The List (31 page)

“Indeed,” I replied, ignoring her rude turn of phrase. “She worked for the
Post
for a long time.”

“Must have been fun,” chimed in Olivia. “Those softer beats really do seem amusing,”
she said. “If you like that kind of thing.”

“I do happen to like that kind of thing,” I replied stiffly. I wanted to choke her
and steal her husband away forever.

“What do you two write about?” I asked.

“White House,” replied Olivia. “The president of the United States of America.”

“Me too,” chimed in Emily, “but you already knew that.”

“I’m going to grab a drink,” I said, ignoring her. “Can I get you two anything?” Arsenic?
Drano? Bleach?

“We’re fine; thanks though,” replied Olivia with her back already turned to me. “I
have a plane to catch after this. Air Force One, actually.”

Unable to find Alison and Libby, I went outside and told Julia about the awkward encounter.

“Fuck that ho,” she said, feeling her hair to make sure it was
still smooth and pinned in place despite the evening breeze. “You know, I’ve been
here three months longer than she has. On her first day, Tucker asked her if she was
a Style reporter, because she sits near us, and she said, ‘Oh no. I’m a real reporter.’
I almost stapled her hand to the desk.”

My endless wavering about what to do with everything I knew about Olivia—continue
to dig, or bury it all?—was now leaning much closer to the former. Why should I care
about her? She was horrible. If I took her out with a two-thousand-word article and
a few artistic nude shots, her husband would likely be mine for the taking. I just
knew there was something he liked about me. In fact, he had said it. I was adorable
with cool hair.

I stood in the courtyard with Julia, who had started talking about her latest dating
woes. “Stop dating Hill flacks,” I advised her.

“Whatever, you’re one to talk. I heard you went out with James Reddenhurst.”

She did? She’d heard that? Oh fantastic. She probably knew that I had slept with him
in a car and then dumped him because I was infatuated with a married man. I hated
Washington. It was like a never-ending high school prom.

“What else did you hear?” I asked her.

“That’s all. Just that you went out with him. He’s really cute. He used to date Senator
Kirby’s daughter. You know, from Iowa. I think they were engaged. He’s a very serious
guy. Hot, but serious.”

As the night wore on and our colleagues started to head home, I heard my BlackBerry
ringing in my bag. Incredibly, it was James. I had missed three calls from him. I
scrolled through messages to find one from him that read, “Are you at the
Capitolist
anniversary party? I assume you are. Just wanted to warn you that I am too. I’m not
trying to invade your territory, but I
escorted Senator Kirby here and was left with very little choice. I’m sorry. I’ll
try my best not to run into you.”

James was here. And he had sent a courteous note to tell me so. I hadn’t seen him,
but I had also downed three red, white, and blue martinis. He could be anywhere. I
took his note and back-to-back warning calls as my hint to leave. I said a quick goodbye
to the Style girls, nodded to Hardy, who had his laptop out at a patio table, and
escaped out the door toward the Smithsonian castle.

I was parked on Independence Avenue, so I cut through the pretty Haupt garden to get
there faster. I slipped into my car still fumbling for my keys in my oversize clutch.
It wasn’t until I had fished them out that I spotted the masculine hand resting on
the gearshift and started to scream.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. The door was open, and I knew it was your
car. It’s a unique car.”

It was Sandro.

“The locks don’t really work anymore,” I replied, my heart racing with arousal and
fear. “They haven’t for years.”

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

His hand was still on the gearshift. I looked down at it, wanting to put my hand over
his and feel his skin, his pulse, just like in the kitchen.

“You scared me. Terrified me. But I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “I want to apologize
to you about the other night. I’m so embarrassed. I’ve never—”

He interrupted. “Olivia knows,” he said coolly.

I felt my bottom lip start to tremble in fear.

“I had to tell her. I understand you two work together, and I apologize in advance
if that makes things awkward for you, but she is my wife. I’ve been with her since
I was nineteen years old. No one else. And then you come along, and you’re all gorgeous
with these long legs and this blond hair, and your whole aura is so different. I don’t
know what happened. I acted like an idiot. And I was lonely. Olivia is always traveling,
I’m alone all the time, and I guess I just broke a little. You broke me.”

He stopped and looked at me, cleared his throat, and started speaking in a firmer
voice. Olivia knew about me, but Sandro knew nothing about his wife.

“You kissed me, but I shouldn’t have let you. I shouldn’t have held your hand and
said all those things to you. I was stupid to invite you in, to even talk to you that
night at Oyamel. I was leading you on.”

“You weren’t!” I said, getting upset. I could feel my eyes fill with tears. “You didn’t
do anything wrong. I just, I—”

“You made a mistake,” he said in a hardened voice. “And so did I, but I couldn’t keep
something from my wife and make it worse than it is.”

I nodded, wiping my eyes, humiliated.

“I assume you’re aware of Olivia’s character. She isn’t exactly an easy woman to please,”
he said.

That was probably more obvious to me than it was to him.

“She was going to have Upton fire you when I told her. She was going to tell him what
you did and declare that she couldn’t work in the same building with you. She’s absolutely
right to think they would pick her over you. They always pick her. She’s the one that
follows the president. She’s the one they’re grooming.”

The tears falling down my face stung my tired skin.

“I’m sorry to upset you, but she is my
wife,
Adrienne. As captivating as you are, she’s my wife. And I asked her not to talk to
Upton. I said that instead, I would talk to you. That we could come to an understanding.”

“What is our understanding?” I said, looking at his tan, handsome face, hoping it
would involve having his arms around me again.

“Our understanding is that within a month, you’ll give notice at the
List
. You’ll give Olivia room to breathe. You can’t expect her to keep working with you.
You’ve made that unrealistic. If you agree, she won’t speak to Upton about your character
flaws.”

“
My
character flaws!” Not to mention your wife’s, I barely bit back. I wanted to tell
him everything I knew, show him the photos and have him grovel for my forgiveness.
“You were the one who touched me and kept handing me beers and said I was adorable.
This was a mutual thing, Sandro. You can’t just tell me to quit my job! It’s
my
job and despite what your horrible wife says, I’m very good at it. The paper has
hundreds of employees, not just Olivia fucking Campo!” I hit the side of the car with
my hand for emphasis and then let out another yell. I had gone from weepy to hysterical.

“Adrienne?” he asked me after a few seconds of my heavy breathing and grinding teeth.

“Yes,” I replied, my voice leaking sarcasm, my eyes fixed on the speedometer. “That’s
what I’ll do, Sandro. I will quit my job. Don’t worry about a thing.”

I heard the passenger door open, and before I could calm down, try to make more excuses
to keep him there, Sandro was gone.

I put my keys in the ignition of my old blue car, but I was too upset to drive. I
was also too drunk, and Middleburg felt very far away.

I took a cab home that night, the only sound decision I had made in weeks. As the
driver headed down Route 50, I opened
the two back windows and let the humidity soak me through. It was Tuesday, June 19.
And for the first time since I had seen Olivia and Senator Stanton together, I was
now under tremendous pressure to get my story to print. I was not going to be the
one quitting my job. Olivia was. The
Capitolist
was all I had left, and now that little red-haired hag wanted to take it away from
me.

I
wondered what unemployment would be like. Would I just go crazy and start eating
pots of jam with my bare hands? Or would I stare at my old byline and cry? That’s
what Olivia wanted: to knock me out of journalism altogether while she sailed to the
top of the field. She wanted—no, demanded—this to happen within the next month. I
was screwed—unless I could turn my Stanton story into something solid before Olivia
begged Upton to have me sacked. My internal clock suddenly sounded like a gong counting
down the days left in my journalism career.

I needed something to save me from slipping into career oblivion. If I couldn’t find
anything incriminating enough about Olivia’s past, I needed something on Stanton.
He was a public figure, had been for almost two decades—maybe Olivia wasn’t the first
woman to grab his attention. Perhaps he had a thing for bitchy journalists. That Friday
after work, I drove forty minutes east to George Mason University to use their library.
I knew my press pass would let me in, and I was less worried about seeing someone
I knew at GMU than at George Washington, Georgetown, or American. Plenty of Washingtonians
viewed Virginia as the equivalent of Sheboygan in terms of proximity
and sophistication, so I decided to play their game and hide out among my commonwealth
brethren.

I parked my car in the busy lot and walked into the Fenwick Library. It had been years
since I had been inside a college library, and all those happy memories came rushing
over me. I was a devoted library studier in college, always choosing Wellesley’s Clapp
Library over any other corner of campus. I loved the silence, the palpable energy
of expanding intelligence, and the potential to procrastinate in the stacks with your
peers.

The problem I was going to have with Stanton was the opposite of the one I had with
Olivia and Sandro. There was going to be so much for me to weed through on Stanton
that what I was really looking for might stay buried in the mass of information. By
now I knew the senator’s family like it was my own. His father and older brother were
in government, but the family money came from the John F. Stanton & Company meat processing
and wholesale business founded by Stanton’s father. It wasn’t glamorous work, but
it sent all three of the Stanton men into public office and helped fund their campaigns.
Senator Hoyt Stanton worked as counsel for the company after he got his law degree.
He’d had his hands and interests in and out of it his entire career. The plant was
located in Maricopa County, Arizona, and according to the website, it was still operational
and very lucrative.

I was working backward and when I got to Hoyt Stanton’s mid-nineties media clippings
on the computer, they were starting to thin out. I switched my efforts to microfiche
and as with Olivia and Sandro, that’s when my research got interesting.

After two hours of going back month by month, year by year, I started using “John
F. Stanton & Company” instead of
“Hoyt Stanton” to narrow down the results. Within ten minutes I found something that
had me running to the copier to blow up the text.

Ajo Cooper News, Western Pima County, 1989—Death announcement for Drew Reader.

Public Safety officials announced Monday that Drew Reader of Ajo had died in a machinery
accident at the John F. Stanton & Company meat processing and wholesale plant where
Mr. Reader was employed as a custodian. Paramedics and police who arrived quickly
on the scene declared his death accidental. His wife, Joanne Reader, and his young
daughter, Olivia, survive him. Funeral services will be held at Ajo Calvary Baptist
Church at 4:00 in the evening on Sunday.

Olivia. The name leapt out of the page like lightning in a flat midwestern sky. Again,
it was just a name, and not a terribly uncommon one. But it was in an obituary that
mentioned Stanton’s family company. Olivia Reader.
Capitolist
Olivia would have been young in 1989, probably in first grade, like me. But
Capitolist
Olivia had a different last name, and she was from Texas. She had a Lone Star Flag
tacked up at her desk.

I circled the girl’s name and checked dates against the background information I’d
dug up for the company. Hoyt Stanton definitely worked there as a lawyer in 1989.
He was a state representative then—not elected to the United States Senate until 1994—but
the future senator was routinely mentioned in other articles about the plant at that
time. His father was the CEO of the company but Stanton seemed to be running the operation
until he left for Washington.

Continuing to look up only the company name, I found a second article that was worth
printing and highlighting and hiding
away as fast as I could. This one was in the
Arizona Republic,
not some local rag.

Joanne Reader, the wife of a twenty-nine-year-old man who was killed in a machinery
accident at an Ajo, Ariz., meatpacking plant has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against
John F. Stanton & Company, which may also be fined by the U.S. Department of Labor
in connection with the accident.

The lawsuit, filed by Joanne Reader, claims that unsafe working conditions led to
the death of her husband, Drew Reader.

A custodian at the plant, Reader accidentally switched on a meat grinder when cleaning
it. The other workers present during the incident were not able to turn off the machine
before Reader was sucked into it. The accident occurred on May 3, 1989.

Joanne Reader is seeking wrongful death damages, claiming that the device was not
properly locked at the time of cleaning. Hoyt Stanton, the owner’s son and a plant
manager, is acting as counsel for the company.