Free The Night Villa by Carol Goodman

be staying? Some fleabag pensione?”
    “Nah—that’s the best part. The excavation of the Villa della Notte is being funded by John Lyros—”
    “The software billionaire?”
    “The same. Before he made his fortune in computer software he was a classics major here at UT. He’s such a fanatic that he’s had a replica of the Villa della Notte built on the Island of Capri, a half hour’s boatride from the original villa at Herculaneum. Elgin says he’s installed a state-of-the-art multispectral imaging lab and now he’s invited the whole staff of the Papyrus Project—in other words, Elgin, me, Agnes Hancock, and some tech guy from England—to stay on Capri. So I’d be living in luxury at a villa, soaking in a replica of a real Roman bath, and eating plenty of fresh tomatoes and mozzarella. What more could you want?”
    “For Elgin Lawrence not to be there. That man draws trouble to himself like stink draws flies.”
    I shrug. “That may be true, but how likely is it that someone’s going to try to shoot him twice in one year?” I say. “I mean, what are the odds?”
             
    I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the question I so flippantly posed to M’Lou. What were the odds? It was a question that Ely would have taken literally. I lie awake trying to figure out what the variables would be in such an equation. How many pretty young graduate students has Elgin Lawrence flirted with? How many of them had boyfriends who were mentally unbalanced? Of those mentally unbalanced boyfriends, how many had access to firearms? This being Texas the answer was: most of them. For each variable I imagine Ely writing a letter on a chalkboard: x, y, or z. I can see each letter glowing starkly white against the black and then each letter acquires a halo that flames red in the darkness. I startle fully awake, sniffing the air for smoke. Outside the moonlight has turned my lawn into a scorched landscape. My lungs feel like they’re on fire.
    I get up to get a glass of cold water from the kitchen but instead find myself standing in my study staring at the faintly glowing symbols that Ely had painted on the walls. When I realize that I’m looking for an equation that would make some sense out of the shooting and predict the future, I go back to my room. It’s a long time, though, before I can fall back to sleep.
             
    When I wake up the next morning I still feel unsure about whether I should go to Italy with Elgin. Even the fact that that’s how I’m thinking of it—
with Elgin
—sets off alarm bells in my head. I decide to do a little research on the Papyrus Project, to at least pretend that my decision will be based on its strengths and weaknesses. I start off by Googling John Lyros.
    I’ve heard his name bandied about in the Classics Department because he’d been considered one of the most promising Ph.D. candidates before he dropped out in the early eighties, moved to Fremont, California, and invented an encryption program that had made him a millionaire. He’d used the money to found a software company, Lyrik, whose operating system, Lyrik 2.0, made him a billionaire before his thirtieth birthday. He’d gotten an early start. According to his bio he entered college, commuting from his Greek-American family’s home in Astoria, Queens, to City College in Manhattan, at sixteen. He’d graduated with a double major in Greek and math and, after taking a year off to go hiking in the Himalayas—“in order to find myself,” he mentions impishly in one interview—Lyros entered the Ph.D. program at UT at twenty-one. The picture of him hiking in the Himalayas shows a curly-headed brunet with wide-spaced eyes the same lilac color as the sky above the snowcapped peaks in the background. Instead of finishing the Ph.D., he’d dropped out and within three years was running a multimillion-dollar software company. Another clipping, ten years later, announced the sale of Lyrik for an