Page 13 of The Night Of
Who had written it?
Unless I was going to subpoena Baker’s written notes or stumble across his journal, the note Jonathan showed me this morning was the best way to compare the handwriting on the mirror to a known sample of Baker’s handwriting. I pulled out the burner Jonathan gave me and pulled up his saved number.
And nearly fell to my knees when I saw how he’d saved himself in the address book. There was only one entry.
He’d saved his number underMe.
How many times had he teased me, that dry wit of his coming out when we were away from the public eye, when it was just the two of us? When we were brave enough to call each other on the phone but still hiding from what we wanted? I had been jumpy about identifying myself, careful with what I said in case the director himself might pop around the corner. “Hi, it’s me,” I’d say breathlessly every time.Hello, Me, he’d say back, always, always laughing at me silently. I could hear the humor in his voice, shifting beneath his words. The first time he’d said it, I’d smiled so hard and wide I couldn’t reply until he prompted me, asked me if I was still there or the line had dropped.Hey, Me. Hello, Me.
This was ours, our shared memory, a resurrection of the past and the days when we were both breathless with anticipation, and wonder, and desire. Why bring this back? Why drag the past into the present? Why exhume what was dead and gone, buried by his own hand?
That wasn’t fair. He may have buried the past, but I was the one who had killed what lay between us. I had pulled the trigger.
Was this cruelty? Or regret? Or indifference, a casualFuck you, I don’t care about you at all. But I know you care, and this will cut out your heart and shove it into a blender, you fucking—
That wasn’t his style, to be cruel.
But I didn’t understand it. The single word, our past lying in the wreckage of now. Out of all the things he could have typed, why had he chosen that? When it had meant so fucking much to me?
Did he even know how much I had cherished that little tease between us? Had I ever said? Or was this simple expediency and, like he claimed the president had done, a way to verify authenticity by calling back to insider information? Who else but him would know what the wordMemeant? And who else would ever list themselves that way? I had iron-clad confirmation this was Jonathan Sharp, now. An iron stake to my heart.
I texted him, asking for a photo of the note. Already, the writing on the mirror had faded, disappearing as the bathroom cleared of fog. I stared at the empty spaces where the letters had been.Flowerterrible.What the fuck?
I could feel his hesitation in the minutes that crawled by as I waited for his response. No one but me had seen the note or even knew it existed. If he sent it into the world, anything could happen. What if I lost this phone or someone hacked my line? What if that note ended up on every TV and cell phone screen around the world and Jonathan had to explain whatLovermeant and what it didn’t mean?
I’ll delete it as soon as I check something, I texted.Or just send me part of it. I need to compare handwriting.
What did you find?His text, this time, came back in seconds.
A note, I think, but I don’t understand it. I don’t know who wrote it.
I waited. Then the note appeared as a photo, taken on the carpet behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. I frowned. They must have moved him into the Oval while I was gone. He’d better be keeping the doors open. Though if he was taking pictures on the carpet—out of sight of anyone walking by, but still in the main room—then he was listening to me, at least in part. He hadn’t ducked into the president’s private study or dining room, where he’d be alone and cut off. A sitting duck. Prey for a hunter.
If there even was one.Flowerterrible.
Maybe the hunter was the darkness inside President Baker, the snapping of a mind and a soul. Baker’s shoulders may have shrugged, like Atlas’s, and the weight of the world may have been too much to bear. Or maybe it was brain chemicals, bullshit that I didn’t know anything about. Too much of something, too little of something else. I’d had way, way too little of what I needed this past year, and I’d thought about asking for some pills. But that would have been the easy way out, and I deserved this pain. I deserved to feel this way, every single day.
Baker hadn’t.
I pulled up the picture of Baker’s note side by side with the photo of the writing on the mirror.Flowerterrible, in that looping script, a scratchy cursive. It matched the sideways chicken scratch of Baker’s note.
Why had the president written nonsense on his mirror? Was it while his wife showered? After their fight? I remembered the callout over the radio, the order to give the couple some breathing room. That must have been why she left, to calm down. Clear her head, get some air. What had Baker done after that? Scrawled a nonsense word and pulled a hidden gun?
I had to talk to her. I had to know more about the last night, the moments I hadn’t seen. Moments added up to thoughts, impulses, beliefs, and actions. Behaviors. Moments drove lives and deaths. My moment the previous year had destroyed everything I’d ever wanted in the world and had led me here, and I wondered if Baker had had a moment, maybe standing in front of this very mirror, where everything had fallen apart around him and he’d waded through the wreckage and thought there was nothing left to do except wrap his lips around a cold steel barrel.
I did another circuit of the room, sweeping every surface, checking the walls, the floors, the rugs. I checked the tank and reached into the U-bend of the toilet, trying to feel for anything that might have been thrown out or hidden. Nothing.
The bedroom held nothing but the echoes of a life.
I did notice, for the first time, that the bed was askew. Two inches off the centerline at the foot, as if it had been shoved from the left-hand side. Had Baker bumped into the end of the bed, sent it sideways? The bedrooms were carpeted, so it took someoomphto move the heavy furniture. Had it happened during a fight, bodies crashing together, falling to the floor? Or—and this was more likely—had it been my guys, yanking the bed away from the wall as they stripped the sheets, revved up by too much adrenaline and panic? I took a photo on my phone and walked out of Baker’s tomb.
Before I left Camp David, I swung by the command post and asked to see the movement log. I got some lip about not giving that up, and I flashed my badge and the letter from Jonathan, and then there were no more questions. I took photos of the pages from the night before, the details of where every single agent, officer, and civilian was in fifteen-minute increments, along with the radio callouts and the report-ins. There had been nothing unusual. No trespassers, no prowlers, no gate-crashers. No trips on the fence line, no weird flutters in the feed. No deer messing with the trail cams or the perimeter motion sensors. It had been, until the gunshot, a perfectly calm night. As they say, too quiet.
The drive back down to DC was just as soaked and dreary as the drive up. The radio was playing a deluge of investigative reports, a new one diving into another facet of President Baker’s life every twelve minutes. I’d heard all the facts before. I knew most of these reports were total bullshit, too. None of these reporters had met the man.
Steven Baker, when I was on his primary detail, had been even more gracious than the media made him out to be, an unassuming everyman who wanted to leave the world a better place. He shone on camera, but he was more spectacular in private, and I’d been privileged to be a part of his world. I’m not political, as a rule. The job is to protect the office, not the policies. It can be hard to watch the sausage get made in real time. But President Baker made me want to root for him, for the dreams he strove for, the vision of America he wanted to make a reality. I wanted to be part of a world that came from his mind and soul.
It was his friendliness that had doomed me. His and the First Lady’s. They were always kind, always making a point to say good morning and good night, to check in and ask how we all were. They wanted to know who we were on the detail, with more than perfunctory politeness. It was easy to like them both, and my detail agents and I slid into a comfortably warm relationship with both Baker and the First Lady that was born of true respect.
