Oak and Dagger

by Dorothy St. James

  I pushed through a prickly hedge of hollies and reached under a bush to fetch the yellow-handled gardening tool. It wasn’t a trowel but Gordon’s pruning saw. What was it doing over here, so far away from the elms that had been pruned?

  I had to stretch to pick up the saw—it shouldn’t be left out in the rain to rust. The blade was already filthy with mud. As I lifted the saw, my arm brushed aside a pile of mulch that had partially hidden it.

  And that’s when I found Frida Collingsworth.

  Chapter Five

  Fatality seems connected with the occupants of this office and Mansion.

  —JANE PIERCE, FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES (1853–1857)

  “PUT down the saw,” Mike Thatch said. He held out both hands in front of him as he approached, taking each step as if he was afraid he’d trip a land mine. “Just set it on the ground.”

  “She’s dead.” I’d stated the obvious. Frida was lying half-buried in a pile of mulch. It wasn’t a natural death. Her neck and the front of her blouse were soaked with blood.

  “It must have been an accident. A horrible, horrible accident,” I said because I couldn’t believe she’d been murdered within one of the securest places in the world.

  Thatch paled as he leaned over a holly bush and pressed his fingers to Frida’s neck to check for a pulse. He sucked in a quick breath as our gazes met. His eyes widened with panic.

  “Casey.” With one blink, Thatch chased away any sign of emotion. “Put down the saw.”

  “Why?” I asked, still unwilling to believe what my eyes and instincts saw in front of me.

  “It’s bad enough that it’s raining like the second flood is coming,” Thatch said. “We don’t need you tromping through the crime scene and getting your fingerprints all over the murder weapon, too. Put the damn thing down. Now.”

  “Murder weapon?”

  “The saw in your hand smeared with blood.”

  “That’s blood?” I tossed the pruning saw away from me and jumped over a small holly bush to land on a stone paver in the center of the garden. “The . . . that saw killed Frida? You think she was murdered?”

  “The police will find that out for us.” Jack gathered me into his arms. “They’re on their way.”

  “Good,” Thatch said. “We’ll need to lock things down.”

  “Already under way,” another agent said.

  Thatch nodded. “Get everyone out of here. The police will want to erect tents. Get them ready. And post men at the garden’s entrance. We’ve already had enough boots marching through the crime scene.”

  “The pruning saw . . . It couldn’t have killed Frida,” I said. The perfect cuts on the surrounding trees all had bore Gordon’s signature touch. “It’s Gordon’s saw.”

  Gordon and Frida had been arguing earlier. I’d never seen Gordon so angry with anyone. But that didn’t mean . . .

  I hugged myself and shivered.

  “I need to get to the hospital. I need to make sure Gordon is okay. Frida’s death must have been an accident. Just an accident. Gordon couldn’t have—”

  “Let’s get you out of the rain.” Jack took a large black umbrella from one of the other Secret Service agents and held it over my head.

  The rain was coming down with a punishing force now. I was soaked to the bone again, and hadn’t even noticed. Mike Thatch and Jack were just as drenched. Neither of them had bothered with the umbrellas, either.

  “It wasn’t Gordon,” I told Jack as he led me up the narrow trail and out of the garden. “He wouldn’t do this.”

  “Let’s get you inside, Casey,” was all he’d say.

  • • •

  THUNDER RATTLED THE WINDOWS INSIDE THE White House.

  A maid draped a heavy wool blanket over my shoulders as Jack and I, followed by the agents, entered the White House. I pulled the blanket tightly about me to chase away the chill.

  One of the chefs handed me a piping hot mug of coffee as we passed the kitchen.

  Wide-eyed nurses came out of the physician’s office. Doctor Stan, the President’s personal physician, even came out of his office to watch the soggy procession down the residence’s main hallway. I could tell by their grim expressions the medical staff already knew about Gordon and Frida.

  Of course they knew. Tucked into Dr. Stan’s ear was an earpiece that was tuned to the same frequency as the members of the Secret Service. He’d have listened in on the frantic conversations taking place between the Secret Service agents as they’d reported in and made decisions on how to proceed in the Children’s Garden.

  Everyone else who’d converged in the hallway from the kitchens and housekeepers’ offices looked as confused as I felt. Their questions followed me down the hallway. “What happened? Was there a security breach? Was Casey attacked again?”

  Soon everyone would know about Gordon and Frida. Secrets didn’t last long among the White House staff. Whispers spread like wildfires through these halls.

  “Casey? There you are. What, um, is going on?” Nadeem hurried out of the curator’s corner office with a steep pile of file folders in his arms and half-moon metal-rimmed reading glasses perched on his nose. “The meeting with Gordon and Frida was . . . was supposed to have started ten minutes ago, and I haven’t been able to find them.”

  “They—they . . .” I swallowed around a lump in my throat. “About that . . .”

  Nadeem looked at the heavy blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Then at Jack, who was standing like an avenging angel at my shoulder. And then at the team of Secret Service agents filling the hallway.

  His gaze narrowed. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice an octave deeper. He took a step toward me and straightened his shoulders. He no longer sounded like a befuddled researcher but like a man ready to take charge.

  “Let the poor dove go get dried off. She’s soaking wet,” said an older woman as she emerged from the curator’s office. She was wearing a black brocade dress belted high at the waist and sensible black shoes. Her long snowy white hair was piled on the top of her head in an elaborate bun.

  She gestured toward me, her weathered hands moving like a woman used to holding knitting needles. Her faded blue eyes seemed to miss nothing as her gaze took in the drama unfolding around us.

  If Miss Marple had stepped out of the pages of one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels, this would be exactly how I’d have expected the clever sleuth to look and act. This woman even had an English accent.

  “Forgive me,” Nadeem said to the Miss Marple doppelgänger standing next to him. “Casey, this is Dr. Watson, the garden historian from the National Arboretum.”

  Not Marple, but a doctor . . . “Did you say Dr. Watson? As in Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick?” A slightly hysterical giggle escaped before I clamped my lips closed.

  “No, dear, not Watson. Everyone makes that mistake. It’s Wadsin.” She spelled it. “Joan Wadsin. I’m looking forward to working with the White House on developing the exhibition on the history of its gardens.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” My half-frozen hand snaked out from beneath the blanket to take hers in a polite greeting. My grandmother Faye had drilled good manners into me. Child, when the world is falling down around our ears, we must make doubly sure we put our best foot forward. It takes the edge off the stress when everyone knows how to act, she liked to say.

  And sometimes, like when I was numb with shock, social rules did help.

  “What has happened here? Where is Frida?” Nadeem demanded of Jack. “She should have returned by now.”

  Jack crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t look open to providing any answers to Frida’s new assistant. And I wasn’t prepared to announce my grim findings to everyone standing in the hallway.

  Gordon and Frida deserved better. Besides, the Secret Service might have reasons of their own for keeping a lid on that information for now. The staff would find out the horrible news soon enough.

  “I’m sorry.” I took a deep breath and p
atted Nadeem’s arm. “Neither Gordon nor Frida will be available for the meeting. If you don’t mind, could you take Dr. Wadsin to the grounds office and ask Lorenzo to show you Gordon’s archived gardening notes?”

  “Of course he can, dear,” Miss Marple—I mean, Dr. Wadsin said. “And you need to get into some dry clothes before you catch a cold.”

  “Yes, I will,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Casey, they’re waiting.” Jack gestured down the hall and to the rest of the Secret Service team who had passed us as they headed toward the East Wing.

  “Is there anything I can—” Nadeem started to ask.

  “Just—Just get to work on the project,” I said. “That’s what Gordon would want us to do.”

  Chapter Six

  He didn’t get all of those injuries from a fall.

  —MARTHA WASHINGTON, FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES (1789–1797)

  D.C. Police Detective Manny Hernandez’s pencil scratched nosily against the paper as he wrote in his small notebook. He huffed loudly. The quick exhale of breath made his salt-and-pepper mustache dance.

  “Gordon must have been attacked by the same person who killed Frida,” I said. “And that hole at the base of the apple tree. It’s still bothering me. Why was it there?”

  Manny and I were alone in the small office on the second floor of the East Wing. The room had been turned into a makeshift interview room for the police’s use. The D.C. Police Department held jurisdiction over all investigations of suspicious deaths, even for deaths that occurred on the secure White House property. And everyone even remotely involved with Frida and Gordon was being questioned.

  I’d first met the hard-boiled detective and his threadbare brown suits this past spring when he was assigned to investigate the death of a woman I’d found murdered in a nearby park. We’d “teamed up” again in the summer after one of the White House correspondents had been poisoned.

  Manny was the D.C. police’s go-to detective for high-profile and politically prickly cases. He knew how to get the job done without ruffling important feathers. But just because he could get along with the suspects and witnesses involved in a case didn’t mean he wasn’t capable . . . or dangerous.

  At the first whiff of guilt, he’d clamp down with the same intensity with which my aunt Alba’s old bulldog Beauregard would chomp on a butcher bone. And he sure as hell wouldn’t let go until he got to the meat of the crime.

  His tenacity was generally a good thing.

  “So the head gardener and the curator had been arguing,” Manny said as a prompt to redirect the conversation. He seemed determined to keep circling back to Gordon and Frida’s disagreement and the blood on Gordon’s sleeves.

  “As I’ve already said, Frida had changed her mind,” I told Manny. “She told me herself she was wrong to accuse Gordon of stealing her research.”

  “But Gordon didn’t know that. And he was angry.”

  I don’t know what he expected me to say to that. “I don’t like the direction of your inquiry.” I turned away from Manny and watched as a rivulet of rain rushed down the glass of a nearby window to form a small ocean on the windowsill. “I’ve told you what I saw. Now shouldn’t you be asking me why someone might attack both Frida and Gordon?”

  “Okay, Casey. Why would someone want to hurt both the gardener and the curator?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know if Gordon had survived the trip to the hospital. No one would tell me. The not-knowing clawed at my throat.

  Manny’s pencil scratched noisily against the paper in his small notebook as he made more notes.

  “Are we done?” I asked.

  He waved his hand toward the door. “For now.”

  Outside the small office, the hallways in the East Wing were crowded with uniformed police officers and Secret Service agents of every rank and uniform. Their voices were subdued as they spoke with one another.

  I’d just started to descend the stairs to the first floor when I heard one voice boom out over the others. “Bryce!”

  At the base of the stairs, a tall, broad-shouldered man with shimmering silver hair and dressed in a suit that looked as if it had been made especially for his larger-than-life frame paused and turned. I’d dealt with Special Agent in Charge of Protective Operations Bryce Williams a few times. He always treated the grounds staff with respect, even when he didn’t agree with us.

  “Bryce,” Mike Thatch called again as he jogged to catch up with his supervisor.

  The older man leaned against the stairway’s railing. “What is it?”

  Thatch had a cell phone pressed to his ear. “A representative for Lev Aziz contacted our switchboard.”

  “Aziz? Our switchboard? Or the White House’s?”

  “Ours, sir,” Thatch said.

  “Tell me they transferred him over to the Oval Office. Bradley needs to meet with Aziz. Immediately.”

  “I know, sir. But Aziz’s man wasn’t calling to talk about the meeting. He was calling about the curator’s murder. I’m listening to the taped conversation now.” Thatch paused. “That can’t be right. Can you play back that last part again?” he said to whoever was on the other end of the phone call. “What?” After listening for a minute, he pocketed his phone. “Aziz’s man said he would only talk with Calhoun.”

  “Who?” Bryce barked.

  Thatch started to answer, but as his gaze lifted, he spotted me standing near the top of the stairs listening. He held up his hand. “We shouldn’t talk about it here. We’re not alone.”

  Bryce Williams stepped aside. “Forgive us. We didn’t mean to hold you up,” he said to me. His ice blue gaze chilled my bones as he watched me descend the steps. Thatch held the stairwell’s door open for me.

  “Aziz wanted to talk with me?” I asked them. That couldn’t be right.

  “I’m sure you misunderstood,” Thatch said.

  I itched to stay and find out what the two men were talking about. I also wanted to find out how the Turbekistan envoy could possibly be connected with Frida’s death, but I was clearly not welcome.

  I shuffled out of the stairwell and down the corridor. My head throbbed from worry and hunger and questions, lots and lots of questions.

  • • •

  “Are you ready?” Jack inquired, falling in step beside me as I passed through the enclosed breezeway connecting the East Wing to the main residence.

  “Ready for what?” I asked. The only thing I felt ready to do was collapse on the floor below me.

  “I promised to take you to Gordon.” He handed me his coat. “It’s still pouring out there.”

  Jack drove to George Washington University Hospital.

  “What do you know about Turbekistan?” I asked him as he steered his rusty old Jeep onto the ramp for George Washington University Hospital’s parking garage.

  “It’s a country in Eastern Europe.”

  “Thanks for the geography lesson, but that’s not what I was asking for.” I told Jack about the conversation I’d overheard in the stairwell as he steered into a parking space.

  Jack went still when I mentioned Lev Aziz’s name. “You know about the envoy’s visit?”

  “Doesn’t everybody? Do you have any idea why Aziz would want to talk with me?”

  “I’m sure you misunderstood.” Jack’s shoulders tightened. This was clearly a conversation he wasn’t comfortable having.

  “What if I didn’t? What if Aziz wants to be reassured the water line break was an accident and not sabotage?”

  Jack flinched whenever I said the envoy’s name. “I’m sure that’s not it. Who told you about Aziz?”

  “Someone in the West Wing told Gordon when he was getting grilled by the staff. Why?”

  “Because the meeting with Turbekistan is classified. Top-secret classified. Those big mouths in the West Wing shouldn’t be talking about it. We shouldn’t be talking about it.”

  “But—”

  “I’m serious, Casey. Forg
et you heard anything. Forget I said anything, okay?”

  “But what if I can help? Or what if this Aziz fellow is somehow connected to the thefts of my schematics and Frida’s research and”—I swallowed around a lump in my throat—“what if he knows what happened to Frida and Gordon? What if Frida and Gordon saw something they shouldn’t have? Something that involved these secret talks? Aziz wouldn’t have been so skittish after the irrigation line break if he didn’t think he was in danger.”

  “Whoa.” He threw up his hands. “Those are several huge logic jumps you just made there, Casey.”

  “Are they? How can you be so sure?”

  “Listen to me, there isn’t a connection. Aziz has a reputation for being paranoid. Extremely paranoid. Anything he says is suspect.” He opened the Jeep’s door and got out. “And that’s all I can say on that matter.”

  Not one to give up so easily, I told Jack the rest of the story about the stolen schematics and the missing research from Frida’s office as we walked through the garage to the hospital. I hoped this new information would convince him to change his mind, and he’d tell me more about the President’s secret meetings with Turbekistan and who might want to sabotage them.

  Jack listened. Nodded sympathetically. But remained stubbornly silent on the matter.

  My attention turned from Turbekistan’s untapped oil and back to Gordon’s health as I sidestepped out of the hospital’s large revolving front door. I started to type a text message to Lorenzo to let him know where I was, what I was doing. Unlike the tech-savvy West Wing interns, I hadn’t yet mastered the art of walking and texting. Before I’d finished typing the message to Lorenzo, I walked right into a post.

  “Oomph,” the post grunted.

  My fingers stopped mid-text. “Oh! I’m so sorry.” I quickly stepped back from the post, who wasn’t a post at all, but a man with dark eyebrows and a little bit of gray in his black hair. Wait a minute, wasn’t that . . . ? “Nadeem? Nadeem Barr?”