The Long Game by Lynn Barnes

Author:Lynn Barnes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2016-06-11T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 41

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

John Thomas Wilcox was laid to rest on Saturday morning—less than twelve hours after the party had been busted up. Nearly the entire student body attended the funeral, with their parents in tow. It was a Who’s Who of Washington’s elite, and all I could think was that if John Thomas had read his father’s files, he probably had blackmail material on half the people here.

I wondered if he’d tried to use it.

Beside the open grave, the reverend continued talking, the low hum of his voice assuring us that the Lord worked in unfathomable ways. John Thomas’s family stood a few feet away. His mother was shaking, her shoulders rounded, her body on the verge of crumbling in on itself. Beside her, there were two younger boys: one in his early teens and another who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight.

The congressman stood on the opposite side of the boys, his hands balled into fists at his side. He looked grief-stricken—there was no other word for the lines of sorrow etched into the corners of his eyes and mouth. His whole face looked heavy, like the only thing keeping his skin on his face was the tense set of his jaw.

The congressman is very good at paying attention. John Thomas’s statement—his threat—came back to me, and I thought of the way father and son had interacted in the ballroom that night, the look on John Thomas’s face when Henry had said the word disappointment. Congressman Wilcox might have had a gift for ferreting out the skeletons in other people’s closets, but my gut said that he hadn’t paid attention to his son.

As the service ended, my gaze slid to my left—to Bodie. Adam had told me once that Bodie didn’t do funerals, and yet here he was. With me.

And here Ivy wasn’t.

I hadn’t told her I was planning on coming today. I hadn’t told her that I needed her here. I hadn’t asked her to stay, because she would have. And she would have taken one look at me—the way I was watching the congressman, the way I surveyed the presence of each and every mourner—and she would have known that I had more than one reason for coming.

“You ready?” Bodie asked me.

“Not yet,” I said, making my way toward the aisle. A few feet away, I caught a glimpse of a familiar head of strawberry-blond hair. Emilia Rhodes. She peeled away from the crowd and made her way to the far side of the grave. She stood, looking down at the casket. Without thinking, I started walking toward her. When I came up behind her, her head was bowed, and her eyes were closed. At first glance, she looked like she was praying, but when I got closer, I could hear the words her lips formed. They were barely more than a whisper, but her body shook with them.

“I hope it hurt.”

That was her prayer. That was her good-bye to John Thomas Wilcox.

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