by Laura Hayden
Everybody wanted to be the next Michael Moore.
Kate made sure to limit the access the young man received. It was far easier to control a situation than to clean up the aftermath.
With that in mind, she thought back to Daniel Gilroy’s attack on Nick. If Talbot had indeed masterminded the incident, he certainly hadn’t managed it well. You don’t throw a loaded grenade into a crowded room when you only want to injure one person. The man didn’t strike Kate as being so callous as to consider the death of one of his campaign workers as an unavoidable but necessary casualty of friendly fire.
Did it even matter whether Gilroy had acted on his own or in concert with someone else?
The important thing was that he was locked up and no longer a threat to anyone. And Talbot was neatly hog-tied too. Kate only hoped all the ropes would hold until after the election.
She pushed that thought firmly from her mind and pulled out the next spreadsheet she needed to review.
Oh, how she wanted to look forward to a nice, clean campaign.
KATE MANUFACTURED a reasonable excuse to not be on-site for the second presidential debate, but the third and final debate was harder to duck.
“I need you,” Emily whined. “This jerk Talbot is really getting under my skin and I need you to keep me centered. To keep me focused.” She added in a dark voice, “To keep me from tackling him at the podium and plucking his well-groomed head bald.”
But that meant Kate would have to see Charles Talbot face-to-face. She wasn’t sure she could stomach that, not after their invective-laced phone conversation. If Emily thought she was having a hard time keeping her cool around the man, she had no idea what Talbot did to Kate’s blood pressure. . . .
But when it came time for the show—Kate couldn’t think of it as anything else but a show—she gathered her courage and watched the procedure from the wings of the stage. They’d chosen a college auditorium for the last clash.
But clash turned out to be the wrong word. Football teams clashed. What Emily and Charles Talbot did was play an elaborate game of chess, one strategy masking another, each of them thinking two or three . . . dozen moves in advance. They started with a classic opening and it was as if they’d studied the same “How to Play Chess” book.
Avoid moving a piece twice. Or mentioning a topic twice. Make your point well the first time and move on.
Make sure to develop the pieces on both sides. Both candidates fought to present themselves and their agendas as being planted firmly in the middle of an issue, rather than wildly to either extreme. The conservative Talbot tried to lean more to the liberal side of issues and the more liberal Emily tried to anchor herself closer to a conservative center.
Don’t play a piece beyond your own side of the board during the opening stage. There was nothing to be gained by coming out of the corner swinging. The debate would degenerate into modified name-calling soon enough.
Search for weak spots in the opponent’s position. That was the end goal for both prior debates and the third one as well. Robbed of his ability to bring up Emily’s questionable involvement with the highway project, Talbot pounded away at every other possible soft spot. He even glanced once or twice in Kate’s direction during one such attempted drubbing as if to dare her to say something in retaliation.
She prayed for strength.
Apparently something in Kate’s gaze had the power to shake him. He lost his train of thought, and Emily scored points.
However, their unspoken agreement held. There was only one verboten topic; any other subject matter, any new discoveries, were fair game.
After all was said, done, and rebutted, the conservative political experts declared that Talbot had won the debate by a slim margin and liberal pundits stated Emily had tipped the scales in her direction by an equally narrow amount.
In other words, it was anybody’s game.
Emily and Kate returned to the hotel in an unusual silence that Emily broke when they stepped into the elevator along with the Secret Service detail.
Emily crossed her arms. “Is it me, or were you and Talbot having a telepathic conversation back there? He’d glare at you, you’d glare back, and it was almost like you could see words floating in the air between the two of you.”
“Nonsense.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve been acting weird since Seattle. And don’t tell me it’s just stress. Trust me. I know stress. This is something . . . more. I can almost feel power and pain rolling off you in waves.”
Kate glanced at the back of the Secret Service agent who stood between them and the elevator door, filling the gap with broad shoulders. “I don’t like the man. I don’t trust him. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She tilted her head toward the bodyguard. “Not here. Not now.”
As they reached their floor, Kate pushed past the agent and positioned herself to exit first. If that broke protocol, she didn’t care. She had to get out of the elevator before she dissolved into a bundle of nerves.
Emily called after Kate as she made her escape to her room. “Wait up.”
“No. I said later.” Kate’s tone brooked no argument, not even from Emily, used to having her way at all times.
When Kate reached her room, she didn’t turn around to see the expression on Emily’s face. She already knew it was a combination of concern, consternation, and confusion. Once safely inside, Kate leaned against the closed door. Things couldn’t stay like this—her dodging Emily, refusing to explain. Either Kate figured out how to deal with this or she was going to go stark raving nuts.
Lord, what do I do?
Wes.
He was the only person who could help absolve her.
The next night, Kate sat in Wes Kingsbury’s living room, laughing at the antics of his cherubic daughter, Dani. She was amazed at how motherhood had tamed but not extinguished the fiery Anna.
“You look fantastic,” she said as Anna scooped up the baby to blow kisses on her round little belly.
“Thanks. I don’t need a gym membership when I have to run around tending to the kiddo here for sixteen hours a day. It’s like pumping iron with a weight set that keeps getting heavier every day.”
“I never thought my sister-in-law would give up the StairMaster for actual stairs, but she did now that she has kids and a three-level town house.”
“Having kids changes your perspective, if not your architecture,” Anna said with a grin. “You’ll have to excuse me. It’s Dani’s bedtime, so I’m going to head upstairs and give you two some peace and quiet.”
After saying their good nights, Wes stood and gestured for Kate to follow him into his book-lined study. Once she was comfortably seated there, he closed the doors, giving them an added measure of privacy.
He propped against the corner of the desk. “You’ve been very congenial tonight, but I can tell something is bothering you.”
Kate nodded. “I need advice. I need answers. I need . . .” She felt something crumble inside of her, and a new flood of emotions threatened to turn her into a soggy mess. “I need help,” she said, hanging on to her control as tightly as she could.
Wes abandoned the desk and sat next to her on the couch. When he rested his hand on her shoulder, everything bottled up inside of her broke loose.
She told him the entire sordid story, every fact, every conjecture, and every suspicion she had. Kate didn’t hold back anything about Emily, telling him about the irregularities surrounding the highway project. She talked about her doubts but also her belief that Emily was capable of taking kickbacks but not of letting that bridge be built wrong. What Kate didn’t mention was her own conversation with Talbot, the one that had spiked his guns. It was only after she finished that she realized how badly she might be compromising, or at least complicating, Wes’s friendship with Emily. Kate immediately began to apologize, but Wes shut her up quickly.
“You’re not telling me anything new. I’ve known Emily a long, long time.” He paused to correct himself. “O
kay, so you are telling me a lot of things I didn’t know, but you’re not destroying my illusions about Emily. I’ve always known she’s had the capacity to do something under the table. I think deep down inside, you knew that too. We know we need to make up for that particular shortfall in her qualities. But like you, I think the bridge thing wasn’t her style. The money and the family firm finagling control of the job—that’s another matter. . . .”
Kate nodded. “It’s quite a disappointment to learn that your idol is almost entirely made of clay. So what do I do? This . . . animosity and resentment I have is affecting our relationship. How can I support her for president when right now I can barely hold a conversation with her?”
“Why can’t you talk to her? Why can’t you simply tell her what you learned and let her respond? You might find that she regrets having done it.”
“Are we talking about the same person? I don’t think the word regret is in her vocabulary.”
Wes said nothing and instead leaned back, giving Kate a critical once-over that she felt all the way to her shoes. “What?”
“There’s something else going on. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
He crossed his arms. “We can’t begin to untangle this mess unless you’re honest with yourself.”
She sank into the comfortable leather couch, wishing it could swallow her whole. “I did something I’m not proud of and . . .” She closed her eyes and tried to find the right words. “And I’m mad at Emily for putting me in the position where I felt I had to do it.”
“What’d you do?”
“I . . . I blackmailed Charles Talbot.” Kate’s voice broke along with her control. Tears fell as she named her offense, her sin, for the first time. “I think I might have been called to do it. But I still feel like my soul is shattering. I’m not the same. What have I become?”
Wes’s expression didn’t even flicker. He didn’t look disappointed or disgusted. If anything his lack of response was more frightening than anything she could imagine. Had he held no high expectations for her either? She’d expected shock, even censure for her sin, but Wes remained quiet.
Like any good psych patient, she felt compelled to fill the silence. “I’m mad. At myself. I’m supposed to be better than that. But I folded. I’d been sitting on this information for months. I didn’t even tell Emily because I was scared she’d pull another Mark Henderson on me and use what I found without provocation.”
“You worried that she’d take this information and use it to fire the first volley at Talbot?”
“Yeah.” Kate nodded. “Here I thought I was taking the moral high ground. That I was so much better equipped to safeguard the information than she was. But the moment I learned Talbot was going to hold a press conference and reveal all this wretched stuff about Emily and the highway project kickbacks, I reached right into my bag of tricks. I didn’t hesitate for a moment. Not one second thought. I just pulled that loaded weapon out and I fired it point-blank at Talbot.”
“And you stopped him.”
Kate buried her face in her hands, trying to stop the tears. “Yeah, I stopped him.”
“What had he done?”
“Does it matter?”
“I know you. It had to have been bad. Really bad. Maybe bad enough to violate more than your own moral values. Maybe bad enough to be considered a capital crime?”
“Y-es.”
“Are you sorry you used this knowledge?”
“Yes. Maybe. No. Maybe all of the above. I’m sorry that I sank to fighting scandal with scandal. But I’m not sorry that Talbot knows he didn’t get away with what he did back then. He essentially killed a girl he loved with his carelessness, and he ran away from the responsibility of his actions by bribing the witnesses.” Kate hadn’t meant to confide that. Or had she? Should the severity of Talbot’s crime be a consideration? Or was she just trying harder to assuage her own guilt for sinking to his level?
“Someone died?” Wes emitted a soft whistle. “I take it you haven’t told Emily about this.”
“No, of course not. About none of it—not even what Talbot uncovered about the highway project, not that he planned to release it, and definitely not what I found out about him.”
“And you resent her for this. Being unable to confide in her because you fear her reaction.”
“Yes, Dr. Freud.”
“So let me ask. What happens if you tell her?”
Kate’s imagination went into overtime. “She’d want to expose him to the world, even at the risk of revealing her own guilt. But he already knows his secret has been compromised. If he’s smart, he’s trying to clean it up. He’s probably looking even harder into Emily’s background, trying to find something else to hang over her head.”
“What will he find?”
That was the real problem; Kate had no idea what ghosts still haunted Emily’s past that could be used against her. The highway thing had taken her by surprise. What other messes were out there festering? “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I had no idea about the highway project. Who knows what else is lurking in the shadows? I guess this proves I don’t know Emily as well as I thought I did.”
A sense of despair dried her tears. “What do I do, Wes? How can I forgive myself for what I’ve done?” She looked at him, instantly mesmerized by the expression of serenity on his face. “Did I do the right thing?”
“Ask God first. Did you live up to his plan for you? Or did you fall short? If you’re truly sorry, ask for his forgiveness and then ask for his guidance to help you make the right decision next time.”
“There’s always going to be a next time, isn’t there?”
“Of course.” Wes shrugged. “Politics is a difficult business. Honestly, it could use a little more religion.”
“A little more?”
He smiled. “Okay, a lot more.” Wes rose from his chair and offered Kate a hand. After she stood, he reached for her other hand. “You’re a good person, Kate Rosen. You may call it your conscience speaking, but I call it your heart and soul. Listen to both and you won’t be led astray.” He paused, then squeezed her hands. “Would you mind if I said a little prayer on your behalf?”
She nodded. “I need it.”
Wes closed his eyes. “Well, Lord, as you can see, it’s been a tough week for Kate. It’s been a stressful time and she needs your help. She’s in a unique position to influence the woman who just may be the next president, and this is a serious responsibility that Kate wants to do well and in your name. Please help guide her. Help her weigh all decisions and make the wise ones. Protect her from those who want to manipulate her in the wrong direction. Bless her, Lord, and forgive her if she veers off your path. Show her that the way back takes only one step at a time. Watch over her and keep her and Emily in your loving care. In his holy name, amen.”
It wasn’t that Kate suddenly felt all her cares and worries lifted from her shoulders. But she felt better equipped to handle the myriad of problems that still hung around her neck and loomed in the distance.
The main one being Emily Benton.
The next morning, Kate flew to Kansas City, where Emily was starting a series of postdebate rallies in the Midwest. She knew what she had to tell her friend wasn’t going to be the sort of discussion one should have over the phone.
Instead of going backstage, Kate chose to sit in the audience, joining the other Benton supporters, their enthusiasm infectious and familiar. She’d forgotten how exciting a rally could be, how the speeches, the music, and the ceremony could whip up a crowd.
The woman standing next to Kate was particularly caught up. “Isn’t she wonderful?” she shouted to Kate as she clapped in rhythm to the music.
Kate nodded.
“She’s going to make such a wonderful president.”
Kate stared at this Everywoman, representing an important part of Emily’s constituency. “Why?”
The woman stopped clapping.
“Why are you going to vote fo
r her?” Kate repeated.
The woman took very little time to formulate an answer. “Because I like how she thinks, what she says, what she’s willing to fight for. And even better, she has real experience. She practically grew up in politics.” Her eyes began to shine. “The male politicians in Washington, D.C., really respect and listen to her.” She pointed to the stage, where Emily and Burl Bochner stood, drinking in the palpable love and support. “It’s time for a change and she’s going to do it.”
“You really think so?”
The woman smiled. “Honey, I know so.”
After the rally, Kate worked her way backstage and ran into Maia Bari, whom she hadn’t expected to see but who seemed genuinely pleased to see her. The young woman gave her an awkward hug. “You don’t know how much I appreciate being allowed to work with Emily. I never knew politics could be so . . . thrilling.”
Kate almost asked, And when did I supposedly hire you? But instead she played along. “She seemed in fine form tonight.”
“She feeds off the fervor of each crowd.” Maia was slightly breathless. “I am simply amazed at her stamina.”
Kate turned her attention to Emily, deep in an animated discussion with the people clustered around her. “She’s amazing, all right.” She turned back to Maia. “I’m headed to the hotel to check in. Can you tell Emily I’m in town? She wasn’t expecting me. I need to talk to her tonight when she gets back to her suite.”
“I’d be delighted to give her the message. I know she misses your counsel while traveling.”
Kate faded into the throng, deliberately staying out of Emily’s line of sight. Once outside, she took a quick cab ride to the Hyatt Regency Crown Center, moved her things into one of the bedrooms in Emily’s private suite, and tried to distract herself with e-mail until Emily arrived.