Tomb With a View pmm-6

by Casey Daniels

  “Sorry!” It’s not the kind of thing I like to hear after a heart-stopping kiss, but when he pulled away, Jack softened the blow with a smile that melted my anxiety. “That was way too forward of me,” he said. His voice bumped over his rough breaths. “I just couldn’t help myself. You’re so beautiful. I shouldn’t have done that. I hardly know you and you work here and—”

  “Yeah.” I struggled to catch my breath, too. “My boss wouldn’t be happy if somebody reported that they’d seen you and me here and—”

  “Which means I won’t let it happen again.” He stepped back. Just as quickly, he moved forward again, dropped the takeaway bag, and scooped me into his arms. “Well,” he said. “Maybe one more time.”

  There was nothing impetuous about this second kiss. It was slow and leisurely, and I tilted my head back, enjoying every scrumptious moment of it.

  “No more kissing you while you’re at work,” Jack said when it was over, then proved himself a liar by giving me another quick peck. “You ready for lunch?”

  I was ready for a lot of things. Lunch wasn’t necessarily one of them. And this definitely wasn’t the time or the place to think about it. I smoothed my hands over my hair. “You go on down,” I told Jack. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  With another sleek smile, he headed over to the stairway. I took a careful step to make sure I could move, even though my knees were mush. When I was sure I could, I wiped the dreamy little smile off my face (just in case I met Doris or a visitor on my way down) and followed him. It was a good thing I looked back right before I got to the stairway. Otherwise, I never would have noticed that CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC sign.

  It was upside down again.

  OK, so Jack was delectable.

  Jack was charming.

  Jack was one hell of a good kisser.

  None of that was enough to turn me from a capable, self-confident, independent woman into a complete moron.

  Was it?

  I liked to think not, and I proved it to myself by smiling and chatting my way through lunch out at one of the picnic tables near the memorial like nothing was wrong. And when Jack left? Well, of course I told him I’d talk to him soon. I even agreed to meet him for drinks later in the week. That would certainly not be a sacrifice.

  No, no . . . not because Jack was hot. Because now I knew he wasn’t on the up-and-up.

  See, I realized something the moment I saw that upside-down sign outside the ballroom door: luscious or not, that kiss was nothing more than a diversionary tactic. Any idiot could see that. While I’d been busy getting all melty and enjoying the sensations that popped through me like Fourth of July fireworks, Jack had turned over that sign.

  Question number one, of course, was, why?

  Question number two (not as important but way more aggravating) was, did he really think I wouldn’t notice? Unfortunately, I knew the answer to that one. Jack was a guy. He assumed women were dumb, and that I would be left so starry-eyed from getting kissed, I wouldn’t pay attention to anything else.

  How wrong he was!

  Unfortunately, though I was itching to have at it, I got a little sidetracked in my quest for the truth. No sooner had Jack gone than a bus full of visitors showed up from the Rocky River Senior Center, and after that, the day was not my own. The old folks kept me running, and by the time four o’clock rolled around, all I wanted to do was go home and take a nap.

  Unfortunately, a private detective’s life is never that easy.

  In an effort to satisfy my curiosity, I locked the front door of the memorial and headed up the winding staircase to the ballroom. I tugged on the door.

  Yep, it was locked.

  So it was my imagination that made me hear what I thought were noises coming from inside. But not my imagination about the CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC sign.

  Thinking, I batted the little sign back and forth and watched it swing from the red velvet rope where it was hanging.

  “Jackson McArthur, history teacher from Lafayette High School, Hammond, Indiana.” I mumbled the words to myself, my mind racing and every one of my thoughts leading to the same place.

  Within a couple minutes, I was at my desk in the administration building, asking myself the same question I’d asked myself back at the memorial. Namely, just how dumb do guys think women are?

  Because for one thing, there was no Jackson McArthur in the Hammond, Indiana, phone book and I know, I know . . . he could have had an unlisted number, and for all I knew, a guy as gorgeous as Jack needed one or he’d have every woman in town panting at his front door.

  For this, I was willing to cut him some slack.

  But I wasn’t done with my computer search, and what I found should come as no surprise.

  See, that’s the beauty of the Internet. It took me less than a couple minutes to find out there is no Lafayette High School in Hammond, Indiana.

  I could have obsessed about the whole Jack thing.

  I did obsess. At least for a while. Obsessing about who Jack really was and what he really wanted was a far better way to keep my mind occupied than thinking about Ball Cap Guy and looking out my apartment window every ten minutes while I muttered fervent prayers that I would not then (or ever) see him outside looking back at me.

  But really, though I am very good at it, even I can obsess only so long. By the next morning, I’d convinced myself that worrying about the doughy, stuttering man who’d come to see me at the memorial would get me nowhere. I would be careful at work. I would be smart when I went out and pay attention to who was around. Thus assured that I would also be safe, I concentrated on the mess that was the rest of my life.

  Every time I tried to sort out the facts, I came back around to the same three things:

  President Garfield said there was commotion in the memorial.

  Jack turned over the sign.

  Marjorie was dead.

  And detective that I am, I had to ask myself if those three things were related.

  It was kind of hard to get my brain around the whole thing, especially since I didn’t have much help. The president was good about complaining, but he couldn’t offer me any information as far as who was hanging around the memorial or what they were doing there. And certainly, Jack wasn’t going to tell me what he was up to.

  That left Marjorie.

  The thought actually crossed my mind to try and communicate with her spirit. Truth be told, in the course of investigating other cases, I had tried this with a couple other victims, and never with any success. Which wasn’t what kept me from trying again. I am, after all, a redhead, which means I don’t give up easily.

  But there was the little matter of Marjorie’s not-solikable personality. She was a total and complete pain, and I wasn’t going to take any chances. I mean, just imagine what might happen if I was able to bring her back and then she wouldn’t leave! Spending the rest of my life listening to her nattering on about how she was related to James A. Garfield was not something I wanted to even think about.

  With the possibility of talking to Marjorie off the table, I knew I had only one choice: I had to think like her. Scary, yes? But once I convinced myself that there would be no filmy head scarves involved, my nausea disappeared and I carried on with my plan. The next morning, I called Ella and played up the fact that I had to pick up my car from the mechanic and how I’d be in to work only it wouldn’t be until a little later. No worries, she told me, she would simply send Doris over to the memorial.

  Thus relieved of my duties (at least for a couple hours), I picked up the Mustang and headed thirty minutes east of town to Mentor, Ohio, where President Garfield lived with his family. The place is called Lawnfield and it’s now a National Historic Site. That means I had to pay five bucks to get in.

  Was it money well spent?

  For the first thirty minutes I toured the rambling Victorian house along with a couple of senior citizens, a home-schooling mom with two very uninterested preteens, and a pretentious guide named Tammi, I figured I’
d been had. Sure, there was plenty of history all around me. And yeah, I suppose there are folks who would swoon over the Victorian kitschiness of it all. Or the historical significance. Or whatever. But even though I tried to put myself in Marjorie’s place as I looked over the ornate parlor with a fireplace nearly as big as me, the family photos on the walls, and the library where a marble bust of the man I talked to back at the cemetery looked back at me, I was pretty much convinced I was spinning my wheels.

  Until we stepped out into a hallway near where we’d walked in.

  That’s when I noticed a blank spot where a square of paint was a slightly different color than the wall around it. Like something had recently been taken down from the wall and not replaced.

  The rest of our tour group had wandered off to look at the exhibits in the Visitors’ Center in the old carriage house. That left me with Tammi, and thinking like Marjorie would have if only she were there, I said, “It seems funny you would change the exhibits here. I mean, if it’s supposed to be a historic place and look like it did when the Garfields still lived here.”

  Tammi took her job very seriously, poor thing. Apparently anything that even smacked of criticism was a slap in the face. Inside her Park Service uniform, her shoulders shot back. “We strive for accuracy in our depiction of the history of this house,” she said. “The pictures displayed on the walls are mostly the same ones that were here when the Garfields were in residence.”

  “Mostly. Except for this one that got taken down.”

  She was wearing orange lipstick and her mouth pinched. She looked around like she wanted to make sure one of her supervisors wasn’t within earshot. “We had a problem,” she said, leaning closer to me. “A couple months ago. It’s never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since. I mean, we are the Government, after all.” The way she said it, I was sure that word, Government, was capitalized. “But every once in a while, someone slips up. I didn’t work here then.”

  “What you’re telling me is someone stole something. Right off the wall of the home of a president.”

  The pinch got tighter. “Fortunately, it was nothing the Garfield family themselves ever owned, certainly nothing that had any direct connection with the president himself.”

  “But somebody took it, anyway.”

  “It was donated.”

  “And then you hung it up, and then somebody swiped it.”

  She didn’t say yes or no. But then, she didn’t have to. Because what she said next was, “It was authentic enough, but there were people here who didn’t think it belonged, that since it wasn’t original to the house, it shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”

  “So you think someone who works here took it down? Just to get rid of it?”

  “I never said that.” The look in her eyes was one of pure horror. “What I said was there are those of us who don’t miss it. Not that we didn’t report it as stolen. We did. Well, they did. Like I said, I didn’t work here then.”

  “So it obviously wasn’t your fault.”

  She liked my take on things. If we weren’t standing in a site of National Historical Significance, I think she actually might have smiled. Instead, she nodded. “The tour guide got distracted. She left a visitor alone. When she came back, it was gone.”

  “And it was . . . ?” It was my turn to lean forward, urging Tammi to spill the beans.

  She took another careful look around. “A framed floor tile,” she said. “From—”

  “The waiting room of the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station, where the president was shot.”

  Tammi blinked at me in wonder. “How did you know?”

  I didn’t explain. I mean, how could I? I knew because I was thinking like Marjorie, and thinking like Marjorie made me think I would do whatever it took to get my hands on every bit of James A. Garfield memorabilia out there, even if it meant resorting to larceny.

  Was it worth the five bucks I’d paid to get into the president’s house?

  Well, for five bucks, I’d learned something I didn’t know before. Namely, that Marjorie had a dishonest streak. It didn’t help me figure out who’d killed her, but it told me more about the woman than I knew before.

  Cha-ching!

  12

  Sure, I’ve been known to fudge the truth a little once in a while. Usually in the name of solving a case. Or when doing so is vital to something important like my weight or my dress size. That doesn’t change the fact that I am now and always have been a basically honest person.

  I didn’t say a word to Tammi the tour guide, but the idea that Marjorie had a purloined piece of property—stolen from a president’s home no less—just didn’t sit right with me. Even before I left Lawnfield, I knew what I was going to do. I didn’t stop home, but I did make a quick detour to the library, long enough to use the Internet to find Nick Klinker’s home address.

  Nick, it seemed, had better taste than his aunt. At least when it came to neighborhoods and houses. Within an hour, I found myself clear on the other side of town in the chichi suburb of Bay Village. Big houses. Towering oaks. Views of the lake for the lucky few who were smart enough to scoop up waterfront property.

  Nick Klinker was one of them.

  I parked the Mustang on the circular drive that led up to a house with more windows than walls, and a sweeping backyard where I could see a garden with a fountain and one of those gazebos. Vine covered, of course. The house was situated high on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, and though real estate is not my thing, I had been trained right early on; I knew—and appreciated—pricey when I saw it.

  Recession? What recession? Obviously, things were just peachy in the software engineering world.

  By the time I rang the bell, I had already practiced what I was going to say when Nick answered the door. There was no use beating around the bush, and no way to sugarcoat the truth: his late aunt wasn’t just the most annoying individual I’d ever met; she was a crook, too.

  Only I was going to put it in words nicer than that.

  I would have, too, if Nick answered the door. Instead, when it swung open, Bernadine, Nick’s fiancée, was looking back at me. At least I thought it was Bernadine. She couldn’t have looked more different than the stylishly turned-out woman I’d seen at the funeral. The impeccable outfit was gone, replaced with a pair of ratty denim capris and a T-shirt that immortalized some 5K run everybody had already forgotten. The sleek hairstyle? There was no sign of that, either. Bernadine’s blond tresses stuck up in weird spikes all over her head.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” Bernadine’s eyes were blazing. She looked me over, twisted a lock of hair around one finger, and pulled hard. “Do I know you?”

  I did my best to smile. It would have been easier if she’d been wearing those sweet Dolce & Gabbana pointed-toe slingbacks. But she wasn’t wearing any shoes at all, and half her toenails were polished garish pink. The others were done in a chocolately shade of maroon.

  I looked back up to her face. “We didn’t have a chance to talk on Monday, but I chatted with Nick. At Marjorie Klinker’s—”

  “Don’t even mention that woman to me!” Bernadine threw her head back and groaned. When she turned around and padded down the hallway, she didn’t close the door and she didn’t tell me to get lost, so I followed her, closing the door behind me. By the time I found her in the cavernous house, she was in a kitchen with a floor-to-ceiling view of the lake. She had a bottle of Black Velvet in one hand.

  She poured a healthy couple inches into a glass and downed them in one gulp. “Do you know something about what Nick’s up to?” she asked me.

  I was a tad confused so I didn’t say anything. She was a tad busy pouring herself another drink so she didn’t notice. As jittery as a double jolt of caffeine, she went over to the stainless steel, industrial-sized refrigerator and got a handful of ice cubes. She dumped them in with the whiskey and swirled the drink, studying me over the rim of the glass.

  “Well, do you?” she asked. “
Because I’ll tell you something, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, and it’s making me crazy, and I don’t have time to mess with this kind of nonsense. My wedding is in exactly . . .” She glanced at a calendar almost as big as the refrigerator it was stuck to with magnets. The days of the month that had already passed were marked off with thick red X’s, and the Saturday just one week away was circled. There was a big yellow star on the date.

  “I’m getting married a week from this Saturday,” Bernadine said. She took a couple quick sips of her drink. “And do you see my groom here helping me get ready?” She spread her arms and looked around the kitchen, demonstrating.

  Point made. We were the only two people there.

  “I’ve got wedding favors to make,” she wailed. “Three hundred and forty-seven little porcelain picture frames, and every single one of them needs a photo of me and Nick put in it. But is Nick here to help?” Another swig, and she was rarin’ to go. The panic in Bernadine’s voice climbed right along with her anger.

  “Was he here last night when the florist stopped by for one final chat? Did he show up this afternoon when I talked to the soloist about the songs for church?” She didn’t wait for me to say anything, but then, she didn’t need an answer and I wasn’t about to interrupt. That old saying about hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? A woman scorned doesn’t hold a candle to a bride whose wedding day is breathing down her neck.

  “I know he’s been distracted, what with Marjorie’s death and everything,” Bernadine said, doing her best to be understanding. “And I know he’s nervous, too. His tummy’s been acting up and he’s not usually the high-strung type. That tells me he cares and knowing that . . .” She fueled her thoughts with another sip of whiskey and apparently her brief tiptoe into the land of the sensible was over. Her voice rose to a screech. “Has Nick done one damned thing to help me these past few days?” she asked no one in particular. “I’ll tell you what, no, he hasn’t! Does he think a bride can do all these things by herself? I mean, really. Is it fair to expect me to go to the tanning salon, try out nail lacquer colors, do a run-through on hair and makeup, and count out those little bags of pink and red M&Ms with Bernie on some and Nick on some and Love Forever on others? I ask you. Is it?”