The Carriage House

Three

Lauren couldn't get the clasp on her pearl necklace to catch. Her neck ached, and she'd lost patience. She wanted to throw the damn necklace across her dressing room.

Ike had given it to her. He'd picked it up on one of his adventures. "You should go with me next time. Beacon-by-the-Sea will get along fine without you. So will the project. Live a little."

She shut her eyes, fighting a sudden rush of tears. Too much wine. She'd already had two glasses on an empty stomach. She didn't know how she'd make it through dinner. Richard had chosen a dark, noisy restaurant in town. She could sit in a corner and drink more wine while he played terrorism expert and husband of the North Shore heiress.

God, what was wrong with her? She opened her eyes and tried again with her necklace. Richard never gave her jewelry. He liked to give her books, theater and concert tickets, take her to museum openings. No flowers, jewelry, scarves, sexy lingerie. No pretty things.

Ike hadn't understood what she saw in Richard. He was protective for a younger brother, possibly because it had been just the two of them for so long, their parents dying in a private-plane crash twenty years ago. They'd liked Ike best, of course. Everyone did. People spoiled him, spun to his whims and wishes.

"Richard Montague, Lauren? You can't be serious!" Ike had stamped his feet, horrified. "He's one of those limp-dicked geeks who thinks he's covering up his geekiness by knowing scary things."

"He plays squash and racquetball," she'd argued. "He's run a marathon."

Her brother had been singularly unimpressed. "So?"

To Ike, Richard was the antithesis of everything he was. Ike had dropped out of Harvard; Richard had his doctorate. Ike had never worked seriously at anything, even his beloved Beacon Historic Project. Richard worked seriously at everything. Ike played to play, for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of it. Richard played for self-improvement, networking, always with a greater purpose than mere pleasure.

Marrying Lauren, she was quite certain, came under that same heading. It was to his personal benefit. She was an asset. She had money, a good family name, "breeding," as he'd once let slip, smiling to cover his mistake. It didn't mean Richard didn't love her. He did, and she loved him. Not everyone operated out of the passions of the moment the way Ike did. He had spontaneity and a keen sense of fun and adventure, but no idea what real love, real commitment, meant.

"Oh, Ike."

The clasp fell into place. She ran the tips of her fingers over the pearls and managed, just barely, not to cry. She'd have to start all over with her makeup if she did. She studied her reflection in the wall of mirrors. She was tawny-haired and slender, determined not to let her body slip and sink and turn into mush now that she was forty.

Ike had teased her about turning forty. "You're on the doorstep, kid, and look at you-you haven't lived!"

She had a failed first marriage, a daughter away at boarding school, all the responsibilities of managing Grantham family affairs on her shoulders. Even the project, which he'd so loved early on, was largely her doing. She saw to the details, showed up when he didn't. She made his lifestyle possible.

He knew it. He would tell her how much he appreciated what she did, even as he teased her for doing nothing riskier than go frostbite sailing with friends, laugh too loud at a cocktail party.

"Ike," she whispered. "Oh, God."

He's dead. You know he's dead. But she didn't, not for sure. Tess Haviland wouldn't keep the carriage house. She hadn't even been up to see it in the year she'd owned it. Giving Tess the carriage house had been a stupid, impulsive thing for Ike to have done- but so like him.

When Tess put the carriage house on the market, Lauren would snap it up. Maybe they could work out an arrangement on their own, without Realtors. She had to keep her focus on that singular, positive thought and will it to happen.

Her three miniature white poodles wandered in, rubbing against her legs and making her laugh. "You lazy little rats, you've been sleeping on my bed all day, and now you want my attention? Where were you when I wanted to play, hmm?"

Ike had warned her against poodles. "You're playing to stereotype, Lauren. Get yourself a rottweiler or a Jack Russell terrier."

She'd threatened to knit them little vests. Suddenly unable to breathe, she ran out into her spacious bedroom. The windows were open, and she inhaled the smell of spring, stemming her panic. She didn't want to think about her brother. Wouldn't. He'd dominated her life for too long. He was selfish, insulting, reckless. He didn't like Richard because he was doing something important with his life and Ike wasn't. That was the truth of it. The poodles followed her into the bedroom, and she scooped them up and sank onto a white chair in front of the windows. The sun was fading, but her gardens were still bright with color. This was the house where she and Ike had grown up, built by their grandfather in 1923, high on a bluff above the ocean. She preferred her view of the gardens.

She would die here, she thought as she stroked the backs of her poodles. Fifty years from now, she would be sitting right here in her chair, perhaps with descendants of these very poodles, but otherwise alone. Ike would be gone, and so would Richard. That was her destiny, and there was no escaping it.

Richard Montague knew his wife was annoyed with him. She had poured herself another glass of wine and retreated to the back porch, knowing she couldn't do anything that might embarrass him. He had company. Unexpected company. Dinner was canceled at the last minute. He didn't understand her irritation. She hadn't wanted to go in the first place.

"Care for a glass of scotch?" Richard offered his guest.

The chief of staff of the senior senator from Massachusetts declined politely. Jeremy Carver was a very careful man. Richard had noticed that about him straight off, when they'd first met at Carver's office on Capitol Hill. He was careful, discreet, naturally suspicious, and he would destroy Richard Montague, Ph.D., if Richard gave him the slightest cause. There would be no mercy.

"I'm sorry I didn't call ahead," Carver said.

"No problem. Lauren and I both had long days. It was an easy dinner to cancel. Won't you sit down?"

They were in Richard's study on the first floor of the sprawling Grantham house. It had once been his father-in-law's study, his father's before that. Richard liked feeling a part of a tradition, even if it wasn't his own. He had no traditions in his family beyond whacks up the side of the head.

Jeremy Carver sat in the cranberry leather chair as if he owned it, yet Richard knew Carver's background was no better than his own. South Boston, six brothers and sisters, a scholarship to Georgetown. He was a natural for state and national politics.

Richard resisted pouring himself a scotch and sat opposite Carver on the plaid fabric-covered love seat. Carver, he noted, had the position of power in the room. Jeremy Carver was short, paunchy and gray-haired, five or ten years older than Richard, but he radiated self-confidence, a certainty that he was in the right place, doing the right thing.

As Carver settled back in the leather chair, Richard studied the man across from him. Richard knew he was in better condition. He worked out regularly, strenuously. He was taller, and if not handsome, not as pug-nosed and unprepossessing as Carver. He was better educated, worked in a field that gave him intimate knowledge of violent fanatics, amoral operatives. Terrorists, pure and simple, although there was little that was simple or pure about them, at least from his position as someone who studied them, tried to understand them. His work mired him in shades of gray, rationalizations, excuses, life experience, points of view and mind-sets that could justify mass murder.

Yet, despite all Richard knew, Jeremy Carver was just the sort of man who made him feel unaccomplished, as if he'd never gotten out of the faceless, middle-class subdivision where he'd grown up west of Boston.

"I'll come straight to the point," Carver said. "The senator wants to push for your Pentagon appointment."

Richard's heart skipped a beat, childishly. Of course the senator wanted him at the Pentagon. Why wouldn't he? He was the best. He was the right person for the job. "I'm grateful," he said simply.

Carver had no reaction. "Before the senator pitches his tent in your camp, he'll want to know there's nothing in your background that'll jump in his sleeping bag and bite him in the balls. Understood?"

"Of course."

The room was silent. Richard thought he could hear the creaking of Lauren's porch swing. She'd had a lot of wine already this evening. It wasn't like her. He pretended not to hear, instead watching Senator George Bowler's chief of staff. A high Pentagon appointment was just the beginning. Richard saw himself eventually as defense secretary, CIA director, perhaps even secretary of state. He was only fifty. There was time.

"So," Jeremy Carver said, rubbing the fine, soft leather with the fingertips of one hand, his hard eyes never leaving Richard, "tell me about Ike Grantham."