David Baldacci - First Family

"Who are you mad at? Who are you trying to get back at?"

He rose. "You need any more books, you just let me know."

He fled the room, leaving Willa to cry alone. He had never felt more ashamed.

A few minutes later Quarry was eying Diane Wohl as she sat on her haunches in the far corner of her "cell" from him. He should have felt sympathy for her too, but he didn't. Willa was a child. She hadn't had a chance to make choices. And mistakes. This woman here had done both.

"Can I ask you a question?" Wohl said in a shaky voice.

Quarry sat down at the small table in the middle of the room. Part of him was still dwelling on Willa. But he said, "Shoot."

"Can I make a phone call to my mother? To let her know I'm okay?"

"Can't do that. These days they can trace anything. Government eye in the sky. Sorry. Just the way it is."

"Well, then can you let her know I'm okay?"

"I might be able to do that. Give me her address."

He handed her a pencil and a slip of paper. Her brow furrowed as she wrote it down and then handed him back the paper. She asked, "Why did you take my blood?"

"I needed it for something."

"What?"

Quarry looked around at the small space. It wasn't a fancy hotel, but Quarry had lived in worse. He had tried to provide everything the woman needed to be comfortable.

I'm not evil, he told himself. If he kept thinking it, maybe he'd start believing it.

"Can I ask you a question?"

She appeared startled by this but nodded.

"You have any kids?"

"What? No, no, I never did. Why?"

"Just wondering."

She drew nearer to him. Like Willa she had changed into fresh clothes. Quarry had brought along the outfits she'd purchased from Talbot's. They fit nicely.

"Are you going to let me go?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On how things turn out. I can tell you that I am not by nature a violent man. But I also can't predict the future."

She sat down at the table across from him and clasped her hands together.

"I can't think of one thing I've done in my life that would make you do this to me. I don't even know you. What have I done? What the hell have I done to deserve this?"

"You did one thing," said Quarry.

She looked up. "What? Tell me!"

"I'll let you think of it yourself. You sure got some time to do that."

IT WAS EARLY MORNING as the puddle-jumper bounced along the tops of the grayish clouds lingering from a storm that had already passed over the Smoky Mountains. Later, as the plane descended into the Nashville airport, Michelle continued to do what she had done the entire flight: stare at her hands.

When the plane door opened she wheeled her bag out, grabbed a rental, and was on the road within twenty minutes after arriving at the gate. However, her foot was not mashing the gas pedal to the floor as usual. Instead, she drove at a sedate fifty miles an hour. Michelle had no desire to rush toward what she had to face.

According to her brother Bill, their mother had woken up in good spirits, eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast, and worked in the garden. Later she had played nine holes of golf at a nearby course, returned home, showered, gotten dressed, warmed up a casserole for her husband, watched a show she had earlier recorded, and was heading out the door to meet with some friends for a late dinner when she collapsed in the garage. Frank Maxwell had been in the bathroom. He had gone into the garage a bit later and found his wife sprawled on the floor. Apparently, he believed Sally had been dead before she'd hit the cement.

They weren't sure what had killed the woman-stroke, heart, aneurysm-but dead she was. As the trees on either side of the road flew by, Michelle's mind raced even faster, from her earliest memories with her mother to the last few encounters, none of which had been particularly memorable.

An hour later she had talked with her four brothers, two of whom lived relatively close by their parents, and one, Bobby, who lived in the same town. The fourth, Bill Maxwell, who resided in Florida, had been driving to see his parents for a visit when he'd gotten the news barely an hour out. Michelle was the last to arrive. She had next spent several hours with her father, who was equal parts mute and staring off, before erupting from his malaise periodically to take control of the funeral arrangements.

Frank Maxwell had been a cop most of his life, ending his career as a police chief. He still looked like he could jump out of a patrol car and hoof it after someone and do something with the person once he caught him. It was from her father that Michelle had gotten her physical prowess, her drive to succeed, her sheer inability to ever finish second with a smile on her face. Yet as Michelle watched from a distance, catching her father in unguarded moments, she glimpsed an aging man who had just lost everything and had no idea what he was supposed to be doing with the time he had left to live.

After absorbing all she could take of this, she retreated to the backyard where she sat on an old bench next to an apple tree weighed down nearly to the ground with fruit, closed her eyes, and pretended her mother was still alive. She thought back to her childhood with them both. This was tough to do because there were blocks of her youth that Michelle Maxwell had simply eliminated from her memory for reasons that were obviously more apparent to her shrink than to her.

She called Sean to let him know she'd arrived okay. He had said all the appropriate things, was supportive and gentle. And yet when she hung up, Michelle felt about as alone as she ever had. One by one her brothers joined her in the backyard. They talked, cried, chatted some more, and cried some more. She noted that Bill, the biggest and the oldest, a tough beat cop in a Miami suburb that could reasonably be classified as a war zone, sobbed the hardest.

Michelle found herself mothering her older brothers, and she was not, by nature or inclination, a nurturing type. And the close, grief-stricken company of her male siblings started to suffocate her. She finally left them in the backyard and returned to the house. Her father was upstairs. She could hear him talking on the phone to someone. She eyed the door to the garage accessible from the kitchen. She hadn't gone in there yet. Michelle didn't really want to see where her mother had died.

Yet she was also one to confront her fears head-on. She turned the knob, opened the door, and stared down the three unpainted plywood steps leading to the two-bay garage. A car was parked in the nearest bay. It was her parents' pale blue Camry. The garage looked like any other. Except for one thing.

The splotch of blood on the cement floor. She drew closer to it.

Blood on the cement floor?

Had she fallen down the steps? Hit her head? She eyed the door of the Camry. There was no trace there. She gauged the space between the rough steps and the car. Her mother was a tall woman. If she had stumbled forward, she had to have hit the car. She really couldn't have fallen sideways because the stairs had half-walls on both sides. She would have simply ended up slumped there. But if she had stumbled because she'd had a stroke? She could have bounced off the car and then hit her head on the floor. That would account for the blood.

That had to account for the blood.

She turned and almost screamed.

Her father was standing there.

Frank Maxwell was officially six foot three, though age and gravity had stolen more than an inch from him. He had the compact, dense muscle of a man who had been physical his entire life. His gaze flitted across his daughter's anxious face, perhaps trying to read all the content there. Then it went to the spot of blood on the floor. He gazed at it as though the crimson splotch constituted an encrypted message he was trying to decipher.