The Fixer (18 page)

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 living 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.