The Fixer (11 page)

“Why, thank you,” Asher replied. “It’s Emilia’s. Mine met with an unfortunate accident involving a toaster and a squirrel.”

I didn’t really know where to start. “You stole your sister’s car?”

“Is it still stealing if she loaned it to me once and I made a copy of her keys?” The question was clearly meant to be rhetorical.

“Yes,” I told him. “Definitely still stealing.”

“And so begins a life of crime,” Asher said with a morose shake of his head.

“Your sister is going to
kill
you,” I told him. Skipping school. Stealing her car.

Asher waved away my words, unconcerned. “If Emilia was predisposed to fratricide, I wouldn’t have made it past kindergarten,” he said. “I am, however, somewhat concerned that she might kill
you
.”

When we arrived at Vivvie’s house half an hour later, I got out of the car, then hesitated. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. What was I doing here? I had no plan. I wasn’t even entirely certain why I’d come.

It’s probably nothing. Vivvie’s probably fine.

I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t know why. I made my way to the front porch. Asher followed. No one answered the first time I rang the bell. Or the second. But the third time, the door opened a crack.

“Tess?” Vivvie’s voice was hoarse. Like she’d been yelling, or crying—
or
, I told myself, trying to be rational,
like she has strep throat and
that
is why she hasn’t been at school.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

Vivvie looked past me and registered Asher’s presence.

“I was worried about you,” I told her. She didn’t reply. “Tell me I shouldn’t be.”

Vivvie summoned her voice. “You shouldn’t be.”

Liar
. The door was open wider now. She looked like she hadn’t slept since the last time I’d seen her.

“I’m going to stretch my legs a bit and let you two ladies talk.” Asher set off on a stroll around the neighborhood, leaving Vivvie and me alone.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

Vivvie shook her head, but she also stepped back, allowing me entry. I crossed the threshold into the foyer. For a few seconds, Vivvie looked at everything but me: the floor, the ceiling, the walls. Eventually, her gaze found its way to mine. The oversized sweatshirt she was wearing slipped off one shoulder. The skin underneath was darker near her collarbone.
Bruised.

She tracked my gaze to the bruise and froze.

“Did your father do that?” I asked softly.

Vivvie jerked her sweatshirt back up. She shook her head—more than once. “He’s not like that.” She still had a hold on her sweatshirt, like she couldn’t coax her hand into letting go. “It was
an accident.” Now she was nodding, as if she could
will
that into being true.

“Okay,” I said. But we both knew that it wasn’t okay.
She
wasn’t okay.

“My dad and I had a fight. After the wake.” Vivvie’s grip on her sweatshirt tightened. Her free arm wrapped itself around her torso in a fierce self-hug. “The kind of fight where you yell,” she clarified. “Not the kind where you . . .”

Not the kind where the bigger person hits the small one
, I filled in, unable to keep from thinking about that bruise.

“We were just yelling,” Vivvie reiterated fiercely. “That’s how we fight. He yells. I cry. He gets flustered because I’m crying.”

This was Vivvie talking about what
a
fight with her father was like. Not
the
fight she’d had with him after the wake.

“This time was different,” I said. I kept my voice low and stayed away from questions. Questions required answers. I was stating facts.

Vivvie slowly unwound her hand from her shirt. “This time was different,” she echoed, her voice barely more than a whisper. “He grabbed me. He didn’t mean to.” She paused. “I know what that sounds like, Tess. I do. But it’s been just the two of us for years, and he’s
never
 . . .”

We were still standing in the foyer. The house was immaculate: everything in its place.

“You weren’t in school today.” I stuck to statements—nonthreatening ones—as best I could. “You weren’t in school most of last week, either.”

“I’m not hiding any more bruises,” Vivvie said quickly. She could see how this looked. “Last week, my dad and I weren’t
even—we weren’t fighting. I just told him I was sick, and he let me stay home.”

She’d
told
him she was sick. But she wasn’t.

“You have to come back to school eventually,” I said gently. What I didn’t say was:
Who or what are you avoiding?

What I didn’t say was:
What were you and your father fighting about?

“I’ll come back to school tomorrow,” Vivvie told me. “I swear.” I could feel the nervous energy rolling off her. She was starting to panic about what she’d told me—even though she hadn’t said much at all.

“I need some air,” I told her. We both knew that I wasn’t the one who needed it. “You want to go for a walk?”

After a long moment, her head bobbed in something I took as a nod. She slipped on a pair of shoes, and we started walking: out the front door, down the sidewalk, around her neighborhood. Neither of us said a word. I could feel Vivvie trying to reel it in.
Trying to be strong.
This was a girl who didn’t want to
bother
classmates she’d known her entire life by asking to sit at their tables for lunch. No matter how badly she needed my help, she wouldn’t ask for it.

She
couldn’t
.

Matching the rhythm of my steps to hers, I willed my presence to do the talking for me.
You are not a bother. You are not alone.

One block. Two. Eventually, Vivvie’s arms wrapped their way around her torso again.

“Are you okay?” I asked her. I met her eyes. “I know that’s your line. I was just trying it out.”

She managed a small smile. We fell quiet. In that silence, she must have reached a tipping point, because she was the one who spoke next.

“Have you ever known something you desperately wished you didn’t know?” Vivvie’s voice was rough in her throat, like she almost couldn’t choke out the words. We kept walking, slow and steady, as I processed the question.

She was asking me to tell her that she wasn’t alone.

“Yes,” I said, my own voice coming out almost as rough as Vivvie’s, “I have.”

I thought of my grandfather—of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was something wrong with him, and knowing that if I told anyone, I would be betraying him in the worst possible way. The weight of that had been a constant: there when I woke up in the morning and there when I went to bed at night. There with every breath.

I swallowed. “The worst part was knowing that it wouldn’t stay a secret forever.” I was generally better at listening than I was at talking, but I thought that maybe, if I let myself show weakness, she’d show me hers. “I knew that everything would come out eventually, but I thought if I just fought hard enough . . .”

Vivvie stopped walking. “What if that wasn’t the problem?” she asked, a desperate note in her voice. I could feel her hurtling toward the point of no return, the words pouring out of her mouth. “What if the problem was that the thing you knew
would
stay secret? Forever. No one would ever know. Not unless you told them.”

Vivvie knows something.
That much was clear.
And whatever it is—it’s killing her.

“Tell me,” I said. “You need to tell someone, so tell me.”

Vivvie went very still. I could see her thinking,
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t
.

I didn’t let her say it. “You can tell me, Vivvie. Haven’t you heard? I’m Tess Kendrick. Worker of miracles. Resident Hardwicke fixer.”

I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t
want
to be any of those things. But this was Vivvie, who’d offered to cheer me up by recapping her favorite romance novel (and/or horror movie), and she was crumbling in front of me.

“I can’t.” Vivvie sucked in a breath of air.

“It’s about your father, isn’t it?”

Vivvie couldn’t bring herself to tell me her secret. That didn’t mean I couldn’t guess.

“You know something about your father,” I said, making it a statement instead of a question. “Something about your father and Theo Marquette.” Vivvie had broken down at the wake. She hadn’t been back to school since the day we saw the announcement about Justice Marquette’s death on the news.

As far as guesses went, it was an educated one.

“Maybe you think it was your dad’s fault,” I continued. Now I was just stabbing in the dark. “He was the justice’s doctor. His surgeon. And Justice Marquette died from complications with surgery.”

I was reaching the limit of what I knew. And still, Vivvie said nothing.

Think
, I told myself. “Maybe you think your dad did something wrong.” No reaction from Vivvie. “Maybe he operated tired, or inebriated, or maybe you just think he made a mistake.”

Vivvie broke then. “He didn’t make a mistake,” she said fiercely. “My dad doesn’t make
mistakes
. He—” She cut herself off, then started back up again, terrified but determined. “He didn’t just let Henry’s grandfather die, Tess.” Vivvie bowed her head. “I’m pretty sure he killed him.”

CHAPTER 22

Vivvie thinks her father murdered the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
There was no amount of processing that could make something like that sink in.

“I know it sounds crazy,” Vivvie told me haltingly. “Believe me, I know. And it’s not like I have the world’s most stellar track record for teenage sanity—freshman year, dark time, there may have been some Prozac involved. But this . . .” She bit her bottom lip. “I would give anything for this to all be in my head.”

I could barely keep up with the words as they tumbled out of her mouth.

“I asked him about it,” Vivvie continued. She thought her father was a murderer, and she’d asked him about it? “He grabbed me. And he shook me, and he told me that if I really believed what I was saying, then maybe I needed professional help.”

He’d threatened her. Told her she was crazy. But what he hadn’t done was taken her to see a doctor. He’d let her stay home from school. Alone.

Those weren’t the actions of a concerned father.

“I heard him, Tess. Whenever he has to give a speech, he practices. In front of the mirror. Every word, every pause, every emotion.”

I thought of the press release. Major Bharani hadn’t been reading a script. He’d looked straight at the camera. He’d been authoritative, calm.

“I heard him practicing.” Vivvie forced herself to breathe, forced her voice to stay low. “The shower was running. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d left for school, but I circled back to ask him something—I don’t even remember what. I was getting ready to call out, and that was when I heard him.” She held my gaze, her brown eyes steady. “Practicing.”

Practicing what?
I was afraid that if I said those words out loud—if I said anything—she might stop talking.

“ ‘It is with great sadness,’ ” Vivvie whispered, “ ‘that I inform you that Chief Justice Theodore Marquette died on the table a little over an hour ago.’ ”

I recognized the beginning of the statement Dr. Bharani had issued at the press conference.

“He practiced his statement,” I said, not quite seeing where she was going.

“Tess, he practiced it that morning.” Vivvie’s voice caught in her throat. “Justice Marquette died that afternoon.”

I processed what Vivvie was saying. Her father had prepared a speech announcing the justice’s death from
unforeseen complications with surgery
before the surgery had ever taken place.

“That’s not all.” Vivvie started walking again. I strode to catch up with her. Midday, the neighborhood was nearly empty.
On the opposite sidewalk, there was a woman walking a dog. Vivvie kept her voice low enough that I had to struggle to hear her.

“I stayed home sick the next day. I’d convinced myself that I’d misheard, or misunderstood, but then I heard my dad talking on the phone, which was weird, because
his
phone was on the kitchen counter. He wasn’t on the landline, either.”

Vivvie was babbling now, and I had to fight to find the meaning in her words.

“I think it might have been a disposable. Why would my dad have a disposable cell phone?”

My mouth felt dry. “Who was he talking to?”

“I couldn’t make out most of what he was saying.” Vivvie’s voice was very small. “All I heard . . .” She swallowed. “He was reading a number.”

“Like a phone number?”

Vivvie shook her head. “Like an account number.”

The president’s doctor knew that Justice Marquette was going to die. He had a speech prepared. And the day after the justice’s death, that doctor was on a disposable cell phone giving an account number to whoever was on the other end.

“We have to tell someone,” I told Vivvie. “The police, my sister, I don’t even know, but—”

“We can’t, Tess.” Vivvie reached out to grab my arm. “
I
can’t. I know it looks bad.” That was an understatement. “But, Tess, he’s my dad.”

Vivvie had to have known, when she’d told me this, that I couldn’t just turn around and pretend that nothing had happened.

“You said you were a miracle worker,” Vivvie whispered, weaving her fingers together and holding them clasped in front of her body. “I want a miracle.”

I couldn’t go back and change what she’d heard. I couldn’t wave a magic wand and alter the facts. “What do you want me to do, Vivvie?”

She was quiet for several seconds. “I want proof,” she said finally. “Not just suspicions, not just something I overheard. I
want
to be wrong. But if I’m not . . .”

She didn’t want it to be her word against his. She didn’t want to be the one to tear her family apart at the seams.

“Proof?” I repeated. “What kind of proof?”

Vivvie toyed with the bottom of her shirt. “If I can get you the phone,” she said, “can you figure out who he was talking to?”

That was so far outside my skillset I didn’t even know where I would start. “I can try.”