“Ivy’s working on it.” That was all I could say, all she’d told me.
“You might trust your sister to work on this,” Henry said, his voice soft, with a lethal thread of steel. “But I most certainly do not.”
A fuller understanding of what my telling Henry meant slammed into me like a semitruck broadsiding a car. Henry despised Ivy’s occupation. He believed that when she “fixed” things, she left destruction in her wake. I’d known he wouldn’t be able to sit on this information. I’d known that, and I’d told him everything anyway.
Because I had to.
“Do what you have to do,” I told Henry, “but remember that if it wasn’t for Vivvie, none of us would know what really happened. She’s the only reason there’s anything to work on, and it cost her everything.”
Her father. Her home. The naive certainty that there were people in this world that you could count on not to blacken your eyes.
I leaned forward, so that I could see all of Henry’s face, so that out of his peripheral vision, he might catch a hint of mine. “Whatever you do with this information,” I told him, “whoever you trust with it, you better make sure they can protect her.”
Ivy hadn’t even told the president. To protect Vivvie. To protect me.
Henry absorbed my words. “You said there were two numbers on the phone?” he asked after an extended silence.
He would catch that.
“The other number was disconnected.” I wondered if Henry was coming to the conclusion that I had reached: that in order for Vivvie’s dad to kill his grandfather, someone had to get Justice Marquette into surgery first.
Did they poison him somehow?
“Do you know where your grandfather was that morning?” I asked Henry. “Or the night before?”
Without warning, Henry pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road. He killed the engine, his fist wrapped tight around the keys. “I can find out,” he said, and then, moving briskly, he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. I stared after him as he walked a few feet away, his head bowed, every muscle in his shoulders and back tensed beneath his shirt.
“Henry’s not big on public displays of emotion.” Asher followed that statement with a noise halfway between a whimper and a moan. I turned to face him. I waited for a rush of anger at him for blabbing, but it didn’t come.
“You would have told him eventually,” I said. I’d been living on borrowed time.
Asher pressed the heel of his hand to his head and made another moaning sound. “I’m the screwup in the Henry-Asher friendship. Always have been.”
I wasn’t sure if Asher thought he’d screwed up by telling Henry or by keeping it from him in the first place.
“So what you’re saying,” I said, in an attempt to bring some of the old light back to Asher’s eyes, “is that Henry is used to having to rescue you from your own drunk self.”
Ashen shook his head, then winced, clearly regretting that action in his current condition. “I’m not normally an imbiber,” he said. “But there was a lot going on. Oblivion sounded nice.” He closed his eyes, but apparently there was no oblivion to be found. “Vivvie?” he asked.
“Haven’t heard from her.”
The driver’s side door opened, and Henry climbed back in. He took in the fact that Asher was awake, but didn’t comment on it.
“My grandfather didn’t have a history of heart problems,” he told me instead. “We need to figure out what, if anything, can mimic the symptoms of a heart attack.”
“Are we thinking what as in what poison?” Asher asked.
Henry didn’t reply. I couldn’t tell if that was because he wasn’t speaking to Asher, or if he just had nothing to say.
“We?” I asked finally. They’d both used the word.
Henry answered my question with a seemingly unrelated statement. “It wasn’t a good plan.” Everything about him was hyperfocused, intense—it just took me a moment to figure out what he was focused on. “If the plan was to kill my grandfather so that Pierce could assume his spot on the Supreme Court, it wasn’t a good plan.” He curled his fingers into a fist, then uncurled them. I wondered if he even realized he was doing it. “You saw the handout Dr. Clark gave us,” he continued. “There are dozens of potential nominees. The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination.”
You’ll get your money when I get my nomination.
“And the only way,” Henry continued, “that Pierce could possibly be that sure was if he had someone on the inside.”
The inside of the nomination process.
The inside of the White House.