Thus relieved of my duties (at least for a couple hours), I picked up the Mustang and headed thirty minutes east of town to Mentor, Ohio, where President Garfield lived with his family. The place is called Lawnfield and it’s now a National Historic Site. That means I had to pay five bucks to get in.
Was it money well spent?
For the first thirty minutes I toured the rambling Victorian house along with a couple of senior citizens, a home-schooling mom with two very uninterested preteens, and a pretentious guide named Tammi, I figured I’d been had. Sure, there was plenty of history all around me. And yeah, I suppose there are folks who would swoon over the Victorian kitschiness of it all. Or the historical significance. Or whatever. But even though I tried to put myself in Marjorie’s place as I looked over the ornate parlor with a fireplace nearly as big as me, the family photos on the walls, and the library where a marble bust of the man I talked to back at the cemetery looked back at me, I was pretty much convinced I was spinning my wheels.
Until we stepped out into a hallway near where we’d walked in.
That’s when I noticed a blank spot where a square of paint was a slightly different color than the wall around it. Like something had recently been taken down from the wall and not replaced.
The rest of our tour group had wandered off to look at the exhibits in the Visitors’ Center in the old carriage house. That left me with Tammi, and thinking like Marjorie would have if only she were there, I said, “It seems funny you would change the exhibits here. I mean, if it’s supposed to be a historic place and look like it did when the Garfields still lived here.”
Tammi took her job very seriously, poor thing. Apparently anything that even smacked of criticism was a slap in the face. Inside her Park Service uniform, her shoulders shot back. “We strive for accuracy in our depiction of the history of this house,” she said. “The pictures displayed on the walls are mostly the same ones that were here when the Garfields were in residence.”
“Mostly. Except for this one that got taken down.”
She was wearing orange lipstick and her mouth pinched. She looked around like she wanted to make sure one of her supervisors wasn’t within earshot. “We had a problem,” she said, leaning closer to me. “A couple months ago. It’s never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since. I mean, we are the Government, after all.” The way she said it, I was sure that word,
“What you’re telling me is someone stole something. Right off the wall of the home of a president.”
The pinch got tighter. “Fortunately, it was nothing the Garfield family themselves ever owned, certainly nothing that had any direct connection with the president himself.”
“But somebody took it, anyway.”
“It was donated.”
“And then you hung it up, and then somebody swiped it.”
She didn’t say
“So you think someone who works here took it down? Just to get rid of it?”
“I never said that.” The look in her eyes was one of pure horror. “What I said was there are those of us who don’t miss it. Not that we didn’t report it as stolen. We did. Well, they did. Like I said, I didn’t work here then.”
“So it obviously wasn’t your fault.”
She liked my take on things. If we weren’t standing in a site of National Historical Significance, I think she actually might have smiled. Instead, she nodded. “The tour guide got distracted. She left a visitor alone. When she came back, it was gone.”
“And it was . . . ?” It was my turn to lean forward, urging Tammi to spill the beans.
She took another careful look around. “A framed floor tile,” she said. “From—”
“The waiting room of the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station, where the president was shot.”
Tammi blinked at me in wonder. “How did you know?”
I didn’t explain. I mean, how could I? I knew because I was thinking like Marjorie, and thinking like Marjorie made me think I would do whatever it took to get my hands on every bit of James A. Garfield memorabilia out there, even if it meant resorting to larceny.
Was it worth the five bucks I’d paid to get into the president’s house?
Well, for five bucks, I’d learned something I didn’t know before. Namely, that Marjorie had a dishonest streak. It didn’t help me figure out who’d killed her, but it told me more about the woman than I knew before.
Cha-ching!
12
Sure, I’ve been known to fudge the truth a little once in a while. Usually in the name of solving a case. Or when doing so is vital to something important like my weight or my dress size. That doesn’t change the fact that I am now and always have been a basically honest person.
