“I told you it would be this way,” Charles said calmly about the press. Nothing seemed to ruffle him, even when the stories about him were unflattering, which they often were now. It was the nature of the political beast, and he knew that. Once you entered the ring, you belonged to them, and they could do anything they wanted. Gone the peaceful congressional days when he only had to worry about the constituents he represented, and the local press. Now he was dealing with the national press, and all their demands and quirks, love affairs and hatreds. “Besides,” he smiled at her and finished his coffee, “if you were ugly, they wouldn't want you. Maybe you should stop looking like that,” he said as he leaned over and kissed her.
He took the kids to school as he always did. Matthew, their baby, was in second grade now. And Andrew had just started high school. They still all went to the same school, and they had gotten to the point where most of their friends were in Washington and not Connecticut, but they were at home in both places.
Things rolled along smoothly until June, the campaign was going well, and Charles was pleased with it. And they were just about to go back to Greenwich for the summer, when Charles appeared at the house unexpectedly in the afternoon, looking pale. For a sick moment Grace thought something had happened to one of the children. She heard him come in, and hurried down the stairs to the front hall just as he put down his briefcase.
“What's wrong?” she asked without pausing for breath. Maybe they had called him first … which one was it … Andy, Abigail, or Matt?
“I've got bad news,” he said, looking at her unhappily and then taking two quick steps toward her.
“Oh God, what is it?” She squeezed his hand without thinking, and when she took it away again she'd left a mark from the pressure of her fingers.
“I just got a call from a source we have at Associated Press …” then it wasn't the children, “Grace … they know about your father and your time at Dwight.” He looked devastated to have to tell her, but he wanted to prepare her. He was only desperately sorry to have put her in a position where she could have gotten so badly hurt. And he realized now that he never should have done it. He had been foolish and selfish and naive to think they could survive the campaign unscathed. And now the press were going to devour her.
“Oh,” was all she said, staring at him. “I … okay.” And then she looked at him worriedly, “How badly is this going to hurt you?”
“I don't know. That's not the point. I didn't want you to have to go through this.” He led her slowly into their living room with an arm around her shoulder. “They're going to break the story at six o'clock, on the news, and they want a press conference before, if we'll do it.”
“Do I have to?” she looked gray.
“No, you don't, Why don't we wait and see how bad it is, and then deal with it afterwards?”
“What about the kids? What should I say to them?” Grace looked calm, but very pale, and her hands were shaking badly.
“We'd better tell them.”
They picked them up from school together that afternoon, and took them home, and sat them down in the dining room around the table.
“Your mom and I have something to say,” he said quietly.
“You're getting divorced?” Matt looked terrified, all of his friends’ parents had been getting divorced lately.
“No, of course not,” his father said with a smile in his direction. “But this isn't good either. This is something very hard for your mom. But we thought that we should tell you.” Charles looked very serious, as he held Grace's hand firmly.
“Are you sick?” Andrew asked nervously, his best friend's mom had just died of cancer.
“No, I'm fine.” Grace took a breath and felt the first tightening of her chest she'd felt in a long time. She didn't even know when she'd last seen her inhaler. “This is about something that happened a long time ago, and it's very hard to explain, and understand. It's very hard unless you've been there, or seen it happen.” She was fighting back tears, and Charles squeezed her hand.
“When I was a little girl, like Matty's age, my dad used to be very mean to my mom, he used to beat her,” she said calmly but sadly.
“You mean like hit her?” Matthew said in astonishment with wide eyes, and Grace nodded solemnly.
“Yes. He hit her a lot, and he really hurt her. He beat her for a long time, and then she got very, very sick.”
“Because he beat her up?” Matthew asked again.
“Probably not. She just did. She got cancer, like Zack's mom.” They all knew Andrew's friend. “She was very sick for a long time, four years. And while she was sick, sometimes he'd beat me … he did a lot of terrible things … and sometimes he still beat my mom. But I thought that if I let him hurt me …” Her eyes filled with tears and she choked as Charles squeezed her hand still harder to give her courage. “I thought that if I let him hurt me, then he wouldn't hurt her as much … so I let him do anything he wanted … it was pretty terrible … and then she died. I was seventeen, and the night of her funeral,” she closed her eyes and then opened them again, determined to finish the story that she had never wanted her children to know. But now she knew she had to tell them, before someone else did. “The night of the funeral, he beat me again … a lot … very badly … he hurt me terribly, and I was very scared … and I remembered a gun my mom had next to her bed, and I grabbed it … I think I just wanted to scare him,” she was sobbing now and her children stared at her in stupefied silence, “I don't know what I thought … I was just so scared and I didn't want him to hurt me anymore … we fought over the gun … it went off accidentally, and I shot him. He died that night.” She took a big gulp of air, and Andrew stared at her, stunned.
“You shot your dad? You killed him?” Andrew asked, and she nodded. They had a right to know. She just didn't want to tell them about the rapes, if she didn't have to.
“Did you go to jail?” Matthew asked, intrigued by the story. It was sort of like cops and robbers, or something on TV. It sounded interesting to him, except for the part where he beat her.
“Yes, I did,” she said quietly, looking at her daughter, who so far, had said nothing at all. “I went to prison for two years, and I was on probation in Chicago for two years after that. And then it was all over. I moved to New York and met your dad, we got married and had you, and everything's been happy ever since then.” It had all been so simple for the past fifteen years and now it was going to get difficult again. But it couldn't be helped now. They had taken the chance of exposure along with Charles's political career, and now they had to pay the price for it.
“I can't believe this,” Abigail said, staring at her. “You've been in jail} Why didn't you ever tell us?”
“I didn't think I had to, Abby. It wasn't a story I was proud of. It was very painful for me.”
“You said your parents were dead, you never said you killed them,” Abigail reproached her.
“I didn't kill them both. I killed him,” Grace explained.
“You make it sound like you were defending yourself,” she argued with her mother.
“I was.”
“Isn't that self-defense? Then how come you went to jail?”
Grace nodded miserably. “It is, but they didn't believe me.”
“I can't believe you've been in prison.” All she could think of were her friends and what they would say now, when they heard the story. It was worse than anything she could imagine.
“Did you kill Dad's parents too?” Matt asked, intrigued.
“Of course not.” Grace smiled at him. He was really too young to understand it.
“Why are you telling us this now?” Andrew asked unhappily. Abigail was right. It wasn't a pretty story. And it wouldn't sit well with their friends.
“Because the press has found out,” Charles answered for her. He hadn't said anything till then, he wanted to let Grace tell them in her own way, and she had done well. But it wasn't easy to absorb, for anyone, least of all for children to
hear about their mother. “It's going to be on the news tonight, and we wanted to tell you first.”
“Gee, thanks a lot. Ten minutes before it goes on. And you expect me to go to school tomorrow? I'm not going,” Abigail stormed.
“Neither am I,” Matt said, just for good measure, and then he turned to his mother with a curious expression. “Did he bleed a lot? Your dad, I mean.” Grace laughed in spite of herself, and so did Charles. To him, it was all like a TV show.
“Never mind, Matt,” his father scolded.
“Did he make a lot of noise?”
“Matthew!”
“I can't believe this,” Abigail said, and burst into tears. “I can't believe you never told us all this, and now it's going to be all over the news. You're a murderer, a jailbird.”
“Abigail, you don't understand the circumstances,” Charles said. “You don't have any idea what your mother went through. Why do you think she's always been so interested in abused children?”
“To show off,” Abby said angrily. “Besides, what do you know? You weren't there either, were you? And besides, this is all because of you, and your stupid campaign! If we weren't here in Washington, none of this would have happened!” There was a certain truth to that, and Charles felt guilty enough without having Abby rub it in, but before he could answer her, she ran upstairs and slammed the door to her bedroom. Grace stood up to go, but Charles pulled her into her seat again.
“Let her calm down,” he said wisely, and Andrew looked at them and rolled his eyes.
“She's such a little bitch, why do you put up with her?”
“Because we love her, and all of you,” Charles said. “This isn't easy for any of us. We have to work it out in our own ways, and support each other. This is going to be very hard once the press start tearing your mom apart.”
“We'll be there for you, Mom,” Andrew said kindly, and got up to give her a hug, but Matthew was thinking about what she'd said. He kind of liked the story.
“Maybe Abby will shoot you, Dad,” he said hopefully, and Charles could only laugh at him again.
“I hope not, Matt. No one is going to shoot anyone.”
“Mom might.”
Grace smiled ruefully as she looked at her youngest son. “Remember that the next time I tell you to clean up your room or finish your dinner.”
“Yeah,” he said with a broad grin, showing that his two top front teeth were missing. Surprisingly, unlike his siblings, he wasn't upset. But he was too young to really absorb the implications of what had happened.
Eventually, Grace went upstairs and tried to talk to Abigail, but she wouldn't let her mother into her room, and at six o'clock they all gathered downstairs to watch the television in the den. Abby came down silently and joined them, and sat in the back of the room without talking to her parents.
The telephone had been ringing off the hook for two hours by then, but Grace had put it on the machine. There wasn't a soul alive they wanted to talk to. And there was an unlisted emergency line where Charles's aides called him. They called several times, and warned that they had been advised again that the story was ugly.
It was presented as a special bulletin, with a full screen photograph of her mug shot from prison. What startled Grace above all was how young she looked. She was barely more than a baby, only three years older than Andrew, and she looked younger than Abigail in the picture.
“Wow, Mom! Is that you?”
“Shhh, Matthew!” they all said at once, and watched in horror as the story unraveled.
The story was definitely not pretty. It opened with the news that Grace Mackenzie, wife of Congressman Charles Mackenzie, candidate for a Senate seat in the next election, had shot her father in a sex scandal at seventeen, and had been sentenced to two years in prison. There were photographs of her going into the trial, in handcuffs, and of her father looking very handsome. They said he had been a pillar of the community, and his daughter had accused him of rape, and shot him. She had claimed self-defense and a jury had not believed her. A two-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter was the result, followed by two years’ probation.
There were more photographs of her then, leaving the trial, again in handcuffs, and as she left for Dwight, in leg irons and chains, then another photograph of her at Dwight. She sounded like a gang moll by the time they were finished. They went on to say that she had been at Dwight Correctional Center in Dwight, Illinois, for two years, and was released in 1973 for two years of probation in Chicago. There had been no further problems with the law subsequently, to the best of their knowledge, but that possibility was currently under investigation.
“Under investigation? What the hell do they mean?” Grace asked, and Charles silenced her with a gesture, he wanted to hear what they were saying.
They explained that people in the community had not believed the sex scandal story at all. And then they followed it with a brief interview with the chief of police who had charged her. Twenty-one years later, he was there, and he claimed to have total recall of the night she was arrested.
“The prosecutor felt she'd been trying to …” he smiled wickedly and Grace wanted to throw up as she listened,“… I'd say, tantalize her father, and she got angry when he didn't take the bait. She was a pretty sick girl, back then, I don't know anything about her now of course, but a leopard don't change his spots much, does he?” She couldn't believe what she was hearing, or what they'd encouraged him to say.
They explained again, for all who hadn't caught it the first time, that she was a convicted felon, convicted of murder. They showed her mug shot yet again. And then a photograph of her looking like a moron, with Charles, as she stood next to him when he was sworn into Congress. And they explained that Charles was now running for the Senate. And then it was over, and they moved on to something else, as Grace fell back in her seat in horrified amazement. She felt completely drained of all emotion. It was all there, the mug shots, the story, the attitude of the community as expressed by the chief of police.
“They practically said I raped him! Did you hear what that bastard said?” Grace was outraged by what the chief of police had said about her, he had called her “pretty sick” and said she had “tantalized” her father. “Can't we sue them?”
“Maybe,” Charles said, trying to sound calm, for hers and the children's sake. “First we have to see what happens. There's going to be a lot of noise over this. We have to be ready for it.”
“How much worse can it get?” she asked angrily.
“A lot,” he said knowingly. His aides had warned him, and he knew that from his experience with the press years before.
By seven o'clock there were television cameras outside their house. One channel even used a bullhorn to address her, and urge her to come out and talk to them. Charles called the police, but the best they could do for them was get the reporters off their property, and force them to stand across the street, which they did. They put two camera crews in the trees so they could shoot into their bedroom windows. And Charles went upstairs and closed the shades. They were under siege.
“How long is this going to last?” Grace asked miserably after the children went to bed. They were still out there.
“Awhile probably. Maybe a long while.” And then as they sat in the kitchen, looking at each other in exhaustion, he asked her if she wanted to talk to them at some point and tell them her side of the story.
“Should I? Can't we sue them for what they said?”
“I don't know any of the answers.” He had already put in calls to two major libel lawyers, but he also realized that their phones could be tapped by the press, and he didn't want to talk to the attorneys from the house, or even from his office. For the moment, at least, it was a genuine disaster.
The next morning, the press were still there, and Charles and Grace were tipped off again about new coverage on local and national talk shows. She was the hot news of the hour all over the country.
Two guards were interviewed at Dwight
, who claimed they knew her really well. Both were young and Grace knew for certain she'd never seen them.
“I've never laid eyes on them,” she said to Charles, feeling sick again. He had stayed home with her, to lend her support, as she was stuck in the house, and Abby had refused to get out of bed. But a friend had offered to take Andrew and Matt to school, and Grace was relieved they'd gone. It was hard enough dealing with Abby, and herself.
The two prison guards said that Grace had been a member of a real tough gang, and they implied, but didn't actually say, that she'd used drugs in prison.
“What are they doing to me?” She burst into tears and put her face in her hands. She didn't understand it. Why were these people lying about her?
“Grace, they want a piece of the action. A moment of glory. That's all it is. They want to be on television, they want to be a star just like you are.”
“I'm not a star. I'm a housewife,” she said naively.
“To them, you're a star.” He was a lot wiser than she was.
On another channel, they were interviewing the chief of police again. And in Watseka, a girl who claimed to have been Grace's best friend in school, and whom Grace had also never seen before, said that Grace had always talked to her a lot about how much she loved her father and how jealous she was of her mother. The impression being created there was that she had killed her father in a jealous rage.
“Are these people crazy, or am I? That woman looks twice my age, and I don't even know who she is.” Even her name was unfamiliar.
They interviewed one of the arresting officers from that night, who looked like an old man now, and he admitted that Grace had looked really scared and she was shaking really badly when they found her.
“Did she look like she'd been raped?” the interviewer said without hesitation.
Malice Page 30