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.
Then the dam had burst and it had happened all over again. The same nightmare, only this time it was even uglier. For the first few days she had been in denial. When she’d been forced to confront the truth—when her husband, in a rare sober moment, had confessed to everything—she’d been devastated. Addie, the old housekeeper who was the nearest thing to a mother she’d had since Mariah Jones had died, had been ready to retire to South Carolina with her granddaughter when the senator’s troubles had begun. She had stayed on for Sarah’s sake and then returned when Stan’s scandal had broken, knowing how desperately Sarah would need her.
While every dirty little secret in her husband’s life—every secret but one, thank God—had been exposed, the senator had chosen to hole up in a beach house in North Carolina belonging to his friend, lawyer-lobbyist Clive Meadows. There’d been no reason to expect him to stand by her—he’d never been there for her at any other time in her life, but she could have done with a bit of moral support.
Looking back, Sarah knew he’d made the right choice. His presence would only have stirred up the past. One scandal at a time was all she could deal with.
Thank God for Great-Aunt Emma’s legacy. Sarah had visited her maternal grandmother’s sister several times as a small child and fallen in love with the stark old farmhouse. The tiny community of Snowden, North Carolina was only a short distance off the highway they always took driving down from Washington to Duck, on the Outer Banks, where her father had the use of Clive’s palatial beach house.
When her mother had still been living and the two of them used to go to the beach without the senator, they had usually stopped to visit her mother’s only relative. On rare occasions they stayed overnight. Sarah had been eleven the last time they’d spent an entire weekend. She remembered waking in the night with a terrible ache in the pit of her belly and being certain she was about to die. Hearing her crying, both Aunt Emma and her mother had hurried to her room.
“Mariah Gilbert, didn’t you even tell the child what to expect?” Emma had demanded. Her great-aunt had never liked the senator, and preferred to ignore the fact that her niece had married him.
“They teach that sort of thing at school, Aunt Emma. I’m sure she knows all about it, don’t you, darling?”
All Sarah had known was that she was dying. It had been Emma who had explained that her body was preparing her to be a mother. And that, she remembered, had terrified her even more than the bellyache.
But between the two women they had made her understand that what she was feeling, while unpleasant, was perfectly normal. Then Aunt Emma had brought her a cup of hot, sugared and watered-down whisky, while her mother had located and filled an old rubber hot-water bottle.
After that they hadn’t stopped as often. Her mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and Sarah had all but forgotten her great-aunt over the next few years. When Mariah had died, Emma had gone to the funeral, driven there and back in a single day by a neighbor. Sarah had had only a few minutes alone with her. J. Abernathy, distraught over the loss of the wife he had neglected for years, had insisted on having his daughter constantly at his side.
The two women had corresponded, though. Sarah had kept every one of her great-aunt’s letters. When Emma had died at the age of eighty-four, she’d left her entire estate, consisting of a house, a Hudson automobile up on blocks in the shed, and sixty acres of land, partly wooded, partly under cultivation, to her great-niece, Sarah Mariah.
It was almost as if she’d known that one day soon Sarah would need a place of her own. The senator—he was still called that, even after being forced to retire in disgrace—had the place on Wye River, but he’d given up the Watergate apartment where she’d practically grown up. Sarah and Stan had bought a tiny house in Arlington, but they’d had to sell it to pay his lawyers. To Stan’s credit, he wouldn’t allow her to go into the small trust she’d received from her mother, much less sell Aunt Emma’s house.
Her father had been no help at all, either financially or emotionally, but she hadn’t expected anything from that source. In the end, Sarah had been left with the one thing she valued more than anything in the world.
Privacy. A place of her own where she could retreat, where the world couldn’t follow. And if that included loneliness, so be it. She had cut off her friends early on during the first scandal—those that hadn’t already cut her. Here the neighbors were few, the closest being almost a mile away. If any of them had connected Emma Gilbert’s great-niece-who-married-that-nice-congressman with the recent Washington scandals, they never mentioned it. But then, they weren’t inclined to drop by for coffee and gossip.
She missed her old friends, missed the volunteer work she’d been doing for years—the children she’d worked with. Now she kept to herself, paid her utility bills and made the monthly payment to the grandparents of her late husband’s secret illegitimate daughter.
What Stan had been involved in had been depraved by anyone’s standards to the extent that his political future had been shattered beyond repair. One of the participants had been a juvenile at the time. Her name had not been released, but shortly before Stan’s fatal wreck she had called to tell him she’d just had his baby and now she needed money. Utterly distraught, Stan had promised to send what he could, even though at the time they’d been scraping the bottom of the barrel to pay for his defense. He had hung up the phone, blurted out the whole pathetic story, then buried his head in Sarah’s lap and cried.
“She…she named her K-Kitty. Oh, God, Sarah, what have I done?”
“Shh, we’ll deal with it. Maybe when this is all over we can adopt her.”
But before they could make any arrangements, Stan had been killed. By then, a sixteen-year-old girl from Virginia Beach who claimed Stan had fathered her child had been the last thing on Sarah’s mind.
Somehow she had managed to get through the following days and do all that needed doing. Her father’s old friend, Clive Meadows, had been a big help. The day after the funeral, when a man named Sam Pough had called, claiming his daughter had run off and left him and his wife stuck with her bastard, it had actually taken her several minutes to sort it all out.
If Clive had been there at the time, she probably would have simply handed him the
