The Scarlet Pepper Read Online Free PDF Page A

disconnected the call.
    “Jack!” I called as I ran after him.
    He stopped and slowly turned toward me.
    “You—you needed to talk to me?” My heart started pounding again. I swallowed quickly.
    He scowled at his watch. “I’m sorry, Casey, but I’ve got to go.”
    “What did you need to tell me?” I asked while following along with him as his long stride carried him back towardthe White House. “Or did you want to ask me something?” Like out to coffee or dinner? Like a date?
    “I wanted to—” he started to say, but shook his head. “It wasn’t important. I’ve got to get back on duty.”
    “Maybe later, then?” I said and then mentally kicked myself for sounding so blooming needy.
    I didn’t need Jack. Or anyone.
    “I didn’t want to know anyhow,” I grumbled. But he’d already disappeared inside the West Wing.
    “THAT’S THE LAST TIME I HELP OUT WITH THE volunteers, Casey,” Gordon Sims warned later that afternoon.
    I glanced up from the pile of paperwork on my desk, which I’d been hopelessly trying to organize, and found him leaning against the open door frame that connected the grounds office with his own office situated directly underneath the White House’s North Portico.
    With thirty-five years’ experience tending the President’s gardens, Gordon’s incredible knowledge of plants, along with his relaxed demeanor, made him an invaluable asset to the numerous administrations he’d worked under. Over the years, he’d weathered nearly every kind of disaster imaginable. Very few things in his life upset him.
    “Why’s that?” I asked, surprised that he was complaining about this morning. Apart from Francesca’s absence, everything had gone smoothly.
    “While you were chatting on your cell phone, those ladies treated me like I was a juicy tomato they wanted to squeeze. I think a couple of them came close to actually squeezing.” He shivered dramatically.
    He watched while I struggled to decide what I needed to do with an invoice from one of our approved vendors. I dropped it back into my in-box and spotted a handwritten to-do list for the upcoming harvest day festivities.
    “You loved every moment of it. Admit it, I did you afavor,” I said somewhat absently as I ran my finger down the list. It’d been a good day. Nearly every task had been checked off.
    Gordon’s smile faded. “Did you see the newspaper the East Wing dropped off when we were outside?”
    “No, why?”
    “Your kitchen garden was featured in an article,” Lorenzo Parisi, Gordon’s other assistant gardener, chimed in from where he sat at his drafting desk on the other side of the room. Above his head on the whitewashed cinder-block wall hung a colorful schematic for the First Lady’s vegetable garden next to a design for the White House grounds, made by Fredrick Law Olmsted, Jr., that dated back to 1935.
    He tossed the newspaper across the room for me to catch.
    The newspaper wasn’t
Media Today
, I was glad to see. So there was no danger the odious Griffon Parker had penned a scathing attack on the First Lady’s garden or her organic gardening program. The newspaper was one of those free political rags that employed homeless men to hand out copies at all the Metro stations.
    The headline on the second page read, WATERCRESSGATE: SCANDAL IN THE WHITE HOUSE VEGETABLE GARDEN .
    My shoulders sank in concert with my heart. I swallowed before reading the first paragraph. Then the second.
    “‘The First Lady’s garden is an elaborate hoax designed to dupe the American people into eating their vegetables,’” I read aloud. “Why in blazes would anyone even think that?”
    Paragraph after paragraph, facts were jumbled together with conjecture. The article then concluded with, “It’s impossible to believe the plants in the White House’s garden could have grown so quickly in the chilly D.C. spring climate or produced so much. We are forced to conclude the garden has been staged.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s