Chapter Eleven -- The Secretary

 “I can’t face her down again,” Stanley Thorne said to Irene Hanley. He had opened the wooden door but still stood behind the tightly latched storm door.  “I can’t do it.”

“For god’s sakes Stanley, open the door. No one is facing down anyone. The committee is in agreement. I’m sure it will be. She’s our best bet and what’s the governor going to do? Refuse? I don’t think so. Besides, somebody must owe her something.”

“I lost too and I didn’t kill myself,” Thorne muttered. “And I certainly don’t have half a million dollars worth of checks to the governor in my closet either. I can tell you that,” he muttered as he unlatched and then carefully re­-latched the doors as Irene strode through.

“No one would ever think of looking, Stanley.” Irene patted his arm on her way past him toward the dining room where he kept the central committee files. “We’re always sorry you lost, Stanley. You know that,” she said over her shoulder as he followed her down the hallway.

“It is unspeakable,” Patsy said in her new, toneless voice.

“Seems more like poetic justice to me,” Matthew said, trying for levity and winning a rising of his wife’s eyes to his, but no smile. He couldn’t remember her smiling. He couldn’t remember the last time she smiled. He couldn’t remember her smile at all.

“It’s despicable,” she said and reached for the glass on the coffee table with its smidgen of scotch and three slivers of ice. Downing it she handed it up to Matthew who took it.

 ”What in the hell is wrong with all of you big dicks anyway? You can’t find Lucille’s fingerprints on any of this mess? What’s wrong with those big investigators up in Springfield? Are you all getting paid extra to stall? Just long enough for Snakes to slide through his final term untarnished? He just keeps smiling and bobbing that head up and down. He grins like a dog. He flippin’ nominates Carlene Deluccio to head the Licensing Bureau and now you can’t find anything on her either. How can you all find nothing on Carlene Deluccio? First she inherits the keys to the racetrack and now has bought herself a key to the governor’s mansion. You boys are just sitting around scratching yourselves. Probably scratching one another, too.”

“What exactly do you think I can do about any of this?” Matthew Grosen asked his wife. His voice was nearly as toneless as hers and he surprised himself realizing he wasn’t even angered at her words. After awhile, he supposed, you really just don’t hear it.

“You can bring me another drink,” Patsy said.

He went to the kitchen where the scotch and melting bowl of ice set on the counter. He put a handful of ice in Patsy’s glass and carefully poured a level shot of scotch and drank it back. He poured a second level shot, dumped it into Patsy’s glass and after looking at it put in another. He returned to her in the silent living room.

Patsy wasn’t alone in her tirade. It was the tirade of the newspapers and talk radio, accusations appeared everywhere on the goddamn public access channel and now some idiot kids were doing something on the Internet, blabbing or blogging or something. It was all they talked about in the Haden County State’s Attorney’s office. Matthew Grosen was sick of it all.

And it wasn’t just Haden County any longer. There didn’t seem to be a state investigator or a public counselor or a law official of any sort south of the sacred halls of Springfield who didn’t suspect the others of covering up what looked to them all like a governor tied into the racetracks in Southern Illinois. These men, “the dicks” as Patsy termed them all, crossed paths constantly. There wasn’t a one who didn’t believe the governor guilty of something. Few voiced such things to one another, though. They had no evidence to indict. There was no simple act that their superiors deemed strong enough to bet their careers upon. “This is the governor,” they continually reminded one another.

Not even the politicians wanted a stink. Not even, or rather, certainly not Paulie’s natural enemies, the Downstate Republicans. If anyone stood to lose in a Southern Illinois horse racing scandal it was them. Indeed, as it appeared to upstate and downstate pols, everyone stood to gain  the most if business continued as usual.

So as the barbs of incompetence and accusations of criminality were leveled at dicks from their friends, enemies, local newspapers and ultimately late night monologues, the dicks continued to bob their heads, purse their lips thoughtfully, repeat their commitment to following all leads and repeatedly reminded their accusers that no matter what, “In the United States of America a man was innocent until proven guilty.”

As Matthew Grosen and his colleagues choked out the words again and again Powell Paulie basked in the glow of a decent win and was exercising fully its rewarding doling out of appreciative patronage. “Deliver the bacon to their doors,” Buddy Nowak repeated his friend’s old adage while accompanying the governor on a number of swings through Downstate to cut ribbons on new highway projects and open  new branch agencies.

This was certainly not the first time Illinois politics had provided such fodder or that pieces had trickled across Matthew Grosen’s desk. But it was the first time it had radiated from his jurisdiction. And it was personal.

It wasn’t that Grosen was so above the fray he hadn’t ever greased things along, glanced the other way, appreciated campaign contributions of all kinds when needed. But the kind of money-handling and secret-keeping opportunities that returned the big bucks were gut wrenching to him. This was partially his moral code, which he attributed to his pioneer ancestors or, as Patsy called it, “the Grosen male indoctrination.” But his visceral repugnance at large scale malfeasance was also that even the rumored amounts of the various pay offs always seemed puny compared to the horrific risk: To be stripped of your personal honor.

So like most of his brethren, he hated the men he suspected of these things as despicable. But he did not hamper or expose those he suspected. For that would have been dishonorable as well.

In these ways Grosen suspected he was like the average American. He believed a certain degree of deal-making was inevitable, even advisory, to keep things moving; even if some of it would be distasteful to him. Even those who would never take a bribe, even those who would never offer – “all of us schmucks” Grosen would include himself – accept that some people did and that it was useful and necessary.

“And then we schmucks go back to our tiny piece of business-as-usual and continue to vote our self interests year after year.” If Matthew Grosen had told this once to Patsy and Kyle he had told them a hundred times. “That’s just how people are. Few of us are really crooks. But we all feel capable, thus slightly reprehensible and so we always feel a tad bit guilty ourselves.”

For all of that, Matthew Grosen and most of the rest of the dicks involved in the ongoing investigations, would like to find someone to blame for this. It wasn’t Lucille. From all accounts she appeared innocent of wrong-doing . So if she wanted to take her late husband’s seat back from Carlene, and the idiots on the Democratic Central Committee wanted to do that to themselves, well have at it.

“Poetic justice,” was Matthew Grosen’s take on it.  Even though, like Patsy, as the unacknowledged betrayal grew between them, Matthew Grosen had really hoped that Lucille Wolf would just go away.

Upon assuming the Haden County Commissioner seat that Carlene Deluccio relinquished with such protest, Lucille Temple Wolf reinstated her maiden name. She was in accord with the rest of Haden that Lucille Wolf did have to go. However it was Lucille, alone, who was pleased with Carlene’s big stink, which embarrassed the commission and the party. But it proved an opportunity for Lucille to say of her own ambitions, “I feel I owe to Bill, for the good of all Haden County.”

Deluccio had not resigned during the weeks it took for the legislature to confirm her appointment as Governor Paulie’s Secretary of Licensing., which it did overwhelmingly. But then she refused to step down from her commission seat, intending to hold both seats concurrently. She responded incredulously to Irene Hanley’s conflict queries the same as she had during her state confirmation hearings. Owning a racetrack, Carlene told the legislators, gave her expertise for the job as Secretary of Licensing. Similarly, she told the central committee, all the better for Haden County to have such a well connected state appointee sitting on their commission. Furthermore, she told the local paper, the governor said she could have both seats.

When that little snip Irene Hanley had found the prohibition in a deep subsection of state rules guiding central committees, Carlene ignored her. Finally Buddy Nowak called and expressed the governor’s wishes that Carlene serve only as his Secretary, that the post was too important to waste her time on county affairs as well.

 Indeed a schedule conflict arose immediately and Carlene did not attend Lucille’s swearing-in ceremony in late February.

 “This seems the exact definition of surreal,” Lucille told Shelby later that week. They were lunching near the community college in Vernon after a spa morning to celebrate.  “I am serving out Bill’s current term. It seems a century has passed since that victory.”

Her mother still wore black but they had decided earlier, during their pedicures, that Lucille would lighten to navy in the spring. Shelby thought this was adequate. Her mother looked great in both colors. She now watched her mother dab her eyes with a lovely handkerchief, ivory with deep brown embroidered lace edges. Where does she find this stuff? Shelby wondered.

“Well, I have a bit more surrealism for you,” Shelby giggled. “Grand-Mama wishes to know if you’re planning on adding ‘Prentiss’ back into your ‘á tois of names’.” Shelby giggled again and then sobered. “You aren’t are you?”

Lucille looked up dry-eyed, not startled by the question. “No,” she said.

Mother and daughter had agreed that long ago time they sat across the dining room table with Bill Wolf's body still upstairs that Shelby would not merely move into her grandmother’s home but would abandon the Wolf name all together. Even in the midst of that insanity, Shelby, also grieving and betrayed, grasped immediately that it was a sensible course out of the catastrophe. “Grand’Mama,” however, had been purely her idea.

“This will not define our lives,” Lucille had said at the dining room table all that time ago. And Shelby had nodded.

It was after this lunch that Shelby came to apply the word “surreal” to the house Bill Wolf had moved them to after he was elected to his first term. For the rest of her life, when she recalled that house, she tended to remember it as Kyle usually watched it, from across the park, at some distance. It appeared to Shelby as a surreal painting, at once seeming substantial and equally made of nothingness. She saw it as though only half the molecules were in place. In her memory it stood in the exact shape of a house but gaps surrounded every molecule, it was like a mosaic without its clay, seeming about to crumble into a pile of rubble.

Shelby had never gone back inside the house. Her mother had brought her clothing and her grandmother had sent for a few pieces of her bedroom furniture. That had been that. The school in the East was never mentioned. Without fuss Shelby enrolled in the region’s community college and attended in Vernon County, the most collegiate of its campuses. She would  transfer to Northern Illinois University for her degree. She and her mother had also agreed that Shelby would soon be done with Downstate.

Her mother had moved out within days as well. She put the surreal house on the market. She too took only her personal affects and a few pieces of furniture. She rented a townhouse in a new neighborhood near the old courthouse. It was a tad chic, Shelby thought, despite being in Haden.

“It wouldn’t help you in Haden anyway,” Shelby said, thinking still of the Prentiss name she had reclaimed. She found herself unable to hold her mother’s gaze. She picked up her fork to pick further at her salad.

“No,” Lucille burst out with a laugh, “the Prentiss name probably wouldn’t help me in Hades where surely Grand’Mama also owns an acre or two. Or more likely, those boys left her in hawk for that too. Maybe as a result she might just escape at the last possible moment.” Lucille laughed some more then again dried her eyes, this time genuinely damp and reached across to pat her daughter’s hand.  “Darling, you assure your grandmother that I have no intention of further sullying her name. I am working as hard as I can to get out of her precious quad-counties. You assure her of that.”

Shelby looked up surprised. “You’re leaving? You just got the seat.”

“You know I can’t stay in Haden County. Your grandmother certainly does. Or she’s getting dotty.”

“But your seat?”

“Oh my sweet dear, there aren’t even two years left in the term and in no way on this planet could I win Bill’s seat in a Democratic primary.  I’ve got to admit I even impressed myself that I wrangled the appointment. Not that I didn’t deserve it. But, truthfully, that’s my skill, wrangling, arranging. I don’t think this glad-handing and sweet-talking is my favorite side of the business. I think that’s your side,” Lucille smiled and with a final pat lifted her own hand to reach for the bill.

Her daughter raised her face which had lit up at what she took for a compliment, at what her mother had meant as a compliment. They smiled at one another, pleased with one another and with themselves. The pleasure slightly surprised both of them. This was new territory for mother and daughter.

The headlines moved slowly off Wolf’s shoebox and never touched Carlene. Her appointment fell deep into a story about five additional cabinet-level appointments. The headline was about the most controversial, pro-business environmental appointee and then the story was gone. The series of check-by-check discovery stories were still making the front page, albeit below the fold.

 The checks were turning out to be from dead people and long closed accounts. Others were from legitimate donors who ranged from complete innocents to outraged innocents. A few came from firms whose aggregate contributions had previously hit the legal limit. It was a grab-bag of potentialities, but still not a great deal more than a shoebox of loose ends. A gubernatorial campaign’s treasurer could have likely handled them all without a single headline. But they were found in the closet of a prominent suicide. The residue implications were of opportunism by Wolf inside the governor’s campaign. That’s what Nowak had said repeatedly to the investigating agencies. “But we’ll never know,” Nowak would shrug.

It seemed too coincidental to Matthew Grosen. In fact it seemed impossible for Haden County to have both such a big winner and such a big loser grow so quickly out of a gubernatorial election. Wolf had lost three times over, Grosen mused: His commission seat, his campaign and his life. And Carlene got two payoffs:  Wolf’s seat and then oversight of her horseracing industry. So finally, when the checks led nowhere, Grosen managed to push someone in Springfield to probe deeper into Carlene Deluccio’s affairs.

That Paulie owed Carlene was obvious, he argued, but no matter how you cut it, Wolf seemed nothing but a means. Maybe not even that, maybe Bill Wolf was nothing but a convenience. Grosen couldn’t see Paulie having anything to lose or gain from Bill Wolf.

 Paulie surely had plenty to gain from Carlene Deluccio. So much that not even a rather grandly orchestrated route to a commission seat filled the debt. Grosen suspected that Snakes must now have something to lose from Carlene as well.

So what was this stupid shoebox about? Paying off Wolf in traceable checks? Dumb. Not even Bill Wolf could be that naïve, Grosen thought. And payoff for what? Handling something with Carlene? He’d already given up his seat to her. Or was the shoebox just a convenient smokescreen to keep the audience from noticing the racetrack owner taking the reins of the licensing bureau? Who would figure to appoint the racetrack owner head of the racetrack licensing unless nobody was paying attention. Grosen could perfectly see Nowak setting something like that up. It reeked of his touch.

But no matter how Grosen looked at the suicide, that  seemed to be nothing more than Nowak’s dumb luck, extending the smokescreen well beyond the daily news cycle.

Matthew Grosen had no evidential reason to think these thoughts. But he did have a feeling he could not shake despite the lack of evidence. When he stood in Bill Wolf’s bedroom, looking at the mess his former friend had made, listening to the semi-coherent Lucille down the hall with Officer Duane Jesse, Matthew Grosen had thought of Buddy Nowak, could nearly feel him standing in the room beside him.

The state people hadn’t yet arrived. Not even Jesse would have been there yet if Matt hadn’t told Lucille to call 911 when she hung up with him. As Matthew Grosen stood in Bill and Lucille’s bedroom – having somehow known the moment he answered the phone to Lucille’s voice what he’d basically find – he accepted for himself that it was a suicide.

 Yet as Matthew Grosen stood in that room, looking at Bill and looking away, the state’s attorney pictured Nowak and the increasingly haggard Wolf at last summer’s Hambletonian. Nowak had Wolf by the arm and was talking and talking. The grip looked tight and vaguely unfriendly. Bill was looking down and grimacing. Perhaps that was why Grosen thought the grip too tight. Wolf was looking down, grimacing and nodding and nodding.

Chapter 12 – The Wedding

 “escort me to wedding?”

Kyle was surprised at the unexpected text and more surprised at the request. For ten months Shelby continued to answer his texts, but she didn’t initiate. Her answers were brief. She answered his calls, but never called herself. She ended them with a rush to class, late for a meeting, an interview was scheduled. Twice she hadn’t picked up.

She had become perfect again the day last August she’d stepped out of his truck at Northern. The past two years slipped from her shoulders and disappeared. He helped her move what amounted to a version of camping gear into the single room on a women’s only non-drinking floor where she intended to spend the next three to four years finishing undergrad, obtaining a law degree.

He had reaffirmed his offer to help her move after she told him he would not be invited to stay and that she did not anticipate seeing him for some time. “This is it for me,” she had told him. “I don’t have time for Haden County and I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

Kyle had put his hands in his back pockets and kicked at the ground and pursed his lips. He had never won an argument with her despite feeling he had ultimately proven correct many times.  He gave a shrug without looking up. He didn’t believe they would be far apart from one another for any length of time. It didn’t seem possible. Indeed, it seemed unlikely.

“Are you paying attention?” she’d asked him.

That had annoyed him and he looked up at her and knew his lips were a mean slit. He had practiced this face in the mirror in junior high and she had stood beside him telling him when he had it right. Today she burst out laughing and threw her arms around him and then leaned back and kissed him on the cheek.

The two stood facing one another.

“You don’t really care what I want, do you?” she asked

“I do. I care what you want. I just don’t always think you know how best to get it.”

“And you think you do?” she teased.

“Yes,” he said simply.

Shelby dropped her teasing and looked straight at her best friend. “You do,” she said. And then she added. “I’m not like Lucille.”

“Oh. Really?” Kyle said and opened his eyes wide to mimic surprise.

“Really,” Shelby said, not laughing back. “I am going to be the first female governor of Illinois. I’ll always need a loyal aide-de-camp. I don’t know if I can afford anything else.”

“Okay,” Kyle said. He was somber faced again. He believed she meant what she said.

“My mother will always be an aide-de-camp,” Shelby said. “Some people always will be.”

 They weren’t teenagers anymore, although just barely not. But they’d seen a lot and they trusted one another. And they were aged enough to see the value in both.

“Okay,” Kyle said again.

“That is absolutely all I know and as far as I’m going on this point,” she said.

“Okay,” Kyle said. And this time his tone was conclusive.

“Okay,” Shelby nodded.

Kyle had remained at home, living with what he could only think of as grieving parents. “It’s like they lost a child or something,” he would have told Shelby, if she had been there. But she was not there and he did not tell her. They never mentioned Bill Wolf’s death. Not he and Shelby, not he and his parents.

 Kyle began criminal justice and law enforcement classes at the community college immediately after high school. It was expected he would continue at SIU where he would also get his law degree and return to Haden. Despite a more linear pattern, he was a half-year behind Shelby. He had dropped all of his courses the semester Shelby quietly became a Prentiss and his mother quietly broke down. He had never returned as a full-time student. He’d taken this spring off as well, to help with the start-up of a youth camp his father’s department endorsed. He had been working and saving money.

By the time he received Shelby’s text, without any discussion, not even with himself, he’d applied and been admitted to Northern’s business school in the fall.

“I’ve been telling you my whole life, Dad,” Kyle said when his father brought in the acceptance envelope. Kyle meant about leaving Haden County. He had not told his parents he was not continuing in law.

“Well I’m not paying for it,” his father said.

The statement was so far off base in Kyle’s mind he wondered if he’d heard his father correctly.  “I, I didn’t expect you to pay for it.” He had not expected their financial support. They seemed broken. He had only allowed himself to hope that they would heal enough for him to feel he could leave. They would, he told himself. They had to so he wouldn’t join them.

 He would have liked to check this, too, against Shelby’s read of his parents. But even if such a thing was possible, and he understood enough to know it would never be possible again, her opinion didn’t really matter. He knew whatever came that he would continue to tell himself they were fine without him, because he could not remain here.

“I don’t charge you rent,” his father said now. “I buy your food.”

Kyle was again surprised. He and his father drank beer together, watched football together, talked politics together. He had no idea where these sentences were coming from. “Dad, I don’t know what we’re talking about here. Do you want me to pay you rent?”

“No, goddamn it,” Matthew Grosen said, “I don’t want you go to chasing after tail and using college as an excuse.”

Kyle shocked both of them, shooting to his feet and clenching his fists and screaming, “Why do you always do that? What is it with you two? What has she ever done to either of you?”

“She’s using you,” Patsy’s voice from the kitchen door made both men jump, Matt from his seat as Kyle whirled. She was leaning in the jam. “She has always just let you tag along, Sweetie, and we just hate seeing it. We just hate seeing you treated like poor Bill Wolf.”

Matthew Grosen looked across at his son and nodded his agreement. Then he sat down back down and gestured Kyle to sit as well.

Kyle did and took a deep breath and then another. “It just isn’t like what you think it is,” he finally said, looking at his hands.  “I’m not love struck following her up there. I’m not following her up for sex,” he said, looking up at his father, “Trust me on this,” he said. “Maybe I do love her, but it’s not that. It’s just that I am a part of whatever it is she’s going to do. And it’s sort of the other way too.”

“I don’t think so,” Patsy said, still leaning, watching her son’s back. “I don’t see anything changing about her life for you.”

“Well,” Kyle said, and turned to his mother, “no, not as much maybe. But she really is going to be governor. I can’t not be a part of that. I can’t help it. I don’t want to help it. And I’m escorting her to the wedding.”

“Jesus Christ,” Patsy said and turned and left the room.

The wedding was going to be a small, private affair, which disappointed Lucille but she was used to disappointment and it did seem a small price to pay for the long-term reward.

 It would be held in Haden, so no matter how small and private, it certainly wouldn’t be secret. So there was that. What an opportunity to not-invite. She would not invite any board member who had voted her off. She would invite not a single central committee member who had ever sucked up to Carlene and that went for the commissioners as well. “So many not to invite,” she had chortled to her daughter. Not to invite Al Plover. So that part would be fun.

Who to invite was more difficult. She had a funny impulse to invite Matthew Grosen, who had been so good to her that day. He had done it for Bill, of course, which made it both more dear and more difficult to invite them.

“I wish that silly little Patsy Harrison would just get over herself,” she had said just last week to Ruth Prentiss.

 Lucille decided to ask Shelby about the Grosens.

 “A June wedding,” Lucille had gushed to Shelby. “So much to do!”

Her mother had come up to the city. She needed a trousseau and was “getting a few things” for Shelby as well.

“The campaign starts the minute we get back. Easier spending now than when the press starts monitoring every report,” Lucille said. “It’s legal,” she answered to Shelby’s raised eyebrows, “but it looks frivolous. Now this is a great deal more scrutiny than you’ve had before. You’ll be the step-daughter of the future governor.”

“Not exactly,” Shelby laughed. “Besides, I live in a nun’s room, Mother and study like a monk. I only come out to attend classes and occasionally network with the very ‘right kind’ of people as determined by my esteemed professors.  You make a far greater stir than I.”

Both women laughed, but Shelby regretted saying it. Lucille’s connubial background had been picked up by the press and she had confided to Shelby that she worried this marriage, less than eighteen months since her widowhood, would revive the negative headlines.

Indeed there had been headlines. Lucille Wolf had been escorted to her husband’s funeral by Lieutenant Governor Thornton Wilson whom the governor had tapped as the administration’s show of sorrow for a loss of one of its own. Paulie was correct in his assumption that his own appearance would displease Lucille.

Thornton had reappeared to swear her into office barely two months later.  He had been widowed, more decorously by cancer, midway through his prior term as Paulie’s lieutenant. He was ambitious and wanted another wife.

Lucille had shed her spring mourning suits by summer and began attending a variety of state functions on Thornton’s arm. She was introduced as Lucille Temple and little was made of some commissionership she held Downstate. The few gossip column mentions of her multiple marriages fanned out quickly.

The courtship created quite a stir in Haden County, but not as would be expected. It seemed everyone wanted the marriage. For one thing, no one wanted her to stay. Besides, the lieutenant governor needed a wife and it was becoming increasingly apparent he could become  governor in the next election. It looked to Haden County like the proverbial win-win.

“I want her seat,” Stanley Thorne told Irene Hanley.

“Why you and not me?” she had asked, quite annoyed.

“Because I’ll be the one to win her the mansion,” he said.

Irene ignored him. She was having just about enough of Stanley Thorne and wondered who else she could get to run for central committee and get him replaced as the treasurer. Although, she admitted to herself, it wasn’t easy to get a treasurer.

Haden County had already won during Thornton’s courtship. Another road got underway – amazing to get two road starts in a single term!  The new agency branches Paulie had doled out little more than a year before were expanded by the lieutenant governor. Each economic development project had Lucille and Thornton holding either side of the ribbon, smiling at one another, each at the head of long lineups of additional smiling dignitaries. The state’s attorney’s office got some new positions as well. It felt that everyone in Haden got a little something good from this serendipitous state of affairs.

 “Did you tell him I am going to be the first female governor?” were Shelby’s first words when her mother called to say she had been on her first private, actual date with Thornton, outside their colliding public agendas.

“I might have mentioned it,” her mother had laughed over the phone. “But I am sure he has not so bored of the subject, so do not let this deter you from reminding him from time to time.”

In the early glow of finding such a fortuitous match, the happy couple had thought to wait until Lucille’s term concluded and have the big Springfield wedding to launch Thornton’s campaign. But it was become increasingly apparent that Paulie wasn’t going to weather the investigations. A wedding accompanying Thornton’s unfortunate ascent into the governor’s mansion would be unseemly, they decided.

So they decided to have the wedding quickly, determined to appear old-hat at marriage  before – although they never voiced this aloud – becoming the First Couple of Illinois.

Events nearly overtook them. Lucille and Thornton never unpacked until they moved into the mansion. Once the snowball started rolling over Paulie there was no stopping it. In the middle of their honeymoon – five nights in Toronto – the governor was indicted for accepting racetrack stock from Carlene Deluccio. They cut the honeymoon short.

Paulie called a press conference, denounced the lies and fired Deluccio.

 Carlene phoned Victor’s lawyer who immediately phoned the prosecutors who in turn spared her jail time in exchange for testimony. Victor’s lawyer went on to negotiate down her IRS fine and reinstated six months of back pay for firing without justification or notification.

But the firing of Deluccio didn’t help Paulie any, nor did the convening of a commission, the extolling of personal virtues or the demanding of more investigations. The governor resigned in August. His wife and her personal possessions were long removed to her parents’ estate in northern Illinois. Paulie retired to a suite in downtown Chicago to prepare his defense and await trial. None of which turned out well. He ultimately moved a few blocks over for a room in the Chicago federal prison.

And Stanley Thorne was the Haden County man in the know.

“She bribed him and deducted it,” Stanley Thorne told the central committee. “He won’t escape the IRS,” Thorne said.

 “Don’t be ridiculous,” Irene had sad.

“Yes. Carlene believes, as apparently did Victor, that bribes are a necessary cost for doing business in Illinois. What Carlene also believes is that bribes are therefore permitted business deductions on her IRS filings. Given the history of this state, wouldn’t be surprised if her lawyer convinces them,” he said.

As the central committee members laughed and compared notes as to what they had heard and from whom, Irene turned angrily to Stanley. “How do you know so much about it?”

“She asked me about it. I told her I saw her point.”

 “What?”

“She thought Victor’s lawyers were treating her as if she were stupid and withholding deductions only so they could charge her more. She came to me as a certified public accountant to ask my opinion.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Irene said.

“It made sense to Carlene. She started off just asking if she gave away stock wasn’t that a legitimate deduction. I said it was. And it is,” Stanley said. “I’m serious about her lawyers. She isn’t being charged with anything criminal. Right?”

He looked around the room for consensus.  “She just has to pay civil fines for being late. We suppose it isn’t legal to pay bribes, but they’ve agreed not to prosecute, so the point really isn’t made either way, is it?” Stanley asked.

“But it’s illegal to take them,” Lydia Prince said.

“Well,” drawled Stanley, looking happily at Irene, “you maybe can give them away and you maybe can accept a gift, but you can’t build a highway interchange to a single racetrack and pocket the stocks and not claim them on your own IRS filings, let alone your campaign filings.”

The next day the Springfield papers reported the story exactly as Stanley had told it. The central committee did recommend that Stanley serve out the last six months of the seat that had held four recipients in four years.

Lucille laughed until tears came to her eyes when her husband, Governor Thornton Wilson told her he had confirmed Haden County Commissioner Stanley Thorne to her former seat.

Lucille had not kept tabs on Haden County. She had been incredibly busy moving in, re-appointing the mansion, hosting dinners, arranging and wrangling. Thornton had two years to pull the state out of its embarrassment with Paulie as he built his case to become the next Governor of the Great Stat of Illinois.

Lucille felt she was just the woman to get him there.

Chapter 11 – The Secretary

 “I can’t face her down again,” Stanley Thorne said to Irene Hanley. He had opened the wooden door but still stood behind the tightly latched storm door.  “I can’t do it.”

“For god’s sakes Stanley, open the door. No one is facing down anyone. The committee is in agreement. I’m sure it will be. She’s our best bet and what’s the governor going to do? Refuse? I don’t think so. Besides, somebody must owe her something.”

“I lost too and I didn’t kill myself,” Thorne muttered. “And I certainly don’t have half a million dollars worth of checks to the governor in my closet either. I can tell you that,” he muttered as he unlatched and then carefully re­-latched the doors as Irene strode through.

“No one would ever think of looking, Stanley.” Irene patted his arm on her way past him toward the dining room where he kept the central committee files. “We’re always sorry you lost, Stanley. You know that,” she said over her shoulder as he followed her down the hallway.

“It is unspeakable,” Patsy said in her new, toneless voice.

“Seems more like poetic justice to me,” Matthew said, trying for levity and winning a rising of his wife’s eyes to his, but no smile. He couldn’t remember her smiling. He couldn’t remember the last time she smiled. He couldn’t remember her smile at all.

“It’s despicable,” she said and reached for the glass on the coffee table with its smidgen of scotch and three slivers of ice. Downing it she handed it up to Matthew who took it.

 ”What in the hell is wrong with all of you big dicks anyway? You can’t find Lucille’s fingerprints on any of this mess? What’s wrong with those big investigators up in Springfield? Are you all getting paid extra to stall? Just long enough for Snakes to slide through his final term untarnished? He just keeps smiling and bobbing that head up and down. He grins like a dog. He flippin’ nominates Carlene Deluccio to head the Licensing Bureau and now you can’t find anything on her either. How can you all find nothing on Carlene Deluccio? First she inherits the keys to the racetrack and now has bought herself a key to the governor’s mansion. You boys are just sitting around scratching yourselves. Probably scratching one another, too.”

“What exactly do you think I can do about any of this?” Matthew Grosen asked his wife. His voice was nearly as toneless as hers and he surprised himself realizing he wasn’t even angered at her words. After awhile, he supposed, you really just don’t hear it.

“You can bring me another drink,” Patsy said.

He went to the kitchen where the scotch and melting bowl of ice set on the counter. He put a handful of ice in Patsy’s glass and carefully poured a level shot of scotch and drank it back. He poured a second level shot, dumped it into Patsy’s glass and after looking at it put in another. He returned to her in the silent living room.

Patsy wasn’t alone in her tirade. It was the tirade of the newspapers and talk radio, accusations appeared everywhere on the goddamn public access channel and now some idiot kids were doing something on the Internet, blabbing or blogging or something. It was all they talked about in the Haden County State’s Attorney’s office. Matthew Grosen was sick of it all.

And it wasn’t just Haden County any longer. There didn’t seem to be a state investigator or a public counselor or a law official of any sort south of the sacred halls of Springfield who didn’t suspect the others of covering up what looked to them all like a governor tied into the racetracks in Southern Illinois. These men, “the dicks” as Patsy termed them all, crossed paths constantly. There wasn’t a one who didn’t believe the governor guilty of something. Few voiced such things to one another, though. They had no evidence to indict. There was no simple act that their superiors deemed strong enough to bet their careers upon. “This is the governor,” they continually reminded one another.

Not even the politicians wanted a stink. Not even, or rather, certainly not Paulie’s natural enemies, the Downstate Republicans. If anyone stood to lose in a Southern Illinois horse racing scandal it was them. Indeed, as it appeared to upstate and downstate pols, everyone stood to gain  the most if business continued as usual.

So as the barbs of incompetence and accusations of criminality were leveled at dicks from their friends, enemies, local newspapers and ultimately late night monologues, the dicks continued to bob their heads, purse their lips thoughtfully, repeat their commitment to following all leads and repeatedly reminded their accusers that no matter what, “In the United States of America a man was innocent until proven guilty.”

As Matthew Grosen and his colleagues choked out the words again and again Powell Paulie basked in the glow of a decent win and was exercising fully its rewarding doling out of appreciative patronage. “Deliver the bacon to their doors,” Buddy Nowak repeated his friend’s old adage while accompanying the governor on a number of swings through Downstate to cut ribbons on new highway projects and open  new branch agencies.

This was certainly not the first time Illinois politics had provided such fodder or that pieces had trickled across Matthew Grosen’s desk. But it was the first time it had radiated from his jurisdiction. And it was personal.

It wasn’t that Grosen was so above the fray he hadn’t ever greased things along, glanced the other way, appreciated campaign contributions of all kinds when needed. But the kind of money-handling and secret-keeping opportunities that returned the big bucks were gut wrenching to him. This was partially his moral code, which he attributed to his pioneer ancestors or, as Patsy called it, “the Grosen male indoctrination.” But his visceral repugnance at large scale malfeasance was also that even the rumored amounts of the various pay offs always seemed puny compared to the horrific risk: To be stripped of your personal honor.

So like most of his brethren, he hated the men he suspected of these things as despicable. But he did not hamper or expose those he suspected. For that would have been dishonorable as well.

In these ways Grosen suspected he was like the average American. He believed a certain degree of deal-making was inevitable, even advisory, to keep things moving; even if some of it would be distasteful to him. Even those who would never take a bribe, even those who would never offer – “all of us schmucks” Grosen would include himself – accept that some people did and that it was useful and necessary.

“And then we schmucks go back to our tiny piece of business-as-usual and continue to vote our self interests year after year.” If Matthew Grosen had told this once to Patsy and Kyle he had told them a hundred times. “That’s just how people are. Few of us are really crooks. But we all feel capable, thus slightly reprehensible and so we always feel a tad bit guilty ourselves.”

For all of that, Matthew Grosen and most of the rest of the dicks involved in the ongoing investigations, would like to find someone to blame for this. It wasn’t Lucille. From all accounts she appeared innocent of wrong-doing . So if she wanted to take her late husband’s seat back from Carlene, and the idiots on the Democratic Central Committee wanted to do that to themselves, well have at it.

“Poetic justice,” was Matthew Grosen’s take on it.  Even though, like Patsy, as the unacknowledged betrayal grew between them, Matthew Grosen had really hoped that Lucille Wolf would just go away.

Upon assuming the Haden County Commissioner seat that Carlene Deluccio relinquished with such protest, Lucille Temple Wolf reinstated her maiden name. She was in accord with the rest of Haden that Lucille Wolf did have to go. However it was Lucille, alone, who was pleased with Carlene’s big stink, which embarrassed the commission and the party. But it proved an opportunity for Lucille to say of her own ambitions, “I feel I owe to Bill, for the good of all Haden County.”

Deluccio had not resigned during the weeks it took for the legislature to confirm her appointment as Governor Paulie’s Secretary of Licensing., which it did overwhelmingly. But then she refused to step down from her commission seat, intending to hold both seats concurrently. She responded incredulously to Irene Hanley’s conflict queries the same as she had during her state confirmation hearings. Owning a racetrack, Carlene told the legislators, gave her expertise for the job as Secretary of Licensing. Similarly, she told the central committee, all the better for Haden County to have such a well connected state appointee sitting on their commission. Furthermore, she told the local paper, the governor said she could have both seats.

When that little snip Irene Hanley had found the prohibition in a deep subsection of state rules guiding central committees, Carlene ignored her. Finally Buddy Nowak called and expressed the governor’s wishes that Carlene serve only as his Secretary, that the post was too important to waste her time on county affairs as well.

 Indeed a schedule conflict arose immediately and Carlene did not attend Lucille’s swearing-in ceremony in late February.

 “This seems the exact definition of surreal,” Lucille told Shelby later that week. They were lunching near the community college in Vernon after a spa morning to celebrate.  “I am serving out Bill’s current term. It seems a century has passed since that victory.”

Her mother still wore black but they had decided earlier, during their pedicures, that Lucille would lighten to navy in the spring. Shelby thought this was adequate. Her mother looked great in both colors. She now watched her mother dab her eyes with a lovely handkerchief, ivory with deep brown embroidered lace edges. Where does she find this stuff? Shelby wondered.

“Well, I have a bit more surrealism for you,” Shelby giggled. “Grand-Mama wishes to know if you’re planning on adding ‘Prentiss’ back into your ‘á tois of names’.” Shelby giggled again and then sobered. “You aren’t are you?”

Lucille looked up dry-eyed, not startled by the question. “No,” she said.

Mother and daughter had agreed that long ago time they sat across the dining room table with Bill Wolf's body still upstairs that Shelby would not merely move into her grandmother’s home but would abandon the Wolf name all together. Even in the midst of that insanity, Shelby, also grieving and betrayed, grasped immediately that it was a sensible course out of the catastrophe. “Grand’Mama,” however, had been purely her idea.

“This will not define our lives,” Lucille had said at the dining room table all that time ago. And Shelby had nodded.

It was after this lunch that Shelby came to apply the word “surreal” to the house Bill Wolf had moved them to after he was elected to his first term. For the rest of her life, when she recalled that house, she tended to remember it as Kyle usually watched it, from across the park, at some distance. It appeared to Shelby as a surreal painting, at once seeming substantial and equally made of nothingness. She saw it as though only half the molecules were in place. In her memory it stood in the exact shape of a house but gaps surrounded every molecule, it was like a mosaic without its clay, seeming about to crumble into a pile of rubble.

Shelby had never gone back inside the house. Her mother had brought her clothing and her grandmother had sent for a few pieces of her bedroom furniture. That had been that. The school in the East was never mentioned. Without fuss Shelby enrolled in the region’s community college and attended in Vernon County, the most collegiate of its campuses. She would  transfer to Northern Illinois University for her degree. She and her mother had also agreed that Shelby would soon be done with Downstate.

Her mother had moved out within days as well. She put the surreal house on the market. She too took only her personal affects and a few pieces of furniture. She rented a townhouse in a new neighborhood near the old courthouse. It was a tad chic, Shelby thought, despite being in Haden.

“It wouldn’t help you in Haden anyway,” Shelby said, thinking still of the Prentiss name she had reclaimed. She found herself unable to hold her mother’s gaze. She picked up her fork to pick further at her salad.

“No,” Lucille burst out with a laugh, “the Prentiss name probably wouldn’t help me in Hades where surely Grand’Mama also owns an acre or two. Or more likely, those boys left her in hawk for that too. Maybe as a result she might just escape at the last possible moment.” Lucille laughed some more then again dried her eyes, this time genuinely damp and reached across to pat her daughter’s hand.  “Darling, you assure your grandmother that I have no intention of further sullying her name. I am working as hard as I can to get out of her precious quad-counties. You assure her of that.”

Shelby looked up surprised. “You’re leaving? You just got the seat.”

“You know I can’t stay in Haden County. Your grandmother certainly does. Or she’s getting dotty.”

“But your seat?”

“Oh my sweet dear, there aren’t even two years left in the term and in no way on this planet could I win Bill’s seat in a Democratic primary.  I’ve got to admit I even impressed myself that I wrangled the appointment. Not that I didn’t deserve it. But, truthfully, that’s my skill, wrangling, arranging. I don’t think this glad-handing and sweet-talking is my favorite side of the business. I think that’s your side,” Lucille smiled and with a final pat lifted her own hand to reach for the bill.

Her daughter raised her face which had lit up at what she took for a compliment, at what her mother had meant as a compliment. They smiled at one another, pleased with one another and with themselves. The pleasure slightly surprised both of them. This was new territory for mother and daughter.

The headlines moved slowly off Wolf’s shoebox and never touched Carlene. Her appointment fell deep into a story about five additional cabinet-level appointments. The headline was about the most controversial, pro-business environmental appointee and then the story was gone. The series of check-by-check discovery stories were still making the front page, albeit below the fold.

 The checks were turning out to be from dead people and long closed accounts. Others were from legitimate donors who ranged from complete innocents to outraged innocents. A few came from firms whose aggregate contributions had previously hit the legal limit. It was a grab-bag of potentialities, but still not a great deal more than a shoebox of loose ends. A gubernatorial campaign’s treasurer could have likely handled them all without a single headline. But they were found in the closet of a prominent suicide. The residue implications were of opportunism by Wolf inside the governor’s campaign. That’s what Nowak had said repeatedly to the investigating agencies. “But we’ll never know,” Nowak would shrug.

It seemed too coincidental to Matthew Grosen. In fact it seemed impossible for Haden County to have both such a big winner and such a big loser grow so quickly out of a gubernatorial election. Wolf had lost three times over, Grosen mused: His commission seat, his campaign and his life. And Carlene got two payoffs:  Wolf’s seat and then oversight of her horseracing industry. So finally, when the checks led nowhere, Grosen managed to push someone in Springfield to probe deeper into Carlene Deluccio’s affairs.

That Paulie owed Carlene was obvious, he argued, but no matter how you cut it, Wolf seemed nothing but a means. Maybe not even that, maybe Bill Wolf was nothing but a convenience. Grosen couldn’t see Paulie having anything to lose or gain from Bill Wolf.

 Paulie surely had plenty to gain from Carlene Deluccio. So much that not even a rather grandly orchestrated route to a commission seat filled the debt. Grosen suspected that Snakes must now have something to lose from Carlene as well.

So what was this stupid shoebox about? Paying off Wolf in traceable checks? Dumb. Not even Bill Wolf could be that naïve, Grosen thought. And payoff for what? Handling something with Carlene? He’d already given up his seat to her. Or was the shoebox just a convenient smokescreen to keep the audience from noticing the racetrack owner taking the reins of the licensing bureau? Who would figure to appoint the racetrack owner head of the racetrack licensing unless nobody was paying attention. Grosen could perfectly see Nowak setting something like that up. It reeked of his touch.

But no matter how Grosen looked at the suicide, that  seemed to be nothing more than Nowak’s dumb luck, extending the smokescreen well beyond the daily news cycle.

Matthew Grosen had no evidential reason to think these thoughts. But he did have a feeling he could not shake despite the lack of evidence. When he stood in Bill Wolf’s bedroom, looking at the mess his former friend had made, listening to the semi-coherent Lucille down the hall with Officer Duane Jesse, Matthew Grosen had thought of Buddy Nowak, could nearly feel him standing in the room beside him.

The state people hadn’t yet arrived. Not even Jesse would have been there yet if Matt hadn’t told Lucille to call 911 when she hung up with him. As Matthew Grosen stood in Bill and Lucille’s bedroom – having somehow known the moment he answered the phone to Lucille’s voice what he’d basically find – he accepted for himself that it was a suicide.

 Yet as Matthew Grosen stood in that room, looking at Bill and looking away, the state’s attorney pictured Nowak and the increasingly haggard Wolf at last summer’s Hambletonian. Nowak had Wolf by the arm and was talking and talking. The grip looked tight and vaguely unfriendly. Bill was looking down and grimacing. Perhaps that was why Grosen thought the grip too tight. Wolf was looking down, grimacing and nodding and nodding.

Chapter 10 – The Suicide

Kyle and Matthew Grosen sat silently across the kitchen table from one another toying with the remains of yet another casserole left by yet another neighbor. Kyle wasn’t completely sure what prompted the neighbors to bring them casseroles the same as they were also carrying to the Wolfs, whether it was sympathy or cruelty.

They said it was for the two men left alone. Patsy had been away, spending some time with her family. That’s what Kyle and his father and most of Haden County said aloud and to one another, their eyes sliding off one another and then glancing away. Patsy’s mother wasn’t well. Her mother hadn’t been well for a while. What some people in Haden County said was that whatever the suffering of her mother, maybe Patsy’s suffering was greater.

 People in Harrison County thought simply staying with Cecelia  Harrison was punishment enough for anything. “Well good thing you didn’t take up poker for a living,” were the first words out of Cecelia Harrison's mouth when Patsy stepped into the kitchen. Matt set a suitcase on the floor, turned around and drove back to Haden County without further conversation with any of them.

Shelby was away as well, also in Harrison County. She was staying with her grandmother, Ruth Prentiss, the matriarch of a fortune based upon property and the livestock it produced. There was no finer farmland, no clearer running streams, no better timber in the whole of Southern Illinois than on the thousands of acres that generations had acquired and passed intact into her husband’s possession. Her husband, too, had added to the holdings and increased production of what were arguably the finest racing horses and best breeding cattle in the Midwest.

That reputation was lost during the brief tenure of their eldest son between his father’s premature death and then his own. The fortune was moving even more quickly through the hands of their youngest son who used much of it on a succession of trophy wives – even Ruth Prentiss knew the phrase – and to keep his own two sons out of jail. Shelby’s father, the middle son Philip, had never been given a stab at the company, showing himself at a shockingly young age to be not merely a natural dilettante but a wastrel and drunkard as well.

It was astounding how fast it could go, Ruth Prentiss thought about the fortune, but she never remarked upon the money. It would do no one any good to hear her speak such awkward truths, which did not mean she failed to make the point to her remaining sons and grandsons when she ever saw them. She had not yet thought what to make of her granddaughter. She had seen very little of her.

It was rumored her husband actually called her "Ruth," but no one in Harrison County had ever called her anything than Mrs. Harrison or “Ma’am.” That included her sons, Shelby  had been told  more than once by Lucille. Shelby was thinking about that after the deputy had handed her off to a maid who was now closing the parlor door behind her and her grandmother.

Once the door had shut Ruth Prentiss said, “I hear that now your mother thinks you should live with me.” After Shelby remained silent the older woman asked, “What do you think of that?”

“I think I shall call you Grand-Mama if I am to stay here,” Shelby said.

“You’ll call me the devil if you give me any trouble,” Mrs. Prentiss replied.

 Shelby was silent for a moment but then said,“I will call you Grand-Mama and I will return to my birth name.”

The old woman caught herself nearly smiling before she lifted and rang a small bell near her hand on a side table. Nearly immediately the door opened and the maid reappeared.

“Show Miss Prentiss to her room,” the old woman said, nodded at Shelby and returned to reading a pile of documents she had let fall to her lap. “I think we understand each other,” Ruth Prentiss said as Shelby stepped out of the parlor.

  That both of these hugely unusual reunions were taking place seemed somehow normal in the wake of something so irregular and unexpected as Bill Wolf shooting himself in the stomach on his and Lucille’s bed.

"Who would have thought it? Bill Wolf," Irene Hanley went around repeating like a drum beat. "I would have thought it of anyone before Bill Wolf. Who would have thought it?"

When Patsy heard she clutched her stomach and doubled over in an agony from which she could not emerge. She might as well have performed her exposure on the town square. As it was word reached her at Maxine’s. Patsy was done, blown dried and almost out the hairdresser’s door when the news burst in upon her and the women behind her.

To many the news of Patsy’s response was the greatest of the shocks and seemingly endless aftershocks which included Patsy’s husband, the state’s attorney, discovering in Bill Wolf’s closet a shoe box full of checks made out to the governor’s recently successful reelection campaign.

“A goddamn shoe box,” Matthew Grosen told Patsy that night.

Patsy was sitting on the couch when he returned home. Her red eyes were dry and swollen. “I’m going to go stay with my mother,” she said.

Matthew Grosen looked at his wife and finally said, “I think that is a terrible idea.”

It was rumored the first words out of Lucille upon discovering the body – which she did upon her return from her own hair appointment in the clever little arty town of Platteville, the other side of Vernon County – were, “Well you son-of­-a-bitch.”

But this was pure speculation. No one was in the house except Lucille who had a difficult time remembering any type of chronology from swinging shut the door of her small SUV and catching a pleasing glimpse of herself in the side mirror until sitting face to face with Shelby and holding her hands across the dining room table and repeating, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing any of us could have done to prevent this.”

“I’ve got it, Mom,” was the rebuke from Shelby that awakened Lucille to chronology and efficiency.

Lucille remained in black and in firm and complete control from that moment forth, which began with the decision to get Shelby out of town. Lucille handled the funeral arrangements, interface with the forensic people and the damage control. She made every decision necessary regarding the handling of the estate, declining assistance from the Wolf family attorney, the family physician, the husbands of either of Bill’s two aunts, a remarkable array of cousins some of whom she had never met and even from Al Plover.And, of course, from Bill’s dear baby brother Robert.

The inconsolable Robert was in no shape to question anything, he was grateful, repeatedly telling her how grateful he was for her ability to handle all of this. And that mousy wife of his certainly wasn’t going to poke her nose into it.

“You know he would never do anything wrong,” Robert kept telling Lucille. “I just can’t believe this has happened,” he would take off crying again.

 “Well Robert he has done something wrong,” Lucille finally said. “He shot himself on my bed.”

“It’s not your fault Lucille,” Robert said instantly.

“Thank you Robert. I know that. We need to move on now." Lucille said.

Other than that not even Al Plover – who witnessed her pulling every penny of the Wolf money out of his bank – ever received any comment from Lucille regarding her opinion of Bill Wolf or regarding her legal or financial standing. Lucille hired her own attorney, an almost young man from Platteville, but already turning middle aged. He was as circumspect as a choir boy. With him at her side she dressed consistently in a black suit. He wore medium gray. Together they met and  were candid with the police and the investigators. She also had him accompany her to all meetings with the governor's aides, to Buddy's particular annoyance. They all came at her furiously for the first month, at which point the state investigations went on but she became a lesser and lesser piece of  their inquiries.

This was because even the state investigators ultimately came at the truth of the matter, which was that Lucille had been completely and totally ignorant of the shoe box of checks in Bill Wolf’s closet.

 She wasn’t surprised that Bill would be involved – albeit in a minor way – with campaign fraud. He was a pragmatic man. But a box of un -cashed, after-the-fact checks made out to a campaign entity struck her as just some kind of stupid oversight on someone’s part, as stupid as Bill perhaps forgetting to turn them in to someone. Nothing to kill yourself over.

She had sent a sizeable chunk of cash with Shelby. She’d known exactly where Bill kept campaign cash. She’d accepted Bill’s explanation that the cash came from contributors who wished to remain anonymous. Lucille expected she and Bill would use the cash themselves as an unreported reimbursement of the debt they had accrued on behalf of the campaign. Not legal perhaps, but not really cheating. That was how Lucille saw it. It never occurred to her those few thousand dollars, well, maybe even ten thousand, would constitute campaign fraud. Never in the weeks of interrogation by police and investigators did she even in her mind make any link between the improbable checks and the cash she hoped would prove enough to get her and Shelby out of Haden.

When she awoke from her hours of shock and sat facing her daughter Lucille knew she would never understand why he had done it. She wouldn't understand anymore than Haden County itself understood how their fair­-haired Billy Wolf, one of the finest and most upstanding among them, could do this. And as time and investigations wore on, it seemed Bill Wolf crashed so hugely and irresponsibly into a scandal that was never defined. No one would ever understand.

“It was just scandal for the sake of scandal,” Lucille would soon tell Irene Hanley. “He was pilloried to death, Irene. And no one came to his rescue. No one.”

 Lucille was as angry at Bill as a scorned woman, as a threatened mother. But despite it all, the long and the short of it was this, Lucille made a convincing grieving widow, for Lucille did grieve.

Despite her jaw-clenched tenacity to see through what she viewed as a humiliating personal tragedy and its attendant anger at her husband beyond anything she had imagined possible, she sobbed nightly. She sobbed for hours into the pillow in the guest bedroom, which was as far as she could pull herself from their bedroom which remained gapingly empty where the bed had stood.

While Lucille proceeded with her clenched jaw and ramrod spine and abrupt behavior  -- winning her a begrudging admiration but no love – Patsy’s grief verily oozed from her house, which she didn’t leave, not even for the funeral.

The ladies at Maxine’s attempted to stop by that first week and for the first few days were greeted at the kitchen door by a bathrobe clad, slack-faced Patsy who did not invite them in. By the end of the week Patsy wasn’t opening the door. By the weekend Matt took her over to Harrison where it had been agreed her mother needed her.

Irene Hanley wasn’t any longer than an hour bringing a plate of chocolate chip cookies to Kyle. “I saw your dad taking your mom out 231,” she said after rapping at the window in the top of the Grosen’s kitchen door and seeing Kyle look up from the kitchen table. “I figured they were heading over to her people,” Irene called through the door. “For some reason I just thought you might like some cookies. I just baked some for Bobby. With your mom out of town and all.” She stood at the door smiling brightly and held the plate in the air a though she were an advertisement for fresh baked cookies.  “May I come in?” she finally asked.

Kyle stared at her. He couldn’t imagine what to say, he could only formulate things not to say. He got out of his seat and felt he was somehow hypnotized, walking toward the framed face of Bobby Hanley’s mother at the kitchen door. He suddenly realized his fists were clenching and unclenching. “Yeah,” he finally said and reached to open the door. He held it open and let her into the kitchen where they both stood staring at one another.

“Well,” Irene finally said, “I’ll just leave them here on the table.” Placing them there, with her back to him, she tried again, “I hope everything is all right. Is your mother all right?” she asked.

“Uh huh,” Kyle said which thankfully released him from his daze.  It had made him sound like Bobby Hanley.  “Oh,” he said, “oh, absolutely. Mom’s fine. Gee. Thanks for the cookies Mrs. Hanley.”

“Well, I was just worried,” she said.

“Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Hanley. Tell Bobby hello,” he said and stared at her until she walked away from the table and back to the door. She stopped then and looked him in the eye. She was shorter than him, but not by a lot. Her smile twisted at one end and her smile turned briefly into a slight smirk and then righted itself back to her thin smile. She didn’t say anything more until she was out the door. “Bye Kyle. Enjoy the cookies,” she said and got in her car and drove home.

Kyle stared at the cookies and felt suddenly that he might vomit. He turned to the sink and got a glass of water and held on to the counter until the sensation passed. He drank the water and filled the glass again at the faucet but this time only drank half of it before setting it down on the counter. He couldn’t even tell for sure if he was angry, let alone who he was angry at. Who wasn’t he angry at? Shelby. Maybe he wasn’t angry at Shelby. He could think of no reason to be angry with Shelby. But he knew that somehow they would never be the same kind of friends again.

He had driven over to the Prentiss’ house the morning after William Wolf had killed himself. He had learned that night, from his father, where Shelby had gone.

“What?” he had screamed at his father, “why didn’t you tell me? I could have taken her.” He plunged toward the kitchen to get his truck keys when his father yelled.

“Kyle! It’s nearly midnight. Get hold of yourself.” It was unusual for Matthew Grosen to raise his voice. It stopped Kyle and he started to cry but made himself stop as his father entered the kitchen. “Go to your room, I have to talk to your mom, I’ll come by your room in a little bit and answer what I can for you.”

 “Her grandmother?” Kyle said. He had been on his computer, trying to see what the news had about Mr. Wolf when his father came into the room. It hadn’t been long, maybe twenty minutes. He’d heard his father talking and then he presumed putting his mother to bed. She was acting really weird, he thought.

“Keep your voice down,” Matthew confirmed as he closed the door behind himself, “I’m hoping your mother can get some sleep.” He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Doctor Bean sent over a sedative,” he said and only now looked at Kyle.

Kyle pursed his lips but said nothing.

“We were all good friends in high school,” his father said and sat down on Kyle’s bed. “Bill, your mom and me. He hasn’t had a happy life.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” Kyle said.

Matthew Grosen gave his son a sad, acknowledging smile. “Right," Matt said, "I mean before too. I mean his whole life. It never made sense. His life. Everything should have been perfect for him. He always had everything he needed for it to be perfect. And he knew it. He was appreciative. He worked hard and was always a good friend but, but, I don’t know. It would end up, whatever it was, that nothing about it had gone perfectly. Not at all.  This isn’t making much sense, is it?” Matt suddenly asked, turning back to Kyle.

“You mean like Mrs. Wolf? It looked like it was perfect but it was horrible.”

Matt looked still at his son and finally said. “Like both Missus Wolfs. But I don’t mean, Kyle, that they were horrible. It just was somehow everything turned horrible.”

“So was that always the problem? You and mom never liked either Mrs. Wolf?”

“That was a problem,” Matt said and his eyes slid off his son onto his hands clasped between his knees.

“So why did he kill himself? Because of Mrs. Wolf?”

“No. No I don’t think so. No I’m certain not. No,” Matthew said.

"Why?" Kyle asked.

"I don't have any idea."

“Right,” Kyle said. “How’s Shelby?”

“She’s fine. She’s tough. She will be fine. She's like Lucille, no crying, just practical.”

“In shock,” Kyle said.

“Yes. Probably in shock. Lucille sent her over to the Prentiss’ which, I have to say, was a piece of good clear thinking on her part.”

“Mrs. Wolf is okay,” Kyle said. “I don’t know why you and mom hate her so much. I mean, I know she’s kinda a pain in the ass. But she’s okay.”

“We don’t hate her, Kyle.”

“Bullshit.”

“Stop it,” Matthew said quietly. “It isn’t the time for us to be bickering about this.”

 “I’ll go see Shelby tomorrow.” Kyle glanced at his father and saw no rebuke so hazarded one more remark. “Maybe now you and Mom can be nicer to her. She thought of Mr. Wolf as her father.”

“Kyle, it isn’t the time for this either, but I’m going to tell you what I always tell you about Shelby Prentiss, she won’t be staying in Haden County. Not for you. Not for anybody.  And this is just going to speed that up.”

“Well maybe I won’t be staying either,” Kyle said.

Matthew slapped his knees and stood up and walked to his son to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He squeezed it once and turned to leave the room.

Kyle was right thinking his father hadn’t heard him. Even if Matthew Grosen had heard, it would never occur to him that Kyle would leave Haden County.

Chapter Nine – The Candidates

“WINNING IS EVERYTHING!” Buddy cried out.

About thirty-five men and two women tried to raise their right arms in imitation of Buddy and tried to raise their voices in imitation of Buddy but it was a weak echo. The contingent of downstate candidates out of the primary were gathered for their first pep rally with Governor Powell Paulie. The governor would be arriving “soon” they had been told twice and were starting to grasp that they themselves were the warm-up act.

Few Downstate Democrats had faced contested primaries so hadn’t actually won anything yet. They were still new to the silly things that accompanied one-on-one campaigning or slate-building on behalf of the Party. This hollering and jumping up and down in an Elk Lodge  was embarrassing, seemed juvenile to them. They still expecting gravitas and strategic conversations about policies and issues. They were to be disabused of that today. That was the purpose of today, to turn them into candidates running below the governor’s ticket.

“We got to all get on the same page,” Buddy Nowak told them. “We gotta get on the governor’s wagon and we all gotta push. We gotta push to the win. Let’s hear it.”

“Winning Is Everything,” cried Bill Wolf. He believed it. He was a winner. Harrison had been gracious in conceding but had made no effort to throw his party support to Wolf. Instead it appeared his people were moving into Johnson's camp. Harrison had been seen politically only once since the primary, at a Paulie fundraiser. Wolf had seen him deep in conversation with Buddy and hoped Harrison was being encouraged to bring the Harrison County Democrats out for him in November.

  Bill Wolf looked to the men on either side of him. They stood with their right fists clenched but not raised and said the words looking at the floor. “Winning IS everything,” Bill suddenly cried out again and the men to his sides slightly jumped and then turned and smiled at him. Bill reached out and patted both men on their backs.

“WINNING IS EVERYTHING,” Buddy called back. And now Bill, the men on either side of him and the men next to them cheered louder than before.

“BILL WOLF – WINNER IN HADEN COUNTY,” Buddy called back. A cheer went up in the room and Bill grinned and raised his arms into the air.

He was on his way. He could feel it. The room was electric. He was electric. Electric and alive. He had won a grueling race. He was a winner. He was on his way.

“Congratulations,” boomed the governor who stepped upon the plywood stage set up for military recognitions, fire department installations and politicians. “We stand here today as winners and in a few months will stand together in Springfield as leaders representing the citizens of the Great State of Illinois. But first we gotta get ‘em to the polls,” the governor said.

The renewed cheering partially obliterated the rest of the governor’s sentence which ended as did so many of his campaign pledges, “…if we work together.”

“Well that is sure as shit the fly in the ointment, isn’t it,” Lucille said that night. “Working together,” she snorted. She, too, had attended the rally, but she had attended to the seminars and orientations filled with the mishmash of campaign aides and treasurers and spouses. She had been surprised to realize Bill’s campaign committee was far more organized than most. She was surprised and disheartened. She’d expected to find support systems at the rally only to discover Bill’s primary win was drawing other campaigns to her, asking her for help on their fledgling efforts.

 “Tell Carlene Deluccio about working together. I didn’t think Carlene Deluccio could work any harder than she did for Harrison, but she’s outdoing herself for Johnson. She’s not even pretending she isn’t supporting a Republican. And she is holding your goddamn seat, for god’s sakes. You should never have resigned. That seat should have been mine.”

William Wolf was flat on his back on one of the two beds in the Holiday Inn where he and Lucille had decided to “take an extra night, away from the campaign, for a slight breather.” His right forearm was thrown over his closed eyes.

“And don’t just do that big sigh,” Lucille said into the silence.

“You know what I’m saying is the truth,” Lucille said into the continued silence.

“You know she’s just a snake in the grass. They’re all snakes,” Lucille said.

“Now that,” Bill said, taking down his arm, “is the first true thing you’ve said. Carlene isn’t for Johnson, Carlene is for Paulie. Between her personally and three businesses she’s contributed about $350,000. Public contributed. God knows how much more she’s given.”

Lucille was silent and then asked. “What does that mean?”

“Let me rephrase that. Carlene is for Carlene. The public contributions came in four installments. One of them a year and a half ago, about the time the governor visited.”

“What?” Lucille tried to catch up. “Your old seat is worth $350,000?” 

“No,” Bill Wolf said, replacing his arm over his eyes, “Carlene is worth $350,000 to the governor. More.”

“I don’t get it. All this just to give her a commissioner seat? All of this?” Lucille looked around the motel room, their clothes strewn from open suitcases, a bottle of bourbon next to the coffeepot just outside the bathroom. “How much are you worth to him?” Lucille asked.

Bill was silent.

“Well you’ve just got to become more valuable,” Lucille said.

Bill turned away from her and in a moment she realized he was sobbing.