by Sandra Brown
Eddy didn’t respond. He was staring absently into space, frowning. “I still wish she didn’t know about you and me.”
“Let’s not have another fight about that, okay? I couldn’t help it. I walked out of your room and there she was, clutching that stupid ice bucket to her chest and looking like she’d just swallowed her tongue.”
“Has she told Tate?”
“I doubt it.” A piece of golden-brown crust fell onto her bare belly. She moistened her fingertip, picked up the crumb, then licked it off. “I’ll tell you something else,” she said in a mysterious whisper, “I don’t think she’s quite right in the head yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“She asks the dumbest questions.”
“Like what?”
“Yesterday I mentioned something she should have a vivid memory of, even if she did suffer a concussion.”
“What?”
“Well,” Fancy drawled, dragging the nearly clean drumstick across her lips, “another ranch was buying some horses from Grandpa. When the cowboy came to look at them, nobody was around. I took him into the stable myself. He was real cute.”
“I get the picture,” Eddy said drolly. “What does Carole have to do with it?”
“She discovered us screwing like rabbits in one of the stalls. I thought I was sunk, see, because this was a couple of years ago and I was barely seventeen. But Carole and the cowboy connected immediately. You know, snap, crackle, pop. The next thing I know, she’s as naked as we are and rolling around in the hay with us.”
She fanned her face theatrically. “God, it was fantastic! What an afternoon. But yesterday, when I mentioned it, she looked ready to puke or something. You want some more chicken?”
“No thanks.” Fancy tossed her cleaned bone into the box and took out the last chicken leg. Eddy encircled her ankle with his hard fingers. “You didn’t give away any of my secrets, did you?”
She laughed and nudged him in the butt with her bare foot. “I don’t know any of your secrets.”
“So what did you and Carole talk about regarding me?”
“I just told her you were the best I’d ever had.” She leaned forward and gave him a greasy kiss on the lips. “You are, you know. You’ve got a cock of solid iron. And there’s something about you that’s so exciting—dangerous, almost.”
He was amused. “Finish your chicken. It’s time you headed home.”
Disobediently, Fancy looped her arms around his neck and kissed him languorously. She left her lips in place as she whispered, “I’ve never done it doggie fashion before.”
“I know.”
She drew her head back sharply. “Didn’t I do it good?”
“You did it fine. But I could tell you were surprised at first.”
“I love surprises.”
Eddy cupped the back of her head and gave her a searing kiss. Together they fell back onto the sour-smelling pillows. “The next time your Aunt Carole starts asking questions about me,” he panted as he pulled on a rubber, “tell her to mind her own frigging business.” He plowed into her.
“Yes, Eddy, yes,” she chanted, beating on his back with the drumstick she still had clutched in one hand.
Thirty-Three
“What the hell,” Van Lovejoy said resignedly. He took a final drag on a cigarette he had smoked down to his stained fingertips. “I wouldn’t be any better at blackmailing than I am at anything else. I would have fucked up.”
“You threatened her with blackmail?” Irish stared at the video photographer with contempt. “You failed to mention that when you told me about your meeting with Avery.”
“It’s all right, Irish.” Avery laid a calming hand on the older man’s arm. With a trace of a grin, she added, “Van was miffed at us for not including him in our secret.”
“Don’t joke about it. This secret is giving me chronic indigestion.” Irish left his sofa in pursuit of another shot of whiskey, which he poured into his glass from a bottle on the kitchen table.
“Bring me one of those,” Van called to him. Then to Avery, he said, “Irish is right. You’re up shit creek and you don’t even know it.”
“I know it.”
“Got any paddles?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Jesus, Avery, are you nuts? Why’d you do such a damn fool thing?”
“Do you want to tell him, or should I?” she asked Irish as he resumed his seat next to her on the couch.
“This is your party.”
While Irish and Van sipped their whiskey, Avery related her incredible tale again. Van listened intently, disbelievingly, glancing frequently at Irish, who verified everything she said with a somber nod of his grizzled head.
“Rutledge has no idea?” Van asked when she had brought him up to date.
“None. At least as far as I can tell.”
“Who’s the traitor in the camp?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Have you heard from him anymore?”
“Yes. Yesterday. I received another typed communiqué.”
“What’d it say?”
“Virtually the same as before,” she answered evasively, unable to connect with Irish’s shrewd blue eyes.
The succinct note, found in her lingerie drawer, had read, You’ve slept with him. Good work. He’s disarmed.
It had made her queasy to think of that unknown someone crowing over what had happened at the Adolphus. Had Tate discussed their lovemaking with his traitorous confidant? Or was he so close to Tate that he had sensed his mood swing and made a lucky guess into the reason for it? She supposed she should be glad that he thought it was a ploy and hadn’t figured it for an act of love.
“Whoever he is,” she told her friends now, “he still means to do it.” Her arms broke out in chill bumps. “But I don’t think he’s going to do the actual killing.” The word was almost impossible for her to speak aloud. “I think someone’s been hired to do it. Did you bring the tapes I asked for?”
Van nodded toward an end table where he had stacked several videotapes when he arrived, just a few minutes ahead of Avery. “Irish passed along the note you sent me through his post office box.”
“Thanks, Van.” Leaving her place on the sofa, she retrieved the tapes, then went to Irish’s TV set and VCR and turned them on. She inserted one of the videos and returned to the sofa with a remote control transmitter. “This is everything you shot during our trip?”
“Yep. From your arrival at Houston to your return home. If we’re going to watch unedited home movies, I’ve got to have another drink.”
“Next time, bring your own bottle,” Irish muttered as Van sauntered into the kitchen.
“Screw you, McCabe.”
Taking no offense, Irish leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees. On the television screen Tate was seen emerging from a Jetway. Avery and Mandy were at his side. The rest of the entourage was in the background.
“You’ve got the kid, but where are his parents?” Van asked, returning with a fresh drink.
“They drove down. Zee refuses to fly.”
“Funny for an air force wife, isn’t it?”
“Not so much. Nelson flew bombing missions in Korea while she was left at home with baby Jack. Then he did some test piloting. I’m sure she was afraid of being widowed. And Nelson’s buddy—Tate’s named after him—was lost at sea when his plane crashed.”
“How’d you learn all that?”
“I went to Tate’s office when I knew he wouldn’t be there, with the excuse of wanting to have all the pictures reframed. I manipulated his secretary into conversation about the people in—Wait! Stop!”
Realizing that she was controlling the TV with the transmitter, she stopped the tape, backed it up, and replayed it. Very quietly, fearfully, she said, “He was at the airport when we arrived in Houston, too.”
“Who?” Irish and Van asked in unison.
Again Avery rewound the tape. “This is still Hobby Airport, right,
Van?”
“Right.”
“There! See the tall man with gray hair?”
“Yellow polo shirt?”
“Yes.”
“Where? I don’t see him,” Irish grumbled.
“What about him?” Van asked.
Avery rewound the tape. “Does this thing have a stop action?”
“Hell, yes.” Irish snatched the transmitter from her hands. “Say when. I haven’t seen a goddamn thing to—”
“When!”
He depressed the button, freezing the action on the screen. Avery knelt in front of the TV set and pointed the man out to Irish. He was standing in the background, at the periphery of the crowd.
“He was in our hotel,” she declared as the realization struck her. “We were rushing off to a rally and he held an elevator for us.”
That’s why she had noticed him in Midland. She had just seen him in Houston, although it hadn’t registered at the time that the sweaty man who’d come from a workout in the hotel gym was the same as the man in the western suit.
“So?”
“So he was in Midland, too. He was at the airport when we landed. And I saw him later, in Dallas, at the fund-raising dinner at Southfork.”
Van and Irish exchanged worried glances. “Coincidence?”
“Do you really think so?” Avery demanded angrily.
“All right, an avid Rutledge supporter.”
“I had just about convinced myself of that,” she said, “but I’ve been dropping by campaign headquarters nearly every day since we got back, and I haven’t seen him among the volunteers. Besides, he never approached us while we were away. He was always at the edge of the crowd.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Avery.”
“Don’t.” It was probably the harshest tone of voice she’d ever used with Irish. It startled them both, but she modified it only slightly when she added, “I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong.”
“What am I thinking?”
“That I’m plunging in, jumping to conclusions before I’ve lined up all the facts, reacting emotionally instead of pragmatically.”
“You said it.” Van sat back on his curved spine and propped his tumbler of whiskey on his concave abdomen. “You’re good at that.”
Avery drew herself up. “Let’s look at all the tapes and see just how wrong I am.”
When the final tape went to snow on the screen, a sustained silence followed, ameliorated only by the whistling sound made by the video recorder as it rewound the tape.
Avery came to her feet and turned to face them. She didn’t waste time by rubbing it in how right she’d been. The tapes spoke for themselves. The man had shown up in nearly every one.
“Does he look familiar to either of you?”
Van said, “No.”
“He was in every single city we were,” Avery mused out loud. “Always lurking in the background.”
“Not ‘lurking.’ Standing,” Irish corrected.
“Standing and staring intently at Tate.”
“So were you, most of the time,” Van quipped. “You’re not going to ice him.”
She shot him a baleful look. “Don’t you think it’s a little odd that a man would follow a senatorial candidate around the state if he weren’t actually part of the election committee?”
They glanced at each other and shrugged warily. “It’s odd,” Irish conceded, “but we don’t have any pictures of him with his finger on a trigger.”
“Did you see him at the GM plant?” Van wanted to know.
“No.”
“That was one of the largest, most hostile crowds Tate addressed,” Irish said. “Wouldn’t that have been a likely spot for the guy to make his move?”
“Maybe the bottle thrower beat him to it.”
“But you said you didn’t see Gray Hair there,” Van pointed out.
Avery gnawed her lip in consternation. That eventful day was a blur in her memory, punctuated by vivid recollections, like Tate sitting in the emergency room, his shirt stained with his blood. The wound had healed in a matter of days; the small scar was faint and hidden by his hair. She shuddered to think how much worse it could have been if Gray Hair—
“Wait! I just remembered,” she exclaimed. “I read that day’s agenda before we left the hotel,” she recalled excitedly. “The trip to the GM plant wasn’t printed on the schedule because it was squeezed in later. Nobody except Eddy, Jack, and the union bosses at the plant knew we were going to be there. So even if Gray Hair had intercepted a schedule, he couldn’t have known that Tate was going to be in Arlington.”
“You two sound like you’re talking about a goddamn Indian,” Irish said cantankerously. “Look, Avery, this thing is getting too dangerous. Tell Rutledge who you are, what you suspect, and get the hell out.”
“I can’t.” She drew in a catchy breath and repeated with soft emphasis, “I can’t.”
They argued with her for another half hour, but got nowhere. She enumerated the reasons why she couldn’t give up now and rebuked their arguments that she was just doing it for the notoriety it would bring her when it was over.
“Don’t you understand? Tate needs me. So does Mandy. I’m not deserting them until I know they’re safe, and that’s final.”
As she prepared to leave, rushing because time had gotten away from her, she hugged them both. “It’ll be a comfort to know you’re around,” she told Van. Irish had assured her that he would assign Van to the Rutledge campaign permanently until after the election. “Be the eyes in the back of my head. Scan the crowds. Let me know immediately if you see Gray Hair.”
“Not with the Indian names again,” Irish groaned. He pulled her into a bear hug. “You’ve given me the worst bellyache of my life,” he said gruffly. “But I still don’t want to lose you again.”
She hugged him back and kissed his cheek. “You won’t.”
Van said, “Cover your ass, Avery.”
“I will, I promise.”
She left quickly and sped home. But she wasn’t speedy enough.
Thirty-Four
“This is becoming an all-too-familiar scene.” Tate angrily confronted Avery the moment she cleared Mandy’s bedroom door. “I’m pacing the floor, not knowing where the hell you are.”
Breathless, she rushed across the room and gingerly lowered herself to the edge of the bed. Mandy was sleeping, but there were tear tracks on her cheeks. “I’m sorry. Zee told me she had another nightmare.” Tate’s mother had been waiting for her in the hall when she came in.
Tate appeared even more agitated than Zee had been. His face was drawn and haggard, his hair uncombed. “It happened about an hour ago, shortly after she’d fallen asleep.”
“Did she remember anything?” she asked, looking up at him hopefully.
“No,” he replied in a clipped voice. “Her own screams woke her up.”
Avery smoothed back Mandy’s hair and murmured, “I should have been here.”
“You damn sure should have. She cried for you. Where were you?”
“I had errands to run.” His imperative tone of voice grated on her, but she was presently more interested in the child than in arguing with Tate. “I’ll stay with her now.”
“You can’t. The men from Wakely and Foster are here.”
“Who?”
“The consultants we hired to oversee the campaign. Our meeting was interrupted by Mandy’s nightmare, and their time is expensive. We’ve kept them waiting long enough.”
He propelled her from Mandy’s bedroom and toward one of the doors that opened onto the central courtyard. Avery dug in her heels. “What are you most upset over, Tate—your daughter’s nightmare, or keeping the bigwigs waiting?”
“Don’t test my temper now, Carole,” he said, straining the words through clenched teeth. “I was here to comfort her, not you.”
She conceded him the argument by guiltily glancing away. “I thought you were against using professional consultants for your cam
paign.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Eddy and Jack changed it for you.”
“They had their input, but I made the final decision. Anyway, they’re here, waiting to talk strategy with us.”
“Tate, wait a minute,” she said, laying a restraining hand on his chest when he made to move past her. “If you don’t feel right about this, just say no to them. Up till now, your campaign has been based on you—who you are and what you stand for. What if these so-called experts try to change you? Won’t you feel diluted? Homogenized? Even the best advisers can be wrong. Please don’t be pressured into doing something you don’t want to do.”
He removed her hand from the front of his shirt. “If I could be pressured into doing something, Carole, I would have divorced you a long time ago. That’s what I was advised to do.”
* * *
The following morning she stepped out of her tub and loosely wrapped a bath sheet around herself. As she stood in front of the mirror, towel-drying her hair, she thought she saw movement in the bedroom through the partially opened door. Her first thought was that it might be Fancy. She flung open the door, but rapidly recoiled.
“Jack!”
“I’m sorry, Carole. I thought you heard my knock.”
He was standing well beyond the door to her room. If he had knocked, she certainly wouldn’t have given him permission to come in. He was lying. He hadn’t knocked. More angry than embarrassed, she drew the bath sheet tighter around her.
“What do you want, Jack?”
“Uh, the guys left this for you.”
Without taking his eyes off her, he tossed a plastic binder on her bed. His intense gaze made her very uncomfortable. It was prurient, but it was also incisive. The bath sheet left her legs and shoulders bare. Could he detect the difference in her body from Carole’s? Did he know what Carole’s body had looked like?
“What guys?” she asked, trying not to let her discomfort show.
“From Wakely and Foster. They didn’t have a chance to give it to you last night before you stormed out of the meeting.”
“I didn’t storm out of the meeting. I came inside to check on Mandy.”
