by Laura Hayden
“What? ‘The next president of the United States’?”
A twinkle glittered in Emily’s eyes. “That and unimpeachable.”
“Don’t get too big for your britches, girl. Remember Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.”
“None of my dates have blue dresses,” Emily shot back.
Kate had to admit that Emily had her there.
The next few days were intense.
Insane.
Exhilarating.
And that was merely back at M Central. On the road, Kate knew Emily was experiencing twice as much exhilarating insanity, judging by her frequent phone calls and text messages.
The calls were mostly updates on the events and requests for advice, but buried in the news were Emily’s assurances that although Gilroy had not surfaced at any event, that didn’t mean he was elsewhere.
Like Virginia.
Kate had tried to tell Emily that she didn’t need a private security firm assigned to watch her at all times. But Emily insisted. And when Emily insisted, people listened.
Kate ended up with a detail of watchdogs assigned solely to guard her, which was as awkward as it was embarrassing. Finally, after one and a half uneasy, uncomfortable days of constant scrutiny, with two security men running unnecessary interference between Kate and practically every person in her path, known or unknown, she called the agency.
“I thought your people were supposed to protect me from stalkers, not become my stalkers,” she complained.
The head of the agency laughed. “Ms. Benton said you wouldn’t last two days.”
“She was right. I can’t stand this. You’re interfering with my job.” Kate tried not to glare at the man standing next to her office door. She knew his counterpart was sitting in their car just beyond her window.
“You do realize, ma’am—this is for your own safety.” Their boss sounded amused rather than apologetic.
Her grip tightened on the telephone. “Trust me—I’m not safe if I’m walking around in a constant state of irritation. It’s bad enough having your people stomp around my yard every couple of hours, but inside too? My dog, Buster, is going crazy.”
“Yes, ma’am. . . . I understand the dog is all howl and no bite.”
“So far, but I don’t know how long he can hold out. If they keep bribing him with Milk-Bones, I’ll have to put him on a diet.”
After much discussion, they came to the agreement that one member of the security detail would accompany Kate in her car from her home to her office and remain within a discreet distance during any intermediate stops or appointments. The other man would trail them in his car. But she made it plain that her home and her office would be considered sacrosanct. Once they performed a single but thorough internal sweep of each location, all other surveillance would be conducted from the outside of the building.
But despite all arrangements, the one thing the security company couldn’t protect her from was the person who leaked to the press the existence of the two threatening notes.
It wasn’t just a leak. It was a well-orchestrated and obviously deliberate disclosure, released to several key news markets simultaneously. Had she wanted to alert the media, Kate couldn’t have selected a better way to do so if she’d arranged it personally. That, of course, meant that most everyone believed she had leaked the news herself. Instead of spending her time admitting that yes, she had received those threats, she had to defend herself, saying no, she hadn’t leaked the news.
To complicate matters further, the Talbot headquarters chose the same time to announce that Nicholas Beaudry had been hired as deputy campaign manager, and yes, he was the same Nick Beaudry who had been briefly married to Emily Benton.
Gee. What a coincidence. Dueling press releases at thirty paces.
Kate tried to ignore all the questions that flooded her office, whether in person, on the phone, or in her e-mail in-box. Instead, she spent her time, energy, and the better part of the day shutting the questions out and tracking the leak back to its source.
After a couple hours of tracing and retracing, she reached the stunning conclusion that the leak came from within. In fact, every clue she unearthed pointed to a single volunteer, Cassidy Gates, who by all appearances was a sweet, unassuming high school senior getting work-study credit for helping with general office duties—filing, answering phones, stuffing envelopes. After speaking with her, Kate realized that either the girl was a world-class actress, or maybe someone much smarter than her was taking advantage of her naiveté.
But who?
Rather than grill the girl, Kate sent in her assistant, Caroline, whose gray-haired granny looks and Southern drawl hid political acumen of the steel-trap variety. Kate trusted Caroline. Better yet, so did all the other staffers. The mother-confessor of the office, Caroline would be the one to entice out, ream out, squeeze out, or otherwise determine who had used Cassidy’s access to interoffice-only information to knock a chink from Kate’s walls of privacy.
Thanks to that violation, reporters who had spent untold days badgering her about Emily now turned their unwanted attention on Kate’s personal life. When the press realized her neighbors didn’t know her and her campaign staff wouldn’t talk, attention turned to the members of her church. But the staff and congregation there understood how much Kate cherished her privacy and everyone closed ranks.
Buoyed by her church family’s unconditional support, Kate couldn’t help but develop a renewed sympathy for anyone on the lens side of relentless media scrutiny who didn’t belong to such a community of trust.
She also thanked God for the security team who made it possible for her to slip safely past the camera gauntlet outside of the headquarters when she needed to. Unfortunately those same security grunts were of limited use when it came to wading through the increased quantity and variety of mail she was getting on a daily basis.
Some of the letters she received fell in the hate mail category, but most of them smacked of being copycats. Kate had finally become desensitized to the contents after the first dozen or so. She no longer got the shakes. In fact, she didn’t even get worried.
But her new public profile meant she received a larger number of letters from people sent directly to her—a third of them blaming Emily for having sent the shooter, a third praising Emily for having sent the shooter to the Talbot campaign, and another third wanting to defend Emily by helping identify the shooter. The last category contained by far the most interesting letters she received. Kate got variations on the theme from every flavor of nutcase—from a legion of tinfoil hat–wearing conspiracy theorists to a bunch of psychics and everything in between. The writers either claimed to be the shooter themselves or declared they’d seen him in their dreams or in their space-time machines or foretold by an ominous thunderhead in the western sky.
She prayed for the writers. They needed grounding that Kate figured only a healthy relationship with God could give.
But despite all this “help,” no one had identified, much less caught, the New Hampshire shooter or the writer of the Handmaiden note—now thought to be one of Gilroy’s erstwhile disciples—or the other dozen or so missives of doom that her security team and the Secret Service thought might be remotely related to the initial notes.
However, one good thing about politics—both the candidates and the press had short memories and would eventually move on to other issues if they continued to hit a brick wall of silence.
Eventually.
So after a hundred or so repetitions of “No comment,” the press finally accepted the fact that neither Kate nor anyone connected with the Benton campaign would say anything further to keep the story alive. They drifted away to the next scandal, someplace else.
As relieved as Kate was to not be photographed every time she stepped out of the building, she still had her security watchdogs trailing her, complicating her life. At least when she dragged her detail along with her to church, she felt a bit better, as if some good might come of their exposure.
In order to maintain some semblance of normalcy, Kate tried to never stay late at the office; it simply made her security detail that much more prominent when she was the last to leave. The last thing she needed were pictures of her walking out of headquarters in the obvious company of one burly man and being tailed by another. Publicity like that simply wasn’t good for the campaign. So she always made sure that when she left, it was as part of a crowd of office workers. That way, things felt and looked much more normal in her life even if she could never forget she was someone’s target.
She prayed a lot these days, for strength, for mercy, and for somebody to find the shooter before he could do any more harm.
Driving home, Kate tried to make very small talk with her current closemouthed protector, a large and pathologically fit man named Lew. Buster didn’t like the man at all. Her dog sat in the backseat, emitting an occasional growl at the guard when not distracted by the passing cars. Once they reached her house, the three of them waited in the car while Lew’s eminently more personable partner, Sidney, checked the house. As usual, today he proclaimed it safe and she and Buster ditched their guards at her front door. Once inside, she breathed a sigh of relief. Buster flopped down in the middle of the floor and promptly fell asleep.
After nuking a frozen dinner, Kate tried to watch television only to realize—drat her luck—that the few shows she’d managed to see in the last six months were all being rerun that night. She turned to a stack of unopened DVDs sitting on the coffee table, ones that should have been sent back in the mail months ago. She flipped through them. Nothing sounded very interesting to her.
She pulled out her Bible. She hadn’t had nearly enough time to read it lately. She’d settled on a favorite selection from Psalms when her cell phone rang. It was Lee Devlin.
“Sorry to call after business hours,” Lee began.
“Don’t worry about it. I did that to you last time, so I guess it’s your turn. Got something new?”
“On Nick. Yes. A couple of things. First, it turns out that those sealed files Sierra had were nothing more than his juvie records. They were supposedly sealed by the courts, but she’d gotten ahold of them somehow. She won’t let me open them, but she assures me there’s nothing really useful there that applies to his life today. A single charge of grand theft auto made by one of his uncles whose car Nick ‘borrowed.’ A couple of underage drinking raps.”
“Nothing earth-shattering, then.”
“Not there. But I did find something interesting about his DUI after the Big Breakup.”
“What?”
“When he was pulled over, he failed the field sobriety test but blamed it on an inner ear problem. So he requested a Breathalyzer test—it wasn’t mandatory in those days in Maryland. When he took it, he blew a 0.09, which was just under the cutoff at the time of 0.10. He should have gotten off right there. However, there was a scuffle that ended up with him being arrested for driving under the influence and striking an officer.”
“Ouch.”
“Exactly. But it doesn’t add up. I’ve seen the pictures. Trust me—if Beaudry hit the cop, he didn’t leave a mark on the man. The cop, on the other hand, must have had quite a time waling on Nick. He looked as if he’d done a demolition derby without the benefit of a car and was the last man standing. He had no serious injuries, but he had to have been hurting. When Nick finally arrived at the jail, forty-five minutes later, they did a second Breathalyzer test and he blew a 0.18.”
“The results doubled? While he was handcuffed in the back of a police car? How’s that possible?”
“Best way I can figure is Nick might have had a couple more shots of undiluted whiskey poured down his throat while being forcibly held down in the back of the cruiser. It’d account for the injuries and the delay in reaching the station. Nobody ever seemed to question the fact that it took forty-five minutes for them to reach the booking facility that was only five minutes away under the worst conditions from the arrest site. Maybe the officer needed time to let the alcohol metabolize into Nick’s bloodstream. Or maybe he took that long so the news media could get situated in the perfect place to get those front-page pictures. They were stunning.”
Kate recalled several “beauty” shots of a bedraggled, bleary-eyed, and bruised Nick, handcuffed and being marched into the building. Considering how badly he’d humiliated Emily the night before, Kate hadn’t felt any sympathy for him at the time. Nor had she asked any questions about his injuries. She’d only figured he’d resisted arrest after a night of hard drinking.
But now she began to see there might be a different side to Nick’s story. Had he been deliberately set up for maximum humiliation after the breakup?
If so, then by whom?
Other than Emily, Kate was the only other person who could have pulled something like this off with so little prep time.
Besides Emily. . . .
Hmmm. . . .
Kate didn’t have time to ponder the past, even if such thoughts were justified because of the new facts in evidence. The present and Emily’s campaign were much too pressing, the future far more compelling.
Florida and its 210 delegate votes were up for grabs. Emily’s schedule had started with speeches in Miami; then she headed northward. When she called from Orlando, she seemed to be in an unusually nostalgic mood.
“I wish you were here, K. I know how much you’d love it. I can see the big castle in the distance.”
“You mean Cinderella’s castle.”
“You know, it looks a lot bigger than the version at Disneyland.”
“That’s because it is bigger. It’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Disneyland. Different princesses, different castles, different sizes.”
“That was still the best vacation I ever took,” Emily said, sounding almost wistful.
“Same here, thanks to you.”
“Not me. It was all thanks to Dad. He’s the one who arranged everything.”
“True.”
Kate had been around Big Henry only a few times before he died, but she’d found him a surprisingly congenial man—outside of the political arena. Inside politics, he frightened her to death. She’d never seen a man with so much power at his fingertips. He was like Zeus flinging thunderbolts at his enemies with pinpoint accuracy. To Big Henry’s credit, he seemed to use his power wisely. Then again, he seemed awfully careful about what he allowed outsiders to see. Despite her friendship with Emily, Kate had always been an outsider among the Bentons. That is, until Big Henry’s death.
The very first time Kate had met Henry Benton face-to-face was on the tarmac as she, Emily, and two more friends climbed down the stairs of the Benton family private jet. They’d all left Dulles thinking they were headed for Florida, but the plane’s pilot had filed a different flight plan at Big Henry’s orders. Unbeknownst to the girls, they were headed for sunny California instead.
“What do you have up your sleeve, old man?” Emily asked her dad, shading her eyes from the bright sunlight. She pointed at the unmistakable arches of the LAX control tower. “Unless I’m crazy—and trust me, I’m not—this is not Florida.” She glared at her father. “Why did you divert us to Los Angeles, Dad?”
He hugged his daughter and bestowed the famous Benton grin on the rest of them. “I just wanted to give you and your friends the vacation of a lifetime. It’s not every day that your daughter not only gets into law school at Georgetown but does so well in the first semester. I thought you and your friends might enjoy a little pampering.”
A few hours later, all four girls were stretched out on massage tables at The Beverly Hills Hotel, being pummeled by four of the best-looking men Kate had seen in some time.
That afternoon, at Big Henry’s request, they shopped in the boutiques of Beverly Hills to find new cocktail dresses. What they cost was of no consequence, thanks to Big Henry, who paid for t
he dresses with his platinum card. The gift also included matching shoes, purses, and jewelry from famous stores Kate had only heard of in Hollywood gossip columns and certainly had never shopped in before. The cost of college and law school had placed a serious crimp in her finances. She had scholarships and student loans, but it was still hard on her and her parents. These days, her ideal place to go fashion shopping was more budget barn basement than Beverly Hills boutique.
But Big Henry wouldn’t listen to her protests as he insisted the girls each buy the perfect ensemble as his gift.
Then that night, with the girls all dressed in their new finery, they stepped into a white stretch limo that pulled up outside their private bungalow at the famous hotel.
As the limo glided up the ramp onto the interstate, Kate and the other two girls speculated which of LA’s legendary hot spots they might be going to. Emily listened to their theories but refused to tell them anything other than a guarantee that it’d be a night to remember. At least, that’s what her father promised. Even she didn’t know where they were going until they got there.
To their amazement, instead of pulling up in front of Spago or Chasen’s, the limo pulled into the parking lot of Disneyland.
Kate glanced down at her new six-hundred-dollar heels. “Are you serious? An amusement park? In these shoes?”
Emily grinned. “Don’t worry. I know what’s going on now. You’ll be fine.”
The driver opened the door and helped them out onto the sidewalk. There, they watched tired families carrying exhausted children in mouse-ear hats toward the parking lot, back to their minivans, back to Suburbia, USA.
Back to the ordinary world that they’d left behind early that morning.
“Wait here,” the driver directed. Then he walked over to a small building sporting a Guest Services sign. While the driver negotiated, Emily listened to her friends’ whispers as they huddled together on the sidewalk, talking about how they felt totally out of place in comparison to the shorts and T-shirt set entering and exiting the park.