Flashback by Justine Davis (reading e books .TXT) 📗

“Yes and no,” he said, his mouth twisting slightly. “I had it, but didn’t know it. Obviously, from the postmark it came around the time Marion was murdered. Sylvia found it tucked away in the back of a drawer, under some linens. Our best guess is that one of the staff, knowing we were all grieving, put it out of sight to avoid causing more pain at that time, and then forgot about it.”

And so it had languished there, hidden, for a decade, Alex thought. Only to surface now, when the case was as cold as a winter desert night at Athena.

“I suppose we need to step up the spring cleaning around here,” G.C. said, but the quip fell flat. And since she didn’t know what to say, Alex instead reread the details of the three incidents.

“She must have had some idea who was behind all this,” Alex said, almost under her breath. “Why didn’t she say so?”

“Marion was never one to make accusations without having specific proof,” Charles said, his voice level again.

Alex looked at him. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Obviously, her death wasn’t at the hands of the casual burglar the police wrote it off to,” he said.

“Obviously. But that leaves a host of other possible suspects, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Charles agreed. “Marion made enemies as both a prosecutor and as county attorney.”

“And from what you’ve told me about her, some of them were near the top of the criminal food chain.”

He nodded. “And some were people who had a great deal to lose.”

“She took down a couple of politicians, too, didn’t she?”

“Yes. Powerful ones. And it wasn’t easy. In fact, that’s why she ended up running for office, when she saw how much housecleaning needed to be done.”

“Which means somebody with some dirt under the rug might not be too happy with her,” Alex speculated, thinking that the list of possible suspects was growing exponentially.

“And then, of course, there’s Athena,” Charles said quietly.

Alex’s breath caught. “Do you think it could be related to what happened to Rainy?” Alex and her best friends and Athena Academy classmates, the small, tight-knit group self-dubbed the Cassandras, had just gone through a nightmare of untangling a vicious-threaded mess of science corrupted and murder freely practiced. A nightmare that had begun with the loss of one of their own, Lorraine “Rainy” Carrington.

“It could have been, although the timing falls between when Rainy’s eggs were harvested and her murder twenty years later. I think it’s more likely that it’s connected to Marion founding Athena Academy. Opposition to the academy was…virulent, in some quarters. And it was her brainchild, her vision that brought it to life.”

Alex knew this. She’d always thought of Marion Gracelyn as a sort of unofficial aunt and a personal hero, but above all she’d been grateful to her for envisioning and making real the place that had changed Alex’s life—and the lives of countless other women—forever.

Thanks to Marion, Athena Academy existed, and women had chances that had been denied them for so long, chances to make the most of themselves in whatever field they chose…as long as they could excel to meet Athena’s stringent standards. Law enforcement, the military, science, athletics, whatever the discipline, it was open for Athena’s students, and in the relatively short existence of the school her graduates were already proving themselves all over the world.

“The Athena Factor,” Alex said softly, lost for a moment in the immensity of what Marion’s dream had accomplished. She’d been hearing the phrase more and more, as the power brokers of the world ran into the results of an academy devoted entirely to the advancement of women without interference from misguided or antiquated views and glass ceilings.

“Yes,” G.C. said. “But that’s the very thing some powerful people were afraid of. Sad to say that some still are.”

“Afraid enough to kill?”

Even as she said it, Alex shook her head ruefully. Of all people, she knew better than to question that.

“Just how bad was the opposition to Athena?”

“Startling,” G.C. said. “Or at least it seemed that way to me.”

“But you thought it was a good idea to begin with,” she pointed out.

“Yes. I’d wished there was something like it from the time you were five years old and I realized what we had on our hands.”

She blinked. “What you had on your hands?”

G.C. gave her the amused and proud smile that had warmed and encouraged her throughout her life. He’d made the absence of her late father so much more bearable, even through his own pain at having lost his beloved son.

“A girl who refused to see or set any limits,” he said, “no matter what anyone said.”

He didn’t say it, he never would, but Alex knew he meant her mother, who had seemingly spent her life trying to rein in her rambunctious, redheaded daughter. Girls don’t do that was the phrase she remembered hearing most. She’d have been crippled by it if she hadn’t been so stubbornly resistant, and if it hadn’t been for G.C. countering her mother’s negativity with his own brand of high-powered encouragement.

And, she had to admit, her brother, Ben, and his teasing that had goaded her on—intentionally, she later realized—to greater heights. If not for these things, she might have succumbed and become one of those women she had little use for, because they had little use.

Women like, sadly, her mother.

She jerked her mind out of that well-worn rut and back to the matter at hand. “What kind of opposition? From what quarters?”

Resting his elbows on the arms of his chair, G.C. steepled his hands in front of him and rested his chin on his forefingers. It was his pondering position, and as a child who adored her grandfather, Alex had long ago adopted it herself. She saw his eyes go distant, unfocused, knew he was remembering.

“Athena was truly Marion’s brainchild,” he said. “Her views on women’s rights were well-known. So, many were surprised when she opposed opening U.S. military academies to women. But