5
They trampled the petunias.
Thaddeus Roush had known his actions would attract a certain degree of attention. No, he had known he would set off a firestorm. But it hadn’t really sunk in—it hadn’t seemed real—until he found a platoon of reporters buzzing around his house like ants in an ant farm, shouting for him to smile or toss them a quote, as if he were a trained seal performing for their damned minicams. Yesterday he was an unknown; today, they all wanted a piece of him.
The grass was ruined, positively ruined. And the petunias were destroyed.
Ray’s petunias.
Roush sat in his library, one hand pressed against his forehead, the other clutching a Scotch-and-soda that he had not even sipped. Never in forty-seven years had he experienced a day like this one. Up before dawn for a meeting with the President, who behind the closed doors of the White House asked all the questions he was not supposed to ask. Abortion. Gun control. Even gay rights. And Roush hadn’t lied, either. He didn’t for a minute believe the framers of the Constitution intended to provide any rights to homosexuals, penumbral or otherwise. Such a thing would have been unheard of at that time. Any rights of that nature had to come from the legislature, not from the Constitution—and certainly not from the Supreme Court. And so President Blake, confident that the forty-seven-year-old bachelor posed no overt risks, had led him to the Rose Garden and publicly bestowed ringing praise about his judicial acumen, even though Roush was quite certain the President had never read any of his opinions and never would.
Then Roush sandbagged him. He dropped his little surprise in full view of the nation, the tiny revelation that changed everything.
Even as he had approached the podium, he wasn’t sure he would be able to do it. He’d known he should; it was a matter of conscience. As he’d said, he would not live a lie, not once he became a public figure. Furthermore, by coming out as he did, he could make a stand for tolerance in the political arena that could benefit thousands, perhaps even millions, of Americans.
But only at a cost. Yes, he’d known he should do it. Yet in the final seconds leading to the utterance of the speech, he was not certain that he would. Did he have the courage, not only to look the unblinking camera in the eye and tell it who he really is, but also to face the subsequent consequences? The painful price of honesty?
The questioning following his announcement had been extremely awkward and was soon curtailed by the POTUS staff, who treated him as if he had sold nuclear secrets to a hostile nation. The President himself disappeared, probably never to be seen by Thaddeus Roush again. Blake’s chief of staff harangued him for the better part of an hour, saying Roush had abused their trust to forward his personal agenda. And perhaps she was right. Who could say? Roush never felt as if he were advancing an agenda; he was a judge, not an advocate. But he did have a core instinct for the difference between right and wrong. Hiding would have been wrong.
Although he had used the phrase in his speech, he never saw what he had done as “coming out of the closet.” He’d never considered himself in the closet. His sexual preference wasn’t a secret; it was simply something he never talked about. Heterosexual judges never talked about their sex lives; why should he? He knew many of his friends suspected the truth; for that matter, he knew that the President’s investigators who had been burrowing into his life for the past two weeks suspected it. So long as it wasn’t out in the open, it wasn’t an issue, not even for the farthest of the far right. But he had brought it into the open. He had changed everything.
When the White House had finally released him and he came home, Ray was waiting for him. They stared at each other for the longest, most excruciating time. But neither spoke.
Should he have told Ray what he planned to do? Of course he should have. It seemed so obvious now. By outing himself, he had outed his lover as well. Ray should have had some say in that. Chalk it up to Roush’s muddled state of mind. He was running on instinct, blind instinct, more impulsive than compulsive, more feeling than planning. Ray had always been adamant about remaining apart from Roush’s political and judicial work—in part because he wasn’t really interested, and in part because he was a fiercely left-wing liberal.
Roush wondered what the press would do with that, allowing himself a tiny smile. Strike Two for the President’s investigators—they hadn’t discovered that, either.
And Strike Three was the Big Secret. The major-league blot that the investigators had missed altogether. The hidden piece of his past that made his homosexuality utterly unimportant by comparison.
Surely that was too long ago, too far in the past.
Who was he kidding? If he had learned anything from his brief foray into politics, it was this: There’s no such thing as too long ago.
He should have told the President about that secret. Or at the least, declined the nomination for unspecified reasons. But how could he pass up such a momentous opportunity? The crowning achievement of his career—an intellectual feast! It would take a stronger man than he to say no to the Supreme Court, even though he knew that if the truth were ever revealed…
But he was worrying himself unnecessarily. Why should it ever be revealed? No one had discovered the truth in the past. None of the investigators associated with any of his previous appointments had so much as sniffed the scent of the truth. There was no reason to believe anyone ever would. It was long ago and far away, water under the bridge. It had been a mistake, but we all make mistakes, and Roush was entitled to move on. No one could stop him…
Or so he had believed. So he had tried to tell himself until he saw the phone message, the single pink slip in a massive pile of pink slips that actually mattered. It seemed there was another downside to being the subject of the latest media blitz.
The past can find you. Ghosts can return to their old haunts.
Enough. He would need rest if he were going to face the onslaught of the new day. Senator Hammond was bringing over a junket of potential friends. Sadly enough, having been virtually abandoned by his own party, he was forced to look across the aisle to the Democrats for support. That would give Ray a good deal of pleasure.
He needed to be in top form. Since his previous press conference had been abruptly curtailed, he would have to answer more questions from the press. He would be expected to tell them whether he would bow to the call from dozens of right-wing organizations to step down.
And he would have to try to find some way to reconcile with Ray, some way to atone for what he’d done.
He would have to deal with the consequences of revealing his secret, while simultaneously praying that the Big Secret never came to light. He could survive being labeled a traitor, a liar, even a faggot. But no one was likely to lend their support to a murderer.
6
Ben had never before visited Montgomery County, Maryland, a well-heeled suburb outside D.C. He didn’t much care for it; it didn’t seem so much like a real town as it did an overgrown, overpriced housing development—or several housing developments absorbing one another like a multicelled bacterium to create the semblance of a community. Prefab cottages and sprawling McMansions stretched as far as the eye could see, huge spreads located far enough away from the urban centers that they remained affordable to the upper middle class in a way that anything older or closer would never be. There were neighborhoods like this back in Tulsa, Ben knew, especially as you moved south of midtown, where more square footage could be obtained for less. The distance from the notoriously high crime districts of D.C. probably worked in the neighborhood’s favor, too. Still, he didn’t like it. There was something creepy and artificial about it. Like a Stepford town. An overgrown theme park. Not a real city.