September 8
I got lost on my first official day of work. All those long corridors look alike. While I was trying to find Senator Y’s office, I ran into Senator X—my senator. He walked me to the right office & asked me how it was going.
Just before lunch, this other page in the program, R, told me she had seen me talking to Senator X. She said she knew he was my sponsor, but that it seemed like I knew him personally.
Finally I gave in & told her that my parents were supporters of his & that V & I had dinner with him before the program started.
R sniffed. She has all these freckles. I’ve got some, but she looks like someone spattered her with olive-green paint. Then she said something about how a lot of the pages here seem to have some sort of “in” & don’t really need to be qualified.
I couldn’t believe her! I am qualified. Straight A’s, debate, mock UN, mock state legislature, etc. How is it that on my first day of work I’ve already been branded a freeloader? I told her I still had to meet the same requirements as everybody else. It wasn’t just a slam dunk.
Sometimes people think they know you, but they really have no idea.
Then the weird thing was that R asked if I wanted to go to lunch together. Like we were friends or something! We all have meal cards so we can eat in the Senate cafeteria. I told her I was meeting someone else. No way was I hanging out with her.
Of course, then I had to make sure we didn’t show up at the cafeteria at the same time, so she wouldn’t see that I was alone.
But guess who was there? Senator X! He asked if I wanted to sit with him. I didn’t care if it looked like I was sucking up. I just said yes.
He wanted to know where I had heard about the program. I told him there was a guy at school a couple of years ago who had been a page. In fact, Senator X sponsored him, although he didn’t seem to remember him that well.
While I was talking to Senator X, R walked by & stared at me. I knew what she was thinking.
But I am not a freeloader.
HEDGES RESIDENCE
December 19
You’re taking Makayla to church?” Nic asked her mother.
“If your child is staying in my house, then of course she is going to church with me this morning.” Berenice Hedges put her arm around Makayla’s slender shoulders. She wasn’t going to give up her granddaughter that easily.
“But, Mama, I’d rather she decide that kind of thing for herself when she gets older.”
“‘Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it,’” her mother retorted. Berenice was five inches shorter than Nic, but right now she seemed taller.
“Like that made any difference with me,” Nic began, when her cell phone vibrated on her hip. She looked down. It was from the Converses. With a sigh she said, “I have to take this.” Turning away as she pressed the talk button, she said, “This is Nicole Hedges.”
“Can you come by the house?” Wayne Converse said in a rush. “There’s someone we’d like you to talk to. Someone who might know something about what happened to Katie.”
Nic’s pulse began to race. “Who?”
“I’d rather wait until you get here to explain it to you.”
Nic had to park four blocks away. Before she got out of the car, she slipped on her sunglasses and picked up a notebook and an empty Starbucks cup for protective camouflage.
The media filled the sidewalk for the length of the block and spilled out into the street. Three satellite trucks, guys with TV cameras on their shoulders or long-lensed cameras around their necks, others toting boom mikes, a couple of dozen people talking on cell phones or tapping away on their BlackBerries. All of them waiting for something to happen.
She twisted her way through them, her coffee and notebook a kind of disguise. There were so many reporters here now, many from out of town, that a new one wouldn’t be remarked upon. Once she came back out of the house, it would be a different story. Nic was two steps from the Converses’ walkway, two steps from private property, when someone grabbed her arm.
“Nicole,” Cassidy hissed in her ear, no more eager to draw attention than Nic was herself. “What’s happening?’”
Nic shook her off. “Later,” she said out of the side of her mouth.
Cassidy fell back, a tiny smile tightening her lips, her turquoise eyes avid.
The minute Nic turned up the walk, the crowd turned and began to shout. She thought of a pack of wild dogs baying. Baying simply because the others were baying.
“Do you have news about Katie?”
“What about Katie?”
“Is there something new in the Katie Converse case?”
The front door opened, and she heard the cameras whirr. Wayne pulled her inside. Valerie was standing behind him. It was a relief to have the door click solidly into place behind her back, to have the shouts reduced to murmurs.