Oak and Dagger (13 page)

Chapter Thirteen

. . . steady as a clock, busy as a bee, and cheerful as a cricket . . .

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

L
ETTIE
Shaw hummed.

She'd settled into Gordon's office for the afternoon as she sorted through the historical documents that had been stored in a bottom file drawer. And she continued to hum, off tune, like a scratched CD, repeating the same short refrain over and over and over.

I crossed the room to where Lorenzo sat hunched at his drafting table.

“Why is she humming so much?” I whispered.

“Don't know. The hangover is wearing off, I suppose.”

“Hangover?” Were First Ladies' sisters allowed to have hangovers? Was Lettie the problem Seth had been moaning about during that conversation I'd overheard? “Is there anything we can do to make her stop humming?” I whispered.

“Does it bother you?” Lorenzo lifted his head long enough to ask.

“I'm about to go mad. That, or cut off my ears. Or both,” I said.

“Now you know how I feel.”

“What? I—”

“Whenever we work at the greenhouse, you hum. The entire time, you hum. It's torture.”

“I don't hum. Well, not much.”

He glared at me.

“I sound like
that?
”

He nodded.

“Well, won't you say something to her?” I asked. “I can't think.”

I'd even tried screwing my fingers in my ears, but the droning sound seemed to defy all barriers. I needed to concentrate.

The only thing I'd written on the yellow pad of paper since I'd returned from talking with Thatch was, “Where are the branches?”

Thatch had concluded that the CSI guys must have bagged and tagged the branches. I told him I hadn't seen the branches yesterday, either.

“I wouldn't have expected your untrained eyes to have noticed such a small detail,” he'd countered, adding that the shock of finding Gordon
and
Frida would have blinded me to seeing anything important.

When Jack agreed with me, saying he also hadn't seen the branches, Thatch's face turned a funny shade of puce. He grumbled something about looking into the matter and then ordered Jack back to work.

Not willing to give up, I'd called Detective Hernandez. Manny's phone went straight to voice mail. I left a message telling him about the missing branches and asking him to check to see if the CSI team had collected them. That had been nearly an hour ago, and he still hadn't called me back.

And Lettie had hummed the entire time.

“What are you doing?” I asked Lorenzo as I peered over his shoulder to study the large-scale schematic he was currently marking up.

“I'm re-creating the schematic you lost the other day.” The quick movements of his pen made a
scratch-scratch
sound as he worked.

“I didn't lose it.” Not that defending myself mattered. Lorenzo enjoyed believing the worst of me. I'd long given up on forging a friendly working relationship with him. He clearly resented that the First Lady had brought me in to develop an organic gardening program for the gardens last year.

Even though I didn't agree with how he vented his frustration, I was beginning to understand it. He'd spent the past nine years trying to catch the notice of the various first families who called the White House home, only to be ignored. Finally when a true gardening enthusiast had moved into the White House, he must have expected he'd get the recognition he'd long deserved. But that didn't happen. Margaret Bradley had, instead, hired me.

“Aren't you going to ask what I found out in the Children's Garden?” I said.

“Why should I? It was a crime scene. Off-limits.”

“Actually, it's no longer a crime scene. We're free to send our crew in there to clean up at any time.”

Lorenzo looked up from the schematic. “And?”

I explained to him about the missing branches. “The surveillance video shows Gordon entering the Children's Garden and not leaving. So where did those branches go?”

“Gordon must have taken them out through a gap near the gardening sheds,” Lorenzo answered without even having to think about it.

I'd known there were
narrow
gaps in the Children's Garden's fencing and landscape fabric. I'd torn my way through one of them when pursuing a killer this past spring. I'd
torn
my way through. “I don't understand. He would have had to cut through the fabric.”

“No, he wouldn't. He could pin back the landscaping fabric and pass through an opening next to the gardening shed.” Lorenzo pushed back from the drafting table. “We use it all the time.”

“An opening in the fencing? Does the Secret Service know about this?”

“I don't know. I don't see why they should. It's not a security matter. The fencing is there as a visual barrier. It has nothing to do with fencing someone in or keeping someone out.”

“And there's an opening, a gap in the fencing?” I said again as the idea took root. “You mean I didn't have to maneuver the wheelbarrow down that winding path this past spring when planting all those thousands of bulbs? Why didn't anyone tell me?”

“Why should I have told you?”

“Right. You wouldn't have. But why didn't Gordon—”

“I told him you already knew about it, but you didn't care to use it.” Lorenzo smiled. It was a teeth-flashing, not particularly friendly, expression.

“Gee, thanks, Lorenzo. Okay, there's a gap in the fence. So . . .” I wished Lettie would stop that infernal humming. I needed to think. I hurried back to my desk and grabbed my yellow pad. “So anyone on the South Lawn at the time—”

Lettie broke out singing. The loud tuneless song she belted out made me completely lose my train of thought.

“Do you know who else was in the gardens at that time?” Lorenzo asked.

I closed my eyes and tried to block out Lettie's off-key tune. “What is that song?” I asked.

“I don't know. Focus, Casey.” Lorenzo snapped his fingers. “You were on the South Lawn. Who else did you see?”

“I saw some East Wing staffers, but they went in before Frida came out.” I lowered my voice. “Lettie Shaw was out there.” I'd overheard her odd phone conversation. It sounded as if someone had been pressuring her. “Marcel Beauchamp was outside, again, getting inspiration for his designs. And Nadeem Barr, but Frida had sent Nadeem back inside before she went into the Children's Garden. And I'm pretty sure Marcel went back inside a few minutes before Nadeem did.”

“We'll need to find out if anyone else was out there. Perhaps your boyfriend can help out with that.”

“Okay, I'll ask Jack.”

“Ask Nadeem, too.”

“Ah . . . not him.”

“Why not? He might have seen someone.”

“Because . . .” Should I tell Lorenzo what I knew about Nadeem? Knowing Lorenzo, he wouldn't believe me. “We shouldn't talk with him yet. He might still be a suspect. And if he isn't, he might insist on helping our investigation.”

That last part convinced Lorenzo. “Good point. We don't need anyone taking credit for the work we're doing.”

“Right. When Gordon was carrying away the pruned branches, anyone could have slipped through the gap in the fence—”

“Or through the second one where the Children's Garden backs up to the kitchen garden.”

“There's more than one?” I asked.

Lorenzo nodded.

“Okay. Someone slipped through one of the many gaps and killed Frida,” I said as I started to put some of the pieces together. “Gordon returned and found Frida.”

“The shock of it caused his heart failure, and he fell forward into the pond,” Lorenzo added as I wrote this all down on my yellow notepad.

Lorenzo snatched the notepad out of my hands. “What are you waiting for? Let's go look for evidence that this is what happened so we can show it to that detective friend of yours.”

He didn't make it more than a step when Lettie stopped singing. “Lorenzo,” she called from inside Gordon's office, “you have to see this—

“Oh, Cathy, you're here, too,” she said as she poked her head out of Gordon's office.

“Casey,” I corrected.

“Right,” she said. She waved a file folder in the air. “I found this in Gordon's cabinet. Look! It's Frida's missing research. How do you think it got into Gordon's office?”

“It can't be the same research.” Even Frida had admitted Gordon couldn't have taken it.

But Lettie was shaking her head. “No. Frida had let me look through her papers and notes from the Madison administration one afternoon. I remember seeing this.” She flipped through the pages. “And this. What could it mean?”

“It means nothing,” I said. And yet I needed to be sure. I took the file and carried it to the curator's office. Lettie and Lorenzo jogged behind me to catch up.

The curator's offices were located on the same floor as the grounds office, but in the main part of the White House off the north hall. The office was created in 1961 after the White House was officially declared a museum, a move that had been spearheaded by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

The oddly shaped space had first served as a kitchen. It later became a furnace room, a servants' dining room, and an upholstery shop before becoming the curator's office. Bookshelves crammed with documents lined every available wall space in the windowless room.

That's where I found Nadeem . . .
the killer spy
.

Half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose as he read from the pages of a three-ring binder stuffed full of papers. On the top of the page he was reading was written
HMS Fantome.

The spectacles made him look scholarly, and harmless. Were they props or did he really have bad eyesight? I watched him for a moment, trying to imagine this handsome, dark-skinned man with his beguiling smile traveling the world to kill enemies of the state. He looked more like a researcher, someone who preferred to spend his days in a library rather than dodging bullets or installing bombs in world leaders' cigars.

I tentatively knocked on the door. I didn't want to startle someone who might kill first and ask questions later. “Nadeem? Are you busy?”

The way he flipped his notebook closed and jumped up from his chair made him look suspicious. “Yes? Has—has something happened?”

Either that or his nerves were shot. If he were a spy, wouldn't Frida's murder just be another day at the office for him? Wouldn't he be trained to hide his nerves?

I handed Nadeem the file folder. “Tell me this isn't part of the research that is missing from Frida's files,” I said, “and we'll get out of your way.”

He flipped the folder open and thumbed through a few of the pages.

“Where did you get this?” He flipped through some more pages.

“I found it in Gordon's office,” Lettie announced.

Nadeem swallowed hard and slowly turned to the next page. “Let me check something.” He sat down at his desk and punched some keys on his computer. A table popped up on his screen. “Yes. Yes. It's all there. This is the missing research. All except for Frida's personal notes.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

“They've been indexed in this database. This is the research Frida had accused Gordon of stealing.”

I could have kicked Nadeem for saying that in front of Lettie.

“Ow!” Nadeem cried and grabbed his shin.

“Sorry,” Lorenzo said. “My foot slipped.”

I bit back a smile, but Lorenzo's kick had come too late. Lettie pushed her way in front of me and leaned over the desk to look at the computer screen. “I knew it! This is the stolen folder,” Lettie crowed, sounding even more excited.

“Missing,” I corrected.

“I found it in Gordon's file cabinet. You don't think . . .” Lettie's voice trembled with excitement. “It has to be . . . Gordon killed Frida because he wanted Jefferson's lost treasure for himself. I can picture what happened now. Frida caught Gordon trying to steal the treasure, and when she confronted him—” She made a slicing motion over her throat. “We have to take this to the police.”

“No, we don't need to involve the police.” Lorenzo grabbed the folder. A photocopied letter fell out and fluttered to the floor.

I snatched up the paper before Nadeem could. The assistant curator shifted nervously in his chair as I studied what looked like a copy of a letter Dolley Madison had penned a few years after her husband's presidency. She was writing to a woman whose name I didn't recognize.

I read the part aloud that had immediately caught my attention. “I had entrusted Jefferson's treasure to the gardener, a Mr. McGraw, I believe he called himself. In the pandemonium following our return to Washington and having to contend with the near-destruction of the White House, I never had a chance to quiz him about the fate of the treasure. Did the British take it as part of their spoils? My attempts to contact Mr. McGraw have been for naught, but I am continuing my efforts to locate the man in question. I am steadfast in my determination to find the treasure my friend Mr. Jefferson had left to our proud nation. I would appreciate any assistance you might provide in my endeavor.”

Lettie punctuated the air with her finger. “Oh, it's the treasure Cathy was talking about earlier!”

“Casey,” I corrected.

“I'm going to take this to the police. I'm a very good sleuth, you see. Like a young Miss Marple.” Lettie jabbed her finger in the air again. “I already know what happened.”

Did I sound that silly when I claimed to be like Miss Marple? No, I'd never made that claim aloud. Well, maybe just once or twice . . .

“Gordon hasn't even looked at these files,” Lorenzo said. “He was only working on the project with Frida because he had to. Casey, how in the world do you always manage to make things worse?”