CELESTE IS IN SOME DREARY backstage holding room at a Mike Ortiz rally in Des Moines. At least she thinks it’s Des Moines. They all blur together, these rallies in dead-end cities Celeste wouldn’t be caught alive in at any other time. She can hear the muffled screams and cries from the masses in response to Mike’s rising cadences. Women, of course, go crazy for her husband, in his shirtsleeves, his muscles straining against his shirt.
Scream all you want, ladies, he’s mine. Not that I really want him. Well, occasionally. Just to keep him happy and in line. Oh, all right, I enjoy it too, but the most exciting part for me is the head game. The fact that I control him. He’s in my power. He worships me. And my body. But he’ll never be numero uno. That spot was taken twenty-five years ago.
Celeste is bored. She looks around at the minions—the sweaty aides and pollsters and volunteers and speechwriters and strategists. The whole apparatus. She wishes she could just apply the accelerator to Father Time and speed up the next two weeks. Yes, it’s just two weeks until election day. Until she and Lily accomplish the seemingly impossible. Celeste shivers at the thought. At how brilliantly they’ve engineered the whole thing and dealt with every obstacle. They’re one of history’s great teams. Why, they make Franklin and Eleanor and Ron and Nancy look like minor leaguers. Books will be written about them, movies made, statues built, schools named.
There’s only one possible speed bump and that’s the last debate, which is in three days. But it will be fine. Celeste and her tight team have tutored and nurtured their star pupil until he glows with confidence and sincerity, with thoughtful answers to a hundred possible questions at his fingertips.
There are several television sets on in the room. One of them is turned to GNN, and suddenly there’s that urgent pulsing sound and a headline scrolls across the bottom of the screen Update: The Disappearance of Erica Sparks. Celeste moves closer to the set.
Anchor Patricia Lorenzo is saying, “It’s now been two days since journalist and GNN host Erica Sparks’s car went off a cliff on Highway 1 just north of San Francisco.” Footage plays of Erica’s rental car, smashed on the wave-lashed rocks below a sheer cliff.
“The search for her body continues in the frigid waters of the Pacific.” Footage of scuba divers in the surf.
“Investigators have said it’s likely that Sparks was ejected from her car on impact and that her body was carried out to sea by the strong currents in the area. Her fiancé, television producer Greg Underwood, arrived from Australia the day after the accident to supervise the search. He is also looking for answers to the mystery of what Sparks was doing in Marin County that day. He has been joined by Sparks’s oldest friend, Moira Connelly, a newscaster on KTLA in Los Angeles. They have set up a command center in the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, where Erica was staying on the day she disappeared.”
Footage of an earlier interview with Greg appears on-screen, with Moira standing beside him. They both look haggard, stunned, and sad. Greg says, “This makes no sense to me. Why haven’t we found Erica’s body? And why was she on Highway 1? It’s the slowest route back to San Francisco, and Erica was a woman in a hurry. Why didn’t she inform anyone of her plans for that day? This is completely unlike her. And frankly, I’m not sure she was in that car when it went over the cliff.” Footage of the car being hoisted up the cliff face is shown.
Lorenzo continues, “Adding to the mystery of Sparks’s disappearance is the fact that her computer, which she left in her hotel room that day, was completely scrubbed. The computer has been analyzed by experts from the FBI, and they have confirmed that there is nothing on it. Everything was erased.”
Shots appear of a distraught Jenny being escorted out of school. “Sparks’s eleven-year-old daughter, Jenny, is with her father in Framingham, Massachusetts. Dirk Sparks has asked the country to please respect his family’s privacy.
“All that is known for sure is that Erica Sparks left her hotel at approximately ten thirty on the morning of October 26 and got into a rented gray Honda Accord. According to the odometer and the records from Hertz, she drove 104 miles that day, meaning that she did not simply drive north to the vicinity of where the car went off the cliff, which is about fifteen miles from San Francisco. The accident occurred at approximately 2:40 that afternoon, just past a very sharp turn, with no witnesses.” Footage of the vertiginous stretch of road is shown.
Patricia Lorenzo pauses for a moment and her face fills with emotion. “On a personal note, all of us here at GNN are deeply shaken by Erica’s disappearance. She was part of our family. Our thoughts go out to Greg and Jenny. Erica had millions of fans, and we have been inundated with messages of love and support. We will, of course, keep you updated on any developments in the story.”
Celeste walks away from the television set. Out in the arena, the screaming crescendos as her husband reaches the climax of his speech. Erica made a fatal mistake—Well, not fatal, Celeste thinks with a smile. Not yet anyway. She made a major mistake in messing with Lily Lau. What happened to her is her own fault. They were so good to her, feeding her scoops and green-lighting her as debate moderator. And in return she was sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. Foolish girl. Life is so much easier if you just go along to get along.
But Erica will change. Of course she will. The change has already started. When Lily is finished with her, Erica will be one of them. She’ll be much happier. She’s such a complex woman. Too complex for her own good. Soon she won’t have all those awful conflicts that bedevil her. She’ll be free.