As usual, Graham made no attempt to greet our new family member. The only way I knew he was alive was by the documents and demands flowing into my computer. I’d once worried we’d be flung out on our heads if I didn’t carry through on all his demands. I have more knowledge of his interests now, so they made me curious enough to follow where they led.
But family came before curiosity. After a night’s restless sleep, I sent EG off to school, then prepared for the day’s outing. I invaded Nick’s old room—he now had his own digs—and found one of his old overcoats.
I handed it to Alexander, who still looked like a scruffy adolescent to me. “You’ll freeze without a coat. If you’re lucky, Nick left gloves in the pockets. Unfortunately, he won’t cover up his pretty hair, so he doesn’t wear hats.” I could ask Graham, but that was just too intimate, and he’d probably look at me as if I was crazy.
Zander looked dubiously at Nick’s tailored Chesterfield coat but obediently donned it. He was as tall as Nick but not as broad through the shoulders. He looked like a kid wearing his daddy’s coat, but he was less likely to catch pneumonia than in a hoody.
Brought up the way I’ve been, I don’t really notice skin color any more than I notice fashion. But I am over-protective. A black kid wearing a hoodie through white DC causes eyes to narrow and attracts attention. I’m all about doing what it takes to blend in, unless I want attention. Zander’s tawny coloring gave him a distinguished look in a tailored coat, but I wasn’t sure about the hoodie.
I wore my thrift store faux leopard coat, hat, and furred boots. I’d mapped out our transportation—I drive but I don’t have a license—and was prepared to trek out when Graham’s voice filled the foyer like the voice of God. Zander dropped his gloves in startlement.
“The limo is returning for you,” his deep voice tolled through the chandelier.
“You can follow us in it, if you like,” I told him in my most pleasant hostess voice. Once upon a time, I used to beat the tar out of his hidden speakers, but I’d learned to live with the intrusions. Sometimes, they were even useful. Or amusing.
Graham’s manipulation of my life was not.
“It will take you twice as long by public transportation,” he said in irritation.
“But Zander will learn how to use the Metro. Anyone can sit passively in a car, isolated from reality. We don’t follow that path.” I’d experienced that isolation the last time the family had been threatened. The suffocating cocoon of the limo had kept me from learning what was really happening, and I hadn’t liked it.
I opened the massive carved front door and gestured for Zander to precede me.
He looked bewildered, but that went away the moment we stepped outside. It was snowing. Like a child, he held out his gloved hand in wonder, catching the flakes.
My jaded heart warmed. “I take it you don’t go skiing in the mountains.”
“We never left the village until we went to school in Johannesburg.” He tilted his head back to watch the tumble of flakes from the gray sky. “Now I understand some of your Christmas celebration, even though Bethlehem was a desert.”
“I thought it got cold enough to snow in Johannesburg.” We trudged down the street. I ignored the limo cruising toward us.
I could list a thousand reasons why it’s safer to not hand fate to a driver other than myself, but I only pulled out excuses when I was afraid. So that meant I was terrified for Juliana and retreating to my childhood need for control by not taking the limo. I’d been to therapists. I can talk the talk. That doesn’t mean I’ll change. Given my upbringing, I needed to be in charge of nasty situations. Otherwise, I’d been known to blow up buildings to reach my family. I was clenching my fists as I once had as a teenager, and we didn’t even know anything.
“Snow is rare, maybe only forming in a small neighborhood, and it melts quickly,” Zander replied. “We have much sun in winter. Juliana and I were still in the village the last time it snowed.” He glanced over his shoulder, noticed the massive car turning to follow us, and looked uneasy.
We were only half a block from the Metro now. I stepped up our pace, and we disappeared underground where the car couldn’t go.
“If we are wealthy, why can we not take the car?” he finally asked.
“Do you want the full lecture or the abbreviated one?” I asked, studying the overhead signs and moving down the platform through the morning rush hour crowd.
“A car would be safer and faster,” he said cautiously.
“A car would get caught in rush hour traffic and be a perfect target. We’d be trapped inside,” I countered.
“Do we have enemies?” he asked in understandable horror.
“In my experience, yes. Do you, or do you not, want to learn how to survive in any circumstances?”
His father—like mine—had been killed by assassins. Zander looked thoughtful and didn’t question more. We weren’t born to parents who lived in peaceful suburbs and pushed paper for a living.
My full lecture would have taken the length of our Metro ride and would have been difficult in the crush. I was relieved that he was intelligent enough to catch my drift without argument.
We only had to run for one train connection and endure the crush before we reached the King Street station. I saw no sign of the limo waiting for us. In this weather, the limo could have been caught in traffic. DC didn’t handle snow well, and it was coming down thicker now.
The area we strolled through was decorated in evergreen roping and Christmas lights. We had a real holiday happening, which briefly distracted Zander from his gloom.
“Juliana will love this,” he said, gesturing at a brilliantly decorated, wheeling exhibition of Santa’s workshop in a store window.
He did not say what I was thinking—if she was alive.
“All right, let’s find her and make sure she sees it. I want to see the address we have for her. On Google, it looks like an office building.” Knowing any snow this time of year would melt off soon, and hoping Juliana was enjoying it somewhere, I traipsed down the increasingly icy sidewalk. People in hats and scarves rushed by, late for work if they had to be there by nine. The fact that we dawdled, staring around us, made us look out of place, but I didn’t think that mattered—yet.
I followed the map I’d laid out in my phone, and we located the building with relative ease, if I didn’t count frozen toes.
Alexander expressed his dismay first. “Yoh, she would not be living in a tower like that! Those are offices, are they not?”
Yup, it was an ugly concrete-and-glass office building towering umpteen stories above us—not the church or school dorm I’d envisioned.
“One way to find out for certain.” I dove into the crowd crossing the street and pushed through the glass front doors.
The lobby had no security desk, just business suits waiting patiently for the elevators. I studied the index and found Joshua Arden’s Christian America Development with a suite on the tenth floor, about half way up. “They’re the only office on the tenth floor. That’s not looking residential. They’d probably be breaking zoning laws to have a dorm up there.”
“But this is her address!”
“They must pick up the mail here and deliver it elsewhere,” I said reassuringly. “If they’re working on unfinished projects, that could just mean they don’t have delivery where they are.”
I’d lived in third world countries where no one had an address. I hadn’t traveled the United States enough to know if there were places without mail. I kind of doubted it, but construction projects sounded third world to me.
“She was working on the park, yes, but they have classes there as well,” he said in despair, staring at the index as if it would produce answers. “Perhaps we could go up and ask.”
“A perfectly sensible solution—except if Juliana is trying to keep us out for some reason, we ought to respect that for a little while, until we know more.” And if she was dead and CAD hadn’t told her family. . . then I really didn’t want to be on their radar yet. I’d learned my lesson about barging in and jeopardizing everyone I’d hoped to save. I was into subtle these days.
He nodded uncertainly. “Can we find out what projects they’re working on?”
“Only one in the vicinity,” I said with certainty, heading back for the street. I’d already planned this next step. “First, we should buy phones. I don’t want to traipse all the way out there and not be prepared.”
Graham’s limo was idling in a no-parking zone outside the door. He would know I’d head for JACAD’S office first. He’d also know my ultimate destination. But we couldn’t explore the grounds from a limo, and we’d be darned conspicuous when I wanted secrecy.
I led Alexander to a store that sold pre-paid phones. He grasped the concept quickly, worked his way through the shelf to find the best deal, and whipped out his credit card. I stayed his hand.
“Family business, family card.” I added a second phone to our purchase and swiped a card made out to the trust that our lawyer had set up for our funds. The trust had an innocuous name that wouldn’t lead directly back to us without a lot of research and prying into secure documents in a lawyer’s office.
I had Zander open the annoying plastic packages and charge up the phones with the mobile charger I carried in my faux-Birkin bag. While he was doing that, I opened my cell phone and hit a new app I’d downloaded last night. Then I led him into a Starbucks so we could warm our hands on hot tea—or in his case, coffee—until the anonymous Uber driver arrived.
With our warm drinks in hand, I waved at Graham’s limo driver, then climbed into the back seat of a Honda Civic. Zander was starting to wear a perpetual expression of perplexity.
“Can you take us to the entrance of Jesus World?” I asked.
“I can get you close. The road isn’t finished yet,” the bearded driver said. He looked a little rough around the edges, like a man who’d seen things he’d rather have not. I pegged him as ex-military, out to make a few bucks for Christmas. I approved of the entrepreneurship of the new company and the driver. So, call me an anarchist for being cheap and supporting independence.
“Close is excellent.” That meant unfinished areas with no nosy housewives watching us while we looked for a place to cache the phones. “Do you know anything about the project? Know anyone working there?” Another benefit of locals over limo drivers—the locals gossip.
“One of the guys I went to high school with drives a dozer for them. Says they pay good money, but the work keeps getting held up and is moving slow,” the driver obligingly informed me.
“Any work is good in this economy.” I sipped my tea and waited. I checked his name and number to store in my files.
“Tell me about it.” He went off into a rant about jobs going overseas, and I tuned out.
Ignoring the driver, Alexander cuddled his hands around the hot cup and watched the city pass by. “And what do we learn by taking this car instead of the other?” he whispered into a lull.
“That we don’t need a limo to get around. They’re not always available when we need one,” I said in satisfaction, glancing over my shoulder to see the long black sedan following far behind. By now, I was mostly annoying Graham for my morning fun.
Zander looked impressed when I showed him the app on my phone. He figured out my hotspot, pulled out the burner phones, and added the app to both. As I’d hoped, my little brother was naïve, not stupid.
By the time Zander had phone numbers and apps loaded into both burners plus our normal mobiles, the driver had taken us into the countryside and stopped at a gate. Only the name of the construction company adorned the locked gate on the park’s chain-link fence, but in the distance, we could see the monstrosities rising.
Mostly, the so-called attractions were wood and metal skeletons, now covered in a dusting of snow, creating spectacularly eerie gray images rising from what appeared to be open graves for giants. It was impossible to tell a dinosaur from a disciple. But we could make out the foundations of a merry-go-round, the steel of a roller coaster, and the remains of an old-fashioned Ferris wheel with only three seats. Apparently the park wasn’t averse to acquiring used equipment.
I assumed they’d be adding camels and donkeys to the merry-go-round, and the roller coaster would someday be a fun ride across the Red Sea. I wasn’t sure how one transformed a Ferris wheel.
The Uber driver rolled away. The limo was nowhere in sight, thank heavens. Graham’s driver was an older man, like Mallard, and trained to be discreet.
“Trailers,” I said, nodding in the direction of a row of tin cans on wheels and a concrete-block store, complete with showers and propane tanks for sale. “The park will probably have a fancy campground when the project is finished instead of the hotels they have at Disney World.”
So, I’m a bigot like the rest of the world. I despise ignorance, and it was showing in my spitefulness. I actually approved of camping over high-rise hotels, but I was scared and wary and didn’t have anyone to punch to make me feel better.
Zander shivered in his dress coat and studied the rough piles of dirt, equipment, and materials being buried in a blanket of snow. Then he turned to examine what remained of the trees on what had probably once been a lovely farm. “The cache first?” he suggested. “And then I send the coordinates?”
“You’re learning.” Not seeing any good excuse for climbing the construction fence, I trudged with him into a copse of half-dead trees, trying to figure out how anyone could find anything in a jungle of dead vines and bare branches. I’d lived in cities much of my life, occasionally a desert or two. I was as ignorant of the countryside as Zander was of DC. “I didn’t think they had forests in South Africa. How will you know how to create a cache?”
“We have trees in parks in Johannesburg. They are not like this, however.” He studied the vine-covered stumps and limbs. “If I send the coordinates only to Juliana, I don’t think it matters that we find a clever cache. We just need a place of concealment.”
He glanced at the plastic bag from the phone store. “Will this protect a phone from the wet?”
I pulled a gray waterproof envelope from my bag. “I came prepared.”
He wrapped one phone in the store bag, then in the envelope, and folded it until it wouldn’t fold more. It wasn’t exactly a small package, but flat enough that it shouldn’t be too difficult to conceal. I was starting to get the picture.
We traipsed through the meager woods, scuffling paths in the snow that gradually filled behind us. Alexander finally focused on a clump of saplings around a lightning-savaged tree trunk. Pulling out a pocket knife that should never have been allowed on whatever plane he’d flown in on, he pried off the rotting bark around a crevasse in the trunk. The gray envelope blended in with the old wood beneath the stripped bark, and he dug at the crevasse until it was deep enough to hold the package.
When the saplings fell back in place, the hole was completely concealed. We recorded the coordinates of the location from our phones, then hurried back to the street. I checked, and the snow continued to fill our footsteps. Somedays, I seriously believed in a Great Spirit watching over us.
Graham’s limo was waiting out on the main road. Figuring Zander had learned enough, I opened the door and climbed in. Zander’s hands were practically shaking, whether from the cold or anxiety, I couldn’t say. I politely tried not to watch as he composed a message on his new burner phone.
“Home, miss?” Sam, the driver, asked.
“Yes, please,” I said, already mentally listing all the directions my research needed to take when I got there.
I heard Zander’s message send and prayed that Juliana still had her phone.
“Can you also email her? Is there anywhere else you can leave a message?” I asked as he clasped the phone between both big, bony hands as if praying over it.
He nodded. “I brought my tablet, but should I do it from a neutral computer?”
“Yes, from a new email address under a different identity. If you mean to use social media to send messages, you need to start new ones with the new address and keep logged out of your usual ones. I’ll set up my laptop in the library and you can connect with our internet.”
I’d used the library as my office until I’d appropriated my basement hideaway. The aging library was as dark, cold, and inhospitable as the parlor, but it had a gorgeous table that could hold dozens of computers. And it was on the first floor where I could keep an eye on him, if needed.
Traffic had cleared out by the time we cruised the streets toward home, and we made reasonably good time. It wasn’t lunchtime yet when the limo let us off in front of the house.
I raised my eyebrows at the figure sprawled on the front step, backpack cluttering the three-inch lawn. Tudor was so engrossed in his tablet that he didn’t look up when we approached.
I kicked his combat boot. “You could have told us when you were coming.”
“I flew stand-by.” He reluctantly shoved his computer in the pocket of his old army coat and stood up. Coming from the UK, he was at least appropriately dressed for the weather.
Tudor Bullfinch is our sixteen-year-old computer genius half-brother. His father is an Australian shipping magnate married to his third wife who prefers to keep the peace by sending his son by his first wife, Magda, to boarding school in London. Tudor has his father’s carrot-red hair and like everyone else in the family except EG, stands taller than me.
“And Mallard refused to let you in?” I inquired, taking out my key and opening the door.
“No one answered the bell,” Tudor replied. “I didn’t think it polite to sneak in through the tunnel.”
I fought a frisson of fear as I unlocked and opened the door to our secure cave.
The house echoed oddly empty. A cold chill crept down my spine. In these last months, I’d become accustomed to coming home to Mallard’s greetings and Graham’s snark. They hardly ever left the house together. Where had they gone?