They’d never quite look at him the same again.
That bit about being pregnant had been perfect.
When a man in his twenties gets a fifteen-year-old girl pregnant...
And especially when he treats her as badly as she had made it seem that Richie was treating her...
She’d felt pretty cool.
But now that she was about halfway home, she felt empty and lonely.
She hadn’t cultivated any real friends in Crystal Falls, so she had no girlfriends to call. Nor were there any boys her age who interested her...
And then she remembered her good friend the Senator. And smiled...
She still felt like raising a little hell. What could be more fun than dropping in on the Senator?
Tell him she was still trying to decide what to do with the photos she had of him.
Watch him beg and writhe.
He really had no dignity.
And that made him fun to watch.
She drove up to the next corner and then flipped a U-turn, heading toward the county road that would take her to the Senator’s home in the deep woods.
Oh, yes, this was going to be a lot of fun.
8
The last time the Senator had been up for reelection, a good friend of Richie McGuire’s had asked the college star if he’d appear at a Fourth of July picnic for the Senator, kind of a public-relations deal.
Helen had thought this was going to be a slam dunk. How could Richie refuse? Hadn’t his sister gone through law school with funds the Senator had gotten for her?
But Richie had indeed turned him down. Said that he, Richie, was more inclined to vote for the Senator’s opponent. The man Richie had told all this to said that Richie had been pretty drunk when he said this. Drunk, and arrogant, letting the All-Big Ten thing really go to his head, not understanding, apparently, how fleeting sports prominence was.
The day following this phone call, Amy McGuire had personally come over to the Senator’s local office and told the Senator, who was home for one of his weekends, how embarrassed she was that her brother had acted that way.
The Senator had been a lot more forgiving than Helen had, and clearly Amy knew it. She kept playing to Helen, trying to put sympathy in her eyes, but Helen felt no sympathy at all. She wasn’t particularly enamored of sports figures, anyway. She was especially not enamored of this particular sports star.
She knew, Helen did, that someday she would be able to return the favor. If you just waited long enough, she knew, your enemies always did something you could take advantage of...
She thought of all this as she sat talking on the phone in the den. David was in the living room, watching a Clint Eastwood movie he’d rented.
Doris said, “Then you know what he did?”
“What?”
“Tried to strangle her.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Right in the middle of the bar. And everybody standing around.”
Looked like Richie McGuire wasn’t anybody she’d have to worry about repaying. Looked like Richie was going to do just fine on his own.
“Then what happened?”
“She left,” Doris said.
“Richie was drunk, of course.”
Doris sighed. “Of course. Richie’s always drunk.”
Then, “That’s absolutely what happened and Al was right there to see it.”
Al was Al Robertson, one of the local bank presidents and a longtime supporter of the Senator’s. Helen had gone to school with his wife, Doris.
“He used to be a pretty nice kid,” Doris said. “When he was growing up, I mean. Amy did her best raising him, but I think he was one of those kids who needed a stronger hand. His father was a very stern man.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“His father would’ve made sure that Richie turned out all right.”
“I think you’re right.”
Doris said, “Oh, God.”
“What?”
“I’ve got some cookies in the oven. They’re probably char black by now. I’d better go.”
“Thanks for the info,” Helen said. “You’re a lot more reliable than TV.”
Doris laughed. “In other words, I’m a great gossip.”
“In other words,” Helen said, “you’re a great gossip.”
Helen hung up feeling a glow of satisfaction. It was always nice to see an old enemy come to a bad end.
But as she picked up her paperback again, she wondered suddenly if Richie’s situation could possibly have some bearing on the Senator’s situation.
What if the police got involved and started asking Darcy all kinds of questions about her love life?
What if she talked about her relationship with the Senator?...
As the thunder rumbled across the sky, she looked up at the ceiling.
Ever since she was a little girl, she’d liked being in a nice, warm, snug house while it rained. It made her feel so secure, as if she were safe from harm of all kinds.
But now that she was older she knew that harm came in all forms. Sometimes completely unexpected forms.
The form of a fifteen-year-old girl, for instance.
9
In the old days, when it was still all right to put all kinds of bad shit in your lungs, a lot of reporters said that Senator David Cummings looked like the Marlboro Man. But when smoking went out of fashion, they said he looked like Clint Eastwood. He didn’t, of course; he was actually better looking than Eastwood, and even more rugged. The trouble was, and he could admit this to himself only upon occasion, he wasn’t as smart as Clint. Nor as passionate. There was a hollowness to David Cummings that even he noticed when he stared into the mirror.
He got the looks; his identical twin sister, Helen, got the brains. And the passion.
And that’s how they’d always played it. All the years growing up, Helen had the smart ideas and she used her brother as the tool to make those ideas come true.
That’s why he’d run for student senate in high school. Then run for student assembly president in college. And then for state assembly. And then for Congress. And finally for the Senate itself. Because Helen told him exactly what to do and how to do it. In those days, women didn’t have the opportunities they had these days, and so Helen didn’t have much choice but to live through her brother David.
The funny thing was, almost everybody knew about their relationship. You didn’t have to talk to David very long to realize that he wasn’t exactly a wizard. But charming? Good-looking? Gallant? That was David.
In Washington, David had a huge office. He needed it. He had one-half the office space for himself and his staff; Helen used the other half of the office for herself and her staff. Even Helen’s staff was smarter than David’s. She had a better eye for hiring.
But not even Helen and all her wiles could get much respect for David in Washington, D.C.
He was known as the most pro-pork barrel man in the whole Senate. Again, this was Helen’s idea. She reasoned, and correctly, that the only people you really had to care about were your constituents back home.
So that was all they worried about.
Republicans and Democrats came and went; presidents found favor, and then were toppled; wars broke out, and came to bloody ends. Balanced budgets, supply-side economics, and back to balanced budgets. And through it all there was one constant: Senator David Cummings, now in his twenty-sixth year in Congress, and ready to run for another six.
For his home state, he built expressways that nobody really needed; set up defense contracts for manufacturers not really up to the job; created science centers that received hundreds of millions of dollars for work that was at best specious; and, in addition, blessed his state, and especially the area in and around Crystal Falls, with hospitals, highways, swimming pools, parks, floor control projects, historic-preservation projects, airports, schools, and museums, and spent nine million dollars on an advertising campaign for the slaughter hogs produced by local farmers. At the first sign of a serious rise in unemployment, Cummings’s state was flooded with new make-work projects that put people to work immediately.