Rocky And The Senator's Daughter

It had been the standard celebrity bash. Only those journalists who shared the senator’s ideology had been invited to meet and mingle with the glitterati. Rocky, who had considered himself politically unbiased at that early stage of his budding career, had been on his way out when he’d spotted the girl.

In a dress that was obviously expensive and painfully unflattering, the young Sarah Mariah had watched her father buttonhole another major contributor, clasp his hand, slap him on the arm and then proceed to apply the thumbscrews. Something about her expression had caught his attention. It reminded him too much of children he’d seen with eyes far too old for their tender years.

Which was probably why, from a mixture of boredom and sympathy, he had collected a cup of tea and a finger sandwich—asparagus and cream cheese, he remembered distinctly—and made his way over to the potted palm where she’d gone to earth.

“Hi. My name’s Rocky and I’m a truant officer. Do you have your parents’ permission to be here?” Silly stuff, but hell—she was just a kid.

“How do you do, Mr. Rocky. My name is Anonymous Jones, and if you blow my cover I’ll be deported at the very least, beheaded if the king’s having a bad hair day.”

“Yeah, I figured as much.” They’d both stared at the senator’s trademark silver pompadour. “Brought you a last meal just in case. Asparagus sandwiches. They looked like a safer bet than those small brown things.”

“The barbecued loin of weasel?”

“Those were all gone. There were a couple of the guppy filets left, but you know what they say about seafood.”

“No, what do they say?”

He’d shrugged. “Beats me.”

She had smiled then. A quick, spontaneous smile that was gone almost before it appeared. They had talked for a few minutes and then she’d reached for the tea. Her hand had struck the saucer, and in trying to catch the cup before it spilled, she’d managed to dump the sandwich onto his shoes. Cream-cheese side down. Smack on the laces, where it couldn’t easily be wiped off.

The poor kid had looked stricken, so he’d forgotten his own irritation and made some crack about asparagus being a known insect repellant. “It’s the scent, you know? You ever sniff an asparagus? Whoa. Really bad stuff.”

She’d looked so grateful he’d been afraid she was going to do something gauche, like kissing his hand. Mumbling something about an appointment, he’d left before she could embarrass them both.

Even then it had occurred to him that she had vulnerable eyes. Far too vulnerable, considering the circles she moved in. He remembered thinking that with a crook like J. Abernathy Jones for a father, she’d be in therapy before the year was out, if she wasn’t already.

Sarah Mariah Jones Sullivan, he mused now. Daughter of Senator J. Abernathy Jones, who had been reelected by the skin of his teeth shortly after their one and only meeting.

Wife—make that widow—of Junior Congressman Stanley Sullivan, the senator’s protégé and handpicked puppet. Despite his reputation as a latter-day John Kennedy, the jerk had been nothing more than a dirty, womanizing lightweight who had barely managed to escape the tail end of the scandals that had put an end to his father-in-law’s career, if not to his ambitions.

As it turned out, Rocky had been back in the States after a stint in Kosovo when Sullivan had gone down in flames. Still immersed in his own private, personal immolation, he had not joined the pack, choosing instead to watch the coverage from the privacy of his barren apartment. Looking calm, pale and emotionless, Sarah Mariah had been there each day beside her husband and his lawyers. Comparing the grown-up woman to the teenage girl he remembered, he couldn’t help but wonder how much it was costing her. God knows, she must have already suffered enough when her father’s sins had come home to roost.

Under the most trying circumstances imaginable for any sensitive young woman, she had never, to his knowledge, lost her dignity. Rocky watched as day after day she’d be caught outside and surrounded before she could escape. Head held high, she would face down her tormentors with that same disconcertingly direct gaze he remembered.

“Miz Sullivan, did you know at the time…?”

“No comment.”

“Mrs. Sullivan, is it true that you’ve already filed for divorce?”

“No comment.”

“Hey, Sarah, is it true that you were at some of those Georgetown parties your husband threw? Is it true that a Hollywood director supplied the talent and the—”

“If you’ll excuse me?”

Someone—Rocky learned later it was her father’s housekeeper—usually rescued her by pulling her bodily away when she would have stood there with that startled-doe look in her eyes until she ran out of no-comments.

After a while the two scandals had run together in his mind: the senator’s illegal fund-raising, aka influence peddling, arranging for the bypassing of certain sanctions to sell classified materials to terrorist nations, and the offshore bank accounts; followed only a few years later by Sullivan’s sordid little sex, drugs and booze peccadilloes. The consensus was that the man was incredibly stupid to have continued his activities right on through his father-in-law’s investigation.

But then Rocky had been immersed in his own private hell while it was all going on. About the time the first scandal was making the nightly news, Julie’s kidneys had begun to fail. Dialysis had held her for a while, but under the circumstances, she had not been a candidate for transplant. After one last quick overseas assignment, he had handed in his resignation, needing to spend as much time as he could with the woman he’d once loved.

So it was all mixed up in his mind—the end of his shell of a marriage, the Jones-Sullivan affair, and the end of his career. A man could run only so far, so long, before life caught up with him.

He did recall wondering more than once how the shy, intelligent girl with the wry sense of humor, the haunting little half smile and the marked lack of physical coordination, could have married a lightweight like Sullivan in the first place. The guy was smooth. He had the kind of face the cameras loved, but Rocky had once heard him on a radio talk show when a caller had asked if he was worried about the Chi-coms controlling both ends of the Panama Canal.

Judging by his response, the poor jerk had never heard of the Panama Canal, much less any possible political ramifications. He had stumbled around in search of a response and ended up parroting the day’s talking points about campaign finance reform. By the end of the program he’d been batting 0 for 4.

Still, the guy must have had something on the ball. Sarah Mariah had married him. And just as she had stood by her father during the Senate hearings, she had stood stoically beside her husband as, one after another, all his tawdry little secrets had been exposed. With a face that revealed none of her emotions, she had quietly shamed all but the hardcore paparazzi before it was over into granting her grudging respect.

But by that time Rocky had stopped watching. Enough was enough.

Enough was too damned much.

The congressman’s sleazy affairs had been too commonplace to sustain a media barrage for long, once it was determined that national security was not at stake. The mess had sprung up again briefly a few months later when Sullivan had taken dead aim at a bridge abutment and totaled both himself and his car. Shortly after that, Sarah Mariah dropped out of sight.

That must have been about the same time that Rocky himself had dropped out. One way of putting it. He had watched Julie’s final decline. He had cried. He had read until he couldn’t face another book. He’d watched an entire season of baseball, his own brand of opiate. When he’d realized he was drinking too much, he had quit cold turkey. All things considered, it hadn’t exactly been a banner year.

A few nights after Dan Sturdivant’s retirement party, Rocky was watching the news and toying with the idea of doing a series of columns when he caught a thirty-second teaser for a daytime talk show featuring Binky Cudahy, author of the upcoming bestseller, The Senator’s Daughter’s Husband’s Other Women.

That’s when it hit him. Wherever she’d gone, whatever kind of a life she had managed to salvage for herself, the congressman’s widow was probably going to come in for some unwelcome attention once the book hit the stands. Did she even know about it? Did she watch daytime TV?

For all he knew she might be lying on the sand soaking up sun on some tropical island by now. God knows, she deserved a break.

But she also deserved to know what was headed her way, in case she needed to duck. Rocky knew he could find her. He’d put in too many years as a reporter not to have sources. Although why he should feel this proprietary interest in a woman he’d met only one time, and that more than twenty years ago, he couldn’t have said. Maybe because there was a big, gaping hole where his life used to be.

Well, hell…the least he could do was give her fair warning that the buzzards would soon be circling again.

Two

Sarah Mariah flexed her sore hands and examined the newest crop of injuries. The mashed thumb had been yesterday. The sprained little finger several days before that. Today’s scratches were only a minor irritation, but honestly, she was going to have to do better. Good thing she’d had her tetanus booster.

All she’d been trying to do was untangle the wild grapevines from the shrubs that had been allowed to grow unchecked for decades. It wasn’t as if she’d been tackling a jungle with her bare hands. The shrubs were threatening to lift the eaves, but she couldn’t even prune the blamed things until she could get rid of the blasted vines.

Still, if stiff hands and a few scratches were the worst she had to show for today’s work, she’d consider herself lucky. She was still scratching chiggers, and last week she’d had to go after a tick in an inaccessible place with a mirror and a pair of tweezers. Living alone had its drawbacks, but the upside definitely outweighed the downside.

She poured herself a glass of milk and made a salsa and mozzarella sandwich on whole grain bread, feeling righteous because she would rather have had a bacon-cheeseburger with fries. Taking her tray into the parlor, she kicked off her shoes and sprawled out in a recliner that was half a century newer than the rest of her great-aunt’s furniture. It was one of the few really comfortable pieces in the house.

There was a TV on a spool-legged table. It had died a natural death several years ago and had never been replaced. Sarah had no intention of having it repaired, although she might decide to free up the table for a potted plant. She had a weather radio and a subscription to the Daily Advance. Those, plus weekly trips to the grocery store and sporadic trips to the post office filled her needs for contact with the outside world. If World War III or a tornado threatened, she trusted one of the neighbors to warn her.

It had come as no great surprise that her late great-aunt’s lifestyle suited her far better than life in suburban D.C. Sarah had hated Washington, hated the whole political scene. But then, she hadn’t chosen it, she’d been born into it. And then she’d had the poor judgment to marry into the same circles. She would like to think she had played her role competently, if with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, right to the end.

During her father’s ordeal, Stan had been worse than useless. He’d practically fallen apart. On the few nights when he stayed in, he was drunk by the time she served dinner. She hadn’t understood at the time why he’d seemed almost panicked. He couldn’t possibly have been involved, she’d reasoned, because if he’d been a part of anything illegal they would have quickly discovered it. He’d had flawless manners and the face of a sexy choirboy. That guileless grin alone had brought in the women’s votes. He’d seemed so open, so honest—such a refreshing change from all the others. She remembered once trying to reassure him by telling him not to feel guilty, that none of her father’s crimes was his fault. His only sin was being married to the senator’s daughter.

She’d said it with a smile—or as much of a smile as she could manage—but he hadn’t said a word, either in his own defense or hers. Not that she’d expected him to defend her father. What the senator had done was indefensible. But he might at least have absolved her of the guilt of being J. Abernathy’s daughter.

He hadn’t. A year or so after the Senate hearings, when her husband had started behaving oddly, she had tried to be understanding. After all, it had been an ordeal for him, too. She remembered thinking that once his term ended she would try to talk Stan into selling the house they’d just purchased and not running for office again. They could go somewhere—anywhere—and start over.