Chapter 6

Sitting at her desk in the empty office, nervously editing the dangerous photo on a phone she’d “borrowed” from a sleeping security guard, Juliana sent the image fragments to her cloud account. She prayed that neither IT nor security had the imagination to piece together a dozen puzzle pieces, especially since her files were already full of images and designs. Mostly, she prayed they didn’t know about her cloud account.

Until she had the photo printed, she wouldn’t risk contacting Zander.

“You’re working late, Miss Kruger,” a familiar voice chided.

She fought a guilty start, hid the phone in her skirt pocket, and reached for her purse. Her pulse beat anxiously. “I was just leaving, Reverend. Hunting for the right image is time consuming, and I feel guilty doing it on company time. Could I help you with anything?”

“I was just checking to see that the snow hadn’t caused any harm and saw the light. I don’t think you’ve taken a night off since you arrived. Don’t you want to go out and learn more of this country?”

Joshua Arden was a handsome older man with the powerful build of the football player he’d once been before a knee injury had ended his career. He had a megawatt smile that could light a room. She’d heard him preach and knew he could persuade as convincingly as he could bellow condemnations. Tonight, however, he looked like a weary man on his way home after a day’s work. A baseball cap bearing the sign of a cross covered his famously golden hair.

“I’m more interested in learning all I can about bringing education to those who crave it,” she said honestly. “I won’t be staying in this country where you have so much, so I don’t want to become too attached to your ways.”

He nodded understandingly. “You’re young and still believe you can single-handedly change the world. We need that energy. But part of your education should be learning the larger world around you, meeting people who can help you.”

She knew that, but the privileged attitudes of the material world offended her. Still, she couldn’t tell Reverend Arden that she’d never be able to network. “I’m sure you’re right, sir,” she answered obediently.

“One of our sponsors has given us tickets to the symphony for tomorrow night. I insist you take one, Miss Kruger. It’s a holiday program, and I think you’ll enjoy it.”

She liked that he took the time to learn everyone’s name. She had been thrilled when she’d learned the school often offered free concert admissions donated by the park’s charitable founders. She had hoped one day to be recognized for her hard work and offered this kind of opportunity.

Her soul longed for the beauty of music, a glimpse of soaring architecture, and paintings from a world she’d never visited.

Instead, knowing what she did now, her spine froze at his command. She tried to tell herself that he was simply trying to reward her hard work. But as far as she was aware—and she’d studied the matter closely lately—those coveted tickets only went to women: young, pretty, and white ones. She would like this gesture to prove she was wrong, because she was darker than Zander and very definitely not white.

“That’s so kind of you,” she gushed. “I would grab one in a minute, but I promised to sing for First Baptist tomorrow. Evan over in accounting loves the Messiah, and he’s been a bit homesick lately. Why don’t you offer a ticket to him?”

Was he looking at her with suspicion or approval? She could never tell with this man. His smiling public persona hid whatever he thought behind a mask of assurance.

She hoped he wasn’t the monster who stalked the campus, but she couldn’t imagine anyone else in his organization who had his power to kill and get away with it.

Finally giving in to curiosity, I climbed the stairs to Graham’s office later that night. Entering, I contemplated the blank monitors on his office wall with a degree of relief. At least this time he hadn’t moved them out. A month ago, Tudor and I had discovered this room scoured clean, all trace of him gone, and I’d almost had a panic attack.

Now, Graham’s blank monitors were like monuments to dead computers. Maybe Graham had family—or a girlfriend—he’d gone to visit for the holidays. He could have given Mallard the weekend off.

I didn’t play boyfriend games, mostly due to lack of experience. As my therapists had told me, I was too emotionally distant for close relationships. But had I wanted one. . . No point in going down that path. Graham was making it quite clear that he was even less available and more damaged than I was.

I searched for evidence that he’d left his cat behind. My allergies were already kicking in, so it had been in here recently. I didn’t find so much as a bowl of water or a flicking tail. Where could he have gone with a cat?

Refusing to worry about a man who lacked the courtesy to inform me of his departure, I took the hidden stairs down to my office. I had come to rely too much on Graham’s resources. I needed to go back to developing my own.

Opening the Cobalt Whiz, I dug around online, then sent out a few feelers to people I thought might help me crack phone records. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope, but I refused to feel helpless without Graham’s speedier access.

Graham was the covert center of a highly credentialed security agency. I had no clue how far his web reached, but it included a satellite connection or two, and back doors into various government agencies and police records. He had full access to the computer I worked on, whereas his was completely encrypted. My access to his feeds had been cut off. I was on my own.

And I didn’t like it.

Returning to primitive Google searches and human contacts was like a step back in time to a different century. It frustrated me that he would disappear at a crucial moment like this, when one of my family could be in jeopardy.

I couldn’t even sic Tudor’s hack program on Juliana’s cloud account since I had no inkling how to get into her specific information. Frustrated on all personal levels—I even dug into her email and social media without success—I started back on JACAD. I’d already discovered connections to the shady Top Hat sponsors I’d encountered unpleasantly, some months before.

CAD’s corporate board included Archie Broderick, head of a media conglomerate, and the Goldrich who ran a nationwide mortgage company. Both of their monolithic companies teetered on the brink of collapse after they’d been caught in corporate wrong-doing of a gargantuan nature. They had more on their hands than a Jesus park, so even if they were on the park’s board, I didn’t see them as an immediate threat.

Neil Hammond from Hammond Oil was related to EG’s father and another of the corporate sponsors. I didn’t know anything bad about him except oil companies are notoriously corrupt. So I’ve already admitted I’m a bigot. It happens.

George Paycock and Tony Jeffery were on the park’s board. CFO and CEO of General Defense, respectively, they represented an enormous weapons company. I thought that made them strange bedfellows with a religious community that presumably preached the pacifist views of the New Testament, but I’m not much of a church goer. I’ve just read the Bible.

I had to look up the last member, Edward Parker III—a professional dilettante with a trust fund.

Maybe I could have Zander dig deeper into the board and their financials. I wanted a smoking gun. Tonight, I went for a broader approach.

I started with newspaper files on both the Reverend Joshua Arden and his community development organization. Joshua had his own church, his own TV network, and numerous other enterprises, most of which he’d inherited from his retired evangelist father. I didn’t have the resources to investigate all of them. Since Juliana had gone to work for CAD that was the one I concentrated on.

The good reverend preached an ultra-conservative spiel that appealed to the far right-wing religious fanatics who believed people of other faiths were infidels, traitors, and worse.

As a citizen of the world, I recognized that most folks preferred living in a familiar community, one they understood, such as a church of like-minded people. Unfortunately, one simply cannot force the entire world’s population into one’s own narrow image, no matter what your creed.

Joshua’s church believed in strict adherence to the Bible—apparently they liked the idea of the world being created in seven actual days, ignoring all the scientific impossibilities involved.

I couldn’t quite figure out if they thought the Garden of Eden was populated with pterodactyls, but that was their problem. I just needed to understand why Joshua had poured so much money into building a dinosaur Jesus park near DC, one of the most expensive, sophisticated, educated, international communities in the world.

For one thing, I surmised as I studied photos of the groundbreaking, he’d caught the attention of a lot of conservative politicians who were the fronts for extremely wealthy lobbies, corporations, and gazillionaires with their own agendas—few of them holy. Joshua’s predominantly rural and poor congregations had votes and used them—and they swung conservative.

The park itself seemed as harmless as a Disney production.

Joshua’s ambitious effort to spread his word through schools in third world countries was naively misguided, but he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to propagandize in the name of education. If Juliana wanted to build schools, more power to her.

I found an article describing how CAD brought in promising young people from around the world. They employed these student interns in different areas, on different projects to round out their education. Along with the downtown office, they had buildings at the park and scattered around the city. It seemed to be more like on-the-job training combined with programs on how to raise money, find teachers, encourage communities to provide school rooms, and most importantly, convince them that children needed education.

I was totally on board with education being the solution to many of today’s problems—teach a man to fish and he’ll never go hungry made sense to me. Hand-outs merely taught people to stick their hands out, although there was room for helping those who couldn’t help themselves, I supposed.

I was tired and going in circles.

At the very bottom of my search list were some tiny articles that didn’t even include CAD in the headlines. I almost skipped them. But I’d been trained to never leave a task unfinished, so I opened the first one.

It contained a small column from the local paper about a girl found strangled near the Potomac at the beginning of November. She had quit working for CAD a month prior to her death.

Except for the date, that wasn’t enough to set off alarms about CAD. Cities were dangerous places. From everything I’d read so far, CAD provided secure quarters and working conditions. They couldn’t be blamed for a student who quit and went astray.

That Juliana had quit communicating at the beginning of November could be coincidence.

Not until I opened the next article did I experience a frisson of fear.

A family had reported their daughter missing after she’d been with CAD for a few months. That had been eight months ago.

One dead, one missing, and Juliana not communicating—not a good track record for a religious community.

The third article reported a man’s remains discovered in a shallow grave by CAD workers on the Jesus World grounds during excavations in October. He’d been dead since spring.

I pictured the huge empty construction site filled with mounds of dirt, deep excavations, and the steel bones of preposterous creatures rising from cement foundations.

I have an active imagination and too much experience in death to see anything except a graveyard for victims in that image. The church as the new mafia. . . I shuddered, even though the possibility seemed preposterous.

Now I really had a reason to worry. I’d have to start planning an invasion of CAD headquarters or sic the cops on them if Juliana didn’t respond to Zander’s message soon.

My culinary talents extended to making French toast. Egg-dipped bread and syrup might not be the gourmet delight Mallard produced, but it satisfied all the hungry mouths around the kitchen table on Saturday morning.

“We found a platform wagon on Craigslist,” Tudor reported as he shoveled soggy bread toward his mouth.

Without Mallard to scowl at us, my family had spread out like the undisciplined louts they were. The table was covered in tablets, newspapers, books, hats, and other debris.

“There’s a Christmas tree lot just a few blocks from here!” EG reported. “Nick said he’d help us. We can go through the storage rooms in the basement and look for decorations!”

For all I knew, Max had stored dead bodies down there. I sipped my tea without immediately replying.

Zander had bags under his eyes deep enough to bury tree and wagon. He’d evidently been up half the night, searching for his sister or sending coded messages to every media in existence. I had to find Juliana alive just so I didn’t have to inform him that she was anything else.

“Zander and I will hunt ornaments,” I decided, bringing EG down off her dictator high. “You and Tudor can choose the tree, keeping in mind that the ceiling may be twelve feet tall but we have no ladder, and Nick does not have the strength of giants. Under six feet should be plenty.”

“You just don’t want us in the storage rooms,” EG declared, quite correctly.

“I don’t want you staggering around with boxes containing what might contain priceless glassware or Magda’s childhood memories,” I countered. “And if you want a tree, you have to work for it by helping Nick.”

“Where’s the attic chap?” Tudor asked. “He could carry a tree without blinking an eye. And there’s that motor out in the garage. Wouldn’t it hold a tree?”

Tudor had worked hand-in-hand with Graham the last time he’d been here. I’d had foolish hopes that Graham would keep Tudor’s cyber-terrorist bent reined in.

“He and Mallard are off on holiday,” I blithely lied. “And only Mallard can drive the Phaeton.” Another lie. Nick could too. But Mallard really would behead us if we dared stick an evergreen out the window of the old limo, while dripping pine sap and needles across the antique seats. The Phaeton would remain sacred from our disasters.

“We should get a tree for Graham’s office too!” EG announced, as if she hadn’t heard a word about hauling heavy trees around.

She was nine. In her head, Santa probably brought trees. Not that she’d been brought up to believe in Santa, but the whole world was some kind of magic to kids who understood little of it.

“If Graham wants a tree in his office, he can buy one. And if he wants us to decorate it, he’ll let us know. Let’s stick to one task at a time.” I didn’t mind being the practical bully, but once in a while, it would be nice to be the good witch.

Nick arrived to steer the two youngest on the tree hunt. He seemed quite enthusiastic about the project, especially since the snow had cleared away and left behind a beautiful blue sky. “Red and gold ornaments,” he informed me as the kids wrapped up. “We need a theme and as long as we’re stuck with those hideous heirlooms, red and gold works.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the parlor with its maroon velvet draperies and gold horsehair sofa.

“You’ll be lucky if we find broken glass. We make no guarantees.” I turned to Zander. “Are you good with helping me hunt through storage or would you rather go out in the fresh air and tree hunt?”

“I would like to explore the house more, please,” he said. “And you will need help carrying boxes.”

We sent the others off into the crisp winter air. Without Mallard to serve us, the teapot lingered in the kitchen where we’d eaten. I poured myself a new mug of tea, Zander made a cup of coffee for himself, and then I stole Mallard’s key ring from his cubbyhole office.

Since this was ostensibly Graham’s house, I’d not gone where I hadn’t been invited except in case of emergencies. My definition of emergency was pretty broad but hadn’t yet included most of the basement storage rooms. They were locked, for one thing. I respected locks, up to a point.

We’d only recently learned that the coal cellar contained a hidden door to a tunnel leading to the garage on the street behind us. Either Max had been a secretive bastard, or this house had belonged to a speakeasy in the past. Or both.

Since Mallard had been the one to mention ornaments in storage to EG, I counted that as excuse enough to go looking. I unlocked the first set of double closet doors and pushed them wide.

Mallard was organized, I’d give him that. Floor to ceiling metal shelves lined each ugly cement and concrete-block wall, with two aisles of shelves in the center of the low-ceilinged space. Each one was filled with neatly labeled cardboard boxes. I found a switch that lit overhead fluorescents, but I handed Zander a flashlight, just in case.

“If you find anything labeled dead body, don’t tell me, okay?” I headed to our right, leaving Zander to start on the left.

I thought I heard him chuckle. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

“These appear to be linens and clothes,” he called a few minutes later.

“Draperies and towels over here. We could start our own Goodwill store.” I considered opening a few to see what condition they were in, but there were more shelves and another closet to examine.

“Glassware,” he called back. “Dishes, candlesticks and knick-knacks.”

“Honestly? He stored and labeled a box of knick-knacks? Did they never throw anything out?” I ran my flashlight over dusty labels of ancient household items. If the money ran out, we could start an antique mall or at least a thrift shop.

“This aisle contains boxes that all start with Magda,” he said uncertainly.

Crap. That proved they never threw out anything. “Skip that one.” I had a burning curiosity but no masochistic tendencies.

Not finding anything blatantly labeled Christmas, or even holiday, we moved on to the next closet. The shelves in this area were made of heavy wood and covered in a century of dust. The boxes were wood, also, similar to the tangerine crates they have in grocery stores this time of year, only much larger and with lids.

The overhead light was a dangling bulb.

“Okay, I’m gathering this place hasn’t been touched in a while,” I said, wiping my hand through the thick dust.

Zander flashed his light over the nearest crate. The label had turned nearly brown, and the ink had faded to chicken scratches. “How long did our grandfather live here?” he asked in awe. “I’m pretty sure this label says 1901.”

“He wasn’t that old. I haven’t done the research. I thought he’d bought it, but maybe his parents lived here first?” I moved in the other direction, running my flashlight over more browned paper with fading ink. If I had anything to hide, this would be the place, except it would be difficult to do without disturbing the dust.

“It is very strange to think that this represents the home of half my family,” he said in awe. “I am so used to my father’s village being my family, but here. . .” He let out a sigh. “I am not even certain who I am anymore.”

I’d seen his father’s family. They were one generation short of a Zulu tribe. The one time I’d seen them, they had worn bones in their hair and loincloths and had been huge and terrifying—no doubt deliberately to scare the white-faced city kid. Modern financial analyst Zander with his pale brown skin and skinny shoulders had a lot of our mother in him. I could see where he’d be conflicted.

“Our ancestors ground us, they do not make us,” I said, repeating some idiocy I’d probably heard from a therapist. “I’m pretty certain Max was no better than he should be. People don’t become humongously wealthy by abiding by laws, so don’t idealize this side of your family, please.” I was thinking we probably had bootleggers on our family tree if this house had belonged to Max’s family. That would explain a lot.

“What was our grandmother’s name?” he called from behind a distant dusky stack.

“Antonina. I used to think my name was some corruption of hers until I recognized Magda’s predilection for naming us after royalty. Why?”

His head popped out from behind a stack. A gray dust-coated cobweb dangled from his neatly cropped dark hair. “There are boxes here labeled A.M. Do you think these are hers?”

My grandmother had died when Magda was still little. I knew nothing of her beyond that. I was curious about our past—but we had all we could do to handle our present.

“Possibly. I don’t suppose any of them say anything obvious like A.M.’s ornaments?”

“No, but judging by the level of dust, they were all stored on this shelf at the same time. How long ago did she die?” His voice was muffled as he ducked down to examine the bottom shelves.

I performed a few mental calculations. “She died when Magda was six, I think, maybe about 1970. Do they have tests to determine if that’s forty years of dust?”

“No, but the labels are less faded than the ones where you are, if that counts. The handwriting is illegible however. Would it be all right if I pull out this one that seems to have straw sticking out of it?”

I grimaced. “What happens to straw after forty years?”

“Mold most likely. Everything down here is probably ruined. But ornaments from that long ago would have been very thin glass and require packing.”

I heard him haul a box off the shelf without my giving him the go ahead. Fair enough. The boxes belonged to him as much as they did to me. Just because I’d spent my first few years in this house, and his had been spent in Africa, didn’t change the family genes.

I heard grunts of disgust. Unable to contain my curiosity, I wandered back to see what he’d unearthed.

Disintegrated straw, dead spiders, filthy layers of dust—and crystal globes so delicate I feared they’d shatter if we removed the crud. I’d seen Czech crystal like this in museums. These ornaments were far older than the 1970s.

On top was a crystal oval framing an old color photo of a young couple and a toddler girl—our grandparents and mother. I’d never seen my grandmother. She wore the hideous bouffant hairdo of the time. They actually looked like a normal 1970’s suburban family—

And not like the Machiavellian characters I knew at least two of them to be.