to take the back staircase leading one floor down to the ground level. Buster’s toenails made a clicking echo on the marble stairs as they descended.

  Once on the ground level, Kate allowed Buster to follow his nose, and he headed straight for the savory aroma coming from the kitchen.

  When they stepped into the kitchen from the dim corridor, Kate had to shade her eyes against the glare. Fluorescent lights reflected from a thousand stainless steel surfaces—the counters, the appliances, not to mention the hundreds of shiny pots and pans hanging from overhead racks.

  Emily stood beside an industrial-size mixer, glaring with open hostility at it and the noises it was making. She looked ready to kick the appliance.

  And she looked drunk.

  “THERE YOU TWO ARE. I was starting to get worried.” Emily waved her hand around the large kitchen. “You know the trouble with cooking here is that there are no small pans,” she said, reaching for her wineglass and downing a healthy slug. “I think I’m making enough chocolate chip cookies to feed the entire army.”

  Kate had arranged for the kitchen to always keep a supply of the necessary ingredients for Emily’s cookie-baking fetish, knowing that at some point, she would need to resort to cooking to work through a particularly tough issue.

  But somehow, Kate hadn’t anticipated that Dozier’s death would have been the triggering event for a session of baking therapy. She spotted a half-empty bottle of wine sitting precariously close to the edge of the counter and took some small relief that, at the least, Emily wasn’t hitting the cooking sherry. The White House chef might consider that a major violation of his domain.

  Emily clutched the counter’s edge for support as she bent down to Buster’s level, not realizing that she’d brushed against the wine bottle. Kate stretched over the counter and caught the bottle as it wobbled, shifting it toward the center of the counter.

  “Here’s my favorite puppy!” Emily said, as if talking to a baby. “C’mere, Buster.”

  The dog happily abandoned Kate and ran toward Emily, bathing her in kisses and taking inordinate interest in her hands, which probably tasted of flour, sugar, and vanilla. After he had given her a very detailed once-over, his attention was drawn to the ingredients spilled across the counter closest to the mixer. He stood up and danced on his back feet, trying to see better.

  “Uh-uh. No chocolate for you, buddy. But I’m making a batch with no chips so you can enjoy too.”

  Kate reached into his travel bag and pulled out a towel that would serve as his temporary bed. “Come, Buster.” After a moment’s hesitation, he abandoned all the more interesting smells on the counter and obediently trotted to her. After circling the towel three times, he curled into a boneless heap on it.

  Kate patted him on the head. “Good boy.” She turned to Emily. “I can’t let you spoil him too much.”

  M’s grin was just a tiny bit sloppier than usual, a testament to how well she could hold her liquor. “Too late. It’s my privilege as his auntie to spoil him rotten. He’s the closest thing I’ll ever have to a nephew.” She giggled as she took another sip of wine. “You know, it’s a good thing neither of us ever had children. You would’ve retired completely from politics to play mommy, and I would have shipped mine off to military school at the age of six months.” She bent down and allowed Buster to lick her face. “But instead, we’re both at the top of our games, and Buster here may be spoiled, but he’s still the best doggy in the world. Aren’t you, Buster?”

  He roused up long enough to wag his tail.

  “So let’s make more cookies. I’d been dying to use all these spiffy big appliances, but I’ve learned they’re more trouble than they’re worth.” Emily stared at the mixer, made a face, and turned the machine off. “I’d rather stir it by hand anyway.” She grabbed the huge mixer bowl and transferred its contents to a smaller metal bowl, better sized for the task.

  “Sit,” she commanded, nodding toward a stool hiding under the steel counter. Like a good dog, Kate retrieved the seat and perched on it.

  “You know . . . Jack went to military school,” Emily said as she began to stir the ingredients.

  Kate struggled to keep up with the sudden change in topic. Booze tended to loosen Emily’s brain and make her skip over certain conversational niceties, like transitions between subjects. “Jack . . . Marsh?”

  “Yep. I think it was good for him. Dozier would have made a pretty lousy everyday dad, but he was a great holiday and summer break dad. He could keep up the Ward Cleaver stuff for a couple of weeks if he really, really had to.”

  Her face darkened. “Now that I think about it, I think Jack was always jealous of the relationship I had with my dad.” She scratched her chin, depositing a smudge of flour. “Then again, if my mother had had her way, I would have been shipped off to some freakin’ boarding school, probably deep in the Alps.” Her face brightened. “But Dad refused to let her send me away.” She laughed. “That’s why we lived where we did—so I could be a day student at the best private school on the Eastern seaboard.”

  Kate knew the basics about Emily’s early education years, even the bit about Claire Rousseau Benton’s less than maternal attitudes, then and now. Kate had seen the woman in action and tried to avoid confrontations with her at all costs. Whenever she spent any time in Claire’s company, Kate always went home with a much stronger appreciation for her own mother.

  Emily glared at the mixture in the bowl, studied the ingredients on the counter, and then tossed another handful of flour into the dough and continued stirring.

  “Dozier tried to send him to my school, but Jack just didn’t fit in. He actually pleaded to go back to military school, and Dozier finally relented and let him return. I never understood that.”

  “Some people need more discipline and regimentation in their lives.”

  “Yeah, and most of them graduate and become little tin soldiers. But not my Jack.”

  Your Jack?

  A timer dinged, and Emily walked over to the wall of gleaming steel industrial ovens, opened one, and pulled out a tray of perfect cookies.

  The aroma hit Kate, a tidal wave of chocolaty goodness. Buster stirred, but Emily quickly pacified him with a chipless cookie.

  “Hush, puppy . . .” She giggled. She turned to Kate. “Here. Catch!”

  Kate found herself juggling a fiery-hot cookie with both hands, trying to cool it off enough not to burn her tongue on the gooey chips. Although she wasn’t hungry, the cookie was tempting nonetheless.

  Emily reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a small carton of milk, which she also tossed toward Kate. “Heads up!”

  Kate dro
pped the cookie in time to intercept the carton that hurtled toward her. “Watch out!”

  “You gotta keep on your toes around me, girl.”

  Kate opened the milk and drank directly from the waxy cardboard spout. “Tell me about it. I’m wondering if Mom kept my old toe shoes from my very brief career as a ballerina. I might need them again.”

  “I’ve seen you dance. They won’t help.”

  Kate stuck out her tongue at the president of the United States.

  “Hey, don’t complain. Look at the perks. Fresh homemade chocolate chip cookies at—” she squinted at the large clock that hung above the wall of sinks—“3:37 a.m.”

  “Don’t gloss over the fact that this benefit is definitely offset by being woken up out of a sound sleep at three o’clock in the morning to take a twenty-minute ride into work in order to get said cookies.”

  “It’s the price you pay.” Emily picked up a cookie, stared at her wineglass, shrugged, then dunked it in the wine and ate it. The look on her face suggested that it hadn’t been such a good idea.

  “Where are the glasses?” Kate looked around, scanning the area, and then pointed to the milk carton. “I’ll share.” It was the perfect opportunity to distract Emily from drinking any more alcohol. In Kate’s opinion, milk, cookies, and solace made for a much more suitable combination for Emily’s physical and mental health.

  But Emily foiled her plans. She shook her head. “Nope. It’s whine and wine and chocolate. It’s the only way.” She dropped to a second stool and sighed. “I don’t want Dozier to be gone. I need him.”

  Now they were getting to the real topic. “I’m going to miss him too,” Kate responded, hoping she was turning the correct release valve in hopes of bleeding off some of Emily’s turmoil.

  “No, you’re not,” she said too quickly. “You always thought I was being overly sentimental, having him on board.” Although Emily managed to say the words with a smile, there was still an accusatory bite to her words that compelled Kate to defend herself.

  “That’s not true. I just didn’t want to put him in such a key adviser role. He brings . . . brought a great sense of political history with him, and that was invaluable, but I think there were other people out there with equally good grasps of history but with much more modern points of view.”

  “But that’s why it was important to have him involved. I was raised by an old-fashioned politician. I know that world of politics as well as I know this one we live in now. Dozier helped me keep everything in perspective. I didn’t always do what he wanted or support the concepts he wanted, but sometimes I made my decisions based on the differences between then and now. Sometimes knowing the old-school agenda meant I knew I had to do the polar opposite because I knew full well how the old ways had failed miserably.”

  Kate bit into the cookie, now sufficiently cooled. “I just had some problems with his ideas. For example, he wasn’t too fond of me. He merely tolerated me for your sake. You always seemed exempt from the limitations he wanted to put on others.”

  “You mean other women.”

  “Among other things, yeah.”

  “That’s because I was essentially his surrogate child. He knew what I was capable of, but he was never convinced any other woman—any other person—had had the same upbringing, the same experiences, the same chances for office as me. And he knew for certain no other woman had a political heritage anywhere close to mine. Every time I proposed putting a woman in my own inner circle, I had to prove her credentials to him. You included.” She grinned. “And if Dozier could accept my reasoning and my choices, then I knew all of America would take them on face value. He was my toughest critic.”

  Her face fell. “And he’s gone.” A fat tear trickled down her cheek, and she picked up a cookie, shoving it into her mouth whole. After a few seconds, she washed it down with the remains of her wine and poured herself another glass.

  They remained silent for over a minute until Kate couldn’t stand it anymore. “Is his son coming to the funeral?”

  Emily nodded. “I had to play a couple of trump cards, but he’s coming. I saw to that.”

  Kate wondered if she should even ask the nature of those trump cards. With Emily, it could be anything from emotional blackmail to . . . to something she didn’t even want to consider.

  But Kate was concerned less with Jack Marsh than she was with his father’s dying words. She knew Emily might be the only one who could unravel their meaning, but Kate feared the revelation would lead her into asking other questions with even more unsavory answers.

  She stared at her friend, her boss, her president. Emily’s eyes had become a bit glassy and her hand trembled slightly. The wine had already loosened Emily’s tongue a bit. Was this the right time to inquire? Of course, catching Emily off guard was always an adventure and, on rare occasions, an expedition into the unabashed truth.

  “M, I have a question.”

  “Shoot, K.” She began to stack the cookies, turning them into a single tower that wavered and finally toppled over. “Oops. Broke a couple. Cook’s privilege to eat the broken ones.”

  She played with the broken pieces, trying to match them up together again like a crumbly puzzle. She started to toss one to Buster but pulled back, admonishing herself. She reached for a chipless cookie, broke it in two, and tossed Buster the smaller piece, eating the other part herself.

  Kate drew a deep breath and plunged in. “It’s about the last conversation I had with Dozier—before he . . . passed on. . . .”

  “What about it?”

  “He made a sort of admission to me that I think you need to know about.”

  “What? He confessed to something?” Emily leaned forward on the counter, resting on her elbows. “Do tell. Was it sex, drugs, or rock and roll?” She began to laugh.

  “Stop,” Kate commanded, surprised to see Emily respond instantly. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “He said that he’d done something to . . . to Maia. I think he might have had something to do with her death.”

  At first, Emily looked puzzled; then the confusion slid from her face. “Why that old goat! That randy old goat. He didn’t kill her. That’s ridiculous. Isn’t it obvious?” She began to laugh. “They had an affair. I had no idea the child was that cutthroat. She actually tried to sleep her way into the inner circle?” She continued laughing as she put her head down on the counter, toppling over the newest cookie tower.

  Buster stirred at the sound, but a curt gesture from Kate made him grumble softly, close his eyes, and return to his cookie-less dreams.

  Kate reached out and touched Emily’s arm. “That’s not what he meant.”

  Emily raised her head, revealing her eyes red from laughing and from too much imbibing. “Then I don’t understand.”

  “He asked . . . forgiveness for something he did to Maia. And to Tim Colton. That could only mean one thing.”

  Alcohol had dulled Emily’s wits and reflexes. It took her a moment to realize the implication of what Kate was saying and to realize her cookie structure had fallen. She pretended to be more concerned with the tower than the question. “Oh . . . so you think he had something to do with their accident,” she said in her best offhand manner.

  Kate nodded. “That’s what it sounded like to me.”

  “So what is he supposed to have done?” Emily began a third tower to rival the first two. “Crawled under Colton’s car and cut the brake lines himself?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t exactly say.”

  Emily’s blurred expression suddenly sharpened. “Exactly what did he say?”

  Kate searched her memory for the precise words. “At first, he said to tell you he was sorry and that he should have said something when you brought ‘that girl into the campaign.’”

  Emily’s brow furrowed. “So does that mean Maia had been working with Dozier . . . or maybe against him . . . before Marjorie sent her?”

  Before Kate could answer, Emily made a dismissive gesture. “He’d prob
ably run into her before and realized she wanted to get involved high up in my campaign. You didn’t have to be around her more than a moment to understand that was her ultimate goal.”

  “I don’t think that’s it.” Kate hesitated, trying to find the right approach. Dozier’s most damaging confession, if not handled right, could blow Emily’s administration out of the water.

  When she shifted Emily’s wineglass beyond her friend’s reach, Emily tensed visibly. “What is it, K? Don’t hedge. Just say it.”

  “I don’t know how we missed it. We did an in-depth financial review of every potential person around you. It should have shown up.”

  “What should have shown up?”

  Kate drew a fortifying breath. “Dozier holds . . . held a substantial interest in the Pembrooke Group—for years. Evidently Maia found out and had been blackmailing him over it.” Kate waited for Emily’s explosive reaction, but instead of ranting and raving, the president simply rose from her seat and began to pace around the counter at which Kate sat.

  “How much?”

  The simple question surprised Kate. “I don’t know yet, but from what he said, he held a smaller amount of stock when he was on the Armed Services Committee. But the bigger problem is—he held an extremely large stock option. Maybe as a deferred payment. I’m not sure. In any case, it looks bad. For him and for you.”

  Emily responded with an expletive between gritted teeth.

  Kate continued. “He said he stood to gain at least fifteen million when O:EI rolled out.”

  Emily stopped pacing and leaned against the counter, drumming it nervously. “That wasn’t bright. Not bright at all.”

  The metallic rhythm grated on Kate’s nerves, and Buster whimpered, wakened by the noise. She stooped down and comforted him, then turned to Emily. “We have to do something.”

  “Like what? ‘Oops, we didn’t know Dozier failed to disclose his connection with the very company that is likely to make a killing when our pet project is put into play’? Trust me, the press will eat that up and not believe a single word. But they won’t stop with Dozier being the appetizer.” She stopped making the irritating drumming but instead slammed her fist against the counter, an obvious expression of her building frustration. “They’ll make me the main course, roasting on the spit of public appeal.”