Booth and Brennan aren't mine - they belong to David and Emily and Fox and Kathy. Please don't sue me. Imitation is, after all, the highest form of flattery.
Remember When, part three
We approached the grey brick home that, from all outward appearances, seemed to hold no one within it. I peered through the window and noted that the furniture seemed well-ordered and relatively clean and that there wasn't much evidence of an early morning departure; the kind that left empty cups of coffee and newspapers at the door.
Booth had walked from the front door to the side gate and was peering over the privacy fence. I turned toward him, preparing to call out my observations when I noticed a woman heading in our direction. She looked to be in her mid-to-late fifties, her short blonde hair well on its way to grey, and was walking quickly across what I could only assume was her lawn, its edge meeting the driveway where we had parked.
"Can I help you?" she called ahead of her arrival.
I walked to meet her at the driveway and was joined by Booth.
"We're looking for Jon Adams. Is he at work?" I answered, knowing that Booth would most likely chastise me for not letting him 'do the talking'.
"No," she answered, seeming to appraise us as she contemplated whether to answer the question that would soon follow my first. "I don't think I've seen you around here before."
Booth stepped forward then, badge in hand. "We're with the FBI, ma'am, and we just have a few questions for him. Do you know what time we can expect him home?"
The woman seemed disinclined to cooperate at first. But Booth moved closer to her, smiled his charming smile, all the while asking her questions about her family and grandchildren. This was why he always insisted on doing all the talking… he was much better at it than I was and this woman seemed much more at ease than when our conversation had first started.
"Jon won't be back for at least a week," she said and the statement had flown so smoothly out of their earlier conversation that it seemed to be almost an afterthought. "He asked me to keep an eye on the house while he took his little girl out of town for a holiday. Friday is the anniversary of her mother's disappearance, you know."
Booth nodded his agreement, allowing the woman - Maggie as she had introduced herself - to continue to prattle on, all the while giving us valuable information on the case. I realized that I should start listening a little more closely when he offered his advice on my people skills.
"He just left to pick Amy up at school; she goes for half a day, every day. His plan was to take her to a cottage up north… a family place. It's really isolated - you know the kind with no power, no phones, no tv - he didn't want her to be reminded of her mom. The poor girl's just begun to come out of her shell as it is."
Booth thanked the woman and handed her his card, reminding her to call him if she thought of or saw anything else. As we climbed into his SUV, I half-expected an invitation for dinner, so familiar had the two become.
"Bones, get a hold of Zack and see if he's gotten anywhere with the cause of death, yet. I'm going to see if the FBI can get an address for that cottage."
I was in the middle of calling Zack when I realized that he wasn't heading in the direction of the interstate. "Where are we going, Booth?"
"Amy Adams' school. Unless he pulled her out of class early, he hasn't left yet. Parker's school doesn't break for lunch until twelve o'clock. I'd rather pick Adams up there before he gets out of town."
"Do you still think he did it, Booth?" I asked.
The picture Maggie had painted had been one of a loving, caring father and it hadn't fit well with image of a man who would kill his wife and her unborn child solely because she had had an affair. Of course, the picture that I had had of my father while growing up didn't fit well with the man that I knew him to be. This was why there was truth to the adage that appearances could be deceiving.
"I don't know, Bones. We still don't have enough facts yet. I just know that I don't want him off in some out of the way cottage when I find out that he is guilty."
I nodded my agreement before returning to my earlier phone call. My conversation with Zack was brief - he had just arrived at the Jeffersonian and was in the early stages of cleaning the remains. There weren't any answers to be had from that end of our investigation yet.
As Booth finished his phone call, we pulled onto a quiet boulevard. There were several cars lining the street and several women and a few men waited at the sidewalk leading to the school entrance. Slightly off to the side, the dark blonde head of Jon Adams peaked from above the small crowd. He turned slightly at the sound of our approach and confirmed my suspicions of his identity; he hadn't changed much in the time that had passed since the photo had been taken that was in Samantha Adams' file.
We began to approach him and the school entrance opened concurrent to our approach. A little girl with dark, curly hair ran out to meet him. We increased our pace.
"Jon Adams," Booth flashed his badge as he addressed the man. "We need to speak to you for a few minutes."
"Look, agent…" Adams bent to read the name on Booth's badge. "Booth, I'm kinda in a hurry here. Do you think this could wait?"
"No, it can't," came Booth's matter-of-fact reply.
Adams eyes flickered between Booth's and my own and then to Amy. There was a moment of hesitation and then Booth signalled for me to take the girl away from the impending conversation.
I crouched down so I was at her eyelevel. "Amy? My name's Temperance. Did you want to go…" I paused, quickly scanning the surroundings until I found a suitable destination: "… play on the swings?"
She turned up to her father, gaining his approval before taking my hand. We crossed the small courtyard entrance to the swings that I had noticed on the other side of the building. We had stopped in front of the first swing and she turned her innocent face up to mine. I was struck by the trust that she had so easily surrendered as she held her arms up to me, allowing me to lift her onto the swing. The sun glinted off her dark tresses and I noticed the hint of red that laced through her curls. Her eyes met mine as I lifted her, their blue a shade or two darker than my own.
"Push, please, Tem'pance," she pleaded and I moved behind her, giving her a soft push to get her swinging. My eyes strayed to the conversation between the two men, but I was too far to hear any of the words exchanged between them. I observed them for a moment, their body language telling me that the confrontation was growing more heated. I would be spending more than a few minutes with little Amy.
"Higher!" she giggled and I pushed her a little harder, but not enough so that she would go much higher than she had before. I wasn't really sure how safe a swing was for such a little girl… I had seen many a fractured wrist that had been caused by a fall off of a swing and many of those fractures had occurred when the victim had been older than Amy.
"Maybe we should go on the slide," I suggested and she happily accepted, jumping down and racing over to the slide that stood behind us. I followed her and waited at the bottom while she scrambled up the ladder to the top.
"Catch me," she called and then, without waiting for my reply, jumped and slid down into my awaiting arms.
We repeated the exercise a few times more. After her last trip down, I held her in my arms, turning to find Booth and her father. Both men had moved closer to the SUV and the slide, but I still was unable to hear their conversation.
I turned my attention back to the little girl in my arms. Booth and I were in the middle of destroying the last remnants of normalcy that she had in her life. Her mother had disappeared and was likely lying on an examination table in the Jeffersonian. And her father may very well be the man that was responsible for her lying there. In that moment, I was struck by the overwhelming urge to wrap her in my arms and shelter her from the hard life that I knew lay before her.
As I contemplated this girl and the life that her parents had left her to, I realized that there were a great many things that I could do - and probably would do - that were worse than bringing a child into this world and raising it with a man like Booth. As I held this little girl and imagined that the life growing inside me could one day look just like her, I realized another truth; there may be many things that would be worse than having our baby, but there were few things that were worse than not having it.
Amy squirmed in my arms and I remembered that I had been holding her overlong and released her from my embrace. I glanced over to Booth as she raced to the steps again.
'Booth, we're going to have a baby,' I told him in my mind.
He had glanced over when I had, seeming to feel my eyes upon him. He smiled in our direction before returning to his conversation. I turned back to Amy who was dancing impatiently at the top of the slide. That was when the world blew up.
A/N: My usual pleas for feedback. This is the first story of any length that I have written in the first person and I would love to know if it is still working. A drawback - there's more to this story that I want to tell and the first person telling prevents me from telling it. Maybe I need to write a companion piece from Booth's pov? Anyway… please send me your thoughts. Scarlet.