Funeral for a Friend

35

Devin Card stared at the unruly crowd, the way he had hundreds of times in his career. The supporters tried to drown out the protesters, and the protesters raised their voices in response. Card tightened the knot in his tie, smiled, waved, and walked from one end of the stage to the other, bending down to shake hands. Town halls fed his ego, regardless of whether people were cheering him or screaming at him, but tonight he was nervous. He wondered if it showed on his face as he sweated under the bright lights.

For the first time in his career, he didn’t know what to say. His entire future hung in the balance in the next few minutes, and the pressure weighed on him. Every word, every expression, every twitch of his mouth or blink of his eyes, would be analyzed and reanalyzed by the press in the months ahead.

Come November, he would either be Senator Devin Card, or Devin Card, private citizen.

Devin Card, rapist.

He stepped up to the microphone in the very center of the stage and held up both hands for quiet, but that didn’t work. The roar became rhythmic chanting. Loyalists shouted his name: “De-vin, De-vin, De-vin, De-vin.” He grinned, soaking it all in. When he glanced to his right, he saw Peter Stanhope and several of his senior aides waiting on the far side of the stage. They smiled back at him and gave him the thumbs up. But they were nervous, too.

“Hello, Duluth!” Card bellowed into the microphone, his voice booming through the convention center.

The crowd wouldn’t let him talk. The noise got louder.

“It’s great to be back home in the Zenith City!” he said, trying again, smiling as the shouts drowned him out. He raised his hands to settle them down, and he repeated his greeting multiple times. It took several minutes before the deafening tumult in the ballroom began to fade, like the keynote at a political convention.

Finally, he had the floor.

“Hello, Duluth!” Card said again, trying to sound casual and relaxed. “And thank you to everyone for showing up here tonight, with your questions, with your encouragement, with your support. And yes, with your opposition, too.”

A small spat broke out in the crowd but was silenced. Card used the pause to focus on the faces nearest to the front of the stage. In his mind, he isolated the women who were the right age and tried to read their eyes. He tried to see what they were thinking as they looked at him. Was she there? Was the woman looking back at him right now? He needed to decide how to react when she stood up and announced herself, and he still didn’t know.

What to do. What to say.

His staff had told him: Wait.

Don’t bring it up. Wait until the woman comes forward. Maybe she won’t show. Maybe this was all a ruse, another chance to change the subject from politics to his past. Until there was a real human being to put a face to the accusation, he should pretend it didn’t exist.

He took a deep breath. He launched into his remarks, using the script his staff had worked up for him. The teleprompter scrolled the words, and he followed the plan.

“An election isn’t about me,” Card told the crowd. “It may be my name on the ballot, but elections are about all of you. They’re about making choices. Making sacrifices. Deciding the kind of life we want for ourselves, for our families, for our friends and neighbors, and figuring out how to lay the groundwork for the next generation. We don’t always agree about the best ways to do that, but that’s okay. As long as we listen to each other, disagreement makes us stronger. Addressing the concerns of our opponents makes our plans better. That’s why I’m here. To talk about those things. To listen to you. To hear what you think, what you have to say, what you like and don’t like, what you’re afraid of, and what you’re excited about.”

Card stopped.

He had a lot more to say, but he let the silence draw out. The teleprompter froze where it was, waiting for him to continue. His staff exchanged uncomfortable glances. So did the people in the crowd. The longer he stood there without speaking, the more people began to shuffle on their feet and wonder what was going.

“Okay, look,” Card told them, going off the prepared script. He took the microphone off its stand and walked to the front of the stage. “Here’s the thing. I really believe elections are about you, but this town hall, right now, right here... well, let’s face it. We all know it’s about me. It’s about an anonymous accusation from back when I was in college. An accusation that I have said over and over is not true. But you’ve seen what they’re saying in the media. So have I. Supposedly, the person who made that accusation is here tonight. Some people have suggested that I should pretend like this situation doesn’t exist, but I’m not going to do that. I want to talk to this woman directly. If you’re here, I invite you to come up here on stage and say what you want to say. Let’s not wait. Let’s deal with this right now.”

People began to look around, and an expectant hush fell across the crowd.

“I get it, you may be reluctant to do that,” Card continued. “I’ve said harsh things about this accusation in the past, and that’s not because I don’t believe women. It’s because politics can be an ugly business. When you’re accused of something but you can’t put a name to the person behind it, well, you start to wonder if it was all made up just to tear you down. Believe me, there are radicals on both sides of the political aisle who will do those things. It happens. Still, I understand. If you’re sincere, if this was a genuine accusation, then you’re probably thinking to yourself: He knows who I am. He knows what he did. All I can tell you is, I really don’t. I’m not diminishing whatever happened to you or saying I don’t believe you, but I think there has been some kind of terrible misunderstanding here, and I’d like to clear it up. This may not be the best forum to do that, but here we are. So if you’re in this room, please, come up and talk to me. You talk, I’ll listen. The stage is yours.”

Devin put the microphone down and looked out across the crowd. He waited.

Everyone waited.

It was now or never.

Stride felt his phone vibrating. He stood on a corner of the stage and backed up into the shadows as he pulled it out. Outside, the storm raged on, lightning flashing on the tall windows, thunder making the building shake. The entire room seemed to be holding its breath.

He checked the caller ID.

“Mags,” he whispered into the phone.

“I’ve been calling you for half an hour and couldn’t get through,” she told him.

“Signal’s terrible. What’s going on?”

“Have you found her? Have you found Andrea at the DECC?”

Stride shook his head. “No, Serena and I have both been looking, but we haven’t located her yet. It’s a madhouse in here.”

“You have to stop her. Don’t let her go public.”

“We’re trying, but why? What have you found? Did you talk to Halka?”

Maggie’s words tumbled out. “It wasn’t him, boss. Halka didn’t do it. It was Ned Baer. Ned was a roadie at the big ZZ Top concert in Duluth that night. He was there. He went to the party with Halka, the one where Andrea was assaulted. You know what that means. It was him. It had to be him.”

Stride closed his eyes and silently swore.

“How sure are you about this, Mags?”

“As sure as I can be after thirty years. Do you believe in coincidences? Because I don’t. Baer kept it a secret. He didn’t want anyone to know he was in Duluth that night, because he did it.”

Stride could see Ned Baer’s face in his head again. He could see him at the Deeps, that nasty smile on his face, proud of what he’d done. That man had violated Andrea as a girl and then violated her all over again years later by coming to town to expose her secret.

It made Stride wish he’d been the one to pull the trigger.

“Andrea won’t believe it,” he went on.

“Maybe not, but if she goes up there and confronts Devin, and then this all comes out, it will destroy her,” Maggie went on. “You can’t let her do it.”

Stride stared across the stage, and his heart fell.

“Too late,” he said. “She’s here.”

Andrea held her breath at the top of the steps on the west side of the ballroom stage. It took a while for anyone to realize she was there. For that fleeting moment, she was still anonymous. She froze where she was, gathering her strength, debating whether to turn and walk away while she still had time to stay out of the spotlight.

She could go back home if she changed her mind right now. She could live her life. It was sad, it was shadowed, but it was still a life. She could make peace with who she was and what she’d done. Forgive every sin. She almost turned around and preserved all of that, but she waited too long, and circumstances made the decision for her. One second of hesitation passed, and there was no going back.

Peter Stanhope noticed her first. His gaze passed across her without really seeing her, but then, as if by instinct, it went back and stopped. He stared at her with a kind of curious horror. She could tell. He knew, watching her face. She could see him whisper to the person next to him, could see his lips form the words.

It’s her.

Someone with a camera noticed her next. A journalist. He took a picture. The pop of the flash, as bright as the lightning storm, made her squint and cover her eyes, and suddenly, others began to look her way. Murmurings began, a growing undercurrent, a rumor that became a living thing in the ballroom. People pointed at her. Every gaze shot toward her. More cameras flashed, and video cameras swung toward the end of the stage. The staff saw her, the crowd saw her, the seas began to part to let her through. A long stretch of empty stage opened up in front of her, a clear path for her to walk toward Devin Card.

He was the last one to realize she was there.

For a long moment, he was oblivious, trying to understand the changed dynamic in the ballroom. Everything was different, and he obviously didn’t know why. Then, finally, Devin saw her, too. They stared at each other. He studied her like a scientist discovering an unusual new species. It was all too obvious that he knew she was the one, and it was equally obvious that he had no idea who she was. No idea at all. She was a total stranger to him. That, more than anything else, made her furious. This man had been the central figure in her entire life, had dominated her thoughts every day, and he didn’t even recognize her. He had used her and thrown her away and forgotten her. His life had gone on, a life in which she didn’t matter at all. Meanwhile, she hadn’t been able to get his face out of her mind. He’d always been there, tormenting her, reminding her of what she’d lost, of what she’d given up.

Andrea started across the stage. She didn’t hurry. Someone, from somewhere, came up and handed her a microphone. She held it in her hand and thought: I have a voice now. It made her feel strong, made her walk with a confident step. All the years had led her to this moment. Devin watched her come, and she could see uncertainty cross his face, confusion fill his eyes. He was racking his brain, hunting to find her there, trying to pull her out of some dusty drawer in the back of his head.

Do you know me?

There were thousands of people in the room, but now it was just the two of them.

She stopped when she was six feet away. Devin didn’t say a word. He was waiting for her to begin. The whole ballroom waited for her, wanting to see what would happen next.

“My name is Andrea Forseth,” she said into the microphone.

Just like that, a thousand journalists keyed her name into search engines. She would never be anonymous again. The first line in her obituary had just been written.

“Hello, Ms. Forseth,” Devin Card replied. “Thank you for coming forward. I know this must be hard for you.”

Her mouth was dry. She had trouble forming words.

“I know you won’t admit what you did to me,” Andrea said, hearing her voice in the room like the voice of a stranger. “I know you can’t. But that’s not even why I’m here. That’s not what I want. After all this time, it doesn’t even matter to me to hear you say it. I know what happened to me. I know how my life changed that night. You can deny it, or say I made a mistake, or say I never told you to stop even though I did, but I don’t care. Like I said, that’s not what I want from you.”

Devin waited a long time before he said anything. He wasn’t going to interrupt her.

“What do you want from me, Ms. Forseth?” he asked.

She stared into the face that had haunted her dreams for decades. It was an older face now, but still with the same wavy blond hair, still with the same movie star blue eyes, the same masculine confidence that life would give him whatever he wanted. He was the football quarterback and always would be.

Andrea inhaled and put down the microphone, so that he was the only one who could hear her. “I want you to say that you remember me.”