First Family

by David Baldacci

  team. She had gone straight from the limo up to their private quarters to find him sitting there going over some briefing papers.

  “I’m fine, Danny. I wish people would stop asking me that. I’ll start to think there’s something actually wrong.”

  “The FBI has briefed me about these visits to the post office box.”

  “And not the Secret Service?” she’d said quickly. “The spies among us?”

  He sighed. “They’re just doing their job, Jane. We’re national property now. National treasure, at least you are,” he’d added with a quick smile that usually did the trick in boosting her spirits.

  Usually, but not today. “You’re the treasure, Danny. I’m just the baggage.”

  “Jane, that’s not—”

  “I don’t really have time to waste on this and neither do you. The kidnappers communicated with me through a letter. It gave me the post office box and a key to that box. They said I would receive a letter at some point and to check that box every day. I have. And so far, no letter.”

  “But why work through you at all. Why not Tuck?”

  “Yes, why not Tuck? I don’t know, Danny, because I apparently cannot think like a kidnapper.”

  “Sure, sure, I didn’t mean that. So maybe we were right. They’re going to ask me to do something in order to get Willa back. It can’t be money because your brother has more of that than I do. Hell, we can barely cover our personal grocery bills at this place. It must be tied to the presidency.”

  “And then it becomes problematic, like you said. Emasculate the office, I believe were your words.”

  “Jane, I will do all that I can do, but there are limits.”

  “I thought the power of the Oval Office was unlimited. I guess I was wrong about that.”

  “We will do all we can to get her back.”

  “And if all we can do isn’t enough?” she said angrily.

  He stared at her, a slightly hopeless look in his eyes.

  The most powerful man in the world , she thought. Emasculated.

  Her anger cooled as suddenly as it had risen. “Just hold me, Danny. Just hold me.”

  He rushed to do this, pressing her tightly against him.

  “You’re shivering. Are you coming down with something? You’ve lost weight too.”

  She stepped away from him. “Look, you need to go. You have your speech in the East Room.”

  He automatically checked his watch. “They’ll call up when it’s time.”

  He went to hold her again, but she moved away, sat down, and stared off.

  “Jane, I am the president of the United States. I am not without influence. I can probably help.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  The phone rang. He picked it up. “Yes, I know, I’ll be down in a minute.”

  He bent down and kissed his wife on the cheek. “I’ll come back up and check on you later.”

  “After the women’s basketball team.”

  “Just what I’ve always wanted to be around,” he quipped. “A bunch of leggy women far taller than I am.”

  “I’ve got some events too.”

  “I’m going to have Cindy cancel them. You need to rest.”

  “But—”

  “Just rest.”

  As he started to walk away she said, “Danny, I will need you at some point. Will you be there for me?”

  He knelt beside her, wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “I will always be there for you, just like you have with me. Get some rest. I’ll have them send up some coffee and something to eat. I don’t like how thin you’re getting. We need some more meat on those curves.” He gave her a kiss and left.

  I have always been there for you, Danny. Always.

  CHAPTER 67

  MICHELLE PUT THE SUV in park and climbed out. Her shoes touched hardened dirt and she looked up at the old house with the dying tree, the rotting tire swing, the skeleton truck up on blocks in the back.

  She glanced across the street. At the house where an old lady named Hazel Rose had once lived. Her house had been meticulous, the yard the same. Now the structure was beyond saving; a bare few inches from giving one last heave and falling down for good. Yet someone was living there. Toys were strewn across the front yard. She could see laundry flapping in the breeze on the line in the side yard. It was still a depressing scene. Her past was eroding away before her eyes, like sludge off a mountaintop.

  Hazel Rose had always been kind to Michelle. Even when the little girl stopped going over there for the tea parties she gave for neighborhood kids. Why that memory had slipped into her mind just now, Michelle didn’t know. She turned back to the house, knowing what she had to do, even if she didn’t want to do it.

  Michelle’s hunch had been right. Her father’s car was parked in front of hers. The front door to the farmhouse was open. She walked past his car and then by the stunted remains of the rose hedge.

  That’s what it was, she now recalled. A rose hedge. Why had that popped into her head? And then she remembered the lilies on her mother’s coffin and telling Sean that her mom preferred roses. And she had felt a pain in her hand, like a thorn had pricked her. But there was no thorn, because there were no roses. Just like now. No roses.

  She walked on, wondering what she would say to him.

  She didn’t have long to think.

  “I’m up here,” his voice called out to her. She gazed up, using her hand to shield her eyes against the sun. He was standing at an open window on the second floor.

  She stepped over the fallen screen door and walked inside a house she had called home for a brief time when she was a child. In a way she felt like she was traveling back in time. With each step she was growing younger, less confident, and less competent. All her years of living, her experiences in college, in the Secret Service, as Sean’s partner, were dissolving away. She was six years old again, dragging a battered plastic baseball bat around, looking for someone to play with.

  She eyed the old stairs. She had slid down them on flattened cardboard when she was a kid. Something her mother didn’t really like, but she remembered her father laughing and catching her as she hurtled down.

  “My youngest son,” he sometimes called her because she had been such a fearless tomboy.

  She headed up. Her father met her on the landing.

  “I thought you might come here,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Unfinished business, maybe.”

  She opened the door to her old room, walked over to the window, and sat on the edge of the sill, her back to the filthy glass panes.

  Her father leaned up against the wall and put his hands in his pockets, idly stabbing the scuffed wooden floor with his shoe. “Do you remember much about this place?” he asked, his gaze fixed on his shoe.

  “I remembered the rose hedge when I was walking up to the house. You planted that for an anniversary, didn’t you?”

  “No, your mother’s birthday.”

  “And somebody chopped it all down one night.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  Michelle turned to look out the window. “Never found out who.”

  “I miss her. I really miss her.”

  She turned back to find her father watching her. “I know. I’ve never seen you cry like you did the other morning.”

  “I was crying because I almost lost you, baby.”

  This answer surprised Michelle and then she wondered why it had.

  “I know that Mom loved you, Dad. Even if she… if she didn’t always show it exactly the right way.”

  “Let’s go outside, getting sort of stuffy in here.”

  They walked along the perimeter of the backyard. “Your mother and I were high school sweethearts. She waited for me while I was in Vietnam. We got married. Then the kids started coming.”

  “Four boys. All in four years. Talk about your rabbits.”

  “And then my little girl came along.”

  She smiled and poked him in
the arm. “Can we say accident?”

  “No, Michelle, it was no accident. We planned for you.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “I guess I never really asked either of you about it, but I always assumed I was sort of a surprise. Was it because you were trying for a girl?”

  Frank stopped walking. “We were trying for… something.”

  “Something to hold you together?” she said slowly.

  He started to walk again but she didn’t. He stopped, looked back.

  “Did you ever consider divorce, Dad?”

  “It was not something our generation did lightly.”

  “Divorce is not always the wrong answer. If you weren’t happy.”

  Frank held up a hand. “Your mother wasn’t happy. I, uh, I was trying to work at it. Although I’d be the first to admit that I spent too much time on the job and away from her. She raised the kids and she did a great job. But she did it without a lot of support from me.”

  “Cop’s life.”

  “No, just this cop’s life.”

  “You knew about Doug Reagan, obviously?”

  “I saw some of the signs that she was attracted to him.”

  Michelle couldn’t believe she was about to ask this, but she had to. “Would it have bothered you if you knew they had slept together?”

  “I was still her husband. Of course it would have hurt me, deeply.”

  “Would you have put a stop to it?”

  “I probably would’ve beaten Reagan within an inch of his life.”

  “And Mom?”

  “I hurt your mother in other ways over the years. And it wasn’t her fault.”

  “By not being around for her?”

  “In some ways, that’s worse than cheating.”

  “You think so?”

  “What’s a quick fling in the sack compared to decades of indifference?”

  “Dad, you weren’t gone all the time.”

  “You weren’t alive when the boys were little. Trust me, your mother was a single parent for all intents and purposes. You can never get that time, that trust back. At least I never did.”

  “Did you cry for her too?”

  He held out his hand for her to take. She did.

  “You cry, sweetie. You always cry.”

  “I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Michelle had nearly made it to her SUV when it happened. Without any warning at all, her feet pointed toward the house and she started to run.

  “Michelle!” her father screamed.

  She was already inside the old building and racing up the stairs. Feet pounded after her. She took the steps two at a time, her breaths coming in gasps, as though she had run miles instead of yards.

  She reached the top. The door to her bedroom was closed. But that was not her destination. She raced to the door at the end of the hall and kicked it open.

  “Michelle, no!” her father roared from behind her.

  She stared into the room. Her hand went to her gun. She flicked off the cover strap. The Sig was out, pointed straight ahead.

  “Michelle!” Feet pounded closer.

  “Get away from my mom!” she screamed.

  In Michelle’s mind her mother looked back at her, terrified. She was on her knees, her dress half torn off. Michelle could see her mother’s bra, the indentation of her heavy cleavage, and this exposure terrified her.

  “Baby!” Sally Maxwell yelled out to her. “Go back downstairs.” Her mother was young, young and alive. Long white hair had been replaced with soft dark strands. She was beautiful. Flawless, except for the torn dress, the terrified expression, the man in Army fatigues standing over her.

  “Get away from her. Stop hurting her!” Michelle screamed in a voice she had only used for arresting someone.

  “Baby, please, it’s all right,” said her mother. “Go back downstairs.”

  Michelle’s finger slipped to the trigger. “Stop it. Stop it!”

  The man turned and looked at her. He would have probably smiled, like he had all the other nights. Except she was pointing his own gun at him, the one she’d pulled from the holster he’d carelessly tossed on the chair. You didn’t smile when a gun was pointed at you. Even by a six-year-old child.

  He made a move toward her.

  Just as she had that night, Michelle now fired a single shot. It passed through the air and slammed into the wall opposite.

  A big hand clamped down on her pistol, took it from her. She let it go. It was so heavy, she couldn’t hold it anymore. She looked into the room. Saw her mother screaming. Screaming at what Michelle had done. At the dead man on the floor.

  A hand was on her shoulder. Michelle turned to look.

  “Dad?” she said in an odd voice.

  “It’s all right, baby,” her father said. “I’m here.”

  Michelle pointed into the room. “I did that.”

  “I know. Protecting your mom, that’s all.”

  She gripped his shoulder. “We have to take him away, but don’t leave me in the car, Dad. Not this time. I can see his face. You have to remember to cover up his face.”

  “Michelle!”

  “You have to cover his face. If I see his face—” Her breaths were coming in short swells. She was barely able to draw one breath before she needed another.

  Her father put the gun down and squeezed her tight, until her breathing slowed. Until Michelle looked into that room and saw what was really there.

  Nothing.

  “I shot him, Dad. I killed a man.”

  He drew back a bit, studied her. She looked back at him, her eyes clear, focused. “You did nothing wrong. You were just a kid. Just a scared little child. Protecting your mother.”

  “But she—he came before. He was with her, Dad.”

  “If you want to blame anyone, you blame me. It was my fault. Only my fault.” Tears were staining his cheeks and Michelle felt her own tears start to fall.

  “I’ll never do that. I’ll never blame you for that.”

  He gripped her hand and steered her down the stairs.

  “We need to leave here, Michelle. We need to leave here and not come back. This is the past, and we can’t relive it anymore. We have to keep going, Michelle, it’s the only way life works. Otherwise, it’ll just destroy us both.”

  Outside, he held the SUV door open for her and she climbed in. Before he closed it, he said, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She drew a deep breath and then nodded. “I don’t know exactly what happened in there.”

  “I think you know all you ever need to know. Now it’s time to forget.”

  She glanced over his shoulder. “You cut down the rose hedge, didn’t you?”

  He followed her gaze and then looked back at Michelle. “Your mother loved those roses. I never should have taken those from her.”

  “You probably had good reason.”

  “Fathers aren’t perfect, Michelle. And I never had a good enough reason to do a lot of things.”

  She stared up at the old house. “I’m never coming back here.”