Oak and Dagger (16 page)

She was being watched. I made sure of it.

I hadn't forgotten the curious phone call I'd overheard shortly before Frida's murder. It had sounded as if Lettie was in trouble and in need of quick cash. I wondered if her loss of fortune caused her to lose her job and her husband. Or was it the other way around? Had she lost her job and her husband and now, as a consequence, found herself strapped for cash?

She'd said to whoever had been on the other end of that mysterious call that she had a plan to get it, whatever “it” was.

While Nadeem was still my number one suspect—a retired trained assassin with an obvious interest in hidden treasures, plus he'd lied to me about leaving the gardens before Frida had entered the Children's Garden—I couldn't discount that Lettie had been working with Frida at the time the Dolley Madison research had gone missing. If Frida was as anxious to shoot up the social ladder as Pearle and Mable had claimed, I would imagine Frida would have been more open with her special files with the First Lady's sister than she'd have been with her brand-new assistant.

And if Lettie's reason to go searching for a missing treasure was so strong that she'd kill for it, wouldn't she also want to cover her tracks? What better way to cover those tracks than to “play sleuth” and discover “evidence” that made Gordon look as if he wanted Frida dead?

I stood with my hands on my hips, making doubly sure I didn't allow Lettie out of my sight as she poked around in the bushes. When she disappeared from view, I followed her.

I took the path that led through the canopy of trees and connected the kitchen garden with the nearby grounds shed. And as I'd suspected all along, in a wheelbarrow that had been left out in the weather were the missing branches from the Children's Garden.

This was it! Proof that Gordon had left the Children's Garden through one of the gaps in the fencing. Proof that anyone else could have entered the garden the same way.

I quickly typed a text to Manny, Thatch, and Jack, telling them what I'd found and where I'd found it. I also included pictures of the branches stacked up in the wheelbarrow.

“What are you doing?” Lorenzo shouted. I jumped. Lorenzo was dressed more casually than usual. He wasn't wearing a suit coat. His dress shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. And he wasn't wearing a tie. He also had dark circles under his eyes as if he'd worked through the night.

“Look!” I pointed to the wheelbarrow. “The missing branches!”

“Took you long enough to go looking for those things,” he grumbled.

“I kept getting distracted with other things, like, oh I don't know, Lettie and her efforts to prove Gordon's guilt. I'm sending pictures of them to Manny. If that doesn't convince him that Gordon didn't kill Frida, I don't know what will.”

“This will.” He thrust a file folder into my hands.

I looked up at Lettie. She was still in the same place. Good. Then I looked down at the folder in my hands. My brows creased as I read what was inside. “I don't understand. This is a spreadsheet.”

“It's not
just
a spreadsheet. It's a listing of the files that are in the grounds office's filing cabinets.”

“Is the missing South Lawn schematic on the list?”

“The missing . . . Why are you still harping about that stupid schematic? You misplaced it. Finding it won't help Gordon.”

I didn't agree. I had a feeling that it was as connected to Frida's murder as the stolen Dolley Madison research. “Well?” I asked as I scanned the spreadsheet.

“The schematic's on the list,” he said grudgingly.

“I knew it!” I clapped my hands.

“But that doesn't mean you didn't lose it.”

“I didn't lose it. The schematic was stolen just like—”

“Focus, Casey.” Lorenzo snapped his fingers in front of my nose. “I'm not working long hours trying to cover your mistakes. This is about Gordon and keeping him from going straight from the hospital to jail.”

“I'm focused on Gordon, too. Don't you see the connection? The murderer stole both the Dolley Madison research papers and the schematic. He's using the schematic like a treasure map to help him look for the missing treasure.”

“I suppose that could be one explanation. But look here.” Lorenzo had highlighted an entry near the bottom of the spreadsheet. I read it. Startled, I read it again.

“I don't understand. Why are Frida's research files listed on the grounds office's inventory?”

“It happened this past summer,” Lorenzo said with a sigh as if I should have already known. “Assistant Usher Wilson Fisher digitized many of the files and recorded everything else.”

“This is what he was doing? He nearly drove me out of my mind with requests for this and that. But if he recorded that the Dolley Madison folder was in Gordon's office, how did Frida get her hands on it?”

“I doubt she did. This is the government, Casey. Anytime someone touches a piece of paper, it duplicates itself. See here. There's an asterisk and a number after the description.”

“So?”

“So the asterisk denotes that the pages are all copies. The number notes the office where the originals are kept.”

“Oh! So what Lettie handed over to the police was a copy, which explains why Frida's notes were missing from the folder. The original is—don't tell me—in the curator's office. Thank goodness for Fisher and his love of paperwork. This proves Gordon didn't take Frida's folder.”

Lorenzo smiled proudly as he tapped the highlighted line in the spreadsheet. “This spreadsheet proves the folder Lettie found yesterday has been in that drawer since at least this past summer.”

“Unfortunately, we still need to find out what happened to Frida's copy of Dolley Madison's garden notes and letters. I bet someone desperate to find the treasure took Frida's notes.” I chewed the inside of my cheek as I thought about it a little longer. “Someone in desperate need of money.”

Lettie was in need of money. Desperately.

I looked back at the thick stand of trees that separated the kitchen garden from the Children's Garden, where the First Lady's sister had been poking around. She was gone.

That's when I made a decision.

“If we're going to find out who killed Frida, we're going to have to find that treasure.”

Chapter Sixteen

I live a very dull life here . . . indeed I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.

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

C
RASH.

Lorenzo and I exchanged glances.

After completing everything we'd needed to do in the gardens, and seeing the volunteers on their way, we'd gathered around Lorenzo's drafting table and started work on a master list of everything we'd learned so far. We knew about the well-hidden gap in the Children's Garden fencing and the location of the branches. We knew Gordon had a
copy
of Frida's research, which proved he had no reason to steal
her
copy. And we knew who else had been in the gardens at the time of Frida's murder.

Despite knowing all that, we couldn't figure out what Lettie had been doing in the gardens this morning. When we'd looked for her, she wasn't in the kitchen garden or the Children's Garden. We later learned she'd left the White House to meet a friend. Nor did we have any idea of how to hunt for a treasure that had been lost for nearly two hundred years.

“I still think the missing schematic is being used as a treasure map,” I said as I added it to our list of stray bits of evidence that still needed to be sorted.

“You're just trying to cover your—” Lorenzo started to say as he struck through what I'd just written.

Smash
.

“What in the world is going on out there?” I asked, rising.

I hurried down the basement hallway, through a set of double doors, and out onto the East Courtyard. In the sunken area between the North Portico and the White House residence, another series of crashes tore through the space. Lorenzo lagged behind, peeking around my shoulder as if he was using my body as a shield.

Ambrose Jones, the efficient and utterly proper chief usher who presided over the entire White House staff, tossed a White House plate at the wall. It exploded into several hundred pieces. He picked up another plate. I recognized it as one of Ulysses Grant's official china platters with a beautiful hand-painted flowering hosta decorating the center. Ambrose didn't even look down at it before he gave the work of art a toss.

“Wait! What are you doing? What's going on?” I cried with no small measure of alarm. Had the pressure of his job finally made Ambrose snap? And why was no one stopping him from destroying the historic plates with immeasurable value?

“They're chipped,” he said. “Unusable.”

“But—but they're priceless!” I rushed over and saved a delicate dessert plate from his hand.

“Not anymore,” Lorenzo said. He snatched the dessert plate away from me and handed it back to Ambrose. “To keep chipped presidential china from becoming collectibles or sold on online auction sites like eBay, any piece of china that is no longer usable is destroyed. Smashed,” he explained.

“The kitchen staff saves up the cracked and chipped bowls, cups, and plates. When someone needs to work off a little stress, the retired china is taken outside and rendered completely unsalable,” Ambrose added.

I'd heard of the plate smashing, but even now had trouble picturing a man as proper and, well, as uptight as Ambrose taking part in the tradition.

“Have you heard the latest?” Ambrose asked as he weighed the elegant green and white dessert plate from Truman's china collection in his hand. “The police are on a witch hunt. It doesn't even seem like they're looking at alternatives. Gordon could never.” He threw the plate at the wall with a surprising burst of anger. “Would never.” He bent down and picked up a bowl with a large chip on the rim out of the plastic storage container beside him.

“We know,” Lorenzo said, gritting his teeth.

Ambrose handed him the bowl.

Lorenzo gave it a toss. The fine china hit the stone wall with a satisfying shatter. “Thank you. That helped.”

Ambrose nodded gravely. “I wish we could do more than toss the china at a wall.”

“What did you think about the ongoing tensions between Frida and Gordon?” I asked. “You don't think Frida could have pushed him over the edge?”

Ambrose didn't have to think about my question before answering, “If that were the case, he would have killed her years ago. She'd given him ample reason to stop turning the other cheek, but he never did. He put his job before his ego. Anyone who doesn't know that doesn't know Gordon,” he said as he smashed another plate against the wall.

“We have new information that might help Gordon—Lorenzo discovered it—but we haven't been able to talk to Detective Hernandez.” Manny even ignored the calls that Lorenzo had placed to him. “He's clearly avoiding us.”

Ambrose lowered the plate he was about to toss. His dark brown eyes widened. “You have information?”

I nodded. “It won't clear Gordon, but it should undo some of the damage that's been done so far. He didn't steal Frida's files.”

“Hurry, then! The detective is meeting with the First Lady in her third-floor office, but he won't be there for long.”

• • • 

“This isn't going to work.” Lorenzo dragged his feet like a petulant child. “The Secret Service won't just let us walk up to the First Family's private quarters.”

“No, they won't.” That's why I had a heavy bag of topsoil slung over my shoulder. Lorenzo was carrying the spreadsheet printout that we needed to show Manny.

The bag of topsoil was our ticket to the third floor . . . I hoped. I wasn't sure how I'd let Lorenzo talk me into doing the heavy lifting. Why wasn't I carrying the paperwork while he had this heavy bag pressing down on his shoulder?

“Surely they'll realize no one starts seeds this time of year.” Lorenzo slowed his step as our destination grew closer.

“Even if one of them does know better, they won't question us. We're the gardening experts,” I mumbled out the side of my mouth. “Oh, hi there!” I called to the pair of uniformed Secret Service guards stationed at the elevator that led up to the White House's third floor. “We need to get this up to the greenhouse ASAP. With everything that's happened in the past several days, we're behind schedule on all our projects. I'm sure you understand.”

Neither of the burly guards looked the least bit sympathetic. “Let me see if it's on the schedule,” the larger of the two grumbled and disappeared into the adjacent office.

“Schedule?” Well, that blew a giant hole in my plan to get upstairs and ambush Manny.

Lorenzo snorted in my ear as if to say, “I told you.”

“I didn't know we needed to be on a schedule,” I told the guard who'd remained behind. “We'll just be a few minutes. It's important that we get the potting soil up there.”

“We can't bend the rules, ma'am,” he said.

“I don't have any record of anything happening in the greenhouse,” the second guard said when he returned. “If it's not on the schedule, it's not happening.”

Lorenzo snorted and danced from foot to foot like a nervous racehorse getting ready to bolt.

“This bag is getting heavy,” I said to buy us time while I tried to think of something, anything we could say or do to convince the Secret Service guards that we needed to get upstairs. “Isn't there anything you can do?”

“No.” The first guard seemed to draw an impenetrable wall with that one word. “Come back when you're on the schedule.”

I was about to admit defeat, something I didn't want to do since that would give Lorenzo an endless supply of I-told-you-so's for years to come. But what else could we do? The Secret Service guards looked as if they'd put down deep roots smack dab in front of the elevator doors. There'd be no budging them.

Think. Think
, I told myself. There had to be a way to get the spreadsheet printout to Manny.

“Lorenzo! And . . . and Cathy! Just the duo I was hoping to find,” Lettie called as she bounded down the hallway toward us.

The Secret Service guards shrank away from the First Lady's sister like she was poison ivy.

“What do you have there, Cathy?” she asked, poking the bag of potting soil with such force that I had to do a sidestep dance to keep from tipping over.

“It's Casey,” I corrected, wondering if Lettie was mangling my name on purpose.

“Right.” She stuck her finger in the air as if to say she'd make a point to remember that. She glanced at the Secret Service guards. Her toothy smile faded. “I'm ready to get back to work on the historical gardening notes, especially Dolley Madison's. I did tell you that I'm a university professor of American history, didn't I?”

“Yes, I think you might have mentioned that. And we do appreciate your help.” I added the last part when Lorenzo, who had claimed to be in charge of the project, snorted again. “We're not dealing with research papers today. We had hoped to prepare the seed flats in the greenhouse so they'd be ready once the seeds arrive for the founding fathers' kitchen garden, but apparently there's some trouble with that. Our name's not on the schedule. So we can't get upstairs.”

“The seeds?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. The seeds I hadn't been able to order because, apparently, they no longer existed. “While the National Arboretum will have the bulk of the display, your sister has been excited about the founding fathers' vegetable garden we'll be planting this spring. It's all ready to go. We just need to get upstairs to start the seeds.”

A little white lie. If I didn't have my hands full holding this heavy bag of potting soil, I would have crossed my fingers.

Child, lies are lies. The devil doesn't own a ruler, so he can't measure the size of your sin
, Grandmother Faye liked to tell me.
And hellfires burn just as hot for the little white lies as they do for a humdinger
.

She was usually right about these things, but with Gordon's reputation—not to mention his freedom—on the line, I was prepared to risk a little cosmic retribution in exchange for helping him.

“You can't get upstairs to the greenhouse?” Lettie muttered. Her gaze shifted slowly to the Secret Service guards, who backed farther away from her. “I can't see why that's a problem.”

The second guard cleared his throat. “I'm sorry, ma'am, but they aren't on the schedule. It's the policy. There's nothing we can do.”

“Come on, Casey,” Lorenzo said as he glanced up and down the center hallway. “Let's not make a scene.”

I was about to agree with Lorenzo and follow him back to the grounds office, but then Lettie blurted out, “They're my guests!” She latched on to Lorenzo's arm before he could make a clean escape. A crowbar wouldn't pry her loose. “I want them to accompany me upstairs to show me around the greenhouse. Do you have a problem with that?”

The guards exchanged wary glances.

I held my breath.

The guard who'd been adamant about us not getting to the third floor gave a stiff nod. “Of course not, ma'am,” he said as he hit the elevator's call button and stepped out of the way.

The third floor of the White House was a later addition built on the roof of the original structure. The space started out as a storage area accessible only by a ladder. Then, a sleeping porch was added. By 1952, the third floor had been transformed into a large living space that included several guest bedrooms and additional offices for the First Lady and her staff. There was also a game room, a solarium that doubled as a family room where the First Family could escape and relax, and tucked against the northwest side of the roof was a greenhouse.

The elevator doors slid smoothly open. Lettie nodded to the Secret Service guard who was sitting in an old desk chair near the lift. He nodded back and returned his attention to his newspaper as we walked down the hallway toward the glass door that opened out to the rooftop deck.

Did I happen to mention that the door to the rooftop deck and the greenhouse was located right next to the entrance to the offices the First Lady had started using since giving birth to her sons? This was the part of the plan that neither Lorenzo nor I had really thought through. We couldn't just stumble through the wrong door, especially not with Lettie following us around. After all, she was the one who was dead set on proving Gordon's guilt.

So close. And still, we were going to fail.

I glanced longingly at the First Lady's office door as we walked past. There was nothing we could do but head out to the greenhouse and prepare the planting trays for seeds that didn't exist.

Lettie opened the door to the rooftop deck. At the same time, Lorenzo gave me a hard shove in the center of my back with his shoulder. I would have been able to catch myself if not for the huge bag of potting soil slung over my left shoulder. Not that I didn't try. I trip-skipped several steps before stumbling over Lettie's foot. My face hit the tan Berber carpeting. The bag of potting soil landed with a dull thud. The thin plastic split open to send a dark cloud of soil billowing into the air.

In the stunned silence that followed, the door to the First Lady's office swung open. The First Lady, dressed in a tailored lavender suit with matching flats, stepped out into the hallway with Detective Manny Hernandez at her elbow.

“Margaret!” I said, so happy to see her.

Her delicate brows furrowed as she frowned down at me and the spilled bag of potting soil. “What's going on here?” She'd addressed the question not to me or Lorenzo or even her sister, but to Manny. Her voice was filled with suspicion.

“Sorry,” I said as I scrambled to my feet and brushed off the black soil as best I could. “I seem to have lost my footing,” I said, and grudgingly nodded to Lorenzo. This was the opening we'd been hoping for. “I had meant to tell you yesterday how so sorry I was about the broken irrigation line on Monday. It was an inexcusable mistake. And my fault. Not Gordon's.”