Proof

Alex opened her mouth to argue, to protest she could keep going. Saw the glint in Christine’s good eye and capitulated so quickly it was almost embarrassing. Some old habits were very hard to break.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said, with a meekness that would have astonished anyone who knew Alex but had never met Christine Evans. Christine occupied a unique place in the hearts and minds of all Athenans. She was both disciplinarian and inspiration, stern and gentle, and a teacher who was willing to learn from her students, all rolled into one. It was a rite of passage to earn the privilege of calling her Christine instead of Ms. Evans.

Alex did go to bed and knew she was beyond exhausted when the fold-out sofa bed felt like the most comfortable thing she’d ever slept on. This time she did sleep, and surprisingly the nightmares she had feared didn’t come. She dreamed, but the tangled images of Rainy alive and smiling, telling them it was all a silly mistake, were somehow comforting. After a while even those stopped, and she slept deeply and barely remembered them when she woke up a few hours later.

The minute she sat up she knew Christine had been right. She felt much better. And ready to go. Ready to get to some answers.

And if need be, ready to fight.

There had to be something there, Alex thought as she paced the small morgue, waiting for the doctor to finish.

She had a feeling Christine had pulled some strings and called the woman in from neighboring Luke Air Force Base. Although Dr. Ellen Battaglia wasn’t in uniform, she gave the impression. Alex recognized it because fellow Cassandra and air force captain Josie Lockworth had it, as well.

No one who met Josie was ever surprised to find out that she was a take charge woman, making a success of her air force career. And if that new stealth system she was working on for the Predator spy plane functioned as well as it was supposed to—something Alex didn’t at all doubt, knowing Josie—there was likely no limit to how far she could go.

“Ready,” the doctor said.

Taking a deep breath, Alex braced herself to look at a very intimate part of one of the dearest people in her life, excised from her body with cold steel. Then she turned around.

The doctor had set a gleaming silver metal tray on a table. Knowing what was in it, Alex had to once more beat down her emotions.

It’s a scientific puzzle, just like anything else you work on every day, she told herself. You can do this. You have to do this.

Still, the two small organs on the gleaming tray made her shiver. With a final effort, she made herself focus on the puzzle, of which these were just a single part. But perhaps a crucial part.

Now that she again saw what she’d seen previously, with plenty of time to look carefully, she was certain her first thought was right. And now she noticed something else, something that bothered her even more.

“Dr. Battaglia?”

The doctor, who had turned away with a welcome sensitivity, turned back. “Yes?”

Alex pointed to the areas on the outer surface of the ovaries. “If you had to guess…how old would you say those scars are?”

The woman leaned over for a closer examination. “These things can be tricky,” she said. “There are so many variables. I’d guess they are older, but I’d hate to testify to an exact age. I’ll take some tissue samples, that may help. But one thing I can say with some certainty.”

“What?”

“The majority of those scars are the same age.”

“The same age?” Alex’s breath caught. If all those scars were made at the same time, then her suspicions had to be correct. “And the regularity of the spacing,” she said. “It looks…mechanical.”

The doctor nodded. “I noticed that, as well. No, those scars aren’t the result of natural monthly ovulation. But the work is somewhat sloppy. As if someone was in a hurry.”

Or scared?

“Work, you said. Something was done to her,” Alex whispered, fighting down a growing feeling of dread.

“I’d say so. A procedure of some kind. Was she undergoing fertility treatments?”

“Yes, but only recently.”

The doctor frowned. “That doesn’t fit. That’s what the scars look like, sloppy or hurried harvesting, but these aren’t recent.”

Alex fought off the ripples of nausea that the scenes in her imagination were causing. “Could what was done to her be done and leave a scar that would look like a routine appendectomy?”

“Absolutely. In this case a bikini scar, such as…your friend has.”

A bikini scar.

A new thought careened into her mind, and Alex had to suppress a shiver as Dr. Battaglia turned and went to work getting her tissue samples.

A bikini scar. A fake appendectomy. Mechanical puncturelike marks on the ovaries.

What had happened to Rainy?

Alex left the morgue quickly. This time, as she stepped outside, she welcomed the blast of heat that hit her. She blinked against the brilliant desert sun and freed a tangled strand of curly hair from the strap of her shoulder bag-cum-holster. She pulled her sunglasses out and slid them on. She walked to her car, careful not to touch any metal part while unlocking it. Got in. Set her bag on the passenger seat. Slid the key into the ignition. Started the motor. Flipped on the air.

She concentrated on each routine step as if it could not be done with anything less than full attention.

She leaned back in the driver’s seat. After a few moments the blast of air from the rental’s vents began to come out cooler, soothing her flushed skin but doing nothing at all for her tangled, wild emotions.

And finally, finally, she let the thought she’d been fighting surface.

She had her own bikini scar. From when she’d had her own appendix out, junior year.

Or she thought she had.

More memories flooded her. Rainy soothing her, saying this made them more sisters than ever, and joking about Athena’s water supply causing appendicitis.

But Rainy had never had her appendix out. Instead, she’d had some ominous procedure done, something to do with her ovaries, likely her eggs.

Alex knew she was making a lot of assumptions on circumstantial evidence, but her gut was telling her she was right. That those scars were as old as Rainy’s supposed appendectomy. It only made sense. Perhaps whatever had made them had rendered her infertile, hence her inability to conceive when she and Marshall had so desperately wanted a child.

What if her own operation was also a hoax? What if it had been a fake of some kind, the abdominal pain induced artificially? Perhaps exacerbated by drugs she thought had been given to help?

What if what had been done to Rainy had been done to her?

Alex sat there for a long time. The very idea of such a deeply personal, intimate violation made her stomach churn, and brought sweat to her skin despite the now chilly blast of the air-conditioning.

She had never thought much about having children, and when she did, it was off in the future somewhere while she concentrated on her career in the here and now. Although she had empathized with Rainy’s quest, she had often doubted that she would be horrifically upset if she herself never had children at all.

But that was before she came face-to-face with the outrageous possibility that that choice had been stolen from her, taken away without her knowledge or consent.

This scraped raw something in the very core of her being. Her world, her whole life, while never dull, had always been within her control. Academics and athletics came easily to her, and she chose what courses she would take and then proceeded to excel in them. Then she had decided to show her parents and her grandfather that she wouldn’t always dance to their tune, and had done so.

In the face of her grandfather’s disappointment she had then decided she’d made her point and worked hard to turn it around. And she had learned quickly that the rigid expectations she’d feared at Athena were in fact the keys to doors too often locked against women in the world.

Athena’s stated goal was to open those doors, expand possibilities and promote opportunities in all fields for women. The bigger picture included empowering women far beyond just the work-place. But above all, the goal was to help students find the person they were meant to be. They were never pushed or prodded in any direction, only given the tools necessary to make the right choice, and the chance to make that choice work.

Choice.

Such a simple thing. Or it should be.

She thought again of Rainy’s craving for a baby. Of the nights she’d spent on the phone listening to her old friend talk about it, so longingly.

“You never had a chance, Rainy,” Alex murmured. “And maybe now, neither do I.”

A slow, burgeoning heat began to build in her. She recognized it for what it was, a rising anger. It would reach the level of red-hot fury, she was sure, before this was over. But then it would cool, set and become rational, become the driving force of a woman with the knowledge and tools to exact retribution.

“Hurt one Cassandra, hurt us all,” she spoke into the now chilly air of the car. “Use one of us, and all of us will exact payment. Whoever you are, whatever your goal, you will regret it.”

The moment she cleared the dead zone, that brief stretch along Olympus Road where her cell service always failed, her phone beeped at her. She quickly dialed her voice mail to play her messages. There were two, the first from Christine letting her know she was still off campus, finishing up interviews with a couple of potential instructors.

A smiled quirked one corner of Alex’s mouth. She didn’t envy the applicants, who were likely expecting a typical job interview. An interview for Athena Academy was anything but typical. No one was even brought to the school until they had passed both the initial and secondary screenings, and the first interview with Christine. And they only got that far if they passed an extensive background check.

The second message was from Kayla. It was short. A bit cryptic. And very disturbing.

She had searched Rainy’s papers and her computer at home and at her office, and was now reluctantly working with a police detective who was looking into Rainy’s accident. Reluctantly, because Kayla was as protective of Athena Academy as Alex and all Athena graduates were. And the suspicion Kayla had developed about Rainy’s death echoed Alex’s deepest fear.

Someone at Athena was part of it.

Chapter 5

Odd, Alex thought. She believed Kayla, trusted her suspicions. Or perhaps not odd; after all, it had never been Kayla’s intelligence or abilities that had been in question, only her judgment.

The judgment of a teenage girl, Alex reminded herself. And only her judgment about men.

That teenage Kayla, in hot-blooded anger and at the height of their dispute over just that, had said Alex could never understand how she felt about Mike because Alex would never climb down off her high horse long enough to let a man get close to her.

Alex had been stung, painfully, that of all people her closest friend would throw that accusation at her. Strangers had often assumed she was a snob before they’d even met her, simply because she was a Forsythe and had the Forsythe millions behind her. She’d developed a reserve because of it, which had in turn fed the image. But she’d never thought to hear it from a friend. Let alone her best friend.

Besides, she’d proven Kayla wrong. She and Emerson would be married…sometime. He’d been pressing her for a date, but she’d continued to put him off. Something always seemed to get in the way—her work, his work, something. She had a heavy caseload this month, he had a big operation scheduled, or a trip for a consultation the next month. Something always interfered. Their mothers had both threatened to intervene and take over, but fortunately so far she and Emerson had managed to stave that off.

But she had never expected anything like this to be the roadblock. She couldn’t even begin to think about a wedding with Rainy gone like this, and her death shrouded in inconsistencies and suspicions. And if that gave Alex a vague sense of relief, she didn’t dwell on it now.

Kayla had been wrong, of course.

And then, for the first time in years, the rest of what her fellow Cassandra had said came back to her.

Unless you happen to find a guy who’s on as high a horse as you are, Kayla had added, just before she’d slammed the phone down on the last conversation they would have for a very long time.

Alex’s mouth tightened. Emerson certainly rode a high horse, and she had no doubt he was exactly the kind of guy Kayla had been referring to. His family was one of the oldest and wealthiest in Virginia, almost in the Forsythe stratosphere, as Kayla had called it.

She had been teasing then. At least, Alex always thought she had been. But in the end the bitterness all came out, as if it had been too long bottled up, and a friendship that was as close as sisterhood had been shattered. Alex had always hoped they might someday heal the breach, but neither of them had ever made the move.

And now they had to deal with each other. In a sad way, Rainy had brought them together again, as she had all those years ago.

Christine was still out when Alex returned to her bungalow. Alex paced, trying to decide whether to call her and risk interrupting an interview.

“She’s probably got her phone off,” Alex told herself aloud as she crossed the small but comfortable living room. Christine had lived here since the beginning of Athena, and she’d made a warm, welcoming home out of what could easily have been cold, impersonal staff housing.

Not for the first time Alex wondered at how thoroughly Christine, an attractive, vibrant woman, had given herself to Athena. She seemed to have no life outside the school, and dedicated herself to the students completely. Alex had often wondered if she herself would ever feel so passionately about anything.

Now she knew. Because the need to find the truth about Rainy’s death was consuming her. And that was a bottom line she knew Christine would understand. She made the call, just in case the principal was finished and on her way back, but as she’d expected got her voice mail. She spelled out the situation quickly, as much as she felt safe doing over a cell-phone call, and told Christine what she planned to do. She knew Christine would okay her next step.

Unfortunately, Christine had the master keys with her. She kept them on hand at all times, just in case.

“I’m going to be a B and E master before this is over,” she muttered. This was putting her lock-picking and breaking-and-entering skills to the test. It was a good thing she’d brought her picks along with her other gear.

But since there was no other way in, and she knew she’d never be able to wait until Christine returned with her master keys, she checked to make sure she had the necessary tools and headed out for the science building, which held the small medical facility. While lock picking wasn’t one of the skills she’d honed at the bureau, her lessons at Athena weren’t that long ago.

At least here if she was caught, the worst she’d face would be explaining to Betsy Stone, Athena Academy’s nurse, what she was doing. The woman could be a bit territorial about her domain. But Betsy hadn’t yet returned from the term break, although according to Christine she was due in later today. Alex would be able to talk to her then about Rainy’s “appendectomy.”

I wonder if Betsy is still as determinedly blond as ever, she thought as she walked around to the rear doors that opened into the hallway just outside the entrance to the small infirmary.

Nearing fifty now, the nurse had been at Athena since the beginning, like Christine. She, however, was much harder to get to know. Alex knew Christine’s former army commander, Lieutenant General Snyder, had sent Betsy to Athena, and it seemed to have worked well for all concerned. Betsy didn’t inspire the kind of loyalty that Christine did, but her frank manner and easy competence earned her respect.

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