by J. L. Brown
Dante glared at Christian one more time before flipping through the pages of his notebook. He leaned back in his chair and began to read. “As you recall, the victim—”
“Kyle Williams,” Jade interjected.
Dante continued, as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “—wrote in his diary he thought a ‘C’ was following him. I found two ‘Cs’ in the yearbook picture: a Carly Simms and a Christie Yardley.”
Christian murmured, “I don’t believe a woman is behind this.”
“I don’t either,” Jade said.
Max took off his glasses and used a handkerchief to polish them. “It would be unlikely this is the work of a woman, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Can I finish?” Dante asked.
Jade nodded.
“I was able to get in touch with the ten students in the photograph,” Dante said, “including Carly and Christie. None of them could imagine who would do such a thing. One of the students died in a car crash three years ago, which would rule him out for the LeBlanc and the latest killing.”
Pat, typing, said, “Alibis?”
“All of them had alibis, but . . .”
“What?” Jade said.
“There’s a problem.”
Jade tried not to roll her eyes in frustration. Working with Dante sometimes was like pulling teeth. “What is it?”
“Ten students posed for the picture. But in order to staff a twenty-four-hours-a-day radio station, the school accepts applications from any student who wants to be a DJ. Students are selected based on their competency, style of music or talk-show format, and maintaining a certain GPA.”
Jade motioned her hand for him to hurry up.
“How many students were on the staff at the time of the Chattenham killing?”
Dante closed his notebook, an incongruous grin on his face. “Over one hundred.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Washington, DC
“So, Whitney says this election is about their future? The way things are going, these students won’t have a future. Student debt, not to mention the national debt, will be a yoke around their necks for the rest of their lives. Our educational system is broken. We are in the middle of the pack among developed countries. Our students couldn’t do a math or science problem if we wrote the answers on the back of their hands. Where’s her plan?
“And, yes, our kids want to live with their parents forever. We allow them to stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they’re twenty-six. Twenty-six! At twenty-six, you’re no longer a child! You should be having children of your own. Health insurance is a privilege, not a right. The Socialists are always talking about rights. A right to health insurance, a right to marry whoever we want, a right to clean air, a right to a first-class education, while I don’t have the right to smoke in my own freakin’ office?
“And concerning President Richard Ellison taking his policy advice from me, well . . . it’s about damn time!” Cole laughed into the microphone.
“The United States Postal Service, as we know it, is dead. We can’t bring back those nostalgic times of the men and women—I know I mustn’t forget about the women—mail carriers in their blue sweaters, blue shirts, blue shorts, and blue socks bringing us our mail in a blue bag rain or shine. But listen: email is not going away, folks. The volume the Postal Service enjoyed back in the day is never coming back. Never. As a country, we must accept this and move on. A piecemeal approach won’t work. Partial privatization isn’t the answer. We must privatize the whole thing. The Postal Service is like a cancer. You can’t remove a little bit of the cancer or the disease will continue to spread. You must remove all of it.
“I need you to do something for me. Make sure you call or write President Ellison about this issue. I know for a fact he enjoys hearing from you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Washington, DC
Whitney settled into the back seat of the Lincoln Town Car. She should be making phone calls to donors, but she didn’t feel like it. Instead she leaned her head back against the headrest, leaving her cell phone in her purse. Her driver had taken a circuitous route from the Capitol to avoid the press, this time because of the allegations of Grayson having had an affair. Sensing her mood, the driver remained silent for the duration of their drive home. She gazed out the window at a city even more stunning at night, thanks to The Height of Buildings Act of 1899, which allowed for the unobstructed view of the city’s many historical buildings. She didn’t notice them tonight.
Before she left the office, Landon told her the campaign event at Randolph High school broke the Internet, her Twitter account adding one million followers in less than three hours. The kids talked about how cool she was, although they probably used a different adjective. Overall, an overwhelming success. For once, she didn’t care.
The rumors had turned out to be true.
Grayson admitted to her on the phone that he had slept with the woman next door, whose husband died young of a heart attack five years ago. She hadn’t been a friend of Whitney’s, but was a good neighbor who had done a lot for their family over the years. Someone she had trusted.
Her thoughts, though, were mostly of Grayson. She now wondered when he had asked her when she was coming home in that conversation long ago, whether it was eagerness or something else. Maybe, he didn’t want to be surprised.
This was not the first time her faith had been shattered by someone she loved. Someone she trusted. She had been raped as a teenager by a boyfriend who was “tired of waiting.” She had become pregnant. With the boyfriend long gone, Whitney wanted an abortion. Her liberal parents wouldn’t give their legal consent, surprising her. Instead, they sent her to live with an aunt outside of Chicago for the nine-month duration. The aunt died a year before Whitney was elected to Congress.
She gave the baby up for adoption and returned to her life in Missouri, telling her classmates she had spent a year at boarding school. Whitney decided then to never put herself in another situation where her choices in life were not hers to make. And she became a lifelong pro-choice advocate. She never tried to find her rapist’s offspring.
After high school, Whitney attended Northwestern University on an academic scholarship and during the summers interned for local Chicago politicians. There, she caught the political bug, and after graduation, enrolled in Harvard Law School. Whitney ruminated now on how many individuals ran for Congress today without a legal background and no knowledge of the Constitution. She believed this was part of the problem in Washington.
After Harvard, she returned to Chicago and volunteered for Brad Davis’s mayoral campaign. She served on Davis’s staff after the election, which was how she met Grayson Fairchild. Whitney walked into a meeting between the mayor and Grayson regarding tax incentives to move a large subsidiary of his father’s company to the city. She gazed into Grayson’s blue eyes; he stared at her, and it was all over for both of them. They had a long-distance relationship for a year before he proposed. After a beautiful wedding for a match that pleased both sets of parents, the newlyweds settled in St. Louis, the headquarters of Fairchild Industries.
Whitney had Chandler about a year after the wedding and Emma two years later. Although she enjoyed being a mother, the political bug never left her. Grayson understood when she explained she wanted to help people. Whitney entered and won her first political race for a seat on the county council. A couple of years later, she campaigned and narrowly won a state representative seat. When the US House representative for her district died in a car accident, Whitney ran in the special election to replace him. Her opponent painted her as an inexperienced legislator and a housewife, but the voters in her district responded to her honesty, her sincere willingness to help people, and her intelligence. Her attractiveness didn’t hurt either. The women turned out to vote for her in droves, and so did the men. She won by a landslide.
Four terms later, she ran for the US Senate when one of the senators retired. The people of Missouri loved
her. She was one of their own. She won again by a wide margin.
Whitney decided to run for president to stop the erosion of women’s rights and to express her frustration with the country’s direction. She believed she could bring a divided country back together. People trusted her. She did not offer pie-in-the-sky rhetoric, but practical solutions and results, as evidenced by her many accomplishments in the House and Senate.
Now, her campaign was no longer about proving a point.
It was about winning.
Their neighbor had always been there for Whitney. When Whitney was away on state business and then in DC, the woman had checked on her family, brought them warm meals, shuttled Chandler to lacrosse practice in a pinch, helped Emma get ready for a homecoming dance.
When Judy, the reporter, had first asked Whitney about the affair, she couldn’t conceive that it might be true. Now, she had a decision to make. Divorcing Grayson in the middle of a presidential run was out of the question, wasn’t it? She fell back on the question that guided her political life. WWHD? What would Hillary do? She knew exactly what HRC would do.
Landon had informed her about the chatter on Twitter and other online sites, the additional rumors spawned, the vicious talk, and the few-and-far-between calls for the couple’s privacy.
The most remarkable development was that although the affair was killing her on the inside, it was helping her poll numbers. The American public loved a scorned woman.
The vehicle stopped, jolting her from her thoughts. The driver came around and opened the door, extending a hand to help her out. She took it and thanked him as she stepped by him. He hustled to the other side to retrieve her bulging briefcase and followed her into her Georgetown home. He placed the briefcase on a stand for that purpose in the elegant foyer, tipped his hat, nodded, and left without a word.
The house was quiet. Unlike most of her colleagues, she lived primarily in DC, refusing to be in perpetual campaign mode. She was sent to DC to do a job, and to do it she needed to be here. At first, living apart from Grayson was hard, but over the years she welcomed the solitude after days spent with ever-demanding constituents, colleagues, the media, and lobbyists.
Leaving the lights off, she kicked off her shoes and padded to the library off the foyer. The curtains remained open and the moonlight provided sufficient visibility to navigate the furniture. She walked around the rolling ladder for the books on the highest shelves and past the large, unlit stone fireplace. She went to her music collection in a section of one of the bookcases. Selecting a CD at random, she slipped it into the player. Skipping the bottles of wine, she selected the bottle of Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 and a tulip glass and moved to the sofa. She poured several ounces into the glass, then sat back and drew her legs up under her. She swirled and sniffed the whiskey, took a sip, and cradled the glass in her hands.
She had to use two hands to keep the glass from shaking.
This was her favorite room in the house, the shelves filled with first editions whose titles she couldn’t read in the dark.
Despite Chopin’s “Nocturnes, Op. 9, No. 2” and the liquor, she couldn’t relax.
She started to reach for the humidor on the coffee table; indulging in a Cohiba cigar seemed appropriate for the occasion.
“Hello, darling.”
A lamp clicked on next to a chair, revealing her husband, Grayson, sitting there in his suit and overcoat, a bittersweet smile on his face.
*
Whitney rose without speaking. She grasped a highball glass from the cabinet above the bar and filled it with ice cubes, pouring an even dose of gin and tonic water.
She glided to Grayson’s chair and dangled the drink before his face.
“Sorry, I’m out of fresh lime. I wasn’t expecting you.” She resumed her position on the sofa and brought her glass to her lips. She peered at her husband over the rim and sipped while he swallowed most of his drink.
He placed the glass on the cherry end table next to his chair. His hair was uncombed, spiking on top. He had been crying.
“It wasn’t an affair. It was just one night.”
“So what would you call it?”
“A mistake.”
She bent forward, placing her own glass on the coffee table in front of her. “I see,” she said. “How did it happen?”
He sighed. “Do you really want to know?”
“I need to know what I’m up against. How did this mistake occur?”
He was silent for a long time. “With you gone, with the kids gone, she still brings dinner over.” A quick, reassuring gesture with his hands. “Brought. Brought dinner over. Especially when I worked late. We’d talk. When you’re the boss, you have few people you can talk to about what’s going on at work. She was so far removed from what was going on there. Easy to talk to . . . One night, we had a bottle of wine, and then another . . .” He shrugged, knowing nothing more needed to be said.
Whitney took in the pain of each word and swallowed her grief. “Have you spoken to the children?”
Grayson grabbed his drink and drained it. “Chandler’s angry. And Emma is not speaking to me. Always protective of her mother. The press had left them alone for the last week, but now they’re back in full force.”
“They’ve been through enough,” she said, her words harsh. “They don’t deserve this, Grayson. Affairs are harder on the children than the couple.”
“Mistake.”
“I wish they had Secret Service protection.”
He stared into his empty glass. “I know. Me, too. This is my fault. What can I do to make this right?”
She said nothing.
After a while, he indicated with his chin. “What’re you reading?”
Whitney glanced at the book on the coffee table, for once, not interested in books. “Another Abraham Lincoln biography. I don’t know how much more can be written about the man, but writers always find something.”
Lincoln was her favorite president, leading the country during its deadliest war and through its greatest moral and constitutional challenges. She loved reading biographies: Churchill, Thatcher, the Roosevelts, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Hitler, Gorbachev. She never understood those people who did not like to read; she pitied them for what they were missing. Whitney learned from the mistakes and successes of others. A lifetime wasn’t long enough to make all the mistakes yourself.
Grayson placed his highball glass on the end table and stood. “I need to get to the airport. Board meeting tomorrow. But I needed to see you in person. To talk about this face to face.”
Whitney didn’t bother to get up. “Lock the front door on your way out.”
He hesitated, continuing to search her face, and then left the room. She heard the front door close.
Whitney reached for the bottle and poured a refill.
She grabbed a cigar, cut the cap, and struck a wooden match. Opening one of the large windows facing the street, she sat on the cushioned window seat. She puffed as she stared out into the cool night thinking about how to use Grayson’s “mistake” to her political advantage, ignoring the tears streaming down her face.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Crystal City, Virginia
My place was dark, except for the light emanating from the three computer monitors on my desk. A news report video played on the monitor to my right, reporters shouting questions as the senator left her office building.
“Senator Fairchild, why aren’t you speaking out against the person or persons who leaked to the media about your husband’s affair?”
“Are you getting a divorce, Senator?”
“Senator, how do you feel?”
“Senator, if you were in a room alone with the other woman, what would you say to her?”
I frowned. Reporters were not my favorite people.
Senator Whitney Fairchild, her posture perfect, stopped. She faced the reporters and the cameras.
“This is a very difficult time for my family and me. We are deali
ng with a personal situation and would be grateful if you would honor our privacy.” She glanced down briefly, before scanning the faces of those around her. “We are all human. We all make mistakes. That’s all I’m going to say about this matter.”
The senator started to walk away, before turning back. “Oh, one more thing.” Her voice hardened. “Leave my children alone.”
She walked to the waiting black car at a brisk pace. She shook her head and waved to the press, her expression unreadable.
God, she’s beautiful.
I laughed when I realized what I had just thought. How can you talk to someone in whom you do not believe?
I paused the video, her face turned toward the camera, as she was about to duck into the car. I traced my finger down her forehead, her nose, her lips, and brought it to my lips. I yanked my finger away, surprised.
Her husband was a fool.
After I wiped my finger with the handkerchief I kept on my desk, I pressed play and ignored the rest of the news program. I turned to the center monitor.
My friends had arrived. I found it curious, yes, and a little sad, that conversing with them was the best part of my home life. I felt closer to my online friends, whom I had never met, than to anyone else. But I did not have time to think about that now. I caught up on the conversation. Pittfan, of course, was leading the discussion topic about the affair.
I lurked as the chat continued, waiting a few minutes before typing.
Good evening. I waited for everyone to return the greeting and typed, Entertainment Tonight is over. We have more important things to discuss. We need to take it up a notch.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Washington, DC
Whitney breezed through the anteroom of her office suite in the Russell Senate Office Building. Sean, her receptionist and scheduler, stopped typing and grinned.
“Welcome back, Senator.”
“Thank you, Sean.” She kept walking. “Give me five minutes and then send Landon in, please. Afterward, you and I can go over my schedule.”