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 she knew what they’d be facing, that they’d have to fight so much harder than the men at those institutions did.”
Alex nodded. “And it was hard enough for the men, without adding intimidation, harassment and the just plain not being wanted that women would face into the mix. I understand all that. But didn’t a ‘separate but equal’ sort of solution placate those opposed?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But we found that many simply opposed women being prepared for any part in what was then a man’s world. Some almost violently so.”
“And one perhaps murderously so?” Alex said softly.
G.C. sighed. “It certainly seems possible.”
“Even probable.” Alex shook her head. “Although it’s hard for me to believe anybody could hate us that much.”
“I’m not sure it’s about hatred,” G.C. said, “as much as hanging on to a tradition, a way of life that’s all they know.”
“So was the Civil War,” Alex pointed out in a wry tone.
G.C. smiled at her as if she were an exceptionally clever student. “Point taken.”
Turning her attention back to the letter, she held up the last page.
“What’s with this?” she asked, pointing at the drawing in the lower left corner.
“I don’t know,” G.C. said, the tone of his voice telling her that he had spent more than a little time trying to figure out the meaning of the hand-drawn graphic that was almost cartoonish, yet at the same time quite ominous.
Only, she told herself, because it was a spider. A big, fat one, crouched in the middle of a web made small by the looming body of the arachnid.
“All I can tell you,” Charles said, “is that Marion was not a doodler.”
Alex looked at the drawing again. “So…this isn’t a casual scribble. It means something.”
“It did to her,” he confirmed.
Which meant it did to Alex, as well. Marion Gracelyn was Athena; it wouldn’t exist without her vision and effort. And anything that threatened Athena or anything connected to it threatened Alex, because Athena was irrevocably entwined in her life and her heart.
As was the case for all the Cassandras. They’d renewed their promises to each other and to Athena in the aftermath of the investigation that had begun with Rainy Carrington’s murder. She hadn’t expected to have the call come again so soon, but apparently it had. And she would respond.
Any and every Cassandra would always rally to Athena.
Chapter 2
“So,
