From Roger to Dion…?
As if a switch had been flipped, Grace’s brain decoded, scrambling and reassembling letters as if they were game tiles.
Dion R. Larue.
Arundel Roi.
Perfect anagram.
Forget the man who’d made him wealthy, he was out to honor his birth father’s identity. Prioritizing bloodline over everything that had happened since the shoot-out at the Fortress Cult.
This was more than a psychopath ridding himself of an uncomfortable history.
This was an attempt at reincarnation.
Now the murders of three sets of parents made strange, cruel sense: Samael Roi reconstructing a childhood spent with a madman and his concubines. Out with the old, in with the new.
Specialized bidding, indeed.
An elderly schizophrenic might recall the bad old days of crumbling bridges and splintering soil, the Wetter family’s exploitation of the helpless, but no one else in this city that prided itself on human rights seemed to know or care.
No surprise, Grace supposed, in the Age of Endless Chances and Reinvention.
An uncomfortable truth settled in Grace’s gut: I’ve also benefited from that.
Staring at Dion Larue’s smug smile, she couldn’t help but think of him as her playmate, perched on the other end of a cosmic seesaw.
The two of them, perfect rivals.
She hadn’t chosen to do battle. But now…
—
Drinking her second refill of coffee—add that to her breakfast caffeine and her heart was thumping and racing—she shifted her analysis to Andrew né Typhon Roi. Surer than ever that she’d been right about the reason he’d sought help.
Needing to sort out his own lineage of evil.
But the question remained: Had he committed evil?
True, Palo Alto being near Berkeley easily accounted for a chance meeting between the brothers. Or did she have that backward and had the sons of Arundel Roi reunited long ago, both agreeing to settle in the Bay Area?
Samael honing his psychopathic skills.
Typhon, brighter, outwardly moral, working on building a professional career.
An alliance set well before the slaying of their adopted families? The thought repelled Grace but she needed to face it: The man she’d known as Andrew may have committed outrages and finally found the guilt too much to live with.
Including the death of his sister, because she’d been judged too bonded to the McCoys to be integrated into the new clan his brother envisioned.
Did Typhon/Andrew’s survival years after Lilith’s demise mean he’d been a co-conspirator? Or simply a silent witness his brother had trusted to maintain silence?
Either way, he’d died because of what he knew and Grace supposed it didn’t much matter. Still…it was time to learn more about the pleasant, pliable man she’d met in a hotel lobby. But first, she needed to educate herself about his sole surviving sibling.
Snapping a bite out of her bagel, she searched for anything related to the new corporation Dion Larue had created. She found no other DRL-Earthmove projects in Berkeley but seven years previous the company had snagged a similar government-funded contract near Gallup, New Mexico, converting a block of derelict shops to an “environmentally friendly” industrial park aimed at enriching “local culture.”
Larue’s partner for that one had been one Munir “Tex” Khaled, a dealer in Indian art. Googling that name brought up a homicide case: Khaled had been found shot to death in the desert near the Mexican border. That location had obvious implications and rumors of a drug connection had endured.
As far as Grace could tell, the crime remained unsolved. Nor could she find any evidence of the Gallup project ever breaking ground.
That despite a golden-spade groundbreaking ceremony attended by hard-hatted politicians. By a hard-hatted Tex Khaled, as well. The former art dealer was a small, dark-haired man in his sixties wearing a brown shirt tucked into daddy jeans secured by an enormous tooled-silver belt buckle and a string tie fastened by an equally oversized chunk of turquoise. Next to him stood a younger, jubilant Dion Larue, also protectively helmeted and wearing a blousy white buccaneer’s shirt that exposed a deep V of smooth tan thorax.
But clothing wasn’t what caught Grace’s attention, or even the likelihood that Tex Khaled had posed happily with his murderer. She’d fixed on a figure standing behind Larue, slightly to the right.
Early thirties, slightly taller than average, coarse features. Not the shaved-head Beldrim Arthur Benn she’d encountered in her garden. The long-haired, shaggy-mustached visage from Benn’s driver’s license.
Despite the smiles of nearly everyone else in the shot, Benn appeared watchful, even grim. Nearly everyone else because of one other exception: a man positioned next to Benn and around the same age and height as Benn but twice as wide.
A bullet-headed rhino with sparse fair hair, a face the shape of a pie tin, squinty eyes, and tiny, close-set ears.
Mr. Beef. Central-casting thug. Maybe that’s why Benn, less obtrusive physically, had been sent to West Hollywood to take care of Grace. Leaving Rhino to dispatch Andrew.
She wondered if the heavy man was still in L.A.—maybe tossing her office—or back here with the boss.
The disposable cell she’d used to call Wayne chirped. His private number. She switched it off and continued to search for info on DRL-Earthmove.
Nothing. Time to switch gears and veer into territory she knew well.
The engineering section of the inter-university peer-review-journal website coughed up three articles authored by Andrew Van Cortlandt during the year of his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. All were math-laden treatises exploring the structural properties of conductor metals under various electrochemical and thermal conditions.
All had been co-authored with Amy Chan, Ph.D., of Caltech.
Backgrounding Chan revealed that she’d served her postdoc at Stanford the same year as Andrew before taking a lectureship in Pasadena. But that position had lasted only two years and now she was an assistant professor of engineering right here at UC Berkeley.
The department’s website offered up a headshot of a pleasant-looking woman who could’ve passed as a high school senior, with a small-boned face surrounded by long black hair trimmed into straightedge bangs. Amy Chan had continued to delve into the world of structural integrity and had received high marks for teaching from undergrads.
Grace knew reading too much into a face—into anything—was foolish. But Chan’s portrait projected diffidence by way of soft eyes and a bashful smile.
Time to take a risk. She phoned Chan’s office extension. If she got a bad feeling, she could hang up and ditch the phone.
A woman with a whispery, slightly tremulous voice picked up.
“Is this Professor Chan?”
A beat. “I’m Amy.” Chan sounded like a high school senior.
Grace said, “My name is Sarah Muller, I’m an ed-psych consultant from L.A. who was friends with Andrew Van Cortlandt.”
“Was?” said Amy Chan. “You’re no longer friends? Or…?”
“It’s complicated, Professor Chan, and I know this sounds strange, but I’m worried about Andrew and if you could find the time, I’d appreciate talking to you.”
“Worried about what?”
Grace waited a second. “I’m concerned for his safety.”
“Something has happened to Andrew? Oh, no.” Words of dismay delivered in an even tone. The tremulousness was gone and Grace’s guard went up but she persisted. “What exactly are you saying?”
“Could we meet to discuss it, Professor?”
“You can’t tell me now?”
“The last time I saw Andrew he seemed troubled. Nervous. He refused to say why and I haven’t heard from him since. He’d mentioned his work with you, so I—Professor, I’d prefer not to get into any more over the phone, but if meeting’s a hassle, I understand—”
“No,” said Amy Chan. “Not a
hassle.” The vibrato had returned. “I just finished office hours, have a few other things to do. I suppose I could use a breather.”
“Anywhere you’d like, then.”
“How about up near Lawrence Hall—the science museum? Not inside the building, the front area.”
Grace knew the spot. She’d been to Lawrence during one of her trips with Malcolm, found the museum full of kids. The site was up in the hills, above campus. The open area Chan had requested offered gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline of San Francisco that caused people to linger.
Safe place to meet a stranger. Careful woman but that would work to Grace’s benefit, as well.
She said, “Sure. When?”
Amy Chan said, “How about two p.m.?”
Before Grace could agree, the line went dead.
—
She returned to the Olds Hotel, encountered the conspicuous aroma of marijuana in the dim hallway. Several steps later, a door to one of the rooms opened and a couple in their forties staggered out. Bumping against each other, they headed her way, the man lean and black, the woman white and heavy. Grace took her time approaching them, one hand in her purse.
When she was a few feet away, the man gave a courtly bow and said, “S’il vous plaît.” The woman giggled, “I second that,” and stepped aside to allow Grace to pass.
Once inside her room, Grace changed into her notion of educational consultant duds: off-white blouse, gray slacks, beige nylon cardigan, brown flats. Off went the stocking cap. On went the brunette hairpiece, which she combed and fluffed to look fuller. The wig cooperated beautifully; paying for real hair had been a good idea.
Next step: true-blue contact lenses that would make her eyes memorable, even behind the nonprescription glasses.
Checking the disposable cell Wayne had just called her on she found no message. Deciding the phone had outlived its usefulness, she lifted a corner of the bed, placed it under a stout metal leg, and sat down hard. The gizmo was a cheapie but tougher than Grace had figured and it took four attempts, using all of her weight, to crack it. But once the initial wound had been inflicted, subsequent stomps reduced the phone to shards, and she finished by disemboweling the little oblong. Removing the three remaining sticks of turkey jerky from their resealable packet, she collected every visible bit of plastic and poured the ruins of the phone inside the bag. She wasn’t really hungry but neither was she stuffed, so she ate the jerky, extricated the second disposable from her luggage, and returned Wayne’s call.
No answer, no voice mail. Deleting any record of the call, she checked her watch. Over two hours until the meeting with Amy Chan. It had been a while since she’d run or done any serious exercise. Time for a brisk walk?
But when she stepped out onto University, the thought of immersing herself in the rhythm of a university town—the youthfulness, the bumper-sticker philosophy, the calculated rebellion—was suddenly more than she could bear.
Returning to her room, she set the alarm on her watch and lay faceup on the sagging bed.
Nothing like solitude for nurturing the soul.
After a week at Harvard, Grace understood the place. Basically, it was Merganfield on steroids. Though, to be clear, the precious little highly gifties at Merganfield were more uniformly smart than the Harvard student body.
From what she’d observed, there were two ways her fellow students dealt with their good fortune at being accepted into the exemplar of Elite American Education. The first was to be honestly obnoxious, dropping the H-word into every conversation, wearing crimson wherever you went. The second was to pretend to be coy. (“I go to school in Boston.”) Either approach spoke of smugness and self-congratulation and Grace had actually passed a group of freshmen and heard a girl say, “Let’s face it, we’re going to run the world. So how about we do it compassionately?”
She decided to adopt a third tack in order to optimize her time in Cambridge: Stick to herself and get out as quickly as possible.
That meant declaring a major early—easy, she’d already decided on psychology because nothing else seemed remotely interesting and Malcolm was a happy man—then getting requirements out of the way by taking on a far heavier load than recommended.
Extra credits could be accumulated easily by filling free time with the Mickey Mouse courses known as “guts.” So-called serious classes turned out to be no big deal, either. The cliché about Harvard turned out to be true: The toughest part was getting in.
But while grades and exams were no issue, the way the university fashioned its social structure was. During your first year, you got assigned to a freshman dorm. After that, it got complicated.
Grace’s dorm was a building called Hurlbut Hall overlooking Crimson Quad, where she lucked into a sizable single room with a tottering old desk, a nice view of lawn, trees, and ivied brick, and a defunct fireplace. Someone had taped the outline of a cop-show corpse to the scarred oak floor and Grace left it in place. Someone else had taken the time to glue hundreds of pennies onto the wall of the corridor just outside her door. What the intended message was, she never learned, but every so often coins went missing.
Malcolm and Sophie flew out with her for orientation and remained for a couple of days to settle her in. When they saw her room, they looked at each other and nodded approvingly.
Grace said, “Good.”
Malcolm said, “Hurlbut? Great. Now you’ve got plenty of time to build your group.”
Grace said, “What group is that?”
“For your sophomore year you move to a house with a suite of other students.”
“What’s the difference between a dorm and a house?”
“Well…not much, I suppose. But your house will remain with you for three years, the goal is for you to feel proprietary. My house was Lowell.”
“You had a group?”
“Indeed, I did. Including Ransom Gardener. Not only do we continue to do business together, we remain chums. That’s the benefit of the system, Grace. One acquires enduring relationships.”
“Did Mike Leiber go here, too?”
The question surprised Malcolm. “No, Michael’s an MIT grad, but for our purposes, he’s self-taught.”
So you didn’t need all that social nonsense. Grace said nothing, distracting herself with the taped body outline. Clean job, maybe a science major. She’d enjoy living with the geometry.
Sophie said, “It needn’t be difficult, dear. Over a year’s time you create a group of friends and move in together.”
“What if I prefer to remain alone?”
Another long look passed between them.
“Hmm,” said Malcolm. “It’s usually not done that way.”
“I can’t stay in this room next year?”
“Dorms are only for freshmen, Grace.”
“That’s kind of rigid.”
“Tradition, Grace.” Malcolm frowned and Grace realized she’d made him uncomfortable. As she considered her next response, Sophie said, “You know, Mal, I think there are some single rooms in Pforzheimer.”
Grace said, “What’s that?”
“Another house, dear.”
Malcolm said, “You’ll be fine, Grace, no rush, give it time.”
But he looked more nervous than Grace had ever seen him and even Sophie didn’t seem too calm. They’d been more restless than usual during the flight from L.A., fidgeting, talking, and drinking more than usual. Neither the taxi ride from Logan airport nor setting foot on campus had settled them down.
Grace realized their anxiety could be a problem if they felt they needed to stick around and overprotect her. As much as she appreciated them, the whole point of this was beginning a new phase in her life.
She smiled and hugged both of them and said, “Well, I’m sure it’ll work out. This is amazing. I love it, thank you so much.”
Malcolm said, “In terms of—I’m sure you’ll own the place soon. But if there’s ever an issue you feel you need help with—”
“You bet,” said Grace. She spread her arms and smiled and touched her mattress. “Meanwhile, this is perfect.”
She hugged both of them, doing it for their sake but also feeling something rising from deep inside her. They owed her nothing but had chosen to change her life. These were wonderful people. Angels, if angels had actually existed.
She would make them proud.
She told them so and Malcolm blushed and Sophie’s eyes moistened and she said, “You always do, Grace.”
Malcolm dared a squeeze of her hand. Sophie touched her face briefly.
Grace embraced them once more and flashed the most confident smile she could muster.
Inside, she was thinking: Pforzheimer.
—
That night they had dinner at Legal Seafood where everyone ate too much and Malcolm drank too much and ended up offering multiple toasts to Grace’s “extraordinary achievements.” The following morning, when she saw them off in front of the Inn at Harvard, they looked uncertain and Grace added more reassurances, careful to look nonchalant even though her own tension had grown during her first night in Hurlbut. Sleep had been a challenge, woken as she was by whoops and stomping feet in the corridor well into the morning hours. The best and brightest acting like any other group of adolescents.
The taxi back to Logan finally arrived and Grace waved goodbye at its rear window until the vehicle slipped out of sight on Massachusetts Avenue.
Malcolm and Sophie had changed their minds about flying straight back to L.A., opting instead for a quick trip to New York for some “museum overload.”
Boston had no shortage of great museums and Grace knew they’d decided to stay close until they were sure she really was okay.
Another sixteen-year-old might’ve been peeved by that.
Grace enjoyed being cared for.
—
Early into a straight-A+ first semester, Grace had figured out that, like the L.A. County social service bureaucracy, Harvard prided itself on accommodating “special needs.” She spoke to a resident dorm advisor and lied about needing solitude in order to deal with “an inborn sensory sensitivity to light and sound” and bagged a single at Pforzheimer for the following year.
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