The Perfect Candidate

by Peter Stone

  Nadia turned him away from the table of letters and said, “We all thank you, BIB. You make it possible for us to do what we do every day.”

  She and Katie gathered around him and walked toward BIB’s office. The three of them holed up in there to discuss the news and developments of the weekend.

  Zeph and I made the rounds, delivering some letters and packages to other offices in the building. When we returned to BIB’s office, Nadia almost tackled me with a “Where have you been, Cameron?”

  “We were just delivering some correspondence . . . ,” I responded.

  “BIB asked for you,” she said, as she guided me into BIB’s office. “It’s generally a good thing if you are here when he asks for you.”

  Questions stampeded across my brain in the few steps it took to get to his office. Does he know about Memo? Can he tell I’ve been looking up Wade Branson? I felt Nadia’s guiding hand more strongly against my back as I filled with dread at the sudden, uncharacteristic summons.

  “Please. Come in, Cameron.” BIB waved me in with a quiet, welcoming gesture.

  I was relieved to see that we were not alone. On BIB’s couch, a couple held hands tightly, as if they were each other’s handrail. The husband’s weathered face and combination of shorts and white socks that reached well into his shins placed him in the forty-five- to sixty-year-old range. His wife’s hair was a civil war between gray and brown strands.

  “I want you to meet the Kluffs,” BIB said. “They’re from Lagrima, and I thought it would be nice for them to see a promising young man from their hometown.”

  “So nice to meet you.” I reached for their hands, both of which were weak. Humble. “Did you come to DC to see the sights?”

  The wife looked down and rubbed her mouth with her hand. The husband smiled a we’re getting through this kind of smile—the expression I remember my dad giving people when they’d ask about my mom and I was still little.

  “Cameron,” said BIB. “Mr. and Mrs. Kluff’s daughter died in Syria. Had some difficulty arranging for space in Arlington for her burial, so we stepped in . . .”

  The wife lifted her head and smiled through glistening eyes. “Congressman Beck got our Linda the honor she deserved. Best representative our district’s ever had. You learn all you can from him, okay?”

  “I’m learning a lot about”—I coughed and corrected myself—“I mean from him. I’m really lucky to be here.”

  “Not many like him out here,” said the husband. “Remembers his roots. Gets things done for the people back home.”

  “Just doing my job,” said BIB, matter-of-factly, as Katie popped in the door.

  “I’m afraid this is a bad time, but we’ve got a question for the congressman. Outside,” she said, and then realized the somber scene. “You two can stay here with Cameron as long as you’d like.”

  BIB and the couple rose to their feet as the wife reached for BIB’s hand. He gave her a hug, and she lost whatever composure remained. Tears of pain and appreciation wet his suit lapel. And I tried to reconcile this beloved congressman before me with Memo’s serious allegations. In that moment, only the couple’s gratitude for BIB’s service felt real.

  “Is it okay?” asked the man, pulling a camera out and looking at BIB for permission.

  “Oh, of course it is!” said BIB. “Cameron, we already got some pictures together, but the Kluffs want some more photos in here. Can you be our office photographer after I run out?”

  I obliged, reaching for the camera, as BIB said farewell and thanked me. “Our interns get to wear many hats during the summer!”

  If he only knew.

  BIB and Katie swiftly exited as I snapped away at the couple in front of BIB’s desk.

  “You don’t think . . . ,” said the husband as he sheepishly gestured toward BIB’s chair.

  “You want a picture in the chair?” I asked.

  “Well, only if it’s not going to get you in trouble,” he responded.

  I guided him behind BIB’s massive desk to the chair, where he assumed a pose that was half state portrait, half cheesy tourist smile.

  As I stepped back to take his picture, I saw a box that contained the photo of Ariel and her friend. And the stack of hair ties. And the Post-its. And files. It was a box of all of the items that had been removed from Ariel’s drawer. Hiding behind BIB’s desk.

  Unwanted adrenaline stalked my veins as I realized I had one more chance to help out Memo. To help out Ariel.

  The man cleared his throat. “Is everything okay?” he asked as I realized I had been studying the box and its contents for a few moments too long.

  His words startled me. “Yes, of course.” I grasped his early- generation digital camera and stood at a distance for a quick picture.

  “Thank you for coming to visit,” I said as I walked them to BIB’s office door. “It was like having a little bit of home in here. Next time, bring some burgers from Vista Drive-In, okay?”

  The couple both laughed on their way out and said something that I didn’t listen to as I scanned the office and the visible hallway outside for any sign of BIB. He wasn’t there. Just a cluster of staffers laughing at a YouTube video on Marcus’s computer.

  As if it were perfectly normal, I retreated back into BIB’s office, left the door barely ajar, and went straight to the open box of Ariel’s belongings. My brain was shaking, yet my hands were somehow steady. I figured I had a couple minutes to find whatever Ariel had left behind, before this box and any leads disappeared forever. I peeled off each Post-it note and figured that Ariel didn’t mean anything special by reminding herself to feed her cat, make “10 copies of Ag Committee report,” or the fateful “Capitol Sinny 9 p.m.” I pulled out a cluster of hair ties and throttled through file folders that contained copies of very official-looking and innocuous congressional reports, travel schedules, and budgets. I flattened the few crinkled gum wrappers and found no hidden messages. Finally, I picked up that picture of Ariel and a girlfriend, their casual, beachside smiles almost taunting me. I shook the frame in my hand, as if Ariel’s clue would somehow magically appear.

  That’s when I heard BIB’s muffled but booming voice reenter the lobby of the office. The shaking from my brain shot right to my fingers, which suddenly trembled. As I held the framed photo in my left hand, I scanned the array of relics on the floor in front of me.

  “What were you so close to, Ariel?” I whispered to myself as BIB’s footsteps signaled he was walking toward his office.

  As I simultaneously crafted an excuse for being in BIB’s office alone, I stuffed everything back into the open box.

  I did everything I could do, Memo. There was nothing in there.

  Except, finally, there was.

  As I placed the framed photo facedown, and I heard the creak of the opening door, I saw a tiny pink corner of a piece of paper peeking out from behind the matting of the frame. I grabbed that pink piece of paper, stood up, and dashed over to the couch where the Kluffs had sat—all in the time it took for BIB to fully open the door.

  “They called and said they lost their umbrella!” I preemptively explained as I knelt down, looked under the couch, and secured the pink piece of paper in my shirt pocket. BIB couldn’t even finish his sentence, “What are you doing in—”

  “Do you think it’s going to rain today? What nice people they were.” I tried to deflect, to distract. “Thanks for bringing me in here to meet them.”

  “Well, you were an important burst of energy in here,” he said. “Such a sad story, their daughter. . . .”

  Out of the twitching corner of my eye, I saw that I had left the box of Ariel’s stuff fully in view—not as I found it when it was obscured by BIB’s desk. Amidst the OCD organization of the rest of his office, the misplaced box screamed, I’ve been tampered with.

  Fortunately, Nadia did the screaming for me.

  “Oh, this is good, this is good!” she shouted from the other room.

  BIB turned his head just long enough
for me to kick the box back into position as I exited his office.

  “What’s happening, Nadia?” asked BIB. I joined him and a group of other interested staffers around the door to Nadia’s office.

  “We’re double digits ahead in the polls,” she said. “You’ve got a nice little runway to November, Mr. Speaker.”

  “Well, don’t get ahead of yourself,” BIB cautioned humbly, though a glint of greed shot across his eyes. “What’s the margin of error?” I was amazed to see how quickly he transitioned from congressman-in-mourning to campaign trail conversation.

  “Oh, you don’t even have to worry about that, BIB. Maybe Jigar’s going to get an upgrade from that sad cubicle of his, come January!” Nadia squealed.

  “You think?” Jigar pandered.

  As the staffers congregated and dreamed of their larger offices and even larger career possibilities, I slipped out the pink piece of paper I had rescued from oblivion. I hoped it would be empty, a blank fleck of framing waste that got lodged behind that spellbinding photo. But somehow I knew that this was my next step. A clue.

  I opened the folded paper and found a hastily scrawled note in all caps. It looked as if Ariel had written it quickly, while no one was looking. Or before it was too late.

  Four frantic letters: “FOR C.” Plus a street address:

  FRYE

  1830 WALKER

  VA BEACH

  15

  I found myself staring at the note on the metro ride home—and focusing on that offering or invitation or demand, “FOR C.”

  For me.

  Ariel had thrown me a hot potato on her way out of this world, and it was starting to burn my hands and blister my train of thought. As we rocketed away from the Capitol South stop, I pointlessly looked around the subway car for another person to whom I could pass it on.

  “Don’t turn around,” low-talked a voice from behind me. It was Memo. “Did you find anything?”

  “Dude, you’ve got to stop sneaking up on me like that,” I said in the direction of a random staffer who cautiously stepped away from me. “No, not you, I’m sorry,” I apologized as she buried her face in her phone.

  “An address,” said Memo as he slipped the paper out of my hands. For a few stops, it seemed as if he studied Ariel’s instructions, or compared it to other notes he had. By the time we hit the commuter crush of the Metro Center stop, I turned around to him.

  “I’m going,” I told him.

  He urgently motioned for me to look away.

  “Oh my gosh, do you really think the people around us are thinking we aren’t talking to each other?” I said as I turned away. That staffer looked up from her phone and smiled at me.

  “I think we should go together. Maybe just me,” he said.

  “Are you serious?” I answered. “Whoever ‘Frye’ is is not going to respond well to a creeper middle-aged man. An ‘old friend of Ariel’s,’ however . . . They’ll let me in the door.”

  “Okay, I may be on the other side of forty-five,” he replied, shifting his weight slightly in protest, then leaning in to whisper, “but a creeper?”

  I turned back to him, eyebrows raised. “My point exactly.”

  “How are you going to get there? What’s your excuse at the office?” he asked, still standing behind me and speaking from a perpendicular angle.

  We rounded the sharp corner of the McPherson Square stop and strained to stand straight as the train whipped left.

  “First of all,” I said, “I have an internship. And interns can have sick days. And I think I’m going to feel sick tomorrow.”

  I let out two small coughs. I could hear Memo stifling a laugh.

  “And”—I leaned back closer to his ear as the train voice announced the stop at Farragut West—“I’m sure your employer can arrange for a car.”

  • • •

  Memo got off the metro at Farragut West and told me he’d see me in the morning. I didn’t bother to tell him my address because I was sure he already knew. I had gotten used to it—his knowledge of intimate details of my life. It didn’t surprise me anymore.

  What did surprise me was the janky Honda Civic parked in the red zone in front of my apartment the next morning.

  “Idiot,” said Hillary. “That guy’s going to get a ticket.”

  “How do you know it’s a guy?” teased Zeph. “You’re sexist.”

  As we stepped down the stairs in front of the building, I looked across the street, where Memo made quick eye contact with me and did a casual turn around gesture with his right index finger. So by the time we were halfway across the street, a sudden and violent onset of food poisoning had rendered me debilitated for the day.

  “Go ahead, you guys,” I said, doing my best fake-diarrhea walk back toward the building. They wished me well, though Hillary looked mostly disgusted.

  “You’re going to miss the food-slash–tax policy panel tonight at AEI,” she said. “Such a shame.”

  “Let us know if you need anything,” added Zeph. “We’ll get back home pretty late.”

  I waved good-bye from the steps and watched until they were out of sight. That’s when Memo walked past the car and placed a set of keys on the roof without looking at me.

  I wanted to go after him and ask if the beat-up car was a joke. Where was my government-issue convertible, or at least my sensible, new-model American car with a killer engine? I’d envisioned that’s what the Bureau would have arranged. No dice.

  However, it was surprisingly immaculate inside, given the bumps and scratches on the exterior. And it was my only way to get to Virginia Beach and back before Zeph and Hillary got home that night. I turned the ignition and was shocked by a too-loud adult contemporary station that Memo must have been listening to when he’d dropped off the car. Adele, wishing me a safe trip.

  The city’s driving ecosystem was not kind to me, but after a few angry honks and illegal turns, I was cruising south on the 95 freeway—the interstate spine that connected Maine to Miami. The four-hour journey was like driving through the pages of an eleventh-grade US history book. Civil War sites dotted the freeway, and I wondered what the warriors at Spotsylvania were thinking about the Waffle House and Starbucks that now christened the area. Lush, never-ending bunches of green leaves flanked the open road and defied the decades of smog that had battered them.

  The Virginia Beach exit came faster than I expected and sooner than I wanted it to. It was just after noon. Multiple flags and mobbed fireworks stands and the subtle sting of salt in the air indicated that this was a party town getting ready for the imminent Fourth of July weekend. Every sign in sight seemed to point me toward “Beach,” but I turned onto Walker Lane and meandered down the friendly looking, narrow street. I soon found myself in front of a butter-yellow clapboard house marked “1830.”

  As I walked to the door, I tried to think of it as one of the hundreds I’d visited during BIB’s campaign back in Lagrima. Just another door. Except that this door led to the truth. This door led to the CVSU contract for my dad. I’ve got this, Ariel, I thought to myself. Whatever hermit conspiracy theorist or Oh wait, Wade Branson didn’t die—he’s been living here all along! or cryptic grandma lived behind this door—I’ve got this.

  No such exotic character opened the door—rather, a thin man with short, graying hair, wearing a burgundy fleece jacket.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Hello, sir.” I cleared my throat and went for it. “My name is Cameron Carter, and I worked with Ariel Lancaster. I . . . I think she wanted me to come here. Or she was going to come here herself. . . .”

  The man covered his mouth with his hand as an equally thin and equally graying woman came to the door.

  “What’s this?” she grumbled.

  “Honey,” the man told him. “This is . . . was a friend of Ariel’s.”

  “No, thank you!” said the woman, as she moved to close the door.

  “Netsie, don’t be rude,” he intervened and held open the door. “Let
’s hear him out. What do you need, son?”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I’m not sure. Ariel left your address behind. It was attached to . . .”

  A startling and immediately recognizable framed photo interrupted my words. It was the photo of Ariel with her arm around a friend.

  “It was attached to that same photo, but on Ariel’s desk in the office.”

  The picture was surrounded by other Kodak moments of the various stages of a girl’s life—water wings by a pool, posing as a Nutcracker mouse, summer camp, family vacations, volleyball team . . .

  “Is that your daughter?” I asked. Then, urgently, hopefully: “Is she here?”

  The pair studied me and then looked at each other with the silent flurry of communication that only a long-married couple can share with their eyes. The woman flapped her hands at the air and said to the man, “All yours.”

  “Come inside,” said the man. “I’m Gerald Frye, and this . . .” She was already long gone, down the hallway of the modest house. “. . . that was my wife, Annette.”

  “Thank you,” I said as I walked in the home.

  “Daughter, yes,” said Gerald. “Was, I guess is more like it. Caitlin died back in high school.” He seemed to apologize for their quiet, clean house. “We’ve been empty nesters ever since.”

  I stood there, stunned, trying to piece together the scene: Caitlin—the name she whispered at Capitol Sinny. Why did Ariel send me here? Who was this friend of hers? The talkative Gerald was happy to help, as he motioned for me to sit on a buoyant, barely used couch.

  “Yep,” he explained. “Ariel and Caitlin were best friends. Met on the first day of kindergarten and never left each other’s sides since. When Ariel’s mom ran for office the first couple of times, Caitlin knocked on the most doors.” He gestured to a series of photos that showed Ariel and Caitlin holding NANI LANCASTER FOR CONGRESS signs. “Never got to see her win, though.”