mattress. Something had happened to her that she didn’t want to think about. And then she remembered: “They hurt you. I heard them hitting you.”
“I’m okay,” he insisted.
She shined the light on Teddy’s face, then sank onto the floor and cried and cried. She couldn’t be strong. She couldn’t be who Teddy needed her to be.
* * *
—
WHILE TEDDY SLEPT on the couch, Helen sat in Henry’s chair, staring at the television that might never come on again. The gun was on the coffee table just in case. By dawn, she had a plan.
They had to leave. That was her plan.
Mrs. Hernández’s corpse was still upstairs. Maybe the cats had eaten it down to the bones. Who knew. Who cared. Helen would never go back up there, but Mrs. Hernández certainly made her presence felt. One day the smell would drift away, but Helen knew they couldn’t wait any longer. Anyway, the dead man in her bedroom was going to start stinking soon enough.
There were crickets all over the house making a horrible racket, which eventually melded into a single droning tune pulsing in Helen’s head. When the sky was finally bright enough that she could see in the kitchen, she opened a drawer and took out a butcher knife. Then she went back into her bedroom.
She knew he was dead, but she was taking no chances. He wasn’t as huge as she thought. Part of his ass was exposed. He looked so stupid. She stabbed him. She heard a great exhalation and jumped back in terror, then she realized it was her own breath she had heard, not the dead man’s.
She took his wallet. There was some money in it. She dug in his front pockets and got her coins and some bills. The Sacagawea dollar was there. She counted all the money. It came to $34.27. One of her quarters was still missing.
A few hours later, the dawn sun hit Teddy’s eyes, and he stirred and saw Helen sitting at the dining room table with the money laid out in stacks of denominations. He looked at her questioningly. “You need to pack,” she told him.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to Aunt Maggie and Uncle Tim’s place. They’ll take us in.”
“But we gotta wait for Dad,” Teddy said.
“Daddy’s dead,” Helen said evenly.
“You don’t know.”
“If he were alive he’d be here.”
Teddy began to cry, but Helen was insistent. “Teddy, we have to go!”
“I don’t want to!”
“Teddy, we need parents!” Helen said impatiently, adopting a tone she had heard her mother use when Henry was being impractical. She would have to be Jill now.
“How will we get there?”
Helen had been thinking about this most of the night.
“I am going to drive us,” she said.
44
Let Her Talk
On August 2, Tildy had a series of meetings in her corner office in the West Wing. Unlike in her little Homeland Security cubby in the basement, she now enjoyed stately windows that filled the room with sunshine. She was steps away from the Oval Office. Her close relationship with the president awarded her power that her title, national security adviser, only hinted at.
There hadn’t been much time to redecorate her new quarters, but she did have a bust of Henry Kissinger brought up from the storeroom. As soon as things settled down, she was going to change out the carpet, maybe go back to the cheerful Condi Rice yellow. Tildy believed in claiming her space as rapidly as possible, and if people were offended by her aggressiveness, that only added to the aura of power that she—after all these years—had earned.
In the morning, Tildy had a brief conversation with the new agency woman. The meeting was off the schedule and unrecorded. The agency man had been buried at Arlington, replaced by this tight-faced older woman whose hair had gone strikingly white on one side while remaining dark on the other. Tildy wondered if it was a deliberate fashion statement to make her resemble Cruella de Vil. But fashion was never in fashion at the agency.
“There’s going to be trouble getting to Putin,” the agency woman said. The CIA hit squad had arrived in Moscow, finding the place a total mess. “Conspiracy theories competing with actual conspiracies, coupled with disinformation to provide cover for Putin’s cyberattack on us. The level of paranoia is out of control.” Putin’s schedule was rarely posted, so he was hard to track down. The kill team was provided with Novichok, the toxin developed by Russian chemists that had become the favored