“I never saw them. I had Cobb deliver them directly to Sam, and then I lost control of him. I guess he’s working for the old man now.”
Jay walks to the chair at the receptionist’s desk and sits down, trying to find his daughter somewhere in this maze of deception. If Cobb is working for Sam now, then it was the elder Hathorne who delivered the warning to back off the injunction, just as he had tried to move Neal away from any public confrontation with Reese Parker about the flyers–flyers that actually benefited Sam and his plan to work out a private settlement between ProFerma and Pleasantville. Even though it was all a lie. There is no bayou development deal. Meanwhile, Sandy Wolcott and her ace in the hole Reese Parker had gone on campaigning, picking up percentage points in the polls for every day the situation with Neal Hathorne wasn’t resolved. The march of the volunteers’ feet crosses Jay’s mind again, that day he’d seen them out in Pleasantville, block-walking, making a naked play for the precinct. And what’s more, he remembers Charlie’s description of Parker’s pitch to donors: It’s not precinct by precinct anymore, not for the ones who want to win. Four years from now, it’s going to come down to a handful of votes. That day, on Josie Street, it looked for all the world as if they were cherry-picking the voters they could get the most out of, skipping some residents completely. And now he finally understands how they had chosen which houses to target: they were using the information in his files. “My god,” he mutters, as he turns the final corner in the maze. He pictures the street addresses, the zigzag pattern of the volunteers, each of whom he now believes was armed with highly sensitive information about the people living inside. He can, by memory, name them all.
They’re his clients, after all.
2002 Josie Street is Mary Melendez’s place. She’d had a complete hysterectomy in her early thirties after a botched abortion, a fact that was included in her medical records, and she had therefore had only one child, a son, David, who was killed in Vietnam. She was woeful about her “mistakes,” and was staunchly pro-life. She did not, in her seventies, drink or take drugs.
At 2037 are Robert Quinones and his wife, Darla. Mr. Quinones had a preexisting injury to his shoulder when he’d caught buckshot on a hunting trip with his son, who was thirteen at the time. He was an NRA member and a weekend did not pass that he wasn’t hunting some kind of mammal somewhere.
At 2052 are Linda and Betty Dobson, sisters who’ve lived together for years, who are not actually sisters at all, but “dear friends,” and who Jay has always believed are lovers, in a relationship for over thirty years. Because copies of their medical records and birth certificates were included in their client file, along with tax records and the names on the deed to the house, Jay is the only one who knows this, and he was sworn to secrecy by both of them. They were serious, three-nights-a-week-at-church Baptists who did not like “queers,” they told him.
2055 is Rutherford Tompkins, widower and retired firefighter, who was home alone when the explosion happened last spring. Jay had seen his tax returns too, and received an earful about how much he was still paying to the government, chunks of money taken out of his Social Security checks. Jay had noted all of this in the file, along with the name of his deceased wife and dozens of other personal facts about the man’s life, from birth to his sixty-seventh year.
My god, Jay thinks again, if Parker could swing any one of them away from Axel, if she could reach into traditionally black precincts throughout the country, for that matter, and pluck out the registered Democrats with the slightest tear in their liberal fabric, a weak thread that could be pulled until the stitches came apart, could she, four years from now, swing them for a Republican candidate? If you could take Pleasantville from a Hathorne, you could do anything. They’re trying to break Pleasantville. And damn if they didn’t have help.
The car is a surprise, still idling there.
He was sure she would have left him here, abandoning him at the worst time, as she had done nearly thirty years earlier. But Cynthia, of all people, is right here when he needs someone most. He has no car, no other way out of here, back to his real life, before Aguilar and T. J. Cobb, before the Hathornes and this mess of a trial, when his daughter was still safe. He opens the rear passenger door of the Town Car and collapses into the leather seat. The car is filled with gray smoke, swirling from the end of the cigarette in Cynthia’s shaking hand. She looks pale, her blond hair lank in the warmth of the car, the smell of her sweat mixed with the woodsy scent of her perfume, looking at this angle like the girl he once knew, the one who leaned across the cab of her green Ford Econoline truck and kissed him at dawn. She’s staring out the tinted window. “I told you not to fuck with Sam.”
“Where’s my daughter, Cynthia?”
“I don’t know.”
Turning from the window, she leans forward, tapping the back of the driver’s seat. “Get him out of here now,” she says before turning to Jay, who leans forward, elbows on his knees, his head in his sorry hands, and weeps.
CHAPTER 28