Page 35 of After All The Wreckage
She flinched as if regretting she’d let the words slip.
Images of a tiny Rory twisting through ventilation shafts and planting bugs flashed in my mind. My lips twitched upward but my stomach rolled with additional worry. When she didn’t say anything, I pushed. “What the hell does that mean, Pipsqueak?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it, Gage. It was a mistake. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Rory.” I pulled her to a stop, looking down into eyes that glimmered. Rory hated to cry. Her jaw worked while she appeared to debate telling me whatever dark secret she was keeping.
Finally, she blew out a breath and said, “I’m the reason they got divorced. I fucked up and got caught. Mom found out Dad had been sending me in to collect evidence without her knowledge, and she freaked out. She moved us to Cherry Bay until the divorce paperwork dried.”
I wanted to strangle her dad all over again. She’d been twelve when she moved to Cherry Bay. Twelve! I could understand her mother’s anger. “What were you doing when you got caught?”
“Planting a bug in a senator’s home office during a sleepover with his daughter.”
I stared at her, stunned. Her love forVeronica Marstook on a whole new meaning. She’d been living it long before she’d ever watched the show.
“Jesus…”
“Don’t even. I knew what I was doing. It was just a fluke that he came into the office.” She turned and started walking, and I followed. “I know this city. I know how it works. And I know the people in it. Mom wouldn’t let me take the same risks as Dad, but after I convinced her I wasn’t giving up the life, she put me behind the computer instead. I ran her office and did most of her research. When I started driving, she’d let me do the occasional stakeout for some low-risk cases. When I turned eighteen, I got my investigator’s licenses in Virginia and D.C. and went to work for her as a partner. This job paid my way through college.”
I grew quiet. I’d worked at the tavern a few hours a week as a teen. Stocking and cleaning, nothing too hard, just basic barback activities as I couldn’t legally bartend until I was twenty-one. Overall, my life had been fairly easy. Even once I’d gone away to college, Dad had footed the bill as much as he could so I didn’thave to work too many hours while studying. Then, I’d gotten my paid internship with Storm Dominators, and it had covered the majority of my school expenses. But I’d still had a lot of free time I’d filled between classes and studying with the normal parties and dates.
Rory had basically been working like a mini adult for most of her life, which made me suddenly ashamed of the irritation I’d felt at becoming the head of our family at twenty-three. Everyone had to grow up at some point. But she shouldn’t have been thrust into it so early.
As if she’d read every thought that had crossed my mind, she said, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I loved it. I loved every moment. The only regret I have is the mistake I made that cost my parents their marriage.”
“I very seriously doubt you were the reason they got divorced.”
“You don’t know. You didn’t live with them.”
“I know it takes a lot more than one screw-up by a parent, or a kid, to make a marriage fail. It takes two people and years of disagreements. Look at my dad. He was still married to Demi when he died. Even after…”
Rory and I drifted back into silence, lost in our thoughts—mine of my parents, our childhoods, and the wounds they’d left behind—as we made our way around to the front of the Rayburn Building.
The classic white-and-gray building had the same stately, reverent feel of the Capitol Building, with a series of steps flanked by two ten-foot marble statues staring at each other. Above the doors, six Ionic columns supported a portico carved with an eagle.
We stepped inside and got in line at the security booth where Rory took over with a smooth smile. She navigated us through, all the while laughing and joking with the security guards,calling them by name, and asking about their families. She seemed to know more people here than I did at the bar when the locals came out in force for Tango Tuesday.
After one last tease she directed at a large officer who dwarfed even my six-foot-three frame, we headed for the enormous staircase drifting up from polished marble floors.
“We have time before we meet up with Lucidia to flash Monte’s picture around Dunn’s staff and see if anyone recognizes him,” she said.
When we walked into the congressman’s suite, the guy at the desk didn’t even look up from his laptop. Instead, he waved toward a clipboard on a sideboard.
“The congressman has a full schedule this morning. If you sign in, we’ll see what we can do to give you a call later in the week.”
Rory wasn’t put off by the guy’s no-time-for-you-peasants attitude. Instead, she hung a photo of Monte over his laptop screen. His eyes flickered over the image and then up to her face.
“This is Monte. He came here Friday. We’d like to know what happened when he did.”
“We see hundreds of people every day,” he said in a dismissive tone.
“But this is a red-haired thirteen-year-old. I doubt you get many of them in here. I’m betting he would have stood out.”
The guy squinted, irritation blooming. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t remember him.”
A weird silence settled in the room. In the middle of it, the inner door opened, and Representative Dunn emerged. He was a large man with a clean-shaven face, dark blond hair graying at the temples, and blue eyes sparkling as if he was a jovial uncle. Next to him was a lean, muscled man with black hair, black eyes, and a goatee. They reminded me of that old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife.
“Good morning,” Dunn said, turning his camera-ready smile at us.
