Tomb With a View

In the meantime, I lost precious seconds, and in those seconds, Nick closed in on me and I stepped back and bumped into the table. Before I had a chance to figure out which way to run, his hands had already closed around my neck.

“Give me that letter!” he said, his voice deadly serious. And even though I struggled to breathe at the same time I fought to loosen his hold, I recognized the important word there.

Deadly.

He was stronger than any IT geek had a right to be. He shook me like a ragdoll. “It’s mine. Give me the letter. Now.”

Never let it be said that Pepper Martin isn’t willing to oblige. I was getting nowhere trying to pry Nick’s hands away from my neck so I groped for the framed letter. Once I had a hand on it, I swung. Hard.

When the frame and the glass shattered on Nick’s head, the noise was as loud as a gunshot.

I guess that got Quinn and Scott’s attention. They untangled themselves from the doorway and scrambled over just as Nick’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he crumpled to the floor.

“Nick Klinker, you’re under arrest—”

They did it again. Started talking at the same time.

Quinn and Scott exchanged cutting looks. But maybe Scott is the smarter of the two. Or maybe he just knew that the case was officially Quinn’s and there was no way he was going to scoop it, anyway. He stepped back and Quinn cuffed Nick and called for the paramedics.

What did I do while all this was going on?

Well, I still had a hold of what was left of the frame, and I looked down at the letter, but I couldn’t really see it clearly. That’s because my hands were trembling.

“You OK, Pepper?” Scott asked. He put a hand on my arm.

“I’m fine,” I lied, but only because Quinn looked up, anxious to see how I was going to answer.

“I’ll just . . .” My knees were mushy, and I figured it would be more graceful to sit down in the office than to fall down on the floor, so I headed that way. “I’ll wait inside the office.”

This, too, was a good plan.

Or at least it would have been, if Nick Klinker hadn’t been telling the truth about Marjorie’s murder, and the real murderer wasn’t lying in wait for me.

I had already slumped down into the chair behind the desk when the office door swung shut, clicked, and locked. Too late, I realized someone had been standing behind it.

“Thank goodness for Nick causing all that commotion. I never could have gotten in here unnoticed if your two cops friends hadn’t been so busy trying to one-up each other.” Ted Studebaker stepped out from the shadows. Good old Ted, always the showman. He wasn’t content using the ol’ finger-in-the-pocket-like-a-gun trick. He really did have a gun, a small, silver pistol with a pearl handle. It was aimed right at me.

“Let’s get this over with as quickly as we can,” he said. He held out his left hand and jiggled his fingers, urging me to hand over the letter. “If I can get out of here fast, we can avoid any messy consequences.”

“If you shoot me, Scott and Quinn are going to come running.”

This sounded reasonable to me, but it wasn’t about to make Studebaker change his mind. “By the time they stop what they’re doing and figure out where the shot came from, I’ll be out of here. That’s the thing about surprise. It’s . . .” He grinned. “Surprising!”

“All this for a stupid letter?” What was left of the frame was on the desk and I looked down at the President’s fancy, curlicue script. “Come on, it can’t be worth that much.”

“It isn’t.” Studebaker stepped closer. “But what’s on the back of it . . .”

I hauled in a breath, and if I wasn’t so worried about living through the next couple minutes and about how if I didn’t, my body would be found with a big, ugly red mark on my forehead, I would have given myself a slap. “Of course, Jeremiah Stone said there wasn’t any blank paper in his portfolio. He went to get some, but the president couldn’t wait. He grabbed a piece of paper, anyway. And if there was no blank paper, that means something has to be written on the back of this one.”

Carefully avoiding both Studebaker’s confused “What are you talking about?” and the sharp bits of glass still left inside the frame, I took out the president’s letter and flipped it over. Even though the writing on the other side of the paper was stiff and old-fashioned and hard to read, I skimmed over the words and my breath caught.

I looked up at Studebaker in wonder. “This isn’t possible. You mean—”

“When word of this gets out . . .” He dangled the word to reflect the possibilities.

OK, so I’m not exactly a whiz when it comes to politics. Or world affairs. Or treaties and such. But even I knew the piece of paper in my hands would blow the lid off international relations.