Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,60
Not for almost forty years.”
“Why not?” Muirin demanded. She sounded angry, and almost about to cry. “Look at that!” She pointed an accusing finger at the page, which had landed at her feet. “It was in the file! They have to know!”
“You said once that Burke and Spirit aren’t anybody, Murr, and even you and I aren’t anybody. And you were right. But Addie is heir to Prester-Lake BioCo. She’s worth millions. At the very least. She can’t be the first super-rich kid to end up here. Doctor Ambrosius probably sold her trustees on what a great safe secure place it would be for her, because if he hadn’t, it would be the easiest thing in the world to tie up Conrad Lake’s will in court until she was of age.”
“ ‘Safe and secure,’ ” Muirin said bitterly.
“That’s the whole point,” Loch said eagerly. “Anybody who had proof that it wasn’t—that this whole place was something out of Wes Craven land—could just take her out of here and get a lot of money from her trustees for bringing her to safety. They wouldn’t even have to break any Magician’s Code of Silence. They could leave that part out.”
“And nobody’s ever done something like that,” Spirit said.
“Well, Oakhurst is still here,” Loch said. He bent over and began scooping up the scattered papers. “And believe me, my dad worked with people like Conrad Lake. When the really rich want something to go away, it does.”
Spirit didn’t stop twitching at every sound until she was back in her own room with her door shut. Of course the door didn’t lock. None of the doors in the dormitory wings locked: the demerit points you got for stealing were astronomical; almost as high as the ones for being found in the dorm wing of the opposite sex. Ever.
But even when she was lying in bed, lights out, right where she was supposed to be and doing (almost) what she was supposed to be doing, Spirit couldn’t relax. For the first time in months, cruel recollections of the life and the family she’d lost pushed into the forefront of her mind, and nothing Spirit could do could stop the torture of those memories. She remembered when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out: She’d been nine, and wild to see it, and she’d been afraid she wouldn’t get to, because the house rule was that any theater movies had to be something both she and Phoenix could go to, and Phoenix was three years younger than she was, and at nine she was barely old enough to see some PG-13 movies.
But Dad was crazy about pirates (Mom preferred cowboys), and Spirit’s parents had struck a deal, so she and Dad drove an hour to the only theater in the area showing Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl—just them—and all the way home Dad had talked in a pirate voice while Spirit had yelled and stuffed her fingers in her ears. “Yarrrr!” he’d said. “Yarrrr, me heartie! T’will be our secret, arrh arrh! Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead—arrrrrh!”
She missed them so much.
And Oakhurst held a horrible secret—and it wasn’t the one she’d thought for the last two months that it was. It was bad enough to be drafted into a secret wizard war. It was worse—much worse—to find out that war might have started early, in the place that had been supposed to be safe.
And if it wasn’t safe, who was the enemy? Spirit stared unseeing at the ceiling.
She thought Loch had to be right: it couldn’t be Doctor Ambrosius and all the teachers and staff doing this. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Addie couldn’t be the first student at Oakhurst who’d be going back to claim a family fortune when she turned twenty-one. As Loch said, somebody—in all the years Oakhurst had been open—would have taken the quick path to easy money. Even if the rich kids weren’t the ones slated to be “Tithed,” it wouldn’t matter—not if there was evidence that anyone was being . . . taken away. No matter what you saw in summer blockbusters or in books, trustees didn’t want heirs disappearing. Things could get tied up in court for decades, the way they always seemed to with money. Just look what had happened when that rich guy Anna Nicole Smith married died!
For the first time since the accident that had killed her parents