Twin Genius

by Patricia Rice

  “He and Mallard are off on holiday,” I blithely lied. “And only Mallard can drive the Phaeton.” Another lie. Nick could too. But Mallard really would behead us if we dared stick an evergreen out the window of the old limo, while dripping pine sap and needles across the antique seats. The Phaeton would remain sacred from our disasters.

  “We should get a tree for Graham’s office too!” EG announced, as if she hadn’t heard a word about hauling heavy trees around.

  She was nine. In her head, Santa probably brought trees. Not that she’d been brought up to believe in Santa, but the whole world was some kind of magic to kids who understood little of it.

  “If Graham wants a tree in his office, he can buy one. And if he wants us to decorate it, he’ll let us know. Let’s stick to one task at a time.” I didn’t mind being the practical bully, but once in a while, it would be nice to be the good witch.

  Nick arrived to steer the two youngest on the tree hunt. He seemed quite enthusiastic about the project, especially since the snow had cleared away and left behind a beautiful blue sky. “Red and gold ornaments,” he informed me as the kids wrapped up. “We need a theme and as long as we’re stuck with those hideous heirlooms, red and gold works.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the parlor with its maroon velvet draperies and gold horsehair sofa.

  “You’ll be lucky if we find broken glass. We make no guarantees.” I turned to Zander. “Are you good with helping me hunt through storage or would you rather go out in the fresh air and tree hunt?”

  “I would like to explore the house more, please,” he said. “And you will need help carrying boxes.”

  We sent the others off into the crisp winter air. Without Mallard to serve us, the teapot lingered in the kitchen where we’d eaten. I poured myself a new mug of tea, Zander made a cup of coffee for himself, and then I stole Mallard’s key ring from his cubbyhole office.

  Since this was ostensibly Graham’s house, I’d not gone where I hadn’t been invited except in case of emergencies. My definition of emergency was pretty broad but hadn’t yet included most of the basement storage rooms. They were locked, for one thing. I respected locks, up to a point.

  We’d only recently learned that the coal cellar contained a hidden door to a tunnel leading to the garage on the street behind us. Either Max had been a secretive bastard, or this house had belonged to a speakeasy in the past. Or both.

  Since Mallard had been the one to mention ornaments in storage to EG, I counted that as excuse enough to go looking. I unlocked the first set of double closet doors and pushed them wide.

  Mallard was organized, I’d give him that. Floor to ceiling metal shelves lined each ugly cement and concrete-block wall, with two aisles of shelves in the center of the low-ceilinged space. Each one was filled with neatly labeled cardboard boxes. I found a switch that lit overhead fluorescents, but I handed Zander a flashlight, just in case.

  “If you find anything labeled dead body, don’t tell me, okay?” I headed to our right, leaving Zander to start on the left.

  I thought I heard him chuckle. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

  “These appear to be linens and clothes,” he called a few minutes later.

  “Draperies and towels over here. We could start our own Goodwill store.” I considered opening a few to see what condition they were in, but there were more shelves and another closet to examine.

  “Glassware,” he called back. “Dishes, candlesticks and knick-knacks.”

  “Honestly? He stored and labeled a box of knick-knacks? Did they never throw anything out?” I ran my flashlight over dusty labels of ancient household items. If the money ran out, we could start an antique mall or at least a thrift shop.

  “This aisle contains boxes that all start with Magda,” he said uncertainly.

  Crap. That proved they never threw out anything. “Skip that one.” I had a burning curiosity but no masochistic tendencies.

  Not finding anything blatantly labeled Christmas, or even holiday, we moved on to the next closet. The shelves in this area were made of heavy wood and covered in a century of dust. The boxes were wood, also, similar to the tangerine crates they have in grocery stores this time of year, only much larger and with lids.

  The overhead light was a dangling bulb.

  “Okay, I’m gathering this place hasn’t been touched in a while,” I said, wiping my hand through the thick dust.

  Zander flashed his light over the nearest crate. The label had turned nearly brown, and the ink had faded to chicken scratches. “How long did our grandfather live here?” he asked in awe. “I’m pretty sure this label says 1901.”

  “He wasn’t that old. I haven’t done the research. I thought he’d bought it, but maybe his parents lived here first?” I moved in the other direction, running my flashlight over more browned paper with fading ink. If I had anything to hide, this would be the place, except it would be difficult to do without disturbing the dust.

  “It is very strange to think that this represents the home of half my family,” he said in awe. “I am so used to my father’s village being my family, but here. . .” He let out a sigh. “I am not even certain who I am anymore.”

  I’d seen his father’s family. They were one generation short of a Zulu tribe. The one time I’d seen them, they had worn bones in their hair and loincloths and had been huge and terrifying—no doubt deliberately to scare the white-faced city kid. Modern financial analyst Zander with his pale brown skin and skinny shoulders had a lot of our mother in him. I could see where he’d be conflicted.

  “Our ancestors ground us, they do not make us,” I said, repeating some idiocy I’d probably heard from a therapist. “I’m pretty certain Max was no better than he should be. People don’t become humongously wealthy by abiding by laws, so don’t idealize this side of your family, please.” I was thinking we probably had bootleggers on our family tree if this house had belonged to Max’s family. That would explain a lot.

  “What was our grandmother’s name?” he called from behind a distant dusky stack.

  “Antonina. I used to think my name was some corruption of hers until I recognized Magda’s predilection for naming us after royalty. Why?”

  His head popped out from behind a stack. A gray dust-coated cobweb dangled from his neatly cropped dark hair. “There are boxes here labeled A.M. Do you think these are hers?”

  My grandmother had died when Magda was still little. I knew nothing of her beyond that. I was curious about our past—but we had all we could do to handle our present.

  “Possibly. I don’t suppose any of them say anything obvious like A.M.’s ornaments?”

  “No, but judging by the level of dust, they were all stored on this shelf at the same time. How long ago did she die?” His voice was muffled as he ducked down to examine the bottom shelves.

  I performed a few mental calculations. “She died when Magda was six, I think, maybe about 1970. Do they have tests to determine if that’s forty years of dust?”

  “No, but the labels are less faded than the ones where you are, if that counts. The handwriting is illegible however. Would it be all right if I pull out this one that seems to have straw sticking out of it?”

  I grimaced. “What happens to straw after forty years?”

  “Mold most likely. Everything down here is probably ruined. But ornaments from that long ago would have been very thin glass and require packing.”

  I heard him haul a box off the shelf without my giving him the go ahead. Fair enough. The boxes belonged to him as much as they did to me. Just because I’d spent my first few years in this house, and his had been spent in Africa, didn’t change the family genes.

  I heard grunts of disgust. Unable to contain my curiosity, I wandered back to see what he’d unearthed.

  Disintegrated straw, dead spiders, filthy layers of dust—and crystal globes so delicate I feared they’d shatter if we removed the crud. I’d seen Czech crystal like this in museums. These ornaments were far older than
the 1970s.

  On top was a crystal oval framing an old color photo of a young couple and a toddler girl—our grandparents and mother. I’d never seen my grandmother. She wore the hideous bouffant hairdo of the time. They actually looked like a normal 1970’s suburban family—

  And not like the Machiavellian characters I knew at least two of them to be.

  Chapter 7

  “Reverend Arden gave me a ticket to tonight’s Messiah!” Maryam waved one of the coveted pieces of cardboard as she bounced into their shared mobile home.

  The words struck Juliana with a wave of guilt and fear. Unable to reveal her unproved, incomplete theories, she could only smile to share her roommate’s excitement. “You have only a few hours to prepare. What will you wear?”

  Maryam had a colorful collection of shalwar kameez—pants and shirts—that she wore every day, but she also had an enviable collection of heavily embroidered Punjabi dresses. If Maryam hadn’t been one of the shortest people on campus, and Juliana one of the tallest, she would have borrowed any of Maryam’s outfits in an eye blink. They both had dark hair and eyes and brown complexions, so they favored bright reds and golds and blues—a fact that gave her pause now.

  As far as she was aware, even though the students working at JACAD were both male and female and predominantly people of color, only girls with light skins had received tickets. Juliana had wanted to believe that most of the lucky ticket-holders came from English-speaking families like hers and were better able to communicate. But she’d seen blond German and French girls who barely spoke English receive the coveted symphony and theater tickets before she had been offered one. Again—that could be a notion developed out of offended feelings of rejection.

  She’d only recently switched from offense to concern after realizing that the girls who received tickets often started dating the men they met outside the school. Several were long-time students who had given up their studies and not been seen again.

  The roommate she’d had when she’d first moved here haunted her. Esther had been one of the second year students. She’d been dating a wealthy older man whose identity she kept secret. When they’d broken up, Esther had been angry for weeks. Then she’d packed her bags and said she was going home. Why hadn’t she let Julie know she’d returned safely home as she’d promised?

  Julie would like to believe that Maryam receiving the ticket was evidence that her observations of prejudice over the tickets were incorrect. And if the tickets brought Maryam in contact with wealthy older men, then Julie hoped her friend was sensible enough not to fall prey to temptation.

  That did not mean she should send her friend out completely unprepared. Juliana prayed silently as she helped her roommate choose the perfect outfit, but at the same time, she was building an emergency kit in her mind.

  “How will you go to this place?” Juliana asked.

  “They send a car,” Maryam said with relish. “I am so tired of that rattily old bus! I know I am to aspire to a life of poverty, but the bus stinks.”

  Like Juliana, Maryam came from a fairly well-to-do, educated family and was accustomed to a higher standard of living than an aging trailer park. Her much older brother worked at the embassy, but so far, he’d been too busy to bother taking Maryam anywhere.

  “Do you know if there will be others with you?” Juliana hunted through her trunk for the items Zander had insisted that she bring with her to this country.

  Studying their tiny wall mirror, preening with the gold embroidered shawl she’d flung over her thick dark hair, Maryam shrugged. “I’ve not heard of others. I guess I will find out. It does not matter. For a change, I will see the rich and glamorous part of DC, and enjoy real music! One needs the occasional reward. I’m sure you’ll be offered one soon.”

  Juliana didn’t say that she’d already turned it down or she’d ruin her friend’s pleasure in the moment. “I’m sure you will have a lovely time, but it is a big city, and you are unfamiliar with it. You should not go unprepared. Take your phone, some money, and a credit card. Zander gave me this whistle flashlight. It can serve as an alarm. You are not large enough to fight, so if there is trouble, run and cry for help.”

  Maryam looked at her as if she were crazed. “What kind of trouble would there be in a concert hall? And how could I run in these?” She held up one foot bearing her favorite pair of high heels.

  “I would suggest wearing the gorgeous gold slippers instead, but you could pack them in your purse, just in case,” Juliana urged. “What if there was a fire? Or a terrorist attack?”

  Her roommate rolled her eyes. “This is America. We are safe here.”

  Not from the kind of predators Juliana feared. She packed the items into Maryam’s gold purse. “Take them for me, so I can sleep while you are out having a good time. Do you have 911 programmed into your phone?”

  After much good-natured arguing, she sent Maryam into the world as prepared as was possible.

  Now, she had to find a printer for her photo and some way of locating the coordinates Zander had sent. Sneaking and stealing weren’t her favorite pastimes, but she’d been left with little choice. Perhaps she should have gone into DC and slipped away, but then she wouldn’t be able to come back here. And if she couldn’t work here, she would have no means of uncovering whatever was going on.

  Because her fears for her missing roommate Esther were based on her terror of what the photos on her video cameras had revealed.

  I admired the evergreen fragrance of the tipsy tree framed by our large front window. “It’s fat,” I said dubiously, studying the thick layers of long needles.

  “I vote we wrap an apron around the bottom and put a hat on top and call it Mrs. Frosty Claus,” Patra said, sipping at her coffee and tilting her head to the angle of the tree. She looked as if she’d just dragged out of bed and pulled on leggings and Sean’s sweatshirt. She’d stacked her heavy chestnut hair on top of her head in a precarious knot. I tugged my own plain black braid self-consciously, knowing I could never achieve Patra’s casual glamour.

  Maybe I should have tried. I quickly shut out the wayward thought of Graham’s empty office.

  EG sent Patra an evil look and dug through the box of ornaments.

  Zander and I had unanimously voted to rewrap the delicate ornaments in a stronger box and had bought “learner” sets of plastic and wood from a drugstore. We’d gone a little crazy, so there was roping and tinsel and blinky lights. We’d torn them out of their packaging and repurposed one of Magda’s dusty boxes to hold them. Until this moment, EG had accepted them with delight.

  “There’s no star,” EG said with a pout after she’d spread the loot across the priceless Persian carpet.

  “No angel either?” Nick asked, occupying the Morris chair. Nick didn’t do casual. For our Christmas tree experience, he was wearing gray pin-striped trousers and a pink dress shirt with contrasting collars and cuffs that matched the stripes of his trousers. At least he wasn’t wearing a tie.

  So, I wasn’t proficient at decorating trees, and Nick wasn’t educated in choosing one. I hadn’t known a star was required, and he hadn’t known to check the trunk. I sipped my tea and dismissed the critics in favor of action. “I don’t suppose there’s any way of making it stand straight?”

  We all studied the crooked trunk nailed onto a rather rickety cross of two-by-fours.

  “We’d need a saw to cut off the bent part, and then we’d have to saw off the lower branches.” Tudor pointed out the obvious. Garbed in his usual grunge, his auburn curls needing a cut, he had his ever-present tablet in hand and was poking at some game while keeping up with the conversation. Sixteen was an awkward age. He didn’t want to appear childish like EG, but he was as interested in the production as any of us.

  Graham and Mallard still hadn’t returned. I was convinced that if Mallard were dead, he’d come back to haunt us over the destruction of his parlor. I studied the mess EG had created.

  “I’m guessing we start with the lights,”
I suggested. “And we can look for a star or angel later. It probably ought to be something special to celebrate our first Christmas together.”

  EG accepted that. She tugged out a string of lights and looked expectantly at Nick, who just grinned at her and shoved a cookie in his mouth.

  We’d spent some valuable family hours bonding over cookies before we started on the decorating. The results were predictably disastrous but edible. Luckily, we didn’t have high standards when it came to our own cooking.

  Zander took the string of lights, studied the crooked tree, and drew the coffee table up to it. I watched in trepidation as he stepped on the expensive antique, but the sturdy legs held up to his weight. He carefully clipped a light near the top, and wound the string as far as he could reach. Almost as tall as Zander, Tudor finally dragged himself up to grab the string and wind it around the back.

  The rest of us threw out various instructions on where and how to fix the lights, and Zander and Tudor cheerfully ignored us. We were a masterpiece of international holiday good cheer and incompetence.

  “Those are perfectly hideous ornaments,” Nick murmured as I perched on the arm of his chair and watched EG hang the first red ball. “If you want to hide the real stuff, you could have at least bought from somewhere besides Tar-zhay.”

  “Not enough time. When we have more time, I think we ought to make our own, or hang ones that have meaning to us.” I pulled the oval frame from my sweatshirt pocket and showed it to him. “Or you could hang this if you’re feeling really sentimental.”

  He took the frame and studied our mother and her parents. “I see where we get our cheekbones and why Magda calls herself a Hungarian princess. That looks like pearls on her little round neck, and our grandmother is wearing a fortune in rubies. I don’t suppose you found a box labeled jewels.”

  “No, but you’re free to search for yourself. Bring spider spray, a vacuum cleaner, and an army of dust mops.” I left him with the frame and went to help EG hang a feathered hummingbird toward the top of the tree. I had no idea what birds had to do with Christmas, but it was red and gold, as specified.