Mirror Image

lulled her to sleep were some of her earliest and most precious memories of childhood.
    Those had been coveted moments, when Daddy was home and paying attention to her. In the fairy tales he read, the princess always had a doting father. Good was always victorious over the forces of evil.
    Perhaps that’s why they called them fairy tales. They were a departure from reality, where fathers disappeared for months on end and all too often evil was the victor.
    When Mandy fell asleep, Avery slipped from the room and quietly closed the door behind her. Mona retired to her quarters every afternoon for a couple hours of watching soap operas and resting before preparing dinner.
    No one else was at home, but Avery stealthily tiptoed along the tile flooring straight from Mandy’s room toward the wing of the house Zee shared with Nelson. She didn’t weigh the rightness or wrongness of what she was about to do. It was a ghastly invasion of privacy and would have been unthinkable under other circumstances. The circumstances being what they were, however, made it necessary.
    She located their bedroom with no problem. A very pleasant room, it was shuttered against the bright autumn sunlight. The floral fragrance she associated with Zee was redolent.
    Would Zee keep such explosive documents in the dainty Queen Anne desk? Why not? It looked as innocent as a novice nun. Who would think to violate it? Nelson conducted ranching business at a massive desk in the den down the hall. He would have no reason to go through his wife’s seemingly innocuous desk.
    Avery took a nail file from the dressing table and applied it to the tiny gold lock on the lap drawer of the desk. She didn’t even try to cover her crime. Zee expected her to check. She had said as much.
    It wasn’t a very sturdy lock. Within seconds, Avery pulled the desk drawer open. Inside there were several thin boxes of stationery engraved with Zee’s initials, a book of stamps, an address book, two slender, black Bibles, one with Jack’s name embossed in gold block letters, the other with Tate’s name.
    The manila folder was in the back of the drawer. Avery removed it and pried open the metal bracket.
    Five minutes later, she left the room, pale and trembling. Her whole body shook as though she had palsy. Her stomach was queasy. The harmless tea had turned rancid in her stomach. She hastened to her own room and locked the door behind her. Resting against it, she drew in draughts of cleansing air.
    Tate. Oh, Tate. If he ever saw the revolting contents of that folder…
    She needed a bath. Quickly. Immediately.
    She kicked off her shoes, peeled off her sweater, and slid open her closet door.
    She screamed.
    Reeling away from the grotesque sight, she covered her mouth with both hands, though retching noises issued from her throat. Opening the closet door had caused the campaign poster to swing from the end of its red satin cord like a body on a gallows.
    In bright red paint, a bullet hole had been painted in the center of Tate’s forehead. The paint trickled down his face, hideously incongruent with his smile. Written in bold red lettering across the poster were the words, “Election Day!”
    Avery bolted into the bathroom and vomited.

Forty-Two
    “It was ghastly. So ugly.”
    Avery sat with her head bowed over a glass of brandy that Irish had insisted would help calm her down. The first unwanted swallow had burned a crater in her empty stomach, but she kept the glass because she needed something to hold on to.
    “This whole frigging thing is ugly,” her irascible host declared. “I’ve thought so all along. Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I?”
    “So you warned her. Stop harping on it.”
    “Who asked you?” Irish angrily rounded on Van, who was sipping at a joint that Irish had been too upset to notice wasn’t an ordinary cigarette.
    “Avery did. She called and told me to haul ass over here, so I hauled ass.”
    “I meant who asked you for your opinion?”
    “Will the two of you please stop?” Avery cried raggedly. “And Van, will you please put that thing out? The smell’s making me sick.”
    She tapped her fingertips against her lips, as though contemplating whether or not she was going to throw up again. “The poster terrified me. He really means to do it. I’ve known so all along, but this…”
    She set the glass of brandy on the coffee table and stood up, chafing her arms. She had on a sweater, but nothing helped her get warm.
    “Who is it,