The Fixer

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“No,” Keyes barked out. “He is not, nor will he ever be, my president. You’re the one who put him in that office.”

  “He won both the electoral college and the popular vote.”

  Keyes scowled. “You got him the electoral college and the popular vote!” He balled his hands into fists. His index finger escaped, and he pointed it at Ivy. “I taught you everything I knew, I lifted you up from nothing, I treated you like a daughter, and you thanked me by putting a man I despise in the White House.”

  Ivy adopted an icy countenance. “We came down on the opposite sides of a primary, William. You’re the one who told me not to come back if I left. You don’t get to come here now and ask me for favors.”

  “I damn well do!” Keyes shook his fist, like he was pounding a phantom table.

  A car door slammed nearby, and they turned in unison.

  “The front lawn?” Georgia Nolan stopped several feet from them, flanked by Secret Service. “That’s the location you choose for this discussion? Really, William?”

  For a moment, William Keyes was struck silent. His gaze lingered on Georgia. I craned my neck, trying to get a look at her face.

  They know each other. It was there, in the way he looked at her. They know each other very well.

  “We both know the Judiciary Committee will look more kindly on Pierce than some of his contemporaries.” Keyes recovered his voice. It was quieter than the one he’d used with Ivy, but just as authoritative.

  “Thank you,” Georgia said, her tone dripping honey, “for your advice and counsel. We will certainly take that into consideration.”

  That was a dismissal, as clear as if Georgia had ordered him off the lawn.

  Keyes straightened his tie, then issued a parting shot. “It’s a pity about the doctor,” he said. “When a man kills himself over being removed from his position at the White House, that doesn’t look very good for the administration.”

  “It is a tragedy,” Georgia said tersely. “Our thoughts are with Major Bharani’s family.”

  I felt the blood rushing out of my head. My hands went numb. It’s a pity about the doctor.

  “Major Bharani is dead?” Ivy said. “When?”

  Neither the First Lady nor Adam’s father answered. Their eyes were locked on to each other.

  Vivvie’s father is dead. He killed Justice Marquette, and now he’s dead.

  Keyes finally ripped his eyes from Georgia’s and turned to Ivy. “You never did have the stomach for this business,” he told her.

  Then he walked away—past her, past Georgia, past the car.

  I leaned into the car door, pushing it open. One second I was inside the car, the next, I was standing beside it, separated from William Keyes by the body of the sedan and nothing else. When his eyes landed on me, they opened wider.

  He hadn’t realized I was here.

  Neither had the First Lady.

  “Tess, dear,” Georgia started to say, but my gaze was locked on Keyes.

  “How did he die?” The words came out in a whisper. Vivvie’s father killed Justice Marquette, and now he’s dead. My hand tightened around the door, like my grip was the only thing keeping me vertical.

  “William,” Ivy and Georgia said in one voice, Ivy stepping toward me, Georgia toward Keyes.

  Keyes looked at them, then back at me. “He put a bullet in his own head.”

  CHAPTER 36

  I was still standing there, my fingers digging into the metal door, when Keyes got into his car and drove off. Then Ivy was next to me, her hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” she said.

  Vivvie’s dad was dead. He was dead. He put a bullet in his own head.

  “Vivvie’s dad killed himself.” There was no filter between my brain and my mouth—only that sentence, repeated in stereo. “We did this.”

  Ivy reached out and placed her own hand on the door near mine. I didn’t realize until she steadied it that both the door and my hand had been shaking.

  “This is not our fault,” she told me, her voice steady. “It’s not yours. It’s not mine.”

  Wasn’t it?

  “He must have known,” I said, my throat clenching. “That we were on to him. That things were going to get bad.” I couldn’t stop picturing Vivvie. Smiling Vivvie, beaming at me over bagels the first day.

  I couldn’t stop picturing her father, picking up that gun.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” Ivy said quietly.

  “Vivvie,” I said, barely hearing her. “I need to call Vivvie. She’s the one who told us about her father. She’s going to think this is her fault.”

  A few feet away, Georgia Nolan turned her head slightly to one side, her eyebrows arching upward as she processed our exchange. “I get the very real sense that I am missing something here.” Georgia stepped toward us. “Did you have something to do with Major Bharani’s reassignment, Ivy?”

  It hit me then why Ivy wanted to talk about this later. Georgia didn’t know—about Vivvie’s dad, about Judge Pierce. About any of it. Ivy hadn’t told her.

  You can’t tell anyone what you told me, Tess. Ivy’s warning echoed in my mind. Until we’ve got a handle on it, until we know exactly who’s involved, we can’t risk drawing attention to either one of you.

  I thought of Georgia saying that Justice Marquette’s death was an opportunity, tragic though it may be.

  “There was a situation with Bharani’s daughter.” Beside me, Ivy was answering Georgia’s question. “I intervened.”

  She’s not telling Georgia about Justice Marquette. She’s not telling her about Pierce.

  “Ivy?” My voice shook with everything I wasn’t saying: Why aren’t you telling Georgia everything? Why didn’t you tell the president the second we told you?

  “This was a mistake.” Ivy ran a hand roughly through her hair as she took in the look on my face. “Your life here was supposed to be normal, Tess.” And then, more to herself than to me: “Adam was right. I never should have brought you here.”

  I didn’t realize until she said those words that I’d been waiting to hear her say them since the moment I saw the bedroom she’d saved for me. Nausea rose in the back of my throat.

  Vivvie’s father was dead, and my sister was keeping secrets from the president and the First Lady, and Ivy thought bringing me here was a mistake.

  Just like that, I was thirteen years old again. She asked me to live with her, and then she left. I tried so hard not to let myself remember. I tried so hard not to hurt—to push against any weakness, to fight it, to go numb.

  I can’t be here. I can’t do this.

  I couldn’t let Ivy see me cry.

  I bolted—down the driveway, past Georgia’s Secret Service escort. I heard Ivy calling after me, but I just kept running. My feet slapped the pavement. I needed out. I needed away. Ivy still had the First Lady to deal with. She couldn’t follow me.

  I ran faster. Wind-in-my-hair, nothing-can-touch-me, muscles-burning faster.

  I had no idea where I was going. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, and then I bent over at the waist, heaving in and out, my breath scalding my lungs. My cell phone rang from inside my pocket.

  I realized on some level that the phone had been ringing. I pulled it out, but didn’t answer. Eventually, it stopped ringing. I waited for it to ring again. Instead, it informed me that Ivy had left me a message.

  I started moving again, concentrating on the rhythm of my steps, the push and pull of my muscles.

  I didn’t want to listen to Ivy’s message. What could she say? That we needed to talk? That she had her reasons for keeping everyone, even the president and Georgia, in the dark? That bringing me here hadn’t been a mistake?

  That Vivvie’s father hadn’t killed himself because of something we’d done?

  Feeling numb, I turned my phone over in my hand. For the longest time, I just stared at it, and then my clumsy fingers found their way to the keypad. I called the number Bodie had given me the day
before—for Vivvie.

  It rang until the voice mail picked up. I couldn’t find any words, certainly not the right ones.

  I hung up.

  An hour passed. Maybe two. Every once in a while, the phone rang. Ivy. Adam. Bodie. And then, finally, a number I didn’t recognize. I hesitated. Probably, it was Ivy. Probably, I should just let it ring.

  But what if it was Vivvie?

  I answered. “Hello?” My throat was dry, and my voice sounded it.

  “Tess!” It took me a minute to place the voice. “Tesssssss.” The second time Asher said my name, he stretched it out.

  “Asher?” I raised my eyebrows at the phone. “Are you drunk?”

  “High on life,” he declared. “And possibly piña coladas.” Then he murmured something incomprehensible. There was a tussling sound on the other end of the phone line. I heard Asher yelp, and a second later, a new voice came on the line.

  “Asher is a bit indisposed at the moment.”

  Henry.

  “Isn’t it a little early in the day to start partying?” I asked, hoping Henry couldn’t hear the hoarseness in my tone.

  “Asher has . . . ups and downs.” Henry chose his words carefully. I thought of Asher, telling me he’d climbed to the top of the chapel because the higher you were, the smaller everyone else got. “Are you all right?”

  So much for hoping I could pass for normal. “I’m fine.”

  Henry was too polite to call me a liar. His silence did that for him. “Your sister called Asher’s phone,” he said finally.

  “She what?”

  “She called to see if he’d seen or heard from you. We gathered that you’d pulled a bit of a disappearing act.” He paused. “Or rather, I gathered, and Asher serenaded her with some kind of eighties medley.”

  I tried not to think too hard about any part of that statement.

  “She gave Asher your number. God knows how he managed to remember it.”

  “Tess?” Asher was back on the phone, sounding slightly—though not significantly—more sober. “Was your sister calling about The Thing?” I heard him stage-whisper to Henry, “There’s a thing.”

  Henry’s grandfather was dead. So was Vivvie’s father. My sister thought bringing me to live with her was a mistake, and Asher was getting ready to let the cat out of the bag with Henry. Everything was unraveling—most of all me. I felt useless. Helpless and useless and weak.

  “Vivvie’s dad killed himself.” My mouth seemed set on saying the words out loud—like saying them proved something. Like if I forced myself to feel this, it might give me some level of power over the pain.

  “Poor Vivvie,” Asher mumbled. “First her dad kills Theo, then he kills himself.”

  It took exactly three seconds for Henry to take the phone back from Asher.

  “Tess,” he said, his voice straining against his vocal cords. “What is Asher talking about?”

  My mouth opened, but words wouldn’t come out.

  “Tess?”

  This time, I managed to form a coherent sentence. “Henry, can you pick me up?” My heart thudded against my rib cage. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Henry Marquette drove a hybrid. When he pulled up to the curb next to me, Asher was sprawled across the backseat, leaving me no choice but to crawl into the front. As I shut the door, I caught sight of my reflection in the window. My hair was falling out of its ponytail, flyaway pieces stuck to my forehead with sweat. I couldn’t make out enough of my face to tell if it betrayed how close I’d come to crying.

  No more. I was done with this. Tears were useless. Crying was useless. I focused on Henry—and the unalterable fact that I was screwed.

  From the second I saw the set of Henry’s features—the tense jaw, the down-turned lips, the eyes that betrayed the mix of emotions swirling in his chest—I knew that I wouldn’t be able to lie to him. Henry wasn’t a problem. He wasn’t a fire to be put out, or a situation to be handled.

  He had a right to know.

  “Someone once cautioned me against making assumptions,” he said. He had a death grip on the wheel, his eyes locked on the road. “So you’re not going to make me assume, Tess. You’re going to tell me if that was just the piña coladas talking, or if Asher . . .”

  Was telling the truth. My brain finished his sentence as if it were my own.

  I swallowed, then summoned my voice. “Four days ago,” I said quietly, “Vivvie Bharani told me that she thought her father had killed a patient.”

  “My grandfather.” Henry’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

  I nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at me—wouldn’t look at me.

  “Talk,” Henry said roughly. “Every detail, every suspicion, every single thing you know, Tess.”

  The phone. The voice on the other end. That voice’s identity. I told Henry everything. Not just for him. For me. I kept picturing Vivvie’s father lifting a gun to his temple. I kept picturing his blood splattered on a wall.

  Secrets came at a cost.

  So I told Henry. Maybe a part of me wanted his anger. I wanted him to lash out. I wanted him to blame me, the way I blamed myself.

  “Asher knew?” Henry almost choked on those words. I glanced back at Asher—self-destructive, loyal Asher, who’d been Henry’s best friend since they were kids.

  “He wanted to tell you.”

  I could see Henry thinking, But he didn’t. “I don’t suppose it occurred to any of you—or to your sister, for that matter—to take this to the police.” That wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

  “Ivy’s working on it.” That was all I could say, all she’d told me.

  “You might trust your sister to work on this,” Henry said, his voice soft, with a lethal thread of steel. “But I most certainly do not.”

  A fuller understanding of what my telling Henry meant slammed into me like a semitruck broadsiding a car. Henry despised Ivy’s occupation. He believed that when she “fixed” things, she left destruction in her wake. I’d known he wouldn’t be able to sit on this information. I’d known that, and I’d told him everything anyway.

  Because I had to.

  “Do what you have to do,” I told Henry, “but remember that if it wasn’t for Vivvie, none of us would know what really happened. She’s the only reason there’s anything to work on, and it cost her everything.”

  Her father. Her home. The naive certainty that there were people in this world that you could count on not to blacken your eyes.

  I leaned forward, so that I could see all of Henry’s face, so that out of his peripheral vision, he might catch a hint of mine. “Whatever you do with this information,” I told him, “whoever you trust with it, you better make sure they can protect her.”

  Ivy hadn’t even told the president. To protect Vivvie. To protect me.

  Henry absorbed my words. “You said there were two numbers on the phone?” he asked after an extended silence.

  He would catch that.

  “The other number was disconnected.” I wondered if Henry was coming to the conclusion that I had reached: that in order for Vivvie’s dad to kill his grandfather, someone had to get Justice Marquette into surgery first.

  Did they poison him somehow?

  “Do you know where your grandfather was that morning?” I asked Henry. “Or the night before?”

  Without warning, Henry pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road. He killed the engine, his fist wrapped tight around the keys. “I can find out,” he said, and then, moving briskly, he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. I stared after him as he walked a few feet away, his head bowed, every muscle in his shoulders and back tensed beneath his shirt.

  “Henry’s not big on public displays of emotion.” Asher followed that statement with a noise halfway between a whimper and a moan. I turned to face him. I waited for a rush of anger at him for blabbing, but it didn’t come.

  “You would have told him eventually,” I said. I’d been livi
ng on borrowed time.

  Asher pressed the heel of his hand to his head and made another moaning sound. “I’m the screwup in the Henry-Asher friendship. Always have been.”

  I wasn’t sure if Asher thought he’d screwed up by telling Henry or by keeping it from him in the first place.

  “So what you’re saying,” I said, in an attempt to bring some of the old light back to Asher’s eyes, “is that Henry is used to having to rescue you from your own drunk self.”

  Ashen shook his head, then winced, clearly regretting that action in his current condition. “I’m not normally an imbiber,” he said. “But there was a lot going on. Oblivion sounded nice.” He closed his eyes, but apparently there was no oblivion to be found. “Vivvie?” he asked.

  “Haven’t heard from her.”

  The driver’s side door opened, and Henry climbed back in. He took in the fact that Asher was awake, but didn’t comment on it.

  “My grandfather didn’t have a history of heart problems,” he told me instead. “We need to figure out what, if anything, can mimic the symptoms of a heart attack.”

  “Are we thinking what as in what poison?” Asher asked.

  Henry didn’t reply. I couldn’t tell if that was because he wasn’t speaking to Asher, or if he just had nothing to say.

  “We?” I asked finally. They’d both used the word.

  Henry answered my question with a seemingly unrelated statement. “It wasn’t a good plan.” Everything about him was hyperfocused, intense—it just took me a moment to figure out what he was focused on. “If the plan was to kill my grandfather so that Pierce could assume his spot on the Supreme Court, it wasn’t a good plan.” He curled his fingers into a fist, then uncurled them. I wondered if he even realized he was doing it. “You saw the handout Dr. Clark gave us,” he continued. “There are dozens of potential nominees. The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination.”

  You’ll get your money when I get my nomination.

  “And the only way,” Henry continued, “that Pierce could possibly be that sure was if he had someone on the inside.”