Tomb With a View

8

My gut told me Ray didn’t kill Marjorie, but my gut had been wrong before. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the murderers without a scorecard.

Still, even though I was sure Ray was lying about something (and even though I couldn’t figure out what that something was), I just couldn’t imagine a nice old guy like him tossing Marjorie over that balcony. Believe me, I was in the right place to try to picture it. The following Monday, I was standing in the rotunda of the memorial doing my best to look like the expert-in-residence. The why is no mystery: without Marjorie there to be the Garfield know-it-all, Ella needed someone to handle the day-to-day duties over at the memorial. Naturally—at least to Ella’s way of thinking—she turned to me.

Back in the day, I wouldn’t have minded. At least not too much, anyway. But then, back in the day, James A. Garfield wasn’t exactly a tourist magnet. The memorial had a couple visitors now and then, but for the most part, the place was quiet and empty. Quiet and empty I could deal with. In fact, it would have suited me just fine. Then maybe I would have had a chance to sort through what I knew about my case. But it’s funny, isn’t it? And not in a ha-ha sort of way. Murder adds notoriety to a place, and the memorial was no exception. What with the publicity Marjorie’s murder had generated in the media—local, national, and sensational tabloid—it was no wonder that there was a line waiting to get inside the memorial even before I unlocked the door.

“So this is where it happened, right?” A woman twice my age and half my height had the nerve to step into my path. “Where was the body? Was she beaten and battered? Was there . . .” The woman shuddered. “Was there a lot of blood?”

“No hablo inglés,” I told her, and left her to figure out why if that were the case, I was wearing the standard-issue khakis and the yellow polo shirt with GARDEN VIEW embroidered over my heart. Before she could question me, I backed away from her and sidestepped a group of teenagers who were wondering if the memorial was haunted. If they only knew!

I slipped into the office, but even there I found no peace. There was a man standing near the desk with his back to the doorway. He was middle-sized and average height, and even when he turned around, I couldn’t see his face clearly. That was because he was wearing a baseball cap tugged low over his eyes. Something told me I wasn’t missing anything. He was fifty, maybe, and as bland as an outfit right off the rack at WalMart.

As much as I didn’t feel like it, I put on my cemetery employee face. “May I help you?”

“Pepper!” The man’s cheeks were pale and doughy. His chin was weak, his hands were plump. He fingered the unpatterned gold tie he wore with a blue shirt and faded black pants, and even though his eyes were shaded by the brim of his ball cap, I could feel his stare. Everywhere it touched me, I felt a chill. “I saw you,” he said, and I swear, he must have run up every single one of the couple dozen steps that led to the monument’s front doors. He was breathing that hard. “On TV.”

I’d hoped Cemetery Survivor had been forgotten by everyone who’d ever bothered to watch the reality show based on the cemetery restoration we’d done earlier in the summer. It was that bad. Still, it was kind of a kick to be recognized. I sidled past him and slipped behind the desk, and no, I didn’t feel like it. I mean, I was stuck in the memorial and I had all those ghoulish people out in the rotunda who kept asking me about Marjorie, and I had a murder to solve. I gave the man a smile, anyway. “You want an autograph or something?”

“I want . . .” His fingers worked over his tie, faster and faster. He licked his lips. He shuffled his feet. “I want . . .”

I am nothing if not a good sport, but being stared and stammered at has a way of making even the most self-assured woman lose her legendary cool. Still, I managed to keep smiling. And waiting.

He, however, couldn’t get out of the “I want” loop.

Still standing, I tapped my fingers against the desktop.

He shuffled forward. He scuffled back.

I tapped some more.

“I saw you on TV,” he mumbled. “I watched. Every week.”

“That’s terrific. Really. But if you want to talk about Cemetery Survivor—”

“Talk? No. I want . . .” He shuffled another step closer to the desk.

By this time, I’d pretty much had it. I mean, it was one thing being a TV sensation. It was another thing to have my time wasted by someone who probably just didn’t have the nerve to ask what it was really like to find Marjorie’s brains sprinkled all over the rotunda.

I pointed at the desk. “Work,” I said. It might have been a far more effective strategy if there was actually something on the desk, but since the guy was so busy staring at me, I don’t think he noticed so I went right on. “I’ve got a whole bunch of work to take care of. So if you really don’t want anything . . .”

He jumped like he’d been slapped. His tongue flicked over his lips. “I want . . .” He shambled to the door, and the closer he got to it, the faster he moved. “I want . . .” I heard him say one last time, before he rocketed into the entryway and out the front door.

“Well, that was weird.” I dismissed the thought—and the guy—with a toss of my head, and I was all set to plop down in the chair behind the desk and pretend I was actually working, the better to avoid the crowds outside the office.

It was then that I noticed the single red rose on the desk chair.

OK, call me slow on the uptake. I’d been so busy dealing with his weirdness, I never even thought that Ball Cap Guy and my stalker might be one and the same person.

My knees turned to rubber, and before they gave way completely, I swept the rose from the chair with shaking hands and plunked down. I lectured myself about letting my imagination run away with me. I reminded myself that just because someone was a little . . . well . . . a lot odd . . . that didn’t mean that same someone was dangerous. Or threatening.

“He was just a tourist,” I told myself. “And this is a public place, and anyone can come in, and sometimes, people are just a little strange, and that doesn’t mean he’s your stalker or anything. Does it?”

Brave words. They actually might have made me feel better if I didn’t keep remembering the way his eyes had been glued to me.

When I reached for the phone to call cemetery security, my hands trembled. I guess that’s why it took me a couple tries and I still couldn’t punch in the right numbers. Before I had a chance to give it another go, I heard the front door of the memorial creak open, and yeah, my head told me it was probably just another harmless visitor come to ooh and ahh over the murder scene. My instincts weren’t so sure.

My heart pumping a mile a minute, my stomach somewhere up in my throat, I watched a thin stream of sunlight sneak through the front door and pool on the floor of the entryway. It was followed by a shadow that paused for a moment, then pivoted toward the office.

He was back!

I swallowed down the sour taste in my mouth and reminded myself that Pepper Martin is no namby-pamby wallflower. Just to prove I was listening, I braced my hands against the desktop and pushed myself to my feet at the same time I tried to issue a warning. My mouth was filled with sand; the words wouldn’t form. I gulped and tried again. “Get lost!”

“Wow, I’d heard people in Cleveland were tough, but I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

He came around the corner.

Not doughy Ball Cap Guy.

No way. No how.

This guy was tall. Blond. Gorgeous.

Really. I mean it. Absolutely, drop-dead gorgeous.

Strong, square jaw dusted with golden stubble. Eyes the exact color of the robin egg’s blue in the golf shirt he wore with dark, tight jeans. Loose-limbed, rangy body. The greatest smile I’d seen in a long time.

Oh yeah, he was the total package.

And I felt like a complete idiot.

“I am so sorry.” I was moving toward him even before I realized it. “I don’t usually tell visitors to beat it. Honest. It’s just that—”

“No apologies necessary.” He stuck out his hand and it took me an instant to realize he meant me to shake it. “Jackson McArthur,” he said. “My friends call me Jack.”

When our fingers made contact, my heart thumped, and my words whooshed out of me. “Mr. McArthur, I—”

“Jack.”

“Jack.” It wasn’t intimate. It wasn’t anything but a name, an introduction. Which didn’t explain why my insides buzzed like a hive full of bees. “I’m Pepper. I work here. I guess you can see that. Who else but someone who works here would wear one of these polo shirts!”

“You wear it very well!” He held on to my hand just a nanosecond longer than was polite, but I was so busy staring up into those electric eyes, I didn’t have the sense to care. “You’re the one in charge, right?” he asked.

“I guess I’m supposed to be.” I figured I’d better start acting like it, so I stepped back and away from the magnetic pull of his personality. He was older than me, thirty-five, maybe even forty. I don’t usually cave in to the whole maturity thing, but on McArthur . . . er . . . Jack, those years were as attractive as the relaxed charm he wore like a second skin. “Can I help you with something?”

“Well, there’s a loaded question if I ever heard one.” One corner of his mouth lifted into a smile that was a little more personal than the one he’d given me a moment earlier. “Actually, I’m here because of—”

“Marjorie.” I figured I might as well beat him to the punch. “You want to know about the murder.”

He moved a couple steps farther into the office. “Well, I have read a thing or two about it. And I have to admit, it’s pretty bizarre. It’s not every day that a woman gets murdered in a presidential memorial. Your cemetery’s famous because of it.”

I made a face. “It’s not the kind of famous anyone around here ever wanted. Ella . . . she’s my boss . . . she’s pretty tired of fielding questions about what happened and when and—”

“Shouldn’t the media be asking you those questions?” I was baffled, and I guess he knew it, because he shrugged and added, “You’re the one who found the dead woman, right? You did say Pepper. And Pepper, that’s a hard name to forget.” He took his time looking me over, from the top of my head to the tips of the open-toed ballet flats I’d been smart enough to wear because I had a feeling I’d be running all over the memorial that day. When doughy Ball Cap Guy looked at me like that, I felt like I needed to shower. With Jack, it was a whole different feeling, and maybe he knew that a tingle raced up and down my spine, because his smile inched up a notch. “There’s no way I could ever forget you. I’m sure you were mentioned in the on-line article I read about the murder.”

I guess the fact that I hadn’t realized I was an Internet celebrity said something about how good Ella was at her job. She was deflecting the media and the questions. I was grateful. And suddenly a little suspicious, too. Tingling aside, I narrowed my eyes and looked Jack over. It was no hardship. “You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”

“Honest. Not.” He held up one hand, Boy Scout style as if that would prove it. “Though I have to admit, I’m just as curious as everyone else. You really are the one who found the body, right?”

It’s not like I could deny it or anything.

I braced myself for more questions, but Jack just shook his head. His eyes were troubled. “That must have been awful.”

Aside from Ella, he was the first who’d acknowledged that finding a body, especially one that had been smashed against a marble floor, isn’t anything near glamorous. Believe me, the fact that this complete stranger sympathized and Quinn never had was not lost on me.

He took another step closer and he was tall, so he had to cock his head to look into my eyes. “Are you OK? You know, there are counselors who specialize in this sort of thing. Trauma counseling, grief counseling. Have you talked to anyone? A professional?”

“No. I mean . . .” His gaze was so intense, so downright concerned, the only thing I could do was pretend I hadn’t spent the weekend not sleeping. It was either that or admit that every time I closed my eyes, I saw Marjorie’s brains and Marjorie’s blood and Marjorie’s broken limbs. “I’ll be fine,” I said.

His serious expression was relieved by the smallest of smiles. “I know that. But promise me you’ll talk to someone, anyway.”

I managed to smile back. “No. Really. I’m cool.”

“Well, obviously!” Jack laughed, and just that easily, all the tension drained out of me. I smiled, too, and realized that for the first time since I’d walked into the memorial the Friday before and found myself at the center of a murder investigation, I felt the knots in my shoulders loosen and the ice in my stomach melt. “So . . .” He took a quick look around the room and nodded, confirming something to himself. “This is it. The famous Garfield Memorial. It’s just as impressive as I thought it would be.”

“This is just the office.” I guess he knew that, but I figured it didn’t hurt to point it out. I was the cemetery’s one-and-only full-time tour guide, after all. “The rotunda is bigger and fancier. The president and his wife—”

“Lucretia, yes.” Jack’s eyes lit. “I can’t wait to see the crypt.”

“Really?” I couldn’t have sounded more skeptical. Or less like somebody who was supposed to be proud of the place she worked. I cringed. “I mean, really! You’re actually here to see the memorial?”

He leaned back and took a quick look into the rotunda. “You’re telling me that all these other people . . . Let me guess, they’re all here because of the murder.” His sigh rippled the air between us. “There are always new and different ways that people disappoint me. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. They’re probably trying to get the facts firsthand from you since you were the only one here when the body was discovered. You were the only one here, right?”

I nodded.

“You were the only one here so everybody assumes you saw something. But you didn’t, right?” He brushed aside his own question with the lift of one shoulder. “Of course you didn’t. If you had, you would have told the cops, and somehow, the media would have gotten wind of it. From what I’ve heard, the police don’t even have a suspect.”

“They wouldn’t tell me if they did.” It was the truth, though I failed to mention the Quinn component. There was no use muddying the waters, and besides, there was no way Jack would care. “All I told them is what happened. I came in here. I found the body. I called the cops.”

“And there was nothing else? Nothing suspicious? Of course there wasn’t, and I bet I’m sounding just as morbid as everyone else. I’m sorry. It’s hard not to get caught up in the sensationalism. I should know better, and I should have known to stay away for a while, too, out of respect for the poor woman who was killed. But this was my only opportunity to see the memorial. What with earning a few continuing education credits, I’ve been busy all summer, and school’s going to be starting again soon.”

“You’re a—”

“History teacher. Lafayette High School. Hammond, Indiana.”

“I never had a history teacher who looked like you.” I hadn’t meant to say the words out loud. My cheeks got hot. “I mean—”

“No problem. Believe me, I didn’t expect a cemetery worker who looked like you, either.” There was that smile again, as bright as the sun and just as hot. “So you’ll give me a tour, right? If you have time? I’ve always been a huge admirer of James A. Garfield.”

Sheesh!

That’s what I thought. What I said was, “Of course, but we’ve got a time limit. Marjorie’s funeral is this afternoon, and in her honor, the memorial is going to close at one and stay closed for the rest of the day. That gives us . . .” I glanced at the clock on the wall and so did Jack.

“Plenty of time,” he said. Like the hero in a swashbuckling movie, he made a dramatic gesture toward the doorway, but before I could walk out with him, he caught sight of the red rose on the floor. He scooted over and picked it up. “You drop this?” he asked, then looked again. When I threw the flower from my stalker onto the floor, I hadn’t exactly been careful about it. Its petals were mooshed and the stem was bent. Jack twirled the flower between his fingers. “You learn a lot teaching high school,” he said. “You know, watching students and teachers and parents, dealing with their dramas and their moods. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that somebody . . .” He gave me a look that was only half-teasing. “Somebody is in the middle of a lovers’ spat.”

Just the thought of the word lover associated with the creepy man in the baseball cap made me shiver. I hugged my arms around myself. “No way.”

Maybe Jack was the basketball coach at Lafayette High, too. He tossed the rose across the room. It arced over the desk and splatted into the wastepaper basket without ever touching the rim. “Good.” He grinned. “That means I don’t have any competition.”

Oh yeah, a girl’s head could get turned by a man like Jack McArthur. This girl’s head sure did. By the time we were out in the entryway and he was deciding if he wanted to hit the rotunda or the crypt first, I didn’t even care that he was a fan of James A. Garfield. Don’t get me wrong! I still knew it was lame. I just didn’t care.

“So . . .” He drew in a breath and glanced around, taking in the marble, the stained glass, and that statue of the president, his right arm bent and his hand resting against the vest pocket where I’d just recently seen him take out his nonticking watch. “Where to first? What do you think is the most important aspect of the memorial, Pepper? You probably know the building better than anyone, you must have your favorite spots. Certainly, the fact that Garfield isn’t buried here, that his casket is on display . . . that’s unique in and of itself.” His eyes glinting, Jack waited for me to comment, and when I didn’t, he sailed right on.

“Refresh my memory. When was the memorial built?”

So far that day, I’d done a pretty good job of avoiding questions. Now I was trapped. I blinked up into Jack’s brilliant blue eyes. I smiled my most competent and cemetery-visitor friendly smile. I stalled, wondering as I did how easy it was to pull the wool over a history teacher’s eyes.

“The building was begun in 1885, and dedicated on Memorial Day in 1890. The architect was a fellow named George Keller.”

At the sound of the deep, booming voice, I turned just in time to see the president materialize at Jack’s side. He stood with his shoulders back and his chin up and his right arm cocked, just like the statue inside the rotunda. I repeated what he’d just said, except I left out the fellow part. There was no use sounding as fuddy-duddy as he did.

“And he wasn’t even quite fifty years old when he died.” Jack shook his head sadly. “Fifty. It’s sounding younger all the time, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t say I agreed so I was glad he didn’t wait for an answer. “President Garfield was in the House of Representatives, I know that,” he said. “But for how many terms?”

“Nine,” the president rumbled. “I was elected in 1862 while still on active duty with the Army. I attended my first congressional session in 1863.”

“Nine.” I parroted the information to Jack. “I . . . that is, he was elected in 1862 but he was in the Army then, so he didn’t go to Washington until the following year.”

I wasn’t imagining it; Jack was impressed with my knowledge. His eyes lit up. “And he was elected president in 1880.” He was on a roll now, but then, I couldn’t blame him. Thanks to the quick answers the president had provided, Jack mistakenly thought I was a kindred spirit in the Garfield geek squad. “He was shot in July of that year and died in September. Such a loss to our country. Such a waste.”

“Humph.” The president agreed without actually coming right out and agreeing. “I advocated civil service reform, you know.”

“Civil service reform,” I told Jack.

“I directed a special subcommittee to modernize the census-taking process.”

“Census.”

“When I was a congressman, I even went around and visited various government agencies so I could see firsthand how they were spending the people’s money. Once I assumed the presidency, I ordered an investigation into widespread corruption in the Post Office.”

“Post Office,” I said.

The president frowned. “It is truly a shame there wasn’t time to accomplish more. And a calamity that I didn’t have time to teach my successors to pay more attention to the past in their search for solutions to the problems of the present. Alas, the lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves.”

I couldn’t follow most of that, so I just glommed on to the last part. “The lesson of history—” I began.

“Is rarely learned by the actors themselves!” Jack grinned. “You can even quote the president. Pepper . . .” He took my arm, and together, we headed into the crypt. “Something tells me this is a match made in heaven.”

Was it?

I couldn’t say. I only knew that for the first time since Quinn walked out on me, I felt pretty, and smart, and more than competent in my job. Of course, the president helped me out every step of the way. But Jack didn’t know that. And Jack didn’t care. Jack was funny and he was friendly, and yes, OK, he was also incredibly hot. But there was more to my attraction to him than that. Take, for instance, the way he talked about history and actually made it seem not nearly as boring as I always thought it was. We explored the memorial top to bottom, and an hour-and-a-half flew by.

I’d already gone into the rotunda and told the gawkers there that the memorial was closing for Marjorie’s funeral. Now, standing outside the office together, Jack and I watched those visitors file out the front door. He leaned close. “You’ll be here again tomorrow?” he asked.

I hoped it meant he was planning to come back, but I knew the rules of the game. If I wanted to keep him interested, I had to play it cool. “I’m on permanent assignment here in the memorial,” I told him. “At least until Ella can find a docent to take my place.”

“Take your place? Impossible,” he said, and humming, he walked out of the memorial.

When the door closed behind him, I realized I was humming, too. The president was hovering outside the office and I smiled at him. “You want to come along?”

“To that woman’s funeral?” I didn’t know ghosts could look green, but he did. “I have business of state to take care of,” he blustered. “Important matters. Things essential to the workings of the government. I—”

I cut him off with a laugh. “I was talking about a walk around the memorial.” I swirled a finger in the air. “I’ve got to make sure there’s no stragglers left behind.”

“Oh.” He blew out a breath of relief. “Well, really, I’d best get back to my cabinet. We are discussing those Post Office reforms, you know, and . . .” Even as I watched, he stepped into the rotunda and poofed away into nothing.

I took one last look around, and everything was ship-shape.

Well, just about everything.

Upstairs, just outside the roped-off doorway that led into the old ballroom, that CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC sign was upside down again.