Evil Genius

by Rice, Patricia

  I’d almost forgotten the tuna until I sneezed so hard I nearly dropped the wireless keyboard from my lap. Spotting the cat tail as it darted behind the sofa, I grabbed the sheet I’d left hanging over a chair, and lunged for the space where it had disappeared.

  The cat darted out the far side—straight into the trash can I’d deliberately turned on its side in anticipation of this moment.

  It hissed and yowled and had almost rolled the can around to escape when I emptied the can into the sheet. The blamed animal was huge, and holding onto it was a struggle. Sneezing so violently it was a wonder I could stand, I knotted the fancy Egyptian cotton around its hissing burden. I was annoyed enough to choose direct confrontation by returning both sheet and feline to their rightful owner. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind who had chosen to run me out with the cat.

  I was a mass of raging fury as I trudged up three flights of stairs, sneezing like a sitcom character, carrying a snarling sheet over my shoulder. Our host had insisted that he not be disturbed, and I had been prepared to respect his privacy despite my avid curiosity. But his damned snooping devices had invaded our space without apology. He’d possibly injured EG through her father. And now he was trying to kill me with cats. I not only wanted answers, I wanted justice.

  The third floor hallway was heavily carpeted. The soles of my shoes sank inches into the plush silver wool. Closed doors greeted me on both sides of the hall. Apparently the stand EG had reported had been moved. I had no idea which door hid the recluse. Shit. If he really was one of my grandfather’s doddering old cronies, I didn’t want to stumble onto him in the shower and give him a heart attack. I just wanted to straighten out a few of the rules around here.

  I should have been terrified, but stupidity leads to inexplicable courage at times. If Graham was a spook, I had no business tangling with him, but one thing I’d learned in therapy was to confront fear instead of repressing it. I preferred ignoring that advice when it came to myself, but my family is all I have. For them, I’d move the earth.

  Goliath, meet David.

  One would think the cat’s owner would hear the yowling and come to its rescue, but I didn’t hear a sound as I tip-toed down the hall. No music, no keyboard tapping, no shower, nothing.

  I didn’t think he ever left the house. I’d never seen or heard him on the stairs. If there was an elevator anywhere, I hadn’t found it. Was it possible for a man to be that quiet? While sleeping, maybe.

  Deciding if Graham was awake, he’d know I was there and be yelling at me by now, I reverted to form and gave up on the confrontation. I just wanted to be rid of the damned cat and get back to work. I opened the last door on the left side of the corridor, prepared to open the sheet, heave the cat in, and slam the door shut.

  To my utter amazement, I walked into my version of fantasyland—a well-equipped gym. And not just one of those sissy “home gyms” with contraptions more complicated than an industrial automaker’s but one with mats, bags, and barbells. My kind of place.

  Releasing the cat into a room across the hall—an unused guest room from the looks of the dust—I sneaked back to the gym, closed the door, and leaned against it. Reverently, I gazed around at the beautifully equipped, fully modern work-out room. I really shouldn’t.

  I couldn’t resist. It had been over a week since I’d had any outlet for my frustrations, and after the day I’d had, I was wound up tighter than a clock. Just one punch, maybe. Something to soothe the nerves, clear my head, and get me back to work.

  I stepped up to the canvas heavy bag—high quality, with a pair of well-worn gloves hanging on a hook nearby. I couldn’t imagine an old man wearing out bag gloves. After this morning, I might have to give up the reassuring image of our landlord as an old man.

  My gut churned as I realized I’d relied heavily on my imagination and my memory of my grandfather to conjure up the occupant of this floor. Still, any normal, healthy male could not live as quietly as a ghost in the attic, even if the house had been sound-proofed. If I couldn’t have my old man theory, I’d go with the invalid, especially if everyone thought Graham was dead. Maybe the gym was therapy for crippling physical disabilities.

  I tapped the heavy bag tentatively, just to see how much noise I’d make.

  I don’t recommend bare-knuckled punching, but it felt so good to slam my fist into the sand that I couldn’t resist hitting it several more times. Then I gave it a good swift kick. I was getting rusty without my regular workouts.

  My sneezing stopped, and my head was totally in the zone as I advanced from a few swift kicks to practicing my legwork. Kickboxing is an American combination of martial arts borrowed from Japan, China, and Korea. It’s a competitive sport, but most women do it for exercise. I can always use exercise, but I’m in it for therapy.

  And it worked great. Within an hour I was huffing and puffing and dripping with sweat despite the air conditioning. I ruined my T-shirt and wondered if Mallard did laundry. But the frustration was gone and my head was clear. Taking deep breaths to fill my lungs, I let myself out of the gym and stole back down the hall. Still not a peep from the spook.

  I took a shower and put on fresh clothes and was in a much better frame of mind when I went back to work. At least, I was until Nick and EG returned. With their usual flair for the dramatic, they slammed open the library door, startling me from my inspection of the police department’s crime scene notes. Don’t ask me how I cracked their files, and no one will get hurt.

  From the police files, I learned more about the life of a mid-level government hack than I ever wanted to know. Mindy Carstairs had been as much of a geek as I was, except her background was in history, and I was paid better.

  I winced at the slamming door, hoping it hadn’t woken Graham. If he was an invalid, I understood his need for silence.

  “I gave them my school transcript, and they’re still putting me in fourth grade!” EG wailed, throwing her bags on the library table. They had apparently spent a productive day at the mall with my credit card.

  “She hasn’t finished any grade she’s entered.” Nick sauntered in, dumping a file folder of smeary copies of school rules on the table and adding a few more shopping bags. “They’re not taking my word for it that they should just hand her a diploma and be grateful.” He didn’t sound his normal cheerful self, which for Nick passes as irritation. The job of nanny really was beneath his skill level, and I’d sympathize, except I’d done it for years.

  I flicked through the school rules folder, shaking my head at the errors in grammar and syntax and the appalling formatting. I didn’t need to read any of it. I’d seen similar papers follow me home through all my years of desultory schooling. “It’s all a game. You go, you mess with the teacher’s head, they pass you up to the next grade. It won’t hurt you.”

  “I won’t go until you teach me self-defense.” EG plopped down on the century-old office chair, probably adding three dozen cracks to the brittle leather.

  “I’m not teaching you how to kick your classmates. Self-defense is for safety purposes only, not retaliation.” I felt a tug of guilt at not mentioning the gym upstairs. I really ought to get permission before using it again. Besides, we had other issues confronting us. I had to break the news of her father’s arrest, and this did not seem an auspicious moment.

  “You haven’t seen my classmates,” she said gloomily.

  “If the Neanderthals playing ball in the school yard tell us anything, she’s probably right.” Nick gracefully alighted in a wing chair with a copy of the classifieds he’d appropriated from the stack of newspaper he’d left on my desk. “It’s an elementary school, but some of those guys looked sixteen.”

  “You promised me an alternative school,” EG grumbled.

  I understood EG’s plight. That didn’t mean I had a solution. “Look, it won’t kill you to go until I’ve finished this job. Once we catch Brashton, you can attend any school you want.”

  “Show me the trick with the quarters.”

&
nbsp; “The quarters?” Nick raised his eyebrows over the newspaper and made a tsking noise. “What have you been teaching the dear sweet child?”

  “The same trick you used to lay out bullies,” I reminded him.

  Nick had had it rougher than I in some of his Brit boarding schools. His prettiness was an obstacle at an early age. He was the one who had taught me the quarter trick. Some “daddy” or another had thought fighting back—even dirty—would make a man of him.

  Nick and I had consequently spent our childhoods attempting to kill each other with ever more clever fighting techniques, until we’d reached a tacit agreement to kill others instead. Apparently our fights had made it into family legend if EG knew about our tactics.

  “Fine,” he agreed complacently, settling into the chair. “Time to pass on the family secrets. She’s a girl. You do it.”

  “You’re such a help. Thank you.” I pried myself away from the computer, which was all he’d wanted anyway—appreciation for dealing with school officialdom while I had presumably done no more than deliver a letter and play in the library.

  I wasn’t certain I was prepared to tell how I’d spent my day. I didn’t want to leave our new home, and Nick was bound to insist on it if I told him my suspicions about our host possibly being a vengeful invalid.

  “We’ll go out back,” I told the kid. “Just remember, if I catch you using these techniques for anything less than an attempt on your life, I’ll not teach you anything else ever again.”

  “What if they make an attempt on my person?”

  I looked at her scrawny frame as she dashed ahead of me. She was wearing shorts like mine, only her legs weren’t much bigger than a toothpick. “Right, then. If they lay a harmful hand on you, whack ’em.”

  “What if they’re hurting someone else?”

  I could see this might take a left turn through ethics and straight toward the metaphysical. It’s tough knowing when to use violence and when to refrain. That’s why guns scared hell out of me. Running was always the best option, in my opinion. Explain that to a testosterone-fried male who believes he’s bigger and better and should give back as good as he got. Or that he should get in the first shot. Competitive idiots. I hoped EG had more sense.

  I swiped at the perspiration forming on my brow the second we walked out of the air conditioning into the sticky blanket of August humidity. Trying not to breathe in mosquitoes, I showed EG how to wrap her fist around a roll of quarters and use them to give her knuckles extra strength with an uppercut. Then I told her to deck the juniper while I sat on the back step trying not to melt.

  When she’d got in her blows and looked winded but triumphant, I broke the news. “Did you hear about Tex’s arrest?”

  She jammed her puny fist into the tree branches enough to scratch her arm to the elbow. “He’s scum anyway,” she announced.

  Technically, I agreed with that, but it hurt to hear it from a kid who idolized her father. “He’s human,” I suggested. “He’s made mistakes. That doesn’t mean he’s a murderer.”

  She stubbornly refused to look at me. Maybe that was for the best. I didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep. That was Magda’s territory. She would promise to bail Tex out, or break him out with helicopters, or something equally illegal, unjustified, or just plain insane. And she’d probably attempt it, too, until someone talked reason into her. That had been my job for the better part of twenty years. I didn’t know who was doing it these days.

  Instead of making promises, I showed EG a few more tricks she could use to keep the bullies at bay. She might look cool most of the time, but she had as much anger to let out as I did. Her frustration simply didn’t have my repressed sexual bent. I wasn’t a virgin by any means, but I’d been living like a saint for much too long.

  By the time EG had grasped the basics of dirty fighting, she was looking more her smug self, and my clean cut-offs had grass stains on them. Dripping with sweat, we trudged in through the back hall to the delicious scent of chicken marsala from the basement kitchen. I could get used to living like this. My best meals lately had involved Chinese take-out. After all the unanticipated exercise, I was salivating.

  We trotted downstairs, peeked in the kitchen, and discovered Nick glaring at the dumb waiter. I assumed it was used to serve the dining room, but it might also deliver to the third floor. There was no sign of Mallard or mouth-watering dinner.

  “You’re cooking?” I asked hopefully.

  “He only prepared two servings,” Nick said with disgust. “I utterly refuse to defrost good poultry in the microwave. Looks like stirfry for us.”

  Damn. My stomach had been prepared for a real dinner. I’d had enough stirfry to last me into hell. I’d had a rough day and would have enjoyed a pleasant time-out before returning to my frustrating work. I swallowed my disappointment. “How about pizza?” I suggested.

  “If you mix the sauce while I mix the dough.”

  I’d been thinking in terms of ordering out, but if Nick was willing to make the real stuff, I wasn’t arguing. Carbohydrates were my friends.

  Which was how the kitchen became a war zone. Nick is a great cook, but he left a lot to be desired on the scullery maid side. And all I was interested in was eating and getting back to work. So in retaliation for being left off the guest list, we filled the sink with dirty pots and bowls and perhaps smeared a bit of sauce here and there. Flour littered floor and cabinets as we carried our dinner upstairs.

  With the three of us settled at the formal dinner table, I savored the perfect combination of garlic, oregano, and tomato, with some delicious Italian sausage Nick had found in the freezer. “All right, here’s the plan,” I said. I’d had time to prioritize my to-do list and re-adjust my thinking while we’d prepared the pizzas.

  I swallowed a little bit of heaven before returning to professional mode. “If you haven’t run my credit card into overdrive,” I lifted a questioning eyebrow at Nick, who shook his head, “we’ll rent a car so you can drive out to the casino in the mountains tomorrow. If you can make enough to pay Oppenheimer’s retainer, I think we need to go for a three-fold approach.”

  Nick’s mathematical genius practically guaranteed he would win at any game that involved odds instead of chance.

  “Oppenheimer will drag a lawsuit into eternity,” EG predicted before I could tell them my plan to keep our house.

  “Even I can figure that.” Nick dismissed her pessimism. “He’s just backup in case we can’t find Reginald or bring his law firm to their knees some other way. Telling me if they have high-stakes Omaha would be more useful.”

  “I don’t know card games.” EG shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Can’t predict what I don’t know. Want to teach me to play?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Excellent. I’ll teach you to fight dirty and Nick can teach you to cheat at cards and you’ll have a well-rounded education.”

  “Beats fourth grade.”

  I was a wee bit sensitive on the subject of education, and I wasn’t taking any further sulking on the matter. I slapped down my tumbler of ice water and glared at her. “If you don’t want an education, then I’ll send you back to Magda, and I’ll go back to Atlanta.” With Tex in jail, that she certainly couldn’t go to her father went unsaid. “With your genius, just studying history alone could put you into the class of people who can save the world. You have to learn from the mistakes of the past to change the future.”

  “I can read about the past without going to school,” she pointed out.

  “You can’t interpret what you read until you hear it discussed by people who have experienced it,” I retorted. “School, or Magda?”

  She shoved pizza into her mouth and shut up.

  I could be persuasive in my own way. I turned back to Nick who was jotting notes in his PDA. “Do you think you can walk away with enough cash to give Oppenheimer his fee?”

  “Sure, as long as you don’t need me to go back to that casino. I’ll go on their banned list if I take it all
in one day. What about Brashton? Won’t we need funds to hunt him down?”

  “Brashton is the sole owner of a corporation called IWM registered in Delaware.” I summarized my research. “IWM lists assets of stocks, bonds, cash, a yacht, and property in St. Kitts. Guess whose assets they might be?”

  “Our grandfather owned property in St. Kitts?” Nick looked fascinated.

  EG gave him one of her evil looks. “Brashton bought the yacht and property with Grandfather’s money,” she concluded without me explaining, “so he could set up offshore accounts and run away.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and attempted to steer the discussion back to the point. “The yacht is named The Patsy. I’m tracking its course at the moment. I need to buy open-ended plane tickets to St. Kitts so I’m prepared when he finally lands there. That’s pricey.”

  “Oppenheimer, option number one; Brashton, option number two.” Nick was always good at math. “Your Cambodian is option number three? Do you really think you can find him? Or that our landlord will let us remain here if you do?”

  If we were to help Senator Tex, it was more imperative than ever that we have a place to stay in D.C. , and this house was our best alternative. I didn’t mention my suspicions about the connection between Graham and Tex aloud, given the electronics of the dining room. “I think I can find Pao.” Amid all my other work, I’d been fleshing out the investigative scheme I’d been toying with. I might despise venturing into the real world, but I knew how. “I just don’t know if I can find him before we can reach Brashton.”

  Nick and EG both sobered. Neither of them are dumb.

  “If we don’t find him by next Wednesday, the other options won’t help us, will they?” Nick asked gloomily. “We’ll be out on our ears long before Oppenheimer acts, and even if Brashton lands in St. Kitts tomorrow, it will take you the last few days of our stay to go down there, and you can’t search for Pao at the same time.”