Jasper got a funny look on his face, like Madison amused him more often than not. “Well,” he said, “it’s a possibility, yes.”
“President Jasper Roberts,” I offered.
“Well, not anytime soon. There are more important things to think about right now,” he said.
He simply started walking to the house, and I let him get twenty yards away from me before I followed him. I watched him, his posture slightly crooked. He looked like he had no idea how anything in his life had fallen out the way that it had. I felt the same way.
Three
We were humming down the highway in a white fifteen-passenger van with the last two rows of seats removed and an air mattress slapped down in the back. To make it more inviting, there were Charlie Brown bedsheets and two stuffed animals, identical Smokey hound dogs. At the moment, it was just Carl and me, the unhappiest couple in the history of the world, on our way to pick up the children, Roland and Bessie.
I don’t know why, but I had just assumed that the kids would one day appear at the estate, maybe stuffed inside a giant wooden crate, packing peanuts pressed against their rickety bodies. I thought I’d just take them in my arms and place them in our new home like dolls in a dollhouse. But no, we had to go on a road trip, six fucking hours round-trip, and Carl made it seem like we’d have to tie them up, pull them screaming from the crawl space of some bombed-out building, a kind of kidnapping. “These children are not used to transitions,” he said. “They’re already dealing with the death of their mother. From what I understand from their grandparents, they’ve been . . . agitated.”
“Well, then maybe the police should get them,” I offered. I hated the way I always tried to get out of hard work, but, Jesus, hard work sucked. I’d been sleeping on a feather bed and drinking chamomile tea. I wasn’t up for snatching some feral kids.
“No police,” he said. “That’s not what we need right now. This all needs to be private, a personal matter. We don’t want social services or hospitals or police. It’s just you and me. It’s an easy enough task.”
“What does Madison say?” I asked him, hoping to gain a reprieve.
“This is what you’re being paid to do,” he said, exasperated. “You’re to care for these children. So you’re coming with me to get them. Once they’re here, you can do whatever you think is necessary to keep them safe and happy.”
“What should I wear?” I said. I was still in my pajamas, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times while Mary fried some eggs for me. It was already ten thirty in the morning. It made more sense to go early the next day.
“Just wear normal clothes,” Carl said. I appreciated that he no longer tried to hide his impatience with me. It meant that I didn’t have to hide my irritation with him.
“Okay, okay. Chill out,” I told him. “After I eat my eggs, we’ll leave.”
“I have some granola bars and a thermos of coffee. We need to get going. I already let you sleep in,” he said.
“Mary is already making the eggs,” I said. “I don’t want to waste them.”
Carl sat down on the bench next to me and leaned forward, whispering, “Do you think Mary cares if you don’t eat those eggs? Do you think you would hurt her feelings?”
“You’re too close to me,” I told him, and he seemed to suddenly realize how threatening he might seem to me, that my fucking with him had made him overplay his authority. He got all stiff and embarrassed, and he stood back up.
“I’ll be waiting in the van,” he said. “Meet me in ten minutes.”
“Should we sync our watches?” I asked, but I don’t think he heard me because he was already in the hallway. I stood up and went over to the kitchen counter. Mary, not saying a single word, set a plate of fried eggs in front of me, and I ate them so quickly it was like they hadn’t ever existed. “Thank you, Mary,” I said, and she nodded.
“Safe travels,” she said, and she allowed just the slightest musicality into her normally monotone voice. I loved how expertly bitchy she was; I wanted to study her for a year.
Now we were almost to the vacation home where Jane’s mother and father were keeping the children out of sight. From what Carl told me, the Cunningham family had long been a political force in East Tennessee, but not long after Jane’s marriage to Jasper, her father, Richard Cunningham, had been implicated in some complicated Ponzi scheme and pretty much lost the entire family fortune in litigation. Jasper had kept him out of jail, but the Cunninghams were ruined. Undeterred, Richard sold blue-green algae door-to-door, some kind of superfood that sounded like its own kind of Ponzi scheme. But they still had this vacation home near the Smoky Mountains, which was where they were watching over the children. Carl indicated that all they did was sit around while the kids splashed in the pool for hours at a time, occasionally calling them inside to eat fish sticks. I figured that, for their discretion, Jasper was going to pay them a tidy sum. There was an entire industry that had sprung up around these children.
As Carl tried to navigate the unmarked back roads, I grew antsy. “Were you in the military, Carl?” I asked him.
He turned his head, his sunglasses reflecting my image right back at me. He stopped at an empty four-way intersection and actually waited five seconds before continuing. He was probably in his late forties, lean but not handsome, his nose too big and his hair thinning. He was short, too, but there was an intensity about him that made up for it, the way he accepted his ugliness, which was a kind of virtue. “No,” he finally said, “I’m not military.”
“Did you used to be a cop?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Well, what did you do before you worked for Jasper Roberts?” I asked, not willing to give up until I understood this man a little better.
“Different things,” he said. “I worked for a newspaper as a junior reporter, and then I sold insurance, and then I got a license to be a private investigator. I was good at it, discreet, and I started running in political circles. And I did some work for Jasper, looked into the life of someone of interest to him, and I did a good job, I guess. He hired me to work for him full-time.”
“Do you like working for him?” I asked.
“It’s better than running down deadbeat dads,” he said. “I grew up in a rough place. Sometimes I feel so far away from there that it seems like I must have done the right thing.”
“I grew up in a rough place, too,” I said, suddenly feeling tenderness for Carl, shocked that he had actually confided in me. I knew that we were nothing alike. He was too buttoned-up, too afraid to fuck up. I’m sure he thought I was a disaster waiting to happen, a problem that he was going to have to constantly manage. But for a moment, I could see him. He was good at his job, even if that job probably sucked. He handled things. You could depend on him.
“Oh, I know all about you,” he said, and then he turned back into a starched suit, the way he tensed his jaw. So, okay, we wouldn’t be best friends after all. Fine with me. “Where the fuck is this house?” he said, looking around, and he made a quick U-turn.
We finally pulled up to a cabin with all kinds of strange windows, the shape of it a triangle, and the front door was wide open. “Oh, Jesus,” Carl said, removing his sunglasses and pinching the bridge of his nose.