Harmony 03 After Glow (10 page)

“Your staff said that you wanted to create a theme based on the underground ruins.”

“Yes.” He spread some drawings out on the table. “What I want is a dazzling, fantasy version of a trip through the catacombs. From the moment a guest walks into the lobby of my resort, I want him to be surrounded by genuine relics and artifacts, not reproductions.”

“That’s where I come in, I take it?”

Gannon smiled and sat back against the sofa. “Yes, Miss Smith, that is precisely where you come in. I want the settings to be as authentic as possible. You’ll have a generous budget. I want you to use it to acquire only museum-quality antiquities. Attend the auctions. Contact your connections on Ruin Row. Get the word out to the private collectors. Do whatever it takes. I want only the best pieces. My design team will incorporate them into the décor.”

“It sounds like a very exciting project,” she said.

“I’m not one to micromanage.” Gannon rose to his feet. “I hire qualified people and I let them do their job. However, this project is very important to me and I will expect to be kept informed. I’d like weekly status reports in person. Will that work with your schedule?”

She realized that he was terminating the meeting already. “No problem, Mr. Hepscott.”

“Please. Call me Gannon.” He studied her with a warm, considering expression. “Something tells me that you and I are going to make a great team,
Lydia.”

Forty minutes later she leaped out of the cab in front of Shrimpton’s House of Ancient Horrors, paid the driver, and rushed through the entrance. The meeting with Gannon Hepscott had gone smoothly and swiftly enough, but the cab had encountered a rush-hour traffic jam on the way back downtown and as a result she was twenty minutes late for work. She hoped that her boss was not yet aware of that fact.

The elderly man behind the ticket booth waved to her. “Morning,
Lydia.”

“Morning, Bob. Is Shrimp here yet?”

“Nope, you’re in the clear.”

“Great. Thanks.” Relieved, she slowed down to catch her breath.

Thirty years ago, Shrimpton’s had started out as a third-rate museum featuring low-end alien relics. The establishment had gone rapidly downhill from that point. By the time
Lydia had put in an application for a position on the staff seven months ago, it was considered more of a carnival fun house than a legitimate museum. No respectable antiquities expert took it seriously. Certainly no one with her credentials would have even considered working in the place under normal circumstances.

But she had not had a lot of career options after the university had let her go. Her professional reputation had been in shreds.

Shrimpton had given her a job when she had needed one desperately and she would be forever indebted to him. Although she was trying to build a new career as a private antiquities consultant she had vowed to give her employer his money’s worth. She would work through lunch to make up the twenty minutes, she promised herself.

She walked quickly along a long exhibit hall that was dramatically shadowed and lit with glowing green fluo-rez lamps designed to provide the eerie, creepy atmosphere that was the hallmark of Shrimpton’s.

In spite of its low reputation, the museum had acquired, under her direction, some rather nice relics including several wonderful carved urns and a matching pair of green quartz columns.

Her greatest acquisition, however, one that had forced the more upscale antiquities community to sit up and take notice, was a little vessel of pure, worked dreamstone. It occupied a place of honor at the end of the main gallery and was protected by a state-of-the art security system that had been donated by Mercer and Tamara Wyatt. The placard next to the beautiful little object read,
Unguent Jar. Dreamstone. A gift of Mr.
Chester Brady.

Unfortunately, the gift had been posthumous because
Chester, a shady ruin rat who had made a career working the illegal side of the antiquities trade, had run afoul of an illicit excavation operation. He had been murdered, his body dumped into a sarcophagus here at Shrimpton’s.

Lydia had been escorting Emmett on a tour of the Tomb Wing when they had discovered the body. She knew that she would never again be able to walk past the display of not-quite-human shaped coffins without thinking of
Chester.

She opened a door and walked into the small suite of museum offices. There was no light showing through the opaque glass panel of Shrimpton’s door. Bob had been right, the boss had not yet arrived. Shrimpton had probably stopped for a box of doughnuts.

The door to the office of Shrimpton’s secretary and all-around general assistant, Melanie Toft, stood wide.
Lydia put her head around the corner.

“Morning, Mel.”

Melanie looked up from the tabloid she was perusing. She was an attractive, dark-haired woman with lively eyes and what could only be called a very fashion-forward sense of style.
Lydia sometimes wondered if she shopped for all her clothes in the lingerie departments of the stores. Melanie had an extensive collection of sheer blouses, very short skirts, and daring little dresses that resembled nightgowns and slips.

“About time you got here,” Melanie said. “How was the meeting with Hepscott?”

“Fine. He gave me a budget that is several times what I get to spend here in a year. I can’t wait to start buying.”

She went into her office and set her portfolio case against the shelves holding her extensive collection of the
Journal of Para-archaeology
.

She was stuffing her purse into the bottom drawer of her desk when Melanie appeared in the doorway, rattling the copy of the tabloid.

“Have you seen the papers?”

“Hard to miss the headlines. The news that someone tried to murder Mercer Wyatt is above the fold of every newspaper in town. I also caught the report about it on
Good Morning, Cadence
on the rez-screen before I left my apartment.”

“How can you sound so calm and casual?” Melanie sashayed into the office and propped one well-rounded hip on the corner of the desk. “For goodness sake, woman, you’re dating the new boss of the Cadence Guild.”

“
Acting
boss.”

Melanie winked. “The job could become permanent if Wyatt doesn’t make it.”

“Got a hunch Wyatt will survive. He’s a tough old specter-cat.”

Melanie held up the tabloid. “You never told me all the juicy details about Emmett London’s connections to the Wyatts. How could you keep that kind of gossip from your very best friend? I’m crushed,
crushed
I tell you.”

Lydia glanced at the cover of the
Cadence Tattler
and froze. A large, grainy photo of Tamara Wyatt and Emmett going into the main entrance of
Cadence
Memorial
Hospital together filled most of the available space.

The headlines screamed
New Guild Boss Involved in Lovers’ Triangle?
The type had to be at least an inch high.

“Let me see that.”
Lydia snatched the tabloid out of Melanie’s hand.

“Be my guest,” Melanie replied.

Lydia raced through the article, her stomach growing colder by the second.

Emmett London, newly appointed chief of the Cadence Guild, was formerly engaged to wed Tamara Mcintyre (now Mrs. Mercer Wyatt) in a Covenant Marriage in
Resonance
City. According to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, the wedding was called off abruptly after the bride-to-be was introduced to the boss of the Cadence Guild, Mercer Wyatt, at the engagement ball.

In a magazine interview last month, Mrs. Wyatt maintained that she had been “swept off her feet” by the dynamic Wyatt and that the two intended to convert their current Marriage of Convenience into a full Covenant Marriage in the near future.

A spokesperson for the Resonance Guild assured this reporter that the engagement between
London and Tamara Wyatt had ended amicably. But other sources, speaking off the record, hinted that
London was furious about the breakup and vowed revenge.

“Revenge?”
Lydia reread the last line of the story, appalled. “This idiot reporter is implying that Emmett wanted revenge because Mercer Wyatt stole his fiancée.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Oh, jeez.”
Lydia sat down hard on her desk chair. “This is terrible.”

“You’ll notice that the article stops short of actually suggesting that
London may have been the one who shot Wyatt,” Melanie said dryly. “But the implication is a little hard to miss.”

“It’s impossible to miss.” The chill in
Lydia’s stomach turned into an even more unpleasant sensation of hollowness. “This could turn into a disaster.”

“Forget that. Let’s get to the interesting stuff. Any of it true? Was the lovely Mrs. Tamara Wyatt London’s fiancée at one time?”

Lydia cleared her throat. “Well, yes.”

Melanie’s eyes rounded. “Oh, my.”

“But the engagement didn’t end because Tamara got swept off her feet by Mercer Wyatt.”
Lydia thumped the cover of the tabloid in disgust. “Good grief, he’s forty years older than she is.”

“Still in great shape though, I hear,” Melanie said cheerfully. “At least he was until yesterday. Why did the engagement end?”

“Emmett informed her just before the engagement party that he had accomplished his objectives for the reorganization of the Resonance Guild and planned to step down. He wanted to go into private consulting. That did not suit Tamara. She had other goals.”

“Wanted to be Mrs. Guild Boss, huh?”

“She sure did. As it happened good old Mercer Wyatt had recently been widowed and was apparently in the market for a new bride.”
Lydia turned one hand, palm up. “Tamara ended the engagement.”

Melanie drew up one bare knee and clasped her hands around it. The motion hiked her lacy skirt dangerously high on her thighs. “How did Emmett feel about being dumped?”

“He had a very narrow escape and he knows it.”

“It says in the paper that they were planning a Covenant Marriage. It would have been a legal and financial nightmare to get out of it once the vows had been spoken.” Melanie shook her head. “Wonder why they didn’t go for a standard Marriage of Convenience, first?”

Lydia cranked back in the squeaky desk chair and swiveled slightly from side to side. “Emmett is a long-term planner, one of those types who sets goals and then does whatever it takes to accomplish them. He probably applied that management approach when he set out to marry Tamara.”

“Well, you’ve got to admit, she does seem to be the perfect Guild boss wife. She’s not only beautiful, she’s stylish and smart. Heck, she’s an executive in her own right. Look how active she’s been on the boards of all those charities and social clubs this past year. She’s done more to promote a more modern, mainstream image for the Cadence Guild in the past year than anyone else has done since Jerrett Knox defeated Vincent Lee Vance.”

“I know.”
Lydia drummed her fingers on the top of her desk. She did not need to be reminded of the long list of Tamara Wyatt’s personal assets and accomplishments. “I’ve met her. She’s impressive but she would have been the wrong woman for Emmett. I’m pretty sure he knows that now.”

“Of course he does,” Melanie said loyally. “It’s obvious that you are the right woman for him.”

They both thought about that for a while.

Melanie cleared her throat. “So, where was Emmett London in the early morning hours when Mercer Wyatt was getting shot in the back?”

“The leader of Zane Hoyt’s Hunter-Scout troop asked him to help supervise the boys on a camping trip. They got back around two in the morning. By the time Emmett dropped the kids off at their various homes and got to his place it was three. Wyatt had just arrived in the emergency room.”

“The paper says that Wyatt was shot sometime between two and three,” Melanie pointed out.

“Uh-huh.”

“Sounds like Emmett might have a little trouble accounting for the time between dropping off the last Hunter-Scout and answering the phone call from the hospital.”

Lydia leveled a finger at her. “Don’t even think of going there, Mel. At the most, we’re talking twenty minutes.”

Melanie pursed her lips but refrained from pointing out that twenty minutes was long enough to murder someone.

Lydia sighed. “Luckily, Detective Martinez seemed satisfied that Emmett was not a suspect. After all, it was Wyatt himself who appointed Emmett to take over on an interim basis. He wouldn’t have done that if he thought that Emmett had tried to murder him.”

Melanie rocked back and forth on the desk a couple of times. “But Wyatt was shot in the back, according to the papers, and never saw the person who tried to kill him. Plus, I’ll bet that
Martinez didn’t know about this lovers’ triangle thing when she questioned you and Emmett. Her view of the situation may change when she finds out those three had a tangled past.”

Lydia slumped deeper into her chair.

“On the other hand,” Melanie continued on a brighter note, “this is a Guild matter and everyone knows that the Guild polices its own.” She hopped off the desk. “Well, gotta run. Things to do. By the way I meant to tell you that Shrimp is feeling very pleased with himself.”

“Why is that?”

“He got an offer from a private collector for the Mudd Sarcophagus. The guy apparently saw it in the Tomb Wing last week and wants it badly because it fills out his collection. He’s willing to pay a lot more than it’s worth. Shrimp is thrilled, as you can imagine. He says you can use the profits to get a more interesting coffin.” She rolled her eyes. “What a concept, huh? An
interesting
coffin.”