The Fixer (13 page)

Based on the steely expression on Henry’s face, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t.

If only he knew
. Asher excelled at acting natural. From his tone, you would have thought he and I had been plotting a high school prank, not discussing how one went about pulling deleted information off a disposable phone.

Henry had no idea just how bad an influence I was.

“I’ll meet you in the computer lab during free period,” Asher told me.

I started making my way to the courtyard.

“Tess,” Henry called after me. On his lips, my name sounded like a nonsense word, one he’d condescended to saying and thought about as much of as
flapdoodle
or
flibbertigibbet.
“A moment?”

What if he knows?
My heart announced its presence in my chest, beating viciously against the inside of my rib cage.
Of course he doesn’t know
, I told myself. There was no way he could.

“Yeah?” I said.

Henry came to stand next to me. “I understand Emilia hired you to keep Asher out of trouble in my absence.”

Emilia. Not Vivvie. Emilia
. The knots in my stomach relaxed, just slightly.

“Emilia
tried
to hire me,” I corrected, forcing myself to respond to what he was saying instead of what he wasn’t. “She also tried to bribe me, and I’m pretty sure that threatening me into compliance might have eventually been on the table.”

Henry took his time with his reply, spacing his words apart, giving each its own weight. “Regardless, as it happens, I am no longer absent.” His green eyes narrowed slightly. “Whatever you’re doing with Asher, you can stop.”

Henry Marquette hadn’t wanted Ivy at his grandfather’s wake. He hadn’t wanted me around his little sister. And he didn’t want me
fixing
Asher.

“Hate to break it to you,” I replied, “but Asher’s a big boy. He can make his own decisions about who to hang out with and who’s a liability.”

At the word
liability
, Henry’s expression shifted slightly. He hadn’t expected me to see things from his perspective so clearly. “I know what your sister does, and I know the kind of destruction she leaves in her wake.” Henry’s voice was perfectly pleasant, but the glint in his eyes was anything but. “If you want to fashion yourself into some kind of high school fixer, fine. But stay away from Asher.”

I probably should have been insulted that Henry was so convinced that he needed to protect Asher from me, but given what Asher and I had planned for that afternoon, I couldn’t help wondering if he was right.

CHAPTER 25

Asher’s contact met us in one of the smaller computer labs. She seemed about as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

“You have
got
to be kidding me.” Emilia gave her brother a
look
.

“Is this my kidding face?” Asher asked her.

Emilia glared at him. “It’s the only face you have.”

“And what a face it is,” Asher agreed jovially. “Now, about that memory card reconstruction . . .”

“Do I even want to know where you got a burner phone?” Emilia asked. Asher opened his mouth to reply. “Don’t answer that,” she told him before swinging her attention over to me.

“Can you do it?” I asked Emilia flatly.

“Can I?” she repeated. “Yes. Girls qualify as an underserved minority if you’re applying to a STEM field.” At my blank look, she rolled her eyes. “Science, technology, engineering, math? Have you even thought about college applications?” She held up a hand. “Don’t answer that, either. I
could
do this. That doesn’t mean I will.”

She folded her arms over her waist. “I told you I’d owe you if and only if you agreed to keep my brother out of trouble for just a few days. Let’s do a brief accounting, shall we?” She began ticking items off on her fingers. “In the time since he’s made your acquaintance, Asher has skipped school, committed grand theft auto, and threatened to rearrange John Thomas Wilcox’s face.”

I turned to look at Asher. He hadn’t threatened John Thomas in my presence. Asher shrugged and then turned back to his twin. “Tess did get me off the chapel roof,” he volunteered helpfully.

“For which she has my undying gratitude.” Emilia’s voice was dead dry. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, some of us like to use our study period to actually study.”

She turned. Asher gestured at me to say something.

“I’ll owe you.” Those words grated, but they had the desired effect. Emilia turned back to face us.

“One favor, no questions asked, whenever and wherever I ask it of you.” Emilia gave me her sweetest smile and held out a delicate hand. “Deal?”

Gritting my teeth, I took her hand, feeling like I’d just signed on the devil’s dotted line. “Deal.”

Half an hour later, Emilia handed the phone back to me. “Voilà, and you’re welcome—in that order.”

I took the phone and pulled up the restored call log. All the ingoing and outgoing calls were linked to the same two numbers.

“Any way to tell who these numbers are registered to?” I asked.

“Unless the owner of that phone is a complete moron,” Emilia replied, “I’m guessing those numbers belong to other disposable cell phones.”

“One way to find out.” Asher plucked the phone from my grasp, and before I could stop him, he’d hit
call
. He switched the cell to speaker and set it on the counter.

This is a bad idea
. I reached for the phone, just as a computerized voice filled the air. The number had been disconnected.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. If Vivvie’s dad had been smart, he would have destroyed this phone—not just thrown it away.

Emilia stood up and stretched slightly, like a gymnast preparing to tumble.

“Tess?” Asher nodded to the phone in my hand. “There’s still one more number.”

This is still a bad idea.
But putting myself in Emilia’s debt had also been a bad idea. Letting Vivvie fish this phone out of her father’s trash had probably been a very bad idea. Not going straight to my sister with Vivvie’s accusations almost certainly was.

I brought my thumb to the phone’s keypad, scrolled down, and hit
call
before I could change my mind. This time, the phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. I didn’t put it on speaker. My hand tightened around it with the fourth ring. I could feel my heart beating in my stomach.

No one is going to answer. Whoever Major Bharani was talking to on this phone, they’re long gone.
That was what I told myself, right up to the point when someone picked up.

“I told you, you’ll get your money when I get my nomination.” The voice was male, deep and velvety with an American accent I
couldn’t quite pinpoint. Whoever he was, he wasn’t happy. “Don’t call this number again.”

The line went dead.

“Any answer?” Emilia asked, unable to keep the curiosity from her tone.

I cradled the phone in my hand for a moment, then flipped it closed. “No.”

Asher met my eyes over his sister’s head. He wasn’t buying that answer. I didn’t expect him to.

You’ll get your money when I get my nomination
. The words were burned into my brain. I’d wanted Vivvie to be wrong. I’d wanted this to be a mistake.

Clearly, however, it wasn’t.

CHAPTER 26

“The process for appointing a judge to the Supreme Court is an involved one. It starts with the president and his staff vetting candidates for the nomination. Who can they get past the Senate? Who best serves the party’s needs?” As Dr. Clark lectured, I thought of the president telling Ivy to dig for skeletons in someone’s closet.

I tried not to think of the voice on the other end of the phone line.

You’ll get your money when I get my nomination.

“Eventually, the president selects a nominee, typically one who shares his broader ideological viewpoint. Once appointed, the only way a justice can be removed from the bench is impeachment—and no justice has been so impeached since 1804. As a result, Supreme Court appointments have the potential to dramatically change our legal and political landscape for
decades
.”

As the class wore on, we got a brief overview of some of the biggest cases the Supreme Court had ever taken on.
Voting rights. Segregation. Women’s health.

“The president’s nominee eventually goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Dr. Clark continued. “During the hearings that follow, the nominee is questioned on everything from their record to their personal life. The committee then issues an assessment. A negative evaluation might send the president’s team scrambling for a new nominee. Eventually, to get a confirmation, the would-be justice will have to be confirmed by a majority vote of the Senate.”

Dr. Clark leaned back against her desk. “It probably won’t come as a surprise to most of you to hear that long before the nomination goes to the floor, lobbyists and special interest parties will already be attempting to sway votes, one way or another.”

Lobbyists. Special interest.
She was speaking a language that was foreign to me, but for many of my classmates, it was their native tongue. I understood only that there were a lot of reasons for different groups to want—or not want—a person on the Supreme Court.

I tried not to think about the fact that there were probably just as many reasons to want a Supreme Court justice dead.

There were two numbers on the phone’s call log
. I couldn’t stop the gears in my mind from turning. One of the numbers had belonged to the man I’d talked to. And the other?

That one was a giant question mark.

“For the next two weeks, you and your partner will be playing the role of the president.” Dr. Clark began handing out an outline of our assignment. “You’ll be researching candidates, putting forth your own nominee. Think of it like March Madness,
but instead of putting together a bracket, you have your eye on the prize, and instead of winning a championship, the appointee instantly becomes one of the most powerful individuals in our country.”

I took the sheet someone passed me and stared down at it. There were dozens of names on this list: possible nominees to research.

“Mr. Marquette.” Dr. Clark lowered her voice as she came to Henry. “If you would prefer an alternative assignment . . .”

“No,” Henry said, his posture almost supernaturally straight, his face giving nothing away. “This will be fine.”

“You know something,” Vivvie said the second we settled in the back corner of the room to “brainstorm” for our project. “I know you know something. You have that look on your face.”

I tried to think of a way to catch Vivvie up to speed without hurting her. That way didn’t exist.

“There were two numbers on the phone.” I stuck to the facts, as bare-bones as I could make them. “We called both of them.”

“We?” Vivvie leaned toward me, her eyes wide and panicked. “Who’s
we
?”

Her voice carried. Several other students—and Dr. Clark—turned to look our way. Vivvie lowered her voice again. “Who’s we?”

I broke it to her that Asher had overheard her—and that his twin had been the one to retrieve the call log for us. Vivvie weathered that blow, pressing her lips together and bowing her head.

“What happened when you called the number?” she asked quietly, looking up at me through impossibly long lashes. She must have known, from the expression on my face, that the answer wasn’t good. She gripped the paper in her hands so hard I thought she might tear it.

“The first number was disconnected,” I said, pitching my voice as low as I could.

“And the second?”

I told Vivvie what the person who’d answered had said, verbatim.

“So we’re dealing with what? A person who’s hoping to get the nomination himself? Or someone who has a candidate in mind?” Vivvie stared down at the paper in her hands—the list of names.

“How are we doing here, girls?” Dr. Clark came to stand beside us.

Vivvie forced herself to snap out of it. She smiled brightly, an expression so sweet it could make your teeth ache, and so utterly artificial that I wanted to cry. “We got distracted,” she said, sounding like a copy of a copy of the happy, chattering girl I’d met that first day. “But, hey, procrastination is the mother of invention, right?”

Dr. Clark bit back a grin. “I believe that’s
necessity
,” she said, studying Vivvie a bit more closely. “Are you sure you’re okay, Vivvie?”

“Great,” Vivvie replied forcefully. It hurt me just to hear her say it.

“In that case,” Dr. Clark said, “I’m going to suggest you two switch partners. Procrastination, I am afraid, is the mother of nothing but more procrastination.”

Before I could object, Dr. Clark had steered Vivvie in the direction of a new partner and brought someone else back to work with me.

“Do you two know each other?” Dr. Clark asked.

Henry Marquette looked about as happy with this development as I was. “We’ve met.”

CHAPTER 27

Partnering with Henry Marquette on a project devoted to choosing a replacement for his grandfather, while harboring suspicions that his grandfather had been murdered
so that he could be replaced
, was not what one would call a highlight of my day.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t the highlight of Henry’s day, either.

“So we’re in agreement,” he said, his voice crisp. “I’ll take the top half of the list. You take the bottom.”

Your grandfather’s death was planned.
I said that silently, because I couldn’t say it out loud.
There were at least two people involved. Maybe three.
My mind went to the other number on the phone—the one that had already been disconnected.

“I know you and Asher are up to something.” Henry’s words snapped me back to the moment. “Emilia, too, God help us all.”

He said Emilia’s name the way one might reference a force of nature—a tsunami, perhaps, or a hurricane.

“I don’t know what you’re doing.” Henry gave me a look. “I’m fairly certain that I don’t want to know.”

He really, really didn’t.

“If this is the part where you warn me away from your friends,” I told him, putting on my best poker face, “why don’t we just skip straight to you making veiled comments about my sister, and me telling you that I’m not her.”