The Advocate's Daughter (9 page)

Tweed looked conflicted. “I don't know the facts, so I can't—”

“But you know this kid, Jon. Is it something he's capable of? Murder?”

Tweed fussed with the straps on his satchel. He started to speak, but hesitated.

“What is it?”

“I understand that there was an incident when he was in college.”

“An incident? What kind of incident?”

“I'm not sure. Something popped up in his background check for his clerkship with Justice Sheldon. She called me to ask about him. She didn't give me any details, but said there'd been an altercation with a girlfriend and the police were called. There was no arrest and Sheldon said it seemed harmless, but she wanted to know what he was like.” Tweed looked down at the floor. “I keep thinking about that because I told her he was a model student and got along with everyone and that I thought he'd make a great clerk. If I would have known…”

Sean considered relieving Tweed of any guilt. After all, how much could he possibly know about his hundreds of students? But he couldn't bring himself to say the words. “Was Abby working on some special project for you? Something confidential?” He'd been thinking about this since the meeting with Hellstrom. Abby loved to talk with Sean about the law: about her law school papers, her law review note, her work for Jon. He couldn't believe she'd have kept something from him, but your children will do nothing if not have their secrets.

Tweed's forehead wrinkled. “I'm not supposed to—”

“Jon, come on.”

His friend's shoulders drooped. “I'm helping the administration vet potential candidates for Chief Justice Malburg's seat. I've got students helping me. It's obviously sensitive. We made the students sign confidentiality agreements. Violation is grounds for expulsion.”

“Abby was one of them?”

Tweed nodded.

“Did you tell the FBI? I mean, in case it's relevant to the investigation?”

“They never asked. They actually haven't interviewed me yet. I think they believe they've got their man.”

“Am I on your list?” Sean asked. “Your students are digging into
my
background?”

“Don't be ridiculous. I wouldn't have students look into your past.” Tweed waited a beat. “I personally handled your vetting. You're pretty boring, by the way.”

Sean shook his head. “Can I see Abby's research files?”

“I don't think…” Tweed trailed off again. “Come to my office and I'll give you the file.”

 

CHAPTER 18

“You ready to go?” Sean said. Emily stood in the entryway of their home. She wore a black dress with a single strand of pearls around her neck. She had on more makeup than usual, but it didn't completely camouflage the dark circles under her eyes, and she looked too thin. Sean couldn't recall the last time he saw her eat.

“I'm not sure I'm up for this.” Emily bent over and strapped one of her shoes.

“People need to say their good-byes to Abby,” Sean said. “They already delayed the vigil by a week for us, and Jonathan said we don't have to stay for the whole thing.”

The drive to Georgetown was silent. A May storm had blown in and rain sprinkled the windshield. The wipers beat back and forth, entrancing them all. He thought about the previous two weeks. It was hard enough navigating the well-meaning, stupid efforts to console. The intrusive calls, e-mails, and texts. Visits to the house. The Serrats were the type of family that would tightly bandage their gaping chest wound, not keep it exposed to the elements. He'd also had to figure out the formalities of death. The cold paperwork. The details about cremation. Picking an urn. He felt a moment of empathy for his father, who'd made the arrangements after Sean's mother's death. When his father died, the military had taken care of everything.

He glanced at his sons in the rearview mirror. Ryan sat quietly, his iPod buds in his ears as always. Jack pressed his nose to the window. Sean reached for Emily's hand, but she kept it just out of grasp.

Why were they doing this? Abby's classmates and friends needed some closure, but his family hadn't even said their own good-byes. A pillow-shaped biodegradable urn for a water burial still sat unceremoniously in the back of the SUV. His daughter's remains tucked in a Bloomingdale's sack. Sean sat at a red light on Sixteenth Street. When the light hit green, he spun into a U-turn.

“Fuck this,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Emily said, her brow sprouting lines.

An hour later they inched along in traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The strobe of police lights glowed ahead—an accident that had left them stuck on the four-mile bridge over the Chesapeake Bay.

“Traffic should start moving soon,” Sean said.

Emily gave an icy shake of the head and gazed wearily out the rain-spattered window.

Sean said, “Look, you didn't want to go to the vigil and neither did I, so I thought we could say good-bye to Abby at one of her favorite places.”

Emily continued her stare into the gloom. Sean could read her thoughts: Rehoboth Beach in Delaware wasn't exactly a hot spot in May, they didn't have beach clothes, they didn't have their toothbrushes, and they weren't ready for some getaway. The days of spontaneous outings to the Delaware shore were over. It was one of Abby's favorite places as a kid, but that was just going to make them feel worse.

“Is the water going to be too cold to swim, Daddy?” Jack asked from the backseat.

Emily gave Sean a hard look.

“I don't think we'll be going in the water,” Sean said, “but we can go to the boardwalk.”

“Can we go on that ride that takes us into the sky?”

“If it's open,” Emily clipped.

“I hope it's open,” Jack said.

And it was. By nine o'clock the four of them were on the boardwalk riding The Sea Dragon, a giant pendulum that swung back and forth into the cloudy night sky. Emily and Ryan on one side, Sean and Jack on the other. When they swung up, Jack laughed and thrust his arms in the air. When the pendulum swung back down, Sean gazed up at Emily and Ryan, both with blank stares, Emily hugging herself from the chill in the air.

After the Monster, Sean took Jack into the Haunted Mansion, which had a sign that read
AWARD-WINNING RIDE
, undoubtedly an award issued in the 1970s given the state of the thing. After some fairground games, the family walked on the beach toward the hotel. All of them carried their shoes, and the boys, Sean included, had rolled up their trousers. Emily clutched at her cardigan. Sean had envisioned them releasing Abby's ashes that night, perhaps reminiscing about the great times they had spent on this shoreline since she was a little girl. But instead, they ate cardboard pizza from a vendor and went to their room at the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel.

Emily had barely said a word to Sean since he'd turned the SUV around and abandoned the vigil. Late that night, with the sound of the boys snoring in the double bed next to theirs, he and Emily lay in the darkness.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “For some reason, I thought it would help.”

“It's fine,” Emily said.

“We need to talk. We can't go through this alone.”

Silence.

“Did I do something? Did I
not
do something?” Sean said. “I can't get through this without you, Em. Please, talk to me.”

She did speak to him. Just when he thought he couldn't feel any more of the peculiar hollowness in his chest or the weight in his arms—when he thought he couldn't feel any more alone—she uttered six words: “Why didn't you take her call?”

 

CHAPTER 19

Sean didn't sleep that night. Every hour or so he'd turn to the red glow of the hotel alarm clock. At six a.m., he slipped out of bed and pushed aside the curtain of the sliding glass door of the tiny suite. He opened the door a crack. The salt in the air filled his lungs. The rain clouds had disappeared, and there was a burst of orange from the horizon. He stepped quietly into his pants and padded barefoot to the door.

A voice whispered in the darkness: “Are you going to watch the sunrise like you and Abby used to do?” It was Ryan.

“I was thinking about it,” Sean said. He waited, then said, “Wanna come?”

“That was you and Abby's thing. I couldn't…”

Sean felt that lump in his throat again. “She'd want you to.” He added, “
I
want you to.”

Ryan climbed over his little brother, who was snoring next to him. Sean and Ryan then walked shirtless and shoeless down the stairwell of the hotel and journeyed the sandy path to the beach. Abby was seven years old when they began their covert missions to the beachfront—their “sunrise escapes,” as she called them. They continued the tradition into Abby's adulthood. Every summer, from elementary school through high school through college. And just last summer at Nauset Beach in Cape Cod.

“It's weird without her here, isn't it, Dad?” Ryan said. He stared out at the ocean, the sun reflecting off the water.

“Yeah, it is. I think it was a mistake dragging us here. I don't know what got into me.”

“I'm glad we came. She's not here, but it kinda feels like she is here, do you know what I mean? The smell of the ocean or the room at the hotel, I can't explain it.”

Sean took in a deep breath through his nose and nodded.

“What'd you guys used to do when you'd sneak out?” Ryan asked.

Sean thought about this and his mind flashed to Abby as a little girl, goading him into the cold water where she'd jump on his back. He would bodysurf, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, gliding through Rehoboth's unsettlingly strong shore breaks, making sure she landed softly. Making sure she didn't get caught in the undertow. Protecting her. His mind wandered to last summer, their final sunrise escape.

*   *   *

“No, really, I've studied all of the past justices—I know them all,” Abby said. The sound of crashing waves filled the air.

“All of them?” Sean said skeptically. “There's been more than a hundred Supreme Court justices, I don't think you—”

“Try me. Give me a clue, and I'll guess the justice.”

Sean smiled at his daughter. The summer after her first year of law school. Like every person who'd ever studied the law, she was consumed by it. And a bit insufferable, too, with the law jokes and constant legal references. He was surprised since he thought that Abby might be immune, having grown up with the law and Supreme Court around her.

His daughter stuck out her lower lip. It worked as well in her twenties as it did when she was five.

“Okay, okay. How many hints?”

In her best game show contestant voice, Abby said, “I can name that Supreme Court justice in three hints.”

“All right. First hint, the justice was a great writer.”

“Uh, could you
be
more general?” She smiled, her teeth gleaming against her tanned face. “John Roberts, Elena Kagan,” she added.

“Nope, way before their time.”

Abby bunched her lips.

Sean said, “Okay, okay, hint number two: The justice was a bestselling author.”

“Sotomayor. No wait, she was after Roberts, so it must be before her time too. Come on, these are too general, give me a
real
hint.”

“Last hint. The justice's picture is in the anteroom right outside the Supreme Court's conference room. Remember when I took you there? The conference room where the justices decide their cases in secret, right next to the chief justice's chambers.”

“Of course I remember. You let me sit at the table where they decided
Brown v. Board of Education.
I remember John Marshall's portrait above the fireplace, but you're talking about the small room at the entrance, not the conference room itself?” She scrunched her face, trying to conjure the image. “Ugh, don't tell me you're referring to Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

“Not bad! But what's wrong with Holmes? He was one of the greatest writers on the court. Didn't you learn about ‘clear and present danger' or ‘shout fire in a crowded theater' in Con Law? He came up with those lines. And his dissents were phenomenal. They called him ‘The Great Dissenter.'”

“He also was a pig.”

Sean threw up his hands, giving her a baffled look.

“In
Buck v. Bell
he upheld a mentally disabled woman being forcibly sterilized,” Abby said in disgust. “He wrote the poetic line ‘three generations of imbeciles are enough.' Lovely. Your hero.”

With her hair blowing in the breeze, and her fiery gaze ready for a vigorous debate, there was no other word for her but
exquisite.

“Come on, Abby,” Sean said. “You can't judge a man by his one mistake.”

“Oh yes you can—if that mistake shows his true character. All the other stuff, it's just cover.”

*   *   *

The last comment stung now, just as it did then. Was that what his life had been all these years since Japan, just cover? When he thought about it, he'd really made two oaths that night in Misawa. The first the vow of silence with Kenny and Juan (which he'd broken by going to his father); the second, an oath to God, ironic since back then he hadn't been quite sure that he believed. The Almighty hadn't cured his mom's cancer, after all. But sobbing alone in his room, he'd vowed to never break the law again. To be a better person. To make something of himself. He'd left Japan soon after and his new school gave him the opportunity to reinvent himself. He was on a mission to succeed. By the time his father had retired from the military, Sean had attended five high schools in four years, but gotten straight As. That made for a helluva college essay. Dartmouth offered, he accepted, and once he was in the Ivy League system everything came easy: Harvard Law, a D.C. Circuit clerkship, on to the Supremes, then a coveted spot in the solicitor general's office. It didn't take a psych workup to connect why he had become a lawyer, why he dedicated himself to upholding the law and had become an appellate specialist whose job it was to fix mistakes made in the past by the lower courts.