steady. Alex had hopes this would cheer him, but then a clip of a politician flinging some charges G.C. strongly disagreed with set him off on a rant.
“He’s an idiot. Most of them are, anymore. Hasn’t been a decent senator elected since Marion,” he muttered as long-time cook and housekeeper Sylvia Barrett set bowls of her homemade sorbet in front of them.
“Speaking of Marion,” her grandfather began, then stopped. Finally he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. Again he hesitated, enough unlike him to make Alex’s concern rise again. But finally he handed it across the table to her.
“And this is?” she asked, still focused on him rather than the envelope she’d taken from him.
“I’d like you to read it yourself and tell me what you think.”
Something in his tone and manner told her he was speaking to his granddaughter the FBI agent. This relieved her; she’d been afraid what he’d handed her was some sort of medical report she wasn’t going to like.
She studied the envelope for a moment. The paper was heavyweight, rich feeling. It was addressed to her grandfather here at the farm, in a bold, looping hand that looked familiar. There was no return name or address, only an Arizona postmark, which made her frown. Her forehead creased when she noticed that the letter had been postmarked ten years ago.
Her gaze flicked to G.C., who sat across the table from her with an expression she couldn’t read. He rarely used the mask honed by years in the upper echelons of power and the business world on her, and that he was using it now told her this was even more important than she’d guessed.
She slid out the folded pages. They were the same rich, ragg-heavy paper of the envelope. When she lifted the pages above the first fold, a familiar letterhead at the top of the page stopped her dead.
She knew now why the writing had looked familiar.
“Marion,” she murmured under her breath.
She glanced at her grandfather again, saw that he was quietly, expressionlessly waiting. She looked back at the words handwritten on letterhead from the United States Senate, further labeled in the upper corner as from Arizona senator Marion Gracelyn. The list of committees she’d served on during her tenure as junior senator ran a considerable length down the left margin.
Alex fought off the instinctive shiver a communication from the dead gave her and read. And reread the letter, her shock growing. Finally she lifted her head and stared at her grandfather. She’d wanted a distraction, and she’d gotten one in spades.
“She knew,” she whispered. “She knew someone was trying to kill her.”
Charles let out a suppressed sigh. “I was almost hoping you’d see something different there.”
She shook her head slowly. “It’s…right here. Three accidents, that close together, that weren’t really accidents? What else could it be?”
Charles nodded. His eyes were full of remembered pain as he gestured at the letter she held. “It’s as if she’s saying goodbye.”
Alex looked at the letter again. Looked at the closing line she had at first skimmed over in her shock at the other revelations the page held.
I don’t want this to sound like a letter from a foxhole, Charles, but I hope you know how much I love you and yours. We too often don’t tell the ones we should, and sometimes we leave it too late.
He was right, Alex realized. She’d been focused on the warning implicit in the letter and hadn’t recognized the tone of farewell until he pointed it out. Marion had not only known someone was after her, but had been convinced they were likely to succeed.
“What could have made her expect to be murdered?” Alex asked, forgoing the obvious next step, that Marion had been exactly right.
“More to the point, who on earth thought they could get away with murdering a U.S. senator?” Her grandfather’s tone was grim.
And why hadn’t this come out before now, all these years later? Alex wondered.
When Marion Gracelyn had been bludgeoned to death in a lab building on the grounds of her brainchild, Athena Academy for Women, it had been headline news for weeks. Speculation, both wild and informed, had flown around the country.
And if she’d been too young to know then, Alex certainly knew now what kind of pressure that type of high-profile case put on investigators. She’d borne the brunt of some of the frustration agents working such cases felt, when they wanted evidence processed immediately and everybody thought their case was more important than anyone else’s.
She could only imagine what it must have been like after the murder of a United States senator.
So why hadn’t this come to light? Why hadn’t the investigators back then put it together? In all the digging she knew had to have been done, how had this been overlooked, the fact that Marion had known someone was trying to kill her?
Once more she looked at the second page of the letter, which held the short, stark documentations of the three events that on the surface looked like accidents or to the mystics, a string of Mercury retrograde bad luck. An automobile malfunction, a fire at her home and the crash landing of the small plane she’d chartered to make it to D.C. in time for a crucial vote.
Taken individually, Alex might have thought the same. But when you looked at them all together, she thought, took into account that they had all happened in the space of two months, and added the final, grimmest fact, that Marion had indeed been murdered, there was no way to see it differently.
And Marion had known it.
“Why didn’t she tell me before?”
There was an undertone to her grandfather’s voice, an almost plaintive note that made a long-ago and long-forgotten suspicion resurface in her mind, that her grandfather and the late senator had perhaps been closer than she herself had then been aware of. And something she’d at first skimmed over made her look back at the first page of the letter, addressed, she only now realized, to “My Dearest Charles.”
She wondered, but she knew this was not the time to pursue that particular possibility.
“I don’t quite understand, G.C. Have you had this all this time?”
“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
