Free Jericho's Fall by Stephen L. Carter

the chance. She had loved him once, and he had loved her back. Even though Dak insisted that Jericho had been eased out of public life, in Beck’s romantic image he nevertheless had tossed away his career for her, and, like it or not, her mother had raised her to a sense of obligation so powerful that few competing priorities could stand against it. Dr. Eisenstadt, her therapist, had tried to help her overcome her guilt about the end of Jericho’s career.
    So far, without noticeable effect.
    “Trust me,” said Beck.
    “Trust you?” laughed Pamela.
    “He’s ringing,” said Audrey, on her feet, but they all heard the same buzzer.
    “I’ll go this time,” said her sister, and hurried off toward the stairs.
    Audrey turned to Beck. “What was that about?”
    “What was what about?”
    “You’re scared.”
    “That’s ridiculous.”
    But Audrey for once refused to let go. “Did Dak say something to you? If he did, you should tell us. It’s not right to keep it to yourself.”
    Rebecca looked at the round, worried face. Audrey’s plump fingers were cradling the cross around her neck. “You sound pretty scared yourself.”
    “I don’t like all these people coming to the house.” She glanced at the archway to the foyer. “And Pamela—she’s not usually like this. Really, Beck. She’s not. I know the two of you don’t get along, but— well, she’s worried. Maybe it’s just Dad dying. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t know. She hasn’t been herself since she arrived.”
    “Since she arrived, or since I arrived?”
    Audrey took a ferocious bite of her sandwich. “What is it with you two? My dad is upstairs dying, and you guys won’t even try to—”
    She stopped. Beck’s cell was ringing. Audrey looked impressed, presumablybecause they didn’t work up here. Beck lifted it slowly to her ear, knowing what to expect. And was not disappointed. A blast of static. The fax whine. With a shudder, she pressed the red button.
    “Wrong number?” said a voice behind her. Pamela stood in the doorway. “He wants you, Beck.” Her tone was listless. “He’s agitated. He gets this way sometimes. Please don’t upset him.”
    (ii)
    Tonight was different. Tonight she was afraid. Not of Jericho. For Jericho. She climbed the wide stairs to the second floor while the sisters chattered in the kitchen, and she might have been back at Princeton, in the echoing stairwell at the Institute for Advanced Study, shivering as she made her way to Professor Ainsley’s drafty office. When she reached the landing, she almost expected to see the bookshelves and portraits that had lined the halls of the dingy but prestigious building. She stood outside the double doors to the master suite, hesitating with her hand on the knob, much the way she used to hesitate before slipping into Professor Ainsley’s office suite, and trying, with mixed success, to wheedle her way past Mrs. Blumen, the professor’s intimidating secretary, who had come up to Princeton with the great man when he left the Agency.
    Then he takes up with a sexy teenaged seductress. That’s what we thought .
    That’s what Mrs. Blumen thought, too. Rebecca would hear it in the acid tone every time she called for an appointment; she would read it in the furious protective glare every time she showed up; she would sense it from the set of the broad back when she tiptoed out again, now and then slightly disheveled, and Mrs. Blumen was hunched over her typewriter, pounding away in anger until the nasty little harlot left. Of course it had never occurred to Mrs. Blumen, any more than it had to Phil Agadakos and his crowd, that Jericho might have been the seducer; that he might have taken advantage of a starry-eyed nineteen-year-oldwho had bluffed and begged her way into his seminar, braving the boycotts and protests from those who wanted him kicked off campus for his crimes; that Beck herself might have been the wronged party.
    The possibility of Jericho’s fault