AllFreeNovel
Share Us
From the bed, Eddy began to laugh.
* * *
Avery woke up before Tate. The room was deeply shadowed. It was still very early, but she knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep. She tiptoed into the bathroom and showered. He was still asleep when she came out.
She took the ice bucket and the room key with her and slipped out the door in her robe. Tate enjoyed jogging every morning, even when he was out of town. When he returned, he consumed quarts of ice water. It wasn’t always easy to come by in a hotel. She had started having it waiting there for him when he returned from his jog, hot and dehydrated.
She filled the bucket from the ice machine down the hall and was on her way back to their room when another door opened. Fancy stepped out and quietly closed the door behind her. She turned toward the elevators, but drew up short when she saw Avery.
Avery was shocked by the girl’s appearance. Her hair was hopelessly tangled. What was left of her makeup was smudged and streaked. Her lips were bruised and swollen. There were scratches on her neck and across her chest, none of which she had made an attempt to hide. In fact, after recovering from her initial shock of seeing Avery, she defiantly tossed back her hair and threw out her chest to better display her wounds. “Good morning, Aunt Carole.” Her sweet smile was in vile contrast to her debauched appearance.
Avery flattened herself against the corridor wall, at a loss for words. Fancy swept past her. She smelled unwashed and used. Avery shuddered with disgust.
The elevator arrived almost immediately after Fancy summoned it. Before stepping into it, she shot Avery a gloating smile over her bare, bruised shoulder.
For several seconds Avery stared at the elevator’s closed doors, then looked toward the room Fancy had come out of, although she already knew who it belonged to.
Tate was wrong about his best friend. Eddy wasn’t as scrupulous as Tate believed. Nor was he as bright.
Twenty-Seven
From Houston the campaign went to Waco, and from Waco to El Paso, where Tate was the undisputed champion of the Hispanic voters. The Rutledges were received like visiting royalty. At the airport, Avery was handed a huge bouquet of fresh flowers. “Señora Rutledge, como está’?” one of their greeters asked.
“Muy bien, gracias. Y usted? Como se llama?”
Her smile over the cordial welcome faltered when the man turned away and she happened to lock gazes with Tate.
“When did you learn to speak Spanish?”
For several heartbeats, Avery couldn’t think of a credible lie in any language. She had minored in Spanish in college and was still comfortable with it. Tate spoke it fluently. It had never occurred to her to wonder if Carole had spoken it or not.
“I… I wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m surprised.”
“The Hispanic vote is so important,” she continued, limping through her explanation. “I thought it would help if I could at least swap pleasantries, so I’ve been studying it on the sly.”
For once, Avery was glad they were surrounded by people. Otherwise, Tate might have pressed her for details on where and when she had acquired her knowledge of Spanish. Thankfully, no one else had overheard their conversation. Tate was the only one she could trust completely.
Being with Jack, Eddy, and a few of the campaign volunteers as they traveled from city to city had provided her with no more clues as to who Carole’s coconspirator was.
Carefully placed questions had revealed little. Innocently, she had asked Jack how he had managed to get into the ICU the night she regained consciousness. He had looked at her blankly. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Never mind. Sometimes the sequence of events still confuses me.”
He was either innocent or an adroit liar.
She had tried the same ploy with Eddy. He had answered by saying, “I’m not family. What would I be doing in the ICU?”
Making threats on Tate’s life, she had wanted to say.
She couldn’t say that, so she had mumbled something about her confusion and let it go at that, turning up nothing in the way of opportunity for either of them.
She hadn’t been luckier in discerning a motive. Even when Tate disagreed with his confidants and advisers, as he often did, they all seemed devoted to him and his success at the polls.
In lieu of a campaign contribution, a private businessman had loaned the entourage his private jet. As they flew from E
l Paso to Odessa, where Tate was scheduled to speak to independent oil men, the key personnel aired some of their differences.
