Exclusive

by Sandra Brown

  “Very.”

  “So what about her?”

  Vanessa, already dressed and seated on a chaise, took a swallow of white wine. “She’s doing a series on SIDS and wants to include an interview with me.”

  Merritt slipped on his tuxedo jacket and checked his reflection in the mirror. When he took office, he had decided against having a personal valet. Not even the most experienced haberdasher knew how to take advantage of his physique better than he himself. The cut of his jacket accentuated his broad shoulders and narrow waist. He kept his hair well trimmed but never lacquered into place. Secretly, he preferred it rakishly windblown. He wore formal clothes with elegance and grace. In blue jeans, he was the boy next door.

  Liking what he saw in the mirror, he turned to his wife. “And?”

  “And she’ll be at the reception tonight. Dalton has promised her an answer.”

  Dalton Neely was the White House press secretary. He had been handpicked and well trained by Merritt and his top adviser, Spencer Martin.

  “Actually, the formal request came through Dalton’s office.” Vanessa shook out a Valium from the prescription bottle in her beaded evening bag. “Barrie Travis has been calling my office for several days. I haven’t taken her calls, but she’s very persistent.”

  “Reporters make their living by being persistent.”

  “Well, her persistence has put me on the spot. Dalton approached me this afternoon with her request. Both want an answer from me tonight.”

  Quickly closing the distance between them, the President grasped her hand and took the small yellow tablet from her palm. He removed the prescription bottle from her evening bag and dropped the pill back into it, then pocketed the bottle.

  “I need that, David.”

  “No, you don’t. No more of this, either.” He took the wineglass from her and set it aside. “It counteracts your medication.”

  “That’s only my second glass.”

  “It’s your third. You’re lying to me, Vanessa.”

  “Okay, so I lost count. Big deal. I—”

  “Not about the wine. About this reporter. She didn’t put you in a spot—you did that yourself. She didn’t start calling your office until your outing with her a couple of weeks ago. Isn’t that the way it happened?”

  He’d been informed of their meeting the day it occurred, so he wasn’t surprised by Barrie Travis’s request for an interview. What bothered him was that, without his consent, Vanessa had initiated a conversation with a member of the media. Vanessa and a reporter, especially one reputed to be less than reliable, was a dangerous combination.

  “Did you have me spied on?” she fired.

  “Why’d you make that date with her, Vanessa?”

  “I needed someone to talk to. Is that a crime?”

  “You chose a reporter to confide in?” He laughed skeptically.

  “She wrote me a touching note. I thought she’d be nice to talk to.”

  “Next time try a priest.”

  “You’re making a big deal out of nothing, David.”

  “If it wasn’t a big deal, then why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “It wasn’t important until she asked for this on-camera interview. Before, our visit wasn’t worth mentioning. She promised that anything I said that afternoon was off the record. I needed someone—a woman—to talk to.”

  “About what?”

  “What do you think?” she shouted.

  She jumped off the chaise, grabbed the glass of wine, and defiantly drained it.

  He struggled to rein in his temper. “You’re not yourself, Vanessa.”

  “You’re damn right, I’m not. So you’ll be much better off going without me tonight.”

  The reception, honoring a goodwill delegation from the Scandinavian countries, was to be her first official function since Robert Rushton’s tragic death. The small, formal gathering seemed well suited for Vanessa’s reemergence into public life. She’d retreated from it following the baby’s death. Three months was enough time. The voting public needed to see her back in action.

  “Of course you’re coming,” the President said. “You’ll be the belle of the ball. You always are.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. I’m tired of making excuses for you. We have to work through this, Vanessa. It’s been twelve weeks.”

  “Is there a time limit on grief?”

  He ignored the sting in her voice. “Tonight you’ll come through like the Thoroughbred you are. Just be your charming, smiling self, and everything will be fine.”

  “I hate all those people, looking at me with pity and remorse and not knowing what to say. And when someone does say something, it’s so trite, I want to scream.”

  “Just thank them for the sentiment and leave it at that.”

  “God!” she cried, her voice cracking. “How can you just resume—”

  “Because I have to, dammit. And so do you.”

  He glared at her with such force that she fell back onto the chaise. Stricken, she stared up at him.

  He turned away, and when again he spoke, his anger was contained. “I like your evening dress. Is it new?”

  Her shoulders slumped. She lowered her head. Watching her in the mirror, he recognized these reflexive gestures as concessions of defeat. “I’ve lost weight,” she mumbled. “Nothing in my closet fits anymore.”

  There was a tap on the door. He crossed the room and opened it. “Hey, Spence. Are they ready for us?”

  Spencer Martin glanced over David’s shoulder and surveyed the room. Spotting Vanessa, and the empty wineglass on the end table, he reversed David’s question. “Are you ready for them?”

  The President purposefully disregarded his adviser’s concern. “Vanessa’s got a mild case of stage fright, but, as you know, she always comes through.”

  “Maybe we’re rushing her. If she doesn’t feel up to it—”

  “Nonsense. She’s up to it.” He turned toward his wife and extended his arm. “Ready, darling?”

  She came to her feet and slowly walked toward them, not looking directly at either man.

  One of David’s personality traits was to ignore things he didn’t want to acknowledge, such as the dislike between his wife and his top adviser. To fill the awkward silence, he said, “Doesn’t she look beautiful tonight, Spence?”

  “Indeed, Mr. President.”

  “Thank you,” Vanessa replied stiffly. As they stepped into the hallway, she took her husband’s arm and asked, “What should Dalton tell Barrie Travis?”

  “Barrie Travis the reporter?” Spence cut in. “Tell her about what?” He looked quizzically at the President.

  “She’s asked Dalton for an interview with Vanessa.”

  “About anything in particular?”

  “SIDS,” the President replied.

  * * *

  Barrie was positively giddy. Her words gushed out like water from a broken fire plug.

  “I was going through the receiving line with my date. Don’t get excited. He’s a gay friend who’s still in the closet. We scratched each other’s back, so to speak. He had an invitation to the reception and needed a female date, and I had an opportunity to speak directly to the President and First Lady.

  “Anyhow, I’m gliding along the receiving line, acting real cool and blasé, and when I get to the President, he clasps my hand between his, swear to God, and says, ‘Miss Travis, thank you so much for coming. It’s always a pleasure to have you at the White House. You look radiant tonight.’

  “Actually, I don’t remember his exact words, but suffice it to say that I wasn’t treated like a stranger, or a passing acquaintance, or even an ordinary reporter. Barbara Walters couldn’t have been more warmly greeted.”

  Cronkite yawned and made himself more comfortable in the center of her bed.

  “Am I boring you?” Barrie asked, pausing for breath. “You don’t seem to realize the importance of my getting the first exclusive interview with the First Lady since th
e death of her child.

  “Actually the President mentioned it before I did. He said Mrs. Merritt had informed him of my SIDS series. He thinks it’s an excellent idea and said that he urged the First Lady to participate. He commended me for raising public awareness on this heartbreaking phenomenon. Then he said that he and Mrs. Merritt would extend me their full cooperation. I was… Well, let me put it this way. If it had been sex, I would have been having multiple orgasms.”

  She climbed in with Cronkite, who took up two thirds of the bed and wouldn’t budge an inch. Balancing on the edge of the mattress, she added, “I only wish Howie had been there to see it.”

  Chapter Four

  He was aware that the television was on, but it was only background noise until he heard the familiar voice. It brought his head up out of the bathroom sink, where he’d been sluicing cold water over his face. Grabbing a hand towel, he stepped around the corner into the bedroom.

  “… which, unfortunately, you and President Merritt share with thousands of other couples.”

  He didn’t recognize the reporter. She was thirtyish, maybe older. Shoulder-length auburn hair. Wide eyes and bee-stung lips that promised a good time, although both eyes and lips were unsmiling now. Distinctive, husky voice, unusual for a broadcast journalist; most of them sounded as though they’d graduated from the same school of sterile diction. Her name was superimposed at the bottom of the TV screen. Barrie Travis. It rang no bells.

  “The President and I were astounded to learn the number of families who experience this tragedy,” Vanessa Merritt was saying. “Five thousand annually in our country alone.”

  This face and voice Gray Bondurant recognized and knew well, even though it was instantly apparent to him that she’d been coached on how to conduct herself during the interview. She held her hands demurely in her lap, no gestures allowed. Facial expressions carefully schooled.

  The interviewer segued into a sound bite from Dr. George Allan, the Merritts’ personal physician, who’d had the unpleasant task of pronouncing Robert Rushton Merritt dead in the White House nursery. Dr. Allan explained that medical science is still trying to isolate causes and preventatives of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

  Then the interview became more personal. “Mrs. Merritt, we all witnessed your and President Merritt’s grief during your son’s funeral.” Scenes from the funeral were edited in. “You’ve had three months’ distance from it. The wounds must surely still be tender, but I know our viewers would be interested in hearing any reflections you might wish to express.”

  Vanessa took a moment. “My father has a saying: ‘Adversity is a great opportunity in disguise.’ As always, Daddy’s right,” she said with a fleeting smile. “David and I feel that we’ve become stronger, as a couple and as individuals, because we’ve been tested to the limit of our endurance, and we’ve survived.”

  “Bullshit.” He balled up the hand towel and hurled it across the bedroom, then picked up the remote control, unwilling to listen to any more.

  But he paused. Vanessa was saying, “The President and I hope that others who experience a similar tragedy can draw courage and comfort from survivors like us. Life does go on.”

  Swearing, Bondurant hit the Off button.

  Scripted responses, signed, sealed, and delivered to Vanessa to memorize and parrot. Words composed by Dalton Neely. Maybe her father, Clete Armbruster. Possibly even the President, with final approval by Spencer Martin.

  However they’d been rehearsed and revised in advance of the interview, they weren’t Vanessa’s words. She had spoken them, but not spontaneously and not from her heart. He doubted that the reporter with the sexy voice was aware that she’d been duped. Vanessa had been as well programmed as a talking doll with a computer chip in her head. Revealing her inner feelings wouldn’t be seemly. It damn sure wouldn’t be politic.

  Feeling that the walls of the bedroom were closing in on him, Bondurant stalked to the kitchen to get a beer, then went out onto his front porch. Ten feet deep and shaded by an overhang, the porch extended the width of the house. He flung himself into his rush-seated rocking chair and tipped the beer to his mouth. The muscles of his tanned throat worked as he drank half the can in one long swallow.

  He looked like a beer commercial. Pictures of him drinking it bare-chested in these rustic surroundings could have sold millions of cans of any brand-name brew, but he didn’t realize that, or care. He knew he made an impact on people, but he had never bothered to analyze why. Vanity wasn’t in his nature, certainly not during the past year, when weeks would pass without his seeing another living soul. If he drove into Jackson Hole, he might shave. Or he might not.

  He was as he was. Take him or leave him. That was, and always had been, his attitude, and he silently communicated it to everyone he met, which was one of the reasons why he hadn’t blended in well with the Washington scene. He was glad to be out of it. A certain amount of conformity was required of presidential confidants; Gray Bondurant was a nonconformist.

  His blue eyes as hard and cold as a glacier, he stared at the jagged snow-capped peaks of the Tetons. Actually miles away, they looked close enough to touch. Purple mountains’ majesty. In his front yard. Imagine that.

  He crushed the empty beer can as though it were a foil gum wrapper. He wished he could take back the last ten minutes. Why hadn’t he stayed outside a little longer before going in to wash up? What quirk of fate had made him tune his TV to that particular channel at that particular time?

  He wished he’d never seen the interview. Thank you so much, Barrie Travis, whoever the hell you are. For days now he would be haunted by thoughts of David, and Vanessa, and the baby who had died in the White House nursery.

  What galled him most was that the interview might spark a renewed public interest in him. People would begin thinking, supposing, connecting the dots. And then the shit would start flying all over again.

  * * *

  David Merritt paced in front of his desk in the Oval Office. His shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows; his hands were deep in his pockets. Beneath an errant lock of hair, his brow was furrowed. “I’ve never heard of it before. What the hell is it?”

  “It’s called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, named after a German count who got off by inflicting pain on himself.”

  “I thought that was masochism,” Spencer Martin remarked.

  Dr. George Allan shrugged and poured himself another scotch from the President’s private stock. “It’s a little out of my area, and I haven’t thoroughly researched it.”

  “Barrie Travis did.” Merritt made it sound like a rebuke, and the doctor took it as such.

  Looking abashed, he said, “The ‘by proxy’ kicks in if the pain is inflicted on someone else, typically a child.”

  “What’s it got to do with SIDS?” Merritt asked. “Why’d Barrie Travis go into it so deeply?”

  Dr. Allan took a quick sip of his scotch. “Because adults afflicted with the disorder sometimes take it to the extreme. They injure their children, sometimes even kill them, in an attempt to get attention and sympathy for themselves. Some mysterious infant deaths, previously attributed to SIDS, are now being reinvestigated as possible murders.”

  Muttering a curse, Merritt sat down behind his desk. “Why couldn’t that Travis broad have stuck to the subject without bringing all those horror stories into it? Pour me one of those, will you?”

  The doctor did as asked.

  “Thanks.” Merritt thoughtfully sipped his drink for a few moments, then looked over at Spence. He didn’t like what he saw. Spence was in his thinking mode, and the matter under consideration was troublesome.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged Vanessa to grant the interview,” Merritt ventured.

  “I disagree. What possible harm’s been done?” the doctor asked.

  “For God’s sake, George, you better than anyone should know,” Merritt said testily. “This goddamn series has got her bouncing off the walls again.”

  “
People are noticing,” Spence remarked quietly. Merritt gave him a sharp glance that demanded names. “Staff, sir. People have noticed the First Lady’s mood swings, and they’re concerned about her.”

  In another implied rebuke, Merritt turned to the physician.

  “I can’t control her mood swings with medication when she’s drinking as much as she is,” Dr. Allan said.

  Merritt dug his fists into his eye sockets. “Clete’s on my ass about that. I keep reminding him that she’s lost her baby. That, coupled with her condition, how can he expect her not to be a little unstable.”

  “Everybody responds to tragedy differently,” the doctor said, trying to be helpful. “Some people pitch themselves into their work, hoping to exhaust themselves so they don’t have the energy to dwell on it. Some people find God, light candles, and pray. Some—”

  “I get it, I get it,” Merritt snapped. “My father-in-law doesn’t.”

  “I’ll talk to him if you’d like,” Spence offered.

  The President barked a mirthless laugh. “Clete doesn’t like you, Spence. You’re the last person he’d want commenting on Vanessa’s emotional health. She’s not too crazy about you either.” He turned back to the doctor. “But you, George—maybe if you spoke with him, explained…”

  “I’ll call him tomorrow and say that you told me about his concerns. I’ll reassure him that she’s being carefully monitored.”

  “Thanks.” Merritt smiled, as though the matter were closed.

  “It’s not just Clete we’ve got to worry about,” Spence said. “Next year is an election year. This administration needs its First Lady. We need Vanessa, we need her soon, and we need her well adjusted and ready to campaign.” He turned to the doctor. “Can you deliver?”

  “Of course. There’s no alternative.”

  “There’s always an alternative.”

  Spence’s rejoinder moved like a chill wind through the room.

  “Jesus, Spence,” Merritt said. “You sound about as cheerful as a death knell. Forget Mr. Gloom and Doom over there, George,” he said, coming to his feet to shake hands with the physician. “Vanessa’s in your good hands, so I’m not going to worry. And thanks for explaining this Munchausen thing, although it was irrelevant to Robert’s death.”