The Fixer (12 page)

Vivvie blew out a long breath, then nodded. “Okay,” she whispered. Then she turned and started walking back toward her house.

“Vivvie,” I called after her. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay at home? With your father?”

“He won’t hurt me.” Vivvie had to believe that. She wanted me to believe it, too. “He doesn’t know that I know about the phone. After the wake, all I told him was that I’d heard him practicing his speech.”

And look how that ended.

“You don’t have to do this. You can come with me. We’ll . . .”

“No, Tess.” Vivvie forced a smile. The painstaking upturning of her lips hit me like a knife to the gut. “I just told you that I think
someone paid my father to kill a Supreme Court justice. I asked you not to tell anyone about it until we have proof. So, yeah, I kind of
do
have to do this.” She started walking back toward her house again. This time I let her go and stood there on the sidewalk, feeling like I’d fallen into some kind of parallel universe.

“Funny story.”

I turned to see Asher Rhodes rounding the corner.

“Vivvie’s voice carries,” he said. “And I have freakishly good hearing.”

CHAPTER 23

Asher and I stared at each other for several seconds.
He heard.
I racked my mind, trying to remember what, exactly, Vivvie had said in the last thirty seconds of our conversation.

I just told you that I think someone paid my father to kill a Supreme Court justice . . .

“Henry’s my best friend.” Asher’s tone was conversational, but quieter than normal. “In the first grade, he was the one who strongly advised me against roller-skating off my roof.” There was a beat of silence. “He was also the one who taught me to write left-handed when I broke my right arm. When we were nine, I inadvertently-possibly-on-purpose insulted a sixth grader. The kid would have pounded me into the ground, but Henry stepped forward and
challenged him to a duel
. Because he was into knights and honor and standing up for best friends who were too stupid to watch out for themselves.” Asher shook his head, his voice still quiet, intense. “I can still remember when Thalia was born. Henry spent the night at my house, and I woke up in the morning
and found an itemized to-do list, focused on his duties as a big brother.”

The image of a tiny Henry Marquette making a big-brother to-do list was all too easy to picture.

“He’s been my best friend for almost as long as I can remember, Tess. When his dad died . . .” Asher shook his head and didn’t finish that thought. “Henry and his grandfather were close. Theo was the closest thing to a father Henry had left.”

My stomach twisted sharply. It was too easy to put myself in Henry Marquette’s shoes, to imagine how I would feel if I woke up tomorrow and Gramps was gone. It was a short jump to imagining what it would be like to know that my grandfather’s death hadn’t been an accident.

I would have been out for blood.

“You can’t tell Henry what you just heard,” I told Asher.

Asher gave me a look. “I knew you were a little crazy, Tess. It’s there, in the eyes.” He gestured in the general vicinity of my face. “But I, too, have been in possession of the Crazy Eyes on occasion. I get it. If you want to go head-to-head with John Thomas Wilcox, or take up permanent residence in the guys’ bathroom, or skip out in the middle of the school day, I will happily go along for the ride.”

But you won’t keep this from your best friend
, I filled in.

“How do you think Henry will respond to this news?” I asked. Asher’s expression darkened. “My guess would be not well,” I continued. “And right now, even if he knew, there wouldn’t be anything he could do about it. He could try going to the police. But if Vivvie gets spooked, if she
recants
 . . .”

All we had was Vivvie’s word.

“We’re talking about the president’s physician, Asher.” I wasn’t sure what kind of background checks working at the White House involved, but if the Powers That Be were willing to put the president’s life in Vivvie’s father’s hands, he obviously wasn’t considered a security risk. Or a threat.

“Darn you and your infernal logic.” Asher ran both hands through his hair, mussing it to ridiculous heights. “Fine,” he capitulated. “But I want in. Whatever you’re planning to do about this, whatever Vivvie’s doing, I want in.”

It went against every instinct I had to agree. But based on the mutinous set of Asher’s jaw, I didn’t see that I had much of a choice.

“Fine,” I said sharply. I scuffed my shoe into the ground. “Any chance you know someone who can get information off a disposable phone?”

Asher drove me back to Ivy’s. I texted Bodie to let him know that he didn’t need to pick me up from school. A moment later, I got a text back:
Call from school
.
Skipping classes? HRH not pleased.

So Ivy wasn’t happy with me. Right now, that was the least of my problems. Belatedly, I translated Bodie’s code for Ivy.
HRH
:
Her Royal Highness.
I snorted.

Asher glanced over at me from the driver’s seat. “Care to share with the class?”

“Ivy’s driver,” I replied, like that was explanation enough. For Asher, it turned out that it was.

“And by
driver
, I’m assuming you mean
bodyguard
.”

“That’s a thing?” I asked.

Asher turned onto Ivy’s street. “At Hardwicke,” he replied, “that’s definitely a thing.”

Of course it was. I’d been in DC a week, and I’d already met the First Lady, crossed horns with the minority whip’s son, and gone to the funeral for a Supreme Court justice. Ivy had said it herself: Hardwicke
was
Washington. For every student like Asher, whose parents were dentists, there was someone like Henry or Vivvie.

Or me
. As Asher pulled into Ivy’s driveway, I was reminded of the fact that I wasn’t as removed from the power players in this town as I felt. There was a limo parked in the drive.

Asher eyed it. “Just another afternoon at Ivy Kendrick’s house?”

The car had shaded windows, with glass that I deeply suspected was bulletproof.
One of Ivy’s clients
, I thought. With any luck, maybe she would be busy enough that she wouldn’t have time to cross-examine me about why I’d skipped school—or where I’d spent the afternoon. I unbuckled my seat belt and opened the car door.

“Thanks for the ride,” I told Asher. What I was really thinking was,
Don’t tell anyone what happened. What Vivvie overheard. What
you
heard.

Asher inclined his head slightly and gave me a smoldering look. “Until tomorrow.”

I slammed the car door before Asher could say anything else. I’d nearly made it to Ivy’s front door before I realized the entrance was blocked. A man in a dark-colored suit stepped forward, gesturing for me to stop. It took me less than a second to get a read on him: suit, sunglasses, gun holstered at his side.
Secret Service
.

“My sister lives here,” I told him. “Light brown hair, about yea tall? Is probably in there talking to the First Lady right now?”

The agent raked his eyes over me.

“Seriously,” I said. “I live here.”

The agent glanced from me to the street. He watched Asher pull away from the curb and tracked his progress until the car disappeared. I was about to reiterate the fact that I
resided in this house
when the front door opened.
Bodie
. He walked out and whispered something into the Secret Service agent’s ear, letting the door close behind him as he did.

“Tess,” Bodie said, turning his attention to me. “Meet Damien Kostas. Kostas, this is Ivy’s sister, Tess.”

The Secret Service agent made no move to allow me into the house. I was about to suggest that he ask the First Lady if
she
thought I was a threat when Ivy’s front door opened again. Another agent stepped outside.

Behind the agent was the president of the United States.

Not the First Lady
, I thought, my brain scrambling to catch up as President Nolan glanced over at Bodie and the Secret Service agents before his gaze settled on me.

Ivy stepped up beside him, her eyes locking onto me. “You’re home,” she said.

“By some definitions,” I replied, trying not to stare at the president.

The leader of the free world offered me a smile. “Tess,” he said. “Short for
Theresa
, isn’t it?”

I managed to nod but couldn’t summon up a verbal reply.

“It’s nice to meet you, Theresa.” President Nolan was in his late sixties. He had an easy smile and—unlike his wife—not
even a hint of an accent. “I’ve heard a lot about you—a bit from Ivy, but mostly from Georgia. She said something about a dinner?” The president gave me another trademark smile. “My wife has an uncanny knack for getting her way,” he said. He eyed Ivy. “Something she and your sister have in common.”

“Mr. President,” one of the Secret Service agents prompted, glancing down at his watch.

The president nodded. “No rest for the weary,” he told me before turning back to Ivy. “You’ll do some digging?”

Ivy worded her response carefully. “I doubt I’ll come up with anything your people missed.”

The president wasn’t dissuaded. “You’re resourceful. If there’s a skeleton in his closet, I want to know.”

Whose closet?
I wondered. I flashed to the First Lady saying that Justice Marquette’s death was
an opportunity, tragic though it may be
. Was the president already working on digging up information on possible replacements?

“If there are skeletons,” Ivy said coolly, “will I be burying them or exposing them?”

This time, Peter Nolan gave
her
his most presidential smile. “Let me have a chat with the party leadership,” he said, “and then I’ll let you know.”

And just like that, the president was gone.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take Ivy long to turn the full strength of her attention on me. “You want to tell me why you skipped your afternoon classes?” She crossed one arm over the other and tapped the tips of her fingers against her elbow, one by one. “Or where you went?”

I went to see a girl who thinks her father murdered Justice Marquette
, I thought. Out loud, I opted for: “Not really.”

Ivy pressed her lips together, like if they parted, she might say something she would regret. “You know that you can come to me, right?” she said finally. “With anything, at any time.”

Maybe I believed that, and maybe I didn’t. With Ivy, it was always the maybes that hurt me most.
Vivvie asked me to keep this secret
. I concentrated on that.
Until she’s sure. Until we have proof.

There was no maybe about that.

“Are Supreme Court justices normally treated by the White House physician?” I asked.

Ivy blinked once, twice, three times at the change of subject. The question had caught her off guard. “No,” she said finally. “They’re not. But Theo wasn’t just a justice. He was a friend.”

Not just Ivy’s friend. The
president’s
friend, treated by one of the military’s most highly decorated physicians.

“Is everything okay?” Ivy asked me.

I pushed past her into the house, my heart pumping like I’d just run a marathon. “Sure,” I told her, lying through my teeth. “Everything’s fine.”

CHAPTER 24

The next day, Vivvie was back in school. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail on her head. Makeup covered the bags under her eyes. She did a fighting job of looking normal, like everything was fine.

I wondered how blind the rest of the school had to be not to realize that she wasn’t.

The two of us didn’t have a chance to talk before classes started. In English, she kept her eyes locked on the board. She wouldn’t even look at me. In physics, we were assigned to work in partners.

“We’re supposed to calculate the coefficient of friction,” Vivvie said, busying herself with pulling metal discs out of a plastic bag. “We’ll need the angle of the ramp . . .”

“Vivvie.”

She looked up at me. I held her gaze but didn’t say anything, willing her to remember that, for better or worse, she wasn’t in this alone.

“I got the phone.” She said those words so quietly, I almost couldn’t make them out. “He’d thrown it out. I went through the trash.”

Her hand shook as she set one of the metal discs on the scale. On the other side of the room, Henry Marquette was doing the same thing. Vivvie tried very hard not to look at him, but she couldn’t keep her gaze down. I reached out and steadied Vivvie’s hand.

“You’re okay,” I told her.

She reached into her bag and slipped out a flip phone. Her hand wrapped around it so tightly that her knuckles strained against her skin. “Nothing is okay.” For a moment, she pulled the phone close to her body, but then, like someone ripping a bandage off an open wound, she thrust it across the table toward me, forcing her grip to relax, finger by finger. I closed my own hand around the phone, feeling the weight of it.

“Girls.” The teacher stopped by our table. “No phones.”

I dropped the phone into my blazer pocket before he could move to take it from me. “What phone?”

The teacher pointed his index finger at me. “Exactly.”

The class passed torturously slowly. We did the work. But all I could think about was the phone in my pocket and the fact that on the other side of the room, Henry Marquette kept sending narrow-eyed glances at Vivvie and me.

“As it turns out,” Asher told me, slipping behind me in the lunch line, “it is possible that I do know someone who might be able to get information off a disposable cell phone.”

“Even if the phone has been wiped clean?” In between classes, I’d checked the call log and contacts. Both had been cleared.

“My contact is . . . let’s say,
resourceful
,” Asher told me. “Nothing electronic is ever truly deleted.”

“Asher.” Henry Marquette cut between the two of us. “Any chance you’re actually intending
not
to skip out on your remaining classes today?”

“That’s Henry’s way of saying he thinks you’re a bad influence on me,” Asher informed me. “Given the high bad influence standards set by yours truly, I’m pretty sure that’s a compliment.”