The Fixer (3 page)

“Do you live here, Bodie?” I asked, darting a sideways glance at Ivy’s “driver.”

He choked on his own spit. “Ahh . . . no,” he said, once he’d recovered. “I don’t live here.” I must have looked skeptical, because he elaborated. “Kid, I worked for your sister for a year and a half before she even invited me up here, and that was only because she broke the plumbing.”

“I did not break the plumbing,” Ivy replied testily. “It broke itself.” She turned back to me. “Your room is through here.”

My room?
I thought. She spoke so casually, I could almost believe that I wasn’t just some unpleasant surprise that fate and Alzheimer’s had dropped in her lap.

“Don’t you mean the guest room?” I asked.

Ivy opened the bedroom door, and I realized that the room was completely empty—no furniture. Nothing.

Not a guest room.

The room was mostly square, with a nook by the window and a ceiling that sloped on either side. The floors were a dark mahogany wood. A series of mirrors doubled as sliding doors to the closet.

“I thought you might like to decorate it yourself.” Ivy stepped into the room. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said she looked almost nervous. “I know it’s a little on the small side, but it’s my favorite room in the house. And you’ve got your own bathroom.”

The room was beautiful, but even thinking that felt disloyal. “Where am I going to sleep?” I asked.

“Wherever you put the bed.” Ivy’s reply was brusque, like she’d caught herself caring and managed to put a cork in it.

“Where am I going to sleep
until I get a bed
?” I asked, checking the impulse to roll my eyes.

“Tell me what kind of bed you want,” Ivy replied, “and Bodie will make sure it gets here tonight. I’ve got some furniture catalogs you can look at.”

I stared at my sister, wondering if she realized just how ridiculous that plan sounded. “I don’t think furniture companies do same-day delivery on a Saturday night,” I said, stating the obvious.

Bodie set my bags against the wall and then leaned back against the doorjamb. “They do,” he told me, “if you’re Ivy Kendrick.”

CHAPTER 5

The next morning, when I woke up in the bed I’d selected more or less randomly from one of Ivy’s catalogs, there was no escaping the physical reminders of where I was. And where I wasn’t. The bed beneath me was too comfortable. The ceiling above wasn’t my ceiling. Everything about this felt wrong.

I thought of Gramps, waking up in Boston and staring at a strange ceiling of his own. Pushing back against the suffocating wave of emotion that washed over me just thinking about it, I got up, got dressed, and pondered the fact that the mere mention of my sister’s name had been enough to make furniture appear within hours of being ordered. Back on the ranch, she’d managed to have herself declared my legal guardian and obtained our grandfather’s power of attorney almost as quickly.

Who
did
that? And more importantly—who could?

I should have known what my sister did for a living. I should have known Ivy. But I didn’t. Making my way out of the bedroom, I found the loft empty, a visceral reminder that it had always
been my sister’s choice not to know me. She was the one who’d left. She was the one who’d stopped answering my calls.

Whoever she was, whatever she did—she’d chosen this life over me.

The muted sound of voices rose up from downstairs. At the top of the spiral staircase, I paused. The female voice was unmistakably Ivy’s. The person she was talking to was male.

“You don’t think that this was, just possibly, a little bit impulsive?” The mystery man’s tone of voice made it quite clear that he thought
little bit
was an understatement.

“Impulsive, Adam?” Ivy shot back. “You’re the one who taught me to trust my instincts.”

“This wasn’t instinct,” the man—
Adam
—countered. “This was guilt, Ivy.”

“I’m not debating this with you.”

“Evidence would suggest you are.”

“Adam”—I could practically hear Ivy clenching her teeth—“if you want me to look into your little friend at the DOJ, you’ll stop talking.
Now
.”

For several seconds, there was silence, followed by a grunt of frustration.

“What do you want me to do, Adam?” my sister asked finally, her voice soft enough now that I had to strain to hear. “Things were bad in Montana. I’m not sending her back, and I am not shipping her off to some boarding school. And don’t give me that look—you were the one who told me to bring her here three years ago!”

Realizing that they were arguing about me turned my body to stone. And what did Ivy mean that
Adam
was the one who had
suggested she invite me to live with her the first time around? Who was this guy? Why had she listened to him?

Why had she changed her mind?

Some memories were like scars. This one had never healed right. Just hearing Ivy talk about it ripped off the scab.

“Three years ago, bringing Tess here might have been the right call.” Adam’s voice was terse. “But things change, Ivy. Three years ago, you were on speaking terms with my father.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and the stair beneath me creaked. The voices below went suddenly quiet. They’d heard me. I had a split second to decide on a course of action. I went with “pretend you weren’t just eavesdropping and walk down the stairs.”

“Ivy?” I called out. “You down there?”

Ivy met me at the bottom of the steps. Her light brown hair was loosely coiffed at the nape of her neck. She wore a formfitting blazer as comfortably as most people wore sweatshirts. Even her jeans looked expensive. If she saw through my innocent act, she didn’t call me on it. “Good,” she said. “You’re up.”

I had an excellent poker face, refined by years of playing actual poker with gruff old men. “I’m up.”

Ivy smiled, gleaming white teeth covering for the fact that she didn’t look happy in the least. “Adam,” she called out, her voice so pleasant my teeth ached from the sugar in her tone. “Come meet Tess.”

I had two seconds to wonder what the man would look like before he rounded the corner. He was a couple of years older than Ivy. If I’d had to guess, I would have put his height at exactly six
feet.
No more. No less.
His posture was perfect; every muscle in his face was tightly controlled. His eyes met mine, and that control wavered. Just for a second, this stranger looked at me the way Ivy had looked at our grandfather when he’d called her by Mom’s name.

The expression was gone from his face in an instant. “Tess,” he said, holding out his right hand, “I’m Adam Keyes. It’s nice to meet you.” His words sounded genuine. He looked like an honest enough guy. But given that
Adam Keyes
thought bringing me here was a mistake, I somehow doubted he was all that pleased to meet me.

I took his hand. “Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”

He waited, like he thought I might elaborate, but I didn’t say anything else.

“Ivy tells me you’ll be starting at Hardwicke tomorrow,” Adam said, trying to make conversation. “You’ll like it there. It’s a great school.” He raised an eyebrow at the expression on my face. “Not a big fan of school, I take it?”

“School’s fine.” Again, he waited, and again, I left it at that.

“But you’d rather be outside,” Adam elaborated on my behalf. I glanced over at Ivy, wondering what she had told him about me—wondering how she even knew that about me, when the two of us were practically strangers.

“My brother was like that,” Adam said, clearing his throat. “IQ off the charts, but his favorite subject was recess.”

“And how’d that work out for him?” I asked, trying to decide whether or not I’d just been insulted.

A small, fleeting smile passed over Adam’s face. “He joined the army the day he graduated from high school.”

Bodie announced his presence by slamming the front door. “Somebody call for pancakes?”

The smile hardened on Adam’s face. Apparently, he wasn’t as fond of my sister’s driver as she was. “I should go,” Adam said stiffly. “I need to stop by the office.”

“On a Sunday?” Ivy pressed.

“Like you’re one to talk,” Adam retorted. “You never stop working.”

“I do now,” Ivy said, folding her hands in front of her body. “Sunday is the day of rest. This is me, resting. I thought Tess and I might go shopping this afternoon, get some clothes for her first day at Hardwicke.”

Shopping? With Ivy?

Bodie let out a bark of laughter at the expression on my face. “Hate to tell you this, princess, but the kid looks like she’d rather rip out her own thumbnails and use them to gouge out her eye than go shopping with you.”

Ivy wasn’t deterred. “She’ll adjust.”

Adam’s phone rang. He excused himself, leaving me staring down my sister, and Bodie watching the two of us with no small amount of amusement.

“Have you heard from the doctors in Boston yet?” I asked Ivy.

“Not yet.” For a second, I thought that might be all she was going to say, but then she elaborated. “They’ll be doing a complete diagnostic assessment in the next few days.”

Days.
I swallowed, unable to keep my mind from latching on to the word.
Days. And weeks. And months. And none of it good.
I forced my expression to stay neutral. I couldn’t let myself go
down that road. I couldn’t think about Gramps. I couldn’t think about the future.

Adam walked back into the room. “Ivy.” His tone was low, serious.

Ivy turned to look at him. “Everything okay?”

Adam glanced at Bodie and me, as if to say,
not around the children
.

“Let me guess,” Bodie drawled, poking at Adam like someone taunting a bear with a stick. “The Pentagon?”

“That wasn’t the Pentagon,” Adam said curtly. “That was my father.”

His father—the one Adam had said Ivy was on good terms with three years ago. The one she presumably was not on good terms with now.

“And?” Ivy prompted, in a tone that told me that there was always an
and
with Adam’s father.

“And,” Adam said, his face devoid of emotion, “he was calling to tell me that Theo Marquette was just rushed to Bethesda General. Heart attack. They’re not sure if he’s going to make it.” He let that sink in for a second before continuing. “They’ve got a lid on it for now, but the press will know in a matter of hours.”

Ivy took a beat to absorb that information, then locked her hand around Adam’s elbow and pulled him to the side of the room for a hushed conversation. In less than a minute, Ivy was on her phone, barking out commands.

Glancing back over her shoulder at me, she lowered her voice. “Sorry, Tess. Something’s come up. When I have an update on Gramps, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, Bodie can take you shopping for anything you need.”

I should have been grateful for the reprieve—but really, it was just a reminder that Ivy could and would ditch me at the drop of a hat. I might not have known what my sister’s job was, or why news of some guy’s heart attack had sent her into hyperdrive, or even why the name
Theo Marquette
sounded vaguely familiar in the first place. But the one thing I
did
know was that Adam was right—Ivy never should have brought me here.

It was only a matter of time before she dropped me for good.

I didn’t say a word when Ivy shut herself in her office, or when she left the house, power walking like the devil was on her heels. I let Bodie make me pancakes. It wasn’t until later, after I’d eaten four of them, that I realized suddenly where I’d heard the name
Theo Marquette
before.

Theodore Marquette was the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

CHAPTER 6

Ivy was still in crisis mode the next morning, but—lucky me—she managed to carve half an hour out of her schedule to take me to school. In the back of my mind, I’d expected the illustrious Hardwicke School to look like Hogwarts. Needless to say, I was severely disappointed. The Upper School—because heaven forbid they call it a
high school
—looked like nothing so much as a granola bar turned on its side.

“The facilities here are just fantastic,” Ivy told me as we walked down a stone path toward the historic home that served as the administrative building. “The Maxwell Art Center has one of the largest auditoriums in the city. The Upper School just added a state-of-the-art robotics lab. And you should see the new gymnasium.”

I gazed out at the nearby playing fields. The wind sifted through my hair, lifting a few strands upward, and for a moment, looking out at the massive stretch of green in front of me, I could almost forget where I was.

“Now or never.” Ivy’s voice brought me back. “And you’re not allowed to say never.”

“You don’t have to come with me,” I told her, hooking my thumbs lazily through my belt loops. “I’m sure you have more important things to do.”

As if to accentuate the point, Ivy’s pocket began to vibrate.

“It can wait,” Ivy told me, but I could practically
see
her fingertips twitching to answer it.

“Go ahead.” I gestured to the phone. “Maybe there’s an update on Justice Marquette’s condition. Or maybe the president has a head cold. You get calls for that, too, right?”

Ivy looked up at the sky. I wondered if she was asking God for patience. “That moment,” she said under her breath, “when you realize that sarcasm is hereditary.”

Before I could formulate a suitable reply, the door to the administrative building opened, and my sister and I were ushered inside.

“Ms. Kendrick.” The headmaster’s assistant had suburban-soccer-mom hair. She was wearing a peach twinset, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was about to offer us lemonade. Or cookies. Or possibly both. “And you must be Theresa.”

“She goes by Tess,” Ivy said, as if I were five years old and incapable of speaking for myself.

“Tess it is, then,” the woman replied gamely. “We were so sorry to hear about your grandfather, dear.”

I couldn’t help feeling gut-punched. I’d spent the past year hiding my grandfather’s condition. Ivy, apparently, had taken out a billboard announcing it to the world.