“Trust away,” I shrugged. “He calls them security. I call them an invasion of privacy. You’re free to hunt them down and tape them up.”
“I’m sure he was simply looking after your grandfather, but I can take care of myself. Men have difficulty understanding that.” She dug out her own duct tape—I’d learned from the best—and began hunting under the various paintings on the walls.
“Pardon my doubt,” I continued once all the bugs and cameras were disabled. “But you’ve never bothered to visit us for holidays before. I’m assuming there is a reason this year. And please don’t underestimate my intelligence.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, propped her chin in her palm, and studied me. “You’re hard, Ana. I suppose I made you that way. I can’t say I’m sorry, because you needed to survive. You had the worst of it growing up, the times when we were poor, and I was still learning my way around. You need to let the past go now. You’re in the lap of luxury. Relax. Enjoy life.”
Really, it ought to be permissible to murder one’s mother. Relax, right.
“I’d be tense if I wasn’t working,” I said pragmatically. “Somehow, it’s difficult to relax when my family keeps dropping in on me unexpectedly, needing things that only I can provide. But if you’re here to enjoy your children and have a real holiday, you’re welcome to join in the festivities. EG wants popcorn chains.”
That last was pure sarcasm. We both knew that wasn’t why she was here.
“Shouldn’t EG be in school?” she asked, not giving away anything.
“Today, but she’s off a few days before Christmas and until after New Year’s. Tudor’s already on holiday. They’ll enjoy having you to take them shopping. I’ll leave you to primp before dinner. Maybe Graham will come down to join you.” I walked out before I said anything really cruel.
I loved and admired my mother, but she’d never completely outgrown the spoiled princess persona of her childhood. Sometimes I just wanted to shake her until her brains rattled. It was simpler to agree to disagree and move on.
Applying that realization to my relationship with the spy in the attic, I knew that I couldn’t endure a similar level of passive hostility with Graham. We either had a meeting of the minds, or we battled it out until one of us lost. Since there was no way I was able to concentrate on my work after what we’d just done, I figured it was time to take a big stick to his head.
Chapter 10
Graham’s spy cameras had told him I was coming, of course. By the time I arrived, he had the champagne buffet photo up on a wall monitor, the image he’d sent me earlier, along with the pieced-together photo Zander must have uploaded. Except Graham shouldn’t be able to burrow into my unnetworked laptop. The bastard’s invasion of my privacy was the least of my triggers right now.
I picked up a file folder and swatted him upside the head with it. “Gym, now,” I commanded.
“We have nothing to fight about,” he said stiffly, not bothering to turn and face me. “Your sister is embroiled in a nest of nastiness so huge that even Magda has to investigate. Do you want my help or not?”
“Why now?” I shouted in furious frustration. “You abandoned me the entire weekend when I needed you, and now that Magda is here, you’re offering to help? Why don’t I just go bake cookies and let the two of you handle everything?” I whacked him with the folder again.
I finally had his attention. He rose and towered intimidatingly over me. I don’t intimidate. I marched out of the room and down to the gym. I’d learned to handle my many anger issues by beating up sandbags. I pulled off my Henley, stripping to my tank top and leggings, then yanked on the boxing gloves Graham had bought for me.
I was pounding the stuffing out of the bag when he finally deigned to enter. He crossed his arms and glared.
“I’m entitled to come and go as I please,” he said, taking the offensive. “This is still my house.”
I walloped the bag some more, then swung and kicked it as hard as I could. My blow was solid enough to swing the heavy bag in his direction. He didn’t flinch but kicked it back with an easy side-sweep.
“This isn’t about ownership!” Well, it probably was to some extent, but that wasn’t what was eating at me. “This is about respect!”
I’d finally produced a brief look of surprise out of him. Then he frowned as if I were a misbehaving child and tugged on his gloves.
“That’s ridiculous,” he concluded. “You’re angry because I wasn’t here to listen to you whine about your family. They’re not my family. I want no part of them.”
It was a good thing the bag was closer than he was or I’d have taken out his nose. My rapid tattoo blows immobilized the heavy bag before I dared reply.
“You are not Magda,” I screamed at him as he jabbed the bag back in my direction with a lot more muscle than I possessed. “You care! You don’t want to. You’re doing your best to turn yourself into an automaton in the middle of the Matrix, but you helped Tudor when he needed a male role model. You let EG sneak up here to steal your damned cat! I can’t even go in her room anymore without sneezing. Juliana went missing in a powder keg of dead bodies, big egos, and missing money. And you damned well left me stranded because you couldn’t bear to watch a disaster in the making.”
The things that escape my subconscious when I let it all hang out. . .
Jaw tightening, Graham slammed the bag with a power that should have taken down the ceiling. “I left to look for another place to stay. If I’m signing this place over to your family, I need a new office.”
That was a blow to the gut. I’d known it was coming. It was better to have it out there. But it still hurt.
I slammed the bag in his direction again. He punched it back at me. His t-shirt revealed the burn scars up his arms, but his over-long black hair fell over the one searing his forehead. All that rippling muscle distracted me as he seriously got into battering the bag. His anger issues were weightier than mine.
His words hurt more than the punishing blows I swung to keep the bag from taking out my knees. I couldn’t wrap my tongue around all the exclamations of horror and dismay that he’d rattled loose. “Did you find one?” was all I could say.
“There are lots of modern offices better wired than this ancient hellhole.” He whacked the bag hard enough to send it half way across the room.
I dodged backward, kicked sideways, and drove it back to him. I wasn’t angry now, though, I was scared.
“You have this entire floor for your use,” I finally had the brains to shout. “The only reason you want to leave is because you’re afraid to care about anyone again. That’s the reason you stood us up at Thanksgiving, isn’t it, the reason you never come to dinner?”
“I’m not your damned family!” he retorted.
Sometimes, pounding the crap out of something opened my head and gave me insight.
Panting hard, I stepped away from the bag and pulled off my gloves. “Max was your family,” I said, no longer shouting. “Mallard still is. That’s why you took him with you. You care, Graham. You may not want to, but you do. And even if you might not want to be part of us, we accept you. Blood doesn’t make family.”
Graham smashed the bag so hard, the chain creaked.
I walked out. I needed a shower now that I’d cleaned out my thoughts.
Juliana read the text message from Zander again and wept.
I have met our mother.
All her life she’d longed for the woman she remembered as a beautiful golden angel. She knew their mother was no angel, but the little-girl need to know her was still there, eating at her.
And Zander was the one to finally meet their mother. She glared at the burner phone and turned it off. She’d set it to buzz for texts while she worked alone in the office, but this wasn’t the message she wanted to hear.
Had they figured out the photo she’d given them? She hoped so, because she had another one.
She’d been offered the position at Jesus World because of the prai
se she’d received for the video she’d produced for the school in Zimbabwe. When she’d first arrived in DC, the school had given her access to their security cameras so she’d have materials to put together fund-raising videos for the project.
But they’d also talked of an entire film celebrating the creation of the reverend’s grand vision once the park was completed. For that, she’d needed far better equipment than JACAD possessed, so she’d bought and installed her own in strategic positions.
But last night, the recordings had been deleted from the school’s camera overlooking the back field by the pyramids. No one knew that she’d installed a better camera back there.
The discovery of the missing recordings worried her. After everyone had gone home, Julie used Mrs. Overcamp’s computer to access her camera files for the missing time period. She’d uploaded them to her cloud account for safety, as usual, but she hadn’t dared take the time to look at them until now. She stared numbly at the results.
There was the bulldozer again. Her own video camera produced less grainy images than the security ones. This time, she could tell the figure being shoveled into the hole with the dirt was a man, but it was impossible to recognize his face from that distance.
A man, being shoveled into a pyramid foundation. She wanted to freak out, but last time she’d done that, it had got her nowhere except in trouble. She had to stay calm, stay cool, and plan better this time, no matter how fast her pulse raced and how worried she was.
It was time to bring in the experts, she decided. That was smarter than freaking. Tongue caught between her teeth for concentration, she copied that segment into a separate file and named it. Heart pounding harder, she used her new burner phone, and texted Zander the cloud password and file name. She didn’t think her brother would know what to do, but if their mother was here. . . Maybe someone would know what should be done next. She prayed, she prayed hard.
Julie still had to find out if anyone had heard from Esther or the other two second-year girls who had left without completing their courses or their tasks. She wasn’t ready to quit on the reverend just yet.
As the message beeped Sent, she heard a noise in the back of the empty office.
“Hello, Miss Kruger, we meet again.”
The Reverend Arden. And he’d caught her at Mrs. Overcamp’s desk. When could she start freaking out? Now?
After my shower, I trotted down the stairs to admire the inexpertly-wrapped gifts beneath the tree. I needed to wrap the ones I’d bought today, and the ones stored upstairs in my closet. I hadn’t bought Magda anything—not because I hadn’t anticipated her arrival, but because I didn’t know what to buy. Perfume bottles filled with pepper spray weren’t easily available at the mall.
Tudor and EG were there, fighting a video battle in the flashing lights from the tree. They fidgeted in glee as I checked out each gift, looking for my name. I shook my packages and made wild guesses aloud like supersonic missile and world peace.
When EG again demanded popcorn chains, I sent her in search of Magda and Mallard. Then I pointed Tudor toward Graham’s office. “He will never admit it, but he can use your help. Offer it. Or ask him what he wants for Christmas. He likes having you around.”
I freely acknowledge—I’m an annoying gnat who won’t give up. Besides, I was starting to think that Graham really shouldn’t be alone all the time. And if he meant to abandon us, then I was free to annoy the heck out of him.
At this rate, Magda, Mallard, and Graham would all come after me with hatchets before the season was over. They might as well kill me now, because I refused to do this all by myself any longer. I wouldn’t run away as I had before. I was more mature and confident these days. And I had money. I wasn’t ever going to be anyone’s doormat again.
Zander was still in the library, looking seriously bleary-eyed. At my appearance, he turned the laptop so I could see the screen. “I cannot do this. She has sent me access to video files of every single solitary day she has been there, over three months of daily files from a dozen cameras! It is impossible.”
I studied the list of neatly time-dated files. “Any clue what she wants us to find?”
“That’s what makes searching the files compelling.” He hit the keyboard and opened up a single photo file.
I pulled up a chair and sat down to study the image. It was taken at night, so even though it had probably been filmed in color—which meant it wasn’t a normal security camera—the colors were dimmed. All I could see was a puddle of white light, presumably from a security lamp, and the black silhouette of what appeared to be one of the park’s phony pyramids. Off to one side, almost out of reach of the camera, was a darker shadow that might have been a bulldozer.
The only real color in the whole image was a red stripe hanging from an object spilling with a load of dirt from the bulldozer. I assumed the load was dirt and not gravel, but the darkness made it too difficult to be certain. Why was a bulldozer operating after dark? There had to be safety regulations about that.
I enlarged the photo and focused on the red stripe. As I zoomed up, the object attached to the stripe became more human-shaped. Swallowing a lump of fear, I zoomed again and a man’s face appeared—or a white oval with indents where features should be emerged. It wasn’t exactly a close-up, and the dirt or debris all around him added to the muddiness of the image. The red stripe could have been a necktie. He might have been wearing a white shirt and dark coat. Identification was impossible.
But he was pretty definitely dead.
“Is this just another angle of the photo she sent before?” I had to ask, because the similarities were striking.
“I’m no expert. I can’t tell, except the angle seems different. This one is dated from two days ago, though. We can see traces of snow still on the ground. The one Julie cut up. . . had no date and there was no snow. The original image might be somewhere in all these files, but I have no idea how to search.” He gestured in resignation at the list of videos.
“She just sent you the password into her cloud account?” I asked. “Without us asking for it?”
He shrugged. “I texted her to say our mother was here. She has always wished to meet her, so I thought it only fair that she know. The link and the password were her reply.”
“She wants Magda to look through these files and tell her what to do?” I asked incredulously. “Telling Magda anything is like lighting explosives. One thing you will learn about our mother—Magda may flirt, insinuate, infiltrate and otherwise use subterfuge to get what she wants, but when it comes to our safety, she is much more direct. She will head straight for Reverend Arden and pull his hair out through his nose if his park is endangering your sister.”
Zander smiled a little at the image. “That would almost be satisfying.” His face sagged again as he gestured at the piles of paper. “But I fear you are right, and Julie is sitting on a dangerous situation. I don’t know how her photographs and these documents relate, but all is not right in Jesus World.”
“Does your faith recognize that Jesus was a Jew?” I asked out of cynical curiosity as he handed me the first stack of paper. I was too tired to read through lines of what appeared to be expense statements.
“It is Julie’s faith, not mine. Our father attended the Episcopalian Church. Julie got caught up in the school-building and loved the idea of evangelizing through good work. She does not have a scientific mind and wouldn’t know a dinosaur from an armadillo. She may be a very practical person in many ways, but she still wants to go to Disney World for the fantasy of pink castles and Goofy dogs. That she is sending us photos of dead bodies worries me more than I can say.”
And I had yet to tell him about the dead or missing girls. He didn’t need that right now. I held up the papers he’d been working on. “And what are these telling me?”
He swiped nervously at his forehead. “That very large sums of money are flowing through JACAD. It may be that the embezzler in the newspaper story was washing his ill-gotten gains throu
gh his board position at the park, but the sums are not just coming from the weapons factory. And when they go out, it is to corporations and businesses employed by the park, not to any individual’s private account. I cannot imagine how the embezzler benefitted.”
“I can.” I had more experience than I wanted in how mega-corps and bad guys siphoned funds to offshore accounts—or into Senator Paul Rose’s campaign for presidency through powerful PACs. I pulled a bugged table lamp from the closet where I’d shoved it and plugged it in again. “Did you leave Julie’s photo on this table when you fixed dinner?” I asked, as much for Zander’s education as for the lamp’s.
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously and spoke aloud. “I did.”
“Don’t do that unless you want Graham to see it.” I turned to the lamp. “He’s all yours. Treat him gently. I have another angle to work.”
I got up and pointed at the laptop. “It’s not networked to Graham, although he’ll hack it if you let him. If there are files you want him to see, send them to both of us or add them to our cloud account. Our emails and links are in there.”
I’d let him figure out what to do if he had files he didn’t want to share. Unlike others in this family, I respected the privacy of the adult members.
I was rather enjoying being the annoying voice on the intercom for a change. Let Graham see how it felt to have toxic crap dumped on him in the middle of the night.
Not that it was the middle of the night yet, but it was EG’s bedtime since she had school in the morning. That would never occur to Magda. Once more, I’d be the bad guy if I had to go down to the kitchen where mother-worship and popcorn were happening.
To my surprise, as I started down to the basement kitchen, EG was coming up. She carried a plate of decorated sugar cookies complete with neat hanging threads.
“Mallard said we could hang these tomorrow, that adding to the tree each day is part of our tradition.” She proudly held them up for my admiration.
Twin Genius Page 9
