The Scarlet Pepper

by Dorothy St. James

  Frank didn’t say anything. He simply stared at her.

  “Francesca.” Annie grabbed her friend’s arm. “Let’s go.”

  Francesca batted Annie away.

  “We were friends once,” she said to Frank. “More than friends. I’d like to think that would mean something more than a sordid tabloid tale. How much are you getting paid to do this?”

  “Paid? I’m not—”

  “Francesca!” Annie’s voice grew more urgent. “We need to go. Now.” A couple of Secret Service agents closed in to help move Francesca and Annie along. They wanted the area cleared.

  “You may think you’re doing the right thing, but what about Bruce? What will your airing of dirty laundry do to him?” Francesca, teetering on the hysterical, resisted their attempts to herd her back toward Bruce. She raced after Frank, who had moved over to check on the cords to the teleprompter. I followed, hoping to help calm her down.

  “Francesca,” I said, “I don’t think you have the entire story.” I knew I sure didn’t. “Frank is going to the press about his…er…lifestyle.”

  My cheeks burned. A proper Southern lady didn’t talk about such things. Not that I was a proper Southern lady. My grandmother had tried her best, but I don’t think I’d ever fit the mold.

  Still, old lessons remained.

  When Francesca didn’t immediately react, I clarified. “He’s going to tell the press that he’s gay. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Unless…

  What if Annie’s blackmail picture was of Frank kissing Bruce?

  According to Mable and Pearle, Francesca already knew of Bruce’s infidelities. She’d even had a few indiscretions of her own. But would she be as understanding if she learned that Bruce enjoyed the company of men? How would she feel about the world learning that secret?

  Francesca took several deep breaths as she processed the idea of Frank coming out of the closet in front of the White House press corps.

  “Is that true?” she asked Frank.

  “What in hell did you think I would tell them?”

  “I—” She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  She knew darn well what she thought Frank would tell them. And damn it, why hadn’t I put the pieces together sooner? I was so concerned about who might be Kelly’s father and who might want to keep his identity secret that I’d completely ignored the other half of the equation. The mother.

  It was Francesca.

  She was Kelly’s mother.

  “You put that sticky note on my desk with Frank’s name on it because you were dying to tell someone,” I said. She’d abandoned her newborn baby because Kelly was half black. Francesca would never have been able to pass Kelly off as Bruce’s child. And everyone already knew that Bruce didn’t want to adopt. “That’s why you were acting so oddly. You wanted to tell someone. Not only that, you wanted to meet Kelly. How did you find out that she was your daughter?”

  “Parker called asking questions,” Francesca whispered. “I denied that I knew anything about Kelly, but the time frame fit. She’s mine.” Francesca shook her head as fat tears fell off her cheek. “She’s my baby.”

  “Fran-ces-ca,” Annie said, enunciating every syllable in her friend’s name, “if you know what’s good for you, you’ll come with me now. I’m not going to ask again.”

  Her red hair fell even more out of place as she stamped her foot against the slate pavement underneath the West Colonnade. She didn’t look or sound like a concerned grizzly bear friend. She sounded like a demanding bully.

  And back at the gardening shed, Annie had said that she wished someone would “take Frank up and stop him.” The fake suicide note had used a very similar odd phrasing.

  A phrase from the hills of West Virginia?

  Why hadn’t I seen it earlier?

  Her unnatural attachment to Francesca. Francesca’s generosity that held no bounds. Hell, even Frank had said Annie had threatened to blackmail him. The scandal Parker had dug up hadn’t been about Bruce Dearing at all. It had been about Frank and Francesca and Kelly.

  And Annie…

  I grabbed Francesca’s arm and spun her toward me. “She’s blackmailing you.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.

  —JAMES A. GARFIELD, THE 20TH PRESIDENT OF

  THE UNITED STATES

  I didn’t want to believe it. Annie Campbell seemed so meek. So fragile.

  “What did you say about Annie?” Francesca pulled away from me as if I’d suddenly caught fire.

  I felt as if I had.

  “Poor underprivileged Annie. Your best friend from forever. She’s blackmailing you. That’s how she’s kept her high-priced lifestyle when all she had inherited was debts. She was the one who would rather die than return to West Virginia, to her painful roots, am I not correct?”

  Francesca swallowed hard and nodded.

  “How far is she willing to go?”

  My mind went to that urn Annie had broken. Was that an accident…or another one of her plots? “How far has she already gone? Did she kill Parker? And Matthews? Was she driving the car that hit Kelly?”

  “Lord, I hope not,” Francesca breathed. “Not Annie. I have had suspicions, but I’m afraid to ask too many questions. I’m afraid of her. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s always had a mean streak. When I told her about Parker asking questions about Kelly, Annie exploded. She told me that if I tried to contact Kelly, if I talked with anyone about Kelly, she would ruin not only me but also Bruce.”

  Time seemed to slow as the pieces of the puzzle started to click into place. I watched in horror as President John Bradley walked in front of the glass door of the Oval Office and stopped. We’d replaced the planted urn just a few feet away from where he was standing.

  Annie had said she’d spilled gasoline in the shed.

  She’d also grown up around a father who was a miner with experience making ammonium nitrate explosives. A father who had died in a mining explosion. The essential ingredients of such an explosion included fertilizer, a fuel source—like gasoline—and a trigger device.

  Had the bags of ammonium nitrate been finally disposed of or simply put back onto the shelf? I hadn’t taken the time to look.

  Annie had been convinced Frank was going to tell the press about Francesca’s secret. She’d even tried to blackmail Frank to keep Francesca’s secret.

  “Was it Annie’s idea to invite Gillis to the White House?” I asked Francesca.

  Manny was wrong. Gillis Farquhar had no connection to the murders.

  “It was my idea to invite him.” Francesca bristled at the question.

  “This is important. I need to know the truth.”

  She closed her eyes. “It was Annie’s doing. I don’t know how she knows him.”

  Was Annie blackmailing Gillis? Was that how she’d paid Jerry and Bower to do her dirty deeds?

  “How far will she go to keep your secret?” I asked.

  Francesca refused to answer. Perhaps she didn’t know. Or was unwilling to fully face the truth.

  We were all players in Annie’s play. Like puppets on a string, we’d twitch every time she pulled a thread.

  Annie had come to the Rose Garden not to see the press conference setup. She’d come to knock over that urn and break it. She’d come to plant a bomb.

  My head started to pound.

  Every bomb scenario the Secret Service had thrown at me had ended in disaster. Jack had said they had been no-win situations.

  Was this a no-win situation?

  After checking the teleprompter, Frank returned to the podium to set the President’s notes on it. I noticed I wasn’t the only one watching his progress. Annie had given up on Francesca and was watching Frank with an intensity that frightened me.

  What should I do?

  President Bradley and the top members of Congress were just on the other side of that glass door. A large enough blast might injure o
r even kill them…and everyone in the Rose Garden.

  Bomb or not, I needed to do something.

  Annie and I locked eyes. She must have seen something in my expression to tip her off that I knew what she’d done. She took off running, not in the hope of escape, but to buy herself time. She was pulling out her cell phone. That was the trigger.

  “Jack!” I shouted. “There’s a bomb in the urn by the Oval Office. Frank, move!”

  The Secret Service agents in the Rose Garden converged toward the urn. Six members from the Secret Service’s elite military Counter Assault Team, dressed in ominous black battle dress uniforms and armed with large rifles, ran past the window inside the Oval Office. I’d only seen them move in a similar fashion once before. They were moving President Bradley and the members of Congress to safety.

  They were doing their jobs, but they didn’t know what I knew.

  I had to act as well. And if I didn’t act fast, we might still all end up dead.

  My breath was coming too fast. I felt dizzy as I sprinted after Annie.

  “There’s a bomb,” she shouted as she ran. “Francesca, run!”

  What a clever actress she was. She had her cell phone out and was pushing buttons as she charged out of the Rose Garden and down the South Lawn.

  Annie may have been fast, but I had several inches in height on her as well as a lifetime of hard work in the garden.

  I also had cracked ribs that felt like they wanted to shatter with every pounding stride. Even so, she didn’t get far. I grabbed her around the waist and, spinning, pulled the both of us to the ground.

  Her grip on her phone held fast. She punched more numbers.

  She had to be stopped.

  I had to stop her. I grabbed the gardening shears from their leather holster on my belt. “Let go of the phone,” I warned.

  Annie screamed. But she kept punching numbers into the phone’s keypad.

  When I looked at her I didn’t see sweet, muddleheaded Annie. I saw the grizzled face of my mother’s killer. I pulled back and slammed the sharp point of the shears into her hand until the phone dropped to the grass.

  Jack grabbed me around the shoulders and pulled me off her. He lifted me and wrapped his arms around my chest as two other CAT agents pulled Annie from the ground. Annie’s hand was bleeding. The cell phone was shattered.

  “I should have run you down when I had the chance,” she spat at me as they dragged her away. “You had no right to butt into my affairs. No right.”

  “It’s over,” Jack said as he pried the bloodied gardening shears from my clenched fingers. “It’s over. We’ve got her.”

  I pressed my face against Jack’s chest and fought to control the angry tears and rage pulsing through every muscle in my body.

  * * *

  THE ENTIRE WHITE HOUSE COMPLEX HAD TO be evacuated while highly trained members of the Secret Service neutralized the bomb. The press conference, the First Lady’s volunteer appreciation tea, everything, had to be canceled.

  Because we were all witnesses, Francesca, Bruce, Frank, and I were taken together to a Secret Service bunker deep beneath the North Lawn. The entrance…well, I’m not allowed to tell you where we entered the secret passage that led to the secret bunker with a large conference table and plush chairs, only that the door could be found two floors below the grounds office. At the far end of a hallway.

  For the first time since Parker’s murder, Francesca seemed to be in control again. She took deep breaths between each carefully thought-out sentence as she explained why Annie was blackmailing her. “You were campaigning, Bruce. I got lonely. And Frank”—she sighed—“was trying to prove how much he loved the ladies.”

  “I have a daughter?” Frank asked.

  I held my breath, waiting for him to deny Kelly or tell Francesca that he didn’t care, that even if Kelly bore his DNA, he didn’t want anything to do with her.

  He didn’t say a word. He gripped the arms of his chair and bent forward slightly.

  Francesca nodded. “Bruce had ended the campaign before I started showing. Remember, Bruce? The money ran out after you were handily defeated in that first primary election. As soon as you called an end to your campaign, I told you I needed to take care of my mother back in West Virginia. That was a lie. I went up to our cabin. Annie came with me.”

  “You’d vowed to always be discreet, as I had vowed to you,” Bruce said, his voice a low growl.

  “I was discreet.” Francesca spread her hands on the table in front of her. “No one knew.”

  Bruce grunted and turned his head away.

  Francesca grabbed Frank’s hand. “You understand why I couldn’t keep her and why I couldn’t tell you.”

  Frank pulled away. “No, I don’t understand.”

  “What made you abandon your own child outside in the cold in the middle of the night? She was a helpless newborn baby,” I asked. “Kelly said that if the neighbors hadn’t found her, she would have frozen to death.”

  “What? Annie told me that she used an adoption service. She—”

  “Lied,” I said.

  “You should have told me about the baby,” Bruce slammed his fist against the table. “We would have raised her.”

  “You should have told me,” Frank said, still taking it all in. “I would have made it work. I have a daughter? What a miracle. I never thought I’d have a child, not after I stopped pretending to be something I could never be.”

  “I—I didn’t know Annie had abandoned her. She’d promised me that she would make sure my baby found a good home. She’d promised—” Francesca froze. Her eyes filled with tears as she seemed to realize the magnitude of the mistake she’d made all those years ago. “My God,” she sobbed. “What have I done?”

  “How long did it take before Annie started demanding payment for her generosity?” I asked.

  “Almost—almost immediately,” Francesca answered as she lowered her head to the table and started to sob uncontrollably.

  “Bruce,” Frank said. “You do know you’re going to have to resign? When this all comes out about the murders, you’ll be a liability to the President. You already are.”

  Bruce’s shoulders raised and lowered in a slow shrug. “I know my duty.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Bryce said from the head of the table. “Annie poisoned both Griffon Parker and Simon Matthews to keep them from writing about Kelly’s birth parents because if the story got out, she would no longer have a hold over Francesca?”

  “I think that’s what happened,” I said since Francesca was still crying too hard to answer.

  “But how did she get close enough to them to get them to drink poison?” he asked.

  “My guess is she seduced them, telling them that she could be an important source to their story, that she could tell them all they needed to know,” Jack said.

  “She always has been Francesca’s friend, the tagalong,” I said. Francesca refused to look up from the table. Her shoulders shook harder. “I have a feeling that people forgot Annie was even in the room. She’d listen to conversations that she shouldn’t, perhaps even see things that she shouldn’t. And then she used that knowledge to her benefit.”

  “Like taking pictures of me,” Frank said.

  “What about Gillis? What’s his role in this?” Bryce asked.

  “She must have something on Gillis as well and used that to her benefit when she framed him for murder,” Jack said. “She was blackmailing him like she apparently did with everyone else in her circle of friends.”

  “But why didn’t Gillis tell us that?” Bryce asked.

  “Maybe he didn’t know who was blackmailing him. Who knows how many other people Annie has been extracting payments from?” I said. “But Francesca seemed to be Annie’s main paycheck.”

  “Please don’t hate me.” Francesca lifted her head and grabbed Frank’s hands.

  “How can I hate you? You gave me a child.” He jumped out of his chair. “She’s in the hospital. She
’s hurt. I have to go there. I have to be with her.”

  He pushed aside the Secret Service agents standing in his way. “You don’t understand. You can get my statement later. I have to get to the hospital. I have to go meet”—his voice cracked—“my baby girl.”

  Epilogue

  Let us have peace.

  —ULYSSES S. GRANT, THE 18TH PRESIDENT OF

  THE UNITED STATES

  THE White House came alive for the Fourth of July holiday that year. With Annie safely locked away—denying every charge—everyone seemed eager to celebrate. The last I’d heard from Manny, they’d linked Annie’s phone to the threatening phone calls and the calls directing Jerry and Bower to damage the garden. Also, transactions in her bank account matched the dates and amounts she’d paid the two lazy gardeners. And, the most damaging evidence of all, the police had found three severely pruned yew trees in her backyard.

  President Bradley had invited injured troops and their families to a backyard picnic. The First Lady invited all of her volunteers to the picnic to make up for the volunteer appreciation tea that had ended so abruptly. She had made a brief appearance before hurrying back inside.

  I prayed that with the worst of the controversies behind us, Margaret could rest and regain her strength for both herself and those darling babies she was carrying.

  Dressed in my brightest, happiest sundress, I mingled with the First Lady’s volunteers while sipping punch. After being stalked by Mable and Pearle for most of the afternoon, Gordon decided to stick close to my side.

  “Now, that’s a sight that makes me smile,” Gordon said and nodded toward the South Portico.

  I turned to follow the direction of Gordon’s gaze.

  Frank, beaming like a proud father, pushed Kelly in a wheelchair toward a buffet table.

  “Excuse me,” I said and hurried toward the happy duo.

  The doctors promised that Kelly was well on her way to making a complete recovery. I was happy for her. Truly happy.

  Why shouldn’t she get her father and her happy ending?

  I hated the part of me that felt jealous. I made certain that none of that foolishness showed as I hugged Kelly and then Frank, congratulating them on finding each other.