Lincoln stood up, too, matching me. “It ain’t me.” We went chest to chest; Lincoln looked to Annie for confirmation and then back. “This is politics. It’s blood sport now. There’s no control. There’s no privacy. People are out there destroying politicians for fun. Anybody with a computer and Internet access can write whatever they want for the world to see.” Lincoln closed his eyes and shook his head, calming himself down. “You and Dad haven’t been in the trenches like me. You’re up in your ivory towers, but those big save-the-world ideas got nothing to do with the way things are now. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s real. Sorry to be the messenger.”
Lincoln sat back down, allowing the exhaustion with the situation to roll over him. “You two laugh and scoff at me, thinking that I’m some huckster out there selling the Glass name. But what you don’t understand is that all that stuff I do is meant to protect us, and you’re fooling yourselves if you don’t think we need it. Dad came up in a different era. He hasn’t had a real challenger in thirty years, but we’re different. We’re vulnerable. Maybe we win. Maybe we lose. But there are people out there who want to hurt us, marginalize us. It’s not my imagination. Ain’t paranoia.”
I turned and walked back over to the painting. When I tilted my head to the side, I felt my spine crack. Everything my brother was saying to me was true, but I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted the world to be different . . . better.
Finally I said, “I know, Lincoln.” I swallowed hard. “I’ve been thinking about it. Thought real hard about it this morning, and I know I can’t do it.” I took a deep breath. “I know I don’t have the stomach for it, the fund-raising and the back-room deals.” I shook my head. “But it’s nice to pretend there’s an answer. It’s nice to be asked.”
I walked back over to my chair and sat down. “Sammy’s in trouble. I’m in trouble.” I looked my brother in the eye. “For a moment, I thought maybe a fresh start in DC might be the answer to everything.” A soft laugh. “Ideas of grandeur didn’t hurt my ego none, neither.” I looked at Annie and then back at him. “But I’m out. Maybe known it for a long time, maybe from the beginning, but now I’m telling you . . . I’m out.”
Then I turned to Annie. “What do you think?”
She shook her head, sad. “I don’t think much of anything.” Then she looked down at her feet. “Maybe I should quit, too.”
“Hold on.” I pointed at Lincoln. “We have a world-class fixer in the room. He’s probably got a half dozen plans ready to go.” I looked at Lincoln. “Am I right?”
Lincoln smiled, grateful. Then he nodded his head. “Things just have to be handled, that’s all. We have to think them through . . . together.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Lincoln and Annie didn’t stay for dinner. Buster had been waiting outside, and they left as soon as I agreed to Lincoln’s master plan. The rest of us ate, and when we were done, Sammy snuck off to the library with the Judge, as usual, while my mother and I did the dishes.
After the final pot was scrubbed and dried, I walked from the kitchen to the library, where Sammy sat with the Judge on the couch. They’d finished The Iliad. They had now moved on to a compilation of poems by Walt Whitman. I knocked on the door frame as I entered. “Time for bed, sweetie.”
Sammy groaned.
“Have to talk to the Judge for a few minutes.” I gave her my hand and pulled her from the couch. “Why don’t you stop in the kitchen and have another cookie and some milk with Grandma. I’ll be out in a few.”
My consent to yet another cookie got her moving toward the door, where she stopped and blew the Judge a kiss before hustling away.
He smiled, then closed the book and put it on the end table next to the couch. “Everything going OK?” He gestured to the chair. “Have a seat and tell me what the great political mastermind had to say.”
I sat down. “You must be talking about Lincoln?”
“Of course,” the Judge said. “I’m sure he had a plan.”
I nodded. “Always.” I thought for a moment and then added, “Not a bad one, either.”
“I’m sure it entails you giving up your father’s congressional seat.” The Judge was always skeptical of Lincoln’s motives.
“Yes,” I said, “but the seat was never mine to begin with.”
The Judge scoffed. “You don’t believe that, do you? Your father, in a rare moment of insight and wisdom, picked you, and that’s the end of it. Lincoln could bluster and whine, but he’s smart enough to know the rules.” He folded his arms across his chest, signaling his opinion was final. “You win.”
“I appreciate that, but it’s more complicated.”
The Judge raised an eyebrow. “The good mayor?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Judge knew, too. Seemed like everybody knew.
“That’s part of it,” I said. “Sammy is another part . . . school issues.”
“You have the name and your father’s support. That’s all you need.”
“Maybe.” I nodded. “But politics hasn’t been my thing for a long time.”
“You say that now.” The Judge shook his head. “So that means the state Senate seat is out, too?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true.
The Judge looked at me, knowing the haze that I’d been living in and continued to struggle with, then he set it all aside, ready for a new topic. “Assume you had other reasons that you wanted to talk.”
“I do.” I leaned back, thinking about Sammy. “I told Sammy that I wasn’t going to send her back to her old school, so”—the words caught in my throat—“I am going to need your . . . help.”
The Judge looked at me with kindness. I knew it had more to do with his love of Sammy than me, but it was the first time he’d ever looked at me like that. “Of course.” He nodded.
I half expected him to snap out of it and revert to his old self, bashing public schools and government regulation, but he didn’t. He didn’t make me feel guilty or sign a contract with a repayment plan. He just gave me a sympathetic grin. “Anything else?”
It took a moment, but my mind shifted to Devon Walker and all the bodies in Castlewood Park and my conversation with Chief Wilson. I remembered promising to help the families, but I didn’t remember agreeing to heed his warning about doing my own investigation. I didn’t see any harm in doing a little more independent field research. “Wondering if you know any of the judges who work down in juvenile?”
“In the city?” The Judge raised his eyebrows. “Most of them have long retired, but I think I know a few that are active.”
“There’s a probation officer I want to talk to somebody about, hear from somebody who works with him.”
The Judge thought about it a little more. “Danny Bryce would probably be your man. He’s pretty passionate about all that stuff.”
The name rang a bell for me. “The Missouri Miracle?”
The Judge nodded. “That’s the one. He’s the judge they put on all the legal panels to talk about juvenile crime. He’s written quite a few law review articles about intervening early in a juvenile’s life and providing them with wraparound support. He started it in the 1990s and experienced significant drops in juvenile crime. Many jurisdictions copied it, wanting their own miracle.”
“Can you make an introduction for me?”
“You can use my name if it’ll help you get a meeting.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
They scheduled the press conference for ten thirty in the morning on Saturday to allow enough time for reporters to write their stories for the Sunday newspaper and television stations to edit the video for their midday and evening newscasts.