“I understand from your sister that we have a situation,” Georgia said. She gave every appearance of someone chatting about the weather as she linked her arm through mine and turned me back toward the dance floor. “It’s important that we stay calm and trust the proper authorities to get to the bottom of this . . . unfortunate situation.”
Authorities? What did she know? What had Ivy told her?
“What situation?” I asked out loud.
“The situation,” Georgia repeated. “With the reporter.”
CHAPTER 52
The reporter, I thought. The First Lady knows Henry and I talked to the reporter.
Ivy was nowhere in sight. I hadn’t laid eyes on Henry in at least five minutes. When I scanned the room, I didn’t see the president, either.
Stay calm. Think. I had to get out of here. I had to find my sister, or Henry, or both.
The First Lady studied me with eyes every bit as knowing as Adam’s father’s.
Just as she opened her mouth to say something, Ivy reappeared beside us. She said something to Georgia, too low for me to hear, then steered me out of the room.
I tried to turn around and look at my sister, and found myself turned forcibly back to face forward. “Henry—”
“Henry is fine,” Ivy said calmly. “At least, he will be until his mother finishes with him.”
We passed two security teams on our way out of the White House. As we stepped out the East entrance, I tried again. “What happened back there?” I asked, my body dwarfed by massive columns that reminded me that this was the White House. The center of power for the entire country—by some definitions, the world. “Georgia knows about the reporter.”
“She knows,” Ivy said sharply, “that the reporter is dead.”
“Dead?” The word got caught in my throat. The man we’d talked to the day before—the one Henry had tipped off about his grandfather’s death—was dead?
“The police found his body in an alleyway.” Ivy’s words were remarkably unemotional given the content of what she was saying. “Someone slit his throat.”
Bodie pulled the car up. Before I could say anything, my sister had forcibly deposited me in the backseat and climbed into the front.
“What’s she doing here?” Bodie asked Ivy, nodding toward me.
“Tess and Henry Marquette decided a state dinner was a good place to play bait.” Ivy’s answer was laced with barely contained fury.
My brain wouldn’t stop racing, couldn’t stop racing. Someone killed the reporter. Is the killer here? Does he know about us? My skin felt clammy all of a sudden. I felt my fingers digging into the seat beneath me.
“Reagan National,” Ivy told Bodie. He turned and shot her a look I couldn’t quite read from the backseat, but she was already on the phone. “Adam,” she said. “I need a favor. Can you go by the house and pack a bag for Tess?”
What?
On the other end of the line, Adam must have asked a similar question, because Ivy responded.
“Yes, I’m sure, Adam.” She paused, listening, and then spoke again. “Indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely?” I overcame my inability to form coherent words. “What do you mean, indefinitely? Why is Adam packing me a bag?”
Ivy didn’t answer. I turned my attention to Bodie.
“What is Reagan National?”
Bodie met my eyes briefly in the mirror. “Airport,” he answered.
Airport. Bag.
“I’m not going,” I said, feeling a ball of panic slowly unfurling inside me. “I’m not going anywhere. Ivy!”
She wasn’t listening to me. As soon as she got off the phone with Adam, she placed another call. “Stetson,” she said, a smile in her voice that I knew, without being able to see her, was not reflected on her face. “Ivy Kendrick. I need a favor.”
It soon became clear that when Ivy said I need a favor, what she really meant was I need a plane.
Less than an hour after she’d removed me from the White House, she was putting me on that plane. Standing on a private airstrip, being ordered onto a private plane, I didn’t have time to wonder when, exactly, I’d become a girl who wore ball gowns and had access to jets.
“Ivy,” I said for probably the fortieth time. “What is going on?”
This time, she answered. “What’s going on,” she said, her voice cutting through the wind around us like a red-hot knife through butter, “is that Carson Dweck was murdered this afternoon.”
Less than twenty-four hours after talking to Henry and me.
“What’s going on,” Ivy continued, “is that I have every reason to believe the person who killed him was there tonight.” Ivy’s gaze was focused entirely on me, with an intensity that scared me. “What’s going on is that I came to the White House to fill the president in on the situation, and I found you. What’s going on, Tess, is that you have drawn an enormous target on your own forehead, and I am getting you out of here.” She glanced back at her driver. “Bodie will go with you.”
Bodie gave a brief nod in response.