Wind Chime Wedding (A Wind Chime Novel Book 2) Page 14

  “Law school or undergrad?”

  “Both.”

  She continued to study him. “How long have you been working here?”

  “Four years. Richard recruited me right out of law school. He and my father are good friends.” That wasn’t exactly true either. Richard Goldwater had hired Tom’s father to take him and his friends out fishing on his charter boat a few times over the years. Richard barely gave Tom the time of day. He probably got a good laugh out of the fact that he was employing the son of a fisherman.

  A few more black spots swam into his vision, but the connection seemed to impress Lydia and she turned all the way back to face him now. “Are you from the area?” she asked.

  “I grew up on the Eastern Shore.”

  “Where?”

  “Heron Island.”

  Lydia paused, just for a beat. “Heron Island?”

  He nodded.

  “I take it you’ve been following the news?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I’m on your side about the decision to close the school.”

  She regarded him with new interest. “You are?”

  He nodded again. As far as he was concerned, the best thing that could happen was for the elementary school to shut down. Maybe, then, Becca could finally cut her ties to the island for good. He didn’t know why she was holding on so hard to the past. He couldn’t wait to escape the island when they’d been growing up. There was no way he could go back there now. I would be like taking a giant step backwards, like admitting defeat.

  “Enrollment has been down for years,” Tom said. “Fewer young people are staying on the island to raise children. It doesn’t make sense to keep it open when the funds could be used to support the larger schools in the county. The elementary schools in Easton and St. Michaels have enough trouble paying competitive teacher salaries and retaining experienced tutors and aids. With the extra money, they could invest in their current staff and add more special needs programs.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” she said, surprised.

  Tom shrugged, as if he’d just rattled those ideas off the top of his head, when in fact, he’d done his research before she’d come in tonight. Lydia had been quoted in tons of articles over the years about her reasons for consolidations. A simple Google search over lunch had brought up dozens of hits.

  As soon as he’d read Grace’s article the day before, and had seen how bad it had made Nick Foley look, he’d known that his connection to Becca and the island could give Richard Goldwater an advantage over the current governor. The only reason he’d asked Becca to tell him everything that hadn’t made its way into the article was to see if there was anything that Richard might be able to use for his campaign against the governor.

  “Do you still have family on the island?” Lydia asked curiously.

  “My fiancée still lives there, but she’s moving as soon as we get married.”

  “Do you drive back and forth a lot?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  Aside from the fact that he had nothing in common with anyone who lived there anymore, he couldn’t stand the sight of the two small white crosses lining the side of the road at the blind curve a mile past St. Michaels. They brought back to many memories—memories he would prefer to forget. Particularly this time of year, when there was a fresh bouquet of flowers lying on the ground beside the crosses each week, flowers that only one person still bothered to put there.

  “I guess I prefer to leave the past in the past,” Tom said. “And, to be honest, I don’t have much free time to do anything anymore. Everyone at the firm is pulling long hours to make sure Richard’s clients are in good hands so he has time to focus on the campaign.”

  “Are you going to vote for him?”

  “I’m a D.C. resident, so I can’t,” Tom said. “But I would if I could. Not just because he’s my boss, but because I’d rather see anyone in the statehouse besides Nick Foley.”

  Lydia angled her head. “You’re not a fan of the current governor?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “In that case…” Lydia smiled and nodded toward a small conference room off the side of the reception area. “Shall we?”

  “Of course.” Tom gestured for her to walk ahead of him into the private room. He closed the door behind them, even though there were only a handful of lawyers left on the floor.

  He’d met with a few clients at night before, ones who didn’t want anyone to see them coming into the building during normal business hours. He hadn’t spotted anything in Lydia’s LLC contract that would warrant an after hours meeting, but she was probably trying to keep a low profile after all the press she’d gotten over the past couple days.

  Tom gestured for her to sit as he set two copies of the agreement on the table. “Was there anything in particular you’d like to go over, or should we run through each section from the beginning?”

  Reaching into her purse, she pulled out an envelope and slid it across the table to him. “I didn’t come here to talk about the LLC.”

  Tom paused, looking down at the envelope. Slowly lowering himself to the chair across from her, he picked it up and pulled out what looked like a large stack of financial statements from an organization he’d never heard of before. “What’s this?”

  “Accounting records from the charity I used to run with my ex-husband.” Lydia sat back, folding her hands in her lap. “In the late nineties, we opened a school for young children in an impoverished region of the Dominican Republic. We were both Peace Corps volunteers there when we were in our twenties. We wanted to do something to give back, once we’d both gotten established in our careers.” A ghost of a smile flitted across her face, then vanished. “It was a long time ago.”

  He glanced back down, searching for the date of the most recent statement. It was from five years ago, when she and the governor had still been married, when Nick Foley had been running for his first term. He flipped through the pages, and saw that she’d highlighted five different contributions of $10,000 each that had come into their account that year, all from a direct wire transfer tied to an account in the Cayman Islands. “Who are these transfers from?”

  “Henry Cooper.”

  Tom glanced up, his eyes widening. Henry Cooper was the owner of the largest casino chain in Maryland. Anyone who had paid attention to local politics over the past few years knew that Nick Foley had passed new legislation allowing casinos to open all over the state, promising that the millions of dollars of new tax revenue would go to roads, social programs, and schools. He didn’t know if the governor had made good on that promise, but there was a casino open in almost every county now. “Are you suggesting that the governor accepted donations to his personal charity in exchange for kickbacks?”

  “I’m suggesting that Richard might want to look into it.”

  Tom reached back into the envelope, to see if there was anything else inside. His fingers met the sharp edges of a photograph and he slid it out, staring down at a glossy picture of the waterfront inn on Heron Island where he was supposed to get married in two and a half weeks. “What’s this?”

  “The governor is announcing a new jobs program for veterans tomorrow,” Lydia said. “I bet, if you look closely enough, you’ll find some similarities to what went on before.”

  Standing on the lawn of the Maryland State House the next day, waiting for his father to deliver his speech, Colin couldn’t help feeling a rush of pride. It had been a long time since he’d felt any real pride in his work. He wished the announcement about the jobs program didn’t have to come so close on the heels of the news about the school closing, but maybe it would help the public understand that those budget cuts hadn’t been for nothing.

  In politics, there were always sacrifices, and while he didn’t want to sacrifice the island school, there was a reason those funds had been moved around—to help veterans. As angry as he’d been at finding Jimmy Faulkner passed out in a drunken haze the day before, it had he
lped shift everything back into focus. Alcoholism was something a huge number of veterans struggled with in this country.

  Late at night, when Colin lay in bed remembering the faces of his fallen teammates, it was the friends he’d lost back home whose faces haunted him the most. Death at war, as awful as it was, he could wrap his head around. But the guys who died back home, the ones who went over the edge when they returned to their families, their hometowns, the country that had asked them to serve in the first place, those were the ones who kept him up at night.

  They should have been treated like heroes, not left to suffer in silence.

  He had joined the SEALs straight out of college because he’d been a senior at Columbia University in 2001. He’d seen the Twin Towers go down in New York. He’d seen the devastation, the horror, the fear reflected in the faces of his fellow Americans, and he’d wanted revenge.

  He’d gotten it—four tours of it—in dry, sandy places SEALs rarely deployed to before the War on Terror. He’d worked alongside Marines and Army platoons in Fallujah and Ramadi, fast roped into the mountains of Afghanistan in helicopters flown by both Navy and Special Operations Aviation Regiment pilots, ran ops with coalition forces from several European countries. Before the end of his second tour in Iraq, he had already begun to earn the reputation of being one of the SEALs deadliest snipers.

  But it wasn’t the number of kills or an addiction to the adrenaline rush that had him re-upping his contract year after year. For the first time in his life, he’d felt like he’d belonged to something, like he’d been part of something bigger than himself. As a SEAL, he’d had a purpose, not only to gather intelligence and take out key targets, but also to protect his fellow teammates—teammates who had been more of a family to him than his own ever had.

  As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had dragged on, and the people back home had begun to question their reasons for still being over there, for him, it had always come down to the same thing—the guys on his team. As long as they were still there, as long as they were still fighting, he wanted to be with them.

  When he’d returned from his final deployment in Afghanistan, so badly wounded that he was no longer able to serve on the teams that had become his family, the hardest part hadn’t been the months of physical recovery. It had been coming to terms with the fact that he couldn’t go back there, that he couldn’t use his skills and his weapons and his years of training to protect his brothers.

  That he wasn’t ever going to be in the fight anymore.

  Without that mission, that purpose anymore, he had floundered for months trying to figure out what to do with his life. He’d spent a lot of time at Walter Reed, talking to fellow wounded warriors—men and women who were dealing with injuries a hell of a lot worse than his. And the more people he’d talked to, the more he’d begun to realize that there was another fight going on back home.

  A fight that was just as important.

  Over two million post-9/11 veterans were back home now, struggling to figure out how to transfer the skills and values they’d learned in the military into a largely civilian workforce. Many of them had enlisted right out of high school. Many of them had served several back-to-back deployments. For many of them, it was the only life they’d ever known.

  Which was why, as he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the people he’d worked tirelessly with over the past six months to launch this jobs program, he felt for the first time, in a very long time, that he was finally doing something meaningful with his life again. Scanning the faces of the people who’d gathered on the lawn for the announcement, he spotted his friend, Nate Murphy, on the other side of the wall of reporters.

  The former Marine owned the company they’d contracted to build and maintain the electronic database that would match Maryland veterans with openings in the private and public sector. Nate caught his eye and peeled off from the group of people he was standing with beside the magnolia tree. Rounding the mass of reporters, he walked over to where Colin stood.

  Nate grinned, holding out his hand. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, man,” Colin said, shaking his hand. “Any activity on the site yet?”

  Nate nodded. “Close to a hundred people have signed up and the governor hasn’t even started his speech yet.”

  “How’s the website holding up.”

  “Like a dream.” Nate reached into his pocket, pulling out the phone Colin had lent him a little while ago. “My head IT guy loaded the app onto your phone and tested out all the features. Everything’s fully functional. We set you up as an admin for the site so you can enroll people when you meet them. All you need is their name and email address. As soon as you hit save, the program will send them a temporary password so they can complete the application when they get home.”

  Colin took the phone, scrolled through a few of the features, and once he was satisfied that everything was working properly, he slipped it into his pocket.

  “How’s everything going with the veterans’ center?” Nate asked.

  “Good,” Colin said. “We’re still on track to open on Memorial Day. You’re coming down for the event, right?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  In a few weeks, he and Will would start working hands on with some of the wounded warriors who were struggling the most with the transition back to civilian life. He was counting on this new state program to open up all kinds of doors for them. “I’ll be sending people your way, so you better be ready to hire.”

  Nate smiled. “I’ll be ready.”

  A few cameras flashed their way—reporters who wanted to capture the shot of two men with combat muscles and war wounds looking with satisfaction on something they had accomplished together. He almost didn’t notice when Glenn Davis walked down the steps, wearing a grim expression on his face. His father’s campaign manager moved quickly through the crowd to where the press secretary stood, chatting with several reporters. He whispered something in her ear, and the smile on her face vanished.

  When the phone in his pocket buzzed, Colin pulled it out, frowning down at the breaking news alert.

  “Hey, man,” Nate murmured from beside him, his own phone in his hand. “You seeing this?”

  Colin nodded slowly, staring down at the headline: “Richard Goldwater Accuses Governor Foley of Corruption.”

  He clicked on the link, which led him to an article with a video clip of the frontrunner for the party that would be running against his father in the fall holding a press conference at his campaign headquarters on the other side of town. The clip had posted only moments ago, timed to air right before his father’s announcement.

  He scanned the transcript under the video, his eyes widening as he read the words: “I have proof in my hands that Nick Foley has been accepting contributions to charities in exchange for making deals with big businesses all over this state. Earlier this week, he signed a new piece of legislation loosening gambling laws in exchange for a $40,000 donation from the owner of Cooper’s Casinos to his son’s wounded warrior charity.”

  Colin tore his eyes from the screen and looked up at the man striding toward the podium. His father’s white smile flashed for the cameras. His deep voice boomed over the lawn as he began to deliver the opening lines of a speech that Colin had helped write.

  “Holy shit,” Nate breathed as the governor’s press secretary walked quickly up to the podium, whispering something in his ear as the mass of reporters began cutting him off, shouting his name, and firing off a hundred questions at once.

  “Damn it,” Becca murmured, as she tried calling Colin for the fifth time that day and his voicemail picked up again. She’d heard the news about Richard Goldwater’s accusation on her lunch break and she’d been trying to reach him ever since. She didn’t believe it. Not for a second.

  She had met Colin’s father. She had shaken his hand. She had looked him in the eye. He might be a professional politician, trained to say whatever his constituents wanted to hear to get elected, but he was
n’t a liar. And he wasn’t corrupt.

  Richard Goldwater’s accusation was nothing more than a political stunt to sabotage the jobs program and to hurt both Colin and his father. And she had a feeling she knew exactly who was behind it.

  Shoving her phone back in her purse, she walked out of the empty classroom and down the deserted hallway. She knew how much that program, and the veterans’ center, meant to Colin. She knew how hard he had been working on both all winter.

  If she was right, and Lydia was behind this, then it wasn’t just about the school anymore. The school was only the beginning of her plot to take down the governor. She wasn’t going to let the fate of the island, and the future of the children who lived here, get wrapped up in some petty game of revenge. They had to find a way to stop her.

  Pushing out the double doors, the wind whipped the hair back from her face. Pink petals snapped off from the branches of the dogwood trees, raining down on the few cars that were left in the parking lot. She ducked her head against the salty gusts and crossed the lot, slipping into the driver’s seat of her Corolla.

  She sent Annie a quick text message, asking for Colin’s address, then tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and backed out of the spot. A small voice in the back of her head warned that going to him now might be a mistake, that showing up on his doorstep when he wouldn’t even answer her calls probably wasn’t a wise decision. But she needed to see him. She needed to talk to him. She needed to make sure he was okay.

  Two hours later, she found a parking spot in his neighborhood, a few blocks from his apartment, and stepped out of the car. The scent of fried fish and hops blew through the streets, riding the heavy winds that pushed at the wooden signs hanging from the eaves of some of the restaurants. An inky blue dusk was settling over the harbor and gas lamps flickered outside a few of the historic homes, casting a warm glow over the old brick and cobblestone streets.

  She read the numbers on the houses, searching for the address that Annie had texted back to her. When she found the three-story brick row house, she climbed the steps and knocked on the door to the first floor apartment. Nerves fluttered in her belly as she realized she hadn’t given much thought to what she would say. She heard footsteps coming toward her, and she stepped back, quickly running a hand through her windblown hair.