“Schlepp it over here for you?” I was going for ironic. She didn’t get it.
Marjorie nodded. “It would be useful to have someone help me transport my collection, but only if you can be very careful.”
“Oh, I can.” I zoomed right past irony all the way to sarcasm, but she never noticed.
“We’ll go through it all systematically. First the Garfield books, then the artworks, then Garfield memorabilia,” she said, oblivious to the glazing over of my eyes. “Then we’ll move on to the Garfield ephemera, you know memorial cards from the funeral service, the invitation to his inauguration. I’ve even got an original tintype of him taken in his Army uniform. Very rare, of course, and quite valuable.”
I was supposed to be impressed. There was no chance of that, but everything Marjorie said did start to fall into place. “Aha!” I pointed a finger her way. “That explains the whole thing! You collect all this stuff because you’re looking for proof that you’re really related to him.”
“I’m not looking for anything.” She said this in the superior sort of way she said everything else so, of course, I didn’t pay much attention. “What I’m doing is upholding a sacred trust. I’m helping to preserve the memory not only of one of my ancestors, but of one of the truly great American presidents. His term in office was certainly short, but it is often underrated.”
“You would know.”
Again, my words hit the irony wall and bounced back without making a dent. Marjorie simply smiled. “Yes,” she said, “I do know. Because in case you haven’t noticed, I’m something of an expert. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I know more than anybody about the late, great president.”
Oh yeah?
I wasn’t so sure.
Because just as she was saying this, there was a little ripple in the air right behind Marjorie and a mist that took shape little by little until it was unmistakable, down to the beard.
If Marjorie knew everything there was to know about James A. Garfield, I wondered if she knew his ghost was standing right behind her.
3
T
he office phone rang, and ubervolunteer that she was, Marjorie didn’t waste any time. She answered it with a snappy, “This is the Garfield Memorial. Marjorie Klinker, docent, speaking,” and proceeded to ignore me completely.
Fine by me. With her busy pretending she knew all there was to know about James A. Garfield, I was free to follow him (or at least what was left of him) out of the office, through the entryway, and into the rotunda.
Only it wasn’t the rotunda. Not exactly, anyway.
When last I saw it, the memorial rotunda looked like it always looked with its marble floor and columns, its thirteen stained glass windows, and that big, honkin’ statue of the president on the marble dais under the dome, his head high, his chin up, his shoulders back, staring steadfastly at whatever it was he was supposed to be staring steadfastly at. Now, the whole place was filled with mist that shimmered like moonlight on water. The swirling mist curled softly around the bases of the columns and arched over my head. It blocked out the light of the stained glass windows, and made it so hard for me to see more than a few feet in front of me, I felt like I was inside a shaken snow globe.
Without a word or even a look toward me, the president marched on, and curious, I followed. By then, we should have come to the dais where his statue stood. But instead of marble, the floor at my feet suddenly turned to wood, and portions of it were covered with an Oriental rug in shades of deep blue and green.
Weird? Yes. But what happened next was even stranger. A chill breeze ruffled my hair, the mist whooshed every which way, and the rotunda was gone. We were standing on that rug in a room with a high ceiling and tall windows. Outside, sunshine dappled trees and bushes. Inside, the walls were painted white and accented with gold. They were decorated with portraits of presidents like Washington and Lincoln and a bunch of other stick-in-the-mud old guys who looked vaguely familiar from history books. There was a fireplace directly across from me, and a fire crackled in the grate. Between me and that fireplace was a long, rectangular table. Eight guys wearing old-fashioned clothes and too-serious expressions were seated around it. They were talking quietly among themselves.
“Whoa!” I stopped fast. “What’s going on? Who are these guys? And what . . . ?” When I looked up and squinted through the mist, I could just make out the second-floor balcony that looked down onto the rotunda. “What’s happening here? Where are we?”
“Where do you think we are?” James A. Garfield didn’t talk, he boomed. His blue eyes homed in on me like radar and pinned me to the spot. “We are in the Executive Mansion, young lady. Just as we should be.”
Like I was supposed to know what to say? I realized I was gaping, snapped my mouth shut, and blubbered a little before I composed myself enough to say, “Executive Mansion? You mean like the White House? You’re kidding me, right? The White House is in Washington DC and we’re in—”
“Young lady, I am the president. The president conducts business in the home in which he lives, and in the unlikely incident that you have not noticed what you should, indeed, have taken note of the moment you walked in here, I am working. In fact, I am quite busy, so if you would be so kind as to excuse me—”
“Hey, I didn’t come looking for you, you’re the one who showed up to find me.” I poked my thumb over my shoulder and back toward the way we came to remind him that while I was minding my own business, he popped up unannounced in the office. “You know who I am, right? I’m the one with the—”
“Gift. Yes. Of course I know. I am, after all, the president.”
“And you sure wouldn’t get far these days with those sound bites.” I was hoping to maybe get a chuckle out of him, but none of the starch went out of his shoulders so I just got down to business. “Usually when ghosts come looking for me, it’s because they want something,” I told him though I shouldn’t have had to. If he knew I had the Gift, he knew that much about me already. “Most of them want me to solve their murders, but I know that’s not what you’re looking for. Marjorie, she says—”
“Mr. President.” Ignoring me completely, a middle-sized man carrying an armload of papers walked up to the president. He was younger than the other men in the room, but he was dressed as formally as the rest of them including the president himself, in a black suit coat and vest, gray pants, a white shirt with a stiff collar, and a narrow bow tie. The man had a long, angular nose. There was a pair of glasses with no side arms pinched onto the bridge of it. His sandy-colored hair was parted down the middle and he had a mustache. It was fat and bushy, like a caterpillar.
“We’re nearly ready to begin, Mr. President,” he said. His voice was polished smooth, like an actor in a cheesy Shakespeare production. He tapped the pile of papers he carried. “However, there are some small matters we should take care of before you begin your meeting. There are some papers which need to be signed, and—”
“Excuse me! Talking here.” I mean, really, did he expect me to just disappear into the woodwork because he wanted face time with the president? I gave the young, pushy guy a sharp look.
He kept right on going as if I wasn’t even there. “. . . and I really would like to get these taken care of today, Mr. President, if you wouldn’t mind. There are a great many details and—”
“Hello!” He might be acting like I was invisible, but that didn’t mean I had to put up with it. I stepped forward.
It’s hard to miss a five-foot-eleven redhead in an emerald green dress. He did a pretty good job of it, and just kept talking. “. . . and there are certainly a great many things for you to discuss at your meeting today. There’s no need for you to fret about these few small matters, so I will gladly take care of them for you. If you could simply sign these papers, Mr. President—”
“All right, now you’re just being rude.” I waved a hand in front of the man’s face.
And he never once shut his mouth. “. . . I will see to it that everything is taken care of and leave you to your morning’s work.”
I gave the president a
huh?
look, and I guess he got the message because he dismissed the younger man with a tip of his head.
“That is Jeremiah Stone,” the president said when the young man walked away. “He’s an excellent aide, an eager fellow, anxious to keep the business of state moving apace. He is impatient, of course, as all young people are.”
“And pretty rude, to boot.” If he wasn’t going to mention it, I figured the least I could do was point it out.
“No, no. It is nothing like that.” President Garfield turned to face me. “Do not think unkindly of Mr. Stone. He is neither ill-mannered nor cruel. If he had even an inkling that he had slighted a young lady, he would certainly be most perplexed. He and the others . . .” He looked toward the men seated around the table. “They have all crossed over, you see. They are all firmly on the Other Side. They are not being rude in the least, they are simply oblivious to your presence.”
“But they can see you?”
“That’s correct.” He inclined his head.
“And you can see me.”
Again, he nodded.
“So I can communicate with you, but not with them. And they can communicate with you, but not with me.”
“There, you have laid out the whole thing quite compendiously.” I had no idea what that meant, but since the president smiled, I guess it was a good thing. “Since they are on the Other Side, they can have no communion whatsoever with the living. Now, miss . . .” Like I’d seen the characters do in boring costume dramas, he gave me a quick bow. “As you heard Mr. Stone say, there is much work to be done, and I cannot be kept from it longer than I should be. After all, I am—”
“The president. Right. But hey, I’m not the one keeping you from anything. You’re the one who showed up to see me. Which means they might have crossed over . . .” I looked at the men around the table, then shifted my attention back to the president. “But you haven’t. Which explains why you’re hanging around looking for me. But you can’t want your murder solved. Marjorie, she says they found the guy who killed you. They hung him.”
“Hanged.” He said this in the way a teacher would to a student who didn’t get something, even though the teacher thought it was pretty simple. “There never was any question who shot me. It was Charles Guiteau, of course. I imagine the history books report the facts most competently. The villain waylaid me at a train station in Baltimore. He admitted his crime immediately after shooting me. He never denied it at all. In fact, I would say he was rather proud of having delivered the shots which ultimately resulted in my passing.”
“Then if you know for sure it was this Guiteau guy, you don’t need me to solve your murder.”
“Of course not.”
Jeremiah Stone was back. He shifted from foot to foot, expressing his impatience without having to say a word.
“One moment,” the president told him before he turned back to me. “I do not actually need anything from you,” he said. “And yet . . .” He pulled in a breath and let it out with a sigh. If he had been alive, it would have rippled the mist around us, but since this was one dead president who couldn’t get any deader, those stray wisps just hung in the air between us. “There may be something you can do for me, Miss Martin. I am reluctant to ask, seeing as how you are a woman and it is hardly respectable as it is not within a woman’s responsibilities to handle such matters.”
No way I was going to let that pass, not even from a president. “Things are a little different now than they were back in your day,” I told him. “Since you’ve heard of me and you know I have the Gift, you must also know I’ve handled a whole bunch of stuff that was—”
“Yes, yes. Such unpleasant matters. We will not speak of them.” Apparently that was that, because he got rid of the subject with a shake of his broad shoulders and looked me up and down. “I fear that I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty. It is therefore no easy thing for me to remember that, in your world, women are more free to do things for which they might not be deemed qualified for or prepared for by way of upbringing, intellect, or temperament.”
Had I just been dissed? By a president?
I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t taking the chance. If I’d been in my stocking feet, the president and I would have stood just about eye to eye. In my Jimmy Choos, I had the advantage and I took it. I looked down at him. “I’ve heard that back in your day, some women had jobs,” I said, as innocent as can be. “I heard about one who was a reporter for the
New York Times
. Her name was Lucia—”
“Really, Miss Martin!” The president’s beard twitched.
“Though I am trying to be progressive and learn to live with the reality of women working out in the world, I have yet to reconcile myself to women—or anyone else—discussing inappropriate subjects. In order for our relationship to progress in a manner that is both appropriate and mutually beneficial, you must certainly remember that.”
“In order for our relationship to progress in a manner that is . . .” No way I could remember the rest of it, and I screeched my irritation, not to mention my frustration, and cut to the chase. “How about if you just tell me what you want.”
“Well, there is one small problem.” He seemed almost embarrassed to mention it. “It does not, of course, make me waver in my resolve to execute the duties of my office, but it does make it devilish hard to—” He caught himself and cleared his throat. “You must excuse me, Miss Martin. I have not had the singular pleasure of communicating with a member of the fairer sex for some time, and I am afraid I have forgotten my manners. What I meant to say, of course, is that taking into consideration your more tender sensibilities as a weaker vessel—”
“No wonder history always put me to sleep!” I couldn’t help myself, I had to interrupt. If he kept yammering on, I was going to jump out of my skin. Maybe the old guy and Marjorie were related after all. That would explain why they were both so boring. “It takes you so long to answer a simple question, how did you ever get anything accomplished?”