Murder Once Removed

by S. C. Perkins

  I’d tapped the copies box. “These are all acid-free and will resist water, mildew, and dust. For your originals, Karl said to store them in the box in a cool place with low humidity. As requested, he also dry-mounted and matted all of your copies, so they’re ready for framing.”

  “Splendid, splendid,” Gus had said, admiring the newly restored copy of his great-great-grandmother Jennie Epps Halloran. She was in her late eighties in the photo, holding a baby boy who was Gus’s grandfather, Seamus Halloran. Jennie’s face and neck were generously lined from years of sorrow and hard work, but there was a softness to her mouth and eyes as she held her great-grandson. In the photo, she wore a dress of all black, except for a white gardenia blossom that was pinned to her dress. In that moment, seeing Gus looking at his great-great-grandmother, I’d seen a strong resemblance. He had her ears, her nose, and the same natural arch to his eyebrows. I loved those little signs through the generations that our ancestors were still with us, and when I pointed out the similarities to Gus, he’d blushed with pleasure.

  “Like you said, Lancaster, she was one heck of a woman, and I’m just as proud, if not more so, to descend from her as from Seth.”

  My two best friends had less interest in traits through the ages than they did in teasing me, however.

  “We were hoping this time the thing you might not remember doing is our resident Argentine web-designer hottie on the second floor,” Jo said, slowly twirling a strand of her hair, which today was in soft ringlets. “He just called, asking for you.”

  “Or maybe you do remember it…,” Serena said, bobbing her eyebrows up and down. “I’ve heard Mateo’s talents are hard to forget.”

  I put a hand on my hip. “Are you two done?”

  My two officemates exchanged gleeful looks before erupting into sniggers.

  “If I must remind you,” I said, typing in my password, “Mateo is half Argentine and half Irish, but he was born and raised in Fort Worth, for pity’s sake.”

  “That means he’s a smart, gorgeous, and passionate Latin-Celtic Texan, Luce,” Serena exclaimed. “That’s practically the trifecta of men right there!”

  Jo pretended to fan herself. “Too right. He’s totes adorbs.”

  “He also totes has a new girlfriend, as y’all well know,” I said, trying to sound disapproving. Then I gave in and admitted, “Not that he wouldn’t be a fun someone to be a bit of a tart with, as you say, Jo.”

  She and Serena both nodded. “Ohhh, yeahhhh.”

  We all knew we were completely kidding, however. Mateo, with his Argentine sexiness and Irish green eyes, was indeed incredibly handsome, but he most definitely knew it. At twenty-four, he was also six years our junior and still acted very much the college party boy. I’d taken him to Big Flaco’s Tacos for hangover menudo so many times in the past year the waitresses would put a bowl of it down in front of him before we’d even finished taking our seats.

  When it came to his work as a web designer, though, Mateo showed us his smarts and professionalism—which was good, because he was the administrator for all our respective websites, as well as in charge of our internet security. We adored him like a younger brother and loved to ogle and tease him, but that was it.

  Pulling an envelope out of my tote bag, I waved it in the air. “Gus gave us tickets to his suite for the UT game next weekend, girls. Can you both make it with me?”

  Gus had taken the tickets from his desk drawer, telling me, “The Longhorns are up against Baylor next Saturday night. Would you and your two officemates like to be my guests?”

  “You sure you can handle two Aggies and a Cambridge-educated Brit in your den of burnt orange and white?” I’d asked, holding up my right hand and pointing to my Aggie ring.

  “The Brit and the blonde are both as charming as hell, so they’re forgiven for not attending my alma mater,” Gus replied. “As for you, young lady, the University of Texas granted you your master’s degree, so I expect you to show your loyalty during football season.” He slapped his palm on his desk for emphasis and gave me a stern glare, then handed over the tickets. He knew very well I was willing to cheer for the Longhorns … so long as they weren’t playing Texas A&M.

  “I’d love to go,” Josephine said, “but I have a date that night.”

  “With whom?” I asked. “Trevor or Ahmad?”

  “Jake, actually,” Jo replied with a bat of her eyes. “Trevor has been history for, oh, two days now.”

  “I want to hear that story later,” I told her. Turning to Serena, I said, “What about you? Want to bring Walter?”

  “Aw, man, we’re going to be out of town,” she said. “We’re meeting Walter’s parents in New Orleans, but tell Gus thank you.”

  Jo echoed the sentiment and I joked, “Fine. Maybe I’ll ask Mateo, then.”

  Another voice replied, “Oh, now you agree to go on a date with me, Luce? Just when I’ve finally given in and committed to another woman?”

  We turned to see Mateo leaning against the doorway, dark hair tousled, his lean body on display in a pair of jeans and abs-skimming gray Henley, which had his company’s name, RIVAS WEB DESIGN, embroidered on the left side. His clear green eyes, framed by dark hair and sinfully long eyelashes, practically glowed emerald. For a moment, I simply stared. I knew Serena and Josephine were doing the same. The man was all kinds of hot.

  He gave us a toothy grin. “Committed, for the time being, at least.”

  And our immature younger brother was back.

  I rolled my eyes. “Mateo, would you and your new girlfriend—short-term as she may possibly be—like to go to the UT game with me next weekend?”

  “We’ve already got tickets, but thanks,” he replied, strolling in to give me a one-armed hug.

  “To what do we owe the honor, then?” Serena asked as she clicked her mouse a few times. “Though while you’re here, you can figure out what the hell happened to our internet. It just stopped working.”

  “Mine as well,” Jo said.

  “That’s partly why I’m here, but it’s mostly to see Lucy.”

  “Finally wanting your family tree done?” I asked. Mateo was one of the few people in my life who continued to sidestep my offer to trace their roots. I figured the fact that he’d never really known his birth father was at the heart of it, and that made me feel for him, but it didn’t stop me from occasionally offering my genealogy services anyway in hopes he’d give in.

  “Keep dreaming, beautiful,” he said. “Your computer sent up an alarm a few minutes ago. Your phone should have alerted you with a text.”

  “Why? Was I hacked or something? I didn’t hear any message,” I said as I rummaged around in my handbag and came up with my phone. Sure enough, it was still on vibrate and I had a text message that read,

  Alert! Security breach on Lucy Lancaster’s computer. Alert!

  Mateo moved to sit at my desk and started typing. “Someone tried to access your computer through the Wi-Fi network, yes, but the security I have on it sent me an alert and I shut down your router remotely. I’m just here to check everything and ramp up security where I can.”

  I froze. “Wait. Really?” I looked at my officemates and they stared back at me, all of us surprised. “Are you sure I didn’t accidentally download a virus or something? You’re saying that someone was deliberately trying to access my computer?”

  Mateo was typing furiously and didn’t answer. A few seconds later, he pushed back in my chair and swore.

  “He’s spoofed his IP address. I can’t trace him.”

  At our questioning looks, he explained, “It means he’s masked all the underlying information that would tell me who he is or where he is. The IP address I saw was given to him by the Wi-Fi router, so there’s nothing to trace on that end.” He shrugged. “Though he’s obviously not a newbie, it was probably just a young hacker trying to get in some practice by snooping into the files of a small company.”

  “That happens?” I said.

  “Sure. All the ti
me. Every hacker has to start somewhere, right? This guy—or girl—probably saw the press conference on television the other day and decided to practice on you.” That Rivas smile came out in full force again. “I dabbled a little in hacking myself before I went legit, usually snooping around in the computers of girls I thought were pretty.”

  “You didn’t!” Serena said. “You haven’t done that with any of us, right?”

  Mateo pointed to himself, the picture of innocence. “Who, me?”

  Serena and I exchanged glances. We really couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.

  Josephine, however, got up, smoothed her aubergine-colored miniskirt, and languidly walked over to Mateo. His eyes locked on to her long, toned legs, then slowly moved up to her silky cream-colored shirt. She used one of her fingers under his chin to lift his face to hers as she stopped and leaned in close. I heard him suck in a breath.

  “Mateo, darling,” she said in her most soothing, lilting voice as she ran her fingers through his hair. “We absolutely adore you, but if ever you snoop in any of our computers without our permission, your meat and two veg will be served up on my gran’s silver platter. Got it?”

  Then she glanced down at his lap so there was no doubt to which body parts her colorful colloquialism referred.

  Mateo nodded vigorously. “Yep. Got it. Loud and clear.”

  Jo grinned, giving him an affectionate, smacking kiss on the cheek in response.

  I said, “Now that our boundaries have been set, what do I need to do about the hacking, Matty? Should I be worried?”

  “Do you have any sensitive information stored on your computer?”

  “I would consider my clients’ genealogical files sensitive,” I said.

  “But I don’t think the general population would,” Mateo countered. Before I could argue that point, he continued, “I’m going to review all your security anyway and ramp it up where I can, but the system I have in place served you well. It alerted me that someone was trying to get onto your Wi-Fi network and it also let me know which computer he was attempting to access.”

  “Do I need to change my passwords?”

  “It never hurts,” he replied.

  I made a face. I had a lot of passwords. “I’ll get it done by the weekend. Right now I need some tea.”

  “Make a pot, would you?” Josephine asked.

  “Sure thing,” I said, heading for the break room.

  I put the kettle on and added some Darjeeling to the teapot’s infuser. Outside on the balcony, next to the fire escape that zigzagged from the roof to the parking lot, the little potted gardenia Gus had given me was enjoying the sunny afternoon. While its scented blooms would soon drop off as it went dormant for the winter, they were still going strong for the time being. I stared at one particularly beautiful flower until its double petals slowly blurred into a creamy-white blob as my mind wrapped around the thought that someone wanted to hack into my computer. I blinked the bloom into sharp focus again when Serena and Jo joined me for snacks.

  “Speaking of the weekend,” Serena began, pulling some cheese out of the mini-fridge, “have y’all picked out your costumes for Walter’s and my Halloween party on Saturday?”

  Josephine put her arms over her head and wiggled her hips. “I’m coming as a belly dancer. I can’t wait!”

  “Excellent.” Serena grinned. “Luce?”

  “I … uh…”

  “You forgot all about it, didn’t you?” she said, pursing her lips.

  The whistle on the teakettle blew. I turned off the burner and managed to pour boiling water into the teapot and hang my head contritely at the same time. “I did, I confess.”

  “You will still come, though, right?” Serena asked. Besides her life in the fashion world, Serena’s big thing was throwing parties, with her Halloween soiree being her all-time favorite, and she took it as a personal affront if one of us didn’t attend.

  “Of course!” I said, putting on the lid so the tea could steep for three minutes. “You know how much I love your parties. I just have to find myself a fabulous costume.”

  “I hope it’s more fabulous than last year,” Serena said.

  “Was that even a costume?” Josephine asked as she opened a new bag of Oreos. “You wore a strapless pink dress, a black-velvet belt, black strappy sandals, and your hair in a bun.”

  I replied, “Just because I was the only one who knew I was dressed as Charlotte from a years-ago episode of Sex and the City doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good costume.”

  “Sure, honey,” Serena returned. “You keep right on thinking that.”

  “Anyone want to know what I’ll be going as?” Mateo called from my desk.

  The three of us rolled our eyes. “A pirate,” we all said at once.

  Mateo always went as a pirate. The only difference each year was which shoulder he attached his fake parrot.

  “Hey, pirates are cool,” he said.

  “Sure, honey,” Serena called back to him. “You keep right on thinking that.”

  I poured the three of us mugs of tea and grabbed a Dr Pepper out of the fridge for Mateo and a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips from the cupboard for me. What wasn’t cool was that someone tried to hack my computer. The longer I thought about it, the more it unsettled me, and I found myself wondering if it had something to do with the break-in at Betty-Anne’s and the theft of her great-grandfather’s journals.

  It must, my gut told me. It was too much of a coincidence.

  EIGHT

  Once Mateo left, having declared our network safe to use once more, I got to work on a separate genealogy project that I’d begun last week. This was a simpler case, but no less interesting.

  My client, a music teacher in her late forties named Donna, had been told her entire life that she was a direct relation to Paul Revere, the famous eighteenth-century American patriot and silversmith. Unable to find the connection herself, however, she’d hired me for the job.

  It had only taken me a couple of days to trace the line and prove that Paul Revere was Donna’s fourth great-grandfather on her mother’s side. But along the way, I’d also found a link on her maternal side to a famous scientist from the 1800s and an explorer from the early 1900s. Upon hearing my discoveries, Donna had become so intrigued that she’d hired me to trace her full family tree and draw up a report on her DNA testing, once the results came back from her cheek swab.

  That was how I got a lot of my business. It would start with a small job and then blossom into a larger one once the client’s own genealogical history became more interesting. I had yet to have a client who didn’t have at least one unique ancestor in their family, whether it was a famous relative or simply an ordinary person who overcame extraordinary obstacles that allowed the family to survive despite the hardships of place, background, or financial situation. Since I found the results fascinating, too, my enthusiasm tended to rub off on my clients, instilling pride in their ancestry, no matter if they descended from kings or peasants.

  With Donna’s family, though, I was finding more intriguing relations than not. Having finished tracing her mother’s side, for the past few days I’d been working on her father’s side of the family. When I’d made it nine generations back, to Donna’s sixth great-grandparents, I’d found that the couple had lived in the Dithmarschen district of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, and had two daughters. One would eventually become Donna’s fifth great-grandmother, while the other was to become the paternal grandmother of the nineteenth-century composer Johannes Brahms.

  This meant that Brahms and Donna were second cousins, five times removed, which would thrill Donna to no end. It also once again proved to me that certain traits tended to run through families, whether in a great way or small. While Brahms became a famous composer whose name is still synonymous with beautiful music, only a comparative handful of people would know his distant cousin Donna. Yet she was just as revered by her students, whom she taught to respect, love, and play the same music.
r />   Focused on updating Donna’s family tree, I nearly jumped a mile when Serena grabbed my arm.

  “Let’s go,” she said, pulling me up out of my chair as I was trying to type in another Google search.

  “Where?” I asked as she used my mouse to close down my internet page and disconnect me from the Wi-Fi network again. I looked at my watch. Time had flown and it was now nearly five o’clock. “I’ve got to meet Winnie Dell at the Hamilton Center in two hours. She and I are going to talk about hunting down the real C.A.”

  “Awesome, then we have two hours to find you a costume for my party,” she told me. “There’s going to be a nice guy there who works with Walter. I think you two would hit it off.”

  Knowing Serena couldn’t be thwarted when it came to costumes, I grumbled, “Fine, but you know I’m not ready to meet anyone new yet. Nick and I just broke up.” I dug in my handbag for some lip gloss, then turned to her. “Wait—he won’t be at the party, right?”

  “Hell, no,” Serena said. “Walter made sure of it. Evidently, Nick and that bottle-blond floozy of his, Sandra—”

  “Sasha.”

  “With the fake double Ds,” added Josephine.

  “Tell me about it,” Serena drawled, running her fingers through her naturally blond hair, which today was pin straight with a center part. “Could those things look any more like helium-filled balloons? Even her fake hair extensions look more real. Anyway, what’s-her-name doesn’t like Halloween, so she and Nick are going to Horseshoe Bay for the weekend.” She put her hands on her hips and scowled. “I mean, really, who doesn’t like Halloween? That’s un-American.”

  “Apparently her brain is as empty as the balloons in her chest,” Jo said, making Serena and me giggle, though I did feel a smidge sorry for Nick because I knew he loved Halloween almost as much as Serena did.

  Still, I was relieved. I wasn’t afraid of seeing Nick or anything. It was more that I knew how comfortable he was with public displays of affection and I wasn’t up for witnessing him being all lovey-dovey with his new girlfriend, and then having to pretend I wasn’t seeing the looks of pity I’d get from other friends who knew Nick used to be that into me.