Page 60 of The Ruling Class
“Do you know where your grandfather was that morning?” I asked Henry. “Or the night before?”
Without warning, Henry pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road. He killed the engine, his fist wrapped tight around the keys. “I can find out,” he said, and then, moving briskly, he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. I stared after him as he walked a few feet away, his head bowed, every muscle in his shoulders and back tensed beneath his shirt.
“Henry’s not big on public displays of emotion.” Asher followed that statement with a noise halfway between a whimper and a moan. I turned to face him. I waited for a rush of anger at him for blabbing, but it didn’t come.
“You would have told him eventually,” I said. I’d been living on borrowed time.
Asher pressed the heel of his hand to his head and made another moaning sound. “I’m the screwup in the Henry-Asher friendship. Always have been.”
I wasn’t sure if Asher thought he’d screwed up by telling Henry or by keeping it from him in the first place.
“So what you’re saying,” I said, in an attempt to bring some of the old light back to Asher’s eyes, “is that Henry is used to having to rescue you from your own drunk self.”
Asher shook his head, then winced, clearly regretting that action in his current condition. “I’m not normally an imbiber,” he said. “But there was a lot going on. Oblivion sounded nice.” Heclosed his eyes, but apparently there was no oblivion to be found. “Vivvie?” he asked.
“Haven’t heard from her.”
The driver’s side door opened, and Henry climbed back in. He took in the fact that Asher was awake, but didn’t comment on it.
“My grandfather didn’t have a history of heart problems,” he told me instead. “We need to figure out what, if anything, can mimic the symptoms of a heart attack.”
“Are we thinkingwhatas inwhat poison?” Asher asked.
Henry didn’t reply. I couldn’t tell if that was because he wasn’t speaking to Asher, or if he just had nothing to say.
“We?” I asked finally. They’d both used the word.
Henry answered my question with a seemingly unrelated statement. “It wasn’t a good plan.” Everything about him was hyperfocused, intense—it just took me a moment to figure out what he was focused on. “If the plan was to kill my grandfather so that Pierce could assume his spot on the Supreme Court, it wasn’t a good plan.” He curled his fingers into a fist, then uncurled them. I wondered if he even realized he was doing it. “You saw the handout Dr. Clark gave us,” he continued. “There are dozens of potential nominees. The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination.”
You’ll get your money when I get my nomination.
“And the only way,” Henry continued, “that Pierce could possibly bethatsure was if he had someone on the inside.”
The inside of the nomination process.
The inside of the White House.
“Ivy hasn’t told anyone,” I said, thinking out loud. “Not the president, not the First Lady …”
Henry clamped his jaw down, then forced it to relax. “You were right when you said that I needed to think about who I could possibly hand this information over to, Tess. If there’s even a chance that this goes as high as the West Wing, we can’t trust anyone. Not the police. Not the Justice Department. No one.”
“So where does that leave us?” I asked.
Henry’s chest rose and fell slightly with each breath. He was completely in control of himself in a way that he hadn’t been when he left the car. “I know where it leaves me. I’m going to figure out who had access to my grandfather before his so-calledheart attack,” he told me. “And you’re going to go home.”
CHAPTER 38
By the time I got back to Ivy’s, it was dark. I let myself in the front door. The entire house was lit up like a Christmas tree, but there wasn’t another person in sight.
“Hello?” As much as I just wanted to make my way up the spiral staircase and climb into bed, I doubted putting this off until morning would make the coming confrontation any easier. I’d taken off and ignored Ivy’s calls for hours on end. She wasn’t going to be happy about that.
“Hello?” I called a second time. I walked back toward her office. The sound of my footsteps echoed through the otherwise silent house. Ivy’s office door was slightly ajar. I pushed gently on it. “Ivy?”
The door opened. The office was empty. I hovered at the threshold, like a vampire waiting for an invitation.I should turn around and go.But I didn’t. I stepped over the threshold and walked slowly toward Ivy’s desk.
It had been three days since I’d told Ivy everything I knew. She’d had three days to begin unraveling what was going on here. She’d been working, almost nonstop.
The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination.
