After all I’d seen him go through outside, I didn’t have the heart to make the president suffer any more. Hearing that practically no one but a history teacher like Jack or a nutcase like Marjorie remembered him . . . well, there was nothing to be gained from that. I scrambled to think of everything Ella had told me about the president before she assigned me to his memorial.
“You were the twentieth president.”
“Yes.” He nodded, pleased. “That is most certainly true.”
“You took office in March.”
“March of 1881.”
“And you were shot in . . . July?”
“Yes. Exactly. I was shot by a man named—”
“Charles Guiteau.” I was pretty proud of myself for remembering it. “But you didn’t die right away. You lived until—”
“September. September nineteenth, to be exact.” His shoulders rose and fell. “So little time, and so much important work that needed to be accomplished. I could have done so much.”
I scurried through the mental notes I’d made in case someone who visited the memorial actually wanted to talk about the president instead of Marjorie’s murder. “But you did. There was civil service reform. And that investigation of the Post Office. And—”
“And all of it important, yes. But I had years stolen from me. Years, and achievements I can still, to this day, only dream of. All taken from me by a man who was brainsick. You see, by his own authority and with no knowledge or encouragement from any member of my staff, Guiteau gave a speech or two on my behalf during my presidential campaign. Once I was elected, he thought himself solely responsible for my success and insisted he should have a post in my administration as a show of my appreciation. Again and again, he wrote to me, and to members of my cabinet. He insisted I should send him to Vienna and name him consul general. Needless to say, I ignored his missives, as did the members of my staff, but that did not stop him. He kept up his incessant supplications. He wrote letters. He waited outside my office at the Executive Mansion. He finally gave up on Vienna and demanded that I name him ambassador and that he be posted to Paris. Imagine the audacity of the man!”
The president snorted his outrage. He turned and stomped to the table, his footsteps muffled by the thick Oriental carpet at our feet. His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his expression, but I could hear the anger simmering in his voice. “You know, this Guiteau fellow once stole into a presidential reception and actually managed to insinuate himself close to the First Lady. My poor Lucretia! If I had sensed she might be in any danger, I would have pummeled this Guiteau fellow myself, right then and there.” His face purple, he whirled around and slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand.
I think it was the first time he remembered that I was there watching. He blinked, and his eyes cleared. “You must pardon my anger,” he said. “It is a fact that, in my younger days, I was a minister. Apparently I listened when I gave my flock advice, for aside from moments such as these when I allow my emotions to get the best of my nature, I have long ago forgiven Guiteau. He was unbalanced, after all. I do believe that these days, you would call him a stalker.”
Stalker.
The word settled somewhere between my heart and my stomach and sent a cold wave through me that left me shaky. It was one of the times I was actually grateful to be a detective because, well . . . I wasn’t very content with unanswered questions. As disturbing as it was to watch President Garfield suffer when he stepped outside the memorial, thinking about that strange incident sure beat thinking about the doughy-faced man who’d showed up at the office the day before.
“You haven’t explained,” I said, and because I knew he was going to pretend he didn’t know what I was talking about, I stood my ground and refused to let him change the subject. “I want to know what happened outside the front door, and why.”
“Ah, the why of it. That is what I have been trying to elucidate for you. You see, I did not have my chance to be president here on this earth—”
“So you’re president here! Inside the memorial!” The bits and pieces of everything he’d said and everything I’d seen in the rotunda that wasn’t the rotunda when he was with me suddenly made sense. So did the reason why, after all these years, his ghost was still hanging around. All of the ghosts I’d met since I’d discovered my Gift had unfinished business, but not this one. The president’s assassin had been punished. Justice was done, and that should have been the end of that. Yet he was still haunting the memorial. Note: I said memorial. In fact, I’d never seen him anywhere else in the cemetery. In light of everything he said, that made sense. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re making up for lost time.”
He nodded. “I was offered a trade, you see. My time on the Other Side for time here. As president. I was denied so many productive years by my untimely death. Now, as long as I stay within the boundaries of my memorial, I continue to exist in this form. If I leave—”
“You go up in a puff of smoke.”
“Not exactly the way I would have worded it, but yes. That is exactly what would happen should I leave the confines of this tomb for too long. I would cease to exist, in this world or in the next. I have no regrets about making the decision to stay on here. Here . . .” He spread his arms, taking in the elegant room. “Here I am president. I continue the work I started all those years ago. I make decisions. I meet with my cabinet. There is a great deal that needs to be done. So you can see why it is of the utmost importance for me to be left undisturbed. With all the ruckus of late—”
“Well, I’m guessing we’re still going to have the commemoration, with Marjorie or without her. So there’s no way you’re going to get away from that. And no way to avoid the tourists who keep showing up to check out the spot where she bit the big one, either. That will die down, I’m sure. And the commemoration won’t last forever. You’ll get your peace and quiet eventually.”
“Yes, yes. Of course those things will come to an end, and it is all for the better. But really, that is not at all what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the comings and goings at all hours.”
I must have looked as baffled as I felt because he shook his head, disgusted. “Really, I have been attempting to tell you about these disturbances since the day we met. I cannot believe you are not aware of—”
“What?” I closed in on the president. “You said all hours. Are you telling me—”
“That there are people coming and going when there shouldn’t be. Yes, yes. Exactly. There are people in parts of the memorial where they have no business.”
“Like?”
“The ballroom, certainly.”
A memory sparked inside my brain and I hurried out of the rotunda and hung a right in the entryway. Good thing I was wearing my sneakers, I made it up to the roped-off doorway outside the stairway that led up to the ballroom in record time. President Garfield was already there waiting for me.
I poked a finger at the printed sign, the one that said CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC. That day, it was exactly where it was supposed to be, and right side up, too. “A couple times when I’ve been up here, this sign has been upside down. I thought maybe someone on the cleaning crew was just being careless. Or some visitor was being a smart-ass. But if you’ve seen people going into the ballroom . . .”
“It may be a signal of sorts,” the president said. His brain and mine were working on the same track, which was kind of scary, but helpful, too, since we didn’t have to fill each other in about what we were thinking. “Perhaps the inverted sign tells these intruders when they should go in. Or that they should stay away.”