Ghost Image, page 13
“And if he didn’t do that?”
“Cue the lawyers.”
“Seriously? Would the religious order of St. Francis of Assisi, founded on poverty and humility, actually go to court over something like that?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Jack said. “There are only three things God doesn’t know: how much money the Franciscans really have, how many communities of nuns there are, and what any Jesuit is thinking at any given time.”
I burst out laughing. “You’re joking … aren’t you?”
“Only about two of the three. We Jesuits are real enigmas.”
“No fooling.” I smiled. “But I wish I knew what Kevin and Jaine were arguing about at the Austrian ambassador’s the other night.”
“Even if it had something to do with the book, I seriously doubt Edward Jaine trashed Kevin’s study room at the Library of Congress looking for it,” Jack said. “He doesn’t really fit the profile for breaking-and-entering, you know?”
“Maybe someone did it for him?”
“That still seems like a stretch.”
“At some point Father Xavier needs to know about all this,” I said. “The book, Asquith’s, the room at the library … all of it.”
“I called the monastery yesterday. They’re totally swamped. Every news organization in the world wants an interview. Plus they’re still trying to process Kevin’s death, right in their own garden. I think you can wait a few days, Soph, to contact Xavier and add one more thing to his plate. Nothing’s going to change, especially since the book is safe and sound at Asquith’s.”
“All right. It’s probably just as well, because I’m going to London for a week with Harry.” I told him about Chappy, my mother’s trip to Connecticut, and her plans to move my grandfather into assisted living.
“Chap would hate that,” Jack said. “He’s always been so independent. I’ll keep you all in my prayers. Maybe there’s some other explanation for what happened. There are a lot of reasons people get confused, especially the elderly.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I have connections in high places. I’ll do what I can. And if I don’t talk to you before you leave, have a great trip.”
“Thanks. Hey, I just remembered something. Kevin was supposed to drop by the Library of Congress on Wednesday after he met me and then he said he had a meeting with someone. He wasn’t happy about it and said it was something he had to say now because it would be worse later if he didn’t speak up. He didn’t tell me who he was meeting, of course, but what if it was a follow-up conversation with Edward Jaine at the monastery?”
“You really have that guy on the brain, don’t you? And then Jaine killed Kevin?”
“It could have been an accident, or an argument that got out of hand.” I knew I sounded defensive, but for some reason that I couldn’t explain, I didn’t care for Edward Jaine. “It’s not so impossible.”
“Except I happen to know who Kevin was really meeting with,” Jack said. “Yasmin.”
“Yasmin? Why?”
He didn’t answer right away and, knowing Jack, he was doing mental jujitsu about the ethics of telling me what was going on. “I suppose I’m not betraying any confidences now that Kevin’s dead,” he said at last, “but we had a quick chat at the party. One of the things I noticed—and you probably did, too, since you were photographing everyone—was that Yasmin and Victor were never together, almost like they weren’t a couple. Then there was an incident Kevin and I happened to witness that made us wonder if Yasmin’s ready for this marriage.”
“You mean when Yasmin almost spilled her drink on her dress because of the guy who was ogling her?”
“You saw that?”
“His name is David Arista. Thea Stavros told me about him, and then coincidentally I met him the next day when I was at the Smithsonian. Olivia, my editor at Museum Press, says he’s got a reputation among the female employees. Now he’s working with Yasmin on the Smithsonian Creativity Council. Olivia says they’re very close.”
Jack groaned. “Kevin noticed little things here and there on other occasions when he’d been with Yasmin and Victor. He told me he finally decided to talk to her, caution her not to rush into anything, especially marriage, if she wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was the right thing to do. Afterward he was going to call me and, if his talk didn’t go well, we were considering taking a page out of St. Matthew’s gospel.”
“Pardon?”
“Then the two of us would join forces and have the ‘come to Jesus’ talk with her,” he said. “Yasmin shouldn’t be marrying Victor if she’s got feelings she hasn’t sorted out for David Arista, or anybody else, for that matter. Everyone’s going to get hurt if she goes through with it. And in our business, you’re morally obliged to say something if you see that kind of train wreck coming.”
“So what happens now?”
“Well, right now I think the most immediate concern is Kevin’s funeral and the memorial mass at the monastery once the medical examiner releases his body. After that, maybe I can try to talk to Yasmin.”
By the time Jack hung up, I’d reached the outskirts of Charlottesville and 29 had widened again into a multilane highway lined with ugly strip shopping plazas and modern commercial sprawl spreading like a stain toward a sweet little university town that had been founded in 1762. The weather had changed again overnight, back to a raw, gray chill that was more late winter than nearly the beginning of spring. As I made the long corkscrew drive through a fog-shrouded forest up Thomas Jefferson’s mountain, I finally realized what had been nagging at me for the last few miles since my conversation with Jack.
If Kevin’s talk with Yasmin hadn’t gone well and she suddenly realized he had doubts about her marriage to Victor, then she could have been in quite a panic, worrying whether he might also share his thoughts with her fiancé. When I saw her at the monastery on Wednesday, she’d been early for our five o’clock meeting. Though the parking lot had been empty, that didn’t mean she hadn’t already arrived and left her car elsewhere before I’d seen her, maybe to seek out Kevin and urge him not to do anything that could interfere with her wedding or ruin her plans. Though she had seemed stunned at the news he was dead, maybe she was a good actress.
I’d just told Jack I thought Edward Jaine had a motive for murder.
Now I wondered if maybe Yasmin did as well.
Someone buzzed me in at the security gate after I drove past the visitors’ parking lot at Monticello and told me it wasn’t much farther up the mountain to the small private lot near the mansion where Ryan Velis had told me to park. The gardens and grounds staff had their offices in a long rustic shed that included storage barns and a nursery. The low structure was so well tucked into the side of a steep hill I nearly walked past it until two men standing next to a tractor directed me where to go.
“End of the building, last door,” one of them said. “He’s in.”
Dr. Ryan Velis was tall and lanky, probably around my age, with sandy hair just beginning to gray, an open freckled face that was tanned and weathered from years outdoors, and an engaging smile. He was dressed for gardening work in old jeans, a heavy dark green sweater, and a quilted vest. He rubbed his palms together before reaching across the desk and sticking out his right hand.
“How do you do? Sorry, I know it’s like shaking hands with a block of ice. I’m out and about in the gardens so much I hate to heat this barn up and waste the electricity. Unless of course it’s the dead of winter.” He spoke with a folksy drawl as if I were an old friend who’d come a-calling, but he’d given me a sharp-eyed going over.
“I’d tell you to take off your coat and make yourself comfortable, but better not because it is a mite chilly. Do have a seat, though. And I can offer you coffee. Brewed fresh and it’s hot. Warm your hands right up.”
“Thanks. Milk and sugar, if you don’t mind. And thank you for taking the time to see me.”
His office looked like he was losing the war on paperwork, with files, magazines, documents, and books piled on every surface and overflowing a bookshelf. At least half a dozen moving boxes were stacked behind his desk in a long, low wall. He poured two coffees from a coffeemaker on a table near the window and handed me a mug with a scuffed silk-screened picture of Monticello. The milk came powdered and in a can along with the sugar.
“So,” he said, wrapping his hands around his mug and leaning back in his chair, “you knew Kevin, God rest his soul. What a loss. I’ll miss him.”
“Me, too. It’s still such an awful shock.”
“How did you meet, if you don’t mind my asking? You’re a professional photographer and you’ve spent most of your career overseas with a news agency.” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “Don’t look so surprised. You didn’t think I wasn’t going to look you up, did you? Your photographs, by the way, are stunning.”
“Thank you.” I’d looked him up, too. I just hadn’t expected him to be this direct. “A mutual friend, a Jesuit priest, introduced us years ago and we became friends. How about you?”
“I saw him when our paths crossed at various conferences over the past few years, but I only started working at Monticello the week before Thanksgiving so I didn’t really get to know him until he came here for a month in January.” He sipped his coffee and added as if it were an afterthought, “What brought you to me? I mean, besides the letter?”
“I saw your name listed along with Kevin’s as one of the speakers at a conference at the Botanic Garden … ‘Losing Paradise.’ Plus I knew Kevin was here in January doing research.”
He set down his mug and folded his hands on his desk. “Tell me about this letter.”
I realized then that he hadn’t known about it before I contacted him and that Kevin hadn’t confided in him. But if I expected any help, I had no choice but to do as he asked.
“It’s a letter from John Fairbairn, the head of the Chelsea Physic Garden, to a Leesburg doctor named Francis Pembroke,” I said. “It was written in April 1807 and it’s rather long.”
He arched one eyebrow. “Did you bring it?”
“A copy, not the original.”
I got it out of my camera bag and passed it to him. He picked up a pair of glasses and read while I drank my coffee and watched him. Though he kept his face neutral, I could see his eyes flicking back and forth over the page as though he was either surprised or startled by what he read, and my own heart started beating faster.
When he had finished, he looked up. “May I ask where the original is?”
“I don’t have it.”
He smiled like a patient teacher waiting for a student to figure out the right answer to the question. I smiled back.
“Look,” he said, “let me tell you something about Kevin. Here at Monticello we’re trying to restore Thomas Jefferson’s garden to what it was in his day, no mean feat because Jefferson grew three hundred and thirty types of vegetables. You might think a man who kept a detailed Garden Book for nearly forty years and wrote twenty thousand letters in his lifetime would have meticulously recorded the proper names for the plants he grew, but you’d be wrong. Jefferson had a habit of describing plants by their appearance or some identifying characteristic—like ‘the flowering pea of the plains of Arkansas’—that has made trying to figure out what he meant something of a botanic treasure hunt. We wouldn’t be nearly so far along as we are if it weren’t for Kevin, who was tireless in helping my predecessor and, for the last few months, helping me track down some of those lost plants.” He leaned forward, palms squarely on his desk, and looked me in the eye. “So if I can do something to repay a debt Monticello owes Kevin, I’d like to do it.”
“I see.”
He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “So that’s my story. What’s yours? And, while I’m at it, how’d you get hold of the letter? Kevin was in touch a few weeks ago asking questions I now realize had to do with it. He didn’t say a word about this”—he tapped the letter—“so I figure he had a reason for keeping it quiet. Now he’s dead and you show up. Are you working on a newspaper or magazine story maybe?”
The folksiness in his drawl was gone. He thought I was trying to cash in on Kevin somehow.
I straightened up in my chair and looked him in the eye. “No. It’s nothing like that.”
“Then what is it?”
I told him about finding Kevin the other day in the monastery garden, his fears of being stalked, and my belief that his death was somehow tied to the letter.
When I was finished, Ryan said in a stunned voice, “Good Lord, Kevin thought someone was after him? Who would do something like that?”
“I don’t know. But the letter was inside a Solander box with a book. Adam in Eden.”
“Are you implying the book also had something to do with his death?”
“I think it’s possible. That’s why I’m here. I was hoping you could tell me about Francis Pembroke. And about Adam in Eden.”
Ryan looked perplexed. “I know the book, of course. The author was William Coles. Jefferson didn’t own a copy, but I’m sure he knew about it. He used Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary, which was published a century later, as his primary gardening reference. Miller’s book was a classic, far more than Coles’s was. Anyone who was a serious gardener in those days had a copy of Miller’s dictionary. Jefferson owned three editions, including the last one in which Miller finally began using the new Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature.”
From high school biology I dredged up binomial nomenclature. “The Latin system for naming plants?”
“Actually for naming and classifying all living things. Unfortunately, Jefferson didn’t use it or we’d know what we were looking for in his garden.”
“And who was Philip Miller?”
“Curator at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London during the 1700s. One of the most influential botanists of his time. He was succeeded by William Forsyth—for whom forsythia was named—and John Fairbairn succeeded him.”
“Why would the head of the Chelsea Physic Garden be writing to a doctor in Leesburg, Virginia? It was obviously an ongoing correspondence. Who was Francis Pembroke?”
Ryan stood and got the coffeepot, holding it up by way of asking if I wanted a refill.
I shook my head, so he filled his own mug. “Francis Pembroke was a wealthy physician who, as you already know, was a cousin of Meriwether Lewis. Before Lewis and Clark left on their western expedition, Thomas Jefferson, who got Congress to fund this journey, insisted Lewis have some medical training to equip him for whatever might come up in the wilderness. So Jefferson asked Francis Pembroke to train Lewis. In return, and as thanks, Jefferson gave Pembroke many of the new and unknown herbs Lewis and Clark brought or sent back, which would be of obvious interest to a colonial doctor who treated his patients with herbal remedies. Jefferson also asked Pembroke to see whether he could cultivate anything, or what use he could make of these new plants.”
“There was a pressed plant in Kevin’s copy of Adam in Eden,” I said. “It was on the page that described hyssop, the plant John Fairbairn said Francis Pembroke misidentified.”
Ryan gave me a thoughtful look, rubbing his fingers across his lips as though he were considering something. He picked up the letter. “I’d like to make a copy of this.”
“Go right ahead.”
When he was done, he returned my copy and said, “You still haven’t told me where the original is. Though, presumably, it’s with the book.”
“I don’t own the book or the letter, so an antiques dealer friend made arrangements for them to be stored in the vault of another dealer whose specialty is rare books. They’re quite safe.”
“How did you get hold of them in the first place?”
“I had the key to a locker where Kevin kept them.”
“And—?”
“And I found the book and brought it to my friend.” We were still dancing around, but he’d pushed hard enough. I hadn’t told him about the hand-colored prints or that the book belonged to Isaac Newton. But until the thorny matter of who now owned it was sorted out, the fewer people who knew, the better.
“Look,” I said, “Kevin didn’t get to finish something he started. I want to help out if I can, do something in memory of a dear friend. That’s all.”
He gave me a long assessing look. “Let’s go see the garden. Afterward I want to show you something in the mansion.”
“I’d like that. But does the ‘something in the mansion’ pertain to the letter? Because you haven’t explained to me why it was significant to Kevin.”
He gave me an enigmatic smile. “No, I haven’t.” He pointed to my camera bag. “Take that with you. We won’t be coming back here.”
I obeyed and followed him outside. Though Charlottesville is a hundred miles south of Washington, give or take, the trees were as bare as they were at home and the grass was the washed-out yellow-green it always is at the end of winter. Thomas Jefferson’s beloved mansion came into view, long and low with its octagonal dome and neoclassical lines reflecting his love of ancient Rome and the elegant symmetry of Palladian architecture.
“First we’re going over to the west lawn,” Ryan said, “the side of the house you see on the back of a nickel, and then to the vegetable garden before we go inside the mansion. By the time we’re through, you’ll know as much as I do about why Kevin thought the letter was important.”
I had seen a few tourists at the gift shop on this damp, gray day as we walked over to the west lawn, but just now Monticello seemed deserted and we had the wide gravel path that Ryan called “the winding flower walk” to ourselves. Today there were only some early heirloom tulips, daffodils, and rosemary in bloom, and the brilliant yellow of the forsythia.
Halfway around the flower walk when the mansion was directly across the lawn from us, Ryan stopped and pointed down. “Look.”
A brass plaque, maybe twelve inches in diameter, was set into the ground. CORPS OF DISCOVERY II—200 YEARS TO THE FUTURE formed a ring around two hands extended in friendship, a peace pipe crossed over a tomahawk, and the words PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP.
