First Daughter (8 page)

"I'll do my best," Jack said. "I'm honored you asked for me, sir."

"In all honesty, who better, Jack?"

"I appreciate that. Sir, in my opinion the first order of business is to create a plausible cover story." Jack's gaze swung to the woman by the window, who was holding herself together by a supreme force of will. He recalled Sharon in a similar pose, as Emma's coffin was slowly lowered into the ground. He'd heard a whispering then, just as he'd heard in the main building. Sharon said it was the wind in the treetops. He'd believed her, then.

He inclined his head slightly. "Mrs. Carson."

Hearing her name, she started, summoned back into this time, this place. She seemed thin, as if she'd lost her taste for food. For a moment
she stared bleakly into Jack's face; then she came away from the window, stood in front of him.

"Ma'am, do your parents still have that olive farm in Umbria?"

"Why, yes, they do."

He looked at Edward Carson. "It seems to me that would be a good place for Alli to be 'spending the holidays,' don't you think?"

"Why, yes, I do." The president-elect put his cell phone to his ear. "I'll have my press secretary get right on it."

Lyn Carson moved toward Jack. "Now I know what you must have gone through, Mr. McClure. Your daughter . . ." She faltered, tears gleaming at the corners of her eyes. She bit her lip, seemed to be mentally counting to ten. When she had herself under control, she said, "You must miss Emma terribly."

"Yes, ma'am, I do."

Finished with his call, the president-elect signaled to his wife and she stepped away, turned her back on them to once again contemplate the world outside, forever changed.

"Jack, I have something to tell you. You've been briefed, no doubt, given the theories, the evidence, et cetera."

"About E-Two. Yes, sir."

"What do you think?"

"I think there's a hidden agenda. E-Two may be a prime suspect, but I don't think it should be the only suspect."

Lyn Carson turned back into the room. Her lips were half-parted, as if she was about to add something, but at a curt shake of her husband's head, she kept her own counsel.

When he spoke again, it was in the same tone, Jack imagined, with which he held sway over backroom caucuses—hushed and conspiratorial. "What's important, Jack, is that you not leap to judgment like these political hacks. I want you to follow your own instinct, develop your own leads. That's why I expended a great deal of political capital to have you reassigned."

Lyn Carson held out her hand. It was very light, very cold, no more than the hollow-boned wing of a bird, but through it pulsed the iron determination of a parent. The terrible agony in her eyes he recognized as his own.

"I'm so awfully sorry."

Her words had a double meaning, and he knew it. She was talking about both Emma and Alli.

"Bring our daughter back to us."

"I'll return her to you." When he squeezed her hand, the bones felt as if they truly were hollow. "I promise."

Tears overflowed from Lyn Carson's eyes, fell one by one at her feet.

Y
OU SHOULDN'T
have promised," Nina said. "You can't guarantee you'll find Alli, let alone bring her back."

Jack found it interesting and enlightening that Nina Miller had been privy to his conversation with the Carsons. Garner's deliberate exclusion was an all-too-graphic example of the schism within the task force, behind which, of course, was the disagreement between the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party currently in power and the moderate wing about to take that power away from them. It was no surprise that a political agenda governed the task force. This was precisely what Bennett had warned him about, and he knew there was no good news to be had here.

"What I can guarantee is hope," Jack said shortly. "Hope is her food and drink. Only hope will keep her going through the darkest hours."

"Hope dangles people from a slender thread," Nina said. "It's patently unfair."

They had been striding down the hallway. Now Jack stopped, turned to her. "Do you know anything about darkest hours?"

Nina stood staring at him. She didn't answer, because apparently she had nothing to say.

"I've had my darkest hours," Jack continued. "And now the Carsons are having theirs."

He stood very still, but there was so much energy coming off him that Nina, as if slapped in the face, took an involuntary step back.

His eyes glittered. "I
will
bring Alli back, Nina. You can make book on it."

J
ACK LED
her to the right, skirting the shed. There was a swath of lawn, rather narrow by the standards of the rest of the property, beyond which lay a thick stand of fluffy pines and large, gnarled, very old oaks. By the time they reached the trees, Jack had determined that Nina had low-slung hips and a walk that, defying the odds, was distinctly sensual.

"I want you to know . . ." Nina stumbled over a stone as well as her words.

"What?"

"I've . . . had my darkest hours, too."

Jack, navigating through the rooty trees, said nothing.

"When I was a kid." Nina picked her way under tree branches, over exposed roots, the knuckles of angry fists. "My older brother . . . he molested me. . . ."

Jack stopped, turned back to regard her. He was startled at her admission, which couldn't have been easy to make. But then again, it was often easier to confess to a stranger than to someone you knew.

"And when I fought back, he beat me. He said I needed to be punished."

Jack felt a ping, like the ricochet of a steel ball bounding from bumper to bumper in his own shameful pinball machine. "You know that's not true."

Nina's face was pinched, as if she wanted to make the past disappear.
"He's married, got two kids. Now he's got a whole new family to dominate. How I hate him. I can't stop." She made a little sound in the back of her throat that was either a laugh or a sob. "My parents loved God, they believed in his loving kindness. How wrong were they?"

"When we were growing up," Jack said, "parents were unconscious when it came to their effect on their kids."

Nina paused for a moment, considering. "Even if you're right, it doesn't make what they did better, does it?"

They resumed their trek through the stand of weeping hemlocks and pin oaks. He heard the rustle of the wind through brittle branches, the hiss of faraway traffic, the call of a winter bird. The melancholy sounds of winter.

At length, Nina said, "Where are we going?"

"There's a secret path." Jack pointed ahead. "Well, it isn't a secret to the juniors and seniors, but to the adults . . ."

They had reached the far side of the tree-line. He took three or four steps to his left, moved some brush away, revealing a narrow, well-trod earthen path through brambly underbrush and the occasional evil-looking hemlock.

"Except you."

He nodded. "Except me."

Nina followed him along the twisting path, at times half bent over in order to avoid shaggy low-hanging branches. Their shoes made dry, crunching sounds, as if they were walking over mounds of dead beetles. The wind, late for an appointment, hurried through the hemlocks. Grim bull briars and brambles pulled at them.

"With all the manicured lawn, why hasn't the school pulled this stuff out?"

"Natural barbed wire," Jack said.

"What do the kids do in here?" With a hard tug, Nina pulled her coat free of a tenacious bramble. "Drugs and sex, I expect."

"I have no doubt that drugs and sex are on the students' minds," Jack said, "but so is escape."

Nina frowned. "Why escape from the lap of luxury?"

"Well, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it?"

"Who told you about it? Emma?"

Jack's laugh held a bitter edge. "Emma never told me anything." Like so much in life, this was a matter of trust. Edward Carson certainly trusted Nina, and she had bravely trusted him with her secret, and that had touched him in a way she could never imagine. "It was Alli. She was worried about Emma."

"Worried? About what?"

"She never said. I got the impression there was only so much she was prepared to tell me. But she did say that several times when Emma thought she was asleep, she crept out of the room. Alli said the one time she followed her, she saw her vanish down this path."

"Did she go after Emma?"

"She didn't say."

"Didn't you ask?"

"I take it you don't have a teenager. I went after Emma myself."

"And what happened?"

They had reached the high brick wall that surrounded the property. It was guarded on this side by a double hedge: low, sheared boxwood in front of tall privet. Jack was already behind the boxwood, had found the slight gap in the stately privet. Pushing aside the sturdy branches, he vanished into the thicket.

When Nina tried to follow him, she found the privet was so thick, she was forced to leave her coat behind, press herself bodily into what she was sure had a moment before been a gap. Shouldering her way through, she found herself on the other side, almost flush up against the brick wall. Jack was on his haunches, hands pulling at the bricks. To Nina's astonishment, they came away easily until he had a pile of approximately twenty, which left a hole in the
wall large enough for a human being of small to normal size to wriggle through.

"I followed her through here."

Crouching down, Nina saw a wedge of lawn, the bole of a tree, and beyond, a field at the end of which were stands of oaks, birches, and mountain laurels.

"I saw her meet someone; I couldn't tell who, it was just a shadow standing beneath that tree," Jack said. "Either she heard a noise or some instinct caused her to look back. She saw me, she came after me, pushed me back to this side, snarling like an animal." Jack sat back on his haunches, his eyes far away. "We had a real knock-down, drag-out shouting match. She accused me of spying on her, which was, of course, the truth. I told her I wouldn't have had to spy on her if she wasn't sneaking around in the dead of night. That was a mistake. She blew up, said what she did was no business of mine, said she hated my guts, said some things I don't think she really meant, at least I hope not."

Nina was kind enough not to look at him directly. "You never found out?"

Jack dived through the hole in the wall.

O
N HANDS
and knees they picked their way through. There was about the hole the stink of the grave, a sickly-sweet scent that reminded Jack of the time when he was a kid and the neighbor's black cat got stuck inside the wall of his room and died there, giving off the stench of slow decay. The neighbor, an old woman married to a male harem of feral cats, wanted the black one back, to bury it properly beneath her fig tree, but Jack's father refused. "It's good for the boy to smell death, to understand it, to know it's real," he explained to her papery face and sour breath. "He needs to know that his life isn't infinite, that death will come for him, like it does for everyone, one day."

In starless night, he lay in rageful silence, listening to the sound
of his own ragged heart as he breathed in the stench that penetrated to the pit of his stomach until, unable to keep to inaction, he ran across the hall, there to violently lose his supper in the low porcelain bowl. In the adjacent room, his parents made love aggressively, raucous as sailors on shore leave, with no thought that they were not alone.

J
ACK AND
Nina stood close together on the other side. Jack wondered whether Nina was thinking the same thing he was:
Is this how Alli's abductors smuggled her out of the school?
Over Nina's right shoulder, the hills rolled on, leading eventually to the Georgetown Pike.

Saigon Road, the site of Emma's crash, lay just five miles west down the Pike. He felt a stirring, as if a cold wind were blowing on the back of his neck. A prickling of his scalp. Was Emma here in some form or other? Was such a thing possible? In the course of his work, he'd come across a psychic who believed that spirits of the dead who had unfinished business couldn't cross over into the light or the dark until that business was finished. These thoughts sent his mind racing back to when Emma was alive.

At Sharon's fierce insistence, Emma had applied to Langley Fields. Jack saw no need for his daughter to be sequestered in what seemed like a four-year straitjacket, but Sharon had prevailed. The education was exceptional, she argued, and Emma would be exposed to a wide variety of students from all over the world. All Jack saw was the pretension of the consumerati: Mercedes, Bentleys, and tricked-out Hummers disgorging siliconed mothers, cell phones blaring Britney Spears, yapping dogs the size of New York City rats, the flash of platinum Amex cards held aloft. He had been obliged to take out a second mortgage on their house in order to pay the exorbitant tuition. He fervently wished he'd fought harder, insisted that she attend Georgetown or even George Washington, the other colleges to which she'd wanted to go, but Sharon had dug in her heels, wouldn't listen to either him or
Emma. She wanted her daughter to have the kind of education she herself had always dreamed of getting, but never had.

Nina said, "I feel I should warn you that if Hugh Garner got wind of our roles in his task force, he'd find some way to discredit us with the powers that be, so that even the president-elect couldn't save us. That's what a political animal would do."

"I don't concern myself with politics," Jack said, his mind still engaged by Emma.

"I'm with you on that, but you'd better give it some attention now." Without her coat Nina shivered against the advancing chill of evening. "Hugh Garner is a political animal, par excellence."

Jack took off his coat, but before he had a chance to sling it across her shoulders, Nina shook her head.

"Alli's life is beyond adversarial parties, beyond politics altogether."

"I suppose it would be," Nina said dryly, "in another universe."

Nina looked around at the thick stand of old oaks, gnarled into fantastic shapes, the sly shadows moving in and out beneath the cathedraled branches. "This place reminds me of something. I almost expect the devil to come bounding through the trees."