State Secrets (10 page)

David laughed. It was good to hear that sound, even if it was distant. “A medley of Elton John’s greatest hits would have been nice.”

“I’ll buy them a little piano.”

David’s chuckle seemed to reach across the three
thousand miles that separated them and caress Holly. “Have you forgiven me yet?”

“Quite honestly, no.” It was sad to feel the anger again, the hurt. “Why concern yourself, David? You got your man and all that.”

“It’s my woman I’m concerned with.”

Holly thrust out her chin, determined not to let him touch her with his voice. But she reddened to remember being his woman on that very couch and her body responded with a keen, embarrassing ache in her middle and a warm swelling in her breasts. “There are two college girls living in your old apartment,” she said, and then hated herself for revealing that she’d gone there.

David must have sensed her discomfort, for he mercifully allowed the faux pas to pass. “Did they get the stains out of the rug?” he quipped.

Despite herself Holly laughed. “No. As a matter of fact, they didn’t. They asked me if you had a dog.”

There was a short, uncomfortable silence. “Holly,” David finally ventured, “are you coming to Washington for the inauguration?”

Holly was winding and unwinding the phone cord around her finger. “I hadn’t thought about it,” she lied. The truth was that she had thought of little else; she’d been wondering if David would be at any one of the round of parties that were scheduled.

“Think about it.”

“Why?”

“Dammit, you know why! Because I’ll be in the president’s hip pocket the whole time and I want to see you, that’s why.”

“Some Secret Service agent you are,” challenged Holly hotly, flustered because he’d touched a nerve. “Do you always flirt with women while you’re supposed to be protecting the chief executive?”

David sighed and it was a sound heavy with exasperation and strained patience. “I’ll make time for you, don’t worry.”

“You’re not going to make any kind of time, mister, so don’t
you
worry!”

“Damn it all to hell, Holly, will you pull in your righteous indignation for one minute and listen to me?”

“No!” hissed Holly, remembering the lies, the pretense, the humiliation of finding out that she had been used. “You treated me like a…like a bimbo!”

He laughed. He actually had the gall, the temerity, to laugh!

“Merry Christmas!” Holly shouted and then she slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

After a few minutes spent wailing into a sofa pillow, Holly got hold of herself. She dried her tears and then stood up and went back to the Leggo village, putting it together carefully. When it was done, she made sure that the red wagon was at just the right angle beneath the tree and that the football was displayed to proper advantage.

Then she burrowed on her hands and knees through the scratchy, fragrant branches, to unplug the tree lights and plunge a conscientious finger into the base of the stand to make sure there was enough water.

Later, upstairs, she put on a nightgown, brushed her teeth, washed her face and stumbled off to bed. Regrettably, no sugarplums danced in her head—only memories of David trying to fly his funny-looking model airplane
in the park, David mixing fruitcake batter in the department-store class, David ushering Elaine and Toby through a pressing crowd of reporters and cameramen. David making love to her.

“Nerd!” she whispered, pounding one fist into the pillow. “Get out of my mind!”

David remained in Holly’s mind until she slept; then he haunted her dreams. It seemed she had barely closed her eyes before Toby was bouncing gleefully on her bed, his tightly filled Christmas stocking in hand.

“Look, Mom!” he crowed, holding up the evidence. “Santa Claus came!”

Holly widened her eyes in feigned wonder; it was a game they played every Christmas morning. In truth, Toby had already added Santa to his list of fictional characters, along with the Hardy Boys, Superman and the Tooth Fairy. He was still undecided about the Easter Bunny.

Toby upended the stocking and the booty spilled out over the quilt—an orange, a bottle of bubbles, a deck of trick cards, a candy cane and at least a dozen other things. His delight uplifted Holly as nothing else could have.

“Can we go downstairs and open the presents?” the child demanded once the stocking goodies had all been inspected and mentally categorized in order of usefulness.

Holly pretended to be surprised. “I think we should eat breakfast first,” she said.

Toby caught her hand in his and literally dragged her out of bed, giving her only a second to scramble for her robe and slippers before proceeding out into the hall and down the stairs.

The next half hour was happily absorbed in ripping
away paper and ribbons. Toby received a model car and a Scrabble game from Elaine and Roy, along with gifts from Holly herself, from Madge, from some of his friends at school. Skyler had given him a radio with—he was a true friend, that Skyler—earphones.

“Aren’t you going to open any of your stuff?” he asked, surrounded by loot of every type. The eagerness in his eyes made her choose the package he and Elaine had wrapped in secret and put under the tree with a converse sort of ceremony.

“This one has been driving me crazy,” she confessed, taking sidelong notes of the little boy’s quick, delighted grin. She opened the parcel to find a book she had been longing to read tucked inside. And her pleasure was real.

After that, Holly uncovered a frying pan from Skyler—that made her smile—and a bottle of her favorite cologne from Elaine and Roy. There were other things, too, sent by her mother and faraway friends, but nothing, she assured the little boy, was quite as wonderful as the book he had chosen for her.

Toby was frowning, peering into the depths of the tree. “What’s those things?” he asked.

“What things?” Holly asked, honestly puzzled.

“In there. There’s two presents in there, in the branches!”

Holly smiled, thinking that Elaine must have hidden away an extra surprise or two for Toby. She liked to do things like that. “Guess you’d better investigate,” she said.

Toby drew out a sizable box—Holly couldn’t imagine how she had missed seeing it—and then a smaller one. Both were wrapped in gold foil.

“The big one’s mine!” Toby crowed after reading the
tag. He was already tearing at the wrapping as he extended the other present to a confused Holly.

She looked down at the tag on her own gift and her heart stopped, then started again with an aching lurch. “Love, David,” was written upon it in a typically firm hand.

Trembling just a little, Holly did not open her gift but, instead, watched Toby rip away a second layer of paper to reveal a plain box. Inside was a small robot, complete with hand-controls and a set of batteries.

Toby lifted round, shining eyes to Holly’s face. “Who’s this from?” he whispered, awed. It was obvious that he was considering shifting Santa Claus from the fiction list to the one peopled by Holly and his teachers and everyone else he could see and touch.

“From David, I think,” Holly said, and thank heaven, Toby was too enthralled with the gift to notice the tremor in his aunt’s voice.

“Wow,” he said, dragging the word out for that emphasis peculiar to seven-year-old boys.

Holly’s eyes were stinging a bit, and she averted her face for a moment before opening her own present with numb, awkward fingers. Inside was a small, elegant velvet box, and inside that was the most beautiful diamond engagement ring she had ever seen. Still trembling, Holly opened the note that had been rolled up and slipped through the ring itself.
“Marry me or I’ll jump off the Washington Monument. Subtly, David.”

Holly couldn’t help it. She laughed. She bit her lower lip to stop herself and that didn’t help so she laughed again. Tears were streaking down her cheeks and Toby was looking at her in total confusion.

“What’s-a-matter, Mom?” he asked, flushed with concern.

Holly closed the ring box firmly. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing is the matter.”

“Was it a joke present?” Toby wanted to know, and his manner said that he wouldn’t consider that untoward.

“Yes,” Holly managed to say, taking the gift, box, wrapping paper and all, to the mantelpiece, where she tucked it behind a picture of her grandmother. Out of sight, out of mind, she told herself without much conviction.

All through that hectic day, all through the hurried breakfast, all through the drive to Elaine and Roy’s apartment, all through Christmas dinner and the rousing trivia game that followed, Holly’s mind and heart kept straying back to that ring and all it meant.

Of course, she couldn’t marry David Goddard, as intriguing as the possibility was—not after what he had done. But she would take a certain pleasure in throwing that diamond in his face when she went to Washington next month to attend Howard’s inauguration.

E
laine was fairly dancing with excitement, her eyes bright and wide. She hugged Holly unreservedly, as other passengers pressed past them to board the airplane, and enjoined, “You have the best time anybody has ever had at an inauguration, Holly Llewellyn!”

Holly felt rueful and wary—perhaps it was a mistake to go to Washington after all—but she did return Elaine’s hug. “Take care of Toby,” she said.

“You know I will,” Elaine scolded good-naturedly.

Holly wished she could back out at this late date but resigned herself to the fact that she couldn’t. She squared her shoulders, drew a deep breath and entered the covered passageway leading to the airplane. She looked back once, wavering, but Elaine made a little shooing motion with her hands and winked encouragingly.

The flight was uneventful. Holly had a brief stopover in Denver, and then it was on to Washington, where a car and driver were waiting to take her to the White House—was this really happening to her? As a relative of Howard’s—good heavens, she barely remembered him—Holly was to be accommodated in style at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Escorted by a grim-looking Secret Service agent who would obviously rather not have been bothered, Holly was quickly shuffled into a limo with tinted windows and driven to the most august address in the United States.

On the way, she tried to make conversation with the agent who sat in the back with her. A little chit-chat, she thought, might ease her nervousness about what was to come. “Jimmy Carter came to Spokane once,” she ventured, “to speak at Riverfront Park. He rode past in a car like this one, with darkened windows, and I think he smiled at me because I saw a flash of teeth.”

The chauffeur chuckled to himself, though his eyes were fixed on the crazy Washington traffic. But the Secret Service man only reacted with a look that questioned her sanity. She supposed that Jimmy Carter and his teeth were old news to this guy, but he could have been a little friendlier all the same. Holly resisted an urge to tap on his forehead with her knuckles and ask if there was anybody in there.

They entered the White House grounds through a back gate, snow crunching beneath the limo’s tires as it came to a stop at a rear door. Holly drew in her breath and let it out as a long, Toby-like, “Wow.”

The Secret Service agent cleared his throat, got out of the car and extended a hand to Holly. Reluctantly, she accepted it. This character had no personality at all, it seemed. He was certainly nothing like David.

Holly left the limo with as much dignity as she could summon. Perhaps David would behave in just this manner when he was on duty; for better or worse, she was about to find out.

In a small anteroom—Holly had no way of knowing what part of this fabled mansion they were in—another agent appeared. Like the first one, he wore a trim three-piece suit, a no-nonsense expression and a very small earphone that probably connected him to all sorts of small in-house intrigues.

Holly was more nervous than ever, and that made her chatter again. “George Washington actually slept here,” she muttered, wide-eyed.

The agents exchanged a long-suffering look, probably thinking how unfortunate it was that the president-to-be had to have such a bumpkin for a cousin. “This way, Madam,” one of them said, and Holly found herself being propelled through a series of rooms and up a rear staircase.

“Do you know David Goddard?” Holly tried again. Maybe these guys were at least semi-human.

The agents traded another look. Apparently the answer to that question was a state secret, for neither of them bothered to respond.

They were now on the floor where the first family resided. Holly decided charitably that that accounted for the reticence of the two men escorting her. She was deposited in a lovely room decorated all in blue. To her amazement, her baggage had already been brought up, and a small, plump woman in a maid’s uniform was busy taking Holly’s new evening gowns from the garment bag and hanging them carefully in the closet.

Here, perhaps, was a human being, though after the Secret Service agents, Holly didn’t want to make any rash judgment.

“Hello,” she ventured.

The maid, an elderly woman with a look of long service about her, smiled warmly. “Hello, Ms. Llewellyn. And welcome to Washington.”

“Thank you,” Holly said with a sigh of relief.

“I’m Mrs. Tallington, and I’ll be helping you while you’re with us. The first lady asked me to tell you that she will be in to greet you shortly.”

So, Holly thought, Howard’s Maggie is already referred to by that lofty title, even though the swearing-in isn’t until tomorrow. “Have you worked here for a long time?” she asked as Mrs. Tallington examined Holly’s blue chiffon, made a cluck-clucking sound and shook her gray head.

“Since JFK and Jackie,” came the brisk answer. “They come and they go. Some are happier to leave than to arrive, I might add. This gown will need pressing.”

Holly chuckled and relaxed enough to set her purse on a mahogany dresser and remove her winter coat. “I was afraid everyone here would be like those men who brought me upstairs.”

A mischievous light twinkled in Mrs. Tallington’s bright blue eyes. Her snow-white hair made a little knot on the top of her head, just visible through the gauzy fabric of her cap. “Don’t speak ill of those who are probably standing right outside your door,” she warned good-naturedly.

Drawing in a quick breath, Holly went to the door, opened it a crack and peered out. The two agents looked back at her impassively, and she closed the door again with a resolute click.

Mrs. Tallington was chuckling. “A little unnerving, isn’t it? But they’re there to guard you; they mean you
no harm. Just make yourself comfortable and pretend they’re not around.”

Holly had never been “guarded” before, and she was nonplussed. Once again she had misgivings about the wisdom of coming here, to this place where she didn’t belong, where everything was so formal and intimidating.

“I’d like to see the room where Mr. Lincoln slept,” she said to distract herself.

Mrs. Tallington nodded, her eyes twinkling again, toward a huge painting of the Great Emancipator himself. “You’re in it,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Some say they’ve seen Abe sitting on the edge of that very bed, taking off his shoes.”

Holly shuddered despite her pleasant surprise at finding herself in a room once occupied by one of the greatest men in history. She certainly hoped that Mr. Lincoln would not deign to sit upon the side of the bed while she was in it—that would be most disconcerting.

There was a slight ballyhoo outside and then a knock at the door. Before Holly could issue any sort of invitation, Maggie swept into the room, all campaign-trail smiles, her glistening blond hair artfully coiffed, her dress a designer original.

“Holly, dear! How marvelous to see you!”

Holly stiffened, then worked up a smile. After all, this was Lincoln’s bedroom and this was the first lady of the land. Such things had to be accorded due respect. “Hello, Maggie,” she said.

Maggie bypassed Holly’s cheek with a distant-cousin-by-marriage kiss. “Howard and I are so pleased that you could come!”

Mrs. Tallington, the wrinkled blue chiffon evening gown draped over one capable arm, ducked out of the room without a word. Holly watched her go, using the time to overcome her secret ire over what Howard and his suspicions had put her through.

The first lady drew back her guest’s attention with a trilling, musical laugh. “Howard will apologize himself, of course,” she said, “but I did want to tell you that we’re both very sorry over what happened to poor Craig.”

Holly was momentarily annoyed. They were very sorry. Did they think their third cousin from Spokane had come down in the last snowstorm? They had believed, actually believed, that Holly could turn on her own country. “Thank you,” she forced herself to say.

Maggie dragged discerning eyes over Holly’s rumpled woolen suit. “You’ll want to change before meeting with the president, of course.”

Which president? Holly wanted to ask, but she bit the perverse inclination back. The outgoing administration was probably out-gone anyway. “Of course,” she answered.

Maggie smiled her blinding, trust-my-husband smile. “Wonderful. When you’re ready, just tap at the door and the men stationed outside will see you to the Oval Office.”

The Oval Office. Holly’s knees weakened and she hoped she didn’t sway visibly. Me? she thought. In the Oval Office?

Maggie noted with a glossy smile that her guest was properly overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all. With a cheery word of farewell, she swept out.

Holly wobbled her way into the bathroom that must
have been added on sometime after Mr. Lincoln’s demise, undressed and ran a hot bath. Half an hour later, she was presentable again, her hair neatly brushed, her makeup fresh. Wearing an expensive suit of beige and emerald, she drew a deep breath and tapped at the door, as instructed.

It opened to give Holly Llewellyn the shock of her life. David Goddard was smiling down into her face. “That outfit makes you look like a Midwestern schoolmarm,” he muttered out of one side of his mouth.

Holly grappled inwardly for composure, then lifted her chin and retorted, “If it was good enough for
The Today Show
, buddy, it’s good enough for Howard.”

For a moment, before the intangible veil of officialdom fell over his eyes, making them expressionless, David allowed them to transmit a welcome that made Holly pinken slightly.

She was led to the Oval Office itself. There were Marines guarding the double doors, and beyond that point, there was a spacious outer office, populated by secretaries and advisors of various stations. One of them pressed a button on an intercom and said, “Mr. President, Ms. Llewellyn has arrived.”

It was unsettling, the way everyone around there seemed to know Holly’s name without her telling them. Did they know how much she owed on her charge cards and what kind of hairspray she used and whether or not her library books were overdue, too?

She flung one scathing, sidelong look at David, remembering just how personal a presidentially ordered investigation could get. “Rat,” she whispered, and one side of David’s firm mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.

“Send her in, send her in!” boomed Howard’s jovial voice over the intercom.

Holly was escorted right to the doors—what did they think she was going to do? Bolt and run? Make a stirring speech in favor of Osama bin Laden?

“Let go of me!” she hissed.

Both agents immediately released their hold on her elbows. Though his face was completely expressionless, David’s mouth twitched again and something danced in the blue depths of his eyes. “Give ’em hell, Llewellyn,” he said, to the other agent’s obvious distress.

And then Holly was inside that office of offices, alone except for Howard, and she couldn’t hide her reaction to it all. After all, this was a place where dramatic decisions had been made. John F. Kennedy had discussed the Cuban missile crisis with Bobby. FDR had planned the New Deal. Abe Lincoln had listened to the ominous beat of Confederate drums from just across the Potomac….

“Wow,” she said.

Howard, a genteel-looking, gray-haired man with a powerful build and a winning smile, stood up in gentlemanly deference. “My sentiments exactly,” he said. “Actually, I’m just getting the feel of the place myself. This isn’t my office yet.”

Holly liked Howard for saying that. “Your predecessor—?”

“He’s around somewhere,” Howard said. “We both want the transition to go as smoothly as possible and the president has been decent about this whole thing.”

Howard gestured toward a long, comfortable-looking
sofa, only one of several in the massive, overwhelmingly significant room, and Holly sat down gratefully with a smile.

But her smile faded as she considered the tremendous burdens that were about to be placed on this man’s sturdy shoulders.

Howard had apparently guessed what she was thinking. “I’ll do my best,” he promised quietly and with conviction.

Holly’s respect for the man deepened. “Waking up every morning, being responsible for much of the free world—I don’t think I could do that.”

The future president chuckled. “I can’t make a decent wonton, so I guess we’re even.” He paused and cleared his throat in an I’m-about-to-say-something-momentous way. “Holly, Maggie and I are both very sorry about that investigation and the trouble it must have caused you.”

Maggie’s apology had been somewhat varnished and breezy, in Holly’s opinion, but Howard’s came across as the real thing. “You certainly had reason to doubt Craig,” she admitted with dignity, “and I suppose you had no way of knowing that I would never take part in such a thing.”

Howard watched her with kindly, rather tired eyes. “Thank you, Holly.”

Holly bolted to her feet, conscious of the drains on this man’s time and energy. She didn’t want to be one of them; he had important things to do. “I’d better go and let you get back to your work. Do you think I could look around a bit?” She paused and chuckled nervously. “It isn’t every day that a cookbook author from Spokane finds herself in the White House, you know.”

“Nor a lawyer from Oregon,” quipped Howard, referring, of course, to himself.

Holly cocked her head toward the sturdy double doors and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Do those two goons have to be on my heels the whole time?” It felt good to refer to David Goddard as a “goon,” unsuitable as the word might be for such a smooth operator.

Howard laughed his loud, ingenuous laugh. “I’m afraid so, Holly. They go with the territory.”

“You mean, the whole time I’m in Washington—”

“The whole time you’re in Washington,” confirmed Howard with resignation.

Holly shook her head in irritated wonder and laid her hand on a knob touched by some of the greatest—but she wasn’t going to ride that mental train again. Presidents, as had just been brought home to her, were as human as anybody else. Still, it was exhilarating to venture among such illustrious ghosts.

David was waiting, sans his partner, just beyond the doors. “I’d like a tour, please,” she said, delighting in the brief flicker of irritation that moved in his eyes and tightened his splendid jawline a little.