Tomb With a View (6 page)

“Oh, I got a great deal accomplished during my administration. Which is quite remarkable, you will agree, considering I was in office actively for only four months. I ordered an investigation into corruption in the Post Office. I presided over a Treasury refunding in which most holders of maturing six percent bonds agreed to replace them with a three-and-a-half percent rate. I . . .” Maybe he was starting to get the message that I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about; he swallowed the rest of what he was going to say.

I curled my hands into fists at my side. “So this small matter you’d like me to take care of . . .”

“Oh yes. Certainly. It is not that I wish to inconvenience anyone, but I am, after all, the president and—”

Oh yeah, by this time, I was practically willing to beg him to get a move on. Anything to get him to stop wasting my time. “What do you want me to do?”

He finally gave in, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me. Jeremiah Stone was pacing not three feet away, tapping that pile of papers of his and mumbling something about how nothing could be accomplished until the president put his signature on them. “There is a great deal of commotion around here,” the president said, and something told me he wasn’t talking about Jeremiah Stone or the men at the table, who were looking a little restless.

“You mean because of the commemoration.” I nodded. Believe me, I understood! “Well, there’s not much I can do about Marjorie. I think she’s a royal pain, too.”

“It is all disturbing the important work I have to do.” The president stared at me. “You do understand, I am sure. There is a great deal for a president to accomplish, and when he is interrupted by other things . . .”

It was obvious from the way he glared at me that he believed Marjorie wasn’t the only one disturbing his important work.

Dismissed and dissed, all in the same morning.

I walked away, waving a quick good-bye to Marjorie, who was still on the phone, and at the front door, I turned around for one last look into the rotunda. There was the statue, the marble columns, the stained glass windows. Everything was back to normal, and there was no sign of the somber men around the table, of Jeremiah Stone, or of the president.

 

 

W
hat with getting tag-teamed by Marjorie and the most long-winded guy ever to hold public office, I needed a break, and fast. I drove to the administration building and snuck in through the back door, the better to avoid Ella and any phone messages Jennine might have taken for me while I was out. I had the latest issue of
Marie Claire
in my desk and that salad I had brought for lunch. If I could buy myself an hour of quiet time, I could put up my feet and get down to what was really important. An article on the hottest fashions coming for fall sure beat an hour with Marjorie or a dead president any day. Smiling at the very thought of avoiding my coworkers and chilling out for a while, I walked into my office and found—

Flowers!

I swear I felt the blood drain out of my face. I was left feeling cold and clammy, and I stood riveted to a spot near the door and forced myself to take a good, long look around. There was no one there. I knew this for sure because even though my office isn’t very big, I checked out every nook and cranny twice, even behind the door and under my desk. When I was one hundred percent certain that I was alone, I closed the door behind me and went over to the desk for a better look at the bouquet that had been left on my computer keyboard. It was a bunch of white roses and pink carnations with their stems wound with pink satin ribbon, and for I don’t know how long, I stared down at the flowers, listening to the blood whoosh in my ears and my heartbeat pound out a deafening rhythm.

Yes, I admit this all sounds a little over the top and (dare I say it?) crazy, too. Actually, I had good reason.

See, as if I didn’t have enough to deal with earlier in the summer when I was working on that cemetery restoration project and solving a twenty-five-year-old murder, I found out something really creepy—I had a stalker. And not just any stalker, one with bad taste in flowers, candy, and all-wrong-for-my-coloring lipstick. He’d been lying low since I’d wrapped up that last case, and always up for a good game of denial, I’d convinced myself that maybe I’d gotten lucky and he’d fallen off the face of the earth. It would have been nice to go right on believing it, too—if not for this bunch of flowers.

I scraped my suddenly damp palms against my shirtdress and poked the bouquet with one finger. Nothing happened.

Realizing just how nutsy it was to think something might, I wasn’t sure who I was angrier at—the stalker, who’d gotten to me so badly I was poking flowers to see if they’d blow up or something, or myself, for giving in to the fear. There was one thing I was sure of, though. I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

The thought burning in my brain, I grabbed the bouquet and marched out to the reception area with it.

“Jennine.” I don’t think I could have possibly surprised her since I was flaming mad and my peep-toe sandals banged against the floor, but she was scribbling a note on a message pad decorated with kittens, and she jumped a mile when I called her name. I stood in the doorway between the hallway and the reception area and waved the bouquet of flowers. “I’ve had it with this. I mean, really. I. Have. Had. It. And you’re going to help me put a stop to this horse hockey. I need to know who brought these flowers and I need to know it right now.”

In her job as receptionist, Jennine sees plenty of people, but they are not routinely five-foot-eleven redheads in full anger mode. Her eyes wide, she stared at me like I was making a scene (which I was, but since it was justified, that didn’t count). Then she simply blinked, and pointed a finger behind me.

I turned and saw what I’d been too hopped up to see when I stomped through the hallway—a man standing over on my right, his arms crossed over his chipped-from-granite chest, his shoulders resting casually against the wall.

“Quinn!” My voice was much too breathy and I cursed myself for giving in to the surprise and him for having the nerve to show up out of nowhere and pull the rug out from under me. At the same time I thanked the fashion gods for watching over me and making sure I looked as good as I did that day; I wondered if Quinn didn’t have a direct line to the same deities. He was wearing a charcoal suit and a shirt so white, it nearly blinded me. His tie was colorful in an I-am-a-detective-with-excellent-taste-and-I-don’t-need-to-prove-it-to-anyone way, a refined swirl of black, gray, and white with just enough red splashed in for good measure.

Delectability aside, this was the same man who’d walked out on me not three weeks earlier. I told myself not to forget it (as if I could), narrowed my eyes, and it was a good thing I had that bouquet of flowers. Hanging on to it prevented me from digging my nails into the palms of my hands. Quinn was taller than President James A. Garfield. I looked him in the eye. “What do you want?”

He shot Jennine a thousand-watt smile by way of excusing us, then took me by the elbow. “A little privacy would be nice,” he said.

I yanked my arm out of his reach. “Why?”

“If I wanted to stand here in the hallway and tell you, we wouldn’t need the privacy.” He knew where my office was; he led the way.

I made sure I closed my office door behind me, then crossed my arms over my chest. “Well?”

He’d already taken a seat in the chair behind my desk and he looked up at me, as unruffled at the center of personal drama as I’d seen him at the scene of a homicide. “I missed you, too. Why don’t you sit down.”

“I don’t need to be invited to sit down in my own office.” I took a couple steps closer to my desk, the better to glare at him when I asked, “What do you want?”

“I thought we should talk.”

“If you wanted to talk, you shouldn’t have walked out on me. Then we could have talked.”

“You’re angry.”

I tossed my head. “No wonder you’re a detective. You’re a real whizbang when it comes to getting to the heart of things.”

“Which is how I know you wouldn’t be angry if you still didn’t care.”

“Oh, no!” I backed off and backed away. It was better than daring to get too close and catching a whiff of the expensive aftershave he always wore. That stuff made my knees weak, and Quinn knew it. Rather than dissolve into a puddle of mush, I sat in my guest chair. “You’re not going to pull that on me.”

“What?” Quinn had a way of shrugging that emphasized his broad shoulders. His eyes were the exact color of my emerald dress and they glittered at me across my desk. “You’re being unreasonable.”

“Me?” I was out of that chair in a flash. “You haven’t seen unreasonable, buddy, not from me. I’m the one who was always up front with you, and you’re the one—”

“Who’s had three weeks to think about everything we said to each other last time we were together.” He stood, too, and came around to the other side of the desk. A stronger woman might have backed away, or at least taken a swing at him in an effort to wipe that sexy smile off his face. But I am not a strong woman, not when it comes to Quinn, and I didn’t move a muscle, not even when he settled his hands on my shoulders.

“I am about to prove just how very reasonable I am,” he said, his voice honey. “I’ve done a lot of thinking in the past three weeks, Pepper.”

I swallowed hard. I knew what he was talking about, because I’d done a lot of thinking in that time, too, and somewhere between the anger and the misery, I’d decided the only way I would ever take Quinn back was if he came crawling. He wasn’t on his knees, not yet anyway, but I could afford to curb my temper and bide my time. I felt an apology of epic proportions coming on. Oh, how I was going to enjoy hearing it!

He leaned a little nearer, and I knew that if I gave in the slightest bit and moved a fraction of an inch closer, he would have kissed me. As much as I wanted it, it was too soon to surrender. I kept my place, just like I kept my mouth shut.

He skimmed both thumbs over my collarbone and said, “I’ve decided to forgive you.”

Even I didn’t know I could move that fast. I had his hands batted away and the desk between us before Quinn knew what had happened. And believe me, I wasn’t at a loss for words, even though I was just about choking on my anger. “You? Forgive me?”

Maybe he looked a little uncertain because he’d never seen steam coming out of a woman’s ears before. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it, and I realize when you told me all those crazy things you told me—”

“About talking to dead people.”

“Well, yeah.” He scraped a hand through his inky hair.

“Me walking out on you, it was a knee-jerk reaction, and it’s not like anyone could blame me. I had every right to ask what was going on with you, and when you made up that nonsense about ghosts—”

“Get out.” The bouquet of flowers was the perfect prop, but I motioned toward the door with it a little too forcefully. A shower of rose petals rained down on my desk. “Get out of my office, and get out of my life, and if you ever think of forgiving me again, get that out of your head, too. I don’t need your forgiveness, Quinn, and I don’t need you.”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

“Oh, I’m going to be happy, all right. As soon as you’re out of here and you close the door behind you.”

He did, and guess what? I didn’t feel any happier. Just to prove it, after he was gone, I winged the bouquet of flowers at my closed office door. The ribbon around the stems of the flowers came loose and unrolled, and I saw that there were gold foil letters glued to the ribbon.

Dearest Grandmother
, it said in loopy letters.

“Oh, you forgive me all right,” I mumbled to myself, giving the bouquet a kick across my office just for good measure. “And you proved it by bringing me a bunch of flowers you swiped off a grave!”

N
ever let it be said I don’t have a social life.

There were plenty of things I could have been doing the next evening. Honest. For instance, I usually call my dad in prison out in Colorado on Thursdays, and when I’m done talking to him, I call my mom to fill her in. That particular Thursday, I also could have gone to a car show with none other than Absalom Sykes, one of the guys I’d worked with on the cemetery restoration project. Sure, Absalom is a car thief, and yes, I suspected he was going to the show mostly to case the joint, but that was beside the point. Even though he’s big, and gruff, and scary looking (and he practices voodoo, too), I like Absalom. We would have had a good time.

Unfortunately, by the time Absalom called to invite me along, I’d already given in and given up to Ella’s pleading about how much she needed my help with the whole goofy commemoration, and what a team player I was, and how much she admired my willingness to pitch in, and blah, blah, blah. As much as I didn’t want to—and believe me when I say that was a whole lot—I agreed to go to Marjorie’s that evening.

None of which means I was particularly happy about it.

Marjorie lived in a nondescript house in a nondescript neighborhood, and I stood on her front porch, rang the bell, and braced myself. Not even that was enough to prepare me. When she answered the door in her cheap jeans and her white T-shirt with a picture of President Garfield on the front of it, I couldn’t contain myself. Everything I felt for Marjorie bubbled out of me, and the words just came pouring out of my mouth. “I’m here exactly why?” I asked. Marjorie was not put off. For one thing, she was wearing a pair of shoes with the highest heels I have ever seen except for the girls on stage at
The Thundering Stallion
(trust me, I was there in connection with an investigation even though the owner tried to get me to audition). This was a pair of sandals untastefully done in black and white patent leather with an ankle strap, a two-inch alligator green platform, and heels in a color to match. Just to make sure I noticed she was taller than me, Marjorie raised her head and pulled back her shoulders. She was on her home turf, and if I thought she was condescending, annoying, and just plain nasty back at the cemetery, she was twice as condescending, annoying, and just plain nasty in her home sweet home.