“Well, uh, bring him in.” But he sounded doubtful. He was obviously recalling our last meeting.
I’d never encountered this before, a district office that disliked — hell, despised — the congresswoman it represented. Apparently Peter and Mandy did their jobs well, tending to the various constituent services that the voters needed. And with an economy sinking lower every day, they had to be busier than ever. I wondered if they secretly drew mustaches on Susan’s photographs after they closed up shop for the day.
“You can go in.”
“Thank you, Mandy.”
Her face wrinkled. She turned away. As I walked toward Peter’s office, I saw the room where constituents filled out forms for help. The table sat twelve, six per side. All the seats were taken and half a dozen more people were standing around a coffeepot waiting for their turn to sit down. There would be a lot of heartbreak in that room.
Peter wore a gray suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie. With his sleek dark hair and bland smile he looked like every successful male senatorial staffer in Washington, D.C.
“I’ll bet you’re having a busy day,” he said. He couldn’t quite keep the sound of pleasure from his tone. He might be witnessing the downfall of his stepsister.
“Yep.” I closed the door and walked over to one of the chairs in front of his desk. Photographs of major state pols from a generation ago, the men who would have helped him fulfill his dreams if only he’d had the guts and savvy to help himself. In the wide window behind him a 747 was just getting speed, elegant against the flat perfect blue of the sky.
“I’ll do all I can.”
“I’ll bet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I’d been thinking about the newspaper story and all the inside information the reporter had gotten from somebody close to the campaign. What about a stepbrother who was jealous of his stepsister? “Somebody talked to that reporter. Somebody who knows the campaign. Otherwise that story would never have been written.”
He’d been slouching. Now he sat up straight. He had Natalie’s eyes. He could never match her scorn. He merely looked petulant.
He gritted his teeth and sighed. “Did Susan and Ben send you here to accuse me? They can shove this up their ass. I really resent this. I can’t believe that my mother sanctioned this — you coming here.”
“Things have moved way beyond what your mother sanctioned or didn’t sanction, Peter.”
“This is total bullshit.”
But everything — the body language, the anxiety in the gaze, the too-loud voice — told me he was lying.
I gave him my best lizard smile. “I talked to the reporter, Peter. I also offered him five hundred dollars to tell me who’d ratted out the campaign. He told me it was you.” Lies can come in damned handy sometimes. He went back into his slump. He sulked. He waved a hand to dismiss me.
“I don’t have to talk to you. I don’t have to talk to anybody.”
“Mommy’s not going to be very happy when I tell her what you did. She’s put an awful lot of money into this campaign,” I said.
“You just get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back.”
“Mandy’s going to stop me, is she? Between Mandy and Mommy, you’re pretty well protected, aren’t you, son?”
At the door I said, “You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?”
Fortunately for both of us, Mandy wasn’t in the reception area when I left.
Chapter 18
The press conference started promptly at three-twenty. Eighteen reporters filed into campaign headquarters and assembled in front of a rostrum we’d brought in. A good share of the office space used by the volunteers had been cleared to make more room for the press and a table had been set up with coffee and cookies. Staffers stood at the back, looking as if they’d been invaded and were just waiting for the jackboots to come back and kill them.
Susan arrived a few minutes after I did. I’d spent the earlier part of the afternoon working on our other two campaigns. Things were still going well for us, but there were problems my field people wanted me to work through with them. I spent half an hour in the gym. By the time of the press conference I’d cut my anxiety in half. I was stoned on some inexplicable form of optimism. Susan was not only going to do well, she was going to triumph.
In the staff office, she clutched my hand and said, “Wish me well.”
I kissed her on the cheek. “You’ll be fine, Susan. All you’re going to do is tell the truth. You don’t have anything to hide. That’s all you need to remember. There’s no reason to be on the defensive at all. And you’ve written a really fine statement to read.”
She knew how to write and the words would be more meaningful if they were hers, rather than something contrived for her. I’d read them and they were good, strong, and honest. She’d dressed carefully, too. Her black pants suit was softened by a single strand of pearls. The burgundy blouse complemented her skin tone and the blonde chignon she had carefully fashioned. The look was efficient but still warm.
By the time we worked our way up front, the press was in place. There was the usual rumbling about deadlines and when the hell was this thing going to start, anyway. Ben and Kristin pacified them by pointing out that we were actually starting ten minutes earlier than we’d promised.
“Good afternoon,” Susan said after stepping up to the microphone. By now there was a small bank of microphones from various TV and radio stations mounted on the rostrum. She’d always been comfortable with the press. “Thank you for coming here on such short notice. I know there is a story about me you’d like clarified, so I’ll try to do that without keeping you too long. I know you’re in a hurry to get your stories filed.”
She glanced at me and then said, “And I’ll take questions after my statement.”
And so the beast set to feeding. Recorders were turned on, cameras focused, old-fashioned reporters’ notebooks scribbled on as she began to read her statement.
“Twenty years ago I was a very different person than I am today. I was just out of college and living pretty selfishly. When I look back I’m not very fond of the young woman I was. One day I learned that I was pregnant. The man I was with wanted me to abort the child, and I have to admit that that was my first inclination, too. But something stopped me. I’d never really thought about abortion in a personal way. I was all in favor of a woman’s right to choose — as I am today. But somehow it wasn’t right for me. The father of my child and I went our separate ways. I had the child. But over the course of the next month I realized that I had too many personal problems to be a decent mother for my son. Maybe I was just being selfish; maybe I just didn’t want the boy to interfere with my lifestyle. I took him to some nuns I knew at a convent near where I was staying. We talked for a long time, and the sisters decided that it would be best for the boy if they found a new home for him. It was a terrible experience for both my son and me. About a week after the nuns had taken him, I changed my mind in the middle of the night. I went to the convent. I was hysterical. I wanted my son back. But it was too late. Arrangements for a new family were under way. And I’m sure I didn’t look very stable pounding on the convent doors at three in the morning. There hasn’t been a day in my life when I haven’t longed to know about my son. And there hasn’t been a night when I don’t wish I had kept him and raised him and let him know how much I loved him. And that’s why I’m so happy to say that he’s here in Aldyne and that we’ve been seeing each other and talking things through. My son’s name is Bobby. He’s married and I’m happy to say that his wife Gwen is pregnant. So not only am I a mom, I’m also about to become a grandmother. And I’m so grateful to the family that adopted him and gave him a good home.”