I could only shrug. "Probably not. At some point they're going to dehydrate. Come on, let's get unloaded. They're in charge of offspring."
He turned and told his oldest. "You get to help. Grab some gear and take it ... well, follow us."
I dragooned Charlie into helping as well, and we carried the first load inside. We were only using three rooms (the girls shared a room just like at home – they liked to be together) so there were enough rooms for the others. We gave the largest remaining room with a bathroom to Suzie and John, put Jack in his own room, and put Alex and Harry together. If Alex and Harry couldn't put up with each other, we could split them and combine Charlie and Jack. We went back for a second load, and Marilyn and Suzie were still yapping away. Marilyn was holding Harry, and Molly and Holly had taken Alex down towards the beach.
"Okay, ladies, take it inside, and grab some stuff on the way.", I told them. We waited a few minutes while they grabbed kid stuff, and then I led the way inside again. Marilyn showed her sister-in-law where things were, and I dropped my load off. I turned to John and asked, "Care for something to drink? Beer? Wine? Mixed drink?"
He smiled at me. "A little early, don't you think?"
I glanced at my watch. It was a little after noon. "It must be five o'clock somewhere. Anyway, we should probably feed the kids." I led the way into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and lifted out a couple of bottles of Red Stripe, and gave him a quizzical look. He nodded, so I opened them. I pushed one across the island to him. "What do the kids eat? In my experience, little ones can be picky."
"Jack and Harry are pretty good. All Alex eats is boiled hot dogs!"
I snorted and opened the freezer and pulled out a package of hot dogs. "We can cover that. Hey, when I was his age, all I would eat was Braunschweiger and apple butter sandwiches! Drove my mother nuts for years."
He gave me an odd look at that. "Literally?"
I blinked and smiled. "That was a figure of speech. Mom's issues go way beyond me."
"Your sister filled me in on some of it."
I sat down on a bar stool, and sipped my beer. "John, I had no idea how much this all hurt my sister. I was going through a living hell at the time, but I didn't see what she was going through."
He sat down across from me. "What was she like growing up?"
I shrugged. "Normal. She was always the normal one. Hamilton was the crazy one. Mom went along with anything he wanted, and Dad went along with anything Mom wanted. I was the boy genius and ne'er-do-well nobody wanted around. Suzie, well, she was just normal. She's five and a half years younger than me, so it wasn't like she was always around me. We went to different schools. By the time she started growing up and dating, I had already escaped. I made sure to stay in touch with her in high school and college, if simply to make sure she was safe. I figured she was doing all right; she was Dad's favorite and Hamilton never went after her like he did me. Maybe I was wrong about that all along. She told me before she graduated from college that she already had an apartment lined up and was moving out as soon as she got home." I drank some more beer. "Maybe if I had been there for her, she wouldn't have run away."
"Running away brought her to me.", he replied.
I smiled at that. "So, please, make her happy. She's a big girl now, but I never wanted anything else for her."
I led him out through the patio door onto the deck and showed him around. Maybe I was getting jaded, but John was astonished. He couldn't believe we owned almost a quarter of a mile of prime beachfront property. After a bit we went back inside.
At that point the rest of the crew came in. Marilyn carrying her baby nephew, Suzie shooing Alex in front of her, and Holly and Molly wandering in behind the others. Out the window I could see Charlie showing Jack around the beach and deck and pool. "I should have known the two of you would be drinking!", protested my sister.
"Outrage? Or jealousy?", I commented.
Suzie refused to answer, so Marilyn simply pulled two more bottles of beer out of the refrigerator. "Glass?"
My sister smiled and shrugged. "The bottle is fine for me."
"You're still a Buckman, all right, barbarian to the core!" She poured her own beer into a glass.
I simply made a funny face at her and gave her a loud raspberry. The others laughed. Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me, and then we made lunch. Boiled hot dogs. We could get creative later.
My sister and her family stayed the rest of the week with us. We kept the kids a couple of nights and let Suzie and John have some adult time out on the town, and they returned the favor one night. The rest of the time, we talked. There was a lot of catching up to do. The twins spent a lot of time playing with the littlest Rottingens, although by the end of the week Alex's constant trailing around after them was proving quite exasperating, and Charlie delighted in showing Jack all the various hiding places and nooks and crannies around the place. At the end of the week, we all loaded onto the plane and flew back to Westminster. They came out to the house for a night with us to see our regular home. The verdict – appallingly normal! Marilyn and I were happy with that and sent them on their way the next day.
It was good to have my sister back in my life, and I was really glad she had found a good guy and a good life. Still, things just weren't the same anymore. Maybe too much time had passed. Maybe we had both changed too much. I wasn't sure how that was going to work out.
Chapter 100: The Race Begins
One thing I did with Brewster was to start spending some money. In the military they teach you very early on the value of reconnaissance. In business, it's no different. If you are going to win, or just even hold your own, you need to know who you're going up against, and what they have planned. In the Army you can add espionage to the mix. That's a bit frowned on in the business world, at least if you get caught, so we generally avoided that, but I knew of companies that did it.
Why should politics be any different? Andy Stewart was not going to conduct a gentlemanly campaign, not against Bill Worley, who had already announced a primary battle, and certainly not in the general election against me. The more information we had on him, the better. The first thing that McRiley and the accountant and I agreed on was the need to have Stewart investigated.
One aspect was to look for 'gotcha' moments, where he had said one thing and voted for something different. Why would a dedicated public servant do such a thing? Not to seem cynical about it, but perhaps he had been paid to change his mind. That led to a second subject for investigation, Stewart's campaign finances. Who was donating money to Stewart, and what were they getting in return?
The sort of thing we needed was his financials, as well as some very discreet inquiries into everything else. Specifically, how had a guy who had never once worked in the private sector, but had always worked for the government somehow, become a multimillionaire? Inquiring minds wanted to know! We needed to hire a forensic accounting team, and perhaps not look too closely at the techniques they used to get some of the information we asked for.
Who was to do all these wonderful things? A quick answer was to hire a clipping service, to go through newspapers and magazines and find anything being reported on Stewart. John suggested we expand the search to what they were reporting on me, since Andy was certainly going to do that. We needed professionals to do the investigating of the finances, but for a lot of the other work we needed volunteers. There was no way I could afford paid personnel to do all the scut work; that would blow through our campaign budget way too fast. I needed campaign volunteers, and fast. One of our first priorities after officially announcing my candidacy was to start rallying the troops. McRiley laid out a timetable and a plan for doing this. We would start out with captive audiences, the local Republican groups. One problem we had was that there was only a couple of colleges in the district, Carroll Community College and Western Maryland College in Westminster. College kids make for great volunteers, but on the downside, they are usually Democrats. Win some, lose some. I would certainly rely on whatever resources the local Republican committees had available.