Chapter 5

Juliana labeled the graphic of the pyramid granaries, and Baby Moses in his basket among the reeds, and sent the image to the mainframe. She wondered why mummies were stored beneath grain but history and science didn’t interest her. She was here for one purpose only—to learn to build schools. If the cost of that education was working on Reverend Arden’s park, she would happily pay.

But if there were hidden costs, as she feared, she needed to know about them. Before opening the next screen, she looked around at the other student interns bent over their keyboards, working on their own tasks. None of them were watching her.

Pretending to stretch her back, she glanced up. The office manager usually slipped out for a smoke about now, although no one was supposed to know that. She hid her relief—Mrs. Overcamp was nowhere in sight.

Furtively, she went on-line, called up last night’s surveillance videos—both hers and the park’s—saved them to a cloud account, and deleted her history. She wasn’t certain when she would have time to watch all of the footage. Security was tight, and she had reason to believe she was watched.

Retrieving a dead-tree document from her desk in-box, she opened a comparable form in her computer. She kept that screen large and visible while she opened a smaller screen. Typing in her password, she checked her online email notifications. She knew the account wasn’t secure, but she couldn’t help checking once a day. Mostly, it was spam these days, and she could ignore the box.

She almost closed the screen on what appeared to be spam from an unknown sender—until the subject clicked in her tired brain—Revelations 3:4.

Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. Geeky Zander loved to tease her with that quote when she wore white. Zander would use Tardis when he quoted it, of course.

Verifying no one watched, praying IT wasn’t sophisticated enough to store keyboard strokes, she opened the message, and her heart raced a little faster. Embedded in the quote were the capitalized letters N and W, with numbers inserted as if they were verses. Could Zander be sending her coordinates? To what?

The message had to be from Zander. How? She didn’t recognize the address.

Memorizing the combination of numbers and letters worked into the verse, she deleted the email without reply. With luck, the Bible code would prevent anyone from understanding what Zander was telling her. That was unnaturally devious for a straight arrow like her brother.

Could she hope he was here in the States? She couldn’t imagine it, not with his new job, but perhaps he’d found help nearby. She didn’t know if electronic listening devices could tell what she was doing if she were to use her phone with the GPS tracker to test this location. Best not to try.

She knew the instant Mrs. Overcamp returned because the stink of cigarette smoke preceded her. Why did smokers think they could conceal their habit? Couldn’t they smell themselves?

The general contractor, Mr. Gregory, arrived to inspect some document on Mrs. Overcamp’s desk. He was a burly man, smelling of the outdoors and dressed for the cold, alien to the indoor students bent over their desks. The presence of authority made her nervous.

Julie hastily cleaned out her history again. She would make them work to find out what places she visited.

Plotting how she could copy an image from her cloud account without revealing her use to security, and where she could find an unbugged phone, she returned to rendering artistic images of what she now thought of as tombstones.

“Tudor, you’re home!” EG cried happily as she returned from school the afternoon of Tudor’s arrival. She dropped her colorfully-decorated purple backpack next to Tudor’s grungy one in the foyer. The shabby modern bags looked incongruous beneath our grandfather’s antique Waterford chandelier and polished Sheraton table.

Mallard would have a fit, if he were here. He wasn’t.

Nervously I set down a tray of hot chocolate-filled mugs on top of the glossy magazines laid out decorously on the coffee table. Tudor and Zander were playing video games and getting to know each other, and the parlor was the most comfortable location. Mallard would have had a conniption at my serving food in his precious parlor. I was almost begging for him to emerge from the woodwork and sniff in disapproval.

There had been no sign of Mallard in the kitchen. We’d made our own lunch.

Worse, there had been no missives from Graham waiting in my inbox. Graham worked 24/7. I couldn’t remember a time that he hadn’t been pouring documents into my box, even when he’d been in hiding.

Six months ago, this lack of intrusion would have made me deliriously happy. Now—I was frightened.

I’d had plenty of years of therapy to recognize my abandonment neurosis. I didn’t want to admit it. If I started including Graham and Mallard in my family circle, I would never know peace again. I refused to go to the attic to check on them—which was probably even more neurotic but believing they deserved their privacy was my way of dealing with paranoia.

“Now we can find a Christmas tree,” EG cried excitedly. “Can Nick come with us? What about Patra?”

A Christmas tree? Where had that come from? We’d never ever had. . . . Oh. They’d never had Christmas, so of course they wanted one.

I glanced at the boys. They looked up expectantly, then at my expression, ducked their heads and returned to their games.

Were they hoping for a real old-fashioned picture-book family Christmas? That thought terrorized me almost enough to drive out my worries over Graham. I had absolutely, utterly no experience at holiday celebrations.

Dang it, Nick had agreed to help me with this family business. And Patra was expected to join in now that she was in town. I didn’t want the responsibility for everyone’s happiness—as well as their safety—on my scrawny shoulders.

“I’ll call them,” I said neutrally, making no promises.

But even I had to admit to a degree of anticipation at the possibility of a real Christmas tree. This old Victorian parlor would be perfect. . . .

If I started thinking of this place as home. . .

Growing up, I’d had too many expectations dashed to allow my hopes to rise. Mallard and Graham’s disappearance and my fear for Juliana easily damped any incipient excitement over a silly holiday.

I would have to buy gifts. Well, I’d already stored one or two for EG. She was just a kid. But a tree. . .

Deep breath. “There’s not a lot of room in here,” I said, looking around as if they’d asked for a TV—which would, no doubt, be next.

“We could push the sofa down the wall and put the tree in front of the window,” Tudor suggested offhandedly—which meant they’d already discussed this, and he’d been thinking about it.

Email made it easy for them to gang up on me long distance.

“We don’t have decorations,” I reminded them.

“Mallard said we have old ones in the storage room. And we can make our own,” EG cried excitedly. “Popcorn strings and sugar cookies!”

If Graham wasn’t here. . . I tried to think positively: my workload would lighten considerably. I’d already quit advertising my availability as a virtual assistant weeks ago so I’d have more time for EG and for Graham’s projects. If I didn’t have Graham’s work to do. . . I would go stark raving berserk. If Mallard didn’t arrive soon, I’d have to tackle Graham’s lair.

“Drink your chocolate before it cools,” I ordered. “I’ll talk to Nick and Patra.”

Patra Llewellyn is Magda’s daughter by her second husband, my father being her first. Our mother had married at seventeen and been widowed at twenty-one, so she had some excuse for going through husbands like bottles of wine. The affairs in between. . . were none of my business.

Patra had recently graduated journalism school, helped break a major scandal involving a notorious media mogul, and had just taken a new job in DC. I didn’t entertain sentimental notions that she did so to be near us. She had her eyes—and other body parts—set on Sean O’Herlihy, a hot investigative reporter for our local newspaper.

Coincidentally or not, Sean’s father had died in the same car bombing that had killed mine and Graham’s. We came by our conspiracy theories honestly.

I left the boys rearranging the furniture while I trotted back downstairs to my basement office. Mallard would walk out on us again should he ever return and see what we were doing to his museum. He revered my grandfather and preferred to leave everything as it had been in the good old days—like last spring.

The chances of actually reaching Patra and Nick by phone were almost nil, so I cc’d them both on an email explaining what I wanted—saved me the trouble of explaining to two voice mail boxes.

Then I returned to hacking Juliana’s phone account. Her phone bill was still being deducted from her funds, and it was sizable. Surely she’d bought a U.S. chip when she’d come here. If she wasn’t calling family, how could she be running up a bill that high? I finally located more passwords buried deep in the documents Zander had copied from her computer. Holding my breath, I opened the website for her carrier and typed in an ID and a password that looked promising.

The account opened on the first try. After studying her bills inside and out, I had to admit defeat. She was paying for unlimited data, which was very expensive. There were no extra costs for phone calls out of the country. Her biggest charge appeared to be for cloud storage. I’d need to crack that next.

What I really needed were phone records to see who she’d been calling, and when and where, but that information doesn’t appear on statements. For that, I needed Graham and his illegal resources.

I checked my mailbox. Still nothing from him. If he was in danger, did I really want to know? I told myself that if he had Mallard with him, he wouldn’t be anywhere unsafe. He was just being his normal secretive asshat self, and I really needed to smack him for being so inconsiderate, but I wasn’t his keeper.

I tried every ID and password on Juliana’s list and none of them opened any account in the cloud storage website listed on her bill.

Frustrated, I glared at the screen and heard my stomach rumble. Lunch had been whatever leftovers Zander and I could scrounge. We would have to go out for supper. It wasn’t as if I ever fixed my own dinner, much less one for four people.

Fortunately, feeding a family wasn’t as fraught with anxiety as fighting terrorists.

Family—I had a family again. I didn’t know whether to celebrate or weep. It just needed Magda’s arrival to push me over the edge, and I’d pack my neuroses and vanish into the snowy night.

I texted Nick and Patra of my dinner plans. Patra actually called back.

“Can Sean come too or is this a super-secret family do?” she asked without greeting.

“If you wish to inflict your entire family on him, sure, let him tag along,” I said wearily. I’d have to start considering adding in-laws to the family table. I was feeling overwhelmed.

“Entire family?” she asked warily. “Magda is here?”

“Not yet. Want to place wagers on when?”

“Christmas morning, guilting us for not buying her anything by arriving with her arms full,” she replied without hesitation. “I get your Berkin bag if I win.”

I didn’t tell her it was a fake, because she was undoubtedly right.

We met at a Moroccan restaurant off the beaten path to keep down expenses. I refused to feel guilty for not buying thousand-dollar dinners out of our family funds. We all needed to learn to manage our new-found wealth and channel it for good instead of wasting it.

So far, I hadn’t received a lot of resistance to my stinginess. Of course, so far, they had no idea of how incredibly wealthy we were. Our grandfather Max had been a wise investor and a bit of a miser. I could relate to miserliness when money was short, but not when people were starving and homeless, and he had funds to spare. I had some philosophic processing to do.

Patra arrived on Sean’s arm. She has our mother’s tall, buxom good looks and extroverted personality. Sean is a Pierce Brosnan look-alike who caused heads to swivel. They would make an elegant pair—if they hadn’t still been wearing the jeans and cheap nylon coats they’d worn to work. Despite Patra’s tacky clothes, the waiters still raced to help her with her jacket—she’s that gorgeous. With that figure and face, she belonged on TV news, but she had a mind of her own, and her heart belonged to her daddy’s profession of investigative reporting.

Nick and I had already decided he would stay after dinner to explain Juliana’s disappearance to Patra and Sean. It wasn’t a subject we wished to discuss in front of EG and Tudor. EG was already prone to gloomy predictions, and Tudor could be a mercenary cynic. They needed to see happiness and healthy relationships to give them more positive outlooks.

“How do you plan to carry a tree to the house?” Sean asked in amusement when he heard our request. He had grown up in DC and knew more about this tree stuff than we did.

“Your MG obviously won’t carry it,” I said. I had unpleasant memories of flying down the interstate in that antique convertible abomination.

“There’s a tree lot only half a mile away,” Tudor said through a mouthful of saffron pilaf. “We could carry it.”

I quirked a dubious eyebrow at him, but he was too engrossed in his food to notice. He wouldn’t be the one pounding city streets with a tree on his head. The skinny geek couldn’t lift a box of ornaments.

“If the snow had lasted, we could have made a sled,” Zander suggested.

“Wagon,” EG cried. “We need a wagon.”

As ideas went, that wasn’t a bad one, better than suggesting the Metro anyway. “And we’ll find a wagon where?” I asked. “And if we manage this feat, how do we set a tree up in the living room without it toppling through the window?”

“The leaky, thousand-year old window,” Patra added unhelpfully.

Zander almost gained some color as he joined the family discussion. For a few rare minutes, he was enjoying himself instead of worrying about his twin.

None of them knew to worry about Graham and Mallard.

When it came time to pay the bill, I used the family credit card. They all watched in awe as I signed away the extensive meal for seven people with wine for four. Even in the out-of-the-way places, DC is not a cheap place to dine out.

“Will Oppenheimer send us statements on the trust?” Nick asked, referring to our trust lawyer and checking the numbers on the bill as I hadn’t.

“He can, although we’d be better off hiring a financial manager now that it’s almost finalized.” The house was the big sticking point. It needed to be in the family trust as well—except Graham’s name was still on the deed.

Zander glanced up from the burner phone he’d been checking all evening. “Investing is what I do, although for a firm in South Africa. Perhaps I could have my employer recommend someone here.”

Nick and I shared a look. As the eldest, we’d been the family money managers for years. Since we’d never had enough money to lose, Nick’s brilliance with math had led down the dangerous trail of gambling. He’d saved our hides more than once with his card sharping. Neither of us had any reason to know anything of investments.

“That’s an excellent idea,” I agreed noncommittally, but the mental gears were grinding. I much preferred a family member overseeing family funds, but Nick and I were lousy at it.

“You need to set financial goals,” he said in all seriousness. “I can help with that.”

Patra and Sean were donning their coats. Tudor and EG were scarfing up leftover desserts. They listened, I know. They were just signaling disinterest in money management. I knew the feeling.

Nick nodded almost imperceptibly. With his approval, I was free to distract Zander from his twin with our finances, or some small portion of them.

“Come along, lovebirds, I’ll buy you drinks in this new dive I found down the street.” Nick straightened his cashmere scarf and gestured at Sean and Patra, leaving me with the under-21 group. I didn’t care that I was missing out on adult conversation. I had my family working together and safely in one place—except for one. I needed to get back to my office to find her—that was the only Christmas present I needed.

We took the Metro home. The earlier slush had frozen to ice. No one had thrown out salt on our doorstep. I could feel the house deteriorating already in my inept hands.

No one had turned on the lights or lit the parlor logs. Entering a cold dark house, I felt abandoned, which was ridiculous. Gritting my teeth with determination, I located switches, ordered everyone to take their coats to their rooms, and followed them up as if I meant to go bed, too.

I worked at my laptop in my room until I heard the house settle down. No messages had appeared from Graham in my absence.

When I was assured everyone was in bed, I grabbed a flashlight and started up the stairs to the attic, terrified I’d find it empty.