concerned with is your immediate family. You keep them straight, and we can iron out everything else.”
His was the voice of confidence and it had its effect on his audience. When he had their buy-in, he turned his attention to George.
“And unfortunately, Mr. Baxter,” he said, delivering the bad news straight, “if you want to help mitigate what your daughter’s arrest could do to Graham’s campaign, you’ll have to take it on yourself.”
“What do you mean by that?” Graham asked.
“Your father will have to blame himself for the way your sister turned out. ‘I don’t know what happened to my daughter. She was always the black sheep of the family. But at least Graham turned out right.’ That sort of thing.”
He watched George’s eyes narrow, yet he knew the old man would take the bullet. Daniel had started to learn some of the Baxter family history—their fixation on holding political office. The father would do what he could to protect his son’s chances. Of that, Daniel was confident.
CJ’s mother looked worse. The first time he visited, she was wearing a bathrobe and no makeup, and was deep into a bottle. And yet today, in a pair of flowery pants and a white top—both pressed—and without a hint of anything on her breath, CJ thought she looked worse.
It was something in her eyes—the way they flitted about the room, never resting on anything for too long. She was nervous, almost manic. And while she looked outwardly better than she had the day before Sal’s funeral, one does not trade mental solidity for physical form and come out even.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Mom?” he asked for the third time.
“I’m fine,” Dorothy answered. “Why do you keep asking?”
He didn’t answer the question, and Dorothy didn’t follow it up. She ran a hand over Thoreau’s coat. The petting seemed to calm her, and Thor couldn’t get enough of it, so it was a win for both of them.
“So how is it that you’re still in town and this is only the second time I’ve seen you?” she asked.
CJ did feel a bit guilty about that, especially as it was her call that had brought him out here today. He’d begged off from helping Dennis at the house so he could do this, and he felt like a bad son because he would have rather been hanging sheetrock.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here, Mom. I’m working two jobs.”
“And playing poker, going to Albany, and having dinner at the house,” Dorothy said.
“For someone who supposedly never leaves home, you’re pretty well-informed,” CJ said, snapping more than he wanted to. Even Thor, eyes half-closed in canine contentment, seemed to give him a frown.
Whatever was going on with his mother, one of the effects was that she didn’t seem inclined to stay on topic for long.
“While you’re here,” she said, “can you help me move a table down from the attic?”
Grateful for something to do besides sit in the parlor, CJ said, “Sure, Mom.” He stood and headed for the hallway, to the pull-down stairs that would take him up to the attic.
“I didn’t mean you had to do it right now,” Dorothy called from the parlor.
“It’s okay, Mom.”
When he slid the latch aside and pulled the stairs down, a musty smell came with them. That couldn’t be good, CJ thought, knowing that the smell meant some moisture.
His work boots clumped on the wooden staircase as his hand instinctively went for the string that hung at the top of the stairs.
When he pulled on it, a single, swinging sixty-watt bulb went on, yet it didn’t do much to dispel the shadows from the corners of the room.
But what the light did show was enough to coax a single word from CJ.
“Wow,” he said.
Dorothy, who stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up at her son, said, “Wow, what?”
“I’d forgotten all of this stuff was up here.”
Except for a few items, the attic was a photograph of the way it had looked when he’d last been up here. The only differences involved the far right corner of the room, where several items— his father’s, by the looks of them—had been haphazardly tossed into a pile.
Seeing them made CJ aware that he’d gained access to a place his father had been trying to get to for years.
“The table’s the small one to your right. I’ll help you carry it down.”
She started coming up the stairs behind him, and he moved deeper into the attic, until his eye