He pulled his hands from beneath hers and dragged them down his loose jowls. “I need a drink. Want one?”
He returned to the couch moments later with a tumbler three-quarters full of straight whiskey. Avery said nothing, though she eyed the glass meaningfully.
Defiantly, he took a hefty draught.
Okay, I follow you so far. A gross error was made while you were unable to communicate. Once you were able to communicate, why didn’t you? In other
words, why are you still playing Carole Rutledge?”
Avery stood up and began roaming the untidy room, making ineffectual attempts to straighten it while she arranged her thoughts. Convincing Irish that her
charade was viable and justified was going to be tricky. His contention had always been that reporters reported the news, they did not make it. Their role
was to observe, not participate. That point had been a continual argument between him and Cliff Daniels.
“Somebody plans to kill Tate Rutledge before he becomes a senator.”
Irish hadn’t expected anything like that. His hand was arrested midway between the coffee table and his mouth as he was raising the glass of whiskey.
The liquor sloshed over the rim of the tumbler onto his hand. Absently, he wiped it dry on his trousers leg.
“What?”
“Somebody plans ”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, Irish,” she said, raising her voice defensively. “And I don’t know where or when, either, so save your breath and don’t ask. Just hear me out.”
He shook his finger at her. “I may give you that spanking yet for sassing me. Don’t test my patience. You’ve already put me through hell. Pure hell.”
“It hasn’t exactly been a picnic for me, either,” she snapped.
“Which is the only reason I’ve restrained myself this long,” he shouted.
“But stop bullshitting me.”
“I’m not!”
“Then, what’s this crap about somebody wanting to kill Rutledge? How the bloody hell do you know?”
His mounting temper was reassuring. This Irish she could deal with much more easily than the woebegone shell he’d been minutes earlier. She’d had
years of practice sparring with him. “Somebody told me he was going to kill Tate before he took office.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shit,” he cursed viciously. “Don’t start that again.”
“If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll explain.”
He took another drink, ground his fist into his other palm, and finally relaxed against the back of the sofa, relaying that he was ready to sit still and listen.
“Believing me to be Carole, somebody came to me while I was still in the ICU. I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see because my eye was bandaged and
he was standing beyond my shoulder.” She recounted the incident, repeating the threat verbatim.
“I was terrified. Once I was able to communicate who I really was, I was afraid to. I couldn’t tip my hand without placing my life, and Tate’s, in jeopardy.”
Irish was silent until she had finished. She returned to the sofa and sat down beside him. When he did speak, his voice was skeptical.
“What you’re telling me, then, is that you took Mrs. Rutledge’s place so you could prevent Tate Rutledge from being assassinated.”
“Right.”
“But you don’t know who plans to kill him.”
“Not yet, but Carole did. She was part of it, although I don’t know her relationship with this other person.”
“Hmm.” Irish tugged thoughtfully on the flaccid skin beneath his chin. “This visitor you had ”
“Has to be a member of the family. No one else would have been admitted into the ICU.”
“Someone could have sneaked in.”
“Possibly, but I don’t think so. If Carole had hired an assassin, he would simply have vanished when she became incapacitated. He wouldn’t have come to
warn her to keep quiet. Would he?”
“He’s your assassin. You tell me.”
She shot to her feet again. “You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you believe it.”
“But you think it was my imagination.”
“You were drugged and disoriented, Avery,” he said reasonably. “You said so yourself. You were half blind in one eye and forgive the bad joke couldn’t see
out of the other. You think the person was a man, but it could have been a woman. You think it was a member of the Rutledge family, but it could have
been somebody else.”
“What are you getting at, Irish?”
“You probably had a nightmare.”
“I was beginning to think so myself until several days ago.” She took the sheet of paper she’d found in her pillowcase from her purse and handed it to him.
He read the typed message.
When his troubled eyes connected with hers, she said, “I found that in my pillowcase. He’s real, all right. He still thinks I’m Carole, his coconspirator. And
he still intends to do what they originally planned.”
The note had drastically altered Irish’s opinion. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “This is the first contact he’s had with you since that night in the
hospital?”
“Yes.”
He reread the message, then remarked, “It doesn’t say he’s going to kill Tate Rutledge.”
Avery gave him a retiring look. “This has been a well-thought-out assassination attempt. The plans were long-range. He’d hardly risk spelling it out.
Naturally, he made the note obscure, just in case it was intercepted. The seemingly innocent words would mean something entirely different to Carole.”
“Who has access to a typewriter?”
“Everybody. There’s one at a desk in the family den. That was the one used. I checked.”
“What does he or she mean by ‘whatever you’re doing’?”
Avery looked away guiltily. “I’m not sure.”
“Avery?”
Her head snapped around. She had never been able to fudge the truth with Irish. He saw through it every time. “I’ve been trying to get along better with
Tate than his wife did.”
“Any particular reason why?”
“It was obvious to me from the beginning that there was trouble between them.”
“How’d you figure that?”
“By the way he treats her. Me. He’s polite, but that’s all.”
“Hmm. Do you know why?”
“Carole either had, or was planning to have, an abortion. I only found out about that last week. I’d already discovered that she was a selfish, self-centered
woman. She cheated on Tate and was a disaster of a parent to her daughter. Without raising too much suspicion, I’ve been trying to bridge the gap that
had come between him and his wife.”
Again Irish asked, “Why?”
“So I’d know more about what is going on. I had to get to the source of their problem before I could begin to find a motive for a killer. Obviously, my
attempts to improve their marriage have been noticed. The killer figures that it’s Carole’s new tactic to put Tate off guard.”
She chafed her arms as though suddenly chilled. “He’s real, Irish. I know it. There’s the proof,” she said, nodding down at the note.
Not yet committing himself one way or the other, Irish tossed the sheet of paper down on the coffee table. “Let’s assume there is a killer. Who’s gonna ice
him?”
“I have no idea,” she replied with a defeated sigh. “They’re one big, happy family.”
“According to you, somebody out there at the Rocking R ain’t so happy.”
She provided him with a verbal rundown of names and each person’s relationship to Tate. “Each has his ax to grind, but none of those axes has anything
to do with Tate. Both his parents dote on him. Nelson’s the undisputed head of the family. He rules, being stern and affectionate by turns.
“Zee isn’t so easy to pigeonhole. She’s a good wife and loving mother. She remains aloof from me. I think she resents Carole for not making Tate
happier.”
“What about the others?”
“Carole might have had an affair with Eddy.”
“Eddy Paschal, Rudedge’s campaign manager?”
“And best friend since college. I don’t know for sure. I’m only going by Fancy’s word on that.”
“What a cliché\ How does this Paschal character treat you?”
“He’s civil, nothing more. Of course, I haven’t put out the signals Carole did. If they were having an affair, maybe he just assumes it ended with the
accident. In any event, he’s dedicated to Tate winning the election.”
“The girl?”
Avery shook her head. “Fancy is a spoiled brat with no more morals than an alley cat in heat. But she’s too flighty to be a killer. Not that she’s above it; she
just wouldn’t expend the energy.”
“The brother? Jack, is it?”
“He’s extremely unhappy with his marriage,” she mused, frowning thoughtfully, “but Tate doesn’t figure into that. Although…”
“Although?”
“Jack’s rather pathetic, actually. You think of him as being competent, good-looking, charming, until you see him next to his younger brother. Tate’s the
sun. Jack is the moon. He reflects Tate’s light but has none of his own. He works as hard as Eddy on the campaign, but if anything goes wrong, he usually
gets blamed for it. I feel sorry for him.”
“Does he feel sorry for himself? Enough to commit fratricide?”
“I’m not sure. He keeps his distance. I’ve caught him watching me and sense a smoldering hostility there. On the surface, however, he seems indifferent.”
“What about his wife?”
“Dorothy Rae might be jealous enough to kill, but she would go after Carole before she would Tate.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I was browsing through family photo albums, trying to glean information. Dorothy came into the living room to get a bottle from the liquor cabinet. She was
already drunk. I rarely see her, except at dinner, and then she hardly says anything. That’s why I was so surprised when, out of the blue, she began
accusing me of trying to steal Jack. She said I wanted to pick up with him where I’d left off before the crash.”
“Carole was sleeping with her brother-in-law, too?” Irish asked incredulously.
“It seems that way. At least she was trying to.” The notion had distressed Avery very much. She had hoped it was only an alcohol-inspired delusion that
Dorothy Rae had drummed up white sequestered in her room with her bottles of vodka. “It’s preposterous,” she said, thinking aloud. “Carole had Tate.
What could she possibly have wanted with Jack?”
“There’s no accounting for taste.”
“I guess you’re right.” Avery was so lost in her own musings, she missed his wry inflection. “Anyway, I denied having any designs on Dorothy Rae’s
husband. She called me a bitch, a whore, a home wrecker things like that.”
Irish ran a hand over his burred head. “Carole must have really been something.”
“We don’t know for certain that she wanted either Jack or Eddy.”
“But she mast have put out some mighty strong signals if that many people picked up on them.”
“Poor Tate.”
“What does ‘poor Tate’ think of his wife?”
Avery lapsed into deep introspection. “He thinks she aborted his baby. He knows she had other lovers. He knows she was a negligent parent and put
emotional scars on his daughter. Hopefully, that can be reversed.”
“You’ve taken on that responsibility, too, haven’t you?”
His critical tone of voice brought her head erect. “What do you mean?”
Leaving her to stew for a moment, Irish disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a fresh drink. Feet spread and firmly planted, he stood before her.
“Are you leveling with me about that midnight caller you had in the hospital?”
“How can you even doubt it?”
“I’ll tell you how I can doubt it. You came to me, what was it, almost two years ago, with your tail tucked between your legs, needing a job any job. You’d just
been fired from the network for committing one of the worst faux pas in journalism history.”
“I didn’t come here tonight to be reminded of that.”
“Well, maybe you should be reminded! Because I think that’s what’s behind this whole damned scheme of yours. You plunged in that time over your head,
too. Before you got your facts straight, you reported that a junior congressman from Virginia had killed his wife before blowing his own brains out.”
She pressed her fists against her temples as that horrible sequence of events unfolded like a scroll in her memory.
“First reporter on the scene, Avery Daniels,” Irish announced with a flourish, showing her no mercy. “Always hot on the trail of a good story. You smelled
fresh blood.”
“That’s right, I did! Literally.” She crossed her arms over her middle. “I saw the bodies, heard those children screaming in terror over what they had
discovered when they had come home from school. I saw them weeping over what their father had done.”
“Had allegedly done, dammit. You never learn, Avery. He allegedly killed his wife before blasting his own brains onto the wallpaper.” Irish took a quick
drink of whiskey. ‘But you went live with a report, omitting that technical little legal word, leaving your network vulnerable to a slander suit.
“You lost it on camera, Avery. Objectivity took a flying leap. Tears streamed down your face and then then as if all that wasn’t enough, you asked your
audience at large how any man, but especially an elected public official, could do such a beastly thing.”
She raised her head and faced him defiantly. “I know what I did, Irish. I don’t need you to remind me of my mistake. I’ve tried to live it down for two years. I
was wrong, but I learned from it.”
“Bullshit,” he thundered. “You’re doing the same damn thing all over again. You’re diving in where you have no authority to go. You’re making news, not
reporting it. Isn’t this the big break you’ve been waiting for? Isn’t this the story that’s going to put you back on top?”
“All right, yes!” she flung up at him. “That was part of the reason I went into it.”
“That’s been your reason for doing everything you’ve ever done.”
“What are you saying?”
“You’re still trying to get your daddy’s attention. You’re trying to fill his shoes, live up to his name, which you feel like you’ve failed to do.” He moved toward
her. “Let me tell you something something you don’t want to hear.” He shook his head and said each word distinctly. “He’s not worth it.”
“Stop there, Irish.”
“He was your father, Avery, but he was my best friend. I knew him longer and a whole lot better than you did. I loved him, but I viewed him with far more
objectivity than you or your mother ever could.”
He braced one hand on the arm of the sofa and leaned over her. “Cliff Daniels was a brilliant photographer. In my book, he was the best. I’m not denying
his talent with a camera. But he didn’t have a talent for making the people who loved him happy.”
“I was happy. Whenever he was home ”
“Which was a fraction of your childhood a small fraction. And you were disconsolate every time he waved good-bye. I watched Rosemary endure his long
absences. Even when he was home she was miserable, because she knew it would be for only a short time. She spent that time dreading his departure.
“Cliff thrived on the danger. It was his elixir, his life force. To your mother, it was a disease that ate away her youth and vitality. It took his life quickly,
mercifully. Her death was agonizing and slow. It took years. Long before the afternoon she swallowed that bottle of pills, she had begun dying.
“So, why does he deserve your blind adoration and dogged determination to live up to his name, Avery? The most valuable prize he ever won wasn’t the
fucking Pulitzer. It was your mother, only he was too stupid to realize that.”
“You’re just jealous of him.”
Steadily, Irish held her gaze. “I was jealous of the way Rosemary loved him, yes.”
The starch went out of her then. She groped for his hand, pressed it to her cheek. Tears trickled over the back of it. “I don’t want us to fight, Irish.”
“I’m sorry then, because you’ve got a fight on your hands. I can’t let you continue this.”
“I’ve got to. I’m committed.”
“Until when?”
“Until I know who threatened to kill Tate and can expose him.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know,” she groaned miserably.
“And what if this would-be assassin never goes through with it? Suppose he’s blowing smoke? Will you stay Mrs. Rutledge indefinitely? Or will you simply
approach Rutledge one day and say, ‘Oh, by the way’?”
Admitting to him what she had admitted to herself only a few days earlier, she said, “I haven’t figured that out yet. I didn’t leave myself a graceful escape
hatch.”
“Rutledge has got to know, Avery.”
“No!” She surged to her feet. “Not yet. I can’t give him up yet. You’ve got to swear you won’t tell him.”
Irish fell back a step, dumbfounded by her violent reaction. “Jesus,” he whispered as the truth dawned on him. “So that’s what this is really about. You want
another woman’s husband. Is that why you want to remain Mrs. Rutledge because Tate Rutledge is good in bed?”
TWENTY-THREE
Avery turned her back to keep from slapping him. “That was ugly, Irish.”
She moved to the window and was alarmed to notice that it had already grown dark. At the ranch, they’d be finished with dinner. She had told them she
was going to shop through the dinner hour. Still, she needed to leave soon.
“It was ugly, yes,” Irish conceded. “It was meant to be. Every time I feel like going soft on you, I think about the countless nights following the crash when I
drank myself into a stupor. You know, I even considered cashing it all in.”
Avery came around slowly, her face no longer taut with anger. “Please don’t tell me that.”
“I figured, fuck this life. I’ll take my chances in the next one. I had lost Cliff and Rosemary. I had lost you. I asked God, ‘Hey, who needs this abuse?’ If I
hadn’t feared for my immortal soul, such as it is…” He smiled ruefully.
She placed her arms around him and rested her cheek on his shoulder. “I love you. I suffered for you, too, believe it or not. I knew how my death would
affect you.”
He gathered her into a hug, not for the first time wishing she was truly his daughter. “I love you, too. That’s why I can’t let you go on with this, Avery.”
She leaned away from him. “I have no choice now.”
“If there is somebody who wants Rutledge dead ”
“There is.”
“Then you’re in danger, too.”
“I know. I want to be a different Carole for Tate and Mandy, but if I’m too different, her coconspirator will figure she’s betrayed him. Or,” she added soberly,
“that Carols isn’t really Carole. I live in fear of giving myself away.”
“You might have failed already and don’t know it.”
She shivered. “I realize that, too.”
“Van noticed.”
She reacted with a start, then expelled her breath slowly. “I wondered. I nearly had a heart attack when I opened the door to him.”
Irish related his conversation with Van. “I was busy and didn’t pay much attention to him at the time. I thought he was just being his usual, obnoxious self.
Now, I think tie was trying to tell me something. What should I say if he brings it up again?”
“Nothing. The fewer who know, the better for their sakes, as well as mine. Van knew Avery Daniels. The Rutledges didn’t. They don’t have anyone to
compare the new Carole to. They’re attributing the changes in her to the crash and its traumatic aftermath.”
“It’s still shallow,” he said worriedly. “If there is no assassination plot and I pray to heaven that there isn’t the best you can hope to get oat of this is a broken
heart.”
“If I gave it up now and managed to come out alive, I would have done it for nothing. I haven’t got the whole story yet. And what if Tate were assassinated,
Irish? What if I could have prevented it and didn’t? Do you think I could live with that the rest of my life?”
He lightly scrubbed her jaw with his knuckles. “You love him, don’t you?”
Closing her eyes, she nodded.
“He hated his wife. Therefore, he hates you.”
“Right again,” she said with a mirthless laugh.
“What’s it like between you?”
“I haven’t slept with him.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“But that’s what you wanted to know.” “Would you?”
“Yes,” she replied without equivocation. “From the tine I regained consciousness until the day I left the clinic, he was wonderful absolutely wonderful. The
way he treats Carole in public is above reproach.”
“What about how he treats her in private?”
“Chilly, like a betrayed husband. I’m working on that.”
“What will happen then? If he gives in and makes love to you, don’t you think he’ll know the difference?”
“Will he?” She tilted her head to one side and tried to smile. “Don’t men say that all cats are gray in the dark?”
He gave her a reproving glare. “Okay, let’s say he doesn’t notice. How will you feel about him making love to you while thinking you’re somebody else?”
That hadn’t occurred to her. Thinking about it now caused her to frown. “I’ll want him to know it’s me. I know it’s wrong to trick him, but…”
Her voice trailed off as she wrestled with the question she hadn’t yet found an answer for. Leaving it unresolved again, she said, “And then there’s Mandy.
I love her, too, Irish. She desperately needs a caring mother.”
“I agree. What will happen to her when your job is done and you desert her?”
“I won’t just desert ”
“And how do you think Rutledge is going to feel when you do an expos6 on his family?” “It won’t be an expose.”
“I’d hate to be around when you try and explain that to him. He’ll think you’ve used him.” He paused for emphasis. “He’ll be right, Avery.”
“Not if I saved his life in the process. Don’t you think he could find it within himself to forgive me?”
He swore beneath his breath. “You missed your calling. You should have been a lawyer. You’d argue with the devil himself.”
“I can’t let my career end in disgrace, Irish. I’ve got to make restitution for the mistake I made in Washington and earn back my credibility as a journalist.
Maybe I am only trying to be daddy’s little girl, but I’ve got to do it.” Her eyes appealed to him for understanding. “I didn’t pursue this golden opportunity. It
was forced on me. I’ve got to make the best of it.”
“You’re going about it the wrong way,” he said gently, tilting her chin up with his index finger. “You’re too emotionally involved, Avery. You’ve got too much
heart to remain detached. By your own admission, you care for these people. You love them.”
“All the more reason for me to stay. Someone wants to kill Tate and make Mandy an orphan. If it’s within my power, I’ve got to prevent that from
happening.”
His silence was as good as waving a white flag of surrender. She consulted his wall clock. “I must go. But first, do you have something belonging to me?”
In under a minute she was slipping the gold chain of her locket over her head. Monetarily it wasn’t worth much, but it was her most valued possession.
Her father had brought it back to her from Egypt in I967, when he had been hired by Newsweek to document the conflict between that country and Israel.
Avery depressed the spring and the two disks parted. She gazed at the photographs inside. One was of her father. In the photograph, he was dressed in
battle fatigues, a 35-mm camera draped around his neck. It was the last picture taken of him. He had been killed a few weeks later. The other picture was
of her mother. Rosemary, lovely and dainty, was smiling into the camera, but sadly.
Hot, salty tears filled Avery’s eyes. She closed the locket and squeezed it in her palm. Not everything had been taken away from her. She still had this,
and she still had Irish.
“I hoped you had it,” she told him gruffly.
“It was in the dead woman’s hands.”
Avery nodded, finding it difficult to speak. “Mandy had noticed it around my neck. I had given it to her to look at. Just as we were about to take off, Carole
became annoyed because Mandy was twirling the chain. She took it away from her. That’s the last thing I remember before the crash.”
He showed her Carole’s jewelry. “Shook my gizzard when I opened that envelope you sent. You did send it, didn’t you?”
She told him how that had come about. “I didn’t know what else to do with it.”
“Why didn’t you just throw it away?”
“I guess I secretly wanted to make contact with you.”
“You want her jewelry?”
She shook her head no, glancing down at the plain gold band on her left ring finger. “Its sudden reappearance would require an explanation. I have to
keep things as simple as possible.”
He cursed with impatience and apprehension. “Avery, call it off now. Tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Hell and damnation,” he swore. “You’ve got your father’s ambition and your mother’s compassion. It’s a dangerous combination lethal under these
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