Two days later, I got an invitation to dine at the White House. I hadn’t said a word to Ivy about my suspicions. The president was a friend. I couldn’t ask her to investigate the possibility that he’d arranged his own shooting until I was sure.
Sure that there was something to investigate.
Sure that it was worth it.
So I accepted Georgia Nolan’s invitation to brunch, and I went to the White House, uncertain what I expected to find there.
Something to tell me I’m not crazy. Or, better yet—something that would tell me I was wrong.
I’d had forty-eight hours to think about Dr. Clark telling me that the Nolan administration was corrupt. She’d convinced Henry that the president was the fourth player in the conspiracy to kill Justice Marquette. The one who’d brought the other men together. The one who’d walked away scot-free.
Over the past two days, I’d found myself wondering if that was true.
The president’s doctor, Dr. Clark’s voice whispered in my memory as I took my seat opposite Georgia Nolan. A Secret Service agent on the president’s detail. That doesn’t strike me as a coincidence.
It shouldn’t strike you as one, either.
If President Nolan was the kind of man who could arrange to have himself shot for approval ratings, what else was he capable of? Could he have been involved with the assassination of Justice Marquette?
Brunch was served in the family dining room. The residence was different from the public face of the White House, but I couldn’t forget—even for a second—where I was.
President Nolan was out of the hospital and back to work. Ivy was off doing damage control for a famous philanthropist who had apparently gotten caught up in some not-so-philanthropic things.
It was just the First Lady and me.
How well do you know your husband? I thought, as Georgia dished out the food. If I told you what I suspect, would it shock you? Would you turn around and tell him what I’d told you?
Georgia speared a piece of fresh fruit with her fork and assessed me across the table.
“How are you doing, Tess?” she asked. “Truly?”
I considered my answer. “I’ll survive.”
“I have no doubt of it,” the First Lady replied. “Ivy is one of the strongest women I have ever met, and you, my dear, are very much your mother’s daughter.”
I am.
That was why I was here. That was why I would watch and wait and look for patterns, hints that no one else would think to see.
“I’m so glad we were able to sit down like this,” Georgia said. “I must confess, I did have an ulterior motive for asking you here today.”
I’d told the First Lady—told the president—that the terrorists had said, again and again, that they weren’t responsible for the attack on the president. Did you ask me here to figure out what I know? What I suspect?
Georgia gave me a considering look. “I understand that your grandfather may have told you certain . . . truths, shall we say?”
My heartbeat evened out. “Truths,” I repeated. “About Walker.”
That’s what this is about. That’s why you called me here.
“My Walker,” Georgia told me, “is very much like you, very much like his father.”
Had we been overheard, an observer would have assumed she was talking about the president. I knew better.
“I know my son must be struggling,” the First Lady continued. “I know that his heart is broken. But he doesn’t say much. Not to me. Not to his father.”
This time, she was referencing the president. He was the man who’d raised Walker. In the ways that counted, he was Walker’s father.
“It would hurt them,” Georgia said, “both my husband and my son, if certain truths were to come to light.”
“I know how to keep a secret,” I told Georgia.
She smiled slightly. “I suspect that you do.”
Not long ago, I’d put my life in Daniela Nicolae’s hands. I’d chosen to trust a known terrorist because Walker Nolan was her child’s father. Because family mattered. Because we were connected by blood.
Sitting there, opposite Georgia Nolan, I thought about the connections between us. She’d had an affair with my grandfather, the result of a relationship that went back decades. Georgia treated Ivy like a daughter. I was a Kendrick, and I was a Keyes, and in some twisted way, that made me hers.
“What would you say,” I asked the First Lady, my heart thudding in my chest, “if I told you that I thought there was a chance that your husband had himself shot?”
To mitigate the damage done by the Daniela Nicolae scandal. To protect himself from the fallout. To play on people’s emotions on the eve of midterm elections.
“Tess, darling,” Georgia said, “don’t be ridiculous.” She wasn’t looking at me like a threat. She wasn’t looking at me like a target. She was looking at me like a child. “The president simply is not capable of something like that.” Georgia’s tone was as polished as ever, but beneath the gentle Southern accent, I could hear a thread of sincerity.
A thread of steel.
“I’ve been married to the man for nearly forty years, Tess. I know him as well as it is possible to know anyone in this world, and I am telling you, he could no more arrange for his own shooting than he could kill our children in their sleep.”
Everything in me wanted to believe what Georgia was saying. But I couldn’t help thinking: Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?
I couldn’t help thinking about the Supreme Court justice, murdered by the president’s doctor and an agent on the president’s detail. They could have been working for him.
“You’ve been through a very traumatic event,” Georgia told me. “It’s understandable that there would be some lingering aftereffects.” Georgia softened her voice. “Have you talked to Ivy about any of this? To Adam, or your grandfather?”
She said the words like they were a suggestion, but part of me couldn’t help wondering if they were a probe.
“Ivy knows Peter,” Georgia continued. “Almost as well as I do. She knows he is not capable of something like this.”
This time, when the First Lady said the word capable, I heard it in a different way. What if capable wasn’t a value judgment, a comment on the president’s moral compass? What if it was a statement of fact?
The First Lady was the one who held the press conference after the president was shot. She was the one who made it a call to action.
From things I’d overhead here and there, I knew that Georgia Nolan took an active hand in her husband’s administration. I knew that Ivy and Adam and Bodie considered her a force to be reckoned with.
I knew she was a woman with whom the kingmaker had fallen in love.
When I asked the headmaster why he took down the photo of the Camp David retreat, I thought suddenly, he said that someone had told him it was a bit gauche.
That photo connected the three men who’d conspired to kill Justice Marquette. There was a chance—a good one—that the fourth conspirator had been there, too.
I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche. That didn’t sound like something the president would say. The word gauche sounded polished. Female.
I was told displaying that photograph so prominently was a bit gauche.
I was sure, suddenly, irrevocably sure that someone was Georgia Nolan.
Why would Georgia tell the headmaster to take that photo down?
She held a press conference after her husband was shot, rallying support for him, for the party.
“You really should talk to someone,” Georgia told me, “about everything you’ve been through.”
Even now that I’d put my initial suspicions on the table, Georgia wasn’t treating me like I was a threat. She wasn’t telling me to keep my suspicions to myself.
“Everything,” Georgia repeated softly. “Including the truth about Henry Marquette.”
Slowly, I registered the meaning behind those words. Georgia knew. Somehow, she knew that Henry had betrayed me. She knew that he’d been working with the terrorists.
Just like I knew that she was the one who’d had her husband shot.
“I care about you, Tess,” Georgia told me. “You’re very dear to people who are very dear to me.”
People who would scorch the earth to find the person responsible if anything ever happened to me.
The First Lady wouldn’t attack me. But she knew about Henry—and whether I was family or not, whether she cared about me or not, she’d come at him to get at me.
You really should talk to someone about everything you’ve been through.
I could tell Ivy what I suspected. I could tell the kingmaker. I could start them down the path of tying the First Lady to the attack on the president, maybe even the assassination of Justice Marquette.
Everything. Including the truth about Henry Marquette.
This was what it looked like to play five moves ahead. This was strategy. This was power.
I stood. Georgia came over and pressed a kiss to my cheek. All I could think, as I made my way out of the residence and was escorted onto the White House lawn, was that William Keyes had been right.
The queen is the most dangerous piece on the board.