The Scandal and Carter O'Neill

First of all, Carter O’Neill was going to be fine. A guy like that was born fine. He was simply too good-looking, too cool and calm, to not be fine. He was like James Bond or something. Though, she thought with a smile, James Bond had gotten batted around like a cat toy by that wily Tootie Vogler.

He was actually far more handsome when he was frazzled, which was saying something, because it wasn’t like the guy was ever hard to look at.

That little scene she’d caused in there would simply blow over.

And if she felt any doubt, any little wormhole of guilt, it was because of the reporter-guy asking the questions. She hadn’t counted on a reporter, and that might take some repair work. Maybe she’d write a letter to the editor or something, tell the whole world she was off her meds. Or stalking the handsome deputy mayor with the lips so perfect they should be bronzed.

More likely, though, she’d just be explained away in some kind of press release issued by the mayor’s office.

Yeah, she nodded, liking that one the best. They’d take care of it.

The second reason that what she’d done was not a mistake was that the guy was planning on tearing down the heart of this community as if it was nothing; as if a year without day care and senior bingo nights or after-school dance programs was all just an afterthought. A footnote on some memo.

Beauregard had clawed its way out of the gutters and the programs offered at Jimmie Simpson had been part of that. She was part of that. And pretty damn proud.

And third, and most important, she had a thousand dollars in her pocket. Like a roll of hope, heavy and dense. She tucked her hand in her pocket, just to feel the thickness, the tension in the rubber band.

A thousand dollars.

She had no insurance, and her savings were going to be eaten up by the hospital birth, so a thousand dollars could buy a lot of diapers. A little bit of security.

And for that—she put a hand under her belly, where she could feel her little guppy doing a soft-shoe number—she would cause any number of scenes.

For the baby, she’d do anything.

The woman, Amanda, stood outside Zoe’s door, with a cell phone attached to her ear, a distracted guard.

Zoe rubbed her hands over the smooth leather and the slick wood panel on the door. Was it real, that wood? Who knew, but fake or real wood in a car was weird. Seriously, did the world need such a thing?

Yeah, she thought, sliding over to the other side of the car, her mind made up. She didn’t need to feel bad. Carter would be fine. Money made a lot of things go away, and Carter had money. He had money and shine and polish. Hell, he had a staff.

Watching Amanda’s back, she silently opened the door and slowly crept out of the car. Amanda didn’t even twitch.

Zoe ran off into the side streets.

“I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN Dad getting arrested would make you surface. What are you doing, Mom?” Carter asked, dimly wondering why he still called her Mom. After all she’d done, the years of screwing with their lives, he still couldn’t just call her Vanessa. It was a little sick.

“Let me see you, Carter,” his mother said, her voice gruff with the appropriate amount of manufactured emotion.

He turned, thinking he was prepared, but he wasn’t. Could never be. Her presence was a punch in the gut and a slap in the face. A pain and an offense all at the same time. She was lovely, of course. Looking at her, shrouded in cool elegance, you’d never guess she was one step up from being a grifter. A common thief.

Despite her presence in a dirty Baton Rouge alleyway, she looked like Princess Grace.

She looked, actually exactly like Carter’s sister, Savannah.

Her smile, a sharp little slash in her face, was like opening a door to a burning room, and he was suddenly filled with anger and fury. Smoke and fire.

“I can’t come see—”

“No,” he said quickly. “You can’t. That was our deal. I testified and you were supposed to stay away from me. From all of us.” He stepped toward her, gratified when she flinched, one foot sliding backward.

That’s right, he thought, something primal roaring to life, you’d better be scared of me.

But then she stopped herself, stiffening her thin shoulders as if facing a firing squad. “You’re my son,” she said.

He paused and barked out a bitter laugh.

“I understand you’re mad, Carter, but there are things we need to talk about.”

“Sure there are,” he said. “Like why you broke into Savannah’s house a few months ago. Twice. That broke our deal, too, Mom.” He sneered the last word, because one shouldn’t have dirty deals with their mothers, bargains made to keep the distance between them permanent. “You’re supposed to stay away from all of us. I should send you to jail.”

She blinked the beautiful blue eyes that he and both his siblings had inherited. In the past few years it had gotten so bad he could barely look at Tyler and Savannah and not see his mother. Not see all the ways he’d failed his siblings. The ways he’d let them down.

“We need to talk about the ruby,” she said.

“You want to talk about where you hid it, after you stole those gems seven years ago?”

“I didn’t steal the gems,” she said.

“Dad may go to jail, but I know somehow, you’re at the bottom of this. So take your story somewhere else. I’m not buying.”

He had a pregnant liar to deal with. A public image that was going to take the beating of a lifetime if Jim Blackwell had his way.

“It’s not a story, Carter. I just…is it so wrong to want to see you? To want someone in this family to know the truth?”

It had been twenty years since Vanessa had dropped him, along with his brother, Tyler and sister, Savannah, off with their grandmother, Margot. Ten years since she’d resurfaced to bribe him into lying for her on the stand. And now, suddenly, she thought she deserved a chance to tell her side of the story?

“This family wouldn’t know the truth if we sat on it,” he snapped. He turned to leave, walking up the slight hill toward the end of the alley.

“I didn’t steal the gems and I didn’t plant them in the house. You’re right. I was looking for them months ago, but I didn’t find them. But now that the diamond has surfaced, everyone is going to come looking for that ruby and it could get ugly. For all of us. If they’re not at The Manor, there’s a chance Margot has them on her.”

“Margot?”

“She could be in danger, Carter.”

“I can’t believe this,” Carter sighed. “You’re trying to convince me you care? About us? Or someone else getting their hands on the ruby.”

“Do you think I would be here if I wasn’t worried? If I wasn’t serious?”

“Yes.”

She sighed, exasperated. “I paid that girl a thousand dollars, Carter.”

Right. Money. Not something Mom parted ways with easily.

Vanessa opened her mouth, but from the end of the alley, he heard Jim Blackwell’s voice talking to Amanda.

“I don’t know where he is,” Amanda was saying, very loud.

“You know,” Jim said, “for a PR gal, you’re a shit liar.”

“Monday night,” he said to Vanessa, resigning himself to the fact that he needed to manage his family, because out of his control, they could ruin everything. “At 8 p.m., outside of my office. Anyone asks who you are, you lie.”

She nodded and stepped into the shadows, the faint click of her heels against the asphalt fading away as Jim Blackwell appeared at the top of the alley.

“I never pegged you as the deadbeat daddy type,” Jim said, his face awash with victory. “Not very nice of you.”

Carter stalked up the alley, wishing, truly wishing that politics weren’t so important to him so that he could just haul off and punch Jim in his fat mouth. But his job, the work he did, the work he wanted to do, it all mattered.

“No comment,” was all he said as he stomped by. “And I’ll have your job if even one word of this is blown out of proportion.”

“Come on, now, Carter. I’m a newsman, I only want to tell the truth. I just don’t understand why you have such a problem telling it.”

Carter ignored him and continued to his car, where a very stressed Amanda stood.

“What?” he barked, trying to look past her for a glimpse of the lying pregnant elf. The backseat was empty. “Amanda?”

“She’s gone,” Amanda said. “The girl. She just vanished.”

“THIS REALLY HAPPENED?” Tom Gilbert asked, coming to perch his skinny butt on the corner of Jim’s desk. Tom was to the City Desk what lunch ladies were to playground bullies—ineffective and overzealous. In a word, useless.

“Of course it happened,” Jim said, not looking up from his five hundred words about Carter O’Neill’s testimony for his mother ten years ago.

He’d already handed in his story about Carter O’Neill’s love child.

Honestly, this might be one of the best days of Jim’s life.

“Jim?”

“You’ve got a picture,” Jim said, rolling away from the keyboard to face his boss. “It happened. I’ve got two old ladies saying they had no idea Zoe Madison was having a thing with the mayor pro tem. What more do you want?”

“News,” Tom said, smacking the copy against his knee.

“Carter O’Neill, who is going to announce his candidacy for mayor any minute, knocks a girl up and walks away?” Jim laughed. “That’s not news?”

“I don’t think it’s true,” Tom said and Jim sat up.

“You accusing me of lying?”

“No, Jim,” Tom sighed. “Christ, you’re so defensive I can barely talk to you. What I’m saying is I don’t think it’s a story. The Mayor Pro Tem office is going to issue a statement saying O’Neill’s never even heard of this girl, and I don’t want to have to print a retraction in two days for a story tomorrow.”

“That might not happen, Tom.” You lily-livered, soft-handed coward, he thought. “And right now, you’ve got a public official involved in some pretty crummy stuff. I know it’s been awhile since you were out there, but that is news. The girl’s broke—a dance teacher or something—she has no insurance, and she just accused Golden Boy Carter O’Neill of knocking her up. It’s gonna be all over the region, it’s so good.”

Tom stood up, his freaking king-of-the-world attitude putting a few more inches on his lollipop build. “Your hard-on for this guy is getting in the way of your judgment. You did good work two years ago on the Marcuzzi administration. No one can take that away from you—”

Especially you, you little nosebleed, Jim thought.

“But not every public official is out to ruin this town.”

“Carter O’Neill’s father was arrested with a thirty-carat stolen gem! His sister is dating the son of the man arrested for the original theft. The man comes from a family of crooks. His grandmother was a high-paid whore—”

Tom winced, because he had the stomach of a little girl.

“His mother is a known criminal—”

“Convicted once of grand theft auto.” Tom shook his head. “You did this story when Richard Bonavie was originally arrested and Carter answered every one of your questions. He has very little contact with his family. Not everyone running this town is dirty. I think the Marcuzzi administration ruined you, made you see crooks were there aren’t any.”

“Gem theft!” Jim cried. “If Carter has anything to do with it, he’s dirtier than Marcuzzi.”

“I’m not against you,” Tom whispered. “I want to help you. But you’re young and fairly new to the city—you keep running around here half-cocked and we’re all gonna get burned. There’s a difference between journalism and a witch hunt.”

“What about the love child story?” Jim asked, ignoring Tom’s little pep talk.

Tom sighed. “It runs. Copy already came up with a killer headline,” he said and Jim fought back a smile. Of course it would run. It was top-shelf scandal, and scandal sold papers.

“What else are you working on?” Tom asked.

“I’ve got five hundred words on O’Neill testifying for his mother in a criminal case ten years ago.”

“Are you kidding?” Tom asked. “You’re turning into a one-trick pony here, Jim.”

“You’ve got a hole on page three,” he said with a shrug. “I can fill it.”

“Damn,” Tom sighed. “Okay, Jim, but let’s remember what we’re here to do. Tell news, not stories.”

CARTER DIDN’T WAIT for the emergency Saturday-morning meeting to officially begin. He stormed into Amanda’s office and caught her shoving the last of a doughnut into her mouth.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“Knock?” she asked, around a mouthful. “Learn some manners?”

He sighed and slapped the Gazette on her desk. The picture of the pregnant elf on that chair stared up at him, mocking him. Jim Blackwell had found out the woman’s name—Zoe Madison. It was right there in the caption, and Carter had spent most of the morning finding out what he could about her.

Her address on a scrap of paper burned in his pocket, and he wanted nothing more than to go over to Beauregard Town and strangle her. Of course, that wouldn’t do much for his image. Maybe he’d be better off parading her around town and making her tell every single person they met that she’d lied about him.

“He’s calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” Carter said through gritted teeth.

“Actually,” Amanda said, swallowing and standing, as she gathered a stack of papers in her arms, “so are the Houston Chronicle, and the New Orleans Sentinel and—” She tossed the papers on the desk, each one hitting the mahogany with a flat thud like a nail in Carter O’Neill’s coffin. “The real kicker, the pièce de résistance, if you will—”

“Amanda. We don’t need any more theater.”

“Third page in USA Today. They’re all calling you Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.”

He hissed as if burned. And it felt that way; his anger was so hot he had to stand up and walk to the window, looking down on St. Louis Street, quiet and slick with rain.

This was going to be his legacy. He could clean up every neighborhood in this city, but he’d still go to his grave as Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.

He was, at this point, the opposite of Bill Higgins.

Bill Higgins, who came out of retirement last year after the previous administration was finally exposed in its corruption, and who was reelected Mayor-President. It was a quirk of Baton Rouge politics that the Mayor of Baton Rouge was also the President of the Western Baton Rouge Parish, but it hardly mattered. Bill Higgins was king in this city. Hell, in this state.

And Carter wanted to align himself with such a man.

He needed to, if he had any hope of becoming mayor in eighteen months.

But he should have known better. He was an O’Neill, after all—scandal was practically his middle name. He thought that he could keep the dirty part of his life away from the clean part.

But honestly, when had he ever gotten what he wanted?

“You okay?” Amanda asked, and he realized he’d been silent far too long.

“How do we fix this?”

“Well—” Amanda leaned back in her chair “—we can get them to retract, but I’m not sure we can ‘fix’ what’s really the issue here, Carter.”

“Of course we can fix this. Anything can be fixed.” He knew this for a fact. A lifetime of bribery and extortion, holding the worst of his family at bay like wolves in a storm, had taught him that everyone could be bought and anything worth fixing could be fixed.

Amanda stared at him as if he was something wiggling under a microscope.

“What?”

“Sometimes,” she said, “you look like a different person. You get this expression and it’s like I’ve never seen you before.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Amanda.”

“I’m not. I’m telling you, the mask you wear every damn day slips and the guy underneath it freaks me out a little bit.”

He sighed. Amanda was great, but the frustrated novelist under her brittle public relations/press secretary exterior got a bit old. “What are we going to do about Zoe Madison?” he asked.

“The pregnant lady?” She waved a hand. “I can fix that. I can fix that in my sleep. What’s got me worried is what’s happening with your family. The postponement of your father’s arraignment is hurting us in public opinion. And you didn’t tell me you testified for your mother ten years ago in a criminal case.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, picking up the papers and dumping them in the recycling beside Amanda’s desk.

“Worrying about it is kind of my job, Carter. I need an answer when those questions start coming up again, and they will if you’re going to announce your candidacy for mayor after Christmas.”

The sentence hung there, unanswered.

He was going to do that. That was the plan. The goal.

Yesterday, before his mother’s resurfacing, it seemed like the fruition of years of hard work. The only likely outcome for his life.

Today, it seemed ridiculous. Announcing his candidacy for mayor while his father went to jail, his mother was snooping around in the shadows, and there was a missing ruby kicking around somewhere?

“That is still the plan, right?” Amanda asked.

“Yes,” he said, because he still wanted it.

“Then don’t put your head in the sand. We need a strategy and I need the truth.”

“Our strategy,” he said in a tone designed to remind her that she worked for him, “is that you say ‘no comment.’”

“The public—”

“The attention will die down. It always does. We just need to stay the course.”

“Stay the course?” She watched him dubiously. “This can’t be you talking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you haven’t backed down from a fight once since taking this office. And now you want to stay the course? You think that’s gonna work?”

“When it stops, if it stops working, we’ll come up with a new strategy.”

Amanda blew out a long breath, said, “You’re the boss,” and leaned back in her chair, kicking her feet up on the desk. “Now,” she said, her eyes alight, “about Zoe Madison. We’ve got three choices. We can issue a statement saying you’ve never seen the girl and you are not the father.”

“Will that work?”

“In time, but in that time, Blackwell’s going to be going through your family’s dirty laundry, of which there seems to be plenty. And sure, we can fight for some retractions, but it’ll be like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.”

“We need a distraction.”

“Exactly. We can dig up a whole bunch of dirt and annihilate her in the press.”

“Annihilate?” he asked, liking the idea.

“But she’s practically picture-perfect. If we go after her, it’ll make us look like baby kitten killers.”

“Okay, what’s our second choice?” he asked, sorry to see annihilation off the table.

“Well, I’ve got an idea, and frankly it should take the heat off your shady family.”

“Good,” he said, ready for anything.

“Don’t be too eager,” she said. “This might hurt a little.” There was something about Amanda’s smile that made him nervous.

Very nervous.

THE PREGNANCY CRAVINGS were not to be messed with.

They were primitive and so strong they could last for days, taking Zoe places no sane woman should go.

She’d learned that the hard way in month three when she’d left the house in need of ice cream and had systematically torn the head off every person that had crossed her path. She’d made a four-year-old cry for accidentally riding her bike over Zoe’s foot.

A four-year-old! Zoe was going to be a great mother.

Now, Zoe stayed home and rode the cravings out like she was tied to the saddle of a runaway horse. Or she called in reinforcements.

“You sure you’re all right?” her mom asked, wrapping one of Zoe’s scarves around her neck. “That thing in the paper—”

“A huge misunderstanding, Mom,” Zoe said, lying through her teeth. Her picture in the paper this morning had been a shocker, and that little trickle of guilt she’d been ignoring all night had turned into a geyser. She was on the front page of the paper and the story made it seem as though Carter O’Neill was one step down from an axe murderer.

Deputy Deadbeat Daddy. It was awful.

Well, some cold, no-nonsense voice in her head whispered, what did you expect, standing on a chair like that?

“The mayor’s office will handle it, I’m sure,” Zoe insisted, wanting her mother out of the house with such force it was hard not to just open the door and stand there, waiting for her to get the hint.

But Mom had brought salsa.

So she was trying to be polite.

“You sure you don’t mind if I take this?” her mom asked, looking down at the green-blue ends of the scarf. “It looks so pretty on you.” It did. It does. It was her favorite scarf, but Mom needed to leave so Zoe could dunk her fresh batch of ginger cookies into the salsa in peace.

There were parts of this pregnancy business that required privacy, and this newfound obsession with ginger cookies and salsa was her own little secret.

“Absolutely, wear it in health. It goes great with your new hair,” Zoe said, and as if cued, her mom smoothed a hand down the back of her new short silver bob.

“It does look good, doesn’t it?” she asked, preening slightly in the mirror beside the door.

Go. Zoe thought. Leave. Please.

“You look much younger,” she said instead.

Her mom beamed, tossing the scarf around her neck with a little flair, and Zoe smiled. “You don’t look like you’re about to be a grandmother, that’s for sure,” she said, feeling tubby next to her mom’s hard-won thinness. Seven years ago, Mom had sworn she wasn’t going to turn fifty in a size fourteen and she hadn’t. She’d put her mind to it and lost twenty-five pounds. But that was Penny Madison for you. Once her mind was made up, that was it. Done. Deal. The weight had no choice but to leave in defeat.

“Okay,” Penny said. “I need to get to work, but I’ll see you tonight? We can go get a new slipcover for that couch.”

“What’s wrong with the scarf?” she asked, pulling on the pretty black fringe of the Spanish-style scarf that was draped over the back of her blue velvet couch. It had been part of a costume from La Bohème adaption she’d done in Houston a few years ago.

“It looks a little trashy, sweetie. We’ll get you something in a nice tweed.”

Zoe didn’t get a chance to say over her dead body, because her mom clasped her hands over Zoe’s face, squeezing her cheeks just a little so that her lips pursed. An old routine her mom refused to let go of, despite the fact that Zoe was thirty-seven and five months pregnant.

You will always be my little girl, Penny was fond of saying. And somehow she always made it sound like a jail sentence.

“Okay,” Zoe said, the words distorted by her squished face. “My last class is over at seven.”

“I’ll pick you up here at seven-thirty,” her mom said, and pecked Zoe’s pursed lips. “Remember,” she said, her eyes flicking over to Zoe’s kitchen counter, where a batch of ginger cookies sat getting cold. “Every pound you gain now is one you’ll have to lose after the baby gets here.”

Was it illegal to punch your mother? Zoe wondered, anger billowing through her. Or merely immoral? Because immoral she had no problem with. She was, after all, a political scandal in the making.

“Bye, honey,” Penny said before Zoe could even curl a fist, and then she was gone. The Craving-Goddess-turned-nightmare walked out the door, Zoe’s favorite scarf trailing behind her.

“Oh, thank God,” Zoe muttered and turned back to her cookies.

She cranked the lid off the jar of salsa and poured some into a chipped china bowl, because she wasn’t a heathen, and then dunked the nearest cookie into the tomato mixture.

It was still disgusting, not a good fit at all. Salsa required salt, not sugar. Seriously, what possessed her? She eyed the cookie in her hand and dunked it again.

And why couldn’t she stop?

A knock on the door practically shook the windows loose, and she quickly put down the cookie and slid the salsa into her fridge.

Wiping her hands and any stray crumbs from her face, she opened the door.