Or like he was pointing a finger, pretending it was a gun.
The tension washed out of me and I tossed my head. “Oh, come on, Nick. That’s just about as lame as it gets. You don’t have a gun.”
He made a face. “I figured you’d give me the letter if you thought I did.”
“Is that what you told Marjorie that morning you came here to the memorial? That you had a gun? That she had to turn over the letter or else?”
Even with the shadows, I could tell his face went ashen. “I tried to reason with her,” he said, his voice squeezed thin. “Aunt Marjorie was not a reasonable woman.”
That was neither here nor there. I stuck to my case. “So when she wouldn’t hand over the letter so you could sell it, you tossed her over the balcony.”
“No. I didn’t. I swear.”
He started to shake, and seeing it, I got a fresh dose of courage. I took a step toward Nick. “I know you were here that day, Nick. You took the brownies.”
All the gray washed out of his face and left him as white as a sheet. Nick staggered back and swallowed hard. “How . . . how did you know?”
“Because of what Bernadine said. She said you were nervous about the wedding and your tummy was acting up. But it wasn’t nerves, was it? It was the brownies. Gloria Henninger put Ex-Lax in them.”
All that pale skin was suddenly shot through with a color that reminded me of blood. “I’ll sue!” Nick yelled. “That woman is a menace. This certainly proves it. She . . . she tried to kill me.”
“But here you are, alive and well.” I let this comment settle before I added, “But Marjorie isn’t, is she?”
Nick whirled around, then spun back to me. He tugged at his hair, his voice choked and desperate. “Yes, I was here that morning. Yes, when I left, I took the brownies. I love chocolate, you see, and I figured it would serve Aunt Marjorie right to not get any of the brownies. She was . . .” Looking for the right word to describe a woman who was indescribable, he blubbered.
“She was impossible! For once, I wanted to get the best of her, so when I arrived here that morning, I told Aunt Marjorie something she didn’t know. A couple weeks earlier, after she showed me the letter for the first time, I smuggled it out of her house and showed it to Ted Studebaker. You know, so that he could value it. I should have sold it to him right then and there, Aunt Marjorie be damned. But no!” He was so overwrought, his voice gained an octave.
“I had to be the good nephew. Just the way I’ve always been. I had to give in to Aunt Marjorie’s whims. Just the way I always have. I returned the letter to her along with the good news about how much it was worth. She said she’d consider selling it and that I should come here to the cemetery and we’d talk about it further.”
“And when you did?”
“When I did, she laughed in my face.” Nick’s eyes were rimmed with red. He swigged his nose. “She told me I was stupid if I ever thought she’d sell that letter, that it was the most wonderful thing in the world and that she’d never part with it. I felt like a little kid all over again, always being corrected by Aunt Marjorie, always being told by her that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t care enough about family history. She made me so angry . . .” Nick’s hands curled into fists. “I wanted to . . . I wanted to—”
“Kill her?”
Nick went motionless and the only sounds in the rotunda were the echoes of his rough breathing. “I . . .” He drew in a breath and it stuttered out of him on the end of a sigh. “I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t kill her. We fought, yes. We yelled. We screamed. But when I left here, Aunt Marjorie was alive.”
I wasn’t about to believe him, not without proof, anyway. “You were the only one here that morning, Nick,” I said.
“Well, obviously not. Someone threw Aunt Marjorie over that balcony. But it wasn’t me.” He wiped the tears from his cheeks and threw back his shoulders, and suddenly, his voice was as calm as it had been distraught only moments before. “Now you’ll need to give me that letter, Pepper. I may not have a gun, but I am a man, and stronger than you. I’m not leaving here without the letter. Even if it means I have to hurt you to get it.”
Before I could decide if he was bluffing, Nick darted toward me, and honestly, I think I could have taken him if not for the fact that all the lights came on in the place and Scott and Quinn showed up out in the entryway. I was distracted, watching as they jockeyed for position, each trying to be the first into the rotunda. All they managed to accomplish was to trip over each other.
In the meantime, I lost precious seconds, and in those seconds, Nick closed in on me and I stepped back and bumped into the table. Before I had a chance to figure out which way to run, his hands had already closed around my neck.
“Give me that letter!” he said, his voice deadly serious. And even though I struggled to breathe at the same time I fought to loosen his hold, I recognized the important word there.
Deadly.
He was stronger than any IT geek had a right to be. He shook me like a ragdoll. “It’s mine. Give me the letter. Now.”
Never let it be said that Pepper Martin isn’t willing to oblige. I was getting nowhere trying to pry Nick’s hands away from my neck so I groped for the framed letter. Once I had a hand on it, I swung. Hard.
When the frame and the glass shattered on Nick’s head, the noise was as loud as a gunshot.
I guess that got Quinn and Scott’s attention. They untangled themselves from the doorway and scrambled over just as Nick’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he crumpled to the floor.
“Nick Klinker, you’re under arrest—”
They did it again. Started talking at the same time.
Quinn and Scott exchanged cutting looks. But maybe Scott is the smarter of the two. Or maybe he just knew that the case was officially Quinn’s and there was no way he was going to scoop it, anyway. He stepped back and Quinn cuffed Nick and called for the paramedics.
What did I do while all this was going on?
Well, I still had a hold of what was left of the frame, and I looked down at the letter, but I couldn’t really see it clearly. That’s because my hands were trembling.
“You OK, Pepper?” Scott asked. He put a hand on my arm.
“I’m fine,” I lied, but only because Quinn looked up, anxious to see how I was going to answer.
“I’ll just . . .” My knees were mushy, and I figured it would be more graceful to sit down in the office than to fall down on the floor, so I headed that way. “I’ll wait inside the office.”
This, too, was a good plan.
Or at least it would have been, if Nick Klinker hadn’t been telling the truth about Marjorie’s murder, and the real murderer wasn’t lying in wait for me.
I
had already slumped down into the chair behind the desk when the office door swung shut, clicked, and locked. Too late, I realized someone had been standing behind it.
“Thank goodness for Nick causing all that commotion. I never could have gotten in here unnoticed if your two cops friends hadn’t been so busy trying to one-up each other.” Ted Studebaker stepped out from the shadows. Good old Ted, always the showman. He wasn’t content using the ol’ finger-in-the-pocket-like-a-gun trick. He really did have a gun, a small, silver pistol with a pearl handle. It was aimed right at me.
“Let’s get this over with as quickly as we can,” he said. He held out his left hand and jiggled his fingers, urging me to hand over the letter. “If I can get out of here fast, we can avoid any messy consequences.”
“If you shoot me, Scott and Quinn are going to come running.”
This sounded reasonable to me, but it wasn’t about to make Studebaker change his mind. “By the time they stop what they’re doing and figure out where the shot came from, I’ll be out of here. That’s the thing about surprise. It’s . . .” He grinned. “Surprising!”
“All this for a stupid letter?” What was left of the frame was on the desk and I looked down at the President’s fancy, curlicue script. “Come on, it can’t be worth that much.”
“It isn’t.” Studebaker stepped closer. “But what’s on the back of it . . .”
I hauled in a breath, and if I wasn’t so worried about living through the next couple minutes and about how if I didn’t, my body would be found with a big, ugly red mark on my forehead, I would have given myself a slap. “Of course, Jeremiah Stone said there wasn’t any blank paper in his portfolio. He went to get some, but the president couldn’t wait. He grabbed a piece of paper, anyway. And if there was no blank paper, that means something has to be written on the back of this one.”
Carefully avoiding both Studebaker’s confused “What are you talking about?” and the sharp bits of glass still left inside the frame, I took out the president’s letter and flipped it over. Even though the writing on the other side of the paper was stiff and old-fashioned and hard to read, I skimmed over the words and my breath caught.
I looked up at Studebaker in wonder. “This isn’t possible. You mean—”
“When word of this gets out . . .” He dangled the word to reflect the possibilities.
OK, so I’m not exactly a whiz when it comes to politics. Or world affairs. Or treaties and such. But even I knew the piece of paper in my hands would blow the lid off international relations.
“That’s why you were so anxious to get at this. It wasn’t because the letter from the president to Lucia is so valuable. It was for what was on the other side of it. And nobody knew about it but you. When I brought you that newspaper page I wanted to sell, you said you’d have to have an archivist look at it. That’s what you did with this. You took it out of the frame, and you saw what was on the back of the letter, and you . . .” There was nothing to be gained from not going for broke. “You killed Marjorie Klinker to get it.”
“It would have been easier to kill Nick.” Studebaker sniffed. “I was hoping he’d talk his aunt out of the letter and then I could simply eliminate him. I waited for him to leave the memorial with the letter in hand, but then I heard them arguing. She hadn’t even brought the letter with her, the stupid woman. After Nick left—”
“You moved in on Marjorie. And when she wouldn’t tell you where the letter was—”
“Things got out of hand. Yes. As they are about to get out of hand again.” With the barrel of the gun, he motioned me to stand. “I can’t say for sure, but my guess is that once a man has killed for the first time, the second time can’t possibly be hard. The letter, please. Now.”
I got to my feet, and just as I did, I heard the door handle jiggle.
“Pepper?” Scott was outside, and he tried the door again.
“Pepper, are you in there?” This question was from Quinn. “Is everything OK?”
“Tell them it is.” Studebaker mouthed the words.
Let’s face it, I never have been very good at taking direction. Especially not from a murderer.
I yelled something I vaguely remember as, “Watch out, it’s Studebaker and he’s the murderer,” and dropped to the floor, and just as I did, I heard the crash of the door getting kicked open, the sound of a single gunshot, and a muffled cry from Studebaker. I would like to be able to describe exactly how Scott and Quinn subdued him, but truth be told, I crawled under the desk, and stayed there the whole time.
21
“W
e’ve got a mountain of paperwork to fill out.” W Scott leaned over where I was sitting and looked me in the eye. “I hate to have to leave. You sure you’re going to be OK?”
“I’m fine. Honest.” I had my arms wrapped around myself to keep him from seeing that I was shaking like a leaf, but I did a pretty good job of sounding cool, calm, and collected. I had to. I’d already given my statement to the cops, but there was one more thing I had to do before I left the memorial that night, and I couldn’t do it with the FBI hanging around along with half the Cleveland Police Force and the paramedics who were tending to Studebaker’s gunshot wound. (I never did find out if Scott or Quinn was the hero.)
“Somebody’s got to lock up when you guys leave,” I told Scott, and Quinn, too, since he was standing right behind Scott glaring at me like nobody’s business.
“I can call Ella,” Quinn said. “She’ll come over here and—”
“You don’t have to.” I guess I wanted to prove to them both (and maybe to myself, too), that I could stand on my own two feet, so I hauled myself out of the chair. “I’m fine. Look.” I held my arms out at my sides. Yeah, my neck hurt from where Nick had tried to squeeze the life out of me, but other than that, I really was none the worse for wear. Well, except for my slushy knees and my heartbeat racing a couple miles a minute.
“Go.” I shooed them both toward the door. “I’ll lock up and be right behind you.”
Neither one of them liked being told what to do, but it was a testament to how much paperwork they both had to file after all that had happened that night: both Scott and Quinn walked out. I watched them and all their safety forces buddies troop out the front door, then waited a few minutes for the quiet to settle. When it had, I stepped into the rotunda and onto the dais.
“Mr. President?” I wasn’t sure how he was going to take the news I was about to deliver, and my voice was small and tentative.
“Won’t do,” I told myself, and I raised my chin. “Mr. President,” I said, my voice louder this time. “We have a matter of national import to discuss.”
He shimmered into shape not three feet in front of me, and now that he thought all the excitement was over, I guess he was feeling a little more relaxed and a lot more jovial. His blue eyes sparkled. “National import? I swear, Miss Martin, you are sounding more like a politician every day. If you were not a woman, I would suggest you might consider running for office.”
I had the letter to Lucia in my hand and I held it up so he could see it. “There’s something you need to know,” I said. “About those last days before you died.”
Apparently he got the message. He saw how serious I was, and his brows dropped over his eyes. “You have told me already of the letter I wrote to Lucia. What else can possibly—”