“Mother, there’s nothing to worry about. Eddie and I aren’t in any particular kind of trouble. We’re here to make a point of principle.” He hugged me in passing as he reached for the open gate. “Let me get this closed. Just bear with me and watch the road. We’re taking a stand.”
“It’s hard to take a stand on a point of principle without getting stuck. Have you broken any law?”
He laughed tightly. “No.”
“Is this some kind of research for a class?”
He laughed again and shook his head. “We don’t do road trips in Economics.”
“So you risked your life and this . . . Eddie’s . . . to make some kind of point about what? Driving too fast and ditching classes and showing up with trouble in tow on the most important day of the season?”
He frowned. “I didn’t risk—”
“Don’t even try to justify racing down Chocinaw. Don’t. Your father died on that mountain.”
He halted. His throat worked. Even five years after Davy’s death, we had trouble talking about him. God knows, I had my reasons for avoiding the subject.
“Mrs. Thackery?” the girl interjected. I turned to find her standing calmly by the Trans Am. Tall and slender, with golden brown hair, a good, clean-boned but sickly pale face, she had big blue eyes smeared with worry. “Davis is my best friend and I trust him with my life. He’s not in any trouble, I promise you. He’s my hero.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Finally, “Do you need a hero’s help?”
She looked even more exhausted, and began to wobble in place. “A little bit, yes.” Davis hurried to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She wound her arm around his waist and clung like kudzu on a pine tree.
I stared at their interlocked embrace. “My son’s scared you sick, I think.”
“No, he’s been nothing but wonderful to me.” She turned and tilted her head upwards, giving Davis a look of adoration that rang alarm bells in me. I wanted some girl to love him like life itself, and him to love such a girl back. I wanted his wife to become the daughter I’d always wanted but had never risked birthing with Davy Senior. I wanted grandchildren, some day. Just not before my son turned forty, ran a Fortune 500 company, and won a Nobel prize. “I’m afraid we need to be introduced,” I said slowly. “And I really need to know what’s going on, here.”
Davis frowned. “I’ll explain everything, just give me a little time.”
Eddie nodded. “I assure you, Mrs. Thackery, we did this to prove an important point. ‘Plant your dreams with passion and honor, and your roots will hold you firmly in any storm—”
“A book about Johnny Appleseed. I read it to Davis when he was a boy. I carved that saying on a plaque for his bedroom wall.”
“You carve wood for a hobby. Yes. Davis has told me all about you. And all about his wonderful father, may he rest in peace.” She crossed herself. Catholic, I thought. My son had brought me an exotic Catholic girl? She had strict Catholic parents, I’d bet. Good. They’d haul her back home, wherever home was. “And you should be proud, Mrs. Thackery. Davis has tried very hard to live up to the creeds you and his father taught him.”
Clueless. Just like my son, she believed in the fantasies I’d created. I pivoted toward Davis. “What exactly have you done? Talk. Now.”
“There’s no time. The posse is here. Circle the wagons.” He managed another laugh as he looked up the road. Three large, black SUV’s roared around the bend. They swerved into the entrance of our road and squealed to a stop, lined up in perfect formation. All the doors opened, and over a dozen people—mostly men, but also one woman—got out. They tried to look casual in wrinkled slacks and golf shirts. Even the woman. All wore shoulder harnesses with guns.
“Federal agents,” Davis said in my ear. “Eddie has bodyguards. I’ll explain more later.”
Federal agents? Bodyguards? I slowly lowered my hands to my sides and faced a gun-bearing crew in golf shirts. Armed golfers.
“Everyone, please, be calm,” Eddie said. Davis kept an arm around her protectively. She lifted her chin. “Lucille, I’m sorry I put you and your people through this. But I had to.”
“Eddie, we’ve always been fair to you.” So spoke Lucille. She was tall and muscular, mid-thirties, maybe, with shoulder-length blonde hair and freckles and squint lines. She held out both hands to Eddie in a friendly gesture. “I know why you’re upset. But this isn’t the way to handle it.”
“Lucille, it’s exactly the way to handle it. My mother responds to actions, not words. Now, she’s paying attention.”
“Be reasonable. We’ll call in a helicopter, and we’ll take you and your friend, Mr. Thackery, to a secure location, and then we’ll talk. Your mother’s postponed her schedule in England. Your father’s waiting by a phone in Tel Aviv. They do want to listen.”
I frowned. England? Tel Aviv? Helicopters? Who were her parents? International flight attendants?
Eddie stiffened. “My father wants to listen, but my mother wants to destroy every shred of my privacy. Nothing excuses what she’s done to me. Nothing. Nothing.”
“Now, Eddie, it’s not my place to discuss that issue—”
“Do you report to her, too? Were you one of her spies?”
“No. You have my word.”
“I only believe one person’s word right now.” She looked at Davis. “And I’m so sorry for what my mother did to you.”
“Sssh. I’m a big boy. This is about you. Doing what’s best for you.”
“No. For us.”
He kissed her. Every antenna in my brain went on alert. “Whoa,” I said. “Excuse me, but what did your mother do to Davis?”
Davis shook his head. “It’s a matter of principle. Not actual, personal damage. I can deal with it.”
“Fine. Then just tell me what she did, and I’ll help you deal with it.”
“Davis, let me,” Eddie said. “I’m sorry to have to admit this, but my mother has been spying on me. She started when I left home for Harvard, and now she has files of information on all of my closest friends. Including Davis. We found out yesterday.”
I clutched a fist to my stomach. A hundred fervent questions popped into my mind, but by that point this Eddie had turned away from me and looked firmly at Lucille, again. “I hereby decline all further services from you and your office. I’m an adult of legal age, and it’s my right to reject formal protection.”
“I’m sorry, Eddie, but we’re like the tax department. You can’t just tell us to leave you alone.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” Davis warned.
Lucille inched forward.
I stepped in front of her, leaned over my gate, and held up a hand. “What part of ‘private property’ do you not understand?”
She stopped, scowling.
“Mother,” Davis said with affection.
“Thank you, Mrs. Thackery,” Eddie whispered. “Davis said you’d defend us.”
“I’m defending my gate.” Lucille and I fought a silent, primal battle over the whitewashed boards.
She blinked first. “Ma’am, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“My son tells me he hasn’t broken any law.”
“Not exactly, but—”
“Has Eddie? What—did she escape from some witness protection program? Is her father a mob boss in hiding?”
“No, but—”
“A mob boss in hiding,” Eddie repeated under her breath, and almost smiled.
“No, but—”
“Then I don’t give a damn who you are. You’re not coming onto my property.”
Lucille looked even more unhappy. “We do actually have the authority to intercede if we feel the situation warrants it.”
I was a stubborn McGillen by birth and a fighting Thackery b
y marriage. An anthem rose in my mind: I Saved This Farm With Backbreaking Work And No Government Handouts; I’m A Tough One-Eighth Cherokee Mountain Farmer Whose Grandfather Shot Himself Because Of Government Agents Who Confiscated His Liquor Still.
“I’ve got two dozen dead Union soldiers in my apple orchard who made the mistake of invading Sweet Hush Hollow in 1863.”
Lucille’s eyes went cold. “Is that a threat?”
“You better believe it.”
Davis pushed in front of me. “I’m going to drive Eddie to the home my family has lived in for over a century—” he jabbed a hand behind us, indicating the big farmhouse peeking from the orchards in the valley’s distance—“and that’s where she’s going to stay.” He pivoted and took Eddie by the arm. “Let’s go.” She nodded fervently.
“Eddie, it’s my job to come after you,” Lucille warned. She laid her hands on my gate.
I pulled out my cell phone and punched a number. “Smooch? Call Asia Makumba and ask her to get back to me right away.”
“Okay. Anything wrong?”
“Nothing a little media coverage won’t help.”
“Huh? I’ll be there in an hour to go over the radio spots for opening day—”
“Get Asia for me right now. I’ll have to call you back. I’m in the middle of something.”
I clicked the phone off. “Asia Makumba. Local girl. Used to be named Alice. Alice Jones. Married a Nigerian and decided to honor her African roots. Changed her name. Now she works for one of the Atlanta TV stations. Investigative reporter. I have a feeling you people don’t want cameras and an audience.”
Lucille turned an angry red. I leaned over the gate and crooked my finger. When she leaned toward me, I spoke very softly. “Move everyone else in your crew back from my gate, and then you get to come in. Just you. Is it a deal?”
Seconds ticked by. Lucille didn’t move. I had to give her credit. My phone sang. I put it to my ear. “Asia?”
“What’s going on? How can I help you, Mrs. Thackery?” A job at my farm had helped Alice/Asia put herself through the University of Georgia.
“I’ve got a story for you. Here. I’m going to let you talk to Lucille. She’s a federal agent of some kind who’s about to—”
Lucille suddenly held up her hands. Surrender.
“Asia, let me call you back. It may not be worth your trouble.”
“All right . . . but you’re sure?”
“No, but I’ll get back to you if I need to.” I returned the phone to my belt. “This is what the world has come to. To get anything done, you have to threaten government people with television people.”
“All right, Mrs. Thackery, you win,” Lucille said slowly, and eyed me with a certain respect. “My people will wait across the road until they get your permission to enter.”
“Good.” I opened the gate for her, then turned to Davis and Eddie. “Lucille comes in. Just Lucille.”
Lucille sent her group across the two-lane into the mown weeds, then walked back and entered the gate. I locked it behind her. Eddie looked relieved. It was clear to me that she liked this Lucille and didn’t want to cause her any more grief. “Thank you, Mrs. Thackery. Davis said we could depend on you. He was right.”
Davis nodded. “Thank you, Mother.”
I gave him a look that made him duck his head. I had a business to run. Our livelihood and the incomes of most of our relatives depended on it. Ten of his McGillen cousins were headed to college with my money as backing and Davis’s example as inspiration. “I want some answers and I want them fast.”
“I don’t blame you for being upset, and I know it’s apple season, so I’ll keep this basic, for now.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to introduce Edwina Margisia Nicola Jacobs. Eddie, this is my mother, Hush McGillen Thackery.”
Eddie held out a hand to me. “You do recognize me, don’t you, Mrs. Thackery? I can see it in your face. You do. So you understand why I’m in a difficult position? Mrs. Thackery? I’m Eddie Jacobs.” She studied my face. “Eddie. Jacobs.”
“Eddie Jacobs,” I repeated with mild bewilderment, but shook her hand. Her palm felt clammy. She swayed in place.
Davis suddenly picked her up. “Sssh. You can relax now. We’re home. The Hollow is the safest place in the world.”
Her long, skinny, bell-bottomed, Gap-trousered legs dangled in the mountain air, ending in feet clad in what looked to be very fine loafers with gold buckles. She clutched a hand over her mouth. “I may throw up again. This isn’t the dignified entrance I wanted to make for your mother.”
“I’m calling a doctor,” Lucille said.
“No. I’m fine.”
“You have a stomach virus. Or food poisoning.”
Davis shook his head. “She just needs to rest. It’s been a long night.”
Eddie looked at me wearily. “Mrs. Thackery, I’m sorry, but I seem to be a complete sissy.”
I laid a hand on her arm. “Calm down. We’ll get you to the house and I’ll feed you some salted Sweet Hush slices. That’ll cure any upset stomach.” I pivoted toward Lucille. “Lucille, I said back off.”
Lucille frowned. “You don’t have a clue, do you? You don’t understand the situation at all.”
“Then somebody tell me. Right now.” I looked at Davis.
His jaw worked. He raised his head formally, and held Eddie a little tighter against his chest. “Eddie and I met at Harvard this summer. We’ve been dating ever since. In secret. She’s a first-year student in law school.” He paused. “And her father is the President.”
I arched an unimpressed brow. After all, I was a president, too—of Sweet Hush Farms, Inc. “The president of what?”
Davis waited one beat, just enough to let the moment take root in our quiet lives. “President of the United States,” he said.
Chapter 5
IN THE MIDDLE of a tornado, there’s no time to think before the wind sucks you head-first up your own chimney. Suddenly the world outside the Hollow—a world I invited into my home every fall but only under my rules—invaded with no invitation.
Most of my family believed Al Jacobs wasn’t handsome enough to be President. Or tough enough. Or smart enough. Or “like us” enough, whoever “us” was. He had been a lawyer for the poor in Chicago, then a judge, then a congressman, then a senator, and finally, the first Catholic President since Kennedy—and the only President from a Polish-American background. His election single-handedly restored the dumb-Polock joke to its former glory. There was no evidence Al Jacobs fit the stereotype, but people who hated him didn’t care.
“The country’s elected a damned dumb Polock,” Aaron McGillen said loudly during a family reunion the spring after the election.
I turned to Smooch over the fried chicken buffet. “Cousin Aaron is still manning an outpost on the Road to Stupid, I see.”
Editorial cartoonists often drew Al Jacob’s pointy chin like a gull’s lower beak, and portrayed his thick, graying hair as a crazed Einstein bouffant. “Roosevelt didn’t look like some wild thinker,” Gruncle complained, citing his favorite President. “Who’d be willing to die for Jacobs like we did for Roosevelt? Would Al Jacobs inspire men to kill poor German women in the name of war? I don’t think so.” Gruncle Henry, now completely ancient but still tormented by memories of the great war and his part in it, had no sympathy for any President since FDR.
It didn’t help that Al Jacobs always billed himself as Al, reducing his importance with the casual acquaintanceship of his name. But his given name was Aleksandr, after a family tradition, and that was too tricky a business for red-blooded Americans to accept, much less spell. His immigrant relatives had been Jakobeks when they came over on the boat at Ellis Island, then turned themselves into Jacobs sometime before my Gruncles’ great war—fully Americanized, fighting for their new homela
nd, working as mechanics and butchers and secretaries, building up their American dream until they produced plain, solid, Al. Al Jacobs. Good ol’ Al Jacobs. As American as kielbasa and apple pie. In my opinion, he’d won the Presidency because he had kind, dark eyes and radiated a brand of decency no one could ignore, love him or not. Most of the residents of Chocinaw County, who tended heavily toward thorny survivalists and hellfire conservatives, hated his tender, liberal guts.
As for his wife, Edwina Habersham Jacobs, she was either the answer to a modern woman’s prayers or a loud-mouthed, big-butted East Coast blueblood hiding her feminist colors behind designer suits and a “friend of the working mother” campaign promise her enemies didn’t take seriously for one second. Her family had come over on the Mayflower and been rich country clubbers ever since. She’d ranked tops in her law school class back in the 1970’s, then earned a reputation in the Chicago D.A.’s office as a tough prosecuting attorney, which bewildered the hell out of everyone who said she and Al were bleeding heart Socialists. Her admirers insisted she had the style and class of Jackie Kennedy, only in a larger panty size. Dammit, no woman, even the First Lady, could avoid being sized up by the size of her behind. I checked my own size twelve in the mirror more often than I’d admit.
During Al’s campaign, the nation got its first good look at Edwina. Short and pear-shaped and deadly blonde, she took over the podium at her party’s national convention without a single nervous blink of her ice-blue Maryland Pilgrim’s Pride eyes. “I’m not here just to tell you that my husband will make the finest President ever elected,” she announced. “I’m here to tell you that I will make the finest First Lady ever elected.”
The convention delegates went wild with cheers. Once the rest of the country finished swallowing its spit over her drop-dead candor or unbelievable gall—depending on the point of view—she commandeered our attention like Patton in imported pumps. She knocked supermodels off the covers of magazines for months to come. She named her own terms for interviews on all the major cable and broadcast TV networks. The press followed her like lovesick puppies.