Vendetta

The mention of David Gracelyn’s name irritated Winter somewhat. He didn’t trust her or want her there. He’d made that perfectly clear.

“Marion Gracelyn is dead,” Winter said. “She’s been dead a dozen years. Why would her past suddenly be of interest? You want someone to write her memoirs?”

“No. This is of a more serious nature.”

Leaning against the paddock, Winter remained attentive. She was a good interviewer and she knew it, but that skill was sometimes complicated if she intimately knew the person she was interviewing. She not only knew Christine Evans, but she respected and liked the woman tremendously.

“Marion took a lot of secrets to her grave,” Christine said. “I couldn’t even imagine how many until these last few years. And those have been—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “Getting the academy funded and staffed was difficult.”

Winter hadn’t thought about that while she’d been attending the school, but after she’d gotten out in the world and started working as an investigative journalist she’d realized just how monumental the undertaking had been.

“You think Marion did something wrong?” The question didn’t come out as smoothly as Winter had tried to make it.

Christine took in a quick defensive breath. “No. I don’t. Not intentionally. But so many things had to happen simultaneously in order to make the academy a reality. Even Marion, as good as she was, wasn’t able to be everywhere at once.”

“She didn’t have to be,” Winter said. “You were there.”

“Thank you for that.” Christine relaxed a little. “But there were still a lot of problems.”

“We’re not talking about problems, though, are we?” Winter asked. “You mentioned secrets.” She couldn’t help pushing a little. It seemed like the time to do so. And even her patience wasn’t inexhaustible.

“We’re talking about secrets.” Christine hesitated. “I think that one of those secrets has come back to haunt us.”

“Which one?” For the life of her, Winter couldn’t imagine what it might be. Marion Gracelyn had always seemed so open and aboveboard.

“Somewhere in Marion’s life, she made a very powerful enemy.” Christine pursed her lips. “Over the last few years, that enemy has made himself or herself known to us.”

“Who’s the enemy?”

“That’s part of the problem, you see. We don’t know.”

Winter quivered inside. She loved mysteries. They were delectable little things that could encompass her every thought as she sorted them out. No matter what the secret was, it couldn’t remain hidden. There was always a trail. Normally that trail was marked by money or sex.

“How did you find out about this enemy?” Winter asked.

“That’s a long story.”

Winter smiled at the older woman gently. “You brought me out here, to one of my favorite places, to tell me this much. Maybe we could go to your favorite place and you could tell me the rest of the story there.”

Some of the sadness clinging to Christine lifted. She raised an eyebrow over her real eye. “Putting an interviewee at ease?”

A mischievous grin pulled at Winter’s lips. “Perhaps. Is it working?”

“I started being more at ease the moment you agreed to come.” Christine took a breath and nodded. “Let’s go.”

As they strolled through the gardens the horticulture and chemistry classes maintained, Winter listened to Christine talk about the investigation several former students had put together into the “accidental” death of Lorraine Miller. Walking amid the bright spring tulips, lilies, amaryllis, daffodils and irises and talking about murder and illegal genetic experiments seemed incongruous.

Hell, it is incongruous.

Astonished, Winter listened to the story of Lab 33 and the genetically enhanced young women that were—essentially—Rainy Miller’s “children.” Christine didn’t reveal who those young women were, but she talked about the strange physical abilities they had.

Winter couldn’t believe that only bits and pieces of the real story had ever surfaced in the media. There had been some flap over the story, but nothing had ever connected in the way Christine laid it out.

Then, seated on one of the small stone benches placed through the gardens, Christine started explaining about how Rainy’s death might have been connected to Marion’s and the recent kidnapping of the three young Athena Academy students. The story was long and Christine took pains to be thorough.

“You think the two girls that were taken were specifically chosen because they were created in Lab 33?” Winter asked.

Christine stood at the island in the kitchen and prepared chicken breasts. After talking for hours, she’d suggested they get something to eat, then offered to make dinner.

“Not in Lab 33. In a medical facility in Zuni.” Christine rolled a chicken breast in a liquid mixture and set it aside.

“How do you know that?” Winter wielded a chopping knife on salad ingredients with a dexterity she’d learned at the academy. When she’d first realized she was going to have to take culinary classes as part of her curriculum, she had demanded to know why. Her steadfast refusal to participate in class had prompted a visit to Christine Evans’s office. Christine had explained in no uncertain terms that learning to cook for oneself was just as important as any of the other skills she would be learning at the academy. She still didn’t necessarily enjoy the process, but she knew how to do it.

“We’ve managed to reconstruct some of Aldrich Peters’s notes from Lab 33,” Christine replied. “We’re still working on other pieces, but it’s getting harder.”

“But the girls were egg babies?” The term was foreign to Winter, but she’d picked it up because Christine had used it. She’d often unconsciously picked up sentence structure and vocabulary from people she interviewed.

“Yes. We knew they had special powers, but the method of their conception was a surprise.”

“Whoever took them knew more about the students here than you did.”

“We realized that later.” Christine cubed the chicken and scattered it across a hot pan. The meat sizzled and started browning at once.

Winter pushed the chopped vegetables into a salad bowl and shook them. She washed her hands in the sink and gazed around the kitchen.

Christine lived on-site at the school. Most of the faculty did. Of course there were a few teachers and specialists who were transitory and taught only as specific coursework was offered.

The house showed military order and precision. Winter would have expected nothing less. But there was also a softness and a personality that she hadn’t been prepared for. When Winter was in attendance, every student at the academy knew Christine Evans as firm but fair and as an ex-military officer. They even knew a little bit about her family, but none of them had ever been invited to her home.

“It’s good, in a way, that whoever was behind the kidnappings knows more than we do,” Christine said. “I feel more certain that it’s not someone here.”

Retreating to the island, Winter rested a hip against it and picked up a carrot stick. Her mind spun and clicked through the variables.

“Not necessarily,” Winter said.

Christine looked at her.

Winter counted off points on her fingers with her carrot stick. “Someone here could have decoded more of the DNA fragments you’re working with than anyone else has. Someone could have found more of the fragments than you know about. Or someone here might be working with this mysterious A person.”

“I truly hope not. We’ve already had one betrayal. A recent hire helped lure the girls away from the school. With everything that’s gone on, I don’t know how another betrayal in our midst would affect us.”

Winter quietly agreed. She crunched the carrot stick and thought some more. “What do you hope I can do?”

“Find Marion’s enemy.”

Oh? Is that all? Winter barely kept her sarcastic comment to herself. She pushed her breath out and tried to relax.

“How am I supposed to do that?” Winter asked.