Tomb With a View

10

I may have been wondering what on earth I was supposed to do next as far as my investigation was concerned, but believe me when I say I had no such reservations about choosing an outfit the next morning. I was going to lunch with Jack, so no khakis and polo shirt for me. Instead I picked out a sleek little cotton dress: square-necked, sleeveless, form-hugging. I grabbed a matching, kiwi-colored bolero on my way out the door of my apartment just in case the memorial was cool. Since Jack was hot (and oh, how I was counting on that!) and I didn’t want to look too dowdy, I could strip off the bolero before he arrived.

What I wasn’t counting on was getting down to my car parked behind my apartment building and finding that two of the tires had gone flat. I grumbled, sure, but never let it be said that Pepper Martin isn’t a woman of action. I called AAA on my way back up to the apartment, where I took off the kiwi-colored dress, carefully folded it, and stashed it in a carry bag so I could change back into it at lunchtime. That done, I pulled on the dreaded khakis and polo shirt and, as long as I was at it, a pair of sneakers, too. Sure the open-toed slingbacks I’d been wearing were adorable, but just as sure, I could never walk the mile from my apartment to the cemetery wearing them, even if it weren’t all uphill. The slingbacks, too, got tucked into the bag. Thus prepared, I started out for the monument.

It was a sticky morning, so even if it was born of necessity, bringing clothes to change into was an act of pure genius. Just like cute shoes with high heels aren’t meant for walking, perspiration stains on a gorgeous dress make such a bad impression. Especially when the fabric is dry clean only.

By the time I had climbed all those stairs that led up to the front door of the monument and stuck the key into the lock, I was breathing hard and desperate to sit down.

So one can only imagine how much I did not want to be greeted by a certain dead commander in chief.

“This is impermissible.” President Garfield paced the entryway like a caged lion. He’d obviously been waiting for me, he was so worked up, the great orator actually sputtered. “I simply will not tolerate . . . I cannot abide . . . these sorts of interruptions are unconscionable, not to mention rude. Comings and goings and—”

“It’s Tuesday. I’m supposed to be here.” I was sweaty and tired, remember. I couldn’t afford to stand on ceremony, even with the president. I trudged into the office, set down my purse and my carry bag, and flopped into the chair behind the desk. It was blessedly cool inside the monument and I fanned my fiery cheeks and wished I could enjoy a few moments of peace. You’d think a man who’d made it all the way to the White House would have been smart enough to pick up on that.

“I have been patient,” the president said, coming into the office and sounding anything but. The way he huffed and puffed, it was like he was the one who’d had to slog to work that morning. “I have been forbearing. I have been as a man who is adrift on a stormy sea, and who sees that there is no beneficial result to be had from raging against the conjunctive forces of Fate and Nature. He must stay his time, and excogitate his plans. He must—”

With a sigh, I pushed myself out of the chair. “He must get to the point?”

The president flushed. He had a high hairline and the color flowed over his cheeks and all the way up his forehead. “The point is, young lady, I can no longer abide such disturbances. I have a country to run!”

It was early. I was hot and tired. There was no coffee-maker in the memorial like there was in the administration building, where I would have stopped first thing if I was in my car instead of on foot, and the caffeine from the cup I’d had back at home had been sweated out of me. I was a little nervous about having lunch with Jack, and a little annoyed that, so far, my case wasn’t coming together. I was a little worried that Quinn was making more progress when it came to Marjorie’s murder, and more than a little sure that if he was getting somewhere more promising than my nowhere, he wouldn’t share any information with me and that he would, in fact, gloat about it the first chance he got. Oh, how I didn’t like the thought of Quinn gloating!

Like anybody could blame me for blowing a fuse?

I pounded out into the entryway and flung open the door, stepping back so the president could get around me. “You want to run the country? Fine! Get out of here and go run it. You certainly couldn’t do a worse job than all the other goofballs who think they know what they’re doing.” When he didn’t move fast enough to suit me, I stomped one sneaker-clad foot and waved him toward the outside world. “Go!”

The president threw back his shoulders and marched to the door. “I will do exactly that,” he rumbled, and he stepped outside.

If we were in some TV drama, or one of those romance novels my mom likes to read so much, I would have slammed the door behind him and brushed my hands together in a good-riddance sort of way. I was all set to when I looked out to where the president stood on the flagstone veranda and saw his jaw go slack. His shoulders dropped, and he turned as pale as I’d always pictured ghosts would be before I met one and found out they don’t look any different from anyone else. His eyes bulged and he jerked forward and threw his arms out to his sides—right before he let go a cry so gut-wrenching, it rattled my bones.

I rushed outside, but remember, the living can’t touch ghosts. If any of us do, we’ll freeze up like Popsicles. If I could have put a hand on his shoulder, or given him a shake, I might have been able to get through to the president. The way it was, all I could do was stand there, helpless and panic-stricken, while he writhed in pain and screamed as if he were burning from the inside out.

“What’s going on? What’s happening?” By this time, I was jumping up and down in front of him, and he was flickering, like a strobe light. On, then off. On, then off. My eyes filled with tears of desperation and a lump of terror in my throat, I realized that each time he flicked off, it took him longer to come back. “What do you want me to do?” I screamed.

He vanished before he could tell me, and I waited. One second. Two. Three. This was not good. I’d seen ghosts disappear from this world to go into the next before, and aside from one who got dragged to hell and deserved it (the bitch), I had never seen one pass over so violently.

I waited, my pulse beating out each second, wringing my hands and wondering what to do and how to do it and—

The president poofed back onto the wide veranda outside the front door, and I let go a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. As if he needed me to tell him that. “What do you want me to do?”

Slowly, as if each move he made was painful, he turned to look at the door. “Inside.” The word didn’t exactly come out of his mouth. It hissed through the air like the wind and chilled me from head to toe. “Must . . . get . . . into . . . the tomb.”

It was the first time I realized that when we came outside, the massive wooden front door had slammed closed behind us. I prayed it hadn’t somehow locked, too, and I grabbed for the handle, but though I was icy on the inside, my fingers were slick.

My hand slipped.

The president flickered.

“Hold on!” I yelled, and made another try for the door. My fingers wrapped around the iron handle, and once I had a hold of it, I hung on tight and wrenched open the door. A whoosh of air from inside the memorial rolled over us. The president stopped flickering.

“Quick. Inside,” I told him. I didn’t have to. One step at a time, he dragged himself back into the memorial. Once he was in the entryway, I slammed the door closed behind us and stood with my back braced against it, breathing hard.

“What the hell—”

“Really, Miss Martin.” The president puffed like a faulty steam engine. “A woman should never—”

A laugh burst out of me. “You almost disappeared. Or dissolved. Or exploded. Or something. And all you can worry about is my language?”

“I am afraid it is a product of my upbringing.” He laughed, too, but then, I guess I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t know what happened there outside the front door, but whatever it was, he was lucky to have escaped. He knew it, too. I could tell because though he tried to keep a stiff upper lip, his eyes were troubled and his expression was clouded. “I am grateful for your assistance,” he said, snapping himself out of the uncomfortable memory. “As you know, I cannot touch things of this world. If you had not been here to open the door for me and allow me back inside—”

“You could have just poofed right through it.” I nodded to convince him, and myself. “I’ve seen ghosts do that. They can disappear on one side of a wall or door and pop up on the other side.”

“Certainly, if they have the strength.”

“And you didn’t.” Just thinking of the way his features had twisted with pain made my stomach swoop. I hugged my arms around myself. “What happened?”

“You angered me.”

I was about to tell him no way any of it was my fault when he held up a hand to keep me quiet.

“You angered me, yes, with your taunting and your insistence that I should take my place in the world rather than keeping to myself here in my tomb. But I should have known better than to give in to so unproductive an emotion. I was weak, and that failing within my character made me act with brazen disregard for all that is true.”

Like this was supposed to explain things? I leaned forward. “And all that is true is . . . ?”

The president harrumphed. He grumbled. He muttered. When he was done doing all that, he turned and walked into the rotunda. Just like the first time I went in there with him, the marble pillars around us were suddenly enveloped in sparkling fog. It drifted around my feet and curled up my arms. When a blast of air cleared the mist around us, we were back in the room with the fireplace and the long wooden table with all those portraits of all those presidents staring back at us from the walls.

“I was president for only four months,” Mr. Garfield said. “You know that, of course. You must pardon me if I sound far too self-absorbed, but really, like all my countrymen, you must be aware of my singular history.”

I really wasn’t, and I doubted too many other people were, either. I mean, honestly, how many Americans know anything about President James A. Garfield? Though I’d grown up in the area and had attended public schools not all that far away, none of my teachers had ever even mentioned him except in passing. We’d never come to his memorial for a field trip, either, and now that I thought about it, that was a shame. There was a president of the United States entombed practically in our backyard, and I bet thousands of Cleveland-area schoolchildren didn’t even know it.

After all I’d seen him go through outside, I didn’t have the heart to make the president suffer any more. Hearing that practically no one but a history teacher like Jack or a nutcase like Marjorie remembered him . . . well, there was nothing to be gained from that. I scrambled to think of everything Ella had told me about the president before she assigned me to his memorial.

“You were the twentieth president.”

“Yes.” He nodded, pleased. “That is most certainly true.”

“You took office in March.”

“March of 1881.”

“And you were shot in . . . July?”

“Yes. Exactly. I was shot by a man named—”

“Charles Guiteau.” I was pretty proud of myself for remembering it. “But you didn’t die right away. You lived until—”

“September. September nineteenth, to be exact.” His shoulders rose and fell. “So little time, and so much important work that needed to be accomplished. I could have done so much.”

I scurried through the mental notes I’d made in case someone who visited the memorial actually wanted to talk about the president instead of Marjorie’s murder. “But you did. There was civil service reform. And that investigation of the Post Office. And—”

“And all of it important, yes. But I had years stolen from me. Years, and achievements I can still, to this day, only dream of. All taken from me by a man who was brainsick. You see, by his own authority and with no knowledge or encouragement from any member of my staff, Guiteau gave a speech or two on my behalf during my presidential campaign. Once I was elected, he thought himself solely responsible for my success and insisted he should have a post in my administration as a show of my appreciation. Again and again, he wrote to me, and to members of my cabinet. He insisted I should send him to Vienna and name him consul general. Needless to say, I ignored his missives, as did the members of my staff, but that did not stop him. He kept up his incessant supplications. He wrote letters. He waited outside my office at the Executive Mansion. He finally gave up on Vienna and demanded that I name him ambassador and that he be posted to Paris. Imagine the audacity of the man!”

The president snorted his outrage. He turned and stomped to the table, his footsteps muffled by the thick Oriental carpet at our feet. His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his expression, but I could hear the anger simmering in his voice. “You know, this Guiteau fellow once stole into a presidential reception and actually managed to insinuate himself close to the First Lady. My poor Lucretia! If I had sensed she might be in any danger, I would have pummeled this Guiteau fellow myself, right then and there.” His face purple, he whirled around and slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand.

I think it was the first time he remembered that I was there watching. He blinked, and his eyes cleared. “You must pardon my anger,” he said. “It is a fact that, in my younger days, I was a minister. Apparently I listened when I gave my flock advice, for aside from moments such as these when I allow my emotions to get the best of my nature, I have long ago forgiven Guiteau. He was unbalanced, after all. I do believe that these days, you would call him a stalker.”

Stalker.

The word settled somewhere between my heart and my stomach and sent a cold wave through me that left me shaky. It was one of the times I was actually grateful to be a detective because, well . . . I wasn’t very content with unanswered questions. As disturbing as it was to watch President Garfield suffer when he stepped outside the memorial, thinking about that strange incident sure beat thinking about the doughy-faced man who’d showed up at the office the day before.

“You haven’t explained,” I said, and because I knew he was going to pretend he didn’t know what I was talking about, I stood my ground and refused to let him change the subject. “I want to know what happened outside the front door, and why.”

“Ah, the why of it. That is what I have been trying to elucidate for you. You see, I did not have my chance to be president here on this earth—”

“So you’re president here! Inside the memorial!” The bits and pieces of everything he’d said and everything I’d seen in the rotunda that wasn’t the rotunda when he was with me suddenly made sense. So did the reason why, after all these years, his ghost was still hanging around. All of the ghosts I’d met since I’d discovered my Gift had unfinished business, but not this one. The president’s assassin had been punished. Justice was done, and that should have been the end of that. Yet he was still haunting the memorial. Note: I said memorial. In fact, I’d never seen him anywhere else in the cemetery. In light of everything he said, that made sense. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re making up for lost time.”

He nodded. “I was offered a trade, you see. My time on the Other Side for time here. As president. I was denied so many productive years by my untimely death. Now, as long as I stay within the boundaries of my memorial, I continue to exist in this form. If I leave—”

“You go up in a puff of smoke.”

“Not exactly the way I would have worded it, but yes. That is exactly what would happen should I leave the confines of this tomb for too long. I would cease to exist, in this world or in the next. I have no regrets about making the decision to stay on here. Here . . .” He spread his arms, taking in the elegant room. “Here I am president. I continue the work I started all those years ago. I make decisions. I meet with my cabinet. There is a great deal that needs to be done. So you can see why it is of the utmost importance for me to be left undisturbed. With all the ruckus of late—”

“Well, I’m guessing we’re still going to have the commemoration, with Marjorie or without her. So there’s no way you’re going to get away from that. And no way to avoid the tourists who keep showing up to check out the spot where she bit the big one, either. That will die down, I’m sure. And the commemoration won’t last forever. You’ll get your peace and quiet eventually.”

“Yes, yes. Of course those things will come to an end, and it is all for the better. But really, that is not at all what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the comings and goings at all hours.”

I must have looked as baffled as I felt because he shook his head, disgusted. “Really, I have been attempting to tell you about these disturbances since the day we met. I cannot believe you are not aware of—”

“What?” I closed in on the president. “You said all hours. Are you telling me—”

“That there are people coming and going when there shouldn’t be. Yes, yes. Exactly. There are people in parts of the memorial where they have no business.”

“Like?”

“The ballroom, certainly.”

A memory sparked inside my brain and I hurried out of the rotunda and hung a right in the entryway. Good thing I was wearing my sneakers, I made it up to the roped-off doorway outside the stairway that led up to the ballroom in record time. President Garfield was already there waiting for me.

I poked a finger at the printed sign, the one that said CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC. That day, it was exactly where it was supposed to be, and right side up, too. “A couple times when I’ve been up here, this sign has been upside down. I thought maybe someone on the cleaning crew was just being careless. Or some visitor was being a smart-ass. But if you’ve seen people going into the ballroom . . .”

“It may be a signal of sorts,” the president said. His brain and mine were working on the same track, which was kind of scary, but helpful, too, since we didn’t have to fill each other in about what we were thinking. “Perhaps the inverted sign tells these intruders when they should go in. Or that they should stay away.”

I looked beyond the rope to the closed ballroom door. “But why?”

I don’t think he had the answer, so it was just as well that Jeremiah Stone popped up out of nowhere. He cleared his throat. “Mr. President, there is work to be done,” he said. He pointed to the ever-present bundle of papers he carried in one hand and backed away. “And papers to be signed, sir. It is really quite important.”

“Yes, of course.”

When the president moved to follow him, I stopped him. “Wait! What about the ballroom? What about the people who are hanging around who shouldn’t be hanging around? What’s going on?”

I swear, there was actually a twinkle in the president’s eyes when he answered. “Remember, young lady,” he said right before he vanished. “Things don’t turn up in this world until somebody turns them up. You’re the detective!”

It wasn’t very encouraging. Especially since now, I was more confused than ever about what the hell was going on. Before I had a chance to think about it, though, a couple things happened. The front door opened and three middle-aged women walked in and started oohing and aahing. I didn’t know if they were gushing over the monument or the murder scene, but either way, I had to get down there and play hostess. Just as I got to the stairway, my cell rang and I fished it out of my pocket, saw it was the guy who’d gone to take care of my flat tires, and figured I’d better talk to him before he did something that was too expensive for a cemetery tour guide’s wallet.

“Hey, did you take a close look at those tires of yours?” he asked. Obviously, though he’d done some repairs and maintenance on the Mustang, he didn’t know me well. Tires are just about the last thing I’d waste brain cells thinking about. “Those tires of yours weren’t just flat, Miss Martin. They were slashed.”

I was on the winding staircase and I paused, one hand on the railing and one foot dangling above the next step. “Slashed? What on earth are you talking about? Why would anybody—?”

“Don’t ask me, honey. All I can say is that it was no accident. Either some punk was out getting his kicks with a little vandalizing, or . . .”

It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it. That one little or and suddenly I felt like I’d gone one-on-one with one of my ghostly contacts. My stomach turned to a block of ice. Goose bumps shot up my arms.

“Or?” I asked.

He clicked his tongue. “Well, if that’s the case, then I’ll tell you what, sweetie. There’s somebody out there somewhere who doesn’t like you a whole, big bunch.”