The Governor's Lady (44 page)

“Don’t I have an obligation to expose it?”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“And what’s another?”

“Possibly the greater good. If these people know you know, that’s like having a nuclear weapon in your arsenal. Pickett, Woodrow, Figgy—none of them can afford a scandal.”

“My God,” she said softly. “I’ve got to have time to think.”

“The clock is ticking. This is too big. People are going to start applying pressure in ways you might never imagine. You’ll have to decide, one way or the other.”

When they were done, she took him upstairs to Mickey and left them alone.

As he came back down, his eyes were red and puffy, but he seemed at peace with himself. “Thank you,” he said.

She put a hand on his arm. “You were good friends. I’m so glad.”

She walked with him to his car.

“You know,” she said as he climbed in and reached for the door, “in there awhile ago when you talked about options, you sounded very un-Wheeler. Like a politician.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Who’d have thought?”

Carter arrived shortly after Wheeler left, surprising her. He looked thin and drawn, and an unmistakable sense of disappointment covered him like a cloak.

“I had to leave,” he said. His voice broke. “Dad … I love him, but I don’t know him anymore.”

She took him in her arms. “I’m so sorry.”

They waited at Mickey’s bedside—Cooper, Allison and Carter, Fate and Estelle. Mickey seemed at ease, gaunt lines and angles of her face smooth now. She seemed almost young.

At mid-evening, Mickey’s eyes suddenly opened. They were wide, staring upward. Cooper reached and took her mother’s hand in both of hers.

“Did we catch any?” Mickey said clearly.

“Yes,” Cooper said, “we sure did.”

Then Mickey closed her eyes, gave a long sigh, and slipped away.

TWENTY-FOUR

Pickett flew home early on the day of Mickey’s funeral. He was big news—poll numbers climbing, more media attention and political buzz. Money was coming in, new staff—clever, hard-nosed people, veterans of presidential wars.

The local stations televised his arrival. Cooper watched from the Executive Mansion. He said nice things about Mickey. He was full of himself—handsome, assured, riding the wave.

His entourage arrived at the house before he did. There were a lot of them now. They took over the downstairs. The few old hands still left spoke to her, but the rest seemed urgently busy with their papers and cell phones.

Cooper was in her small upstairs office when Pickett came. He kissed her, held her for a moment. He sat, but barely, staying on the
edge of the chair, looking as if he might lift off at any moment.

“I’m glad you took time to come,” she said.

“It was the only thing to do. We canceled some stuff, nothing we can’t pick up later. Tallahassee tonight.” He waved an arm. “I hope you don’t mind that bunch downstairs. Wherever they go, they just take over like they own the place.”

“Have they taken you over?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I guess they have. Things are running smoother. We have a message and stay on it.”

“Sounds like you’re being programmed.”

He gave her a wry smile. “Sometimes, it feels that way. But if I don’t stay focused, I just thrash around in the underbrush.”

“Plato never tried to program you.”

He showed a flash of pain. “I hate that happened.”

She met his eyes, unblinking. “Did he really resign like you said, or did you run him off because he’s gay?”

“I didn’t run anybody off,” he said, voice rising. “We had an understanding.”

“You look fit,” she said after a moment, and he did—color high, eyes quick and lively.

“I get a little exercise when I can—yoga, nothing too strenuous. Short naps.”

“And adrenaline.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Congratulations on the new poll.”

“I could feel it in the past few days,” he said. “Gotta keep the momentum. Long way to go.”

It sounded like something he’d say at a news conference. Part of the programming.

His cell phone warbled. He pulled it out of a coat pocket, glanced at the display, answered. “I’m on my way. Keep ’em happy until I get
there.” He put it back in his pocket. “I’ve got a quick thing this morning. Some local people, money. God, it’s always about raising money. I spend three-fourths of my time begging, kissing ass, massaging egos. I’ll be back before it’s time to go to the Capitol.”

Mickey’s body would lie in state from ten until noon in the same spot where she and Cooper had held watch over Cleve years before. The prominent and notorious would file by and murmur a few words. Mickey had known them all, had especially relished the notorious. Then a procession to First Presbyterian for the service. Tomorrow, they would take her back upstate to the place by the pond. But before that, the afternoon she’d wanted—good band, open bar.

Pickett stood and bent to kiss her again, but she turned away, opened a desk drawer, and drew out the manila envelope.

“You need to look at this.”

He gave the envelope a quick glance. “Later.”

“Now,” she said, and her voice stopped him. He gave her an odd look. “Before you take another step, you need to know what’s in here. About that land deal you’re so interested in.”

The color drained from his face. He took the envelope, sat back down, opened it.

Wheeler had been concise, the details boiled down into two remorseless, single-spaced pages. She waited while he read, scanning it quickly, then going through it again slowly, a flush spreading around his collar. His eyes never left the pages until he finished. When he finally looked up, it was not at her, but at some place on the wall behind her.

“That sonofabitch,” he said.

“Which one?”

“Wheeler Kincaid. This is his doing, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s mine.”

And then he looked at her. “Why?”

“Why did I start asking questions, or why did I care?”

“Both.”

“Because,” she said, “it’s rotten and it’s wrong. And I won’t let it happen.”

He took a long breath. “You have to. I owe Jake Harbin. I owe him big-time. You have no idea.”

“Jake’s your problem, Pickett, and you’ll have to deal with him. And then the others. There are seven copies of that report. Jake, Woodrow, Figgy, and Doster are getting theirs about now. Plus yours and mine, and another one locked away.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“That depends. If I see the need, I can give it to Felicia Withers.”

“God, you wouldn’t.”

She didn’t have to say a word.

He took a long time reading through Wheeler’s report again. Then he folded the pages and slipped them into an inside pocket of his jacket.

“All right,” he said. “If you’re gonna hold it over everybody’s head, then nobody can afford to raise a stink, including you, because if you sit on it now and then let it out later, it looks like a cover-up.”

He’s not feeling, he’s calculating. The political ones and zeroes
. When she saw that, she realized how desperately she had been clinging to one last hope there might still be a strand of something left. But there wasn’t. And now that she finally saw, she felt nothing but hollowness where the biggest part of her heart had been.

“I’m willing to take the risk. You and the others aren’t.”

After that, neither of them spoke for a long while. Neither glanced at the other. He walked to the window and stood there, hands clasped behind his back, looking out. When he finally turned back to her, his face was a mask of pain.

“Cooper, I’m sorry.”

She looked closely at him, saw the nakedness, the sadness, the guile stripped away. For the first time in a great, long while, he was genuine.

“I’m truly sorry. For everything.”

“I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry for the part that’s my fault. I didn’t fight when I should have. I never said, ‘We’re in trouble here. We’re losing each other.’ I just went along. I grieve over it, Pickett, and that regret will follow me as long as I live.”

“I love you,” he said. “It may sound preposterous, but I do.”

“I believe you, but you love yourself more. And there’s not room for both of us.”

“Can’t we—”

“I don’t see how.”

His shoulders slumped in resignation. A moment, then: “Will you keep up appearances?”

“Yes.”

He turned to go. “The land thing, I can get through it.”

“You’ll find a way, like you always do.”

“I’m going to be president, Cooper. I’m paying a helluva price for it, but I’m going to win.”

“Maybe so. God help the country.”

People said Cooper did it backwards—the wake after the funeral. But she thought it made sense, getting the ritual niceties out of the way—the lying in state, the procession to the church. Pickett smiled and hand-shook his way through the preliminaries, then sat with her at the service. The others with her on the front row were the people she cared the most about now, the ones who filled her empty spaces—Carter, Allison, Wheeler, Estelle, Nolan, Ezra, Grace. On the row behind were Fate Wilmer and the other pallbearers—people from home, old friends of Cleve and Mickey’s, not a politician among them.

Cooper took the pulpit, gazing out across Mickey Spainhour’s history.

“I have wondered in the past if my mother kept a little black book
in which she wrote down all her political secrets. If she did, she took it with her,” she said to a ripple of nervous laughter. “What she did leave was a legacy. In the days since her passing, I have heard from many of you about her impact on our state. I’ve heard so many say how quietly generous she was to young people who came to her for advice about starting careers in politics and public service.” She looked straight at Woodrow, seated stone-faced with Figgy and a crowd of other elected officials. “Some of you benefited greatly from her advice, her knowledge, her wisdom. But the two people who benefited most were my father and me. She was proud of the way he served, and in the special time we had together at the end of her days, she shared those principles of public service with me: vigor, compassion, integrity, a sense that the people—not those of us elected to represent them, or those who try to buy us off—own state government. I will try to live up to those principles. I will have Cleve and Mickey Spainhour looking over my shoulder, and I owe it to them to try and make them proud.”

Then, while the hearse took Mickey’s body to the funeral home to await the trip home the next morning, nearly everybody trooped to the State Fairgrounds, where a bluegrass band made the air of the Agricultural Exhibit Hall dance with their fiddle and guitars and banjo.
Four
open bars. By then, Pickett had jetted off to Florida. Woodrow and Figgy disappeared. Doster never showed his face.

Cooper kept the security detail outside and told the press people to go home. She wanted to mingle freely with the powerful, once-powerful, wishful, and nostalgic, all of whom came to drink and trade stories about the woman who, in their telling, became even more mythic. Mickey would have loved it.

She kept Carter and Allison close at her side, enjoyed their enthrallment as people talked about Mickey. They had no idea, they kept saying. And she thought more than once,
I wish they had truly known her
.