Evil Genius

by Rice, Patricia

  “Now that you’ve got that out of your system, shower, and get in here. We need to talk.”

  The words echoed from the track lighting on the ceiling. I lay there glaring at them, wondering which one hid the camera. It was a damned good thing I wasn’t a killer like my mother, or I’d have targeted my first victim.

  But I needed to talk, and EG and Mallard didn’t offer the kind of conversation I wanted.

  I showered and retreated to my dowdy denim dress for the interview. Graham knew Magda. He wouldn’t be impressed by my feeble attempts to vamp him. Besides, I needed the comfort of familiarity. I braided my wet hair and returned upstairs.

  As before, the computer room door was open, and the only light inside came from the monitors on the walls. I sneezed the instant I entered the room.

  “There are pills you can take for allergies,” he said from his chair in front of a screen depicting the Lincoln crossing the intersection in front of the Pierce-Arrow.

  I didn’t know if he was watching CNN or had a personal connection with a satellite. He was far more than a news junkie, and I had the sudden sensible desire to get the hell out of there. But rage and my libido overruled sense, and his preference for dark caves provided a bond of sorts. I shouldn’t hate him just because he knew Magda, and it would be very shallow of me to be jealous of his relationship with Max.

  The screen flashed a license tag. “The Lincoln belongs to a professional hit man,” he continued in the same mechanical voice as the intercom produced. “If he’d wanted any of you dead, you wouldn’t be here now. It was a warning, probably to the senator.”

  “Probably.” I latched on to the one word of doubt in his token reassurance. In the dim light, I located the cat—in Graham’s lap. He was stroking its back as he turned to a different screen, and for a moment, I wished I was the cat. I wanted someone to hold and stroke me and tell me everything would be all right. “I don’t want EG to come that close to probably again.”

  “Then keep her away from the senator,” he said. “The man is under pressure, and you and your sister are not helping matters. You chose the wrong time to descend on D.C.”

  That was the second time today I’d been told that. I casually eyed the nearest wall in search of a light switch. No healthy man in his thirties could spend his life haunting this modern version of a wizard’s cave. Was he so badly scarred as well as crippled that he hid in this dimness? I wanted to put an end to any illusions I might be harboring.

  I couldn’t find the switch, so I chose to push his buttons instead. “You remember my telling you about the client called Oracle who knew Mindy?”

  I’m not certain why this, of all the questions I could have asked, came out first, but I was desperate to have my theory confirmed or denied. I couldn’t bear the idea that my client might have been murdered, much less how I’d feel if that client turned out to be my grandfather. I was trying to be objective here. And failing badly.

  He keyed in a few letters and produced the police reports on Mindy that I’d already read. “Yes,” he said mechanically, not chastising me this time for keeping my client file secret. “I can find no reference to Oracle in her files.”

  “You call yourself Oracle,” I pointed out. “You knew her.”

  “Only as the name of a neighbor,” he declared. “Alexandria is a small town. I have never corresponded with Mindy Carstairs. I can assure you that I was not your client.”

  “Mindy knew Max. Could Max have been my client?”

  He wasn’t a restless man. He obviously possessed more patience and determination than a saint if he could sit confined in these rooms all day doing nothing but monitoring computer screens. But something in his stillness told me I had him riveted. He said nothing.

  “I lost my client the same week that Max died.”

  I thought, there for a minute, that Graham might turn around. His fingers clenched his chair arms rather than clicking relentlessly across his keyboards. “Your client, the one you called Oracle,” he stated to confirm what I’d said.

  “Exactly.” I waited, but he still wasn’t admitting anything. It was up to me to open communication by giving him a piece of my private files. “His last e-mail to me said envelope-poison-tophat-pow, spelled p-o-w.”

  I watched as Graham rubbed his hand over his face in a gesture that might have been despair. Or frustration. Or sorrow. I didn’t know him well enough to interpret and was filtering his reaction through my own.

  “Max was always a double-dealer,” he muttered, seemingly to himself. “He should have sent that message to me.” Reluctantly, he admitted, “I took Max’s screen name after he died.” He sounded more human than he’d ever done. “And if that was his last message to you, I’ve changed my mind. I think you’d better leave immediately. This house is no longer safe.”

  “We’re not leaving,” I said. I knew I was contradicting my earlier desire to get the hell out. I turn contrary when threatened. “You knew Max well enough to know his screen name. You must have known grandfather left the house to us. He was trying to warn me. He had to know I’d follow through once I found out. Did you know about the warrant for Reggie’s arrest and bribe him to sell so he could get out of town?” This was only one of many conclusions to which my paranoia had led me.

  “You have a suspicious mind worthy of your mother,” he said dismissively. “Under law, the house is mine. The subject at hand is that D.C. has become too dangerous. There are elements at work here that you know nothing about. I’m taking you off Pao’s case. There is still time to enroll your sister in a good school I know about in St. Louis.”

  “No.” I surprised myself with that reply, so I hoped it shocked Graham equally. He didn’t give any indication, if so. He merely fiddled with something on the keyboard and changed the image on several screens. One now showed the corner of a keyboard and small fingers typing away at it.

  It was my laptop, in my bedroom. I’d hung a Grateful Dead poster over John Quincy but evidently hadn’t covered the entire camera lens.

  “You rat,” I muttered. “Is this how you get your jollies? Want me to hire a stripper for you so you can really have something to look at?”

  “It’s a security measure. I turn the screen off when you leave the desk,” he said without an ounce of shame. “Among other things, your sister is e-mailing the day’s events to your mother’s personal maid. The CIA pays Emily to keep track of Magda.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked, aggravated out of my introversion long enough to question. “Or better yet, who do you think you are? Batman?”

  His chuckle broke the cloud of gloom. He had a deep rich chuckle that rumbled my gonads in ways I didn’t wish to acknowledge. Even beating the tar out of a hard bag hadn’t lowered my libido. This man had once been hot. I knew it with all the feminine instincts in me. And I hated knowing it. I wanted to call him murderer and have him hanged. But I knew he wasn’t. I was starting to suspect he was as angry and confused as I was, which made him just a trifle more human than I was prepared to deal with.

  “Batman’s technology was highly overrated,” he scoffed. “A bat signal in the sky? Just a little obvious. It doesn’t matter who I am. Your grandfather trusted me to look out for you, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I should never have let you stay.”

  Just knowing Max had told him to look after us recklessly raised my spirits. “Then why did Grandfather leave the house to us if he didn’t want us here? Do you really think I’ll take your word that D.C. is dangerous for us? For all I know, you shot at the car.”

  “I could have,” he agreed. “And that’s one of the reasons you need to leave. I’d rather not waste time trying to keep track of all of you should I need to take action.” Stroking the cat, he finally turned to face me.

  I narrowed my eyes and stared, trying to catch a glimpse of the man silhouetted against the monitors. The eerie light only revealed broad shoulders against a tall chair and long fingers gently stroking an immense cat. I imagined a square j
aw and broad cheekbones in the dark shadow that was his head, where the light illumined the gleam of thick glossy black hair.

  I had to get out of there before I started inventing my own fairy tales. “Well then, don’t shoot at things, and the problem is solved. We’re not leaving.” That sounded like a good parting line, so I started for the door before his attention gave me wrong ideas.

  “I’ll help you get your money back.”

  It would have been nice to get in the last word for a change, but my inexperience at socializing didn’t stand a chance against his manipulative skills. I waited for the stick that always followed a carrot.

  “For EG’s sake, go to St. Louis. I’ll hire someone to catch Brashton when he reaches St. Kitts. You won’t need to sue. I can get the money back without the law.”

  It was very tempting. If I was inclined to trust, I’d be halfway out the door in my eagerness to escape guns and terrorists. But my life with Magda had taught me not to believe strange men offering candy.

  “I’ll get our money back, and then I’ll hire a lawyer to prove you stole this house from us. We’re not leaving.”

  By the time I’d stalked down to my room, I was so suspicious, I had to wonder if I hadn’t just been manipulated by a master into doing exactly what he wanted me to do.

  Graham’s chocolate-y chuckle would haunt my dreams for weeks.

  ~

  I took down the Dead poster and the painting of John Quincy in my bedroom, located the camera behind them, and contemplated ripping it out of the wall. But I admire the resourcefulness of technology. The camera might come in handy some day. Instead, I taped the lens with duct tape I filched from the Ali Baba cave that Mallard called a pantry, returned the painting to the wall, and hung the Dead over it for good measure.

  I tracked EG down in her lair and searched beneath all her artwork while she watched me with boredom.

  “I could have told you there aren’t any cameras in here,” she said when I came up empty-handed. “The room is in a tower, and the wiring is too difficult except in the closet on the wall between this room and the next.”

  She shouldn’t know these things. But if we were to stay in D.C. , she needed to be as prepared as a Medici in Renaissance Italy. Better. The Medicis didn’t have AK-47s.

  “Did you know Emily is being paid to spy on Magda?” I asked. It would be nice if just once I could know something she didn’t.

  “Someone is always spying on Magda. She likes knowing who it is so she can feed them information.” EG shrugged. “Emily supports her family on the bribes she receives, so I give her what news I can.”

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. If Graham heard that, he’d be convulsed with laughter about now. Here I’d thought I was paranoid, when it turned out I wasn’t paranoid enough.

  “If you know so much, then what the hell is Magda doing that people spy on her?”

  “Makes people suspicious,” she said with a shrug.

  How could I reply to that? She was right. Even I was suspicious, and she was my mother. “You told Emily where we were and that’s how Magda found us!” This was what happened when I let cuckoos in my nest. I needed another round with the punching bag.

  “Unlike you, I have no need to hide from her.” Without confirming or denying, she flipped over on her belly and returned to reading her encyclopedia.

  Nah, she didn’t need to hide; she’d just run away because she felt like it. I had EG’s number now. I had decided on a course, and I was bound and determined to follow it. If EG was attempting to annoy me just to test my limits, she was losing. If I was staying, she was staying. I just needed to find a way to eradicate the nest of vipers threatening our home.

  I traipsed down the hall to my laptop and began researching schools for the gifted—and I started with D.C. My grandfather hadn’t left the house to Graham. He’d left it to us.

  Chapter Twenty

  EG finds yet another school, and textbook publishers are connected.

  If EG wasn’t safe attending a school with Tex’s daughter, she deserved an alternative, a school for free-thinking geniuses. Surely if Graham could find her one in St. Louis, I could find her one in D.C.

  Ensconced in my bedroom-office with the laptop and my list of private schools, I heard Nick return home and go to his room. Engrossed in reading the material on schools, I nearly bit my pencil in two a little while later at the sound of a dinner gong and Mallard calling us down to dinner. Had Magda returned that he had actually fixed dinner for us?

  Still holding the information I’d printed out, I opened my door to glance down the hall. EG and Nick stuck their heads out of their respective rooms at the same time. As the echoes of Mallard’s gong died into silence, we stared at each other. Then, with all the savoir faire of an experienced theater troop, we shrugged and emerged from our rooms to play this new act.

  I wore my denim. EG and Nick were in school and office attire. We weren’t precisely dressed for a formal dinner, but we’d not been offered formal invitations either. We were hungry, and food was food.

  Magda wasn’t there, but Mallard had set the table as if she were.

  After a day like this one, food was more than food. Sitting down to a linen-covered table, flickering candles, polished silver, and the welcome faces of family, I finally understood that a meal was a celebration and sharing of survival and togetherness, and not just about food.

  We all looked slightly shell-shocked at this scene resembling a normal family dinner. Naturally, it didn’t take long for us to revert to form.

  Nick beamed in delight at discovering the Salad Nicoise waiting at our places, and fired the first round with his usual charming obnoxiousness. “Forget buying the house with our millions,” he declared, savoring the perfectly dressed vegetables. “Let’s buy Mallard.”

  I waited for the candelabra to choke or otherwise object, but it merely gleamed in polished splendor. If Mallard was listening behind the door, he didn’t give any sign of it. Briefly, we had the stage to ourselves.

  “Did you hear about the attack on Hammond’s car this afternoon?” Nick inquired next, as if imparting a piece of fresh gossip.

  Before I could explain, EG complacently intervened. “We were there. You should have seen Boise take that ramp at ninety.”

  Nick choked and spit beans across the tablecloth. “You were there? In the car?”

  I knew EG well enough to see the pride behind her devious smugness. I didn’t interfere in her little show. Yet.

  “My dad brought us home afterwards. He talked to Magda,” she announced proudly.

  As Nick applied his napkin to his mouth and stared wide-eyed at our evil sister, I diverted the impending shouting match by invoking a more peaceful subject.

  I set the papers I’d just printed out on the table. “Family discussion,” I announced.

  EG squirmed. Still appalled, Nick gave me the same evil eye he’d given EG, as if I had anything to do with shootings and Boise and EG. He wanted explanations.

  Individuals all, we tended to act separately without consultation. We weren’t a family that normally discussed things together, but I was trying my best—probably because the responsibility of raising EG all on my own terrified me. But I sure the hell didn’t have the skills to discuss Tex and Magda, so I moved on.

  “EG has been offered the opportunity of a school for the gifted in Switzerland,” I said in my best professorial tone. “I see no reason why we can’t find a school of equal value in D.C. , as long as she refrains from riding in the senator’s car.”

  EG poked at her salad, but she was listening. I’d debated the wisdom of having her stay here if men were taking potshots at her father, but Magda’s life wasn’t any safer, and no one except family knew Tex’s relationship to EG. Unless I wanted to believe Graham was a murderer, I couldn’t believe we were a danger to anyone. I pushed the papers toward her.

  “I think I’ve found the perfect school. We can think about it. Take a look around. Decide what we want. And
if you’re interested, they offer testing for entrance.”

  “Testing, that’s all?” she asked in suspicion, eyeing the papers. “They don’t want school records all the way back to grandfather’s university and references from the pope?”

  “Nope. Pass the test, they put you in classes according to your abilities. It’s not a fancy place,” I warned. “It’s in an old house run by some parents who were looking for alternatives for their kids. The student population is limited.”

  “In this neighborhood?” Nick asked. He looked interested. “How much will it cost?”

  “It’s not far from here. They offer scholarships. We’ll work it out.” I hoped. Graham had twisted arms last time. I’d never done anything official in my life. I figured it was time to start learning how.

  “I want to see their textbooks,” EG grumbled. “I’m not reading another one that blames environmentalists for sagging economies.”

  “Housing could be problematic,” Nick warned, ignoring EG’s complaint and watching the candelabra as warily as I did. “Are you sure we should stay in D.C. ?” He directed that question at me and not EG.

  “Look at you.” I gestured at his elegant silk tie and suit. “You’re in your element here. You were born to diplomatic circles, not slot machines. Do you have to ask?” Max had meant for us to have a house for a reason—because we belonged here. I might not be the best leadership material, but I was buying the family fairy tale for my siblings.

  Awakened to a world outside her own, EG looked as shocked as Nick, but awareness dawned slowly as they thought about it. Nick straightened his tie. EG studied him as if he were an interesting insect.

  “Tex won’t like it,” she finally decided. “He’ll find out and fire Nick.”