Tom’s frown intensified as he watched her give her cut-and-dried stump speech. She wasn’t a good speaker; her delivery was wooden, and her hands clasped the sides of the lectern as though it would run off if she let go. Tom saw the hand of a previous consultant at work there: Someone had obviously drummed that stance into her.
Speech, canned; delivery, canned, was his judgment. Message, dry as dust. Nothing he couldn’t work with, though. Appearance—for his money, she got ten out of ten, but that was not a plus under the circumstances. For optimum results she needed to be brought down to a six or seven, just a little above average. And maybe made to look a little older.
Tom pondered, his hands templing under his chin as he watched her performance. Her shoulder-length hair was a deep wine-streaked auburn, not carroty in the least, but indubitably red. A color
du jour
, he wondered, or natural? Whatever, it needed to be toned down. Red was forever associated in the public’s mind with Jezebels, which she in particular did not need. Her clothes were all wrong too. Her suit was black, the neckline scooped in front but not indecently so, with silver trim and large rhinestone buttons down the front. Worn with black hose and heels, it should have been an appropriate choice for an evening appearance by a politician’s wife. The problem was it showed too much of a body that, admittedly, deserved to be flaunted. The material was some kind of clingy knit, and the skirt, at four inches or so above the knee, was way too short. To add insult to injury, the suit looked real expensive, like it had cost the equivalent of maybe a couple of months’ salary for the average voter.
Plus her heels were too high, he saw as the camera moved to a side view; the shoes themselves, strappy and pointy-toed, were too sexy. And her jewelry, which he had no doubt went perfectly with the outfit, could only be a negative in the view of the audience she needed to win over. The dime-sized baubles in her ears and the glittery necklace around her throat not only looked like real diamonds, they almost certainly
were
real. More to the point, the audience would
assume
they were real. No costume jewelry for the second Mrs. Lewis R. Honneker IV, wife of His Honor the multimillionaire senator, no sirree.
Or so the voters would say to themselves.
There, basically, was the problem, summed up in a nutshell. She looked like what she was: a trophy wife, bent on enjoying all the perks that came with her marriage to a rich man twice her age. Tom’s job was to soften up her image, tone down her looks, and get her to talk about the kinds of things dear to the hearts of the ladies whose votes her husband needed: kids, jobs, husbands, getting supper on the table.
Think working women
, he told himself. Soccer moms. Make her over until she came across like one of
them
.
That was the key to getting the Senator’s poll ratings up.
Initial assessment completed, Tom relaxed a little.
“Getting her pregnant’s an idea,” he said. “Women love that kind of stuff. They’d surefire warm up to her if she waddled like a duck and her tummy stuck out so far she couldn’t see her feet, wouldn’t they? Get to work on it, why don’t you, Kenny?”
His partner snorted. “
You
get to work on it. I’m a married man, remember? Besides, she looks like the
type that wouldn’t give you a sideways smile if you didn’t have at least a million big ones in the bank.”
“Yeah, well, that lets both of us out, doesn’t it?” Tom said with a wry smile. His bank account at the moment ran into the low three figures, and Kenny’s was in similar shape. It was a lucky thing this job had come along when it had. Everything else they had in the oven—low-profile, behind-the-scenes stuff, all of it—paid peanuts compared with this, and offered zero exposure. “The lady’s image needs some work, no doubt about it. The red hair’s definitely got to go. And the jewelry. And the clothes.”
Kenny grinned. “See there, you’ve got her naked already.”
This attempt at humor made Tom shake his head with a rueful grin. “Okay, let’s can that right now.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
is the key word here. The lady’s our client, don’t forget.”
“Yeah, I know. And no client, no money. And I like to eat.”
“Don’t we all.” Tom glanced at the screen again. “Any cute kids to trot out?”
Kenny shook his head. “Just stepkids. From his first marriage. All older than she is. And the word is they don’t much like her.”
Tom grimaced. Knowing the players as he did, he wasn’t surprised to hear that. Though a lot of things could have changed, in eighteen years.
“Dog?” he asked, then as Kenny shook his head, he continued on a note of declining hope: “Cat? Bird? Hamster?”
Kenny shook his head again. “Nope.”
“So basically we got nothing to work with, right?”
“Basically,” Kenny agreed. “Except the lady.”
“Life ain’t ever easy, is it?” Tom sighed.
“Which brings us back to getting her pregnant.”
“Getting her a dog would be easier,” Tom said. “A mutt, from the pound, that she saves from being put to death by the kindness of her heart. Big, clumsy, and adorable. Or little, scruffy, and adorable. Adorable’s the key.”
“Now you’re talking,” Kenny said.
“So get on it. Check around, find us an adorable pound mutt she can save.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because I’m the senior partner. Because I’m going to deal with the lady while you’re out finding the dog. Because it was your idea.”
“My idea was to get her pregnant. The dog’s
your
idea.”
Tom ignored this. “We’ll do some ads with her and His Honor and the dog. Walking through fields, throwing sticks, that type of thing. Warm and fuzzy stuff.”
“You’re serious about the dog.”
“Yup.”
“Think the Senator will agree?”
“The way he’s dropping in the polls? Sure.”
“The dog can always go back to the pound after the election, right?” Kenny’s voice was dry.
“Now
that’s
cynical. Methinks you’ve been in this business too long, my friend.” Tom smiled, linking his hands behind his head and leaning back in the cushioned comfort of his leather desk chair. Like the rest of the furnishings of his new office, the chair was rented. He was on the comeback trail, and the trappings of
success were important. Appearances were everything in this business. In politics, as in life, winning was the name of the game. Nobody wanted to know a loser.
He might be climbing out of the loser pit by his fingernails, but he was climbing.
“Hey, I know the way it happens. So do you. If Honneker drops much farther in the polls, he’d
let
you get his wife pregnant. Beg you to on bended knee, in fact. Whatever works.”
Tom laughed shortly. “Whatever works. Maybe we should have that put on our business cards: Quinlan, Goodman and Associates, Political Consultants: Whatever works.”
“Not a bad slogan.” Kenny straightened away from the desk, reaching for a doughnut. He’d brought a dozen in with him that morning, and now, at ten-thirty, five were missing from the box on the desk. Tom had eaten exactly none.
“Thought you were watching your diet,” Tom said. “Wasn’t that a heart attack you had last year?”
“A
mild
heart attack,” Kenny said defensively. “More of a warning, really. And it wasn’t brought on by doughnuts. It was stress.”
“Yeah, right.” If stress alone brought on heart attacks, he’d be dead by now, Tom thought. Instead he was hale and hearty at thirty-seven, despite the events of the last four years. Kenny was only a few years older, but he was pale and pudgy, and sweated easily. Tom didn’t have that many good friends, and he worried about Kenny. Especially since he’d been responsible for the stress that Kenny mentioned. Not that Kenny had ever blamed him for his heart attack. But
Tom blamed himself. He’d screwed up, and it had cost them both nearly everything they had.
“When do we get to meet the lady?” Kenny asked, reaching for another doughnut.
Tom swatted his hand away and grabbed the box, which he sheltered protectively on his lap. Kenny scowled at him.
“At lunch. She’s speaking to a group at the Neshoba County Fair. I want to see her in action in real life before we start in on her.”
“The voters hate her, don’t they?”
“She’s his biggest negative. Like him, hate her, is what the polls said. Voters loved Eleanor, the first wife. Women were outraged when His Honor married the GSW here.”
“GSW?” Kenny’s brows lifted.
“Gorgeous second wife. A hated breed among women, apparently.”
“I can see why,” Kenny said, glancing at the monitor where the tape still played. “That lady’s got homewrecker written all over her.”
“It’s up to us to change her into a
mom.
” Tom deftly fended off a snatch at the doughnut box. “If not literally, then figuratively. By the time Election Day rolls around, the good voters of Mississippi are going to perceive Mrs. Honneker to be a sweet southern lady who’s one of them. They’ll want to vote for him
because
of her.”
“What do you think you are, a genie? I think we should just settle for them not hating her.”
“Not good enough,” Tom said, stuffing the box of doughnuts into the trash and squashing it with his foot. He grinned as Kenny howled, and punched the
TV’s power button. The screen went dark. “We’re on the comeback trail, remember? We need to razzle-dazzle ’em. So we bust our fannies, and we make the voters love her.
She’s
the key to this election. Come on, Kenny, time to go meet the boss.”
“Happy, happy, joy, joy,” Kenny said, but allowed Tom to drag him from the apartment with no more than a single longing look in the direction of the squashed doughnuts.
Chapter
3
M
ISSISSIPPI IN
J
ULY
had to be the hottest place on earth, Veronica Honneker thought despairingly. The temperature had already reached 94, and was still climbing. If the atmosphere got any more stifling, she wouldn’t be able to breathe. The big white canvas tent she stood beneath sheltered her from the sun, but that was about all that could be said for it. Though her purple linen shift was short and sleeveless, it was still too much to be wearing on so hot a day. Her pantyhose could have been made of lead for all the air they let reach her legs. Her bra pinched. She could feel her antiperspirant giving up the ghost even as she swung into the closing lines of her luncheon speech. Moisture trickled down her back; her armpits felt wet. The small electric fan whirring on the floor of the platform beside her, ostensibly provided for her comfort, barely stirred the air.
“Remember, a vote for my husband is a vote for education. And education is the bridge that will take the state of Mississippi into the twenty-first century,” Ronnie concluded her standard speech, trying to ignore
a fly that had buzzed around her head for at least the last three minutes. Swatting at flies looked ridiculous, as she had learned from watching other speakers do it on videotapes provided by one of Lewis’s many flunkies. Don’t swat flies, do smile, hang on to the sides of the podium if you can’t think of anything else to do with your hands.… She’d had so much advice drummed into her head since marrying Lewis that she was sick of it.
Her smile was genuinely warm with relief as she finished talking. Ronnie unfolded her cramped fingers from the edge of the podium and acknowledged the polite applause with a wave. Almost before she had left the dais, her audience had turned its attention to their desserts. If not forgotten, she was certainly dismissed.
They didn’t like her, she knew. She had never been, and never would be, one of
them
. She was a northerner, a
carpetbagger
as the locals called her behind her back, a young, beautiful woman of no particular pedigree married to a rich, distinguished older native son whose roots went deeper than those of the state icon, the five-hundred-year-old Friendship Oak.
The hostess—Mary something, Ronnie hadn’t quite caught the last name—touched her elbow, steering her to the table closest to the speaker’s platform. As always, this was where the biggest contributors would sit. And she always, always had to make nice to big contributors.
“Mrs. Honneker, this is Elizabeth Chauncey.…”
Ronnie smiled and offered her hand to the elderly woman just introduced.
“I know your mother-in-law,” the woman informed her, and proceeded to tell her in excruciating detail just
exactly how that was. Ronnie listened, smiled, and responded as intelligently as she could before being drawn on. It took over an hour to greet everyone in the tent. By the time she had clasped hands and exchanged a few words with the last potential donor/voter, Ronnie’s head ached, her hand throbbed, and she felt limp from the inside out.
This was another thing about being married to a senator that she hated. Meet and greet, be nice to the voters. Always on. Smile, no matter how she felt. Well, today she felt lousy. All she wanted was to go home, take a shower and a couple of Tylenol, and lie down.
Fat chance of that.
“That went well,” Thea, her press secretary, said cheerfully as fair officials hustled them toward the back of the tent, where a state trooper was holding open a canvas flap for their exit. Thea Cambridge was thirty, only a year older than Ronnie herself. She was attractive, with short dark hair, a slim figure, and a nice sense of style. She had worked for Ronnie for two years now, and Ronnie considered her a friend.
Passing through the triangular opening, Ronnie walked into a wall of blazing heat, blinding light, swirling dust, and nauseating smells: hot dogs, cotton candy, livestock droppings, vehicle exhaust. For a moment, as her eyes adjusted, she could see nothing. She paused, blinking, her retinue milling around her as they all took a minute to get their bearings.
Mississippi in July was her idea of hell on earth. If it was not for the thrice-damned polls, she would be summering in Lewis’s cottage in Maine, as she had since they’d been married. Just the thought of that cool green shoreline made her feel hotter now. Lewis’s summer
house was almost the best thing about being married to him.