Suicides don’t look good. The brutality of that statement made my stomach lurch.
“I keep telling myself that I did the right thing.” I could hear Vivvie suck in a breath of air. “I keep telling myself that, Tess, and I almost believe it, but I need to know that this isn’t—” She cut off. “That it’s not just going to . . .” She couldn’t finish that sentence, either. “I need to know that my going to your sister matters, that it made a difference, that it wasn’t for nothing.”
“It wasn’t.” I wished I could make this better for her. I wished I could give her something more than that. “Ivy flew to Arizona today. She wouldn’t say why, but it has to have something to do with Pierce.”
On the other end of the phone line, Vivvie was quiet for so long that I thought she might have hung up.
“What if my dad didn’t kill himself, Tess?” Vivvie’s question caught me off guard. “Ivy said this was dangerous. That’s why she wanted to keep you out of it.” The full force of her pent-up emotions crept into those words. “What if someone realized Ivy was looking into things? What if someone found out that she knew about my dad? If my dad could identify the people he was working with, he was a threat to them.”
“Vivvie—”
“Or what if my dad told someone he was worried about getting caught? What if he got freaked out that the phone was missing, and he told someone? Pierce, or . . . or . . .”
Or whoever else was involved.
It had been easy for me to believe that Vivvie’s father had killed himself. With the phone missing, he had to have known things were unraveling. He’d lost his job at the White House. Maybe he even hated himself for hurting Vivvie.
What I hadn’t thought about was the fact that Vivvie’s father wasn’t the only one who stood to lose something if he got caught. I hadn’t thought about the fact that he might have been able to identify the other people involved.
He put a bullet in his own head, William Keyes had said, staring straight at me. And maybe Vivvie’s father had.
But now that Vivvie had raised the issue, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe—maybe—he hadn’t.
CHAPTER 40
I got to school late. In English, I could feel Henry’s eyes on me across the room. In physics, he sat down at my lab table. The day’s experiment was on centripetal force.
“You asked if I could find out where my grandfather was the night before his heart attack.” Henry’s attention seemed one hundred percent focused on the knot he was tying around a tennis ball. His expression gave nothing away: the very portrait of the dedicated student. “He was at a fund-raiser for the Keyes Foundation.”
Keyes. As in William Keyes. Adam’s words echoed in my head. The president is rarely the most powerful person in Washington.
“There were over four hundred attendees,” Henry said, testing the security of his knot. “Not to mention the waitstaff. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to slip something in my grandfather’s drink.”
Poison the justice. Send him to the hospital. Have the White House physician declare it a heart attack. Have him operate. Twice. By the time the justice died, the poison would have been out of his bloodstream.
The perfect murder.
In my mind, I could still hear Vivvie telling me that she needed having gone to Ivy with her suspicions about her father to have made a difference. To mean something.
“Any idea who those four hundred attendees were?” I asked Henry, my eyes locked on the instructions for our lab.
“My mother got me a list.” Henry’s eyes flickered toward mine, only for a second. “She doesn’t know why I requested it.”
He won’t tell her, I thought, reading his expression. Not until he knows more. In his position, I probably would have done the same thing.
There were times when I thought Henry and I were a lot alike.
Glancing up to make sure that we hadn’t attracted the attention of the teacher—or anyone else—I reached into my bag and pulled out my copy of the photograph from Raleigh’s office. After a moment’s hesitation, I slid it across the table to Henry.
Ivy had told me to stay out of it. But Ivy had told me a lot of things over the years.
Henry had a right to know.
Across from me, he unfolded the picture and studied it for a few seconds, then set it aside and returned his attention to our project.
“Any idea where it was taken?” he asked.
“No. I can identify five of the men.” I indicated which five.
Henry weighed the tennis ball and made a mark in his notebook. “The one next to the president is John Thomas Wilcox’s father.”
That made six.
“And how many of those men are on the list you got from your mother?” I asked Henry. How many of them might have had the opportunity to poison Theo Marquette?
Henry didn’t have to consult his list. He held up two fingers.
I considered the men in the photograph, setting aside Vivvie’s dad and Pierce. The Hardwicke headmaster. The minority whip. The president. The man behind the scenes.