LITMIR.BIZ

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Nodded. So this was it, she thought. The showcase was out, the musical was in. And somehow she would have to make it all work.

      “Thank you,” Arthur replied, distracted again. Once more, he sighed. “I’ll need dates for the production as soon as possible,” he said. “Nelva Jean can make up fliers stressing that we’re going to need more parental help than usual.”

      Nelva Jean was the school secretary, a force of nature in her own right, and she’d been eligible for retirement even when Julie and her sisters attended Blue River High. But aged miracle though she was, Nelva Jean couldn’t work magic.

      Julie and Arthur went their separate ways then, Julie’s mind tumbling through various unworkable options as she hurried toward her classroom, her thoughts partly on the three playwrights and their own hopes for the showcase.

      She’d met with the trio of young authors all summer long, reading and rereading the scripts for their one-act plays, suggesting revisions, helping to polish the pieces until they shone. They’d worked hard, and were counting on the production to buttress their college credentials.

      Julie entered her classroom, took her place up front. She had no choice but to put the dilemma out of her mind for the time being.

      Class flew by.

      “Ms. Remington?” a shy voice asked, when first period was over and most of the students had left.

      Julie, who’d been erasing the blackboard, turned to see Rachel Strivens, one of her three young playwrights, standing nearby. Rachel’s dad was often out of work, though he did odd jobs wherever he could find them to put food on the table, and her mother had died in some sort of accident before the teenager and her father and her two younger brothers rolled into Blue River in a beat-up old truck in the middle of the last school year. They’d taken up residence in a rickety trailer, adjoining the junkyard run by Chudley Wilkes and his wife, Minnie, and had kept mostly to themselves ever since.

      Rachel’s intelligence, not to mention her affinity for the written word, had been apparent to Julie almost immediately. Over the summer, Rachel had spent her days at the Blue River Public Library, little brothers in tow, or at the community center, composing her play on one of the computers available there.

      The other kids seemed to like Rachel, though she didn’t have a lot of time for friends. She was definitely not like the others, buying her clothes at the thrift store and doing without things many of her contemporaries took for granted, like designer jeans, fancy cell phones and MP3 players, but at least she was spared the bullying that sometimes plagued the poor and the different. Julie knew that because she’d taken the time to make sure.

      “Yes, Rachel?” she finally replied.

      Rachel, though too thin, had elegant bone structure, wide-set brown eyes and a generous mouth. Her waist-length hair, braided into a single plait, was as black as a country night before the new moon, and always clean. “Could—could I talk with you later?”

      Julie felt a tingle of alarm. “Is something wrong?”

      Rachel tried hard to smile. Second period would begin soon, and students were beginning to drift into the room. “Later?” the girl said. “Please?”

      Julie nodded, still thinking about Rachel as she prepared to teach another English class. Probably because she’d had to move around a lot with her dad, rambling from town to town and school to school, Rachel’s grades had been a little on the sketchy side when she’d started at Blue River High. The one-act play she’d written—tellingly titled Trailer Park—was brilliant.

      Rachel was brilliant.

      But she was also the kind of kid who tended to fall through the cracks unless someone actively championed her and stood up for her.

      And Julie was determined to be that someone. Somehow.

      APHONE WAS RINGING. Insistent, jarring him awake.

      With a groan, Garrett dragged the comforter up over his head, but the sound continued.

      Cell phone?

      Landline?

      He couldn’t tell. Didn’t give a damn.

      “Shut up,” he pleaded, burrowing down deeper in bed, his voice muffled by the covers.

      The phone stopped after twelve rings, then immediately started up again.

      Real Life coalesced in Garrett’s sleep-fuddled brain. Memories of the night before began to surface.

      He recalled the senator’s announcement.

      Saw Nan Cox in his mind’s eye, slipping out by way of the hotel kitchen.

      He recollected Brent Brogan providing him with a police escort as far as the ranch gate.

      And after all that, Julie Remington, a little boy and a three-legged beagle appearing in the kitchen.

      Knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep after Julie had taken her young son and their dog back to bed in the first-floor guest suite—the spacious accommodations next to the maid’s rooms, where the housekeeper, Esperanza, stayed—Garrett had gone to the barn, saddled a horse, and spent what remained of the night and the first part of the morning riding.

      Finally, when smoke curled from the bunkhouse chimney and lights came on in the trailers along the creek-side, Garrett had returned home, put up his horse, retired to his private quarters to strip, shower and fall facedown into bed.

      The ringing reminded him that he still had a job.

      “Shit,” he murmured, sitting up and scrambling for the bedside phone. “Hello?”

      A dial tone buzzed in his ear, and the ringing went on.

      His cell phone, then.

      He grabbed for his jeans, abandoned earlier on the floor next to the bed, and rummaged through a couple of pockets before he found the cell.

      “Garrett McKettrick,” he mumbled, after snapping it open.

      “It’s about time you picked up the phone,” Nan Cox answered. She sounded pretty chipper, considering that her husband had stood up at the previous evening’s fundraiser and essentially told the world that he and Mandy Chante were meant to be together. “I’m at the office, and you’re not. You’re not at your condo, either, because I sent Troy over to check. Where are you, Garrett?”

      He sat up in bed, self-conscious because he was talking to his employer’s wife, one of his late mother’s closest friends, naked. Of course, Nan couldn’t see him, but still.

      “I’m on the Silver Spur,” he said, grabbing his watch off the bedside table and squinting at it.

      Seeing the time—past noon—he swore again.

      “The senator needs you. The press has him and the little pole dancer cornered in their hotel suite.”

      Garrett tossed the comforter aside, sat up, retrieved his jeans from the floor and pulled them on, standing up to work the zipper and the snap. “I can understand why you think this might be my problem,” he replied, imagining Morgan and Mandy hiding out from reporters in the spacious room he’d rented for them the night before, “but I’m not sure I get why it would be yours. Some women would be angry. They’d be talking to divorce lawyers.”

      “Morgan,” Nan said quietly, and with conviction, “is not himself. He’s ill. We still have five children at home. I’m not about to turn my back on him now.”

      “Mrs. Cox—”

      “Nan,” she broke in. “Your mother and I were like sisters.”

      “Nan,” Garrett corrected himself, his tone grave. “Surely you understand that your husband’s career can’t be saved. He won’t get the presidential nomination. In fact, he will probably be asked to relinquish his seat in the Senate.”

      “I don’t give a damn about his career,”

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