Tomb With a View

Fine by me. With her busy pretending she knew all there was to know about James A. Garfield, I was free to follow him (or at least what was left of him) out of the office, through the entryway, and into the rotunda.

Only it wasn’t the rotunda. Not exactly, anyway.

When last I saw it, the memorial rotunda looked like it always looked with its marble floor and columns, its thirteen stained glass windows, and that big, honkin’ statue of the president on the marble dais under the dome, his head high, his chin up, his shoulders back, staring steadfastly at whatever it was he was supposed to be staring steadfastly at. Now, the whole place was filled with mist that shimmered like moonlight on water. The swirling mist curled softly around the bases of the columns and arched over my head. It blocked out the light of the stained glass windows, and made it so hard for me to see more than a few feet in front of me, I felt like I was inside a shaken snow globe.

Without a word or even a look toward me, the president marched on, and curious, I followed. By then, we should have come to the dais where his statue stood. But instead of marble, the floor at my feet suddenly turned to wood, and portions of it were covered with an Oriental rug in shades of deep blue and green.

Weird? Yes. But what happened next was even stranger. A chill breeze ruffled my hair, the mist whooshed every which way, and the rotunda was gone. We were standing on that rug in a room with a high ceiling and tall windows. Outside, sunshine dappled trees and bushes. Inside, the walls were painted white and accented with gold. They were decorated with portraits of presidents like Washington and Lincoln and a bunch of other stick-in-the-mud old guys who looked vaguely familiar from history books. There was a fireplace directly across from me, and a fire crackled in the grate. Between me and that fireplace was a long, rectangular table. Eight guys wearing old-fashioned clothes and too-serious expressions were seated around it. They were talking quietly among themselves.

“Whoa!” I stopped fast. “What’s going on? Who are these guys? And what . . . ?” When I looked up and squinted through the mist, I could just make out the second-floor balcony that looked down onto the rotunda. “What’s happening here? Where are we?”

“Where do you think we are?” James A. Garfield didn’t talk, he boomed. His blue eyes homed in on me like radar and pinned me to the spot. “We are in the Executive Mansion, young lady. Just as we should be.”

Like I was supposed to know what to say? I realized I was gaping, snapped my mouth shut, and blubbered a little before I composed myself enough to say, “Executive Mansion? You mean like the White House? You’re kidding me, right? The White House is in Washington DC and we’re in—”

“Young lady, I am the president. The president conducts business in the home in which he lives, and in the unlikely incident that you have not noticed what you should, indeed, have taken note of the moment you walked in here, I am working. In fact, I am quite busy, so if you would be so kind as to excuse me—”

“Hey, I didn’t come looking for you, you’re the one who showed up to find me.” I poked my thumb over my shoulder and back toward the way we came to remind him that while I was minding my own business, he popped up unannounced in the office. “You know who I am, right? I’m the one with the—”

“Gift. Yes. Of course I know. I am, after all, the president.”

“And you sure wouldn’t get far these days with those sound bites.” I was hoping to maybe get a chuckle out of him, but none of the starch went out of his shoulders so I just got down to business. “Usually when ghosts come looking for me, it’s because they want something,” I told him though I shouldn’t have had to. If he knew I had the Gift, he knew that much about me already. “Most of them want me to solve their murders, but I know that’s not what you’re looking for. Marjorie, she says—”

“Mr. President.” Ignoring me completely, a middle-sized man carrying an armload of papers walked up to the president. He was younger than the other men in the room, but he was dressed as formally as the rest of them including the president himself, in a black suit coat and vest, gray pants, a white shirt with a stiff collar, and a narrow bow tie. The man had a long, angular nose. There was a pair of glasses with no side arms pinched onto the bridge of it. His sandy-colored hair was parted down the middle and he had a mustache. It was fat and bushy, like a caterpillar.

“We’re nearly ready to begin, Mr. President,” he said. His voice was polished smooth, like an actor in a cheesy Shakespeare production. He tapped the pile of papers he carried. “However, there are some small matters we should take care of before you begin your meeting. There are some papers which need to be signed, and—”