45
The office was quiet as I made my way in, the envelope of photos clutched tightly in my left hand. I felt like I had aged a hundred years in seconds.
“Where is everyone?” I asked Stuart.
“The interns went back to school,” he said, not looking up. “You knew that already.”
I did. They’d be coming in odd hours and working around their class schedules, while we scrambled to find volunteers. But I had forgotten.
“Is Bev here yet?” Michael called from his office. Before I could respond, he strolled out, his face lighting up as he saw me, then draining of color when he looked closer. He crossed the office in three seconds and put me in a chair. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Larry,” I said, choking on the name. Then I shook my head and handed Michael the envelope.
He pulled out the contents, then sank into the chair next to mine and swore. “Bev, I’m so, so sorry. This was all my fault.”
“Don’t,” I said.
Stuart hung up the phone and came over to see what was going on. He looked at the top picture over Michael’s shoulder and made a sour face.
“You two couldn’t have done that inside?” he asked. “You’ve got a whole back office with a door that locks.”
I glared at him.
“Not helping,” Michael muttered. He looked at me and took my hand. “Is he going to use it in court?”
I nodded. “If I don’t quit.”
“That’s easy,” he said. “I’ll testify. It was all me, and nothing else happened.”
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“You absolutely can’t do that,” Stuart agreed. “It’ll be the end of the campaign.”
“Her kids matter more than me winning,” Michael said. “He can’t take the kids.”
“He won’t get the kids,” Stuart said. “You know that as well as I do. But if you testify that you kissed a married woman, everything we worked for is done.”
“There’s more,” I said quietly. They stopped arguing to look at me. “He gave the pictures to Sam.” They both stared at me in silence. “If I don’t quit, he’s going to use them against you publicly.”
Stuart let out a string of foul invective explaining exactly what Larry could do to himself, where, and with a goat.
“While I think we could probably sell tickets to that,” I said drily, “there’s only one answer here. I’ll clear out my desk. And I suppose type up a letter to show him as proof.”
“No,” Michael said.
“It’s the only way. It’s okay. There’s not much more I can do at this point.”
“She’s right,” Stuart said. “Look, I agree, we would have never made it this far without her, but right now”—he picked up a picture and held it out at us—“she’s a liability.”
“Which is my fault,” Michael said. “I want to find a way to fix this.”
“You can’t,” Stuart said. “She can.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “There were two of us there that night. If anything, you were the voice of reason.”
Michael put his other hand on mine, and for a full minute said nothing. Then finally: “Do you want to quit?”
If he had asked me that morning, when Robbie was all tearful and asking if I would be home more, I might have said yes. But quitting meant Larry won, even if we won the election. And more than that, I wanted to see this through. I didn’t want to be like Anna Wainwright, describing myself as a housewife who stayed out of business because a wife should never be her husband’s boss.
I wanted to be something, do something, leave a legacy. And if we lost, we would lose knowing we had fought our hardest and not been outsmarted by a man who took me for granted.
“No. I don’t.”
His hand squeezed mine. “Then we figure this out.” He looked up at Stuart. “Together.”
Stuart nodded. “The Three Musketeers,” he said with a sigh.
“He’ll plant a newspaper story,” Stuart said as we sat around the table in the back of the office, trying to strategize. “Larry will be the anonymous source of course.”
“You think he’ll be anonymous?”
Stuart nodded. “He’s not going to risk dragging Sam through the mud on this. Then he’ll give some on-the-record quote about just wanting what’s best for his kids.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, the beginnings of a headache forming. “That’s the biggest joke in this.”
“Look, we knew Sam fought dirty,” Stuart said. “It’s why Michael was the perfect candidate.”
“Until I came along,” I finished for him.
Stuart didn’t argue. “He was squeaky clean. No dirt.”
“Let’s find the girl,” Michael said.
“What girl?”
“The one from six years ago. The one they said Tom Stanton had the affair with.”
“Greg said his firm represented him,” I said. “She dropped the charges as soon as Tom dropped out.”
“They paid her off,” Stuart said. “They’re probably still paying her. I doubt she’d talk.”
“We have to try,” Michael said.
“What about the secretary?” Stuart asked. “The one Larry is having the affair with.”
I shook my head. “I tried. She seems to think she’s in love with him. She won’t testify.”
Both men thought for a moment. “It’s too bad you don’t have receipts from the Colonial Manor or something like that,” Stuart said. “We could build a case.”
The name rang a bell. “That motel on Rockville Pike? Why?”
Michael and Stuart exchanged a look. “It’s where a lot of men go to cheat on their wives,” Michael said slowly.
My eyes widened.
“That night,” I said. “The night there was that big thunderstorm, and the power went out, remember that?” They both nodded, not sure where I was going. “I went looking for matches and I found a book in the junk drawer. I remember putting it away the next morning. It was from the Colonial Manor. I’ve never been there. But we had a matchbook, which means Larry was there.”
“The sign-in book,” Michael said.
“Which only works if they’ll give it to us and if he was dumb enough to use his real name,” Stuart said.
“It’s worth a try.” Michael stood up. “Come on. We’re going over there.”
“You are not going anywhere,” Stuart said. “The last thing we need is this PI getting pictures of you going into a motel with Bev. I’ll go.”
“Wait,” I said, holding my hands up in a “time out” gesture. “What are we doing?”
“If he stayed there with anyone, the motel will have a record of it,” Michael said. “If we can get the pages from the book with him and a woman checking in, we can use that in court.”
“And to battle anything Sam’s campaign claims in the papers.”
“That’ll be enough in court?” I asked. They both nodded. “Then I’ll go.”
“I’m coming with you,” Stuart said.
“I can do this.”
“No one said you couldn’t,” Stuart said. “But backup never hurts. And it’s all our jobs on the line here.”
I picked up my purse. “Let’s go.”