“Clementine! Stop!” I order, gripping her shoulders hard enough that I know she feels it.
Her eyes turn my way, her anger still at full boil. The scariest part is, for that half a second, she looks exactly like her father. She again grits her teeth, and the big vein swells. I wait for her to attack.
“You can let go now,” she says in a low voice. Her arms are still tensed.
“You sure?” I ask.
“Let go, Beecher. I want you to let me go. Now.”
As she tugs free of my grip, I shoot Dallas a look, hoping he’ll apologize. He doesn’t.
“Dallas didn’t mean it,” I tell her.
“I know who I am!” she shoots back, struggling to find control. “I know I’m impulsive. And passionate. I know I have a temper-but I’m not him, Beecher! I’m not that,” she insists, refusing to say her father’s name.
I reach out to calm her.
She again pulls away. By now, I know she’s good at hiding her wounded side. And her scared side. But this anger… this venom that erupts and stings so brutally… Some things can’t be hidden-especially when it’s who we really are.
“The least you can do is pretend to stick up for me,” she adds, catching her breath.
“C’mon, you know I don’t think you’re like Nico.”
“I know you can say it, Beecher. The point is to mean it.”
The words bite as she lets them freeze in the air.
Before I can say a word, she turns around, walking back to the path alone.
“Apologize later,” Dallas says, gripping my arm as I go to chase her. “Right now, let’s get back to the group so we can figure out what’s going on.”
“The group? Your super-bad-ass Culper Ring?” I ask, my eyes still on Clementine, who needs some time to calm down. “In case you haven’t noticed, Dallas, for all the bragging you’ve done, they didn’t get anywhere until I gave them Nico’s answer. And in case you hadn’t noticed that, everything else has failed: The rock was empty, all the messages are gone, and we’ve got no leads to follow.”
“That’s not true. You said Tot found that police report-the one that had the President’s doctor…”
“Stewart Palmiotti.”
“… that when Palmiotti was home from college, he was the last one who saw Eightball alive… that he told the police he saw Eightball voluntarily get into that car. While you were running around with Clementine, I had our guys confirm it. They found the report. Palmiotti knows what really happened that night, which means we can-”
“We can what? We can send some Culper Ring guys to go confront Palmiotti? Is that the new master plan-that they march into the White House, stick a finger in his face, and accuse the President’s oldest and most trusted friend of harboring an old secret?”
“You’d be surprised what people will say when they think you have the upper hand.”
“But we don’t have the upper hand! All we have is a sheet of paper with someone saying, I know what you did last summer, which is proof of nothing! And I’m telling you right now-I don’t care how many brainiacs you’ve got in that Ring-if you go in there with nothing and start yanking on the tail of the lion, that lion is going to take out his claws and show us firsthand why they crowned him king of the jungle. And the first claw’s coming at me.”
As Clementine heads back down the curving concrete path, Dallas for once doesn’t argue. He knows I’m right. He knows that the moment those tox reports come back and Khazei can prove that Orlando was murdered, every single eye is going to be aimed at the last person Orlando was seen with: me. And when that black hole opens, there’s no slowing it down. Not until it swallows every one of us in its path.
“That still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t focus on Palmiotti,” he says, again motioning to the footprints. “Our people are looking. They can find anything. So whatever happened all those years ago, we’ll find out what they saw, or who was there… or even where they were-”
“Wait,” I blurt. “Say that part again.”
“We’ll find what they saw?”
“No. Where they were. If we find where they were…” I pull out my phone, quickly dialing a number.
“What’re you doing?” Dallas asks.
“If we want to take down the lion,” I tell him, “we need to get a bigger gun.”
82
"What’re you doing?” Dallas asked.
“If we want to take down the lion,” Beecher replied, “we need to get a bigger gun.”
Still watching from the treeline, the barber had to hold his breath to hear what they were saying. He tried to tell himself it was still okay. But as Beecher dialed whatever number he was dialing in the distance, Laurent knew the truth-and he knew just how far he was from okay.
From what he could hear, Beecher and his group weren’t just guessing anymore. They had details. They had names-and not just the President’s. They had Palmiotti… plus, he heard them say Eightball…
If they-for them to know about that… for them to know what happened that night…
On the side of the apple blossom tree that hid Laurent from sight, a small patch of snow, clinging like a white island to the bark, was slowly whittled down by the intensity of the blowing wind. As he watched the island shrink, flake by flake, Laurent knew it was no different here.
Erosion over time.
For a while now, Palmiotti said he could stop it. That somehow, he could make it all go away. But confidence is no different than friendships or secrets. They’re all susceptible to the same fate…
Erosion over time.
It was so clear to Laurent now. This wasn’t the beginning of the tornado.
This was the beginning of the end of it.
A few inches in front of the barber, the island of snow was the size of a quarter, worn down by another slash of wind. Across the snowy field, Beecher was having much the same effect. Indeed, as the last bits of snow were tugged from the bark, Laurent once again felt a thick lump in his throat and the matching swell of emotion that overcame him earlier when he read his client’s tattoo.
If Laurent wanted to stop the tornado, there was only one way to make it go away. Until this exact moment, though, he didn’t think he had the courage to do it.
But he did.
Reaching into his jacket pocket, Laurent gripped tight to the item he’d instinctively grabbed from the shop, one of only a few mementos his father brought back from the war: the Master Barbers straight-edge razor with the abalone handle.
As he slid it out and flipped the blade open, the lasts bits of snow were blown from the tree bark.
Across the field, both Beecher and Dallas had their backs to him.
The tornado was about to start swirling a whole lot faster.
83
"National Archives,” a familiar voice says through my phone. “How may I direct your call?”
“Katya, it’s Beecher. Can you transfer me over to Mr. Harmon in Presidential Records?” Standing in the snow and reading the confusion on Dallas’s face, I explain, “The goal is to find what really happened on February 16th, right? The problem is, the only record from the sixteenth is that police report, which is a record that Palmiotti created himself. But what if we could find out where Palmiotti and Wallace were on the seventeenth… or even the eighteenth?”
Dallas’s eyes tighten as he tries to put it together. He knows the problem. Twenty-six years ago, Wallace wasn’t President. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any presidential records.
“Okay, so when this happened… Twenty-six years ago, the President was… back in college,” Dallas adds, quickly doing the math.
Dallas knows how the Archives work. He knows what we keep. And knows that when Wallace or any other President gets elected, the very first thing we do is start a file for them. But most of all, we start filling that file-by preserving that person’s history. We start collecting photos and family pictures, mementos and birth records and elementary school reports.