It was surprising to her that Matt seemed like a new person, too.
Matt didn’t see how he could ever be the same again having witnessed firsthand what it meant to stand up for one’s principles. Once the furor had died down and he returned to his offices, he quickly began looking into some questions he’d had for a few weeks, particularly after hearing the names Franklin and Vandermere. In the middle of one night, he had awaked with the answer—Franklin and Vandermere was a big road construction firm, and several years ago, they had been party to a lawsuit in which he had been peripherally involved. His memory was that they had paid themselves for contracted work on a toll road near Houston that was never completed. The details were foggy, but he recalled that they were a shady outfit. After the events of that night—the closeness between Rebecca’s ex-husband and Tom, along with Franklin and Vandermere reps, he knew there was something rotten going on, and he was determined to unearth what it was.
While Matt was quietly looking into Tom’s ties to Franklin and Vandermere, Rebecca had begun to pull things out of the old barn in her quest to return to her artistic roots. She told Matt that maybe she would create and sell pottery, or paint for a living until she figured out what she might do, and who knew? At the moment, she was just ecstatically happy being free of the old Rebecca and planning on her life as the new Rebecca.
But a couple of weeks after her astounding fall from grace, Rebecca’s phone rang, and a male voice asked for her. “Ah, Ms. Lear, my name is Russ Erwin, and you and I met at a little candidate deal up there in Georgetown,” his deep voice rang out.
“Yes, of course! I remember it well.”
“Well, now, I’d be less than honest if I said I hadn’t followed with some glee what happened out there at Tom Masters’s big fund-raiser, and I thought I’d just touch base, see if you were interested in coming over to our side. You sound like the type of lady we want.”
Rebecca sank onto a bar stool. “You want me to help you with your campaign? But the election is less than a month away.”
“It’s creeping up, isn’t it? Still, I’d like your help—not without some study on your part, though. What I’d like to do is send you some material, and after you look it over, see what I’m about, maybe you can call with any questions you have and we can decide if there’s a fit, and what sort of place we might have for you in our organization, before and after the election.”
She grinned broadly at Grayson, who was sitting at the bar eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I’d like that, Mr. Erwin.”
“Please, call me Russ. We’re just a few folk who came together and are trying to do the right thing. Where should I send the material?” he asked.
Rebecca gave him her address, and they talked a little longer about what had happened at the Three Nines Ranch. When she at last hung up, she was thrilled, as was Matt when she called to tell him. “It sounds like a great opportunity,” he agreed.
“But I thought we’d sworn off politics,” she laughingly reminded him.
“No, we’ve sworn off politicians we don’t believe in,” he said. “There’s a big difference.”
“You’re sure you wouldn’t mind if I got involved in another campaign?”
“All I want is for you to be happy, Rebecca,” Matt said. “Whatever it takes.”
She loved that man.
Rebecca did indeed join the Independents and was so immersed in it leading up to the election that she didn’t really notice how much time Matt was putting in at the office.
Matt was pretty immersed himself in two issues: the first, and most important, was to come up with a buy-out plan that Ben could live with. Ben wasn’t exactly anxious to split up, but he agreed with Matt that the time had come to go their philosophical ways. The trauma was too much for Harold, and, having branched out a little with Rebecca during the campaign, decided he had what it took to run a biker coffee shop. Which is precisely what he and Gary moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to tackle.
To each his own, Matt thought.
The second issue Matt had on his mind was Tom’s campaign, and he quietly, methodically, followed up on his suspicions. In the course of his follow-up, he had a chance to study Tom’s voting record on hundreds of boring bills, and mentally kicked himself for never having done it before, because there were, indeed, some interesting voting patterns.