“Just as I thought. Then it’s good-bye, Pepper.” We were toe-to-toe, and he leaned in close, then paused, asking permission without saying a word.
I gave it the same way.
The kiss was deep, searching, and intense, and when it was over, Jack disappeared into the shadows on the far side of the room just as the federal agents burst in.
They scrambled up the old stone stairway that led out into the cemetery, but they never did find him.
Too bad. It would have looked good on Scott’s record to have collared the head of the counterfeiting operation.
Too bad Jack was a crook, too, ’cause he sure was a mighty good kisser.
Call me crazy. Or maybe it was just my hormones talking.
I believed Jack when he said he didn’t kill Marjorie.
I was glad. Sure he was a major felon (at least that’s one of the things Scott called him when he showed up at the cemetery and read the riot act to the agents who’d let Jack get away), but aside from that teensy character flaw, Jack didn’t seem like such a bad guy. Besides, now that I knew he hadn’t killed Marjorie, I could relive those couple knee-melting kisses and not feel guilty. Or grossed out.
Of course, the fact that he wasn’t willing to cop to Marjorie’s murder didn’t help out in terms of my investigation. I had eliminated Doris and Ray as suspects, and now Jack was off the list, too. It was time to narrow the field even more.
With that in mind, I called Gloria Henninger and told her to stop down at the memorial the next Monday afternoon and I would take her to lunch.
I know this doesn’t exactly sound like an investigative strategy, but believe me, I had a plan. I put it into motion the moment she was through the front door.
“You sure found the memorial with no trouble,” I said. Yes, it was a shaky accusation, but desperate times, desperate measures, and all that crap. I pinned Gloria with a look.
She was made of sterner stuff than I’d expected. In honor of our lunch date, she was wearing pink pants and a white T-shirt with a photo of Sunshine on it. Her top lip curled like the dog’s. “The memorial is big,” she said. “So is the cemetery. It’s easy to find.”
I wasn’t about to let her off the hook so easily. I took a step closer, and since I’m like a foot taller than her, it wasn’t hard to look imposing. “You said you’d never been here before.”
“Did I?”
If she was going to play hard to get, I had no choice but to get tough. I hoped it would work because it was my one-and-only chance, and if it didn’t, I was up that proverbial creek without a paddle. “You lied to me, Gloria,” I said, poking a finger in her face and sounding like a detective in one of those corny old movies who reveals the murderer in a big aha! moment. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you? That’s why you didn’t have any trouble finding the place!”
When it came to aplomb, Gloria had exactly none. I was oh so glad. When she realized she’d been found out, she started shaking in her pink Keds.
I couldn’t afford to be nice. I pounced. “You told me you’d just heard about the statue here in the memorial. That you’d never seen it. But I found this . . .” I had the brochure I found at Gloria’s house in my pocket, and I whipped it out and waved it under her nose. “This was in your living room, Gloria. It’s from that rack of brochures right over there.” Just in case she’d missed it when she walked in, I pointed. I’m pretty sure all this pointing wasn’t necessary, but it sure was dramatic. “You’ve been here before. I don’t suppose that just happened to be the day Marjorie died, was it?”
“Yes! Yes, it was.” Gloria collapsed like a cheap lawn chair. Figuratively speaking, of course, because had she really collapsed, I would have helped her. Instead, I watched her snivel for a while and congratulated myself. Getting a confession out of her was going to be far easier than I thought. Gloria pulled a rumpled tissue from her pocket and dabbed her nose. “I was here that morning, all right. I came to . . . I came to . . .”
“Kill Marjorie?”
Her eyes flew open, and this time, I really did think she was going to collapse. Since the floors in the memorial are solid marble, and Gloria is an elderly lady whose bones are probably as brittle as an old bar of soap, I didn’t have the heart to let that happen. I took her by the arm, led her into the office, and plunked her down on the desk chair.
“You hated Marjorie. You hated her because she was a pain in the neck who deserved hating. You hated her for the statue in her garden and for the way it upset Sunshine. You came here that morning, and my guess is you had a fight. Maybe you didn’t mean to push her over that railing—”
“No! No!” Gloria was crying for real now and I almost felt guilty about it. Almost. She covered her face with her hands. “I wanted her dead, yes. But . . .” She raised her head and looked me in the eyes the way I figured a real perp never would. “I could never do a thing like that. Oh, in my dreams, maybe. But not for real! In fact, I came here that day to bring her brownies.”
This sort of bombshell deserved a shake of the head so that’s exactly what I did. Maybe when my brain settled again, the news would make sense. It didn’t. I had to resort to the old-fashioned way and talk things out. “You hated Marjorie so you brought her brownies because . . .”
Gloria’s eyes were rimmed with red. That didn’t prevent her from giving me a sly look. All she said was, “Ex-Lax.”
I swear, I would have burst out laughing if we weren’t talking murder. “You brought Marjorie brownies with laxative in them because—”
“Because I hated that Klinker woman!” Gloria emphasized her point by pounding her fist on the desk. “I was sick of trying to talk some sense into her. Nobody could do that. I wanted my revenge and the brownies were the only way I could think to get it. You know what?” She stood and threw back her scrawny shoulders. “The only reason I’m sorry she’s dead is because now I’ll never get even.”
I was too stunned by all this to say anything so all I did is stand there and watch Gloria march out of the room. Good thing the president popped up right before she walked out of the memorial. He was the one who reminded me that I was passing up a golden opportunity.
“She was here,” the president said. “The morning of the murder. Do you suppose she might have—”
“Did you see anything?” I jumped on the opportunity—and on Gloria, figuratively speaking, of course—before she could heft open the heavy front door. “When you came to give the brownies to Marjorie, was she here? Was anyone with her?”
She clicked her tongue. “If I had seen someone here, young lady, don’t you think I would have told the police? There was nobody around. Not a soul. Not that Klinker woman, not anybody. I didn’t hear anything, either, so don’t ask if there was any yelling or screaming or anything like that. The place was as quiet as a tomb.” Gloria thought about it for a moment before she chuckled. “Tomb, get it?”
I did, I just didn’t care. The president and I exchanged looks, and something told me that if he could, he would have asked exactly what I asked. “And the brownies?”
Gloria looked back at the office. “Left them in there. Right on the desk. Figured it was even better that way because then the Klinker woman would never know who brought them. Why? Is it important what happened to the brownies?”
I wondered, and wondering, I said, “Maybe. Because when I got here that morning, there were no brownies on the desk.” I did a quick shuffle through the mental notes about my case, sure that no one had mentioned brownies or chocolate or—
Gloria might have been too slow on the uptake to realize what was going on, but the president knew exactly when inspiration struck me like a bolt of lightning. An expectant look brightening an expression that was usually somber, he stepped closer.
“What is it?” he asked. “Have you discerned something important?”
Since I wasn’t sure what discerned even meant, I wasn’t sure about that. I did know one thing, though, and if Gloria thought I was weird talking to the empty air beside me, so
be it.
“Brownies laced with Ex-Lax. Get it? That’s what we in the business call a big-time clue. It means I know who killed Marjorie.”
19
I was pretty sure I knew who the murderer was. But there’s this little thing called proof, see, and though I had suspicions aplenty and those brownies helping to point me in the right chocolately direction, what I didn’t have was proof.
I did have another thing, though. That was the heart-pounding, blood-thrilling, brain-buzzing certainty that I was one step ahead of Quinn. Oh yeah, I was jazzed, and so eager to wrap up the case before he somehow caught wind of what I was up to and scooped my suspect out from under me, I was ready to go all-out.
Which explains what I was doing in that conference room Ella had reserved for Marjorie and me to sort and store the Garfield memorabilia that would be displayed at the commemoration.
“There’s got to be something,” I mumbled, thumbing through a pile of old photographs and not caring if Ella knew what I was talking about or not. “We’ve missed something.”
Ella didn’t get it, but then, I didn’t expect her to. She had a normal life, and normal lives don’t include murder. Not routinely, anyway. It was a chilly September afternoon, and she was bundled in a cardigan that wasn’t exactly the same shade of green as her ankle-skimming, button-front dress. She poked her hands into the pockets of her sweater. “Something worth putting on display?”
“Something worth killing for.”
I knew I wasn’t imagining it—her face really did turn the same color as her sweater. She sounded just like I’d heard her sound on the phone when she offered one of her teenaged daughters advice. “If you think you know something that would help solve the case, Pepper, you should leave it up to the professionals. Why not call that nice detective friend of yours.”
I stopped just short of throwing her a look that would have caused her to implode. But only because I liked Ella, both as a boss and as a friend. My smile was sweet, but my teeth were gritted when I said, “First of all, Quinn is not my friend. Not anymore. And second of all, he’s not nice. Never has been.”
“Putting yourself in danger isn’t smart.”
I was holding a handful of photos of the Garfield family and I waved them in front of her face. “Does this look like danger to you? The only thing I’m in danger of is getting bored to death.” I plunked the pictures down on the table and looked around at the mess that was once the neat piles and stacks of memorabilia. “There’s nothing here,” I wailed. “It’s all so ordinary. So dull. I was hoping something that belonged to Marjorie might have gotten mixed up with all this stuff that belongs to the cemetery,” I explained. “But whatever I thought I’d find . . .” When I looked around, my sigh shivered through the room—and caught.
“What is it?” Ella was at my side instantly, one hand out as if she thought I was going to take a tumble and she’d actually have a chance of keeping me from hitting the floor. “You look surprised.”
“Surprised at how incredibly stupid I am,” I told her. I didn’t bother to explain. But then, I really couldn’t. I was already on my way out the door.
Of course I’d forgotten all about the stuff Marjorie gave me that night I visited her at home and I stowed in the trunk of my car. I mean, who wouldn’t? She’d pretty much come right out and told me none of it was all that valuable, so naturally after I dug out that newspaper page I’d shown to Ted Studebaker, I hadn’t bothered wasting any brain cells on what any of it was.
What it was, as it turned out, was exactly what Marjorie had promised: not much.
There were a few photographs of James Garfield the soldier and James Garfield the congressman and James Garfield the president. There were a couple postcards that showed the newly opened memorial. There was a poorly done watercolor of the log cabin where the president was born, a half-dozen or so shots of the canopy under which his body had been displayed when it was first brought back to Cleveland, and a couple ancient magazines, their covers promising “new and surprising information” about the president’s passing.
It seemed even after she was dead, Marjorie had gotten the last laugh: she said she wouldn’t trust me with anything important, and she hadn’t.
There was a piece of newspaper at the bottom of what I thought was the now-empty box, and I grabbed it so I could wad it up and throw it away.
Which was when I realized that what I thought was an empty box wasn’t empty at all.
I lifted out a sixteen-by-twenty-inch frame and stared at the single piece of paper behind the glass.
Ella was still in that conference room with me, and when I read what was written on the paper and my eyes lit up, she knew something was going on.
“What is it?” she asked. In her excitement, she bounced up on the heels of her flat, chunky shoes. “Is it something valuable?”
“It depends who you ask,” I told her, and even though it was late, I headed back to the memorial.
It was time to confront the one and only person who could give me a straight answer.
If Ella knew I was standing up on the marble dais next to the statue of the president, she would have gone into cardiac arrest. National treasure and all that stuff. I was so not in the mood to care. I stood right next to that statue, the framed letter I’d found in one hand and my voice raised so that not even the dead could fail to hear.
“I need to talk to you, Mr. President, and I need to talk to you now!”
It must have been a slow day at the White House. Not two seconds later, he poofed into shape beside me.
“Really!” Honest to gosh, the president’s nose was up in the air. “To think you can disturb the chief executive this way!”
“The chief liar, you mean.” I held up the frame and its contents. “You know what I’ve got here? Well, maybe you don’t. Because maybe you never thought anybody would find it, that nobody would ever know about it.”
He harrumphed in a presidential sort of way. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”
“Really?” I gave him a moment to come clean, and when he didn’t, I cleared my throat and read:
My dearest Lucia,
You have, no doubt, heard of the misfortune that has brought me to this delicate point in my life. The reports are sadly true. I was shot by a man with murderous intent, and though I did not succumb to the attack immediately, I have been most inconvenienced and in much pain. The doctors tell me there is hope, but I watch them as they turn from my bed, their eyes downcast and their expressions somber. They dare not speak the words. They do not have to. I know that I am dying.
Here I paused and looked up at the president. He was as still as that statue over on my left and as pale as the marble floor at our feet. He didn’t say a word so, of course, I had no choice but to keep reading.
I cannot leave this earth, my dear, without conveying to you my last good-byes. Though ours was a fragile and momentary relationship, it has remained as clearly etched upon my heart as if it were the love of a lifetime. I cannot part this world, and from you, my dear Lucia, without imploring of you one last request. Give Rufus . . .
Oh yeah, I admit it . . . I raised my voice here and read slowly and carefully, getting the most I could out of the moment.
Give Rufus Ward Henry my love, and tell him how I do so regret that I was never able to properly acknowledge him . . .
I paused again. After all, this was the big moment.
. . . acknowledge him as being as dearly beloved as are my other sons.
That was where the letter ended, and besides, I think I’d pretty much made my point. His eyes glassy, the president swayed on his feet and staggered back, one hand to his heart.
“I remember now,” he said, drawing in a labored breath. “It was in those steamy days of September. I lay on my deathbed, weak and delirious, haunted by my past, my mistakes.” He swallowed hard. “My regrets. I was so much in the throes of emotion and pain, I could hardly think straight. I called . . .” He passed a
hand over his eyes. “I called to Jeremiah Stone for paper and ink. I intended . . . I intended . . .” The president stumbled back toward the center of the rotunda, and when he did, the scenery around us shivered and shifted. I fully expected to see that we were back in that White House office, but instead, I found myself standing in a spacious, neat cottage. There was a window opposite from where I stood, and through it, I saw a sweep of beach and, beyond that, the slow rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean. No way I was as much of a Garfield fanatic as Marjorie, but at this point, even I knew enough about the president to know where I was: at Long Branch Beach along the Jersey shore, the place where President Garfield died.
I was alone, or at least I thought I was until I saw a movement underneath the blankets of a nearby bed.
“Stone! Stone!” Even though it was breathless and thready, I recognized the president’s voice. When I stepped closer to the bed, though, I realized I wouldn’t have recognized him as the man under the blankets. Not for all the world.
His skin was gray. His eyes were sunken. He was at least a hundred pounds lighter than the robust ghost who haunted the memorial.
“Stone!” Even as I watched, the president shifted in bed. A spasm of pain crossed his face. His skin was slick with sweat. His eyes were glassy. “Stone, I must write a letter!”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
A door over on my right opened, and as efficient as ever, Jeremiah Stone marched into the room, the ever-present portfolio in his hands. “I am terribly sorry, Mr. President,” he said, as oblivious of me now as he’d always been. “I was just discussing a certain matter with Mr. Windom, your secretary of the Treasury.”
“All is . . .” Another spasm of pain crossed his face, and the president closed his eyes against it, then opened them again. He wasn’t about to let that stop him. Though it obviously hurt, he sat up, and Stone shifted the pillows behind him. “All is well, isn’t it? There are no . . . no . . .”
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