Sweet Hush Read online

  “Euell. Euell Davis. We call him Davis. I said, ‘Do you have notes on me—’”

  “Davis.” Her voice held a distinct edge, now. “Davis is, no doubt, a fine young man, although I believe he’s insinuated himself into my daughter’s life with far too many expectations—”

  “Whoa. Back up. You spied on my son, and now you’re spying on me. Is that right? But you have the gall to criticize us?”

  “Mrs. Thackery, I’m not going to discuss any personal issues with you, but I will say that I have been completely above-board and legitimate in my gathering of information about the strangers who surround my child—as I’m sure you can understand, given her status in the world. My daughter is a thoughtful and caring young woman who is under a tremendous amount of very public pressure and is very vulnerable to exploitation.”

  Fury began seeping into my blood, along with the fear and that feel-your-way-along sensation of the unknown. Like walking barefoot in a dark pond, I was aware that poisonous snakes might slither around my feet with every move I made. “So you think my son’s some kind of social-climbing Romeo who conned her into running away from college with him?”

  “No, no, now, I’m only saying that a secret summer romance has to be kept in perspective—”

  “It must just fry your grits when your daughter didn’t tell you about him. I didn’t know about the romance either, but at least I didn’t spy on my son to find out.”

  “I didn’t ‘spy’ on my daughter—nor have I ‘spied’ on you, beyond acquiring the most public facts about you. An entire team of professionals is assigned to keep track of my daughter’s every move. For her own good. Her current behavior is simply an unfortunate aberration, and I am trying to protect her any way that I can.”

  “It’s a little late, since she’s aberated right down the Eastern seaboard and into my hollow. Now she’s co-aberating with my son, in my house.”

  “Hush, you’ve obviously had a difficult morning. I’m sure you lead a very quiet life, and I promise you that the President and I will help you and your son get back to your ordinary daily routines very, very quickly.”

  “That’s good, Mrs. Jacobs. Since you’re so condescending in your appreciation of me and my routines, I’m going to hand this phone to Agent Olson. Lucille. We’ve taken a liking to her, already. So I’m going to hand my phone to Lucille, and if you will, just tell her to open the gate to my farm so I can sell some apples today. You and the President are keeping up with the government’s business despite this problem, and I’m keeping up with mine. As soon as my gate’s open, you and I can have a nice long talk about our children. All right? Just tell Lucille to open my gate.”

  Silence, round three. But I could hear her breathing. “Hush,” she said slowly, “If I wanted, I could be sitting in your . . . little farmhouse . . . right now, and your entire property would be cordoned off like a nuclear waste site. But instead, it is my fondest wish—as I’m sure it’s yours—that I not disrupt your life, and that we put this episode behind us. No one in the public or the media ever needs to find out about this little escapade. All right, Hush?”

  I let out a long breath. “Edwina,” I said loudly. Ed-weena. “Edwina, you tell Lucille to open my goddamned gate, or I’m calling CNN.”

  Lucille winced and began warning me with her hands. Mrs. Jacobs, she mouthed. Not Edwina. No first names. Protocol.

  “Now, calm down, Hush, no need to get the media involved—”

  “Edwina, tell it to Lucille.” I held out the phone to Lucille. “Edwina wants to talk to you.”

  The Secret Service agent looked from me to the phone as if it was electrified, then slowly lifted it to her ear. “Mrs. Jacobs, Ma’am? In Mrs. Thackery’s point of view, the issue always come back to her gate, and I am very sorry . . .” Her voice trailed off. When I craned my head, I could just make out the mad-bee buzz of Edwina Jacobs’s voice. Lucille nodded, cupped a hand over the phone, and spoke to me. “If I open your gate, will you allow me to post my people at your house until Eddie’s safely moved elsewhere?”

  “Yes.” Anything to resolve this.

  Lucille spoke to Edwina, again. “We have an agreement. I’ll confirm that with my office, Ma’am, but yes, Ma’am, of course, Ma’am.”

  Lucille handed the phone back to me. “Mrs. Jacobs wants to talk with you again, Mrs. Thackery.”

  I put the phone to my ear. “Edwina, thank you very kindly. I never had any intention of exposing your daughter and my son to the gossips of the world, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “I don’t care what your intentions are. I’m getting my daughter out of there.” Edwina Jacobs spoke in a voice that could slice rock. “And if you let so much as one word about her situation leak to the rest of the world, or any harm comes to her—if so much as one hair on her head is ruffled—I will personally make certain that the entire bureaucracy of the federal government crawls up the ass end of your business, your financial accounts, and your family. In other words, I will fuck up your life and the life of your overly ambitious son and the lives of your entire apple-picking hillbilly clan. In the meantime, you already know the President and I are sending someone to bring Eddie home.” She was yelling, now. “A trusted family member! He’ll arrive there in a few hours! I urge you to stay out of his way and treat him with more respect than you’ve shown me!”

  “Send him. Glad to have him. You keep your nose out of my business, my life, and my son’s life. Or I’ll come up there to Washington and kick your ass.”

  Silence. We both drew in deep breaths as the enormity of what we were doing sank in. The First Lady of the United States and the First Lady of Chocinaw County had degenerated—in their very first conversation—to the level of street hoochies at a gang initiation. “Good Bye,” I said quickly.

  “Indeed,” she answered, undone.

  I stuck the phone back in its holster on my belt. Logan and I stared at each other. “I’m sorry.”

  “You could be arrested for what you said to her, Sis.”

  Lucille nodded in unhappy awe. “Mrs. Thackery, it’s a federal offense to threaten the First Lady.” She paused. “If I had heard you do that, I’d have to react.”

  “Thank you. Now open the gates.” I sagged. There was nothing else to do, at the moment.

  I watched as Lucille stepped aside and Logan unlocked the broad, pretty, hopelessly ineffective gates. We swung them wide. Almost immediately, Lucille’s fellow agents went to their SUV’s and climbed in. They drove through as if they’d never doubted they’d be allowed. I put a hand over my stomach. I needed more apple slices.

  The world had come to my doorstep in ways I’d never imagined. It was quickly invading my home and taking full seed in my life and the life of my son. I would reap the harvest I’d sown, as we all do, sooner or later.

  Apple season had begun.

  I could only wait for fate, the future, and Edwina’s hit man to arrive.

  LT. COLONEL NICK JAKOBEK. Retired. Not a bad career path: Put in your twenty years, leave when your uncle runs for President. Try to keep an even lower profile than two decades of overseas special operations assignments gave you. Then fade further from sight when your uncle wins the White House. Helluva pension system. Obscurity and notoriety. I’d learned to deal with it.

  I was the Presidential relative Al’s political enemies loved to talk about. Haywood Kenney brought up my Chicago history and military career regularly. I even had a nickname among his newspaper readers and the listeners to his nationally syndicated radio show. Mad Dog Jakobek. That was me. Pure proof that Al’s views on any issue, including the military, crime, punishment, drugs, sex, family life, raising children, and international relations (take your pick) could be analyzed through the lens of some nasty family baggage. Me.

  It didn’t help that nobody in Al’s camp invited me to photo opportunities d
uring the campaign or the inauguration or at any Presidential event afterward. Not that Al and Edwina didn’t ask me personally, and sincerely. But I knew my place—I knew what would hurt their image, in public. Me. They fought the good fight their way. I fought it, mine.

  Some of Al’s enemies swore I was dead. Not Kenney—I was more valuable alive, to him—but according to others, I didn’t even exist, anymore. My death happened during an illegal covert government operation in either (take your pick) Nicaragua, Bosnia, or Iraq, and then Al ordered a cover-up by either (take your pick,) the army, the CIA, the FBI, or Strangers Wearing Dark Suits Who Really Run This Country.

  Wanted. Dead or Alive. Bring proof, either way.

  The truth was that I moved around a lot after leaving the military, so much so that sometimes I had to ask myself where I lived. Where I was. Where I was going. I was still looking for some brand of peace and satisfaction I couldn’t quite name. Counting coups, counting souls, counting backwards over the past twenty-plus years, I tried to remember who I was before I killed that first time in Chicago. That first time. Key words.

  Funded by your taxpayer dollars but without your explicit permission, I had spent twenty years teaching our friends in other countries how to kill their fellow citizens. I protected them while they did it, and occasionally, when needed, I killed their enemies alongside them. Through rebel skirmishes and civil wars and secret military actions and politicians’ lies about the world’s dirty work, I did my job. I saved a lot of lives but I slept at night with the images of the people I couldn’t help. A bloodied old woman by the roadside in Sarajevo. A little boy lying dead in the desert with his feet cut off. A battered family carrying their home on their backs in Afghanistan. As long as I was nothing but my memories, I didn’t know where I belonged.

  And so maybe there was no place to go.

  I’d gotten used to being needed by other people but never really liked by them, if that makes any sense. Not liked for ordinary reasons, at any rate—not just for the sound of my voice or the way I looked while I slept. I’d never been the center of anyone’s life. Didn’t think I knew how to be. I kept searching for the souls I’d taken. Including my own. So far, no miracles.

  Then I got a call from good old Bill Sniderman. I was in Texas at the time, teaching paramilitary techniques to officers from a South American country I won’t mention. There was good money to be made as an ex-military man, training other soldiers how to kill. Until that phone call. “The President and First Lady need you, I’m sorry to say,” Bill told me. “Eddie’s in trouble.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  Chapter 9

  BY MID-AFTERNOON more than two thousand customers crowded my apple barns and pavilion, all unaware that the daughter of the President was hidden in my house. Nearly three dozen McGillens and Thackerys—likewise clueless—were hard at work taking care of those customers. Logan directed traffic at the public gate, and Lucille still commandeered the front walkway to my big porch. WDAL, Dalyrimple’s AM radio station, broadcast live coverage of opening day at Sweet Hush Farm from a booth overlooking the festivities. So far, there hadn’t been one sign of the man Edwina Jacobs had vowed to send.

  Eddie, meantime, slept in my son’s bed. Fully dressed, but still. Davis paced the hall outside.

  I stood by, watching him. “Where is this Presidential kneebreaker? If she were my daughter I’d be here by now or my personal goon would be here, and you’d be in deep trouble.”

  “Her parents can’t just drop everything to take care of family problems. Eddie understands that. In fact, she counted on it. She wants to be left alone. She wants to have a normal life. Even if her parents run the country.”

  “Just remember that I have this farm to run—maybe it’s not a whole country, but to me and most of our family, it’s the whole world.”

  “I know that.”

  I walked to the stairs and halted. “You think long and hard about how your decisions affect all the lives around here, and you be ready to take responsibility when Eddie’s relative gets here to deal with you.”

  “I’m a man,” he said quietly. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He sounded so certain. He had no idea how afraid I was for him and his sake. A man? My son? I had given birth to a full-grown man? I hurried down the stairs, pounding a fist on a smooth oak banister carved with apple blossoms.

  “Come on, hurry up,” I said aloud to the faceless stranger traveling my way to add more trouble to the day. “Come on and fight.”

  “LT. COLONEL JAKOBEK?”

  “Yes?” I looked up from a map of the Georgia mountains. The White House aide who’d met me at a Colorado airport stood by my seat, holding a large file folder. We were in a private jet somewhere over the Midwest. “The First Lady says this should give you some background on the Thackery family.”

  I frowned, took the folder, and flipped the cover open to a color photograph of a tall, green-eyed woman in a tailored blue business suit with a knee-length skirt and pearl buttons on her sleeve cuffs. Sounds prim, but she wasn’t. Not her, not me, not my reaction. I took a breath. “Who is she?”

  “Davis Thackery’s mother. Hush. One of those Appalachian folk names. Hush McGillen Thackery. She’s named after her family’s apples. A variety of apple they created. The Sweet Hush.”

  Hush McGillen Thackery. Sweet Hush. Named after an apple. Mother of a grown kid at Harvard and head of a small family empire. How old was she? I checked a sheaf of notes behind the photograph. Only thirty-nine. Started young. I looked down at stunning green eyes, a strong, classic face, and hair the dark copper-brown color of polished teak in an opium parlor. She wore it pulled up with a heavy silver clasp that couldn’t quite keep it under control. The conservative blue skirt and tailored jacket couldn’t quite keep her body under control, either.

  The aide sat down across from me with a stack of notes on his lap. “That photograph was made in a hallway at the state capitol in Atlanta, sir. Mrs. Thackery serves on the governor’s resource committee for the state agricultural commission. She represents the apple farmers.”

  “Apple farmers have political issues?”

  “Everyone has political issues, sir.”

  Hush Thackery posed next to some pasty-faced state rep with a bad comb-over and a loud tie. He looked like a used car salesman trying to sell an old Buick, and she looked as if she wasn’t buying. “She’s also done some lobbying for the state apple growers’ association,” the aide went on. “She was president of that association for five years. She’s a member of the board of the national grower’s organization. And in her hometown, Dalyrimple, she virtually controls the chamber, the council, and the county commissioner. Most of the local officials are relatives. Her younger brother’s the sheriff. Sweet Hush Farms is the county’s biggest employer and largest single tourist draw.”

  Not your average small-time farmer with an attitude. Ambitious? Willing to encourage her son to make a play for a famous girlfriend? Possible.

  I flipped through a full-color catalog advertising dozens of baked, canned, sun-dried, caramel-dipped, homemade apple products, all available via an 800 number with overnight shipping, year-round, 24/7. I stopped on a color photograph of Hush Thackery among her apple trees and mountains. She was dressed in faded jeans and a soft white sweater, her long legs braced apart, that dark hair draped over her shoulders in thick waves, her arms around a basket full of apples. Her hands, spread lovingly on the basket’s coarse wicker sides, were strong and square. She looked out at the world somberly, but smiled. I felt her smile where it did me no good.

  “She’s something of a legend, sir,” the aide said.

  “Tell me about her kid.”

  “The perfect son.” When I arched a brow, the aide nodded. “Perfect, sir.” He handed me a list of Euell Davis Thackery Junior’s accomplishments. All American farm boy genius, I thought
. I studied a photograph from the Harvard annual and saw a good-looking kid with dark hair and his mother’s calm stare. Trouble.

  “Tell me about the father,” I said.

  “Local hero.”

  “Is there anyone in this family who isn’t a saint?”

  “Sir, I can only report the information. The facts.”

  “Information isn’t facts. It’s just the window dressing.” I exhaled. “Anyway, so tell me what we know about Davis Thackery’s saintly old man.”

  “Davis, Senior. Big Davy, some people called him. Stock car racer, businessman—owned his own racing team, partners in a truck dealership on the interstate, devoted father, great husband, church-going pillar of the community. Beloved. His racetrack fans built a monument to him the mountain where he died. He was racing down on the mountain. Trying to break a local speed record.”

  Dead? This interested me more than I’d admit. “So the saintly Mrs. Thackery is a widow?”

  “Yes, sir. Five years. She and her husband were considered the perfect couple.” He handed me a newspaper clipping. “Here’s a picture of her husband from the county newspaper.” The aide smiled. “A small-town rag called The Dalyrimple Weekly News.”

  Davy Thackery Wins Division Champ Title Again At Chocinaw River Track. I studied a tall, grinning, dark-haired man in muddy jeans and a major belt buckle, in front of a mud-spattered sedan. His son, then a lanky teenager, grinned beside him, with one arm looped over his father’s shoulder. A crowd of fans clustered in the background, waving. Hush Thackery was nowhere to be seen. Just an oversight? I was looking for trouble. Weak points. Vulnerability. Hoping?

  I continued to study her picture. Great husband, great son, great All-American success story. All I had to show for my own life was a houseboat on loan to a family I’d befriended somewhere along the Amazon River in Peru, an apartment on Chicago’s tough southside, which I hadn’t visited in years, and the coyote skulls, somewhere in storage. I was forty-three years old that fall, weighing in at six-four, two-hundred-and-thirty pounds of hard-assed gristle, complete with acne scars and a nose that had been badly broken twice, once in Bosnia, another time in Afghanistan. And of course, I was still missing the little finger on my left hand.