Off the Leash

Chapter 2

Chapter Two“And?”

Clive wondered how anyone could pack so many emotions into such an innocuous word: inquiry, curiosity, impatience, and a touch of someone busy working on a jigsaw puzzle in which he himself was but one of the smaller pieces. Not the most comfortable feeling.

That it was also Miss Watson’s form of a greeting only made it all the stranger. As if they were in the middle of a conversation that he’d already missed the start of and would never catch back up with as it raced away from him.

He always felt like a cave explorer whenever he came down here.

Her office was a tiny space deep in the White House Residence’s lowest subbasement. It was two stories below the kitchen and his chocolate shop, directly beneath the dishwashing room. The latter was proven by the nest of drain piping that covered the ceiling of her office. Any conversation here was punctuated by a succession of gurgles from dishwashers flushing away the remains of meals, ranging from the President’s private dinners to massive state banquets.

The walls were old brick that probably dated back to the massive Truman renovation. They were lined with packed-solid bookshelves. He’d never been able to make sense of the titles. Even an eclectic reader was unlikely to cover such a range of interests: religious texts, English law, German something or other (not one of his languages, not that he actually had any other than mostly forgotten high school French only slightly enhanced while apprenticed to the great Jacques Torres in New York), contemporary thrillers, dictionaries in a variety of languages…

As an excuse to look somewhere other than her steel blue eyes, he inspected her collection of curious artifacts—some of which he wondered how Miss Watson had gotten past White House security. Fierce knives and strange-looking rifles that were like none he’d ever seen being carried by the Secret Service or the military. Some of them looked like they’d be more appropriate in a spy movie than in real life.

High on one wall, with its own tiny spotlight as if it was a place of honor, a tattered wool scarf hung pressed in a glass frame, faded almost a uniform gray with hard usage. The sloppy knitting followed no discernable pattern. There were even holes that he could tell had been dropped stitches that had expanded with age. He’d never found the nerve to ask about it and, he thought about it a moment, today wasn’t going to be the day he braved her daunting expression.

The office looked as if not even a single dust mote had been changed since his first visit here three months ago.

It had been a lovely day in October, one of the most beautiful months in DC. He’d found a note. Not a text or an e-mail, a handwritten note in a flowing black ink script. The problem was that it had been locked inside his personal recipe file box—to which he knew for a fact he had the only key.

“Come see me. Residence, Subbasement Two, Room 043.” Nothing more. The paper had begun to dissolve just from the moisture on his fingers. He dropped it in the sink and it dissolved completely in the moisture accumulated there.

He’d only been called to her twice since and always left more puzzled than when he arrived. Everything about the room made the small, gray-haired woman who sat behind the battered steel desk seem all the more daunting and mysterious.

He tried not to fidget and totally failed. “Sergeant Linda Hamlin’s score on the course was apparently exceptional. She—”

“I have them here,” Miss Watson rested her hand on a slim file.

“Then why did you send me out to—”

“Tell me what isn’t in the file.”

Protesting that he didn’t know what was included in the file didn’t seem like a path that would lead anywhere good, so he abandoned it untested.

Clive wished that Miss Watson had actual guest chairs—not that the office was big enough to accommodate them. Instead, she had a single, four-legged wooden stool on which one of the legs was a half inch short. Sitting on it, he always felt out of balance…and kept checking his head to see if he should be wearing a dunce cap like the bad boy in the corner. It was also short enough that even with his stature he was barely eye-to-eye with her across the desk.

He looked at her again. Penetrating blue eyes. Silver hair back in a 1950s bun. She wore a hand-knit cable cardigan adorned only by a small bronze broach in the form of an oak leaf. She had an intricately patterned sock of gray, pale orange, and brown wool half completed on the corner of her desk. It was a Fair Isle pattern he’d learned at his mother’s knee. He’d rather talk knitting than what he didn’t know about Linda and Thor—but the thin needles caught the low desk light brightly, making them appear dangerous, as if they were weapons of war rather than of wool.

He’d never raised the subject of knitting with her on any of the four occasions she’d had reason to call him to her office. And he wasn’t brave enough to this time either.

“Linda and Thor, a rather silly-looking little dog, moved about the course as if they were a single being connected by gesture and tone. They were more cohesive than most restaurants’ menu plans, though Lieutenant Jurgen said it was their first meeting. There was a well-trodden path leading into the test area that they didn’t follow. Linda led them onto a path of her own choosing instead.”

“They see no boundaries.” Miss Watson typically gave him the impression that he was only one of a myriad of more important topics she was contemplating. He now had her full attention and wished he didn’t—it was rather daunting.

He tried to think of what else might not be in a performance report by Lieutenant Jurgen.

Linda’s lovely face, flowing hair, and cautious eyes came to mind. Also, how hard it had been not to reach for her fine hand again as he left. He’d wanted to hold it again, however briefly, and that seemed a little creepy so he’d done his best courtly bow instead.

“During the course, there was a mock explosion that spattered them with dirt. Linda put Thor’s life ahead of her own, shielding the dog with her own body. She did it so fast that I never saw it happen.”

“You like her,” Miss Watson made it a flat statement.

“Linda offers a lot to be admired.”

Miss Watson brushed that aside with a flick of her ringless fingers. “You like her.”

He grimaced. At which Miss Watson smiled like a benevolent grandmother rather than a scary old lady in the White House subbasement who was never discussed on the floors above. Did the politicians orbited through and mingled in the Residence even know she was down here?

“It is not mindreading. Your voice and expression would give you away. Your automatic use of her first name as well. Yes,” Miss Watson gazed up at the waste pipes that formed her ceiling but appeared to be looking up through the two subbasements and the four stories of the Residence, right up to the Delta Force snipers permanently stationed on the roof. “Yes, I shall have to arrange to meet her.”

“She promised to come by my chocolate shop.”

Miss Watson tipped her head down to look at him as if she was glaring over the rims of her reading glasses, except she didn’t wear any.

“Uh…”

She waited.

“Perhaps I’d best be going.”

“Perhaps,” her tone was drier and grittier than under-conched cocoa. “But before you depart, I would ask you to consider one question. What boundaries stop you, Mr. Andrews?” Then she picked up her knitting and he knew he was summarily dismissed.

He got out while the getting was good.