The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [100]
“But of course he didn’t do that.”
“Nah. It was a stupid whim on the part of a stupid man. He never would have been permitted to do it.”
“Who talked him out of it?”
“I did. Me and Kendall, actually. But as it turned out, he wouldn’t have gone through with it anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“The girl died.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes. How’s that for a coincidence? Hit-and-run, they said, but who really knows about these things?”
“Did you know, Mr. Stinson?”
“No, no. But I did wonder about it; I sure did. Just seemed awfully convenient, and they never did find the driver of the car. Another bit of convenience, if you ask me. Officially, no one heard or saw a thing, even though this accident happened on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. Now, granted, it was the middle of the night, but still, you had to wonder, you know? It just never sat right.” Stinson looked Simon straight in the eye and said, “I’d wanted to strangle Hayward with my bare hands when he started talking about how maybe he wouldn’t run again. All the time and money that went into building his political career. Not to mention the potential fallout in the Congress. But killing the girl? I can’t imagine anyone who would have gone to such lengths. And Hayward ended up staying in office, but between you and me, he never was the same.”
“In what way?”
“He lost his fight. The girl died, and he just sort of dried up. He died within a month of leaving office.”
“Yes, I know.”
Stinson raised the glasses to his eyes and scanned the heavens. “Guess it’s safe to assume that that’s one little anecdote that won’t show up in your book, eh?”
“Stinson admitted that he knew about Blythe, admitted he knew about Hayward thinking about not running for a second term, admitted he was less than pleased with it. But he gave no indication that he knew anything at all about your birth, and I don’t see him as having anything to do with Blythe’s death. He just gave me the feeling that he was as perplexed by that as we are.”
Simon stood in the narrow phone booth, the door closed over to keep out the sheets of rain that blew against the clear walls and streamed down the sides in thin rivers, mentally kicking himself for losing the battery charger for his cell phone in his move to Arlington. At the same time, he wished he could just magically transport himself back to Wild Springs, so that he could see Dina’s face as clearly as he heard her voice. He’d found himself thinking an awful lot about that face today.
“So we can cross him off our list of possible mystery drivers. Besides, he was leading a midnight bird walk through the marshes every other night for the past two weeks and would have been giving his lecture on migrating birds of prey at the time you were jumping over hedges.”
“You’re sure?” Dina felt a tug of a disappointment.
She’d wanted Stinson to be the one to have been behind everything, had been hoping against hope that somehow Stinson would quickly and easily and, without further threat to anyone’s well-being, be revealed as the culprit so that they could be done with the uncertainty. Not a very likely or realistic outcome, she knew, but still, she’d hoped for a bit of a miracle.
“Before I left town, I stopped back at the country store, which is sort of the newsstand, coffee shop, post office, social center of the town. The man behind the counter was on that walk.”
“Sounds like a neat little town.”
“I think you’d like it. Lots of old houses with lots of old gardens. They even had their own tea-burning incident back in the seventies.” Simon paused, then added, “That would be the seventeen hundred seventies.”
“It might be fun to visit.”
“That trip will have to wait until I get back from Virginia Beach.”
“What’s in Virginia Beach?”
“Conrad Fritz. I’m going to be stopping in to see him first thing in the morning.”
“You’re not coming back up to Betsy’s tonight then?”
“No. I’m going to head on down through Delaware and over the Bay Bridge Tunnel tonight, so that I can catch up with Fritz early.”
“And then what?”
“I guess that’ll depend