“We'll be there for you, Mom,” Andrew said kindly, and got up to give her a hug, but Matthew was thinking about what she'd said. He kind of liked the story.

“Maybe Abby will shoot you, Dad,” he said hopefully, and Charles could only laugh at him again.

“I hope not, Matt. No one is going to shoot anyone.”

“Mom might.”

Grace smiled ruefully as she looked at her youngest son. “Remember that the next time I tell you to clean up your room or finish your dinner.”

“Yeah,” he said with a broad grin, showing that his two top front teeth were missing. Surprisingly, unlike his siblings, he wasn't upset. But he was too young to really absorb the implications of what had happened.

Eventually, Grace went upstairs and tried to talk to Abigail, but she wouldn't let her mother into her room, and at six o'clock they all gathered downstairs to watch the television in the den. Abby came down silently and joined them, and sat in the back of the room without talking to her parents.

The telephone had been ringing off the hook for two hours by then, but Grace had put it on the machine. There wasn't a soul alive they wanted to talk to. And there was an unlisted emergency line where Charles's aides called him. They called several times, and warned that they had been advised again that the story was ugly.

It was presented as a special bulletin, with a full screen photograph of her mug shot from prison. What startled Grace above all was how young she looked. She was barely more than a baby, only three years older than Andrew, and she looked younger than Abigail in the picture.

“Wow, Mom! Is that you?”

“Shhh, Matthew!” they all said at once, and watched in horror as the story unraveled.

The story was definitely not pretty. It opened with the news that Grace Mackenzie, wife of Congressman Charles Mackenzie, candidate for a Senate seat in the next election, had shot her father in a sex scandal at seventeen, and had been sentenced to two years in prison. There were photographs of her going into the trial, in handcuffs, and of her father looking very handsome. They said he had been a pillar of the community, and his daughter had accused him of rape, and shot him. She had claimed self-defense and a jury had not believed her. A two-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter was the result, followed by two years’ probation.

There were more photographs of her then, leaving the trial, again in handcuffs, and as she left for Dwight, in leg irons and chains, then another photograph of her at Dwight. She sounded like a gang moll by the time they were finished. They went on to say that she had been at Dwight Correctional Center in Dwight, Illinois, for two years, and was released in 1973 for two years of probation in Chicago. There had been no further problems with the law subsequently, to the best of their knowledge, but that possibility was currently under investigation.

“Under investigation? What the hell do they mean?” Grace asked, and Charles silenced her with a gesture, he wanted to hear what they were saying.

They explained that people in the community had not believed the sex scandal story at all. And then they followed it with a brief interview with the chief of police who had charged her. Twenty-one years later, he was there, and he claimed to have total recall of the night she was arrested.

“The prosecutor felt she'd been trying to …” he smiled wickedly and Grace wanted to throw up as she listened,“… I'd say, tantalize her father, and she got angry when he didn't take the bait. She was a pretty sick girl, back then, I don't know anything about her now of course, but a leopard don't change his spots much, does he?” She couldn't believe what she was hearing, or what they'd encouraged him to say.

They explained again, for all who hadn't caught it the first time, that she was a convicted felon, convicted of murder. They showed her mug shot yet again. And then a photograph of her looking like a moron, with Charles, as she stood next to him when he was sworn into Congress. And they explained that Charles was now running for the Senate. And then it was over, and they moved on to something else, as Grace fell back in her seat in horrified amazement. She felt completely drained of all emotion. It was all there, the mug shots, the story, the attitude of the community as expressed by the chief of police.

“They practically said I raped him! Did you hear what that bastard said?” Grace was outraged by what the chief of police had said about her, he had called her “pretty sick” and said she had “tantalized” her father. “Can't we sue them?”

“Maybe,” Charles said, trying to sound calm, for hers and the children's sake. “First we have to see what happens. There's going to be a lot of noise over this. We have to be ready for it.”

“How much worse can it get?” she asked angrily.

“A lot,” he said knowingly. His aides had warned him, and he knew that from his experience with the press years before.

By seven o'clock there were television cameras outside their house. One channel even used a bullhorn to address her, and urge her to come out and talk to them. Charles called the police, but the best they could do for them was get the reporters off their property, and force them to stand across the street, which they did. They put two camera crews in the trees so they could shoot into their bedroom windows. And Charles went upstairs and closed the shades. They were under siege.

“How long is this going to last?” Grace asked miserably after the children went to bed. They were still out there.

“Awhile probably. Maybe a long while.” And then as they sat in the kitchen, looking at each other in exhaustion, he asked her if she wanted to talk to them at some point and tell them her side of the story.

“Should I? Can't we sue them for what they said?”

“I don't know any of the answers.” He had already put in calls to two major libel lawyers, but he also realized that their phones could be tapped by the press, and he didn't want to talk to the attorneys from the house, or even from his office. For the moment, at least, it was a genuine disaster.

The next morning, the press were still there, and Charles and Grace were tipped off again about new coverage on local and national talk shows. She was the hot news of the hour all over the country.

Two guards were interviewed at Dwight, who claimed they knew her really well. Both were young and Grace knew for certain she'd never seen them.

“I've never laid eyes on them,” she said to Charles, feeling sick again. He had stayed home with her, to lend her support, as she was stuck in the house, and Abby had refused to get out of bed. But a friend had offered to take Andrew and Matt to school, and Grace was relieved they'd gone. It was hard enough dealing with Abby, and herself.

The two prison guards said that Grace had been a member of a real tough gang, and they implied, but didn't actually say, that she'd used drugs in prison.

“What are they doing to me?” She burst into tears and put her face in her hands. She didn't understand it. Why were these people lying about her?

“Grace, they want a piece of the action. A moment of glory. That's all it is. They want to be on television, they want to be a star just like you are.”

“I'm not a star. I'm a housewife,” she said naively.

“To them, you're a star.” He was a lot wiser than she was.

On another channel, they were interviewing the chief of police again. And in Watseka, a girl who claimed to have been Grace's best friend in school, and whom Grace had also never seen before, said that Grace had always talked to her a lot about how much she loved her father and how jealous she was of her mother. The impression being created there was that she had killed her father in a jealous rage.

“Are these people crazy, or am I? That woman looks twice my age, and I don't even know who she is.” Even her name was unfamiliar.

They interviewed one of the arresting officers from that night, who looked like an old man now, and he admitted that Grace had looked really scared and she was shaking really badly when they found her.

“Did she look like she'd been raped?” the interviewer said without hesitation.

“It was hard to tell, you know, I'm no doctor,” he said shyly, “but she didn't have any clothes on.”

“She was naked?” The interviewer looked straight into the camera, shocked, and the policeman nodded.

“Yeah, but I don't think the doctors at the hospital said she'd been raped. They just said she'd had sex with her boyfriend or something. Maybe her father walked in on them.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Johnson.”

And then came the pièce de résistance on yet another channel. A moment with Frank Wills, who looked even worse and sleazier than he had twenty years before, if that was possible, and he said bluntly that Grace had always been a strange kid and had always been after her father's money.

“What? He got everything there was, and God knows it wasn't much,” she shouted at Charles, and then laid her head back in despair again.

“Grace, you have to stop going crazy over everything they say. You know they're not going to tell the truth. Why should they?” Where were David Glass and Molly? Why wasn't someone saying anything decent about her? Why didn't anybody love her? Why hadn't they? Why had Molly died, and David disappeared? Where the hell were they now?

“I can't stand this,” she said hysterically. There was no getting away from it, and it was unbearable. There was no relief and in this case, there was no reward for this kind of pain and torture.

“You have to stand it,” Charles said matter-of-factiy. “It's not going to disappear overnight.” Charles knew better than anyone that it could take a long time to die down once the flames had grown to such major proportions.