Lineage Most Lethal

by S. C. Perkins

  I’ll bet, I thought.

  “But I knew I couldn’t act fast. I had to wait, be an exemplary employee, and pretend to care about Pippa and her self-absorbed mother. If I did anything too quickly, I wouldn’t have my life in Germany that’s now waiting for me.” Her tone became full of wonder. “Then, all of the sudden, just like it was fate, Pippa hired Chef Rocky. I’d just put him on my list not days before I met him, can you believe it?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to rein in a snarky response.

  “And then! Och, Lucy, it was like the fates were smiling down on me, telling me it was time to put my plan into action, because Hugo literally walked into my life and fell in love with me. I’ll admit, I’d been having trouble tracing the descendants of Agent Weissman, so at first I didn’t know Hugo was anything but a weak old sap with a love of history.”

  “When did you realize who he was?” I asked.

  “We began talking about the war over dinners and gelato,” she said, sounding almost wistful. “He felt he could trust me, don’t you know, and one night he opened up about his grandfather being involved in a mission that ensured D-Day would happen. How his poor granddaddy got shot by an evil double agent.” Her chuckle became a cackle. “I could hardly believe it. I was being romanced by a descendant of one of the spies who unjustly killed my grandfather. This man was in my life, he thought he was my boyfriend, and he trusted me with his life and secrets.” Her voice went cheerful again. “And I couldn’t resist betraying him like his grandfather betrayed mine.”

  I felt utterly nauseated.

  “Anything else, dear?” she said, sounding like her old self. “We’re almost there.”

  We were indeed rounding another bend into a pretty little clearing. Just like in Pippa’s photo, the folly’s limestone facade seemed to gleam like a warm, peaceful beacon. I couldn’t yet see Pippa inside.

  “And what about me? I take it that you didn’t know about my grandfather being one of two George Lancasters until he told you, but didn’t you wonder when you heard my name was Lucy Lancaster?”

  “I’ll admit I did,” she said, “but I’d done my research and knew what Lucinda Lancaster looked like, so I wasn’t worried.” She sighed. “But that was my mistake.”

  “I’m confused, though,” I said. “You could have poisoned me or killed me so many times. Hell, you could have poisoned me the night Hugo died when you made tea for me. So why didn’t you?”

  “You know,” she said, her voice again tinged with wonder, “I’m not exactly sure. I think I was just enjoying the wait. With you, the time needed to be right, and the same goes for Pippa. And while it turned out a bit more rushed than I wanted, I’m still getting to take you both out at the same time, so I’m happy.”

  She wasn’t happy, she was stark-raving nuts.

  “So you made the list, using a book cipher—to, what, keep your intentions secret in case anyone happened to come across the list?”

  “Right again!” she crowed. “Plus, it was fun. I thought my grandfather might be proud. I understand he liked The Thirty-Nine Steps too.”

  I decided not to touch that last statement and asked, “I’m curious, how did Hugo find out about it?”

  I heard her snort. “That damn man was as nosy and curious as you are. One day I left the code out at home, forgetting Hugo and I had a date. He’d already seen that I had several copies of The Thirty-Nine Steps.” I could practically see her offhand shrug as we walked over the soft earth. “I guess he took a photo of it when I wasn’t looking, became suspicious, and began deciphering my codes.”

  “Wait. You didn’t know he’d found your ciphers?” I asked, surprised.

  “Not at first,” she said. “Nor did I know he’d sought you out. But it didn’t matter. By the time he found you, he was a walking dead man. Though when you mentioned he’d dropped a Montblanc pen, I was a tad worried. He’d shown it to me once, so I knew about it. But I stood in the back parlor watching you after you saved it from Boomer, and you clearly didn’t know what you’d found. That was when I realized Hugo had inadvertently given me more time.”

  Before I could reply—though I didn’t know if there were even words to do so—Mrs. P. was shoving me over the threshold of the folly, taking me out of the cold wind into what felt like a round, nearly wind-free freezer that was about twelve feet in diameter.

  Two cathedral-style windows with leaded panes let in much-needed light, but the only other details in the place were wooden benches hugging the perimeter, each made up of two wooden slats fitting into holes within decoratively carved limestone blocks and another block supporting the slats in the middle.

  Occupying the center of the bench on my right was Pippa. Her hands were tied behind her back and looped around one of the wooden slats with what looked like twisted cording. It was shimmering in the slight glow of the folly, and I recognized it as the satin cording Pippa had bought for the New Year’s Eve gala favors. I remembered seeing Mrs. P. cutting lengths of the stuff this very morning. She must have put the cording in one of her cargo pockets for just this moment, I thought wryly.

  Pippa was shivering horribly, her head lolling like she was attempting to come back into consciousness.

  I whirled on Mrs. P. “What did you do to her?”

  Mrs. P. shrugged. “She was whining, so I had to give her a little bonk on the head to shut her up.”

  I took an angry step toward her, but Mrs. P. responded by grabbing my injured right wrist. I cried out, and tried to aim a kick at her. As I twisted, I felt something hard and plastic poking me under my left sleeve. I still had the plastic letter opener.

  My twisting caused Mrs. P. to release me. Then, like a demonic cat, she lunged forward, shoving me in the back toward Pippa.

  “Get over there and sit down.”

  As I stumbled forward, I brought my arms in close, like I was protecting my injured wrist, and slid the opener into my left palm. I cried out again on purpose as I landed in a heap next to Pippa. As I did, I forced my left arm around her back, feeling for her hands, pushing the little letter opener into her fingers.

  “Lucy?” she said thickly. But her dark green eyes were focusing. I felt her fingers clamp down on mine.

  “Boomer’s okay,” I said. “Just drugged.”

  Tears came into Pippa’s eyes and she yelled at Mrs. P., “You’re horrible! You told me he was dead!”

  “Shut up,” Mrs. P. snarled. “Both of you.”

  At that point, she seemed to decide that having me next to Pippa wasn’t a good idea after all. Before I could fully swing around and sit down, Mrs. P. had grabbed the back of my down vest and hauled me to my feet again, shoving me across the folly floor to the bench on the other side. I managed to stay on my feet, but fell heavily onto the wooden slats. Looking up, I found Mrs. P. pointing her gun in my face.

  FORTY-THREE

  “Turn sideways and put your wrists together behind your back,” Mrs. P. demanded, gesturing with the gun.

  Wincing, I did as she said, and before I could think of anything to stop it, I felt the satiny cording wrapping twice around my wrists. Then she wrapped it twice more around the backmost wooden slat of the bench, tying it off as expertly as she might a tourniquet.

  I tried to move my hands, my injured wrist singing with pain, but it was no use. I only had one weapon left—the pencil in my boot—but there was no way for me to grab it.

  Across the folly, Pippa was crying, her head bent low as sobs racked her body. I’d been hoping she would try to cut through the cording with the letter opener. Hell, its blade was so small, I didn’t know if it could even cut through one strand, and by the utterly defeated look on her face as she cried, I guessed she’d attempted it, and failed.

  We were both still tied up, and by the way Mrs. P. was pacing around, looking at us with a wild sort of feverish glee, we had little time on our side.

  Then I remembered Dupart. Would he and his team be on their way? Would they even know where to look? I hadn’t hea
rd any approaching sirens at all as Mrs. P. was marching me toward the folly. But then again, would I? Pippa had said the woods offered a unique silence in the middle of bustling Austin.

  There wasn’t much I could do except keep Mrs. P. talking.

  Remembering the motivation of the last killer I’d come across, I asked, “Mrs. P., is all this really because your grandfather was killed”—I just stopped myself from adding, “for being a traitor”—“or is this because, due to his death, you grew up with very little while Pippa and I had more advantages in life?”

  She glared at me, then looked with disdain at her young employer. Then she shrugged.

  “Honestly, I can’t complain about my childhood. My parents gave me a decent life in Florida and I rarely wanted for much. At the Sutton property where my mum worked, they always let me come and swim in the pool, and I got to have my sweet sixteen party there. Yeah, it was real nice, for the most part.”

  “Then why?” I asked. “The least you can do is tell us.” I jutted my chin toward Pippa, who was still crying, albeit more quietly now.

  Mrs. P. walked over to me in a slow, confident manner. “Why, Lucy? Well, it’s because I’d come home from school and find my father sitting and looking at his hands, which were always covered in dirt and grease, and calloused beyond belief. He’d just sit there, looking at them. And when I asked him one day why he did that, do you want to know what he said?”

  She was waiting for my answer. “Yes,” I said, my mouth dry.

  Once again, she affected her working-class English accent. “‘Love,’ he said, ‘It’s because these hands were meant to be soft and clean. They were meant to butter my toast with a silver knife in the morning, grasp the stock of a fine grouse gun during the day, to cup a crystal port glass in the evening, and button silk pajamas at night.’”

  Her clear blue eyes were far off, in the past, then they lasered in on me, almost making me want to flinch. She dropped the accent.

  “He said the same thing every time I asked after that, which wasn’t often. I was still young at the time and selfishly thought Dad just felt like he should have done better for himself and Mum and me. Still, as we both aged, me into my twenties, my dad into middle age, I watched him becoming more and more ashamed of the grease on his hands and only just being able to make ends meet.”

  She swung to face me. “It only got worse after my mum died, too. And soon, he was sick and dying himself, and that’s when he finally told me the truth. Of what my grandmother found out, of who my grandfather was and what he did in the war.” Her eyes had a fanatical gleam to them and her voice was righteous. “How he tried to turn the tide of D-Day, to turn England to the right side, to the side of der Großdeutsches Reich.”

  I saw Pippa go still at the outburst, raise her head, then blink in confusion. Like most Americans, she’d always heard “the Third Reich,” not the German-language der Großdeutsches Reich, for “the Greater German Reich.”

  Mrs. P. hadn’t noticed, though. Without warning, she’d rushed me again. She wanted me off guard, and it worked. I jerked back, banging the back of my head against the limestone wall. Her face was inches from mine, her arms on either side of me, caging me in. I saw the wild look in her eyes and her widening grin at how she’d startled me. I started to turn my face away when her smile gave way to that ever-present chuckle. It sounded sinister now, as puffs of her hot breath landed lightly on my cheek.

  I made myself look at her. If she was going to kill me, she was going to have to look right at me to do it.

  “But your grandfather,” Mrs. P. drawled in acid tones. “He and his filthy cohorts stopped him. My grandfather was their leader before that. He was a sophisticated aristocrat, and a learned man, and those upstarts thought they knew what was better. They were the true traitors!”

  She screamed it so loud, my head jerked back again and I felt my insides clench, waiting to hear the breathlike ffft. Instead, she pushed off my bench with surprising agility and wheeled round to Pippa, raising the pistol in her right hand.

  As she did, however, she’d pushed off hard, making the slat to which my arms were tied bounce in its stone pocket and slide out a bit. My weight was on the foremost slat, so the change went unnoticed by Mrs. P. as she continued to rage. Inch by inch, I began sliding over, using my uninjured fingers to move the cording that attached me to the bench.

  “And your great-grandmother, Miss Pippa?” The derision with which she said Pippa’s name was almost sickening. “She seduced him! That hussy from the backwaters of Corpus Christi, Texas, seduced my high-born grandfather.”

  I felt the first loop of my binds come free as Mrs. P. pointed to herself with her free hand, as if she herself had been hoodwinked by Pippa’s great-grandmother.

  I was struggling to free the second half of my bindings from the slat and, for a brief, nauseating second, I saw Mrs. P. beginning to turn back toward me, when Pippa cried out, “My great-grandmother did what was right! She was brave!”

  Mrs. P. turned back to her, her voice one of purest loathing. “That filthy woman made him think that she believed in his cause. Nell Davis was the traitor who ratted him out. She was at the heart of this treachery. And since I can’t make her pay, you’ll suffer for what she did.” And as she raised her gun, the last bit of my binding escaped the wooden slat.

  Hands still tied behind my back, I pitched forward off my bench like a drunken sprinter out of the starting blocks, aiming for Mrs. P.’s back and shouting, “Pippa, duck!” just as a screaming blond fury darted in through the folly’s entrance.

  Roselyn Sutton and I hit at almost the same time. I’d braced myself to head-butt Mrs. P. between her shoulder blades. Instead, Roselyn hit Mrs. P. like a battering ram from the side, and I smashed into Roselyn.

  Mrs. P. was knocked off her feet and Roselyn and I both went down hard on the limestone floor. I managed to twist and felt the back shoulder of my vest tear as I skidded a few inches on the rough stone, my trussed wrists still behind my back. Stars popped into my eyes and pain shot through both arms. Roselyn, too, went flying off Mrs. P. and onto her hip at Pippa’s feet. I watched the gun go flying out of Mrs. P.’s hand. I heard a breathy ffft and my heart about stopped, then I heard the sound of a chunk of limestone shattering.

  Mrs. P. was stretching out for her gun, kicking her feet out like an angry mule, but Roselyn, who was now clearly in pain, still had a hold on Mrs. P.’s pant leg and was clawing at her.

  Mrs. P. was much stronger than she looked and was gaining inches, though. I struggled to get up, but my left wrist wouldn’t hold me and my right shoulder was shooting shards of pain to my nerve receptors. With a howl of agony, I rolled to my back and used my stomach muscles to pull myself up, my eyes squeezed shut with pain. I had to keep Mrs. P. from that gun!

  “Don’t. Move. Another. Inch.”

  I sucked in a sharp, terrified breath and opened my eyes, ready for the worst.

  In a vision I felt would have made her brave great-grandmother proud, Pippa was standing, tall and strong, all tears gone. The gun was securely in her hands and pointing steadily at her front desk manager. One piece of the satin cording that had bound her wrists was hanging down, gently unraveling as it swayed like a feathery, silvery palm frond.

  Mrs. P. looked up at Pippa with one last rage-filled expression, but her hand went slack just as Detective Dupart and his team rushed into the folly.

  FORTY-FOUR

  “Here we are, the Lancaster Suite,” Nurse Angelique sang out as she rolled me in a hospital wheelchair into my grandfather’s room.

  Grandpa was sitting up, his bruises making him look terrible, yet his expression was as bright as a summer’s day. “Lucy, my darlin’!” He held out his hand to grasp mine.

  And that wasn’t just the painkillers talking in either of us, either, since both of us had refused anything stronger than acetaminophen. Of course, compared to Grandpa’s, my injuries were just minor and mostly superficial, the worst being my wrist, which was badly
sprained, and my shoulder, which was badly bruised.

  “We have matching bruises now, Grandpa.” I grinned, pointing to the one on the side of my forehead that I’d obtained during my collision with Roselyn, having smacked into one of the buttons on the lapel of her trench coat when we both flew at Mrs. P.

  Before becoming a blond battering ram, Roselyn, it seemed, had been off running errands for the gala—all at the request of Mrs. P.—but had come home earlier than expected and was looking for her daughter.

  “Actually,” she’d told me as she, Pippa, and I rode together to the hospital, “I was hoping to discuss Mrs. P. with Pippa. I’d been feeling lately like she’d been overstepping her boundaries, and acting a little strangely.” Meeting my eyes, she said, “When I got home, I parked at my cottage and was heading over to Pippa’s just in time to hear you calling her name and see you go racing off into the woods.”

  Roselyn’s face, unmarked except for dirt and one superficial scrape on her cheek, was set in a protective fury.

  “I followed you, Lucy, and I was just about to call to you when I heard the silenced gunshot. I hid, but saw Mrs. P. taking you hostage. Then I followed y’all to the folly.” She looked at Pippa. “I saw you crying, and heard all those awful things Mrs. P. was saying, and I just didn’t think. I ran at her.”

  “You both did,” Pippa said, smiling at us. “You both saved me.”

  “Yeah, but you got the gun away from her,” I reminded Pippa. “Looking like quite the super spy, I might add. I think we all saved each other.”

  “We did,” Pippa said, and Roselyn proceeded to fuss over her daughter for the rest of the ride, only letting up briefly when Pippa received a call from the vet where Boomer had been taken for observation. He would be fine, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.