The List (33 page)

“Not really,” she replied with her head straight and stern. “Honestly, I don’t remember
that much about living here. It feels like a long time ago. Washington, Virginia,
the whole area was never for me. I wasn’t really happy until I went to New York.”

“Payton!” I exclaimed. “You’re not a hundred years old. Don’t tell me that all memories
of your childhood are gone. You lived here fourteen years ago.”

She sighed and gave the black Arabian she was walking a tug. “I just hate that we
were raised in the country when there was such an exciting city nearby. Seems like
such a waste. I mean, relatively exciting. It’s not all that exciting. But it seemed
exciting in high school.”

“We went to Washington all the time. It’s only an hour away. Mom worked there,” I
pointed out. My memories of childhood were still crystal clear.

“I just remember my first week at Columbia, feeling very out of place. I was thrilled
to be in New York, but I felt like a hillbilly compared to those slick Manhattanites,”
she said.

“Well, I still feel very out of place here most of the time,” I replied unsympathetically.

“Mom said you hate your job,” said Payton, her face still expressionless. “She said
you detest it, and that you have to start at
five and write something every hour, and that you want to drink motor oil at lunch
and just off yourself, but that she won’t help you because you got yourself into this
mess in the first place because you wanted a job with more substance.”

My mother thought I wanted to off myself? Yet didn’t have plans to intervene? She
clearly needed to consult that Spock guide to parenting for a little refresher course.

“It’s not that bad,” I said, dragging my boots through the grass. “Just all-consuming.
The hours are so hard. I don’t have any time for life. And the pressure can be intense.
I always feel like if I get one fact wrong, one tiny thing, my career will be over.
And when you’re going so fast and resting so little, the odds of slipping are high.
But there are good things, too. The access. Working with smart people. And just proving
to yourself that you can do it. Plus, I think people are starting to like me more
there. The important people.”

“Yeah, well, I could probably eat a live snake if I had to, but you don’t see me brunching
on a cobra, do you. Some things aren’t worth proving.”

Ignoring her words, I looked out into the distance of the Blue Ridge Mountains and
saw lights flashing in the field.

“Look! Lightning bugs. They’re one of my favorite things about summer,” I announced.

“I’m aware of your childish affection for the luminescent pests,” said Payton, deadpan.
She sped up to untack her horse and headed into the house to steam off her grit.

Later that night, lounging in our rambling childhood home, I made us iced teas and
Payton tried to give me an outsider’s perspective on the latest details I had unearthed
at George Mason.

“Well, there’s no way that girl is getting in Senator Porno’s pants all for the cause
of immigration reform,” Payton concluded.

Our parents had gone into D.C. to catch the Bolshoi Ballet’s
much-heralded version of
Spartacus,
and we had taken over their room like ten-year-olds, eating takeout on their bed
while
All About Eve
played on the TV in front of us.

“And I don’t understand why Sandro told you all that stuff about his past, about being
from Mexico and marrying Olivia while still in school. If he was in cahoots with her
to change that old man’s votes, he wouldn’t be talking about his below-the-border
pedigree. He would be lying. And I don’t think he knows his wife is having an affair,
either. He wouldn’t be serving as her henchman, delivering threats to you in the front
seat of your car if he knew about Stanton.”

“Yeah, I agree. I realized after I kissed him that there was no way he knew about
Stanton. I don’t think he would’ve pushed me off like that if he did.”

Payton smiled and called me a mouth rapist before turning up the volume on the TV
with our parents’ space station remote control. “You can’t get all soft and lovestruck
and think about Sandro’s reaction,” she added, handing me a box of General Tso’s chicken.
“What matters is that Stanton and Olivia got together, period. Your only story is
the affair. And it’s a big one.”

“Yeah,” I confirmed, shoving a broccoli floret down my throat, causing me to start
choking. Payton did not move to help me. She just sat there in her head-to-toe Lululemon
athletic wear, looking like a yoga advertisement.

After I flung my body over hers to reach the water and save my own life, I clarified,
“And I do have photos. Pretty incredible photos.”

“Show me,” demanded Payton. “I can’t believe I haven’t asked until now.”

I made her leave our parents’ comfortable room and follow me out of the house, through
the wet grass to the barn, where we flopped on my bed and I flicked on my computer.
After entering
my password, which was typed in three languages, I showed her what I had. Photo after
photo of skin and compromising positions. I had them date and time stamped; I had
raw files, huge, duplicable files.

“How have you not run this story already?” asked Payton when she was done scrolling
through the images. “You should have already gone to print with this. There could
be other people on to her. Who cares about the theories. Print the pictures and say
it’s just an affair.”

“But it’s not just an affair!” I said, pulling up the picture of Olivia and Stanton
holding each other by the window. “Look at this! There’s something behind this.”

“You don’t have time to figure it out,” said Payton. “You’re getting fired in twenty-five
days.”

“I know,” I said, feeling time start to crunch in around me. “At first I waited because
part of me still felt like it was none of my business. It’s just an affair, like any
other affair. They weren’t jeopardizing national security or anything like that.”

“And now you’ve stomped all over your pathetic ideals?”

“No,” I said. “I just think there’s a bigger story here, even if Sandro’s not involved.
Before I knew that Olivia was married, I thought she might be risking her career for
lust, or even love. But now I think she has to be trying to sway him on something.
Immigration is his big issue, but since Sandro doesn’t seem to know anything about
it, it could be something with Stanton’s family’s company.”

“But you haven’t confirmed that the young Olivia in Arizona is Olivia Campo,” Payton
reminded me.

“I know. I even looked up the name Olivia online, and out of twenty-five thousand
baby names, it’s ranked as the fourth most popular for girls. That’s pretty damn high.
Adrienne was six hundred and ninety-six.”

Payton rolled her ice-blue eyes at me, stretched down on my bed like a cat, and collapsed
into child’s pose. With her head smushed into my duvet, she said, “You have to go
to print soon. You could lose all your work if you don’t. There are curious reporters
all over this town. You just have to be the one to press ‘go’ first.”

She turned onto her back and put her head on my needlepoint pillow, letting her hair
tumble around her like a halo. “Besides, you know how these things work, Addy. Once
the story gets published, sources will creep out. People will be jumping to talk to
you and then all the dirty details will follow. But the reporter who broke the story
will forever be associated with it, even if they’re not publishing all the intimate
details. Think about Watergate. Or the Abu Ghraib scandal. That’s how it works.”

It was true that someone at Goodstone could be on to them. Or even Stanton’s wife.
But political spouses turned a blind eye all the time, and I did still believe I was
the only reporter who knew.

“Hand me the landline. I have to call Buck. He doesn’t know where I am,” said Payton,
folding herself back into a yoga posture.

“What do you mean he doesn’t know where you are,” I said, reaching for her head. I
should have known better: she successfully bit my hand. She was like a lion cub. They
look so cute, but really they want to suck out your eyeballs.

“I told him I was going north for a couple days, but I think he interpreted that as
Uruguay, not Virginia. Hand me the phone, will you, Fatty Addy?”

“Here,” I said, throwing the phone at her back. I fluffed up the European sham under
my head and propped myself onto my left side. I listened as she called Buck, purring
into the receiver like an expat Eva Perón. She should give global lessons on how to
keep your man in check.

“Buck says hi,” said Payton when she hung up. “He told me to be nice to you.”

“Sage advice.”

“Oh shut up. I’m nicer to you than anyone else in my life. I never see you, so it’s
pretty easy.”

I looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was already past eleven, and I had to
turn out a solid performance on Monday just in case Olivia had already told Upton
to fire me for my sluttish behavior. Sandro was right when he said that they would
pick her over me. They would pick her over almost anyone else at the
List
.

“Payton, I have to go to sleep,” I declared, motioning for her and her fat-free body
to leave my bed.

She stood up slowly and looked at the computer screen. The photo of Olivia with the
senator’s arms around her at the window was still enlarged in Photoshop.

“We should spend the weekend in Arizona,” said Payton as I saved the image for the
millionth time and closed the screen. “The article you found is probably nothing,
but it could be something. I bet the men quoted in that article about Joanne Reader
seeking damages are still alive. We could try to find them. If they knew Drew so well,
they might know his daughter. They might be able to confirm that it’s the same Olivia.”

“You want to go to Arizona?”

“No,
you
should want to go to Arizona. I’m just willing to go with you and pay for it.”

“We can’t go there,” I responded immediately.

“Why not?”

“For starters, I work on Sundays. It’s a six-days-a-week job I’ve been blessed with.
And secondly, that town where the girl in question is from is tiny. I looked it up;
it’s minuscule. You think
if we show up there, and it is the right Olivia, that it won’t get back to her? I’ll
be screwed.”

“But what are you now? You think the George Mason microfiche files are going to solve
this for you? You need people on the record. If we don’t find anything in Arizona,
then we go to Texas. We go to A&M and start asking questions there. But you have to
start flying. Even Friday feels too late.”

I was not sold. I felt like once I started speaking to people, anyone other than Payton,
that my story was leaked.

“Well, we definitely can’t fly into Phoenix,” I said. “It will be on the aviation
record, or whatever it’s called. It will be something that ties us into all this.”

Payton started laughing in her superior way. “You kissed her husband in her house!
You hid in the grass and photographed people having sex, with a ten-thousand-dollar
camera that you rented! I don’t think a plane trip to Phoenix is the thing that’s
going to blow your cover,” she said. “You fell upon something by accident. Then a
few more somethings. You already have a good story, but if the ducks line up for you
in Arizona or Texas, you will have a great story. If you want to ignore my advice
to publish now, then you have to go the rest of the way. Otherwise your forgone hours
of sleep and the beautiful
Town & Country
clothes you gave up for this job will all be for naught.”

Not a terrible point.

“Think about it,” she said. “Something made you stay hot on the trail. Why did you
start fussing around with all this anyway? You could have let it go.”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It was just the way Olivia was standing next to
that car that night. I knew she was hiding something, and I think natural curiosity
kicked in.”

“Like you wondered if she was turning tricks for horse owners by the side of the road?”

“I felt something was off, but also, it was the fact that it was
her
. It was strange to see Olivia, who is the essence of a
Capitolist
reporter, so out of context.”

“So you started snooping.”

“Basically.”

“And that brought you to her exceptional-looking husband.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Why unfortunately!” Payton exclaimed. “You never know with those loyal dog types.
He might switch on her when he sees those photos. Most men would.”

“I still wonder if I can do it,” I admitted. “If I can pull the trigger and change
the course of someone’s life. Many people’s lives. It scares me. I feel like it will
haunt me forever.”

“Well then, you’re in the wrong racket,” Payton concluded.

She was probably right. Journalism had become an extreme sport, not for the faint
of heart. And I had wanted to be in the thick of it.

“We’re going to Arizona,” declared Payton. She sounded sure and steady, like a doctor
about to perform a liver transplant. “Just switch weekends with someone. Say you’ll
work both Saturday and Sunday the following week because you need to tend to your
ill sister.”

It would be very
All the President’s Men
of me to hunt down a lead far out of state. It was something I had never expected
myself to do. I had never been that type of reporter, nor had the
Capitolist
hired me to be that kind of reporter. But people change.

“Okay,” I told Payton. “I’ll put the vacation request in. But you have to help me
hunt down the men who were in the courtroom that day.”

Back at my desk on Monday, my cell phone lit up with a text from Payton. I grabbed
it, made sure Hardy was not at his desk to chide me for moving, and walked quickly
back to the handicap bathroom, the only one in the building with any privacy.

“I have some terrible news,” Payton said when I called. Her voice was as bright and
casual as if she were saying “The soup of the day is clam chowder.”