by Aviva Gat
Madeline shrugged. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying we need more information about this photo so we can develop new leads. There are a few scenarios of how this photo could have been taken. Since it is taken from above, it is a little more complex. Often, when nude photos appear online they are from someone’s phone or computer being hacked. Someone hacks the device, controls the camera, films or takes a picture, then erases the evidence from the device, OK? That’s a typical scenario we see. These photos are often taken from strange angles, catching people in mirrors, or having parts of the picture covered by something else in the room. This picture is from above, making it look like someone planned on taking the picture, either by holding a phone or device above you, or by sticking a camera on the ceiling. So I ask again, is there anyone who could have taken a picture of you like this?”
“No!” Madeline responded, her annoyance simmering into anger.
“Because if there is, that’s a lead, a hot lead,” the agent said. “It could be the person who took the photo, or someone who has access to their phone or photo storage.”
“Listen,” Madeline said. “I am a US Senator and I have been living my life knowing that I am going into politics and that I plan to go far. From when I was young, I knew this was my path. That means that I have constantly thought about ensuring there are no skeletons in my closet. You will not find any pictures of me drinking, underage or not, in college. No one can honestly tell you I cut corners somewhere or took advantage of them. I never smoked, did anything illegal, and I certainly would never have naked pictures taken of me, by my husband or anyone else. That would be careless and detrimental to my life goals, you understand?”
“So you’re saying this picture was taken without your knowledge?” Agent Murray responded. “That’s the other option.”
“If it’s a fact that it wasn’t photoshopped then I guess that must be the case,” Madeline said.
“And you don’t recognize it?”
“No, I don’t recognize how I look in this picture. I can’t remember every set of sheets I’ve slept on in the last eight years, since this was obviously taken after Adam was born. I can’t remember every sexual experience I’ve had in that time either.”
“Every sexual experience with Brandon,” the agent questioned.
“With Brandon,” Madeline confirmed. The conversation was starting to feel like an interrogation to Madeline. As though this blackmail was somehow her fault or that she had in some way put herself in this position. It was time for Madeline to turn this conversation around, put blame where it belonged. “Agent Murray, from this conversation and our previous ones, I understand that you and your team have made absolutely no progress in this investigation. I am not saying you’re incompetent, since I am sure you have solved many cases prior to this—”
“Mrs. Thomas—” the agent cut in. But Madeline did not let him speak.
“But I’m beginning to lose confidence. It’s been weeks now and it seems like I am your only suspect. I’m not sure what you suspect me of, but I haven’t heard you accusing anyone but me. If necessary, I’m ready to speak with your superiors and see if another team could more adequately handle this situation.”
“Ma’am—”
Again, Madeline did not let the agent speak. “As you know, my reelection campaign launch is fast approaching. That is when the perpetrator wants to release this information to the media, I shouldn’t need to remind you of that. This needs to be resolved by then. There are no reasons it shouldn’t be, even if we need to get a new team involved.”
“Ma’am, we are doing the best we can,” Agent Murray responded, this time without being cut off. “It may seem like little progress to you, but we’ve ruled out a lot of possibilities and have narrowed down the long list of potential leads that you provided us. In our work, checking suspects or possibilities off the list is significant. It takes a lot of legwork, interviews and analysis that our team has been conducting furiously over the last few weeks. In fact, we’ve been working so hard that we’re pretty sure there is something big we are missing here and that’s why I’m back, asking you these questions. As someone who has been doing this for twenty years, I know when there is something that someone is not saying. I know when a case follows the regular trajectory and when something is off. In this case, something is off. Someone is lying, some big piece is missing.”
“And I assume it is your job to figure out who that is or what’s missing, correct? Agent?” Madeline responded, again ensuring blame was placed where it belonged.
The agent sighed. “Correct.”
“I think you are focusing on the wrong thing,” Madeline said, now leading the conversation. “You came in here accusing me of something because of this picture. But your focus is wrong. The focus is not why I was naked on a bed, the focus is who is using this to blackmail me.”
“It’s connected.”
“Of course, but we’ve established that I don’t allow naked pictures of myself. We’ve established that I am a married woman who likely has a sexual relationship with her husband. So you need to focus on who is blackmailing me.” Madeline paused as her words sunk in. “So what are the next steps?”
The agent’s tone changed. It now had less confidence and a slight hint of defeat. “I’m going to speak with Brandon after this conversation. I want to confirm his story and see if anything else has come up for him.”
“Well it seems like you have a lot to do, so you might as well get to it,” Madeline said, ending this inquisition. The agent raised his eyebrows and stood up from his chair, closing his notebook, which he still had not written on. As he left the office, he hesitated slightly at the door as though there was something else he wanted to say, but he remained silent. He left, but his presence still very much seemed to hover in the doorway.
Madeline sat quietly at her desk for a moment as she contemplated what she should do. She was beginning to get an itch inside her that she couldn’t scratch away. As her confidence in the FBI agents continued to dwindle, she saw her options bright and clear in front of her eyes. What would happen if this scandal came out? What would happen if her name and naked picture were all over the media? If it came to that, it was only a matter of time before collateral damage began to fall. The itch inside her told her what she needed to do. She needed to make a phone call. She needed to call someone that she hadn’t talked to in a very long time, someone she didn’t think she would ever talk to again. Someone that she probably shouldn’t talk to ever again, but at this point she wasn’t sure what else to do.
Chapter 15
“Hunter Williams, how can I help you?”
“Hunter, it’s Madeline.” Madeline felt as though she were holding her breath as she said it, barely letting out the air needed for the sounds to come out.
“Maddy?”
“Hi.”
“You make your own phone calls these days? You don’t have a secretary or publicist to do it for you?”
“Hunter, please.”
“What’s going on? What brings me the honor of hearing from you today?”
“We need to talk.” Madeline tried not to make her tone sound too dire.
“You know, that’s convenient, because that’s what these telephone things are for. You know the device you’re probably holding to your ear right now, it’s great for talking.” Madeline wasn’t sure if Hunter was trying to joke with her or if his sarcasm came from something more sinister. She decided to respond as though he were joking.
“Oh, really? You know I could never figure out what these things were for,” she said lightly. “I’m so glad I called you so you could tell me.”
“That’s what I am here for, Maddy,” Hunter responded. “You know I’ll always tell you what you need to know.”
“I know,” she responded, the whimsical tone fading away. “I’m going to be in New York next week. Can we meet?”
Hunter hesitated. “I’m not sure that is a good idea.”
> “Why? What’s the problem?”
Again Hunter was quiet, as though carefully choosing his words. “Because…” But then his tone shifted as though something had changed his mind. “Sure, just have your secretary or chief of staff or whatever you got these days call mine,” he said. “It’s this same number, I’ll pretend I work for Hunter Williams and will look for a slot in my boss’s busy schedule to fit you in.”
“No secretaries,” Madeline said. “Just tell me when I can come to your office.”
“Aren’t you worried of what people would say? A Republican Senator from California coming to the office of a Democratic city council member from Harlem?”
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal, Hunter. We just need to talk. Besides if anyone asks, you’re the city councilman responsible for my alma mater. It’s not weird.”
“OK, well, I’m usually in my city council office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come whenever you want.”
“I’ll see you on Tuesday morning,” she responded before hanging up the phone.
A gush of memories flooded over her as she sat, still hearing Hunter’s voice in her ear. Hearing him speak made her feel like she was being crushed, crushed by the emotions, the regrets and the decisions she’d made in her life. She believed she had made the right decisions for herself, the right decisions for someone of her ambitions, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a lingering feeling of ‘what if.’ What if things were different? What if she had chosen differently? What if she hadn’t been forced to choose between her life ambitions and young love? She could spend all day thinking of the what-ifs, but she knew that if she had to do it all again, she would make the same decisions, no matter how hard they were.
Madeline first met Hunter when she was a senior at Columbia University. She was on her way home after a long night of studying in the library. In fact, the night had been so long that it was already dawn when she arrived at her old brownstone on the edge of campus. Her parents had hated that she refused to live in the dorms. Instead, she and a girlfriend rented a small two-bedroom together two blocks away from their prestigious university. But while it was only a seven-minute walk to campus, it was a world away. It was Harlem, the neighborhood where young Caucasian females were told not to walk by themselves late at night. But Madeline saw it differently. To her, it was the neighborhood where jazz wafted out of the basement club on her corner and the smell of frying oil greeted her from the street vendor who sold hotdogs near her stoop. She never felt afraid when walking in her neighborhood. How could she be, when her neighbors were so friendly? There was Tom, the elderly retired man who often spent days sitting on a crate watching the sidewalk and smoking his pipe. There were also Dayvon and Daya, the children who lived with their single mother in the apartment under Madeline’s. The kids were often sitting on the stoop outside the apartment building playing with sticks, cardboard or anything else that could be considered a toy. On hot days, Madeline would sometimes take them to the corner market to eat popsicles. Madeline loved her neighborhood and her brownstone there that had a small garden in front. Someone who didn’t live in New York City wouldn’t have considered it a garden. They would have considered it a small patch of dirt the size of a ping-pong table with a few shrubs and weeds somehow thriving without any water and rare sunlight that shone through when it wasn’t being blocked by the surrounding buildings. When Madeline first met Hunter that early morning, just after dawn, he was planting flowers in that garden.
“Well this is certainly an upgrade,” Madeline commented to him. He was wearing a dirty ripped T-shirt that said Smith and Sons Landscaping on the back.
“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in,” he responded. Madeline instantly recognized the quote. She had just seen the play recently and had also been struck by that line in Les Misérables.
“One definitely needs immensity to dream in when calling this a garden,” she said about their little patch of dirt. She was struck that her landlord would have a landscaper come to beautify the dirt patch. This was the same landlord who had taken months to fix her air conditioning, suggesting she sleep with bags of ice in her bed while she waited for his technician to be available, and refused to put in a new lock on the brownstone’s front door after someone jammed it. “Is Smith and Sons Landscaping doing some volunteering in beautifying the neighborhood?”
“Doing it as a favor to my uncle, your landlord, I guess,” Hunter said. “Hope it makes you smile when you come and go.” Madeline blushed and smiled at him, noticing his strong arms, short curly hair and deep dark skin. Then she went into the brownstone, walked up the three flights of stairs and went to sleep.
The next time she saw Hunter, she was in a friend’s dorm room at school. It was a Saturday evening and they had just ordered delivery from P’s Diner, the place with the best burgers in all of Manhattan if you asked any Columbia student. When the doorbell rang, there was Hunter in a P’s Diner t-shirt standing with a brown bag that had grease stains soaking through the bottom corners.
“Jean Valjean,” Madeline said, calling him the lead character in the play he had quoted at their last meeting. “What are you doing here?”
“Delivering burgers,” he said with a smile. Madeline wasn’t sure if he recognized her, she was focused on his white teeth surrounded by his thick lips.
“Landscaper by day, food delivery man by night,” Madeline commented as she took the burgers from him and handed him the money. She was suddenly self-conscious about the tip she and her friends had contributed for their dinner. Did it make her look like some cheap, privileged, college student?
“I try to be well-rounded,” Hunter responded. “That’s what you call it, right?”
Again, Madeline blushed and thanked him, as she closed the door and brought the burgers to her friends. For the next few weeks, Madeline ordered burgers whenever her college budget would allow it, but sadly, P’s Diner apparently had multiple deliverymen and Hunter hadn’t been the one to bring her orders.
The next time she saw him, she was sitting on the stairs outside of her apartment. Her lock was jammed and her key got stuck inside, leaving her locked outside of her apartment. She called her landlord, who as usual, was angry for the disturbance and had to be strong armed into helping. After a heated conversation, he promised he’d get a locksmith over to her soon. She needed to study, but her books were inside. Every minute wasted could be docking her grades that semester. She’d been waiting for more than two hours when Hunter showed up.
“Don’t tell me you’re a locksmith,” Madeline said when she saw him.
“I’m not,” he responded. “But I’m good with my hands and my uncle asked a favor. No guarantees I can fix the issue.”
“Well that’s promising,” Madeline said with fake annoyance. Being stuck outside her apartment wasn’t as frustrating anymore now that Hunter was there. Hunter fiddled with the lock, tried pulling out the key and even tried breaking into the apartment, but all attempts failed.
“I think you need a real locksmith,” he said after thirty minutes of effort seemed to make the door even more stuck. “I have a friend I can call.”
Madeline sighed deeply as she thought about more hours of waiting for Hunter’s friend to come. Hunter called his friend who promised to come soon, and then he looked at Madeline. She must have looked like a pathetic Ivy League princess, sitting there with her backpack and books that she had just gotten from the library.
“Do you want to get something to eat while we wait?” Hunter asked. “Anything but burgers.”
Of course she wanted to get something to eat. She gathered her backpack and her books, which Hunter offered to carry for her and he looked silly doing it, and the two of them walked a few blocks to a small deli that Hunter recommended. “The best chicken and waffles,” he promised and he was right. The chicken was just the right amount of salty and crispy and the waffles were thick, fluffy and soaked up the maple syrup they slathered on top.
While they ate, Hunter as
ked her about the books she was carrying – The Clash of Civilizations for her International Relations course, an anthropology textbook (for one of her general education requirements which she had put off in previous terms and absolutely hated), and a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (reading materials not prescribed by any professor).
“This book is an insult to our society,” Hunter had said about the last one, holding up the beat-up paperback. Afraid that Hunter would judge her, she said it was for a class she was taking on capitalism and literature and she quickly threw the book back in her bag. She would never mention to him that she found the story fascinating and honestly believed that society could be making its way towards the downtrodden dystopia described in the novel. It would be years before she would tell anyone outside of her Republican circle about her love of the book.
Hunter said he always thought anthropology would be fascinating and Madeline joked that maybe with a different professor it would be, but truthfully she thought the subject was as dull as the professors who studied it. Madeline didn’t want to talk about her classes—she thought about them enough already—but Hunter was interested in her thoughts on what she was learning. Oddly, Madeline had never thought about her courses in that way, she had only thought about them in the ways required to pass an exam or write a perfect paper. The conversation made her even more intrigued by Hunter, who seemed to defy everything a stranger might think of a tall, African American man who worked in landscaping, food delivery, and was handy enough with his hands that someone might think he could also perform the job of a locksmith.
By the time they finished, Hunter’s friend was already waiting for them at the brownstone, annoyed that Hunter wasn’t there when he arrived. He fixed the lock, letting Madeline into her apartment and leaving her with a feeling of disappointment that Hunter would also probably now leave.