Ann Cristy (Helen Mittermeyer)

by Tread Softly (lit)

  "Well, well. Is this what the well-dressed interim sen­ator usually wears?" Rafe drawled from the doorway, both hands at his hips, pushing his suit jacket back from his body.

  "Do you like it?" Cady tried to keep the breathiness from her voice, but Rafe's blue eyes made her dizzy.

  "Very much. It's the sexiest utilitarian garment I've ever seen, and it makes your eyes look purple," he ob­served, reaching for her arm to lead her down the stairs.

  "Isn't it unusual to call a gathering of senators on the Hill on Sunday?" Cady stopped in the doorway leading out to the patio, where a light lunch was waiting for them.

  "It's not senators." Rafe smiled at her. "Some lob­byists representing chemical firms and the nuclear power people want me to pull in my horns about clean water and air." His lips curled. "I imagine they don't want much... just that I keep my mouth shut and not support those bills that my wife fought so hard to keep alive for me." He looked down at her and his face turned grim for a moment, a hard, faraway look coming into his eyes. "The lobbyists have enlisted Bruno Trabold's help in bringing me to heel."

  "All against the environment, of course," Cady ob­served, recalling the pressures that had come to bear against her when she had decided that the very life and

  breath of the planet were being endangered. What had once been an interest became an absorption when she discovered how careless many were about the atmosphere when they pursued the dollar.

  "Yes," Rafe said, leaning toward her. "You know, Cady, my hearing was never impaired in the accident, and I listened when you talked about what was being done to our country in the name of progress. I remember how appalled you were about the goings-on in our state. I learned a great deal from you, wife."

  She could feel her face go pink with pleasure at the earnestness in his voice. How lovely to hear him praise her, to know that he had paid so much attention to what she said. She thought she might even enjoy this meeting on Capitol Hill.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Capitol was bathed in sunlight, its concrete facade having a pinkish hue that looked welcoming on the crisp autumn day. As usual, tourists lined the steps of the many buildings along Constitution Avenue. The sight never failed to delight Cady. As though Rafe could read her mind, he ordered their driver to slow the vehicle on the wide, park like avenue.

  When Rafe noticed people looking at the car with curiosity, he waved to some children, who waved back. When their parents bent to them and whispered, then pointed to the car, Rafe asked the chauffeur to stop the limousine.

  Cady knew Rafe was sincerely interested in people, especially children. She felt a wrench as she thought of the decision they had made long ago not to have children right away because they wanted more time with each other. Cady often speculated that she might have con­ceived more easily at eighteen, and perhaps if they had had children at once they might have been able to avert

  the rift that had developed between them. She wondered now if they would ever have offspring, and if not, would it be her fault? She sighed and put the thought from her mind, smiling at the youngsters who had run up to the car.

  Rafe seemed to have limitless patience as he answered their questions and told them that he thought that Kansas, their state, was quite beautiful and that he was fond of sunflowers.

  They left the children and were driven to the entrance at the back. They took the elevator to Rafe's office, which had been Cady's office for many months. She could hear Bruno's voice before Rafe pushed open the door.

  "Rafe." Bruno's croak reached them just ahead of his outstretched hand. He leaned toward Rafe, whispering, "You'll have to back down some. These boys mean a lot of blocks in the voting booths." His eyes shifted to Cady, but he didn't speak to her. She shivered and stepped closer to Rafe.

  Rafe waded into the group, talking and smiling. For an instant Cady felt her faith in him waver. Would he be coerced by his father's political cronies into defeating the latest environmental bill? Then she heard the man called Greeley whine, "Listen, Rafe, you'd better back down. If I tell my people you ain't comin' across"—he shrugged, wiping one hand down his overstuffed jacket— "you'll lose enough votes to put you out of a job."

  The others muttered loudly, nodding. "I'm not backing down," Rafe announced, pulling a pencil-slim cigar from a flat case. "I'm just not contrib­uting to the health problems of my constituents because you want a cheap way to dump chemicals. Forget it. My wife made an in-depth study of chemical dumping, and I'm against the method you're lobbying for."

  "Then the men I've got will bury you, Rafe," Greeley growled.

  Cady stepped forward to her husband's side. "And the women in the Coalition to Protect Our Children will hear about you, Mr. Greeley. We'll stump the state and tell every mother and father we can that you wish to kill their children in a very protracted and painful way." She lifted her chin. "I wouldn't be surprised if the women lynched you, sir. We're through letting people like you destroy our state. If you try to cross my husband, you'll find that we hit back, too... and hard." Cady could feel her knees quaking, and she laced her moist hands together to conceal their tremors.

  "Feisty broad, aren't ya? Emmett told me you were a troublemaker." Greeley wet his thick lips with his tongue.

  Rafe leaned forward, putting his index finger into the middle of Greeley's corpulent belly. "If you ever call my wife a broad again, Greeley, I'm going to put my fist where this finger is," he announced conversationally, his smile widening when the man retreated a step. "I don't think I have to repeat what Cady just said. If you want a fight, you'll get one." Rafe stepped away from his desk. "Get out of here. You're ruining my Sunday."

  The men filed out, still muttering.

  Bruno stood to one side of the open door. "You're making a mistake getting their backs up like that, Rafe. Emmett won't like it, and you'll weaken your own po­sition in the party."

  "Cut the crap, Bruno." Rafe's face was as harsh as his voice. "No matter what you or my father thinks, my political leverage has never depended on men like Gree­ley. I've never underestimated him, but I'm not afraid of him, either."

  "Damn it, Rafe, you used to be smarter than this!" Bruno all but shouted. "Greeley knows a lot about you— your early days in the House. Remember those parties he arranged? Remember the trouble you had... ?" Bruno flicked a hard look at Cady, then shrugged.

  Cady could feel Rafe standing rigidly at her side. She flashed a quick glance at him, seeing the red staining his neck and crawling up his cheeks. His face looked hewn from granite. She cleared her throat. "If you're referring to the party at Durra when the highway patrol were called and it was discovered that the youngest congressman from the state of New York was hosting a party of call girls and other congressmen—if you're referring to the write up in The Tattler with pictures of said congressman frolicking in his father's pool with a cheesecake blonde and that both were nude—if that's what you mean, Bruno, then speak up and don't worry about me. I know most of the details." Cady sensed that Rafe had kept his eyes on her profile from the moment she began to speak. She knew he didn't see Bruno bare his teeth at her in rage.

  "All right, Cady, so you know what can be done to defeat Rafe's reelection," Bruno growled softly. "Are you going to let some bleeding hearts destroy your hus­band's future when with just a little cooperation, he could win?"

  "Shut up, Bruno, and don't try to coerce Cady. I won't allow it. If Greeley tries to heat up those old ashes, I'll leak to the press that it was Greeley himself and his boys who hired those women to descend on Durra. What do you think people will think of that sort of thing? I'll tell the world that this is the way Mr. Greeley does business. Do you think it will do Emmett's name any good to be linked to a gigantic call girl ring, with his friend Mr. Greeley as procurer?"

  "You don't know what you're taking about," Bruno snarled at the same time that Rafe moved from Cady's side toward his father's aide.

  "Don't I?" Rafe looked from Bruno to Cady, the flicker deep in those blue eyes telling he
r how painful this was for him. He grabbed Bruno's shirt front. Then, like a flash, he looked back at Cady. "How the hell do you know so much about this?"

  Cady thought her smile must make her look as if she'd sucked a lemon. "There were more than enough people on the Hill willing to tell me all about my rakish husband and his high-flying days after his first election. Most of them put it down to your being just another one of those wild Densmores—bright, but wild," Cady finished, her throat feeling tight.

  "Cady, for God's sake..." Rafe began, turning his back on Bruno.

  "And"—Cady lifted her left hand palm outward as though to forestall his words—"I also was made very aware that it was one of those parties you were heading toward when the plane crashed on the way to Durra. I can't tell you how many kind people came forward to inform me what a real good-time Charlie I had married," she concluded, sarcasm in her voice as she fought to keep the searing pain from showing.

  "Cady, I swear to you—" Rafe began hoarsely.

  "For goodness sake, don't perjure yourself, Rafe," Cady said, gulping.

  "Cady, listen to me—" he barked.

  Bruno's laugh bellowed into the room. "I guess you can't fool the missus, Rafe."

  Rafe turned and swung at the same time, his right fist catching Bruno on the point of his jaw, the crunch of bone against bone a sickening sound.

  Bruno was strong and thickset, but he reeled back against the filing cabinet, his head snapping back. "Why, you..." he rasped, putting his hands up like a street fighter, ready to come at Rafe.

  "Come on, Bruno. Do it. There's nothing I want more than to pull you apart," Rafe vowed thickly, his body curving in menace, obviously with no regard for his physical welfare.

  "Stay and fight, but let me out of here," Cady said, her voice shrill as she pushed at Rafe in an effort to get past him. "And.. .and don't you dare have a relapse from fighting," she choked.

  "Cady, don't. Wait for me. We have to talk," Rafe insisted, his attention focusing on her again.

  "No, I'm leaving. Stay away from me." Cady didn't look at Bruno again as she stumbled from the room.

  She heard the low voices and knew Rafe was saying something to Bruno, but she was too busy running to care. An elevator was standing open and she jumped into it, punching the button for the lobby.

  When she ran down the steps of the office building, a taxi was just discharging a passenger. She hailed it and told the cabbie to drive to Virginia.

  She leaned back against the upholstery of the taxi cab, pressing her fingertips into her eyes. Why had she said all that? Her mouth had let go like a ruptured dam, spilling all the bitter truths that she had hugged to herself for so long. Rafe had never known that she was aware of the details of the scandal at Durra, his father's palatial estate in the horse country of Maryland. She sighed as she remembered the atomic row they had had in the early days of their marriage when she told Rafe that she wouldn't accompany him to a lawn party his father was hosting at Durra. She had been young and too hurt by the fresh­ness of the disclosure that Stacy Lande, then a secretary in Bruno's office, had made during a benefit to aid bat­tered children that they were attending.

  "But Cady, honey, you're so naive," Stacy had said uneasily. "I was just kidding about old news. I wasn't trying to hurt you. Many big guns politico-wise were there." Stacy had become increasingly uncomfortable. It isn't so bad for you, really. You didn't even know Rafe then. Honey, I wish you wouldn't look like that. It's all water over the dam. Honestly, Cady, I never meant to hurt you."

  "It's all right," Cady had lied. "I'm not a bit hurt. Of course, I knew that Rafe was quite a lady's man." She had smiled and buried the pain.

  She realized, now that she was older, that if she had faced Rafe then with what she had discovered and they had talked about it, it might not have mushroomed in her mind. Instead she found herself looking at Rafe when he wasn't watching her, wondering what he was like with other women when she wasn't there. Then she would berate herself, telling herself that she knew Rafe had seen other women before he met her, but also that she had no reason to believe that he had ever been unfaithful to her.

  For a long time things seemed to go back on even keel between them, but then Rafe was gone for long periods of time and bitter arguments had ensued. Cady smiled ruefully when she remembered that it hadn't been other women that had sparked the tiffs but angry con­frontations when Rafe listened to his father and Bruno about not supporting nuclear regulatory legislation and enviromental protection bills. More often than not Cady found herself at odds with both Bruno and her father-in-law. Rafe resented it when she accused his father of callousness vis-a-vis the good of the state and being interested only in his own markets and those of his friends.

  Great gulfs were gouged between them. Eventually, Cady remembered, there had seemed to be no safe topic they could discuss without beginning to argue hotly. There were long periods of silence between them. Soon they began to see different cliques of people. Cady threw herself into volunteer work while still keeping abreast of the newest methods in archaeology, the life's work she would have chosen had she continued into the master's program. She grinned wryly as she remembered how, after they were married, she had enrolled at Georgetown in her original major of physics, and how Professor Feinbloom had channeled her enthusiasm toward his own field of archaeology. She had fully intended to get her master's and had begun the courses for the three years it would take her at the pace she had set herself. She had been careful to take an underload so that nothing would interfere with her duties as a senator's wife.

  After the accident, when she had taken over the duties of Rafe's office, it had been archaeology that had drawn her to Rob Ardmore, when she discovered that he had dabbled in the field himself while at the university.

  Cady looked out the window of the cab and wondered what her life with Rafe would have been like if only she had been mature enough to go to him when she was troubled. Would he have been so resentful of her attitude toward his father if he had realized how obstructive Em­mett was with her? Would he have believed her if she had told him when she first discovered that Bruno and Emmett manipulated him for their own political reasons?

  She smiled humorlessly as the cab turned into the long, curving drive that led to her house. How ironic, she thought, that the only time she ever fully commu­nicated with Rafe was when he was lying helpless in a tilted bed, unable to respond!

  She paid the cab and looked up at the facade of the Mount Vernon type house. She had always liked this house because of its spacious airiness, but all at once she longed for the quiet anonymity of their home in upstate New York. She wanted to see her father again. She wanted to feel the balm of his wisdom, his soft humor. In that moment she made up her mind. She was going home.

  With sudden intuition she knew that Rafe would try to stop her. He wouldn't like her going. He never liked that. He could go off on fact finding tours throughout the state or the world and he expected Cady to accept that, but he hated it when she left him to visit her father. The one time she had accompanied a friend to New York City to see a new musical that everyone had raved about, he had muttered into his soup for days afterward.

  She greeted the ecstatic Doberman who raced around the house to greet her, Trock at his heels.

  "Everything straightened out, Mrs. Densmore?" Trock watched her, his face expressionless.

  "The senator is handling it, but I think he has a fight on his hands." She rubbed the silken ears of the dog as they turned toward the rose garden in unspoken agree­ment. Cady's nostrils distended as she inhaled the sweet­ness around her. The roses were dying back now but had taken on a new luster because of the cool overnight rain. The mild Virginia weather would sometimes let them bloom until November.

  "He'll beat 'em as soon as he has you riding shotgun for him, Mrs. D.," Trock said, his sandpaper voice sounding strained after disgorging so many words.

  Startled, Cady turned to look at the man, wondering if the taciturn Trock was being
sarcastic.

  "You're his good right arm, Mrs. D. Didn't you know that?"

  Cady shook her head, unable to accept what he was saying.

  "Believe it, Mrs. D." Trock coughed as though his throat was so out of condition for talking that he had to keep clearing the debris of words. "He's got nobody else but you..." He looked down at the dog, who was leaning against Cady's legs. "And of course Graf here.. .and me."

  Cady smiled at the laconic man facing her across a huge Peace rosebush that had the circumference of a good size dining room table. "Trock, the senator has a large family here in Virginia. He has cousins in Texas and Florida. He's very close to his brothers and sisters."

  "He's close to them, true, but they aren't close to him." He breathed hard. "I saw plenty at the nursing home, Mrs. D. You came to see him every day. Not the rest of them, though; they didn't come so regularly. Oh, I know they told you at the desk they came, but Mr. Emmett and Mr. Trabold actually came about once a week, a little more sometimes. The twins came a couple times a week, the sisters maybe twice a month. Then they'd sit there and spill their guts about all their trou­bles."

  Cady stared at him, aware that her mouth was agape. "You're saying that all those times when I hurried to leave so that Rafe could spend some time with family members... ? You mean they didn't visit according to the schedule? That it was all a sham? That I could have stayed as long as I wanted to?"

  "Most days, yes, ma'am, I'd say that. I wanted to say something, but I thought maybe you had set up the sched­ule yourself."

  "I didn't. Bruno Trabold insisted that Emmett and the family wanted to have their own time with Rafe, so I agreed to a schedule." Cady felt her voice choke. "You mean that many times he spent all those hours alone with no one to visit him?"

  "Yes, ma'am. That's when I got into the habit of playing chess with him. He would blink once for yes and twice for no when I moved the pieces. He was a smart cuss, even strapped to that bed."