Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  Stephanie Albright didn’t look even a bit surprised by any of it; after all, she’d been dealing with these people for some time and was intimately acquainted with what they were capable of. It was her turn to pause now.

  “A pseudonym,” she said. Finally.

  I nodded. “Chosen by someone seeking a way to expose the truth. I’m guessing that’s a very short list.”

  The first lady nodded this time.

  “Sharon Lerner?”

  “She’s been with my husband since the start of his career.”

  “She knows everything?”

  Another nod. “Along with Harlan Babb.”

  “Call Sharon Lerner, Stephanie.”

  She took the phone from a bag she’d slung over the chair and pressed a contact name. I could hear the phone ringing, the click preceding the call’s going to voice mail.

  “She’s not picking up.”

  “Can the Secret Service be trusted?”

  “Some, not all.”

  “Enough?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. “This goes that deep,” I managed.

  “As deep as that manuscript?”

  “In the manuscript, the first daughter finds a knight in shining armor who saved her life. Then they try to bring down the conspiracy together.”

  “That’s why it’s called fiction, Jessica,” Stephanie said, her eyes turning watery.

  I leaned forward in my chair. “Here’s something that’s fact: At least two members of the medical team that treated your daughter in the emergency room that night are dead.”

  Her face turned ashen, all the pigment seeming to wash away. “Murdered?”

  “A car accident and a home invasion,” I said, recalling the details Artie had later learned.

  “Murder,” the first lady said.

  “We’re trying to find the other two.”

  “Don’t waste your time. They’re dead, too. It’s how these people work.”

  “The Guardians,” I said to myself.

  “How did the book end, Jessica?” Stephanie Albright asked hesitantly, as if she was afraid of what my response might be.

  “I don’t know. Those men tried to kill me before I finished it. Then what the fire department was able to salvage of the manuscript disappeared.”

  The first lady stared at me from across the table, her eyes wide and full. “I’m sorry, Jessica.”

  “It’s not me you should be sorry for, Stephanie.”

  “The country, too, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It’s not,” I told her. “I meant your daughter. I meant Kristen. From this point, everything we do is about her, about what the Guardians did to her.”

  “The Guardians?”

  “What the people behind everything are called in the manuscript,” I told her, the lines between fiction and reality becoming increasingly blurred.

  Her eyes were looking past me now, past the wall, past Georgetown. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who let this happen. I knew what we were getting into and I ended up getting my own daughter killed.”

  I reached across the table and grasped the forearm the first lady had laid there. “Loading the gun doesn’t mean you pulled the trigger. We’ll get the people who did. I promise. We’re going to get them.”

  “Did you hear what I just said about them, about what they’ve done, what they’re capable of doing?”

  “I heard, and now I want you to hear me. The manuscript changed everything. It’s not just you and the president anymore and it’s not just me who’s picked up their trail. Three different police departments are investigating, including the NYPD with a direct link to Homeland Security. I have a friend in town who’s waiting for my call now,” I continued. “I trust him completely and there are plenty of people he can trust outside of all of this we can enlist immediately.”

  “Not based on the contents of a manuscript alone,” the first lady said reflectively.

  “No,” I conceded. “It would take considerably more than that.”

  “As in me.”

  “And your husband.”

  Her expression grew pleading. “You need to come back to the White House, Jessica. You need to lay this all out for the president, the same way you did for me. It’s our only hope.”

  “Where’s the president now?”

  “Either the Oval Office or the residence. We don’t have anything formal on the schedule for this evening.”

  “What about Harlan Babb?” I asked, referring to the president’s chief of staff, the man who’d set all this in motion.

  My mind was racing, similar to the way it did when I neared the end of one of my books. The nervous excitement over surmounting the last hump and heading into the home stretch. Finally having a clear idea of how I was going to wrap everything up.

  “I’m not sure,” Stephanie answered.

  “Can we distract him, get him out of the White House if he’s there, so you and I can be alone with your husband?”

  Stephanie started to nod, then stopped. “I think so. Assuming I can, will you do it? Will you come to the White House? Will you help me put an end to this madness?”

  I nodded. “Just tell me when.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  9:00. Come to the back gate. You’ll be escorted to the Oval Office. We’ll be waiting for you.

  My cab approached the White House grounds one hour after I’d received that text from Stephanie Albright, after battling traffic awful even by Washington standards at this time of night. But it gave me time to collect my thoughts yet again, some of which continued to plague me.

  Like what had suddenly struck me in Alma Desjardins’s office about what was missing from the president’s desk, the entire Oval Office, in fact.

  When I finish a book, or think I have, it’s often with the realization that something is still missing. Giving the book a fresh read, or just setting it aside for a brief time, is normally all it takes for the missing piece to reveal itself, usually in the form of a duplicitous character or a twist that’s set up but not acted upon. That was how I felt right now about this very real, and tragic, story.

  Kristen Albright never should have died, didn’t deserve to be murdered. But there were greater factors afoot that had grown and multiplied in all the years since. The first lady and the president would pay a steep price for their complicity in her death and their acquiescence to the powerful force that had corrupted them. They would be judged, ultimately, in the court of public opinion. I wasn’t sure there was a way for Robert Albright to both save his presidency and expose the monsters who had sought to subvert democracy. And I was prepared to make the best case for the latter with him, rehashing all the additional murders somehow made necessary by the existence of The Affair.

  The cab dropped me at the Visitors Entrance to the White House just before nine o’clock. My name was indeed on the evening admittance list, and a pair of uniformed Secret Service agents took me to the post of two marines who brought me inside the building and escorted me down the hall toward the Oval Office, where a suited Secret Service agent cracked open the door for me.

  Almost there, I took the phone from my bag and was turning it to silent when I received an incoming text message from Artie. I entered the Oval Office, the door closing behind me as I read the message:

  Harlan Babb was found dead. Murdered. Artie

  I looked up to see the president rising from behind his desk, not smiling as he was when I’d been there yesterday. The first lady rose from the same chair I’d occupied then; she was joined by a second figure in the adjacent chair: Sharon Lerner.

  Neither of them was smiling, either.

  “Sit down, Jessica,” said Stephanie Albright.

  “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”

 
“Suit yourself.”

  “Guess I had things wrong, didn’t I?” I said to the first lady.

  “You should’ve stuck to writing mysteries,” she told me, “not living them.”

  “That’s quite a statement. Did you ever consider writing a book?”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  “Not at all,” I told her. “It would make some story. A couple sacrifices their own daughter to attain the power they crave. Forget House of Cards; this is a castle of them.”

  “You have a way with words, too,” Sharon Lerner said.

  I was hearing her voice for the first time. How I’d let myself be manipulated, accepting Stephanie Albright’s word that the late Harlan Babb had been responsible for orchestrating all this.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” I challenged.

  “I was only the initial messenger,” Lerner said matter-of- factly.

  “And watchdog, right? Keeping an eye out for whoever’s pulling the strings and, I imagine, running the country.”

  “I’m running the country,” the president said stiffly.

  “Really? And were you the one who ordered all these murders to protect a secret an unpublished manuscript came too close to?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you’re not really running the country, are you, Mr. President?”

  “We’re not the monsters you think we are,” Stephanie said, her tone even more matter-of-fact than Sharon Lerner’s.

  “No? How many more people have to die before I can think that?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I hate when people say that, Madam First Lady. But you’re right—I don’t understand. I don’t understand how any of you could have learned that The Affair even existed, never mind how close it came to the actual truth behind this administration.”

  I caught the first lady exchanging a furtive glance with the president, a realization striking me with a force that sent literal shivers up my spine.

  “Wait,” I resumed, “you’ve read the manuscript, haven’t you? But how, how did you get your hands on a copy?”

  She exchanged another glance with her husband, not as furtive this time. I was the final hole to be filled in, which explained why I’d been lured to the White House.

  So I could join Thomas Rudd, Lane Barfield, A. J. Falcone, Alicia Bond, and probably Zara Larson, too.

  Stephanie Albright was shaking her head. “You’ve got things wrong, but you’re too stubborn to realize that.”

  “Really?”

  “The great Jessica Fletcher unable to see something that was right in front of her all along,” Stephanie said, turning to look at her husband.

  I looked again at the famous Resolute desk, presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880, built from English oak timbers salvaged from the British exploration ship HMS Resolute, and saw what I’d realized I’d missed from Alma Desjardins’s office.

  Because it wasn’t there to see.

  Pictures: pictures of Kristen Albright that, by all rights, should have been in framed evidence. A parent holding fast to the memory of his departed daughter.

  Unless she wasn’t dead, I thought in that moment. Unless she hadn’t been murdered at all.

  She didn’t die of a drug overdose, the text that must’ve come from Harlan Babb read.

  Not because Kristen Albright had been murdered, but because she hadn’t died at all.

  “Did she run away or did you throw your teenage daughter out because she didn’t fit into your plans?” I heard myself ask the president and first lady, the pieces falling together.

  It all made sense now, why The Affair was so dangerous to the president and those behind his election and his presidency. In true roman à clef fashion, first daughter Abby had run away, too. Kristen Albright had just done so before her father was elected president, instead of after.

  “We’re not evil,” Stephanie insisted. “We took advantage of a terrible situation.”

  I just shook my head. “Because a runaway child would have doomed the master plan, right? So you concocted the whole thing. Invented a drug overdose to enlist the sympathy factor and make Robert Albright the kind of impassioned figure people would welcome into their living rooms, because he was one of them. It would be brilliant, if it wasn’t so horrible.”

  “It can be both,” the president of the United States said.

  “We were opportunists; that’s all,” the first lady said in their defense.

  “On top of being awful parents, apparently. Instead of doing everything you could to get your daughter to come home, you must’ve done everything you could to make sure she never came back. What would have happened then, Madam First Lady? How far would you have gone to keep your secret safe? Maybe the people behind all this would have arranged for her to be killed. Maybe you would’ve gone along with that.”

  Stephanie cringed at that but didn’t bother trying to deny it.

  “Do you even know where she is?” I continued, unable to disguise the harshness in my voice. “Did you ever try to find her?”

  “I’m sorry, Jessica,” she said, no longer cringing. “I truly am.”

  “No, you’re not. It’s not possible for someone willing to do what you’ve already done to be sorry for anything.” I looked toward Sharon Lerner, who’d remained sitting, so still she seemed painted onto the scene, her eyes unblinking as they remained fixed on me. “Who are you?”

  “Do I need to introduce myself again?”

  “I’m not talking about your name. I’m talking about who you work for, who’s behind all this. Did someone behind the scenes finally manage to take over the government? Some kind of silent coup with a puppet as president?”

  The Guardians, I recalled from the manuscript, again coming frighteningly close to the truth. The murders all made a twisted degree of sense now, why all the people who knew the content of The Affair needed to die to keep the secret of who was really running the country.

  Thomas Rudd, Lane Barfield, A. J. Falcone, Alicia Bond, Zara Larson . . .

  I conjured their names to remind myself how close I’d come to following them. But I didn’t intend to follow them now.

  Stephanie Albright shook her head, grinning as if she found this whole scenario playing itself out humorous. “Jessica Fletcher, ever so trusting. So trusting you came alone.”

  “I came alone,” I told her, “but I’m not as trusting as you think. That talk we had in Compass Coffee a few hours ago? My phone was on the whole time, our conversation heard by that New York police lieutenant I told you about. Oh, and did I forget to mention he’s also the NYPD’s Homeland Security liaison? I imagine they’re outside the grounds now.”

  “Waiting for your signal—is that it?” the first lady asked.

  She tried not to sound riled, but her tone betrayed her.

  “No need,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere, and my friend knows everything I do, except the fact that your daughter didn’t actually die.”

  I aimed that statement not at the first lady, but at the president. He didn’t respond, remaining impassive, like a child’s toy whose batteries were wearing out. Then my eyes fell on Sharon Lerner, looking at me smugly, not concerned at all by the sudden turn of the tables.

  “You knew all this already,” I said, speaking the words as I thought them. “You already knew about my friend and you know Homeland Security is here or on their way.”

  “On their way,” Sharon Lerner said, her voice sounding hushed. “But this will be over before they get here.”

  The coldness of her voice, coupled with the intent of her words, sent a flutter through my stomach. “What’s it going to be?” I asked her, my anger trumping my fear for the time being. “An accident on White House grounds? A heart attack maybe? A manufactured mugging attack that kept me from g
etting here at all?”

  Lerner smirked.

  I turned toward the first lady, rotating my gaze between her and the president. “How’d you get the manuscript that set all this off? Who sent it to you?”

  It was the vital remaining unanswered question, the part of this that made no sense.

  “It doesn’t matter, Jessica,” Stephanie Albright managed, not sounding very convincing at all.

  I seized on the hesitation, the doubt, in her voice. “You know how this ends, don’t you? Because I’m not really the last one alive who knows the truth: You and your husband are. And how long will it be exactly before you become liabilities instead of assets to whoever’s really behind this?”

  The Guardians, I thought, recalling the puppeteers from The Affair. Whatever Sharon Lerner was a part of must have been very much like them.

  “You get it, don’t you?” I said insistently to the president and first lady. “You’ve outlived your usefulness. You’re the final two who have to die because of the manuscript—not because you read it; because you lived it.” My gaze found Lerner again. “Please don’t tell me I’m going to be the fall guy. Please don’t tell me you expect the world to believe I came here and murdered the president and first lady. I’ve never even fired a gun in my life and everyone knows it.”

  “You mean like this one?” Sharon Lerner said, a semiautomatic pistol gleaming in her grasp, aimed somewhere between the three of us, as she rose from her chair. “Too bad you won’t be able to base a book on this, Mrs. Fletcher. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Base your books on real-life investigations.”

  “Looks like the opposite was the case this time, only it was somebody else’s book. But the ending hasn’t been written yet, has it? How do you intend to do away with the only two people left who can expose you besides me?” I said, rotating my gaze between Robert and Stephanie Albright. “What’s the plan? A terrorist attack? A bombing that kills the first family in the residence? No, don’t tell me—that would spoil the suspense. But the president and first lady have to die. That’s the only way this can end. I’m not the only one who won’t be leaving the White House alive, am I?”