Flashback. Justine Davis

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 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