So soon that she might still have been lying semiconscious on the dark slope that fell away from the road on the right side of the shot.
Jess started to shake.
“. . . preliminary investigation indicates that the vehicle was traveling at excessive amounts of speed—one estimate suggests as much as ninety miles an hour in a forty-five-mile-an-hour zone—when the driver, identified as Raymond Kenny of Silver Spring, Maryland, who had worked for the company that owned the car, Executive Limo, for fourteen years, lost control and the car went off the side of Brerton Road and rolled down an embankment, killing three of the four people inside, including First Lady Annette Cooper. She was said to be on her way to visit a dying friend at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Fredericksburg and . . .”
Dear God.
Closing her eyes, feeling like the world was tipping sideways and she was clinging on by her fingernails in an effort not to fall off, Jess hit the power button, hit it without even consciously making the decision to do so. It was as if her body, reacting in its own defense, just said no to exposure to anything else that might cause her distress. But even with her eyes closed, even with the voices from the television silenced and the screen gone black, it still felt like she was tumbling down into nothingness as images from the accident chased one another through her mind.
9
S
peeding through the night, going faster and faster until the rolling hills and dark pastures and a narrow fence line of tall trees outside the window became nothing more than a black blur and her heart was pumping with alarm, feeling a hard jolt that sent the car skidding sideways, the terrible squeal of brakes drowned out after a single terrified moment by screams . . .
“Jess, are you all right?”
Jess opened her eyes. She was drenched in sweat and drawing deep, shuddering breaths, and she realized from her mother’s expression that she was probably as pale as a piece of angel food cake.
“She was said to be on her way to visit a dying friend at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Fredericksburg . . .”
That’s what they’d said on TV.
Only it was a lie. They were telling lies.
Why?
“Jess?”
Frowning, Judy walked toward her carrying a blue plastic basin filled with water that sloshed softly with every step, a small unwrapped bar of soap, a blue washrag, and a matching towel.
“Jessica Jane? Do you hear me talking to you?”
It occurred to Jess that she was staring at her mother as if she had been poleaxed. She willed herself to focus.
Think it through later. Shake it off.
“Oh, sorry. I was just . . . I’m fine.”
That is, other than the fact that she was dizzy and limp with dread. Which she didn’t mean to share with her mother. Which she didn’t even totally understand herself. Taking a not-too-deep breath, she fought to get her emotions under control, to seem like her normal self, so her mother wouldn’t guess that something was majorly wrong. She didn’t know why she felt this was so important, but she did.
Dark figures rushing past her down the slope . . .
Jess realized she was breathing way too fast.
“You don’t look fine. You look worse than you did when you were unconscious, for pete’s sake.”
“I have a little headache.”
That was true, as far as it went. Also, her palms were sweaty. Her mouth was dry. Her pulse was racing. Disoriented, that’s how she felt. Almost as if she could see—no, she didn’t want to see.
Who were the dark figures? Were they even real?
She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to know.
Her mother’s frown deepened. She was looking at her hard.
“Maybe I should call the nurse.”
“No. No, don’t.”
You can’t go there now. Snap out of it.
Every instinct Jess possessed screamed that she had to keep her mother—keep her family, keep everyone—from knowing that her memory wasn’t totally wiped out where the crash was concerned after all. Instead, it was throwing up weird images like puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit. No, make that terrifying images.
Fire . . . It started as a tiny orange burst and then
—
boom!
—
it exploded, pillars of flame enveloping the car, shooting toward the ink-black sky. . . .
Jess closed her eyes. She clenched her fists. She bit down hard on the tip of her tongue. The pain did what it was supposed to do—it cleared the hideous pictures from her mind.
“Jess?”
Jess opened her eyes. “It’s just a headache . . . I’m better now.”
“It’s been a while since they last gave you anything for pain—maybe we ought to ask for something.”
“It’s okay. It’s gone.”
Her mother was still looking at her with concern. Jess took a deep breath and managed a weak smile for her mother as Judy settled the basin on her stomach.
“Thanks.” Jess felt limp, as if the pictures in her head had taken a physical toll on her body. “And thanks for staying with me, by the way.”
“Are you kidding? It’d take wild horses to get me out of here. After you thought somebody attacked you?” Judy made a
tsk-tsk
noise. “Here, let me help you with that.”
“I can manage.”
Making a conscious effort to keep her hands steady and her head in the present, Jess summoned another perfunctory smile and tucked her hair behind her ears and dipped the washrag in the warm water.
“Maybe the attack
was
a hallucination.” Careful to keep her voice free of any inflection, Jess wrung out the rag without looking at her mother.
The attack was real. It happened.
But even though she was almost completely convinced of it, she didn’t say so. After listening to the TV, she was beginning to get her mind around the true enormity of what Annette Cooper’s death meant. The global scope of it. The interest in it. And the possible ramifications. Through no fault of her own, she was caught up in a world-class tragedy. As the only living witness, in fact. Not a comfortable spot to be in. And, she was becoming increasingly afraid, not a safe one.
Whatever was going on—and she was almost positive that something she’d really rather not know about was going on—she didn’t want to get her mother—her family—involved.
That was the thing about family, she was discovering. Having them, having people you care about, makes you so damned vulnerable.
Annette Cooper fled the White House.
“Whether it was a hallucination or not”—Jess, mindful of her injuries, carefully dabbed at her cheeks and chin, as Judy retrieved a hairbrush from her purse, held it up so Jess could see it, and set it on the bedside table next to the remote—“I’m not leaving this place until you do.”
That was her mother—loyal to the bitter end. For better or for worse.
“I love you, Mom.” It was something she almost never said anymore. None of them did.
Her mother’s face softened. “I love you too, Jessica Rabbit.”
It was a nickname from when she’d been a little girl, funny, so her sisters said, because their Jessica was the polar opposite of her cartoon namesake. Not sexy, not a man-eater, just plain, skinny, blind-as-a-bat bookworm Jess.
Thanks for the confidence builder, guys.
She could almost hear them answering,
You’re welcome, Wabbit.
“Look what else I’ve got.” The crinkle of tearing plastic wrap was followed by her mother waving a cheap pink toothbrush at her, then placing it and a small tube of Crest beside the hairbrush. “It’s been in my purse since the dentist gave it to me.”
Jess’s eyes lit up. “Fantastic.”
Judy poured her a glass of water from the yellow plastic pitcher beside the bed, and Jess quickly brushed her teeth. The minty tang of the toothpaste was so normal, so much a part of her regular, everyday life, that the very ordinariness of it felt special.
She was suddenly, overwhelmingly, thankful to be alive. The idea of never seeing her mother and sisters again, of their grief if she had been killed along with everyone else in that car, made her throat tighten. They were a mess, every single one of them—herself included, she supposed. They could be, and frequently were, a giant pain in her ass. But in the end, she was just now discovering, none of that really mattered.
What mattered was that they were a family.
Annette Cooper had a family, too.
Jess’s throat tightened again. Leaning over the basin, she splashed her face, the better to conceal incipient tears, and discovered that in some places her skin was so raw it stung.
Ironically enough, the small discomfort banished the sudden urge to cry.
Mrs. Cooper ran away from the Secret Service agent who came looking for her.
“You’ve got to be exhausted,” Jess said to her mother in an effort to banish the torturous thoughts that just wouldn’t stay out of her head. Wiping the water from her eyes, she looked at Judy. Her mother really did look tired. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?”
Judy nodded. “Maddie came in this morning, so I lay down on the other bed and slept while she was here. She and Grace went out about an hour ago to pick up some things from the house.” Maddie was Jess’s youngest sister, a just-turned-eighteen-year-old high school senior. The previous weekend, Maddie had precipitated a family crisis—and when weren’t they ever in some kind of crisis?—by telling Grace, who told Sarah (because Jess was working all weekend and Grace had to tell somebody, and Sarah possessed the closest ear), who told their mother, who then told Jess, that she was pregnant.
At the time, having National Merit Scholarship-winning, valedictorian-candidate Maddie confess that she was pregnant had seemed like the family-size equivalent of an atom bomb.
Now it seemed manageable. A small pothole in the road of life. One of those things that you end up making the best of, maybe even laughing about in twenty years. When the kid-to-be was a beloved member of the family.
Nothing like almost dying to provide a little perspective, Jess reflected with an inner grimace as she worked the soap into bubbly lather, which she then carefully spread over the parts of her face that weren’t either stinging or stitched together.
Mrs. Cooper said her Secret Service agents were more like wardens. She was upset, way more upset than she should have been from something as ordinary as a fight with her husband. She was running away.
“I hate for you to stay with me again tonight—you’ve got to work tomorrow,” Jess said. “You’ll wear yourself out.”
Her mother operated a small day-care center out of her home. Both Maddie and Grace, who was a junior at University of Maryland, worked there part-time. It was her mother’s latest moneymaking venture after she lost her job as a shift supervisor at the Red Cross shoe plant three years ago, when Jess had been in her first year of law school and working at Davenport, Kelly, and Bascomb as a research assistant at night. Since then, Judy had been a temp, a waitress, a veterinary assistant, a sales associate at Macy’s, and a pizza delivery person, and sometimes two or three at once. None of which, singly or in multiples, paid enough to support her family. Even with Grace and Maddie holding down part-time jobs, and Jess contributing every penny she could, there was never enough. Until Jess had graduated law school and gotten the fat-salaried job with Davenport. With what she was now able to contribute to the family kitty, everyone was comfortable for the first time that Jess could remember.
Do I even still have a job? Probably the last thing I should be worried about now, but . . . I need the money.
We
need the money.
She grimaced inwardly.
Face it, doesn’t everybody always need the money?
“We didn’t open today, and we’re not opening tomorrow. Probably not the rest of the week, either. I called all the parents—they understand. Lots of businesses around here are shut down out of respect for Mrs. Cooper anyway, and they all know that you’re my daughter and what happened to you.”
It took Jess a second, but then she caught it.
“Is this
Monday
?”
“Sure is. What did you think?”
“I thought it was Sunday.” Jess rinsed her face and reached for the brush, which she pulled carefully through her hair:
Ouch
. She’d been out of it for almost forty-eight hours: unbelievable. And oh my God, it was a work day and she’d missed it. The first one ever. Then she remembered, and realized that it was almost certainly
not
a work day. Not for a firm so closely associated with the First Lady. “Has Mr. Davenport called? Or anyone from work?”
“There were so many calls the hospital switchboard’s only been putting family through.”
So many calls—because everyone wanted her to talk about the accident.
The panic that had been slowly building just below her precariously maintained calm started to bubble to the surface.
They—she wasn’t quite sure who was to blame—had it wrong about where Mrs. Cooper was going when the car crashed
.
Jess’s memory of what had transpired during the accident might be spotty, but her recall of what had happened before was unimpaired. Mrs. Cooper had been running away from the White House, and Davenport had sent Jess and a car to pick her up and take her—somewhere. Those were facts. Admittedly, Jess didn’t remember where they were headed, but for sure it wasn’t to visit a dying friend in a Fredericksburg hospital. Maybe that was an honest mistake, maybe it was a deliberate lie, or spin, as Davenport would probably put it, but the discrepancy made her uneasy. Couple that with the images in her mind of dark figures rushing down the slope past where she lay and surrounding the burning car, add in Mrs. Cooper’s upset and her claim that she was a prisoner in the White House (more facts), as well as the near certainty that she herself had been attacked right here in this very room just hours after the First Lady’s death, and what did you get?