The Silent Places (10 page)

Now, Crittenden was quiet, perhaps impressed for the first time since his arrival.

And Preston pushed into him a little, saying, “Okay?”

Crittenden smiled and said, “Let’s discuss this again in a week.”

The parting was quick and polite. After Crittenden was gone, Keough said, “What was that about?”

Preston sighed to himself. Maybe he would have to get rid of Martin when he made it to the White House. The man was loyal and aggressive, but sometimes he simply did not think.

Preston said, “Don’t you see? The little bastard was testing me. If I’d hesitated the least bit when he brought up the private investigation, he would have decided I wasn’t worth working for.”

“Oh.”

“He’ll come on board,” Preston said. “I can feel it.”

Keough left the house and Preston went upstairs to his bedroom.

Sylvia was there, sitting in a chair reading
The Age of Innocence
. She wore a checkered bathrobe over her nightie.

“Hey,” Preston said. “I thought you read that already.”

“I have,” she said.

Preston retreated to the large walk-in closet and began undressing. He came out a few moments later in his pajamas and went to the bathroom. He was looking in the mirror when he heard her ask him if he’d had a visitor.

“Pardon?”

Sylvia said, “You and Martin were speaking with someone downstairs. Who was it?”

“Oh,” he said. “Jeff Crittenden. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Yes. We met at the White House correspondents’ dinner.” Sylvia set the book down and looked over at the bathroom door. The door was open and she could see her husband’s reflection in the mirror.

“He was here?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“He flew out here to see you?”

“Yes.” Alan Preston began flossing his teeth. He stopped after a moment and said, “Well, he called and asked if he could speak with me personally. I said he could if he wanted.”

“What did you speak about?”

“He wants me to run for president.”

“He wants you to run?”

“Yeah. He was trying to talk me into it. Said I’d be a great candidate, blah, blah, blah. I told him I’d think about it.”

After a moment, Sylvia said, “That’s more than you told me.”

“What are you talking about?” Alan said. “I told you.”

“No, you didn’t, Alan. You told me the field was thin and that you were as good as any of the other candidates in contention.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“How so?”

“Don’t cross-examine me. I’m not a witness at one of your hearings.”

“I’m not cross-examining you. I just want to know how what I said before was not an indication that I might run for president.”

“That’s a convoluted question,” Sylvia said. “And kind of a shitty one, too. Alan.”

“What?”

“Remember when you first ran for office, when you first ran for Congress? You came to me and you asked me what I thought. And then you told me all the good things that could come of it and some of the bad things.”

“Yeah.”

“You said it would be a thing we would do together and that if I didn’t want you to do it, you wouldn’t do it.”

“It’s the same thing here.”

“No, it isn’t. You used to ask. Now you tell.”

“Oh, let’s not go overboard here. If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t do it. Nothing’s changed.”

“Sometimes I fear that it has.”

Alan came out of the bathroom. He looked down at his wife and said, “Why do you say things like that? You trying to be dramatic? What have I done to disappoint you? You live well. You’ve got a good home, a good life.”

“I’m not complaining about … things. Not material things.”

“Okay.
Things
aside, have I ever mistreated you? Have I ever been unfaithful? Abused you?”

“Oh, for God’s sake. No. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

“Don’t patronize me, Alan. I don’t like that.”

“I’m not trying to patronize you. I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from. You’re speaking to me as if I’ve been some sort of lousy husband.”

“I never said that.”

“Maybe you think it.”

“I don’t think it, either.” She gave her husband a look and said, “I don’t, Alan.”

Alan said, “It’s not like I dragged you into this. When I won the congressional seat, you were ecstatic. You liked being my wife. You liked all of it.”

“It was different then.”

“How?”

“When you were a congressman, it was … I don’t know, simpler. You took it seriously, but not too seriously. We had parties and we had friends. Washington was fun then. We used to make fun of people. We used to laugh together. That seemed to change when you won the Senate seat.”

“Look, I’m still the same person. If I take things more seriously now, it’s because the times are more serious. If I meet with someone like Jeff Crittenden, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you or respect you.”

He was looking at her now, offering something vaguely resembling an apology. Or pretending to. He seemed to sense her dissatisfaction with his words and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t discuss it with you first. I should have told you he was coming by.”

“It’s okay,” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry I got upset. I think this Reese person has me worried.”

“I told you not to worry about that.”

“Aren’t you worried about it?”

“No.”

She looked at him. He tried to mask it, but she knew he wasn’t being truthful. He was anxious, and she knew it. She waited for him to change his answer.

But he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Sylvia, I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m ambitious. Not from you.”

“No, I suppose you haven’t. I just hoped we had reached a place where you didn’t want … more.”

“I won’t take any steps without checking with you first. You know that.”

“I know.”

“Now can we go to sleep?”

“Yes. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Alan got in bed and Sylvia walked to the bathroom. She closed the door and looked at herself in the mirror. A middle-aged woman looked back at her, seeming to say, Well, here you are.

Go back and look at your life, she thought, if you’ve got the courage to do it. Sylvia Rains of Mount Prospect, Illinois. The daughter of the owner of a construction firm. She had grown up in that Chicago suburb in relative wealth. Her dad was what he called “small-town rich.” Sylvia was the eldest of five children. People always told her she was smart and pretty. She had a great future. When the time came for her to go to college, her dad said he wanted her to go to a Catholic university so she could meet a nice Catholic boy. She could choose whatever Catholic school she liked and he would pay for it. She chose Villanova. When she finished her undergraduate studies, she enrolled in the law school. After that, she got a job in Washington working for a congressional committee.

She loved Washington. She liked its pace, its insularity, its small-town parochialism. For her, it was a great place for a woman in her twenties. A lot of men asked her out and a few older ones made passes at her. She was always gracious in her rejections. Two years zipped by and she met Alan Preston at a party.

What struck her about him was that he seemed like a gentleman. He was obviously interested in her, but he didn’t hit on her. He was cautious about that sort of thing. She knew then that he was a very focused man. She also suspected, early on, that he wanted to marry her.

She was not put off by this. He was always polite and well mannered and seemingly attentive. They talked about politics because they both enjoyed it. She learned that he was also a Catholic. He was from St. Louis. In time, she also learned that he had come from a rather humble background. He did not tell her this, but she was intuitive enough to figure it out. He did not say much about his parents. Once, she asked him what his father had done for a living. He answered that his father was in sales and said nothing more. She got the feeling that Alan thought his father was a failure.

Alan was a handsome man, but he didn’t smile much. In time, Sylvia realized this was because his lower teeth were crooked and ugly and he was embarrassed by them. Sylvia had had crooked teeth, too, but her parents could afford to give her braces when she was a teenager. Before Alan ran for Congress, he had his teeth fixed by one of the best dentists in Washington. He smiled more after that.

Before they married, Sylvia took Alan to her parents’ house for a visit. Her little brother would later tell her that Alan reminded him of Eddie Haskell. Sylvia got angry and defensive. Alan had had a hard life, she said. He had come from nothing and he had made himself into something. He had not had the sort of advantages they had had. Say what you want about Alan, but there was no question that he tried and that he worked very hard.

When they returned from her parents, Alan asked her to marry him.

Sylvia said, “Why do you want to marry me?”

“Because I think you’re the kindest, most decent woman I’ve ever known. I admire you, I respect you, and I love you.”

It had sounded rehearsed to her, even then. But he had never been the smooth romancing type. And that was partly why he appealed to her.

“You didn’t say I was pretty,” Sylvia said.

“That goes without saying.”

And maybe that wasn’t rehearsed. She told him she’d think about it. Three months later, she accepted his proposal.

She loved him, she supposed. He had been good to her, as he said. He listened to her and sometimes sought her input on minor issues. But over the years, she started to wonder if he really engaged with her. Once, at a fund-raiser, she saw him talking with the wife of a man who owned an aerospace company. Alan talked to the woman as if she were the most fascinating, interesting person he had ever met. He did so because he wanted her financial contributions. Sylvia was repelled by it, even though she knew that kissing up to such people was part of the political game. Yet … there was something else, too. And eventually she figured out what it was: Alan sometimes acted the same way when he talked to
her
, his own wife. Maybe he also told the aerospace manufacturer’s wife she was the kindest, most decent woman he had ever known.

Was it all a performance? She wondered. Did he love her? Or did she simply fit the part he needed her to play? The good-looking, mentally stable, even-keeled wife. Their sex life was not especially active. They made love a couple of times a month, but it was perfunctory. She had never thought that Alan had any latent homosexual tendencies. She believed that sex just wasn’t that important to him. He was not a man of strong libido. Indeed, he may even have been asexual. That was why it irritated her when he pointed out he’d never been unfaithful to her. No, she thought, he hadn’t. But he was not the sort to be tempted by other women.

Alan was smart and he knew how to argue. He was a man who always thought about what he said before he said it. What he had said tonight was …
perhaps
correct. But it was a little too clever, maybe even calculated. Had he communicated with her, or had he just said the things that he knew would placate her? Had he worked her? Was there a difference?

At times, she felt sorry for herself and wondered if she should have had been more adventurous before she married. Had an affair with a lifeguard or maybe an airline pilot. But she knew that was silly, because she had never been a wild girl and she had always been vaguely repulsed by slutty women. She had behaved herself because it was what she wanted to do. She had played by the rules of polite society and married a proper, decent citizen, and now she was unhappy and empty. And at the same time, she was angry at herself for indulging in what she believed might be adolescent self-pity.

Her mother had once told her, “You can’t expect much from a marriage. You can’t expect a husband to give you total happiness. That’s not realistic. The steady, stable ones will bore you. The exciting ones will always let you down. They’ll drink too much or gamble, or they’ll cheat on you. You can’t have it all.”

Maybe her mother had been right. Maybe she just needed to grow up, not ask so much from life. Her mother liked Alan. She said he was a good man.

Her father, though, had never warmed to him and had always kept him at arm’s length. Her father had died the previous year. Sylvia had not gotten the opportunity to ask him what he really thought of Alan. She knew that if she had asked him, it would have been a sort of betrayal of Alan. Yet she had respected her father more than any man she had ever known, and she knew he was no poor judge of character.

Now she was forty-five years old. Her father was gone and her mother was unable to understand how she could feel any discontent. Now she was looking at her life and wondering if she was changing or if she was finally seeing her husband clearly. All this … mysterious behavior, this keeping of secrets. Alan considering a run at the White House while some escaped convict was out there making bizarre threats against him. Alan was scared and he was pretending not to be. She was his wife. Why couldn’t he just tell her things?

Across the street, Hastings lowered the binoculars.

The lights in the master bedroom had gone off a couple of minutes ago. Hastings had let his view drift to the upstairs window. There, he’d seen the senator’s wife walk by.

She’d been dressed, wearing a bathrobe of some sort. Not undressed, but Hastings still felt sleazy. Peeper. Pervert.

Klosterman would say it was her fault for not having drawn the shades. But they didn’t have shades over there. They had curtains. And this woman hadn’t drawn them shut. Besides, what difference did it make? She hadn’t been getting undressed in front of the window. She must have done it elsewhere. It was just by chance he had focused the binocs on the window. He hadn’t seen anything.

Except he had. The woman standing in front of the window had been talking to someone he couldn’t see. Probably her husband. Hastings couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her facial expression had told him she was pissed off.

Like most detectives, Hastings liked to observe people. Generally, it wasn’t something he needed binoculars to do. He could see people in restaurants, in lines at movie theaters, at sporting events, church socials, et cetera. On his first date with Carol, he informed her that a man sitting at another table with a woman was gay but pretending to be straight and that the woman was looking for a rich husband. That was an easy one. Hastings had never met either one of them. But he looked at them and read body language, which is almost always more truthful than speech. He was showing off for Carol, doing something any reasonably good, experienced detective could do. Carol had snorted at his lowbrow determination and teased him about it, but she had been impressed in spite of herself. She had liked him back then. She’d thought he was interesting and intriguing and kind. And he’d been new to her.