Ghost Image, page 29
TWENTY-THREE
I didn’t return to Arlington Cemetery for six months, not until the middle of September, on an afternoon when the sky was so blue it hurt your eyes and the golden sunshine was warm and slanting. It took that long for Ryan Velis and Thea Stavros to call in every favor owed them in order to persuade the National Park Service to open the little safe below the marker by Pierre L’Enfant’s grave. Then there was more wrangling about whose property the contents—if there were any—would be. Eventually it was decided that if there were indeed seeds inside the safe, they would go to Monticello to be cultivated, but it would be a joint project with the National Park Service. I was glad to hear from Ryan that seeds would also be sent to the Millennium Seed Bank in honor of Kevin and Alastair.
Though Thea and Olivia Upshaw pored over records and documents at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, no one could figure out what happened to the key that fit into the lock, which meant it would have to be drilled open. Considering Washington’s bureaucracy, it was astonishing that it took only months and not years to arrange permission for someone to break open the safe. Fortunately, it didn’t require an act of Congress, or I figured I could be an old woman before we’d know how it all turned out.
The months leading up to that day had been busy and tumultuous. Nick came home from his grand tour of the Middle East and moved into Quill Russell’s new Washington office, and I turned down the White House photographer’s job with IPS, though I told Monica to keep me in mind if she needed an extra shooter from time to time. But the truth was I liked being my own boss. I was getting more work than I could handle, and most important, a wealthy friend of Max’s offered to help with fund-raising for the Shoe Project and setting it up as a nonprofit charity, so Grace and I were busier than ever with that.
In a season of bad news, scandal, and heartache, there was some happiness and reason to celebrate when the doctors in Virginia finally figured out that Chappy’s mental confusion had been caused by changes to his medication, as well as Chap himself, who had mixed up his prescriptions. He stayed with Harry and my mother in Middleburg until the beginning of May, when my mother was satisfied he was his old self. By then, Harry joked that they were driving each other nuts again and that keeping all sharp objects hidden from both of them had become a full-time job. So a few days later, Mom and Harry drove Chappy back to Connecticut so she could set up daily visits from a home helper, which was the middle ground everyone finally agreed on if he was going to stay in his house independently and not move to assisted living.
We had been lucky that it turned out well for my grandfather, but Victor’s father died of complications from pneumonia a few weeks after I got back from London. Jack told me Victor decided not to return to Washington and planned to stay permanently in Europe, assuming his father’s responsibilities and commuting between London and Vienna. He had broken off the engagement with Yasmin after he’d learned she and David had been lovers and that David had been blackmailing her about their affair in return for information about Kevin’s book. Jack said what hurt Victor the most was her betrayal, going into his private e-mail and passing along to David correspondence relating to Kevin, his father, and the book.
As for Yasmin, Olivia told me she’d been fired from the Smithsonian, although she claimed she quit in order to campaign for her mother in West Virginia. Ironically, the day I heard the news I ran into her on the staircase on my way out of the Castle.
She was carrying a small box that looked like it contained the contents of her office. I moved aside to let her pass.
She gave me a defiant look and said, “Look what the cat dragged in. What are you doing here?”
I looked her in the eye. “Working.”
“Not me. I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m done with this place. I’m campaigning for my mother, then I’m going to be Edward Jaine’s new personal assistant. He has a private jet, you know. And half a dozen homes. I’m going to be traveling everywhere with him.”
I hadn’t heard about that, but I supposed it made sense. “Congratulations, Yasmin. I hope it works out for you.”
“Stay out of my life,” she said with feeling. “I mean it.”
“I never wanted to be part of it.”
“Please.” She gave me a look of disdain. “You talked to Victor in London and afterward he told me he wanted to postpone the wedding. You probably had something to do with Kevin telling me he thought I should wait as well. You meddled in something that was none of your business, Sophie.”
“Victor had already made up his mind, and I didn’t find out Kevin met you until after he was dead.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I gave her a weary look. “I don’t care. You got someone to pretend to be Victor’s secretary in London so you could get me to come to the Anchor pub, didn’t you? What were you going to do? Talk to me or shove me into the river?”
Her eyes widened, but she tilted her chin and smirked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if it had been me, I know what I would have done.”
“It was you.” I brushed past her and said, “I’ve got to go. Goodbye, Yasmin.”
I never saw her again, but in June Ursula lost her hard-fought primary, in part because of her opponent’s deep pockets but also because of the scandal over Yasmin’s wedding and David’s upcoming trial. Nick told me Quill Russell said Ursula had immediately been courted to join a competing consulting firm in the merry-go-round world of Washington politics and lobbying, plus she had a book deal lined up when she finally left the Senate in January.
In July, David Arista was convicted of the murder of Brother Kevin Boyle in a trial that was swift and tawdry, the kind of scandal that livened up an otherwise quiet summer in Washington. The star witness had been Yasmin Gilberti.
She escaped relatively unscathed thanks to Ursula’s lawyers, who brokered a deal in return for her cooperation at the trial. But Yasmin had claimed—and I believed her—that the reason she had arrived early at the monastery the day Kevin was killed was to talk him out of saying anything to Victor about postponing or even canceling the wedding after their upsetting meeting that morning. She hadn’t known Kevin was dead until she ran into me and Paul Zarin, but once she heard the news, she’d been terrified that David Arista might have had something to do with it. By then she’d had enough of him, so she’d contacted Edward Jaine and told him everything about the book, knowing he’d move heaven and earth to get his hands on it and thwart David’s plans.
As it turned out, I’d been right that someone at the monastery had been indirectly involved in Kevin’s death. Paul Zarin, the seminarian Xavier had been planning to dismiss, was David Arista’s cousin. By then Paul had decided to leave the Franciscans and David promised him a job with Arista Pharmaceutical in return for keeping tabs on Kevin.
Jack showed up at David’s trial every day, following it as a case study for his ethics class. He and I talked about it, of course, but the whole thing upset me more than I’d expected.
No matter how much I wanted to believe justice was being served and everyone was getting what was coming to them, it couldn’t right the wrong, heal the hurt, or bring closure for me. What made it worse was that I knew Kevin would have forgiven everybody. He would have quoted Luke to me: Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.
But I was a long way from forgiveness.
At the end of August, three weeks before the ceremony at L’Enfant’s grave was scheduled to take place, Perry asked me to fly over and help out in the bureau since he was down to a skeleton staff with people still on holiday or out sick. It was good to be back in London. By that time my American journalist colleagues had learned about the tantalizing mystery of the two-hundred-year-old seeds missing from the White House and their storied provenance, and it had unleashed a deluge of media interest. In my profession, it’s never good when a journalist becomes the story; at least in London, I was able to drop out of sight for a while.
A few days before I flew home, I visited Zara Remington at the Chelsea Physic Garden, where she told me that Will Tennant was at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London awaiting trial for the murder of Alastair Innes. As I’d suspected, David Arista had been the American who had shown up at the garden asking about hyssop, and Will had lied in his description to throw me off. David had lucked out when he met Will, who not only also volunteered at the Millennium Seed Bank but was also in deep trouble trying to repay gambling debts and more than willing to accept a bribe in return for information about the project Alastair was working on with Kevin.
According to Zara, Will’s ID badge had been used on the swipe pads leading to the storage area the day Alastair and I were locked in the vault. Eventually Will had been arrested and charged with Alastair’s murder after a neighbor identified him as the man she’d seen leaving Alastair’s garage the night before his car went into the ravine and the police found Alastair’s phone in his home.
On my last night in London, Perry got tickets to the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall, the world-famous series of classical music concerts that begins each year in mid-July and lasts until mid-September. As it happened, it was American music night—Gershwin, Copland, and a mixture of jazz, blues, and country music. After it was over and we were leaving, Perry nudged me.
“Isn’t that Victor Haupt-von Véssey across the aisle?” he asked. “And I recognize the woman he’s with. Her father is the Earl of Chelmsford.”
I turned in time to get a glimpse of Victor with his arm around a pretty redhead who reminded me of Yasmin. They were laughing at something with the intimacy of an established couple, and their body language suggested that they were more than just acquaintances.
“It is,” I said. “I’m glad he’s moved on, though she does look like Yasmin’s double.”
“Want to say hello?”
I shook my head. “I think I’d better not.”
“You’re still not over all this, are you?”
“I don’t know how I could be until they open the safe next to Pierre L’Enfant’s grave. I just hope the seeds are there and that Kevin was right. Or that I’m right about what I think he found.”
Perry squeezed my hand. “Come on, Medina, don’t be so hard on yourself. The Franciscans have Kevin’s book, and it looks like they’re going to loan it to the Library of Congress, at least for a while.”
“I guess Edward Jaine thought it was a good public relations move to say that he’d bought it but out of charity he’d given it to Kevin and the Franciscans,” I said. “It offset some of the horrible press after he got caught covering up that he was exporting toxic electronic waste to the Third World and passing it off as good equipment.”
“Maybe it’s why he got off with only a big fine and avoided jail,” Perry said. “And the guy’s smart. He’ll rebuild his financial empire.”
“No doubt. Yasmin Gilberti is going to be his new personal assistant.”
“You still sound down in the dumps. Let’s get a drink. Look at it this way. A week from today it will be all over. They’re going to open that safe and you’ll know for sure. Plus you get a world exclusive. That’s why I’ve always loved you, Medina. You don’t do anything by half measures.” He gave me his best cheesy smile. “Go big,” he said, “or go home.”
The day scheduled for opening the strongbox would have been Kevin’s fifty-fifth birthday, a deliberate choice and posthumous tribute. The Park Service had set up a large white events tent around the L’Enfant grave with an enormous window at one end that looked out on the city and the Potomac. With the exception of Chappy and me as the two official photographers, and Grace, and a reporter from International Press Service, all the other media had been required to stay behind a rope line and were camped out on the steps of Arlington House.
The biggest concern was the condition of the seeds after two centuries, their fragility and preserving whatever package or container they were in. In addition to Ryan, Thea, Olivia, and Logan, along with a handful of VIPs from Monticello, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the White House, the only guests were people I’d asked to be there: Nick, Jack, Xavier, Max, and Bram Asquith. A locksmith hired by the Park Service would drill out the lock, but it had been decided that Ryan would be the one to look inside the strongbox.
Ryan surprised me by asking Xavier to say a prayer before we began, so we all bowed our heads while he asked for God’s blessing on us and on Kevin. Then he quoted Genesis, a gentle reminder of what we might find inside the box: For dust thou art and unto dust thou shall return.
The locksmith was good, but it took a few minutes before he drilled through the lock.
“Are you all right?” Nick said in my ear. “You look like you’ve stopped breathing.”
“I could be wrong. What if I’m wrong?”
He leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t second-guess yourself. Everyone here thinks you’re right.”
I nodded and raised my camera.
“Okay, this is it.” Ryan sounded tense. He reached into the safe and for a long moment, he was silent.
The only sounds were the shutters clicking from my camera and Chappy’s as now everyone seemed to be holding their breath. What if someone had been there already, or something else had been stored there and we’d got it wrong, or …
Then Ryan pulled something out of the safe. Everyone gasped as he held up a dark brown leather pouch with the reverence of a priest raising a communion chalice. In the slanted afternoon sunlight, the leather, embossed with the initials Th J, gleamed like old burnished gold.
“Thank you, Kevin. I know you’re watching,” he said with a broad smile. “I do believe we’ve found Mr. Jefferson’s seeds.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The characters in Ghost Image are all fictitious creations invented for this story, with the obvious exception of historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Pierre L’Enfant, Lewis and Clark, Dolley Madison, John Fairbairn, and the members of the McMillan Commission, though I have also used those individuals fictitiously. Any resemblance to any living person is entirely coincidental and unintentional. Francis Pembroke and Senator Francis Quincy never existed and there was no seed cabinet left behind in the White House by Thomas Jefferson.
The idea for Ghost Image came about after I heard an NPR book review of Andrea Wulf’s The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (Vintage Books), a page-turning account of the Founding Fathers’ obsession with gardening, seed collecting, and farming, and the impact their passion had on shaping our country. Shortly afterward I read an article in the June 2012 issue of Smithsonian called “Seeds of the Future” on the work of the Millennium Seed Bank in England, which subsequently led to a conversation with Mark Verrilli, a landscaper friend with Pleasant Valley Landscapes in Aldie, Virginia, about whether it might be possible to germinate seeds that were hundreds of years old.
I was fortunate to have considerable help with this book from many people who took time out of busy schedules to answer my questions. As usual, if something is wrong, that’s on me. In America I owe thanks to the following people: Scott W. Berg, author of Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (Vintage Books), for sitting down over breakfast and talking to me about Pierre L’Enfant until it was nearly lunchtime; Rick Tagg, winemaker at Barrel Oak Winery in Delaplane, Virginia, for his help and knowledge of herbs; George Thuronyi, Copyright Division, and Jennifer Harbster, Science, Technology and Business Division of the Library of Congress; Peggy Cornett, Curator of Plants, and Mary Scott-Fleming, Director of Enrichment Programs at Monticello; Dr. Martin Gammon, Vice President of Business Development and Museum Relations, Bonhams (and a regular appraiser of rare books and manuscripts for PBS’s Antiques Roadshow); Detective Jim Smith, Crime Scene Section, Fairfax County (VA) Police Department; as well as Dr. Carmella Moody and Rosemarie Forsythe, who made numerous constructive comments and offered advice. Also thanks to a few anonymous people who answered questions relating to Nick’s intelligence career, as well as several individuals who were my resources for religious matters: You know who you are.
In England, thanks to John and Jackie Briggs, my former neighbors, who fed me and gave me a place to stay when I was in London. I also am grateful to Kay Pennick, Librarian, and Dr. John Dickie, Head of Information Section, Seed Conservation Department, at the Millennium Seed Bank; Christopher Bailes, Curator, Chelsea Physic Garden; Anna Christodoulou, the Connaught; and finally to Andrea Wulf, for meeting me for breakfast in London in between taping a show for the BBC to discuss The Founding Gardeners and offer suggestions and help, including her idea to invent a White House seed cabinet that belonged to Thomas Jefferson.
Several books, in addition to The Founding Gardeners and Grand Avenues, were helpful: The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital by Kenneth R. Bowling (George Mason University Press); The Apothecaries’ Garden: A History of the Chelsea Physic Garden by Sue Minter (History Press, UK); Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape by Kirk Savage (University of California Press); “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello by Peter J. Hatch (Yale University Press); and The Last Great Plant Hunt: The Story of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank by Carolyn Fry, Sue Seddon, and Gail Vines (Kew Publishing, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK).
Heartfelt thanks to my critique group friends and fellow authors: Donna Andrews, John Gilstrap, Alan Orloff, and Art Taylor, affectionately known as the Rumpus Group, for considerable help with many drafts of this book. As always, my dear friend Tom Snyder read the first draft (and the ones that followed) with a keen eye and a sharp blue pencil.
