The Boy from the Woods(35)



Silence.

He stepped forward as though he might hug her, then thought better of it. He gave an awkward half wave and said, “Bye then.”

She watched him walk past her and out the door.

Yep, Hester thought, holding back the urge to leap up and click her heels. Giant Yum.





CHAPTER

FOURTEEN



Rusty Eggers turned the television off with a little too much drama and tossed the remote onto the white couch.

“It’s just a silly nuisance suit.”

Gavin Chambers nodded. They’d been watching Hester Crimstein’s interview with Saul Strauss from Rusty’s sleek, chrome-n-white penthouse. The penthouse of this particular high-rise was made up of floor-to-ceiling windows offering the most breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline imaginable—mostly because the penthouse was in Hoboken, New Jersey, not Manhattan, and so it faced the city rather than stood amongst it. New Yorkers on the Hudson River have the okay view of New Jersey—New Jerseyans on that same Hudson River have the jaw-dropping view of New York City. Right now, at night, with the lights of the buildings twinkling off the Hudson, the river looked like diamonds strewn out on black velvet.

“A judge will toss it out before it gets anywhere,” Rusty continued. He spoke with great confidence. Rusty always spoke with great confidence.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Gavin Chambers said.

“I thought Hester Crimstein was good in that interview,” Rusty said.

“She was.”

“Fair. Called Strauss out on his bullshit.”

“Yes.”

“But he won’t go away easily, will he?”

“Saul Strauss?” Gavin Chambers shook his head. “He will not.”

“You know him, right?”

“Yes.”

“You served together.”

They had. In the Marines. A lifetime ago. Gavin had always admired Saul Strauss. Saul was tough and scrappy and brave—and yet wrong about pretty much everything.

“How long has it been since you saw him?”

“A long time.”

“Still,” Rusty said. “There must be a bond. From your time overseas.”

Gavin didn’t reply.

“Do you think you can talk to him?”

“Talk to him?”

“Get him to back off.”

Saul Strauss used to be what Gavin would consider committed and passionate in a namby-pamby, Kumbaya-like, eco-green, granola-y, unrealistic sort of way, but more and more, the Sauls of the world had raised their rhetoric to the dangerously hysterical, especially when it came to Rusty Eggers.

“Not a chance,” Gavin said.

“So Strauss is a true hater?”

Gavin Chambers and Saul Strauss both came from politically mixed marriages—conservative fathers, liberal mothers. Gavin had taken after his old man while Saul became a proper mama’s boy. There had been a time when they could talk and debate in a spirited way. Gavin would say that Saul was na?ve and a bleeding heart. Saul would say that Gavin was overly analytical and Darwinian. Those relative niceties now seemed a long time ago.

“He’s become a zealot,” Gavin said.

“I figured that,” Rusty said.

“Uh-huh.”

“In some ways, we are the same, your friend Saul and I. We both believe that the current system is rigged. We both believe that the system has failed the American people. We both believe the only way to fix it is to first upend it.”

Rusty Eggers stared out at the view. He was a New Jersey boy through and through—born poor in the Ironbound district of Newark to a Ukrainian father and a Jamaican mother, attended all-male St. Benedict’s Prep on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the heart of the city, earned an academic full ride to Princeton University—all of which was why he stayed in his home state rather than moving across that river. He loved the view, of course. Trains and ferries could get him into midtown or Wall Street in less than half an hour. New Jersey was also a big part of Rusty’s rep—The Three S’s, he liked to say—a sliver of Springsteen, a sliver of Sinatra, a sliver of the Sopranos. Rusty came across as gruff yet lovable, urban yet safe, a big teddy bear of a man with a shock of rust-colored (ergo the nickname) hair. He was light skinned enough to pass as white, yet black enough so that the racists could get behind him to prove that they weren’t really racists.

Rusty Eggers was also, Gavin Chambers knew, brilliant. The only child in a close-knit family, Rusty had double-majored in philosophy and political science at Princeton. He’d made his first fortune by creating a board game that mixed personal opinions and trivia called PolitiGuess. Life seemed to be going swimmingly for Rusty until a tractor trailer, driven by a man who’d popped too many amphetamines to keep on a ridiculous delivery schedule, crashed through the divider on the New Jersey Turnpike and slammed head-on into a car carrying the Eggers family. Rusty’s mother and father both died instantly. Rusty was seriously injured and spent two months in a hospital bed. As the family driver on that particular night, even though it was not in any way his fault, Rusty suffered survivor’s guilt. He became unmoored. He sunk into a painkiller addiction and then diagnosable depression. It was bad for a while.

Fast-forward through three terrible years.

Though some claim that he never fully recovered from this dark period, Rusty Eggers, sporting a limp he carried to this day, eventually rose from the ashes like a phoenix with the help of his old friends Dash and Delia Maynard. Rusty would claim, as so many had before him, that he’d pulled himself up by the bootstraps, but in truth, it had been the Maynards who gave him the boots and tugged on those straps with all their might. With Dash’s help, Rusty Eggers became television’s most trusted self-help guru. Two years ago, he’d ridden that fame and goodwill to a landslide victory to become a United States senator as, in his own words, the “Complete Independent.”

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