I glanced up at Adam, who was tracking my every move, like I might take off again any second. “He’s here,” I told Ivy.
She must have heard a hint of wariness in my voice, because the next thing she said was, “He’s a worrier. Try not to hold it against him.”
I eyed Adam, whose even features were set into an expression of uncompromising disapproval. “Roger that.”
Adam narrowed his eyes at me. “What did she say?” he asked suspiciously.
“Nothing,” I told him.
I could practically hear Ivy rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. “Put him on.”
I handed the phone to Adam. He took it. “As far as I can tell, she’s in one piece,” he said, then paused. “What makes you think I’m going to yell at her?” Another pause. “I don’t yell . . . fine. I’ll be on my best behavior until you get here. I won’t tell her that family doesn’t just take off, or that running away never solved anything.” Adam might have been talking to Ivy, but his sharp blue eyes were on me. “I certainly won’t tell her that if it were up to me, she wouldn’t be leaving this house again until she was thirty.”
For a guy who’d met me only a handful of times, Adam did a good impression of my grandfather.
He and Bodie are Ivy’s family. I didn’t know how long they’d known each other, or what exactly there was between them. All I knew was that while I’d been in Montana with Gramps, they’d been here with her—probably for years.
Apparently, from Adam’s perspective, that made me family, too.
“I’m not supposed to yell at you,” he informed me when he hung up the phone, the muscles in his jaw taut.
“If it would make you feel better, I don’t really mind,” I offered.
Adam’s eyelid twitched. “Of course you don’t,” he said with a shake of his head. “You do realize that completely defeats the point?”
I was pretty sure there was no right answer to that question. “I was only gone for a few hours.”
Adam fixed me with a look. “This isn’t a good time for you to go off the grid—not even for a few hours.”
I thought about Ivy telling me to keep my mouth shut, about Henry pointing out that we couldn’t trust anyone—not the police, not the Justice Department, and certainly not the White House.
“Ivy hasn’t told the president or the First Lady what’s going on.” I studied Adam’s face as I said those words. “The only way any of this makes any sense is if Pierce had reason to believe that he would get the nomination.”
Adam’s poker face was even better than Henry’s. “Don’t take off again,” he ordered.
He’s not going to tell me anything. With a curt nod to acknowledge his words, I turned to go upstairs.
“This isn’t the time to jump to conclusions,” Adam called after me. His voice stopped me in my tracks. He measured his words, choosing each one carefully. “The president is rarely the most powerful person in Washington, Tess. He’s part of a system, a cog in a machine.”
“Are you saying you don’t think the president was involved?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Adam replied, “because Ivy told you to stay out of this. I am telling you to stay out of this.” The warning was clear in his voice. If he had to make me stay out of this, it wouldn’t be pleasant. “But if I was saying something, it would be that this isn’t simple. Power is currency in Washington. And you don’t always know who’s holding the cards.”
He was saying that the president wasn’t the only one we should be wary of. He might not even be the most likely suspect.
Not when there were people out there who made things happen behind the scenes.
People like Adam’s father.
That night, as I plugged my phone in to charge, I remembered the photo from the headmaster’s office. I pulled up the shots I’d taken on my phone. The first two were unusable, but the third one only had a minor glare. I zoomed in and studied the men in the photo: three in the back row, two in the front, one off to the side.
Major Bharani. Judge Pierce. The Hardwicke headmaster. William Keyes. The fifth man, I didn’t know. And the sixth—he was standing slightly off to one side. The glare obscured his face, but the way he was standing, the general shape of his features—
Familiar.
I loaded the picture onto my computer and looked up every tutorial I could find on removing glare from photos. I cloned the picture. I adjusted the shadow. I played with the filters. The end result wasn’t pretty, but it was enough for me to confirm the man’s identity.
Six men. Five I recognize. I walked through them one by one. The doctor who killed Justice Marquette. The judge who paid him to do it. The headmaster of DC’s most exclusive private school. Adam’s father, who makes things happen behind the scenes.
And standing off to the side, staring straight at the camera:
President Nolan.
CHAPTER 39