Firestorm

Chapter Thirty-one

“Daddy is going to be upset with you for wearing that,” Carly said, closing Jac’s bedroom door on her way to flopping down on the bottom of Jac’s bed. Her body-hugging white tank top rode up a good four inches above her very low-cut skintight blue jeans, exposing a glittering turquoise piercing in her belly button. That was new and, Jac was willing to bet, Daddy didn’t know about it.

“Probably right.” Jac checked the crease in her dress blues in the full-length mirror behind the closet door and shook a fold out of her pant leg so the cuff fell smartly over her gleaming black shoe. “How are you doing?”

“I’m all right. I guess there’s no way we can get out of this, is there?”

Jac carried her uniform jacket to the bed and laid it out. “You know there isn’t. How come you’re not dressed?”

“I don’t want to sit around being uncomfortable any longer than I have to.”

“I thought you were the girly-girl in the family.” Jac took the regulation measuring guide and checked the placement of her insignia on her collars and over the right breast. Then she hung the jacket on a hanger and leaned her shoulder against the closed closet door. “You want to talk about all this?”

Carly’s pretty face, more delicate than Jac’s, scrunched up. She kicked her flip-flop rhythmically back and forth against the bottom of her foot. Her hair was as black as Jac’s but longer and sculpted away from her face. She didn’t have the same dark eyes, though. She’d gotten their mother’s blue eyes. She was gorgeous and popular and just as insecure as any other seventeen-year-old. Suddenly being thrust onto national television couldn’t be very comfortable for her. Jac’s solution to the far more limited level of notoriety she’d faced at Carly’s age had been to secretly buy a motorcycle, start running with the rough crowd at school, and find herself a girlfriend, or a string of them. Carly was a lot more tightly wound, which was maybe even more worrisome.

“I sort of thought this was coming,” Jac said, hoping to get Carly talking. She’d been back in Idaho four days, and this was the first time they’d been alone. Four days that felt like forty years. She tried to keep her focus on her sister. Maybe it wasn’t too late to help her. “The announcement kinda took me by surprise all the same. You too?”

“You think he’ll win?” Carly asked.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think the country just votes for the one who’s not in office, hoping that a change will make things better. Powell is pretty popular, though. I think he’s got a fight coming.”

“I don’t want to live in the White House.” Carly sounded defiant, but her lower lip trembled, the way it always had when she was trying not to cry.

Jac was ten years older, and she hadn’t been around a lot to help buffer Carly from the fallout of their father’s growing popularity. She’d thought staying away was the best thing to do. Maybe she’d been wrong about that. She thought about Mallory, remembered the stunned look of hurt on her face, and felt the air blast out of her chest the way it had when she’d been caught in a concussive wave from a bomb that had gone off on her approach, tossing her thirty feet in the air. Leaving hadn’t helped Carly. Leaving had hurt Mallory. Maybe she’d been wrong about everything, everything except the way she felt about Mallory. She was sure about that.

“You okay?” Carly asked. “You kind of spaced out for a minute.”

“I’m okay.” Jac decided her trousers could tolerate a few wrinkles. She sat down on the bed next to Carly and took her hand. “If he gets elected, you’re not going to have to live there. In another year, you’ll be going away to college.”

“Yeah, but he’s traveling all over the place this year to campaign, and he’s talking about pulling me out of school and giving me a tutor so I can go with them. It’s my senior year. I’m not going to leave all my friends behind.”

“Maybe you can work a deal with him—you stay here and go to school except for the really big events where he wants the whole family to be visible.” Jac could hear the defiance in Carly’s voice. Carly would run before she’d give up the security of the school and the friends she knew. “You can’t get away, Carly. I’m sorry.”

“As if I don’t know that.” Carly snorted. “He’s already brought on more security staff, and they’re starting to follow me around. You think he’ll let me stay here alone?”

“You know the security is for your safety, right?” Jac didn’t envy anyone assigned to keep an eye on Carly, and if her father did manage to make it to the White House, pitied whatever Secret Service agent would be responsible for the family.

“You never had anyone following you around,” Carly grumped.

“Yeah. You’re right. I had it easier than you’re gonna have it. He’s a lot more visible now. A lot more important.”

Carly picked at the comforter on Jac’s bed. “Are you going to go back into the service?”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

Carly shrugged. “I don’t think you can call it eavesdropping when everybody in the house can hear you yelling.”

“We weren’t yelling,” Jac said, although she didn’t really remember all of the conversation with her father. She’d made it clear she wasn’t going to become part of his campaign entourage. When she told him she was going back to Yellowrock, back to Mallory, although she hadn’t said that, he’d informed her in his usual cool, calm, absolutely resolute tone that that situation was untenable now. The changes in his political obligations made it necessary for her to refrain from any questionable interpersonal activities. Apparently, she could get herself into problem situations wherever she went.

She’d argued she wasn’t going to be on anyone’s radar in the middle of the national forest, but he hadn’t been swayed. She didn’t trust him not to make it impossible for her to go back to Yellowrock by simply making the entire operation disappear. The one thing he couldn’t stop her from doing was reactivating her enlistment. She had a valuable skill, and she knew she’d have no trouble being reposted overseas. She’d almost made the call that morning, but when she did she would be committing herself to at least a year away, and any hope of seeing Mallory again would be gone. Leaving had always been the right decision before, but this time the pain was tearing her apart.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, Car,” Jac said. “Mostly I just want to get tonight’s sideshow over with.”

“I wish I were as brave as you, so I could disappear too,” Carly said. “But I don’t want to be a soldier. No way am I sleeping in a tent with a bunch of guys around and bugs.”

Jac laughed. “Just hang in there until you get to college. Things will get a whole lot better then.”

“How come you came back?”

Jac looked away from her sister’s penetrating stare. One of the things she loved about Carly, and found the most irritating, was Carly’s habit of asking personal questions as if it was her absolute right to know the answers. Privacy was not a word in her vocabulary. “This time it was easier than fighting him.”

Carly’s brows drew down. “That doesn’t seem like you. You’ve always been too proud to let him tell you what to do.”

“Sometimes there’s things more important than your pride.”

“I didn’t think there was for you.”

Jac nodded. “Me neither.”

Carly drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, laying her cheek on her knees. “It’s a girl. Right?”

Jac couldn’t help smiling, even though thinking of Mallory hurt. Thinking of her also made her happier than anything ever had, and for the past few days had been the only thing that kept her going. “Yeah, it’s a girl.”

“Special one?”

“A real special one.”

“So I guess you kind of fucked things up, huh?”

Jac nudged Carly with her elbow. “Language.”

Carly rolled her eyes. “Please.”

“And what makes you think I fucked anything up? Geez, Carly.”

“You’re here by yourself. If you’re here at all, you must’ve fucked something up.”

Jac sighed. “Probably. Most likely.”

“Is she mad at you?”

“She ought to be.”

“What did she say when you left?”

Jac flushed. “Not much. We didn’t really talk about it.”

“Oh boy. You really, really, really did fuck up.”

“Yeah. Remind me about it, why don’t you.” Jac jumped up and pulled her uniform jacket off the hanger. She slid it on, buttoned it, and checked her reflection in the mirror. She pressed down her collar and aligned her tie. “Come on. I’ll wait for you to get dressed. I’ll be your escort tonight.”

“That’s kind of queer. But nice all the same.” Carly heaved herself up off the bed with loose-limbed grace. “Okay, but you better get between me and the fallout from Daddy when he finds out you’re not wearing the dress you were ordered to wear.”

“He’ll have to shoot me before I wear that.”

Carly slid her arm through Jac’s. “I know it sucks for you, but I’m glad you’re here. It sucks a little bit less for me.”

The ache in Jac’s chest spread down into her belly, and she wondered how much longer she could stay standing. She kissed Carly’s temple. “Then I guess I did one thing right.”

*

Mallory didn’t have any trouble finding the ballroom where Senator Franklin Russo’s presidential campaign fund-raiser was being held. She just followed the crowd of tuxedo-clad men escorting elaborately coiffed women bedecked in expensive gowns and glittering jewels down the carpeted hallway of the mezzanine of the Four Seasons Hotel. Twenty minutes on the Internet when she’d gotten back to base the night before had given her the location and time, and she’d covered the 450 miles to Boise in the morning with plenty of time to get checked into a hotel, shower, and change. She wasn’t wearing a gown or a bank vault full of jewels, but she looked presentable enough in the black suit she’d borrowed from Sarah—she didn’t yet know why Sarah felt the need to bring a Donna Karan suit into the north woods—and heels she’d purchased herself that afternoon. Fortunately, the fund-raiser was not an invitation-only affair, and she hoped she’d pass as press corps or even hotel staff. She didn’t really give it much thought—Jac was here somewhere, and she was going to see her no matter what. If she didn’t do this, she’d drive herself crazy for the rest of her life wondering what might have been.

Two young guys in off-the-rack black suits flanked the double doors into the noisy ballroom. Both had close-cropped blond hair, square jaws, broad shoulders, and the flat stare common to bouncers and cops and security guards the world over. Mallory wasn’t intimidated. She worked with tough guys every day. She smiled at one, said hello to the other as if they were best friends, and walked past them into a brightly lit room filled with white linen covered tables beneath crystal chandeliers. Buckets of Domaine Chandon sat in the center of every table, ringed with china plates, silver flatware, and crystal glasses, all glittering as brightly as the jewels adorning the donors.

At the far end of the room, two long tables flanked a speaker stand bristling with microphones upon a raised dais. Franklin Russo, a vigorous, youthful-appearing fifty and even more handsome in person than his photos suggested, sat to the left of the speaker stand with a dark-haired, middle-aged, patrician woman who was beautiful if a little detached, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. Even from the far side of the room, Mallory could see the woman’s resemblance to Jac. Mallory swiftly searched the rest of the faces of Russo’s entourage, almost passing by her before registering the dark eyes that captured hers like none ever had. In the few days since she’d seen her, Jac had changed. Her cheekbones slashed above sharply hollowed cheeks, as if she’d dropped weight on a forced march. Her thousand-yard stare was remote, removed, impenetrable. She sat erect, her shoulders squared, her hands invisible, probably folded in her lap in keeping with the rest of her militarily rigid posture. The uniform was perfect, not a crease out of alignment, not a wrinkle. Jac was so still she might not even have been breathing, her gaze fixed at some distant point as if she were absent from the room in all ways but physical. Jac had effectively disappeared herself.

Mallory’s heart seized. The red sea of Jac’s pain wafted over her, nearly suffocating her. She fought for her next breath and steadied herself with her fingertips against the pristine white linen covering the table next to her. She couldn’t look away from Jac, even though she bled to see her this way.

“Jac,” she murmured. “I’m here, baby. I’m here.”