Oak and Dagger by Dorothy St. James Page A

fingers, and after carefully folding the brittle paper, I tucked it into my backpack.
    â€œThere has to be another explanation. Perhaps he’d been living a double life and killed his other wife?” I dug my nails into my palms. “He didn’t kill Mom. I was there.
He
wasn’t.”
    If he had been there, my mother would still be alive. Those men who killed her had been searching for my dad, for
James Calhoun
. And the newspaper had mentioned James Calhoun’s name. Not his false identity.
    â€œIf the police had known my parents’ identities, why was I overlooked? Why did the officials allow a damaged child to bounce around in a foster system that wasn’t equipped to help her?”
    â€œI don’t know, Casey,” Alyssa said after she finished her call with Barry. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
    I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I certainly wasn’t in a mood to travel back to that dark time. So I closed the door to those memories and took a page from Alyssa’s playbook and bluntly redirected the conversation. “Who were you calling a spy?”
    Alyssa, unable to contain her excitement, danced around the room. “The cute guy who’s moved into the basement apartment. Man, he’s got sex appeal dripping out his ears.”
    â€œNadeem?”
    â€œI’ve met plenty of spies since moving to D.C.” Alyssa waggled her huge coffee mug at me again. “I know the look. And I also know they’re always up to no good.”
    â€œOh. He has a ‘look’? That’s not very convincing evidence,” I said, eyeing Alyssa’s coffee mug with envy.
    â€œCIA or Special Forces or one of those divisions that has no ‘official’ name. Or perhaps he’s working for a foreign government. It doesn’t matter. He’s a spy.”
    â€œFor once your spider senses are wrong. Nadeem Barr is the new assistant for the White House curator’s office. And believe me, the White House thoroughly screens its employees. No spies allowed.”
    â€œHave you met him?”
    â€œSure I have. And I’m glad he took the apartment.” The basement apartment in our brownstone townhouse had remained vacant the entire time Alyssa and I had lived in the building’s upper two stories. The basement was in need of a total renovation, vital repairs the owner seemed unwilling to make. Instead of paying to make the place habitable, the owner kept lowering and lowering the rent until I’d started to seriously worry about what kind of dangerous character might move in below us.
    Not one to sit on my hands and fret, I did something about it and had told everyone at the White House that the apartment was available.
    â€œHe’s been working on the History of the White House Gardens project with Frida and Gordon.”
    â€œDon’t you find it curious that shortly after this assistant”—she used air quotes when she said “assistant”—“started working in the curator’s office, the curator is found dead? Do you know anything about his past?”
    â€œI think he said he was from Michigan.”
    â€œWell,
I
know something.” Alyssa tapped the side of her slender nose. “Nadeem is not a researcher. He’s nobody’s assistant. He can’t hide the truth from me. He’s a spy.”
    Could that be true? Could he have been planted by a foreign country to thwart the White house talks with Turbekistan? If Frida had learned Nadeem was a fraud, she would have confronted him. But . . .
    â€œWhy would a spy want to work in the curator’s office? I mean, they deal with historical documents and antique furniture. It’s hardly a hotbed for espionage.”
    â€œI don’t know why. To get inside the White House? Spies are clever. You never know what they are up to until it’s too late.”
    I wasn’t going to win this argument, and since