The Fixer (10 page)

“Do you really want me to?” I asked her.

She pulled at the tips of her hair. She was older than I’d originally thought—maybe eight or nine. “No,” she said finally. “But you’re supposed to anyway.”

I said nothing. She plucked a blade of grass and stared at it so hard I thought her gaze might set it on fire.

“You got a pond around here?” I asked her.

“Nope. But there are dogs. Two of them,” she added, lest I mistakenly think she’d said
dog
, singular.

I nodded, which seemed to satisfy her.

She plucked another piece of grass before casting a sideways glance at me. “What would we do with a pond?”

I shrugged. “Skip rocks?”

Twenty minutes later, Thalia Marquette had mastered the art of skipping invisible rocks across a nonexistent pond.

“If it isn’t two lovely ladies, off by their lonesome.”

I turned, surprised to see Asher here—until I remembered that Emilia had attempted to hire me to keep him out of trouble
until
his best friend got back to school to take over the job.

His best friend, Henry. As in Henry Marquette.

“We’re skipping rocks,” Thalia informed Asher. “This is Asher,” she told me. “He’s okay.” She smiled.

Undeterred by the lack of either rocks or a body of water on which to skip them, Asher plopped down beside us on the ground. “I,” he said tartly, “am a master rock skipper.”

Ten minutes later, the cavalry arrived. The cavalry did not look particularly pleased to see us sprawled in the grass.

“You’re not very good at this, Asher.” Thalia was blissfully unaware of her brother’s arrival. Asher shot Henry a lazy grin as he skipped another imaginary stone.

“Five skips,” he declared archly.

I leaned back on my palms. “Two,” I countered. Thalia giggled.

“Surrounded by vipers on all sides,” Asher sighed. He turned to Henry. “Back a fellow up here, my good man.”

Asher’s “good man” looked as if he was considering having the lot of us committed.

“Henry, watch!” Thalia ordered, unaware of—or possibly used to—the dour expression on her brother’s face. She flicked her wrist.

“Excellent form,” Asher commented. “It’s too bad the stone got eaten by an alligator after the second bounce.”

Thalia slugged him. “It did not!”

“Sadly, it did.”

“Henry! Tell him it didn’t.”

There was a beat of silence. “I see no alligators,” Henry allowed.

“Et tu, Henry?” Asher held a hand to his chest. Henry didn’t bat an eye. He was clearly used to the dramatics.

“You’re not wearing shoes,” he told his sister. His gaze went to Asher’s bare feet and then, briefly, to mine. “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”

“We took them off,” Thalia clarified helpfully. Asher’s lips twitched slightly.

“Why did you take them off?” Henry went with a more specific question this time.

“Does a person really need a reason to take off their shoes?” I asked.

Henry’s head swiveled toward me.
Yes
, his disapproving eyebrows seemed to say.
Yes, a person does.

“Tess,” Asher said with a flourish, “meet Henry. Henry, meet Tess.”

“We’ve met.” Henry clipped the words. I thought
met
was a pretty generous description of our encounter outside the church.

“I appreciate your sister’s assistance,” Henry told me stiffly, “but I think it’s time for the two of you to go.” Henry Marquette clearly didn’t want Ivy here—and just as clearly, he didn’t want me near his sister. He inclined his head slightly, staring down at me. “Don’t you agree?” The words were issued more like an order than a question.

I stood, brushing the grass off my legs. “You know, I think I do.”

I’d expected the crowd inside to have thinned, but if anything, it had gotten bigger. I found Ivy in the kitchen.

“Everything okay?” she asked me.

“Fine.”

“Bodie can drive you home,” Ivy offered. “I’ll stay through cleanup, but there’s no reason you have to.”

I nodded. Ivy might have needed me this morning, but now that she had a mission, she was fine. Within seconds, she had her cell in her hand, calling Bodie to pick me up. I made my way to the front door. When I opened it, I caught sight of a man on the front porch, clothed in formal military dress.

“Don’t. Embarrass. Me.”
The man’s words weren’t meant for my ears. They were meant for the teenage girl standing next to him.

Vivvie.

She looked smaller, somehow, than she had the last time I’d seen her. Her eyes were bloodshot, her shoulders hunched, like her body was trying its best to collapse in on itself.

“Vivvie?” I said.

Her eyes—and the man’s—snapped up to mine. His face changed utterly, morphing into a solemn mix of sympathy and kindness.

Bedside manner
, I thought, recognizing him from the news and remembering that he was a doctor—the White House physician. The man who’d treated Justice Marquette.

“Tess.” Vivvie struggled to smile. On anyone else, the expression might have looked natural, but Vivvie’s features weren’t made for small smiles. “Dad,” Vivvie continued, “this is Tess Kendrick. I told you about her. Tess, this is my father.”

Major Bharani gave me a quick once-over. “Of course,” he said smoothly. “It’s nice to meet you, Tess, though, of course, I wish the circumstances were better.”

Major Bharani told me good-bye and slipped inside. Vivvie started to follow him, but I stopped her.

“Are you okay?” I asked her quietly.

“That’s my line.” She managed another weak smile.

“Where were you this week?” I asked.

Vivvie looked down, then away. “I’ve been a little under the weather.”

Too sick to come to school, but not too sick to attend a wake? And not too sick for her father to order her not to embarrass
him, like Vivvie was some kind of liability. Like she was something to be embarrassed about.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked Vivvie.

“I should go.” She couldn’t meet my eyes. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

All I could think as she disappeared into the house was that Vivvie was a miserable liar.

CHAPTER 20

That night, I did an internet search on Vivvie’s father. He was a decorated soldier, a former trauma surgeon in Afghanistan and Iraq. From what I could tell, he’d been the head of the White House medical clinic—and the president’s personal physician—for just over two years. Unable to get the image of Vivvie’s haunted expression out of my mind, I clicked on the video of Major Bharani’s statement to the press.

“It is with great sadness that I inform you that Chief Justice Theodore Marquette died on the table a little over an hour ago.”
Now that I knew to look for it, I could see a resemblance—a faint one—between Vivvie and her father.
“This was our second attempt to fix a blockage in the justice’s heart, and there were unforeseen complications with surgery. This country has lost a great man today. We ask that you respect his family’s privacy in this time of grief.”

Nothing in the twenty-second clip told me what was wrong with Vivvie. I thought back to World Issues, when I’d seen the
clip for the first time—the stares directed at Vivvie, the way she’d gone stiff in her seat.

Her father had operated on one of our classmates’ relatives, and now Henry Marquette’s grandfather was dead. Did she think people would blame her?

Don’t. Embarrass. Me.
The words Major Bharani had hissed at Vivvie echoed in my mind.

“Everything okay in here?” Ivy poked her head into my room.

“You’re home,” I said.

“I am.” She paused. “I wanted to say thank you. For coming today.”

I looked down at my keyboard. “No big deal.”

I could feel her wanting to make it a big deal, wanting to take the fact that I’d gone with her as an indication that the two of us were going to be okay.

“I sent you an e-mail,” she said, instead of pressing the topic further. “With treatment options.”

For Gramps.
I weathered the impact of that blow.

“There’s a chance we could get home care, hire nurses either here or in Montana.” Ivy presented the option calmly and neutrally. “Or there’s a clinical trial. He’d stay in Boston, but they have an assisted living facility, so it wouldn’t be inpatient exactly.”

She was waiting for me to say something. I’d asked to be involved, but now that the information was in my inbox, my mouth was dry.
It wasn’t a good day today.
I willed my eyes to stop stinging.

“Thanks,” I said, staring holes in my keyboard.

“Take a look. Then we’ll talk.”

I managed to force my eyes up as far as my computer screen. The image of Vivvie’s father stared back at me.

“Do you know the White House doctor?” I asked Ivy, as much to change the subject as because I couldn’t rid my mind of the look in Vivvie’s eyes.

“Major Bharani?” Ivy replied. “I know he’s got the patience of a saint. According to Georgia, the president makes a horrible patient.” She leaned against the doorjamb. “Why do you ask?”

Why
was
I asking?

“His daughter was assigned to show me around at Hardwicke.” That wasn’t an answer, not really.

“Vivvie, right?” Ivy said. If I was surprised she knew Vivvie’s name, I shouldn’t have been. Ivy offered me a small smile. “Washington is a small world. And Hardwicke
is
Washington.”

I was beginning to get that sense. Vivvie’s father was the White House physician. Henry Marquette’s grandfather had sat on the Supreme Court. I’d just been to a funeral where the eulogy was given by the president of the United States.

“How did you know him?” I asked Ivy. “Theo Marquette?”

There was an almost imperceptible shift in Ivy. She stood a little straighter, the set of her features completely neutral. “I worked a job for him. We stayed in touch.”

Ivy was the master of answering questions without really telling me a thing.

“Justice Marquette had a problem,” I said, studying her expression, looking for some clue as to what that job had been. “You fixed it.”

Ivy met my gaze, poker face firmly in place. “Something like that.”

CHAPTER 21

Vivvie still wasn’t at school on Monday. Henry Marquette, however, was. At lunch, he sat at Emilia’s table. His posture was straighter than the others’, his default expression more intense. Every once in a while, his gaze flickered over to mine.

He stared straight through me, every time.

“What are we doing?” Asher helped himself to a seat at my table.

“
We
aren’t doing anything,” I told him bluntly.

“My mistake. I thought we were brooding in Henry’s general direction. Like so.” He adopted a stormy countenance, then gestured to me. “Yours is better.”

“Go away, Asher.”

“You say ‘go away’, I hear ‘be my bosom buddy.’ ” He gave an elaborate shrug. “Seriously, though: friendship bracelets—yea or nay?”

I wasn’t sure what game he was playing. I’d been at Hardwicke for a week, and even that was enough time to ascertain that Asher Rhodes was well liked. Popular, even.

“What do you want with me?”

Asher didn’t bat an eye at the question. “Maybe I’m tragically bored and horribly lonely and looking for love in all the wrong places.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Or maybe,” he said, leaning forward and placing his elbows on the table, “I’m tired of everyone liking me all the time and it’s liberating to be around someone with no expectations. Or maybe you just looked like you could use a friend.” He didn’t give me a chance to respond. “Diet Coke?” Asher had two cans. He politely offered me one.

“No.”

“Mentos?” He held out a roll.

“Don’t Diet Coke and Mentos—”

“—explode?” Asher supplied. He opened one of the sodas. “I have a passing fondness for explosions.”

That was concerning on so many levels.

“I’m starting to see why your sister thinks you need a keeper.”

Asher rolled one of the Mentos contemplatively around the edge of the Diet Coke can. I reached over and flicked the candy at him. It pelted him in the forehead.

“I’m going to take that as a yes on the friendship bracelets,” he informed me.

Emilia had said that when Asher got bored, things got broken.
Laws, standards of decency, occasionally bones.
He was probably
sitting here, at my table, for the same reason he’d gone up on the chapel roof.

I was
interesting
.

“Have you spoken to Vivvie at all?” Asher attempted to sound casual, but there was a stray note of seriousness in his tone.

“No.” I studied him for a few seconds. “Should I have?”

Asher’s eyes drifted to the table where Henry was sitting. “She kind of had a breakdown. At Theo’s wake.”

Vivvie.
My gut had told me then that something was wrong—but wrong enough for her to break down? My stomach twisted sharply.
What are the chances that her father found that breakdown embarrassing?
I knew very little about Vivvie’s dad. He was a war hero. A doctor. But I couldn’t keep from thinking about the way his face had morphed when he went from talking to Vivvie to talking to me.

I stood and picked up my tray.
She hasn’t been at school for four days.
Back in Montana, my guidance counselor had been concerned when I’d missed five. Total.

“You look like someone who’s about to do something highly inadvisable.” Asher caught up to me as I dumped my trash. “And God knows, if there’s something inadvisable going on, I want in.”

“Go away.”

“You say ‘go away’, I hear ‘wreak havoc by my side.’ ”

I didn’t reply. In all likelihood, Vivvie was
fine
. She probably had some kind of flu.

In all likelihood, the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach meant nothing.

“Tess?” Asher raised an eyebrow at me. “Anything I can do?”

I glanced at the building. Fifth period was starting soon. After a moment, I turned back to Asher. “Do you have a car?”

We found Vivvie’s address in the Hardwicke directory. Asher drove.

“Nice car,” I told him, trying to distract myself from the fact that I was skipping school to follow up a hunch I couldn’t even articulate.