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She could almost hear the wheels of rumination turning throughout the room. They were giving it serious consideration.
Zee broke the silence. “What if she has your medical records?”
“Records can be falsified, especially copied ones. It would still be my word against hers.”
“We can’t lie about it,” Tate said.
“Why the hell not?” Dirk demanded.
Ralph laughed. “Lying’s part of it, Tate. If you want to win, you’ve got to lie more convincingly than Rory Dekker, that’s all.”
“If I become a senator, I’ve still got to look myself in the mirror every morning,” Tate said, scowling.
“I won’t have to lie. Neither will you. No one will ever know about the abortion.” Avery stepped in front of Tate and laid her hands on his arms. “If we call her bluff, she’ll back down. I can almost guarantee that no local television station would listen to her, especially if she has been dismissed from the doctor’s staff.”
If the nurse took her story to Irish McCabe—and KTEX would probably be her first choice, because it had the highest ratings—he would nip the story in the bud. If she took it someplace else…
Avery suddenly turned to Eddy and asked, “Did she say she had someone to corroborate her story?”
“No.”
“Then no credible journalist would break it.”
“How the hell would you know?” Jack asked from across the room.
“I saw All the President’s Men.”
“The tabloids would print it without corroboration.”
“They might,” she said, “but they have no credibility whatsoever. If we nobly ignored a scandalous story like that, readers would consider it a sordid lie.”
“What if it got leaked to Dekker’s staff? He’d blast it from Texarkana to Brownsville.”
“What if he did?” Avery asked. “It’s an ugly story. Who would believe I’d do such a thing?”
“Why did you?”
Avery turned to Zee, who had asked the simple question. She looked stricken, suffering for her son’s sake. Avery wished she could provide her with a satisfactory answer to her question, but she couldn’t.
“I’m sorry, Zee, but that’s between Tate and me,” she said finally. “At the time, it seemed like the thing to do.”
Zee shuddered with repugnance.
Eddy didn’t care about the sentimental aspects of their dilemma. He was pacing the rug. “God, Dekker would love to have this plum. He’s got the zealous pro-lifers in his back pocket already. They’re fanatics. I hazard to think what he could do with this. He’d paint Carole as a murderess.”
“It would look like he was slinging mud,” Avery said, “unless he can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, which he can’t. Voter sympathy would swing our way.”
Dirk and Ralph looked at each other and shrugged in unison. Dirk said, “She’s brought up some valid points, Eddy. When you hear from the nurse again, call her bluff. She’s probably grasping at straws and will scare easily.”
Eddy gnawed his inner cheek. “I don’t know. It’s chancy.”
“But it’s the best we can do.” Nelson got up from his seat and extended a hand down to Zee. “Y’all sort out the rest of this ugliness. I never want to hear it mentioned again.” Neither he or Zee deigned to look at Avery as they went out.
Dorothy Rae headed for the liquor cabinet. Jack was glaring so malevolently at his brother’s wife that he didn’t notice or try to stop her.
Apparently, no one in the family had known about Carole’s pregnancy and abortion until tonight. This development had come as a shock to everyone, even to Avery, who hadn’t known for certain herself and had lost by gambling on no one ever finding out.
“You got any more skeletons rattling around in your closet?”
