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Francy asks, resting her leather binder near the file folder that’s on the card table between us.
    I shake my head, now confused.
    “And it doesn’t have anything to do with the penny? Or the garden?”
    I’m still lost. “What garden ? I don’t understand…”
    Francy puts a finger to her earpiece. A.J. doesn’t. Whatever the President’s whispering, he’s talking only to one of them. I make a mental note.
    “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” I demand.
    Across the table, Francy still has her finger to her earpiece. She shakes her head no. Whatever the President’s saying, she doesn’t have a choice.
    “Beecher, yesterday morning,” Francy begins, “we found a body part buried in the Rose Garden.”
    “A what ?”
    “A body part.”
    “An arm ,” A.J. clarifies, watching my reaction. “Someone’s left arm. Sawed off from the elbow down.”
    The room goes so silent, I hear the buzz from the fluorescent lights. Francy’s picking me apart. Her right hand grips the temple of her reading glasses like it’s a pen. Her arms are no longer flat at her sides.
    “Y’know what’s the most important part of my job?” she asks me.
    “Keeping the President safe.”
    “No. Trusting my gut,” she says. “I know you hate Wallace, but I also know what you did weeks ago, to stop the shooter at the Lincoln Memorial. You saved the President’s life. So God help me, I trust you, Beecher. I do. For all our sakes, don’t make me regret it.”
    “What’re you doing?” A.J. asks.
    Francy doesn’t even look at him, doesn’t care what he thinks.
    On my left, she pushes aside an old phone on the card table and opens one of the file folders, revealing a color photo: At the bottom of a dirt hole, a severed arm looks pale green, the color of an old, rotting egg. The skin is starting to slip, the outer layer peeling away from decomposition. As the knuckles peek out from the dirt, the hand is squeezed into a tight fist.
    My father’s been dead for thirty years. Or at least I think he’s been dead. Either way, no way is it his. From the coloring and tightness, this corpse is of someone young.
    “What’s this have to do with my dad?” I ask.
    “Truthfully, we didn’t think anything,” Francy says, flipping to the next photo. “Until we pried open the fist and saw what was hidden inside.”

8
    A nd this was in the dead person’s hand?” I ask.
    “He was clutching it. In his fist,” Francy says, pointing to the color photo, where the severed arm is laid out on a piece of white gauze. Hunks of tendons and bone dangle from the elbow, along with a cheesy substance, making it look like a prop from a zombie film. All I’m focused on is the way the pale green hand is pried open, palm up. At the center of the palm is an oval piece of copper no bigger than—
    “A penny. It’s a flattened penny,” Francy adds.
    I nod, studying for myself. It’s one of those elongated pennies you get from a coin-pressing machine at the amusement park. This one’s shine is gone. It’s nicked and beaten, like it’s been through its own war. But as I look closer, I spot the words that’re pressed into it. The font’s tiny:
    OUR FATHER
WHO ART IN HEAVEN
HALLOWED BE THY NAME
    “The Lord’s Prayer,” I say, recognizing it from all the years Mom dragged me to church. I squint to read it all. Not a single word is missing. It ends with a simple:
    AMEN
    “I take it you’ve seen one of these before?” Francy asks, again holding a finger to her ear. Whatever the President’s whispering, she’s focused more on me than him. I know where her loyalties are, but even former reporters have an irrational addiction to the truth.
    “We have a few of these in the Archives,” I say, “one or two even from the Spanish-American War. It’s an old military tradition. When you get your dog tags and get to your unit, some chaplains may give you a Saint Michael pendant or a pressed coin with the Lord’s Prayer on it. You wear it