Flowerbed of State

by Dorothy St. James

  What if the murderer couldn’t find what he’d wanted to steal from that poor woman? What if he’d attacked me with the hopes he’d get his hands on what he couldn’t get from her? I reached for my backpack and started to riffle through it, looking to see if anything was missing, though I still couldn’t imagine why anyone would think I had something worth stealing.

  “What did he use to choke you?” Turner wondered aloud. “If he’d used piano wire or something like that, your neck would have been sliced open.”

  I pressed my hand to my throat. “What a gruesome thought.”

  “It’s the truth.” Turner got up and crossed the room to me. “It’s the lanyard she wore around her neck that held her security badge.”

  “What about it?” Thatch asked.

  “That’s what he used to choke her. It was the closest thing on hand.”

  “But he didn’t have to take her security card,” Thatch pointed out.

  “True,” Turner agreed, but frowned. “I don’t think our killer is a professional, and I don’t think he set out to steal a White House security card.”

  “That may be true, but we have to prepare for the worst. We have to operate under the assumption that there’s been a security breach.”

  “But no one can use my badge to get into the White House, right?” I asked.

  “No. We’ve already canceled all of your security credentials and have issued you a temporary card. It should be ready by now,” Thatch said and hurried out of the room again.

  When he returned, he handed me a bright red temporary security pass and turned me loose.

  It was too late to worry about trying to do anything with my ruined outfit. But perhaps if I ran back to my office, I could grab my presentation boards and only be a few minutes late to the meeting. Like a bird set free from a cage, I dashed out the door and up the stairs.

  I made it as far as the glass double doors leading to the West Wing Colonnade, the most direct route back to my office, when I hit a roadblock in the shape of a hawk-nosed bureaucrat.

  “Ms. Calhoun!” Wilson Fisher, Ambrose’s assistant usher, hurried down the covered colonnade toward me, his beady eyes bright with glee. His thin body swayed back and forth, and a stack of papers about as thick as War and Peace flapped in his arms with every quick step.

  I’d bet dollars to daisies he’d compiled a hefty helping of forms for me to fill out. Wilson’s favorite pastime was to bury me under his endless supply of paperwork that could never, ever wait. I’d never make it to my meeting if he caught hold of me.

  “Ms. Calhoun!” He waved the forms in front of him. His shoes tapped a rapid tempo against the colonnade’s stone tiles. “I urgently need to speak with you!”

  Chapter Four

  “PRETEND you didn’t see me,” I told Turner, who was coming up the stairs behind me.

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “That.” I hooked my thumb toward the colonnade beyond the double doors and the flapping paperwork dervish closing in on us. With the quiet stealth I’d picked up from reading a healthy heap of Miss Marple mysteries and the like, I turned on my heel and took off down the hall in the opposite direction.

  With each step, my determination grew stronger. Yes, the meeting was scheduled to begin in less than ten minutes. And yes, my feet were taking me farther away from the First Lady’s office, which was located upstairs in the East Wing. But if taking the longer route meant avoiding Wilson Fisher, then that’s what I had to do.

  I’d only briefly visited the First Lady’s office once, but I could clearly picture its cheery canary yellow walls, the delicate Chippendale sofa with flowered upholstery that graced the far wall, and the half-dozen comfortable chairs to accommodate long meetings. Margaret Bradley, the President’s soft-spoken wife, was well known for her love of the outdoors and gardening. I’d heard she never closed the blinds on the windows in her corner office that overlooked the intimate Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. If the sun came in too brightly during a meeting, she’d simply move the chairs around.

  Gordon and I had taken all of this information, including the angle of the sun, into consideration when planning for this morning’s presentation. Although I knew I’d found a kindred spirit with the First Lady, a few of the proposed changes might be viewed as radical by some of the long-standing members of the White House Grounds Committee who’d be present at this meeting and providing their input. They were the ones I needed to win over.

  Past experience had taught me that many traditional gardeners still viewed proponents of organic gardening as those flaky hippie tree-hugger types. To them, we were an unreliable bunch who shouldn’t be entrusted with the future of one of the nation’s most revered gardens. A reporter named Griffon Parker had written those exact words in an op-ed piece published in this morning’s edition of Media Today, the print edition of the nation’s largest news outlet.

  It didn’t matter that I’d been born in the seventies and had completely missed the hippie era. Forget my years of experience working in some of the most historic gardens in the heart of Charleston, South Carolina. Never mind that I’d never, ever walked away from any job, no matter how challenging. But I’m straying from my main point, which was: Being late or—even worse—not showing up to this crucial meeting would only feed the misconceptions about me.

  “Organic gardening incorporates concepts such as balance and harmony. Unlike how many in Washington’s partisan political environment approach their jobs, at the root of organic gardening is the belief that man can successfully work with the natural world instead of railing against it. It’s this nonpartisan approach, which echoes the President’s own style, I hope to implement.” That was how I’d planned to start my presentation. Or, I should say, how I still planned to start it.

  The First Lady had already stressed that she wouldn’t approve any changes without the Grounds Committee’s support.

  Now that the Secret Service had finished taking my statement, no one but no one was going to get in the way of my making that meeting. Let Wilson dump his forms on me after the presentation.

  I rounded a corner and met up with a small group of businesswomen and men all wearing red “Visitor” badges. They blocked the hallway while a young White House staffer with obviously no time pressures on his schedule showed off a photograph hanging on the wall depicting President Nixon’s trip to China.

  “Excuse me,” I murmured, and tried to shimmy past them. As I’d mentioned before, the hallways in the West Wing were narrow, intimate even, and—at this particular moment—downright cramped.

  I’d managed to wedge my way into the center of the group when an older woman with short gray hair stepped back and jammed her stiletto heel into the top of my shoe.

  It hurt! A descriptive phrase quite unworthy of the proper manners my grandmother Faye had taken great pains to instill in me may have popped out of my overstressed mouth.

  “Oh!” the older woman exclaimed, whirling toward me. She reminded me of someone I’d seen on TV. But who? “Did I step on you? I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t see you back there.”

  “It’s nothing.” I gave my stinging foot a little shake and tried not to limp as I moved through the rest of the group.

  A gentleman a head taller than the other two men in the group made a grand gesture with his arm and stepped clear out of my muddy way. He wore a deep gray three-piece suit that had clearly been tailored to hug his fit frame. His features were reminiscent of Greek god beauty, the kind of masculine beauty that had the power to steal the breath from a woman’s chest.

  His features were also very, very familiar.

  Richard Templeton, only the richest bachelor in the United States, was a face anyone who owned a TV would recognize. “Tempting Templeton,” a gossip maven had recently taken to calling him. He dated supermodels, Oscar-winning actresses, and heiresses. His breakups rarely went smoothly. The paparazzi followed him from party to party, hoping to catch footage of a nasty scene. News of his wild nightlife frequen
tly made celebrity headlines in magazines such as People, Us Weekly, and Time.

  Despite the prevalence of touched-up and airbrushed photography that created perfection out of mere mortals, Richard Templeton looked even more handsome in person. His deep blue eyes sparkled with sharp intelligence and a smattering of mischief. As I passed him, a corner of his lips quirked up into a wicked grin, setting off a fluttering of soft-winged butterflies in my chest.

  His dark brown hair, slightly long and untamed, made him look more like a rock star than a banker. But he wasn’t a rock star. He sat at the helm of a “too big to fail” bank. His net worth rivaled Bill Gates’s. He owned several islands and, I had heard, a small South American country. Not only that, but he’d been recently crowned by Organic World Magazine as Environmentalist of the Year in recognition of the work his charitable foundation had accomplished.

  If I hadn’t been in such a hurry or splattered in mud, I might have stopped and introduced myself. Okay, I wouldn’t have. But I knew I’d have some lovely dreams tonight of what I might have said and what he might have said back.

  For one thing, I could have asked him what he was doing at the White House. But then I remembered the President’s banking summit, the same summit the raggedly dressed demonstrators were protesting.

  The President had invited thirteen of the top banking CEOs to Washington. Congress was on the cusp of passing additional legislation to toughen banking regulations. It was legislation most of the large banks vehemently opposed. The President had called for this summit to bring the opposing parties together.

  “If you’ll come this way”—the staffer in charge of the small group pumped his arm and pointed with gusto in the opposite direction from where I was heading—“I could show you the rest of the West Wing while we wait for President Bradley.” Apparently the staffer had suddenly remembered his schedule.

  The woman with the stiletto heels, whom I still couldn’t place, ignored the young man’s directions and followed along beside me instead. She was smartly dressed in a dark blue suit with a straight skirt that hung a few inches below her knees. Her short gray hair curled out in such a way at the ends that it looked as if a low-hanging silver halo encircled her head.

  The deep lines around her mouth and eyes gave her a look of experience and confidence, like a woman who expected to get her way no matter what. Her steely silver gaze latched on to the temporary security badge that dangled from the lanyard I’d hastily thrown on over my yellow rain slicker.

  “Casey Calhoun,” she read the name on my badge aloud. “You’re the new gardener mentioned in this morning’s op-ed piece.”

  “You mean the article that suggested hippies were plotting to take over the White House grounds?” the only other woman in the group asked. She looked about my age and had arctic blond hair that brushed the top of her shoulders. She was tanned and impeccably dressed in a lavender pantsuit.

  “She doesn’t look old enough to be a hippie, Lilly,” a man who looked like a balding male version of the blonde pointed out.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “But she’s muddy enough to be a hippie,” he added.

  Tempting Templeton chuckled.

  “I had a little trouble this morning.” I touched the bandage covering the side of my face.

  “Uh, Senator Pendergast, we really should be going this way.” The young staffer’s voice wavered as his group of VIPs followed me instead as if I were the Pied Piper.

  “Senator Edith Pendergast,” I said as I realized why the woman with the sharp stilettos looked so familiar to me. She chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and had recently become one of the most powerful senators on the Hill. She was the senator spearheading the most current legislation to regulate both the banks and Wall Street. “I apologize for my . . . um . . . outburst.”

  “You should hear the senator when she gets in a bitch of a mood. I’m Brooks Keller, by the way.” The banker with the receding hairline grabbed my hand and shook it, his smile dazzling.

  I’d heard of him and his sister, the “wonder twins” of the financial world. Lillian Keller glared at her brother until he dropped my hand. She then rolled her eyes and planted herself between Brooks and me. “The trouble you mentioned, Ms. Calhoun, is that why Lafayette Square looks like a war zone this morning? What’s going on?”

  While I was waiting to be issued a temporary security pass, Thatch had stressed the importance of keeping tight control over the investigation. He’d instructed me not to mention the attack to anyone. The Secret Service and the White House communications director were to be the only points of contact for information.

  So I didn’t know what to say. “No comment” seemed somehow inappropriate. So I did what Grandmother Faye, the matriarch of the Calhoun family, had spent so many years trying to impress on me: I told the truth. “I was asked not to talk about it.”

  “But I understand everything is under control now?” Senator Pendergast asked.

  “Was it those filthy-looking people protesting our summit who were making so much trouble?” Lillian shook her head with dismay, as if she couldn’t imagine how anyone could be upset with the banking community.

  “I don’t know. Now if you’d excuse me, I hate to rush off, but—”

  Though the bankers all nodded and let me go on my way, the senator continued to doggedly follow me. “I find the work that takes place on the White House grounds endlessly fascinating.” She lowered her voice as if about to confess something truly scandalous. “I’m an avid gardener, you see.”

  “Splendid,” I said, honestly pleased to meet someone who shared my passion for plants. “Then you must love working in D.C. and being surrounded by so many world-class public parks and gardens. Have you heard about what the National Arboretum is doing with their—”

  “Yes, yes,” she said impatiently. “I’d like to sit in on your presentation regarding the organic gardening proposal.”

  “I—I—” I stammered, not sure what to say. I didn’t have the authority to invite guests to the First Lady’s office, not even important senators like Edith Pendergast.

  The senator raised her brows, obviously waiting for an invitation I had no right to give.

  “You’ll have to contact the First Lady’s office. It’s her meeting.”

  “Oh?” Her lips tightened, smoothing out many of the wrinkles surrounding her mouth. “Is that so?”

  A chill spiraled up my legs from that icy stare of hers, slow and pervasive like a winter frost creeping into a flowerbed. I stopped in the middle of the hall and turned toward her. The chill continued to coil its way up my chest, tightening as it went. I’d made a tactical error with the senator, though I wasn’t sure what else I could have said. Or what I should say now.

  Early on in my career, when I’d worked for some of Charleston’s most elite society ladies tending their gardens, I’d made a similar misstep that had nearly ruined me. Several of the ladies thought I was giving a certain Mrs. Harleston special treatment because I’d planted a rare variety of camellia in her garden. But truly, her garden had the southern exposure to support the plant’s strict sunlight requirements that the other ladies’ gardens lacked.

  My, my, my, them ladies are so puffed up with pride, they can’t help but get their peacock feathers ruffled, Aunt Alba had declared after I’d lost nearly half of my residential clients and was in danger of losing several more.

  So to soothe bruised prides and salvage my fledging landscaping business, I scoured local nurseries and bribed camellia hobbyists to sell me some of their prize stock until I secured enough rare and individualized cultivars to give to each of my remaining clients. Every lady could now boast of the special treatment I’d given her, and only her, saving her pride and my career.

  And that, I suspected, was exactly what I needed to do now. I lightly touched the senator’s arm and leaned in toward her. Lowering my voice ever so slightly, I said, “Considering your experience with plants, I’m sure Mrs. Bradley will welc
ome any input you might be able to offer.”

  Her frigid glare warmed several degrees. “Splendid.”

  “If you contact her office, I’m sure—” I started to say.

  “I’ll let you go and get cleaned up for the meeting,” she interrupted.

  “Thank you,” I said with a big smile fueled almost completely by relief.

  While I was busy congratulating myself for being ever so clever, the senator pushed her card into my hand. “Call my assistant and let her know when you have arranged for me to sit in on the meeting. She’ll get the message to me.”

  “What? Wait, I hadn’t . . .”

  Senator Pendergast patted my arm like she would a puppy’s head and marched victoriously back to the bankers.

  “But I hadn’t . . .” I said to the suddenly empty hallway.

  That didn’t go as smoothly as it could have. And hell, it was one more task I needed to accomplish before the meeting could even get started. I dropped the senator’s card into my rain slicker’s pocket and trotted through the West Wing lobby, out the front entrance, and across the North Lawn toward my office.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when my cell phone started to belt out the words to “Stronger” by Kanye West. Nerves a bit on edge? Perhaps just a little.

  The phone repeatedly sang the hip-hop version of Nietzsche’s famous quote “what doesn’t kill me” while I dug around in my soggy backpack. Naturally it had slipped to the bottom again and had lodged itself underneath the mystery novel I’d been reading. When I pulled the rose-colored phone free from my bag’s clutches and flipped it open, I noticed not only the incoming number but also the time . . . or rather the lack of it. The meeting should have started five minutes ago!

  “Lorenzo, thank goodness you called,” I shouted into the phone. “Are you still in the office?”

  “Yes, I am. Casey—”

  “Great.” I bypassed the passageway leading down to my office and headed straight for the East Wing. “As you can see, I’m running more than a little late. Could you please grab my presentation boards and bring them up to the First Lady’s office?”