He nodded, a little like he was playing cop with me.
“Well,” he said, “you ought to know.”
I SPENT THE rest of the day talking to as many people at the Branaff School as I could. The students were strictly off-limits until I could get parental consent, so I focused on the faculty and staff for the time being.
Dale Skillings was the headmaster. He seemed pretty tightly wound to begin with, but he’d also been through the wringer in the press, and no doubt with the parents as well. Everyone wanted to know how this could possibly happen at Branaff. Inevitably, some of the blame had already landed on the headmaster’s desk. If he was terse, or defensive with me, I could understand why.
“Enemies?” he said when I asked. “They’re two of the most famous children in the world. It’s not possible to avoid some amount of animosity. But if what you’re really asking about is Zoe’s fight with Ryan Townsend, I can’t discuss that with you. You’ll have to take it up with Congressman and Mrs. Townsend.”
In fact, I already had a few calls in on that one. Skillings wasn’t going to budge on the rules where the kids were concerned, but he did make his staff fully available to me, which I appreciated.
One of the sixth-grade math teachers, Eleanor Ruff, told me about how Zoe had barely scraped by in her class and about how Ethan was testing off the charts, no surprise. She was a twenty-year veteran at the school, but her feelings were as close to the surface as anyone’s I interviewed.
“You don’t even like to imagine something like this happening,” she said. She fluttered around her classroom, watering the plants while we talked. Meanwhile, I sat uncomfortably in a student chair that was much too small for me, or even half of me. “Then one day, everything changes. I’m just glad they were taken together. At least they have each other —”
The second she said it, her hand flew up to her mouth and she burst into tears. “Oh, my God! That’s not at all what I meant. I’m so sorry!”
I handed her a tissue from the box on her desk and told her not to be too hard on herself. Every adult at the school had been questioned extensively, multiple times by MPD, the FBI, and Secret Service. The strain was starting to show. That’s also when people tend to say things they might not the first several times around.
The school nurse, a guy named Rodney Glass, held it together better. He’d been in the Peace Corps in Uganda before this, he told me, and it seemed like he’d seen a lot of suffering in Africa. I’d been there and understood what he was talking about.
“Ethan? Yeah, he’s my little lunch buddy,” he said. “I think he’s just more comfortable with adults, you know?”
“Did he come here very often?” I asked, looking around the small, very organized infirmary.
“Sometimes. Pretty much anywhere he could find a quiet corner. I call kids like him free agents. You go into any school at lunchtime, and I guarantee you’ll find a few in the nurse’s office, or hanging around the librarian’s desk, or in guidance. Actually, you should talk to Pam Fitzhugh over there. If you haven’t already. She knows both the Coyles as well as anyone.”
I was lucky to get a few minutes with Ms. Fitzhugh, as it turned out. She and the other guidance staff had been seeing kids for crisis counseling nonstop since the first day.
“Were Ethan or Zoe under any particular stress that you know about?” I asked her. “In the days before, weeks before?”
“No more than usual,” she said. “But that’s all relative, isn’t it? It’s not easy being the president’s children, or any celebrity’s, really, and they both put a lot of pressure on themselves. In different ways.”
“Different, how?” I asked.
“Well, let’s just say Zoe spends a lot of energy trying not to be the perfect First Daughter everyone expects her to be. And Ethan’s kind of the opposite. He gets an A-minus, and all he sees is that minus.”
She laughed softly, but in a melancholy way, as if she were remembering something one of them had done at some point. Maybe also wondering, like everyone else, if she was ever going to see Ethan and Zoe again.
“Those poor kids,” she said. “God, those poor, poor kids. I wish somebody could help them.”
Yes, so did I.
SECRETARY OF STATE Martin Cho’s Motorcade was running behind schedule, as usual. He’d kept the House and Senate Intelligence Committee chairs waiting most of the morning, and now he was almost an hour late for the Saudi ambassador.
“Call the office, tell them we’re on our way,” Cho said to the aide sitting across from him in the short Mercedes limo. Her name was Melissa Brandt. She was a recent Harvard grad and young for the job, but promising. Also maybe a little naïve.
“Mr. Secretary, they’ve been notified by the scheduling office already. I called them —”
“Just do it again, please, Melissa,” he said. “Make sure the ambassador knows we’re thinking of him. That’s important to them. They’re sensitive people. The ambassador has been pampered all his life.”
“Yes, sir,” the aide answered.
Crisis talks had been quietly taking place between the two countries for several days now. With the president indisposed, as he was, it was up to the secretary to put in the face time on this one. So far, it had been a dour affair. The pre-9/11 days of arm-in-arm policy making with the Kingdom seemed like a quaint bit of history now.
As Melissa Brandt pulled up the State Department on her phone, she craned her neck to see outside and check their progress up Constitution Avenue.
“Hi, Don, it’s Missy with the secretary’s office,” she said, still looking out the window. “We should be there any minute. We’re just passing by the, um —”