“Just like old times,” I murmured, spinning around to jog toward the apartment with Nick on my trail. At least he’d been bright enough to leave his luggage elsewhere.
“And you’re looking more like Magda with every passing year,” he agreed in his own oblique way. “What is that you’re wearing? Pajamas? Why don’t you wear something to flaunt what you have instead of hiding behind that abysmal disguise?”
“What, and repeat Magda’s mistakes?” I asked in incredulity, reaching for my keys as we approached the apartment door. “I don’t need the attention, thank you very much.”
“Some things never change,” he agreed with good humor. “Do you ever intend to grow up and quit competing with her?”
“I’ve changed,” I declared. “I’m working on the important stuff inside and not the superficial stuff on the outside. I don’t need to compete with anyone.”
“Tell me another one, Dr. Faustus.”
He looked good today, as usual. We both have our mother’s angled cheekbones, but Nick inherited her blond hair as well. I don’t remember his father, but he apparently had a firm square jaw with a nice cleft that he passed on. And Nick got the height in the family as well. I figured him for movie star material, but he had absolutely no memory for words. He did, however, possess an aptitude for mathematics that served him well in Monte Carlo.
“I like to believe I’m on the side of the angels,” I countered. “Cover my back.”
“Turned chicken since last we met?” he taunted, scanning the street, while I undid the locks.
If I didn’t know him so well, I’d take that as a reference to my refusal to compete with my mother, but Nick isn’t that deep. He was referring to the punks behind us.
“Until today, I’d taught them to leave me alone. It would have been nice to keep it that way.” I let him into the foyer and secured the bolt behind us before taking the stairs down to my rooms.
Showing her training, EG had already made herself at home. She’d borrowed my extra set of sheets to make up her air mattress, tucked her suitcase under my cot, and was pigging down my raspberry yogurt.
“Hey, Eezhee.” Nick slurred the initials into a Slovakian name. “It really is like old times, isn’t it? How long have you been mooching off the czarina?”
I left them to catch up and did my usual introverted disappearance by retreating to my inner sanctum. My family hadn’t been here for an hour, and already I was a marked target in the neighborhood. This was not an unusual development.
On my own, I might have fought the odds just to keep from moving again. I liked the old Victorian I’d made my home these last few years. Admittedly, my two-room coal cellar wasn’t the most gracious home in the world, but it was mine, and I treasured the few possessions I’d collected. I liked my antique iron bedstead with the flowers painted on it, and the copper and black Persian rug with the moth holes. They were mine, and I’d worked hard to earn them.
But until I knew what to do about EG, I needed a safe house, and this wasn’t a neighborhood for kids, especially one like EG who got in trouble by opening her mouth.
As usual when I had some hard thinking to do, I sat down at my laptop. Writing was a recommended anger management technique that I hadn’t practiced enough. As soon as I poured my frustration into these pages, my brain started whirring.
The first thing I acknowledged was that we’d just made ourselves targets for every gang member in the area. The humiliation of being beaten by a pip-squeak and a gay male model would incite the hoodlums like rabid gunslingers. They’d have to come after us just to prove they were still top dogs.
I’d been through this enough times to know it was fruitless hoping trouble would go away. Once the rabble discovered my family’s eccentric propensities, we were hounded into either retaliation or escape. Not for the first time, I wished my family were normal with a huge house someplace safe and boring where we could live in peace.
I didn’t follow that thought to its logical conclusion immediately, because in my family, it wasn’t a logical conclusion. No, the next step of logic was to wonder again why EG and Nick had arrived on my doorstep on the same day and conclude that my first intuition had been right. Something was vastly wrong.
Had I kept typing, I might have reached the right solution sooner, but the realization that I’d been scammed drove me out of my seat and back to the front room again.
“All right, no more evasions.” I waited in the doorway, hands on skinny hips, trying to look formidable. “I want a good explanation of why you’re here.”
Nick had the experience to look suitably innocent. EG didn’t. She shoved a spoonful of my raspberry yogurt into her mouth to cover up, but I had two decades of practice over her. I snatched the cup away and pointed at the door.
“I get the whole story or I’ll put you on the first train to D.C. and your dad if you don’t spill.” This last was directed at EG. Nick could take care of himself.
EG’s lower lip trembled, and Nick sighed in resignation. Another woman would have felt guilty yelling at a crying kid, but I crossed my arms to hold in my gut-wrenching dismay and gazed at my half brother for explanation.
Nick shrugged. “Don’t you ever read the newspapers?”
“Why? They only make me want to walk the street carrying a sign saying Repent or the world shall end tomorrow.” I hadn’t buried myself in the basement just to avoid family. There was a whole world out there that I would avoid if I could. That way, I could live with the fantasy that the rest of the universe contained sane people, and it was only my piece of it that was nuts.
EG went to my computer, hit a few keys, and called up a news channel. There, in big bold letters I couldn’t miss, was the headline: SENATOR TEX HAMMOND A SUSPECT IN AIDE’S MURDER.
Tex was EG’s dad.
Chapter Two
Ana visits the ancestral home and ends up talking to a lawyer.
The knowledge that the family I loved and hadn’t seen in five years had tracked me down so I could solve a murder brought me to the logical solution I’d failed to reach earlier. I’d always believed my younger half-siblings belonged with their influential fathers, but I’d never had the money to ship them half way around the world to whatever distant outpost they inhabited.
Suddenly, I realized even their ambitious fathers might be questionable as caregivers. A senator accused of murder? That was a new low even for us.
EG had followed Tex’s career for as long as she was able to spell his name, which was to say from about the age of one. She idolized the man. Nobody said geniuses were any less stupid than the rest of us.
Watching EG’s heartbreak, I kicked myself for not seeing the obvious sooner. I wasn’t the only one who needed a permanent home. We needed a safe harbor—together—when the world turned on us. I was already reaching for my crusader’s helmet.
Maybe it was realizing that the senator was in D.C. and that EG would want to go to him that made me wake up to what I should have seen before—why shouldn’t the man who’d let the Hungarian Princess loose upon the world support his progeny’s progeny in their time of trouble? Magda might be chronically bankrupt, but I knew from research that my grandfather wasn’t. And Grandfather Maximillian lived in D.C.
How sweet was that?
In all the years we traipsed around Europe and Asia and Africa, Magda had never mentioned her father except in fairy tales of kings and queens and lost princesses. I hadn’t seen him since before Nick was born. My memory of him was dim, but as far as I was aware, our grandfather had never exhibited any interest in us since we’d left D.C. But that was a minor consideration in my moment of determination. I remembered my grandfather’s house. It was huge. And surrounded by equally large and secure residences. It was the ideal safe haven.
All I had to do was show him the wisdom of taking in his own kin before Magda turned them into terrorists. Or their fathers turned them into murderers. For my family, confronting a rich old stranger was as natural as sunrise.
/> I reached into the refrigerator for the raspberry muffins. Both EG and Nicholas followed my every move as if I could solve world peace and hunger at the same time.
I handed each of them a muffin. “I’m not rowing this boat alone. If you want me to help, then we’re all in it together.” Figuring they were old enough to handle them, I laid down the ground rules.
They waited expectantly, not having a clue as to what I was talking about but apparently willing to find out.
“Our grandfather will know the truth about the senator,” I announced. “Book bus tickets to D.C. and start packing.”
If silence could be frozen, I’d accomplished it. They hadn’t known Maximillian existed.
~
“You’re going to regret this,” EG warned for the thirty-millionth time since we’d left Atlanta. She was hunched up with her arms wrapped around her skinny knees between me and Nick in the back seat of the taxi as it maneuvered D.C. traffic. The cab had no working a/c, and clouds of exhaust fumes and hot August humidity mixed with our anxious perspiration into a decidedly unwholesome atmosphere.
I was still astonished that sophisticated Nick was willing to accept my terms. I’d made him promise to handle nanny duties, using the excuse that I was the only one in a position to make a living at the moment. Have laptop, will travel, and all that. Apparently he really was depressed, or as curious about our past as I was. He’d agreed without a qualm.
“It’s time we met our grandfather,” I insisted over EG’s pessimistic attitude. “We can’t live like vagabonds forever. You need a real home.” That’s what I’d wanted when I was EG’s age, but then, I wasn’t on quite the same genius level. Maybe geniuses didn’t need homes, but at nine, even EG couldn’t live alone.
I had a small nest egg that might have set us up elsewhere, but if we had to be in D.C., my money wouldn’t last long. D.C. is an expensive town. I was still ambivalent about helping Tedious Tex, EG’s dad, but I was bouncing with excitement at the idea of someone else contributing to the family effort.
Grandfather had come to mind first, but now that we were here, Tex had a lot to account for as well. The man paid child support, but to my knowledge, he’d never otherwise acknowledged the existence of his brilliant daughter. I could easily believe a parent that pathetic guilty of murder, but he was EG’s father. She wouldn’t believe it. She was still a kid who wanted to love her charismatic dad. The grass-is-always-greener syndrome, I called it. Most children of separated parents suffer from it.
“You haven’t heard from Grandfather in how many years?” she asked. “You should have given me time to do the research.”
Grandfather Maximillian had been alive and well when I’d checked at Christmas. At the time, I’d been lonely and dreaming of family, but I hadn’t acted on my foolish dreams beyond research. Sentimentality is so not me.
I wasn’t about to house my half-siblings in Atlanta for the time it would take to run a full inquiry into our grandfather. There had been a bus leaving within hours of Nick’s arrival, and I’d made certain we were on it. Uprooting myself—again—required determination.
“If we live here, you could go to a real school,” I interjected, knowing the school argument would divert her from her gloomy prognostications.
“I do not need a school,” she grumbled, but the subject silenced her as anticipated.
I was feeling apprehensive enough without her wet blanket attitude.
I was curious about our grandfather, of course, but I figured anyone who had fathered our mother wasn’t the kind of stable authority figure little kids needed. Given what I’d learned in my research, I had him pegged for Mafia.
I also assumed my mother would never have left a luxurious nest if it was available, so there had to be a major flaw in the household, even though I had this vague memory of his home as a welcoming shelter. I’d just been three at the time and recalled the house only because I adored the heavy bronze spaniels guarding the fireplace. I’d never been allowed to have pets, so I must have thought of them as real dogs.
That Magda hadn’t mentioned her father’s name in a quarter of a century was proof enough that returning to the ancestral home was akin to opening Pandora’s box.
I don’t remember a grandmother, and our mother’s bedtime stories tended to end in the tragic death of the beautiful Hungarian queen, so I had to assume she was out of the picture.
“You should have checked the address again before we left,” Nicholas murmured as the taxi cruised down a narrow street of historic D.C. mansions. Half of them looked like foreign embassies—the substantial kind with turrets and enough brick and stone to pave a path to heaven. Or hell. We gaped like hayseeds. I don’t know about EG and Nick, but my mind boggled at the idea of Magda coming from one of those castles. Maybe she really was a princess.
“I think God must live here,” Nick continued in awe, echoing my impression.
“Or George Washington,” EG muttered.
Admittedly, the sense of history contained in the towering Gothic Victorians and eccentric Romanesque Revival houses was overwhelming, but unlike my siblings, I felt at home here. Maybe it was the familiar urban landscape of belching buses and tacky commercial signs that welcomed me. I just knew the old houses whispered security. Maybe in my heart of hearts I longed for the home that three-year-old child in me remembered.
“The man has lived here for over seventy years. Why would he move now?” I asked, dismissing their fears as if I had none. Big sisters are supposed to be reassuring.
“I can give you at least three reasons,” EG replied. “And if you had given me even half a second to check—”
“I don’t care if he’s dead, or in a nursing home.” I didn’t inquire into the third possibility. The first two were scary enough. “The fact remains, we are his only living kin. Whatever Magda did to him shouldn’t be blamed on us. I’m sure he’ll learn to appreciate our talents.”
Nick snorted at the reference to “talents” but generously refrained from a cocky remark for EG’s sake. “I can’t believe we really come from a background like this,” he said with a measure of awe as he gazed up at the historic mansions.
Our ensuing silence evoked our agreement. We’d really thought the “coming from wealth” part of Magda’s story was simply a line in her well-embellished fairy tale.
“By George, if he lives alone in one of those, he won’t even know we’re in the house.” Recovering, Nicholas smoothed a blond swathe of hair off his forehead, straightened his square shoulders, and morphed into his Prince Charming mode. It’s positively amazing how he does that. “These places are large enough to house a circus.”
“Which they will, if we move in,” I murmured as the taxi pulled up to the curb.
The houses on this block were more urban and less awesome, but we stopped in front of an impressive brown brick Italianate mansion complete with square tower, gingerbread gables, and a covered porch. Unlike many of the townhouses around it, it was on a corner and set off slightly from its neighbor by an alley. I recognized the black wrought iron fence overgrown with ivy and the green marble Chinese lions guarding the steps. I had nicked the ball beneath one paw with a croquet mallet.
In disbelief and astonishment, I realized I had once actually lived in a mansion.
Funny, how memories come pouring back when primed by a familiar sight or smell. I’d never pegged myself as a sentimental person, but gazing up at that ugly house as Nick paid the taxi driver, I was practically choking on a lump of nostalgia. We’d checked our luggage at the bus station until we knew what kind of reception waited for us. I was half inclined to return to the taxi and catch the next bus out. On my own, running away had always been the best strategy.
Did I really want to know why we had been banned from the Garden of Eden?
“I told you so,” EG gloated as I froze at the gate.
I drew a deep breath and took confidence from my geek shield of denim jumper and tight French braid. As a teenager, I’d adopted
the quiet confidence of Princess Leia as my role model, but the braid was just to keep my waist-length, black Irish hair out of my face. Chin high, I strode up the short walk to wallop the brass knocker against a mahogany door. I wasn’t letting a house intimidate me, even if it was larger than the high school I almost graduated from.
I’d ordered EG to wear her blue jeans and a white T-shirt so she looked like a normal nine-year-old and not a tiny Goth, but I hadn’t been able to persuade her to put her long black hair in pigtails. Nicholas looked his usual spectacular James-Bondish self, although the yellow ascot was a dead give-away that he was as nervous as I was. What could I say? He deserved his armor as much as I did. We had good reason to hide behind stereotypes.
No one answered my knock.
“The shrub border has been weeded and watered,” Nick noted. “Someone lives here.”
“Not Grandfather,” EG warned—again.
“It’s our ancestral home. We have a right to visit.” I slammed the knocker in a rapid tattoo that should have echoed through the Halls of Montezuma.
I could hear air conditioning running inside. A place like this had to have servants.
“May I help you?” a voice intoned from the intercom hidden behind a pot of pothos cascading from a sphinx head near the door. I calculated the sphinx as a bronze original and not one of those cheap plaster things adorning Atlanta garden walls. I had an eye for historic detail developed over a lifetime of drooling over other people’s houses.
“Anastasia Devlin here,” I informed the disembodied voice. “I wish to see my grandfather.”
Nicholas elbowed me, and EG scowled, but I didn’t see any purpose in terrifying the old guy by telling him a regiment of Magda’s offspring was at the door.
The silence following my announcement was striking. I opted for the fantasy of imagining a supercilious butler progressing through marble hallways, dusting the woodwork in his anxiousness to garner the approval of the prodigal grandchild.
Evil Genius Page 2