Mission: Irresistible (6 page)
T
he myriad gods and goddesses filed back into the museum with a grim-faced Phyllis Lambert marching at the head of the pack. Cassie brought up the rear, anxiously nibbling her bottom lip.
Which wasn’t like her.
She never lagged behind and she rarely fretted, mainly because she didn’t like thinking about anything that bummed her out. Plus, she hated chewing off her lipstick because she indulged too lavishly at the Neiman Marcus Lancôme counter. At twenty-eight dollars a tube, she’d learned to make her lipstick last.
But she’d just been fired. She was out of a job. So long, Smithsonian. Good-bye, Maddie.
Cassie swallowed the lump in her throat and told herself she would not tear up. She wasn’t about to give Phyllis the satisfaction of making her cry.
Just ahead of her in the multitude, she spied Harrison and her heart thumped illogically. She didn’t even like the guy. Why was her pulse speeding up?
As if sensing her gaze on the back of his head, he turned and glowered at her. Apparently he wasn’t any fonder of her than she was of him, but he had stepped in and interrupted Phyllis when she’d been reading her the riot act.
The question was, Why?
She searched his face, looking for answers, but found none. The man was a master at hiding his emotions. Which in this instance was probably a good thing.
The entire group skidded to a halt in front of Kiya’s now-empty display case. Phyllis took one look, narrowed her eyes, and spun around.
“Cooper!” she bellowed.
Cassie took a deep breath, marshaled her courage, and stepped forward. How much worse could it get? She had already been canned. What else could the irritable curator do to her?
“What is it, Phyllis?” she asked, making sure her tone sounded light, casual, and untroubled as she toed off with the woman.
“Now I realize what you were up to.” Lambert shook a finger in her face. “Screaming and claiming there had been a murder in the courtyard. You were creating a distraction, luring us outside, while your accomplice shut off the electricity to deactivate the security alarms and stole the amulet.”
The crowd inhaled a collective gasp of surprise. She could feel a hundred pair of staring eyes.
“Oh, no,” Cassie denied. “You’re wrong. That’s not what happened at all.”
She had been quite mistaken. Things could get worse. A lot worse.
“Detain her,” Phyllis barked to the security guard, “while I alert the police.”
The brawny security guard moved to firmly take hold of Cassie’s arm.
“What a minute,” Harrison blurted, nudging aside the guests until he was standing beside them. “Phyllis, obviously you didn’t get the memo.”
The curator looked puzzled. “Er, what memo?”
Cassie gaped at him, totally confused. What was he talking about? What was going on? Why was he trying to help? The guy hated her. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
Harrison sent her a look that said,
Just go along with me on this.
As a rule, she wasn’t a liar. She did not prevaricate without a darned fine reason. And she wouldn’t allow someone to step in and take the blame for her. Especially not someone like Standoffish, who wasn’t even pleasant to her under normal circumstances.
“Phyllis, I don’t know what memo he’s talking—,” she started to say, but then Harrison gently but firmly trod on her toe.
Shut up
, his chocolate eyes insisted.
Hey, hey, hey!
Purposefully, she jerked her foot out from under his brown tasseled loafer. She couldn’t believe he was behaving so out of character. What was up?
“What Cassie means is that she doesn’t understand why you didn’t receive your memo,” he said, muscling in and interrupting her in midsentence. “She sent it four days ago, after we cemented the plans.”
“Clyde, did you get their memo?” The curator glanced over at her executive assistant, a pie-faced balding man in his early fifties.
Clyde Petalonus was dressed as George of the Jungle in a cheetah-spotted loincloth with artificial kudzu vines draped around his neck. Poor Clyde didn’t really have the figure for the ensemble. Cassie presumed he’d either gotten his Brendan Fraser movies mixed up, or his sense of geography was so terrible he actually thought there were jungles in Egypt.
“Sure thing. I got the memo,” Clyde lied.
His reply took Cassie by surprise.
Why was Clyde lying? She knew he liked her and that he really disliked Phyllis. The curator had the annoying habit of sending him on “essential” errands the minute the man sat down for a meal in the employees’ lounge. And the sneaky woman would always wait until Clyde had a cherry Pepsi poured over ice and his sandwich unwrapped or his frozen Hungry Man zapped in the microwave before she sprang the urgent assignment on him. But that wasn’t explanation enough for him to risk his job over her.
She looked at him, and he gave her a quick smile that said,
Don’t worry, I’ll cover for you.
But she was worried. Why would he cover for her?
Maybe he wasn’t covering for her. Maybe he was lying to protect himself. He was in charge of overseeing the crew that had set up the lighting for the exhibit. Maybe he was afraid Phyllis would accuse him of some culpability in the crime when she got done chewing out Cassie.
She might get fired, she might even get accused of stealing the amulet, but she knew she was innocent. Whatever Clyde’s and Harrison’s motives might be, she simply could not allow them to prevaricate on her account. She’d done nothing wrong. Phyllis couldn’t pin a thing on her.
Could she?
“What memo?!” Phyllis’s voice jumped an octave, and the tip of her nose turned blotchy red. “What are you talking about? What did this memo say?”
“Interactive murder mystery theater,” Harrison supplied. The tone of his voice was calm and steady, but Cassie caught the jerk of a subtle tic at his right eyelid. He was nervous.
A general titter of delight undulated throughout the gathered crowd.
“What a marvelous idea,” murmured Lashaundra Johnson, a reporter for the Arts and Entertainment section of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Lashaundra had written a feature on Cassie last year after she’d helped the FBI capture the art thief.
“I adore murder mystery theater,” exclaimed a very prominent, very moneyed museum patron dressed as Isis. “Will there be prizes for the winner?”
Murmured speculation rippled throughout the room as the guests eagerly exchanged ideas and discussed suppositions. Harrison’s fabrication was a huge hit.
“I don’t understand.” Phyllis impatiently tapped her foot. “Explain it to me.”
“Give us more details,” one of the King Tuts said. “Who is the mummy? Why was he in the courtyard? How is he connected to the legend of Kiya and Solen?”
“Wait, wait,” Nefertiti said. “I’ll need a pen and paper to keep this all straight.”
“Me too,” piped up Horus the Sky God.
“But what about Dr. Grayfield?” Phyllis asked dubiously. “What about the reunification ceremony?”
“Oh, that’s not tonight.” Harrison shook his head. Cassie admired his grace under pressure. To the casual observer he seemed totally composed, but she noticed he was squeezing his replica djed so tightly the muscles in his wrist bulged.
“Not tonight?” Phyllis repeated and frowned.
Not tonight?
Cassie wondered.
“It’s all in the memo.” Harrison gave Phyllis a gosh-are-you-out-of-the-loop expression.
On the surface, he did not look like a man whose life’s work had just jumped off that display case and walked out the door. He was pretty darn good at bluffing. But Cassie detected the telltale signs. His lips were pressed thin, and she saw a single bead of sweat glisten on his forehead.
“Let me get this straight, Dr. Standish. What you’re telling me is that the amulet is not really missing. No one stole it?” Phyllis asked.
“That’s correct.”
Cassie adjusted her cumbersome headdress. What had happened to the amulet? She shot him a surreptitious glance, and the look he returned was so desperate that she knew for certain the amulet
had
been stolen and he was covering up the theft.
But why?
Because of her?
But that made no sense. Harrison barely knew her, and until tonight he’d acted as if he didn’t care for her methods or her personality.
Was he simply using this opportunity to steal the amulet for himself? But why would he do that? He’d discovered the amulet. If he’d wanted to steal it, wouldn’t he have done it when he first excavated it?
Should she back him up in the lie or blurt out the truth? What were Harrison’s motives? Who had stabbed the mummy? Who was the mummy? Who’d turned off the lights? Who’d stolen the amulet? And most of all, where was Adam Grayfield? Things were weird and getting weirder by the minute.
“Where is the amulet?” Phyllis inclined her head toward the empty case.
“It’s secured in a bank vault. The amulet on display was a copy made for the sake of the murder mystery theater. It was all in the memo.”
“I wish I could see this memo. Clyde, do you still have your copy?” Phyllis crossed her arms over her chest.
“I deleted it from my e-mail,” Clyde said.
“Since there doesn’t seem to be a copy of this elusive memo, then you won’t mind taking me to the safety-
deposit box at the bank vault tomorrow morning and showing me the real amulet, Dr. Standish.”
“I wish I could, Ms. Lambert, but Adam Grayfield has the key. He’ll bring both halves with him to the reunification ceremony,” he said.
“Dr. Grayfield is in on this too?”
“You could say it’s his brainchild.”
Was
Adam party to this farce? Cassie frowned. Pondering these questions was giving her a headache. She didn’t like thinking this hard.
“Oh. Well. Then I’ll take you at your word.” Apparently Phyllis was willing to give them enough rope to hang themselves. “What happens next?”
“The guests will have a chance to solve the mystery on their own, and then when everyone returns with their guesses, we’ll give out the prizes and have the reunification ceremony,” Harrison supplied.
Cassie realized he was trying to buy them time to figure out who took the amulet. She only prayed it worked before Phyllis became suspicious and called the police. She didn’t know who Harrison was protecting or why, but if she went along with his plan, she would be up to her eyeballs in the conspiracy with him.
And the last thing she wanted was to be eyeball-deep in anything with the contentious, but oddly compelling, Harrison Standish.
She had to speak up.
But how?
“And when is everyone supposed to return for the reunification ceremony?” Phyllis raised an eyebrow.
“Anyone who’s interested in returning for the second part of the show will meet back here on Saturday night. Eight o’clock,” Harrison said.
“What about the logistics of all these people returning?” Phyllis waved a hand. “Will there be another party?”
“Absolutely.” Harrison nodded. “It was in the memo.”
Another party on Saturday night! Cassie didn’t have the budget for a second party, and it was only three days away. Would they be able to find Adam and the amulet in seventy-two hours?
“But I can’t make it on Saturday,” one of the King Tuts whined. “Will I get a refund?”
“This event is a charity fund-raiser for the Kimbell,” Harrison said. “You’re one of the most influential men in Fort Worth. Surely you will still want to make your contribution, even if your schedule doesn’t permit you to return for the second party.”
That shut King Tut up and put an end to a possible mass rush for refunds.
“Dr. Standish,” Cassie said. She took his elbow and squeezed it meaningfully. “May I speak with you in private about our mystery theater?”
“Right now?”
“Yes, right now.”
“Phyllis,” Harrison said and smiled at the pickle-faced woman, “could you give us a minute?”
“Of course.” The curator’s return smile was frosty. Clearly, Phyllis didn’t want to go along with their story, but the guests were so excited about the murder mystery theater concept that she had little choice.
“Out in the courtyard, Standish,” Cassie hissed.
She flounced away through the murmuring crowd. Harrison followed at her heels.
“What gives?” she demanded once they were outside. “What’s with this interactive murder mystery theater crap?”
“I’m trying very hard to save your skin, along with my brother’s miserable hide.”
“Who in the heck is your brother?”
“Adam Grayfield.”
“For real?” That was a shocker. Charming, romantic Adam was kin to this pigheaded cynic? The plot thickened. “But you have different last names.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“If he’d told me, then I wouldn’t be surprised that you two were siblings, now would I?”
“We’re half brothers. We have the same mother, different fathers.”
“That’s all well and good, but please don’t do me any more favors. I didn’t ask you to do me any favors. Why
are
you doing me favors?”
The man was a certifiable nut job. Why was he under the mistaken impression that she needed saving? And even if she did need saving, she wasn’t his to save. If she
was
searching for a Sir Galahad, she certainly wouldn’t turn to Sir Gripes-a-Lot as a consolation prize.
Harrison’s jaw hardened in that stubborn clinch she’d come to recognize and dread over the course of the past nine days. Whenever he set his mandible at that fight-or-die angle, Cassie had learned she was in for a protracted battle.
“I know what Adam’s up to, and the way you’ve been waxing rhapsodically about him all week makes me wonder if you two might be in on this together. As far as I know, you might even be his lover.”
“How can I be Adam’s lover? I’ve never even met your brother in person, you ass,” she snapped.
Harrison’s cheeks flushed. Was he embarrassed over his false accusations? Or was he mad because she had called him an ass? He was lucky she hadn’t called him worse.
“Besides, I have no clue what you’re talking about,” she finished.
“I’m talking about you two staging a publicity stunt involving Solen and Kiya as a way to milk the museum benefactors out of more money to fund Adam’s future excavations.”