The List (14 page)

Making sure that the papers didn’t fall out everywhere, I hugged Julia good night,
thanked her for her help, and pushed the down button to call the elevator. Even though
it was well past normal working hours, the garage was still packed with cars. The
Capitolist
had to be one of the only offices in America where the employees didn’t rush out
when the clock struck 6
P.M.
on Friday. Or 7
P.M.
It wasn’t until eight o’clock that people started to trickle out.

Listening to my heels click on the cement, I walked to the purple section of the garage
where I usually parked. It wasn’t very close to the elevators, but I didn’t exactly
drive a car I wanted to show off to my peers.

I was ten cars away from the Volvo when I heard footsteps behind me. Having been raised
by two paranoid parents who gave me bear spray before I went to college in one of
the wealthiest suburbs in New England, I stopped walking, turned around
slowly, and stopped dead. It was Olivia Campo and Justin Cushing. They were walking
in stride and smiling. Actual smiles. I didn’t know Justin Cushing approved of smiles.

I turned around before I looked creepy but heard her say, “Good night, Justin,” and
then the sound of him beeping his car open. By the time he started his engine, I realized
that Olivia had parked her shiny, perfect automobile in the row behind mine. Why would
she park in the purple section? She had a nice car! Everyone at the
List
knew that all the badly paid reporters parked their tin cans in the purple section
and the well-paid employees, like Justin Cushing and Olivia, parked their much nicer
cars in the green section. I had seen Olivia’s car in green before. Was she doing
this to toy with my mind? Maybe she really had seen me that night. Maybe now she was
going to assassinate me in the parking garage and pop my lifeless body into my trunk.

I could hear the click of her thick, practical heels and was going to jump in my car
to make a getaway, but I took three deep breaths like Dr. Phil always suggested and
turned around. Olivia was standing next to her white BMW, keys in hand.

“Nice car,” I said nervously. She didn’t turn around. “Nice car,” I said loudly. This
time my words echoed through the parking lot. She turned around and faced me, startled
to hear my voice.

“A 650i coupe. The most recent model, right?”

Olivia frowned at me but lowered her left hand, which was holding her keys.

“Why do you know that?” she asked with frustration in her voice. “Are you some kind
of weird motorhead?”

Was I a what? “No,” I replied. “It just says so on the back of your car.” Olivia realized
I was right and scowled. “Ha!” she said sarcastically, then lifted her keys again
and beeped the doors open.

“I’m kidding,” I said, smiling and praying I didn’t sound like a girl with plans to
stalk her that weekend. “My friend has the same one. Drives like a dream.”

“Right, well now you really sound like a motorhead,” Olivia offered up while opening
her door. She looked at my car, a Wellesley College sticker still stuck to the back
window, and smirked. “Have a great weekend,” she said in a superior voice as she climbed
into her car, then started the heavy German engine.

We had spoken. And not just Olivia barking at me. I had started the conversation and
momentarily gotten her to feel like a moron. I wasn’t sure how I felt—it was a strange
mix of nerves, panic, and even a little confidence—but suddenly Olivia seemed less
like an unapproachable monarch who ruled the newsroom with a translucent fist and
more like a woman, my exact same age, whose career I could potentially ruin.

I threw the folder from Julia in the back of my crappy car, among the empty water
bottles, articles that were no longer relevant, and a smorgasbord of beauty products,
and jumped in the driver’s seat. So my car wasn’t made in the last decade. It still
got me from point A to point B. “Don’t mind that wench,” I said to the car, patting
the steering wheel, and headed home.

I spent what was left of Friday night studying a map of the inn and comparing it to
the Google Earth view. When I felt as if I could confidently crawl around the place
in the dead of night, I switched to Googling Senator Stanton. I’d been doing it for
weeks now, but every time I entered his name into the search engine, I was sure I
would find something that I didn’t see before. As usual, there were many photos, with
many American flags. Some were with his constituents, others with his wife and handful
of children. He had the Internet presence of an upstanding family man and a devoted
public citizen. Not one skeleton in his data closet. He hailed from a political family,
married his
college sweetheart, and had six children, three of them adopted. He graduated from
Arizona State University and Yale Law and by all accounts lived a straight and narrow
life. His Twitter account was policy and Bible verses in 140 characters or less. If
you agreed with his politics, there was nothing wrong with Senator Hoyt Thomas Stanton.

An affair, if he was having one, would signal a major character flaw. He wasn’t shipping
arms to Iran or embezzling government funds away from elementary education, though,
so I didn’t feel a patriotic obligation to report out his story. At this point, it
was mostly just curiosity, especially because it involved one of my most self-righteous
colleagues. And if I was right, it could break his career and her career, but it would
make mine. I wasn’t proud of the fact that bouncing up the
Capitolist
ladder interested me, but it did. If I was going to put in the same crazy hours as
everyone else, I wanted to feel like I was part of the team, not riding the bench
all season. I wanted Upton to say, “We’ll talk about this at lunch,” and walk to my
car with Justin Cushing. A pay raise wouldn’t hurt, either.

 • • • 

“You’re going hunting?” My father lowered his newspaper on Saturday morning and looked
at me like I was a hot-blooded gun nut. “Since when do you hunt?”

Getting to the Goodstone should have been easy, but I had a few hurdles to bounce
over going a mile down the road, and a little white lie was part of it. So I told
my dad that I was getting the guns and going hunting.

My father was kind of like an accidental rich person. He never cared about making
money or having money; he just happened to have a lot because he worked as a big-time
lobbyist and he inherited barrels full from his dad. He wore old jeans, thick
flannel work shirts, and cotton sweaters from L.L. Bean, drove a pickup, bought horses,
and used the rest of his cash to keep my mother happy. I hadn’t had much time with
him since he came back from Argentina, as he was always outside and I was always inside
the
Capitolist,
but I liked being able to see him from my window when I got home at night. My dad
was the family compass, steady and dependable. He was also eminently practical and
not loving my fake hunting excursion.

I had decided I couldn’t take my temperamental old Volvo to the Goodstone Inn on Saturday
because Olivia had stared it down in the parking garage at
Capitolist
headquarters. My mother’s cherry-red SUV was the most unsubtle color on the planet,
so I nixed her car, too. My father had a 1967 Mercedes convertible and a Toyota pickup
truck. I went with the pickup. It would get me through the mud and might even look
like it belonged to a grounds worker.

“When is the last time you fired a gun?” he said, grilling me on my crazy lie. “I
took you girls a few times when you were kids. I remember Payton being a very good
shot, but you, you decapitated a snowman. Do you remember that? You cried. Payton
then ate what was left of the head lying on the ground, and you cried some more. Now
you’re telling me you’re going hunting?”

Oh good Christ, I had forgotten about Payton’s decapitated snowman eating. Maybe I
should have come up with a different excuse, but I was too far into it now.

“Elsa wants to go,” I explained. “She’s dating some guy who lobbies for the NRA.”
This lie was getting worse and worse. Elsa would never date a card-carrying member
of the NRA. Her last boyfriend was a sculptor with a heart tattooed on his thumb.

“Doesn’t he have a car?” asked my father.

“Of course he does, but no one will pick me up out here, and I don’t trust the Volvo
to make it up those hills.”

My practical dad relented when I made it a safety issue. He ran his left hand through
his dark gray hair while he thought about his daughter doing her best Calamity Jane
with her artsy friends. Like Payton, my dad was about as athletic as they come. At
sixty years old, he was still built like a much younger man, thanks to all his time
trying to break his South American horses, but his skin was tan, worn, and a little
leathery from the sun. His skin crinkled into deep creases around his green eyes and
his mouth twitched slightly under his five-day beard as he imagined me using the wrong
end of the gun to chase a charging buck.

“Don’t shoot anyone,” he finally declared. “It’s March. All the fat white men you
see will be real, not made of snow.” Convinced I was going to both crash his enormous
car and shoot either myself or an overweight Caucasian, he walked down to the car
with me to show me how the truck brake worked. I loaded my Goyard bag (clothes, computer
equipment, camera) into the pickup and gave him room to adjust the driver’s seat and
mirrors.

“Adrienne, hunting,” he muttered as he moved some horse blankets from the passenger
seat to the jump seats in the back.

“I’ll be fine, Dad,” I insisted. “Payton and I used to shoot stuff all the time when
you weren’t paying attention. I’m actually pretty good.” This was also a lie. I was
having trouble opening my mouth and saying anything laced with a shred of truth.

“Well, Payton, she’s a different story,” he said. “I would let her pack heat in a
kindergarten classroom. She’s a hell of a shot.” Like most people who met her, my
parents were in awe of Payton. I remember being at a field hockey tournament with
her and overhearing my mom and dad saying, “How can one person be so good at everything
she does?” They were not talking about me.

“I thought Payton was crazy when she said she was going to
breed racehorses in Argentina with Buck,” said my dad, momentarily sidetracked by
thoughts of his far-off daughter and her husband. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with Virginia?
We have horses right here. This is the state that created Secretariat. Is a Triple
Crown winner not good enough for you?’ She could have just moved in with her old mom
and dad and helped with our little family business, but she said living at home would
be an act so pathet—”

He stopped talking when he saw my face.

“Addy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“No! It’s fine,” I said brightly. “We didn’t all go into lucrative professions like
Payton’s horse torturing.”

“Horse torturing . . .” He laughed under his breath and then looked at me standing
awkwardly outside the car door. “Payton did have that spread in the
Robb Report
. Did you see it? Four pages, with pictures and everything.”

He looked at me clutching my heart and smiled.

“Oh Addy. The little things like that don’t really matter. You’re the one with the
great career,” he said, climbing out of the truck. “You’ve always worked so hard.
Your sister’s just doing what she watched me do her whole life.”

“But I’m just doing what Mom did!” I countered. “Oh God, that’s depressing. You’ve
raised two totally unoriginal children. We’re mimics unable to forge our own paths.”

My dad laughed a low, rolling baritone laugh. His chuckle was like a good bottle of
booze—mellower and better with age.

“I don’t think anyone would dare call you two unoriginal. I certainly wouldn’t. You
and Payton are just a bit different . . . like the sun and the moon.” He smiled, clearly
happy with his attempt at diplomacy.

“Which one am I?” I asked, climbing into the front seat and buckling the tried and
tested seat belt.

My dad flashed me a knowing smile.

“I’m the moon! I knew it. Payton is the lovely hot orb that keeps us all alive and
I’m some lump of rock that looks like it’s made of molten blubber and doesn’t do anything.
You’re a swell father. Thanks for the pep talk.”

“Adrienne,” he said, closing the door. “Don’t be so dramatic. People are different.
Maybe I should have used the no-two-snowflakes-are-alike comparison instead.”

I rolled my eyes and waved at him as he yelled some marksmanship advice in my general
direction.

It was just after 1
P.M.
when I checked into the inn. Before I went to the desk, I drove through the field
to see if the white BMW was there. It wasn’t. The Bull Barn looked empty. I swerved
around the property and drove back down the hill, parking my dad’s truck at the far
end of the parking lot.

“Brown. Adrienne Brown,” I said, handing the young woman at the front desk my driver’s
license.

“Brown, yes, you’re in the Hayloft suite,” she said, smiling up at me. As she punched
in my credit card information, she looked at my license. “New York City. Did you drive
in from there?”

Perfect. I knew I hadn’t gotten around to changing my license yet for a reason. If
she saw my real address she would most likely ask me if I was Caroline Cleves Brown’s
daughter, because everyone knew my mother, or she would question my extremely local
vacation. Instead I just made small talk about escaping the noise of city living.

“Well, you won’t hear a sound out here,” she said, handing back my cards. “Total peace
and total privacy, that’s our motto.” Yes, privacy. Unless you had a newspaper reporter
with a telephoto lens in her purse checking in with the sole purpose of spying.

“Do you need help with your bag?” she asked, looking at my small tote. “Your room
is on the very top floor.”

“Oh no. I’ll be fine,” I said, clutching the bag to my side like it was full of blood
diamonds.