First Family (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 4)

ter my ma.”

“Good boy. Keep on reading, Gabriel. Got to be prepared. The world will give you a chance, but that’s all. The rest comes from you. You blow it you blow it.”

“You been telling me that long as I can remember.”

“Good advice worth repeating.”

Quarry trudged off to his room. It was set on the top floor and had once belonged to his mother and father. Tidiness had never been one of Quarry’s strong points, though Ruth Ann and Gabriel did their best to keep the growing mounds of stuff at least orderly.

Quarry’s wife, Cameron, had been dead for over three years. The greatest loss of his life, and he had suffered through several of them. After she’d passed, Quarry had not slept in their bed. He used a long, ragged, hundred-year-old couch set against one wall of his bedroom. He’d kept many of his wife’s things in the bathroom, and Ruth Ann would dutifully dust them even though they would never be used again.

He could’ve and perhaps should have sold Atlee a long time ago. But that was not an option. Cameron had loved the place and parting with it would mean, for Quarry, finally parting with her. He could not do that, no more than he could kill his own son. Though it frightened him how close he’d come to doing just that. It was the Quarry insanity streak. Day by day, year by year, it kept growing stronger, like the tentacles of a tumor creeping murderously through his brain.

He settled down on the couch and reached for his bottle of gin. Yet before he took a drink, he changed his mind, rose, slipped on his boots, and grabbed the truck keys off a wobbly-legged table.

Two minutes later he was back on the road, staring up at a sky punctured with so many stars that night almost seemed turned into day. He rolled down the window, cranked up some tunes, and drank his gin. The heat of a southern night hit him in the face. He hated air conditioning. Atlee had never had it, nor any vehicle he’d ever owned. A man should sweat. Running away from sweat was akin to running from what made you human.

His old truck ate up twenty miles, veering from dirt to gravel to macadam, and then bouncing onto asphalt heated slick from the hot day.

And then he was there. Been here a thousand times before. Each visit was the same and also different.

He knew everyone by first name. Visiting hours were long since over but they didn’t care. This was Sam Quarry. Everybody knew Sam Quarry because everybody knew Tippi Quarry. They’d named her after the actress. Cameron Quarry had loved the movie with all those crazy birds. Their youngest daughter, Suzie, the one who’d married and divorced the black fellow, now lived in California doing something, only her father didn’t quite know what. He was pretty sure if he did know he’d disapprove. Daryl had been the baby.

Only my damn baby just killed a mother of three children.

Yet neither of them had ended up like Tippi. She had just turned thirty-six last month. She’d been here for thirteen years, eight months, and seventeen days. He knew that because he marked the time off on a mental calendar like he was scratching off his remaining days on earth. And, in a way, he was doing that too. She had never once set foot outside the cinderblock walls of this place. And she never would.

Quarry’s long legs directed him automatically to his oldest child’s room. He opened the door just as he had so many times before. The room was dark. He scooted over to the chair that his butt had graced so often he’d worn off the paint. The trach was in her neck, the way they did it for long-term usage, because, for among other reasons, it was easier to keep clean than when it was down the throat. The attached ventilator was pumping away, keeping her lungs inflated. The vitals sign monitor beeped away. One end of an oxygen tube ran to the central line in the wall, and the other end was inserted in his daughter’s nostrils. An IV drip with a computerized distribution device was hooked up to her and kept a flow of drugs and nutrients running to a central entry point cut into her skin near the woman’s collarbone.

Quarry had a little ritual. He’d stroke her hair that wound around her neck and lay against her shoulder. How many times had he wrapped that hair around his finger when Tippi had been a little girl? Then he’d touch her forehead, a forehead that had crinkled up when he’d given his infant daughter a bath. Then he kissed her on the cheek. As a child the skin and lump of bone underneath had been smooth and pleasant to the touch. Now it was withered and hard long before it should have been.

His ritual complete, he took her hand in his, sat back down, and started talking to her. As he did, his mind wandered through the phrases the doctors had given him and Cameron when it had happened.

Massive blood loss.

Oxygen deprivation in the brain.

Coma.

And finally: Irreversible.

Words no parent would ever want to hear about their child. She was not dead, but she was as close to dead as one technically could be while still breathing with the aid of a machine and expensive drugs. He slipped the book from his jacket pocket and started reading to her by the small light on the nightstand he clicked on.

The book was Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen’s most famous novel had been his daughter’s favorite, ever since she had plucked it off the library shelves at Atlee as a high-spirited teenager. Her profound enthusiasm for the story had led Quarry to read it as well, in fact several times. Before Tippi had ended up here, Quarry had always seen his daughter as a real-life version of Elizabeth Bennet from Austen’s tale. Elizabeth was the intelligent, lively, and quick-to-judge main protagonist. However, after Tippi had come to this place Quarry had reevaluated his daughter’s alter ego in the story and decided she was actually more like the oldest daughter, Jane Bennet. Sweet but timid, sensible but not as clever as Elizabeth. However, her most distinctive trait was to see only good in others. It had led to happiness for Jane in the story, but it had been devastating for Tippi Quarry in real life.

An hour later he rose and said what he always said. “You rest easy, honey, Daddy’ll be back soon. I love you, baby.”

He drove back to Atlee. As he lay on the couch with his gin, his last fleeting image before he fell asleep was Tippi young and smiling at her daddy.

CHAPTER 17

THE UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT Tuck Dutton had been on had not arrived late. In fact, it had arrived twenty minutes early due to a straight-in approach at Dulles and an early pushback from the gate in Jacksonville.

Michelle said, “So he had at least fifty minutes free instead of thirty. Maybe over an hour.”

They were sitting over a cup of coffee the next morning at a café in Reston near their office. To get the press off their backs, Sean had given a statement that hadn’t said much, but was enough to give them some breathing room. But they had not gone back to the office, and were staying at a hotel just in case the reporters got the primal itch to attack again.

“That’s right.”