A DAY LATER, she was at her town’s small library. Past the rows of books and the magazine racks, there were three computers, set up in a row. She sat down and stared at the screen, which showed a picture of the library and said that this picture and the words on it were something called a home page. She put her hands over the keyboard and then pulled them away, as if she were afraid she would make something blow up if she pushed the wrong key.
Beth leaned back in the wooden chair. What to do? She felt queasy, empty, nervous, like the first time she had approached a paying customer with a pair of sharp scissors in her hands.
“Mrs. Mooney?” a young girl’s voice said. She turned in her seat, saw Holly Temple, a sweet girl whose hair Beth cut and styled. She said, “Do you need any help?”
Beth said, “I’m afraid I don’t know how to use this, Holly. I’m looking for some information, and I don’t know how to begin.”
Holly pulled over a chair and sat down next to her. “Well, it’s pretty easy. I’m surprised that Janice couldn’t help you.”
Her voice caught. “Me too.”
SHE WAS DRIVING to the rehab center to visit Janice, who had had what the doctors and nurses delicately called a setback. Physically she was improving day by day; emotionally, she was withdrawing, becoming more silent, less responsive. Beth found that she had to drive with only one hand, as she had to use the other to keep wiping her eyes with a wad of tissue.
At a stoplight, scores of supporters for the senator were gathered at the intersection, holding blue-and-white campaign signs on wooden sticks that they raised as they chanted. They waved at cars going by, gave thumbs-up to passing cars that honked in support. Two young men were staring right at her as they chanted. The light changed to green and she drove by, and she couldn’t help herself — she gave them the middle finger.
THAT NIGHT, FOR hour after hour, she dialed and redialed Henry Wolfe’s number. Eventually, at two a.m., he answered, and she got right to the point.
“Mr. Wolfe, next Tuesday is the New Hampshire primary. The day after tomorrow, I plan to drive to Concord and visit the offices of the Associated Press. There, I’m going to show them the documents that I signed and tell them what the senator’s son did to my little girl.”
Voice sharp, he said, “Do that, you silly bitch, and you’ll be destroyed. Ruined. Wiped out.”
“And come next Tuesday, so will your candidate. I may be silly, but I’m not stupid. I know if he wins the primary with a good margin, he’ll be your party’s nominee. And after that, he’ll be the favorite to be president. So destroying him in exchange for losing my shop and my double-wide and the one thousand two hundred dollars I have in my savings account . . . that sounds like a pretty fair deal to me.”
She could hear him breathing over the phone line. “What do you want?”
Beth said, “The first time we met, you said the senator’s life was scheduled in fifteen-minute chunks of time, and that your job was to make sure that time went smoothly. So here’s the deal. Sometime over the next two days, I want five minutes with him. And with you. Alone.”
Henry said, “Impossible.”
“Then make it possible,” she said curtly. “After all, you’re paid to solve problems.”
This time, she hung up on him.
TWO HOURS LATER, her phone rang. She picked it up and a tired voice said, “A deal. The Center of New Hampshire hotel. Two this afternoon. Room six ten.”
“Sounds good to me,” she said.
“Look, you need to know that —”
Taking more pleasure in it this time, she hung up on him again. And went back to sleep.
LATER THAT DAY, Beth drove to Manchester — the state’s largest city — and instead of going into the pricey parking garage, she found a free spot about four blocks away. She trudged along the snowy sidewalk and walked into the hotel, past guests and people streaming in and out. In one corner of the lobby, there were bright lights from a television news crew filming an interview with somebody who must be famous.
She took the elevator to the sixth floor, got off, and within a minute, she found room 610. A quick knock on the door and it opened up within seconds, a frowning and worn-looking Henry Wolfe on the other side. He was dressed as well as ever, but his eyes were sunken and red-rimmed. Beth had a brief flash of sympathy for him before remembering all that had gone before, and then she didn’t feel sympathetic at all.
He started to speak and she brushed by him and into the room.
She turned to Henry. “Is this what they mean by a suite?”
“Yes,” he said. “Look, Mrs. Mooney, before the senator comes in, I really need to know that —”
“A suite,” Beth said, shaking her head in awe. “I’ve heard of hotel suites, but to think I’d ever actually be inside of one, well, I never figured.”
“I’m sure,” Henry snapped. “Mrs. Mooney, we don’t have much time before the meeting and I must insist —”
She made a point of looking around again. “All of those nice senior citizens, the retirees who send your senator a dollar bill or a five-dollar bill or whatever they can scrape together to help elect him president, do you think they know that their money is paying for this suite? And all those who donated time and money because they believed in the senator’s idea of justice, what do you think they’d say if they knew what his son did to my daughter?”
“Mrs. Mooney —” he began again, and then another door within the suite opened up, and the senator walked in, tall, smiling, wearing a fine gray suit and a cheerful look. The room he was emerging from, she saw, was filled with well-dressed men and women, most with cell phones against their ears or in their hands, and then the door was shut behind him.
The senator strode over, and Beth felt her heart flip for a moment. It was one thing to see him on the cover of a magazine or a newspaper, or on the nightly news, but here he was, right in front of her.
Then she remembered Janice. And she calmed down.
“Mrs. Mooney,” the senator said, holding out a tanned hand with a large, fancy watch around his wrist. “So glad to meet you. I just wish it were under better circumstances.”
“Me too,” she said, giving his hand a quick shake. “And, Senator, I know you’re very, very busy. In fact, I can’t imagine how busy you are, so I will make this quick.”
The senator looked to Henry, who looked to her and said, “We appreciate that, Mrs. Mooney.”
Beth took a breath. “So here we go. I’m sure you know your son’s actions, what happened to my daughter, and the agreement that was reached between me and Mr. Wolfe.”
The senator said, “If there’s something that needs to be adjusted in the agreement, I’m sure that —”
“Senator,” Beth said forcefully, “I don’t want an adjustment. I don’t want an agreement. In fact, you can stop all the payments. What I want is justice for my little girl.”
The senator’s eyes narrowed and darkened. Now she could see the toughness that was inside this man who wanted to be president.
“Do go on,” he said flatly.
She said, “You can stop the payments. Stop everything. But I intend to go public with what your son did to my daughter today, this afternoon, unless my one demand is met.”
Both men waited, neither one saying a word. So she went on.
“By the end of the day today, I want you to announce the firing of Henry Wolfe,” she said. “And I want your
