Helena
She hadn't been on a retrieval in so long that she had almost forgotten the tedium of it. There was the travel, the cheapest of seats on the cheapest of conveyances at the most inconvenient of times. There was the lodging, the bare minimum of amenities at budget rates. There was the company, the most reactionary or, alternatively, the most juvenile of agents partnered with her. Even the work was sometimes less than inspiring, the artefact in the hands of some knob who had no idea of the history, the import of what he held, knowing only that it made him the most successful merchant of woolens in Leeds. The food, however, you could get wonderful food even on the Warehouse's stingy per diem. Alas, she had to exercise twice as hard now to burn the same number of calories, and there were some foods she had to eat sparingly. While her arteries had been in a metaphorical deep freeze for a hundred of her 130-odd years, they were still 130-odd years old. What would never be true about a retrieval again, what hadn't been true for over a century, was seeing the joy in Christina's face when she returned home.
Very much unlike the expression she saw in Artie's face this morning. Today was the first morning of the retrieval, and Artie's expression was six times more bilious than it had been when they left – and it hadn't been one to fill her with love of her fellow man then. Steve was supposed to have been his partner, but after their last retrieval, he had been felled by a vicious cold that left a trail of empty cough medicine bottles and tissue boxes throughout the rooming house. Helena was surprised that Artie had taken pity on him because she knew she was the last person Artie wanted to partner with. Nevertheless he had taken no small pleasure in blasting an air horn next to her ear in the war room, where she had slept after another long night studying the Warehouse's vitals, and announcing, after she had shakily raised herself from the floor, "You have until 9:00 to breakfast, shower, and pack a bag. Then we're leaving for the airport." Thankfully he had been dressed. Had he been so near to her in his baggy briefs, she might have sunk to the floor again, completely insensible.
The artefact they were hunting was in Boston . . . possibly. There was been no alert from the ping machine, only a late night meeting with Kosan and Dr. Kim, one of the newest regents, a doctor at Mass General, the day after Artie and Steve had returned from San Francisco. Helena had been able to worm only that much from him over the course of their three-and-a-half-hour flight from Denver. She hadn't even found out what the artefact was until they checked into their hotel, part of a low-end chain that promised penthouse service at basement rates. When she had grimaced at the lobby's décor, Artie had said, "If you want better digs, you pay for them. This is the second retrieval I've been on in Boston in just the past couple of months, which makes it two too many for the budget. We're not here to pamper your offended sensibilities." She had fared only a little better with him during their elevator ride to the fourth floor. After she had demanded to know what was worth the loss of the better part of her hearing to the air horn, Artie had grunted and said, "One of Edison's fluoroscopes, a prototype that was so dangerous he swore he had dismantled it and buried the pieces."
"A fluoroscope?" Helena had repeated incredulously. "How difficult can it be to find a 19th century prototype? It would take up the better part of a room."
Artie had shrugged and shifted his valise. "We meet with Dr. Kim tomorrow." With a dour look at her, he had added, "Be nice. Remember, she's a regent."
"They always bring the best out in me," Helena had replied, baring her teeth in a carnivorous smile.
As regents went, Lydia Kim was . . . tolerable. Although by tradition more than by-laws, regents were supposed to come from all professions, educational levels, and political persuasions, many of them were leaders in their fields or held positions of power. In that sense, Dr. Kim was no different, being a prominent oncologist specializing in blood cancers. Yet she carried herself with none of the self-importance that so many of the regents did, and she was young. Not much older than Helena herself, relatively speaking, early 40s at the most. Her office was utilitarian, and Helena received the impression that she spent little time in it. Other than framed pictures of her husband and two children, there were no personal touches on the walls and desk. Her personal manner was just as unfussy, composed and straightforward. She described a professional relationship that had made a lasting impact on her when she started at Mass General, a mentor, an oncologist loved and respected by his peers. "Which doesn't always come easy to us doctors since we can be a competitive bunch." Then he had abruptly left, his life shattered by his wife's death from a cancer that neither he nor anyone else could stop from spreading. Years had followed with no news from him and then only a few months ago he had resurfaced, advertising services that Dr. Kim and her colleagues could never have imagined.
"He said he could cure cancer." Dr. Kim slowly moved her head from side to side, as if she were still stunned by the news. "The Tom Oliver I knew never would've said that, but this Tom Oliver, he promises that he can identify malignancies practically before they begin."
"Why are you so sure an artefact is involved? More to the point, why do you think it either is or is related to Edison's fluoroscope?" Helena asked. "I understand why your colleague's turn would be disturbing, but it wouldn't be the first time that someone otherwise eminently sane and practical was driven mad by grief. No artefact necessary." She disliked the mocking tone of her voice, but it was hard to live with, the knowledge that strangers would learn so much about her without knowing her – and new regents lost their Warehouse milk teeth gnawing at the bones of her history.
Dr. Kim's look at her sharpened, but Helena didn't feel she was on an exam table. There was understanding in that look. Yes, it seemed to say, I know your story, but I'm not judging you. "Because Tom has always had an interest in old-fashioned medical equipment. He used to have 19th century surgical tools decorating his office. And also because in a small one-man shop, where his nurse barely has a place to sit and the waiting room is the size of a closet, he's installed a state of the art fluoroscope." She directed another look, no less sharp, at Artie, who nodded knowingly.
Helena demanded irritably, "Only the cool kids get let in on the secret of what's so horrible about Edison's fluoroscope? How can it be any more horrible than his other artefacts we have in the Warehouse?" Surely the regents of the time hadn't taken him at his word that he had destroyed the fluoroscope. She had promised that she would destroy her time machine after her last disastrous effort to change history, but not even the dullest of the regents had believed her. Failures were the best teaching lessons, and no inventor thought she couldn't do better the next time.
"Because we don't have it. Because Edison said he buried the parts in different places so no one could ever find enough of it to put it together again," Artie said with the air of a professor about to enlighten a recalcitrant student. Enlighten her with a long, boring story, Helena sourly reflected. At least Caturanga's stories had been brief. Artie reflexively toed his valise. Unlike the other agents, Helena had no curiosity about the artefact-busting artefacts he carried in it. Virtually every artefact could disrupt the power of another artefact; the trick was discovering which ones were on the same wavelength, so to speak. She preferred to drop them into the neutralizer bag rather than marshal them as a countermeasure that, ultimately, seemed to promise only mutually assured destruction. It was so much easier to work with an artefact when it was no longer an artefact.
She rolled her eyes. "Like they hadn't heard that story before." At Artie's impatient growl, Helena reluctantly conceded to the task at hand, "All right, there's a fluoroscope, or bits of one, on the loose. It's just hard to imagine it as an artefact. Magic light bulbs and movie cameras, yes, medical imaging devices, no."
"Edison decided not to work with x-rays anymore after the death of one of his assistants, or muckers as he called them. Clarence Dally worked with him on developing the fluoroscope. Died of cancer from his exposure to x-rays, and Edison decided to turn his genius to other things." Artie adjusted his spectacles before adding, "That's the story you read, anyway." His eyebrows bristled over the bridge of his nose as he frowned. "I'm surprised he didn't try to recruit you as one of his 'muckers.' You weren't one to hide your light under a bushel. Or maybe," the frown turned into a sly smile, "he didn't think you were as good as you thought you were."
"Or maybe I didn't think his factory-style approach to innovation was a good fit for me." Helena matched Artie's smile-as-weapon with a supercilious one of her own. "Those who can, do; those who can't, admire Edison."
Dr. Kim stared at each of them in turn before muttering, "And I thought we had a collegiality problem."
"Helena and I have what you might call a 'unique' relationship. She killed my best friend."
"Former best friend who had turned against the Warehouse," Helena corrected. "You might also mention that I saved your life."
"It's complicated," she and Artie said in unison.
"Adwin warned me about the traveling show the two of you would put on." Dr. Kim gave each of them the kind of exasperated look she probably reserved for talented but clownish residents. She didn't make a production of pushing back the sleeve of her lab coat and checking her watch, but Artie got the signal. "The point I was trying to make before you distracted me," he glowered at Helena, daring her to contradict him, "was that Edison's explanation for why he abandoned x-ray technology wasn't quite true. Yes, Clarence Dally's death upset him, but it wasn't why he turned away from fluoroscopes. He turned away from fluoroscopes because he invented one that didn't just picture what we look like from the inside," Artie made a circling motion over his stomach, "he invented one that pictures what we want to see."
"An illusion of reality," Helena said, her voice dropping as she thought through what Artie had said, "like a motion picture."
Artie's hair, always in need of a trim, bobbed violently in agreement. "There's speculation that he adapted techniques, possibly even equipment, that he used for his work on the kinetograph and other early motion picture cameras for the fluoroscope. He never disclosed exactly what happened, except that he promised the first regents of Warehouse 13 that they would never have to worry about it ending up in the wrong hands."
"Except that he didn't succeed in destroying it," Dr. Kim interjected, "at least not completely." She looked down at the top of her desk. "I hope I'm wrong," she said softly. She lifted her head. "I know Tom. He has to believe he's helping people, but I'm afraid of the danger, the damage that he may be inadvertently causing. When I first heard about what he was doing, I thought maybe he had developed an experimental therapy, which, in its own way, could be no less dangerous. I went to see him." Helena noticed that Dr. Kim had stopped looking at her and Artie and instead seemed to be looking through them, at a scene that was painful for her to witness. Her eyes filled with tears, and she busied herself with opening desk drawers, her desktop giving her nothing to fiddle with in distraction. "It didn't go well. He seemed. . . possessed. An overused word, but I can't think of a better one. He interpreted my concern as professional jealousy. He was convinced that I had come to claim his 'cure' as my own. He threatened to call the police if I didn't leave. He only calmed down after Ed came in."
"Who's Ed?" Artie had lifted his valise into his lap and was rubbing the clasp with his thumb, as if, at the slightest invitation, he would open it to display to Dr. Kim his assortment of fluoroscope-defying artefacts.
"His son. He's a . . . the term is 'radiologic technician.' He's not a doctor, but he's trained to read images from a number of medical devices. He's a nice guy from what I can tell, maybe just had to struggle too much to get out from under his father's shadow." Dr. Kim glanced up at her door, expecting or, perhaps, hoping for an interruption. "Ed managed to persuade him not to call the police and then he walked with me to the office's entrance. He told me that his father hadn't fully recovered from Karen's death, but he was finding hope in the advances he was making with his patients. When I tried to get him to open up about what these advances were, he shut down, but I sensed he wanted to speak more freely. I think if you could get Ed away from his father, he might tell you what's really going on." The expected knock came, and a young woman craned her head in, the mixed expressions of awe, curiosity, and apprehension telling Helena that this was one of Dr. Kim's acolytes. She wondered if she had looked the same when she had had to interrupt Caturanga in a meeting.
"I'm sorry, I have to run to a session." Dr. Kim rose, and Artie and Helena followed suit. "Please let me know if there's any way I can assist you. Don't hesitate to call me, day or night." She allowed herself an ironic smile. "I actually mean it. I'm a doctor, I'm used to it."
"Is it only cancer patients he treats?" Artie asked it with an interest that might have seemed neutral to Dr. Kim but which struck Helena as too casual.
"I don't know, but if he's found some part of Edison's fluoroscope, he may think he can cure other diseases with it as well. Nothing's more seductive than the belief that you can defy death."
Waiting on their Uber in the hospital's lobby, her eyes firmly fixed on the low-hanging clouds outside, which were threatening something cold and wet and thoroughly nasty, Helena asked, "Why were you asking Dr. Kim if Tom Oliver saw only cancer patients? Aren't we going to do a B&E?"
"The older I get, the less I like doing that. Too many risks. No, my plan is to get inside, see how he's running things. Maybe we'll find out it's not the fluoroscope." Artie was intently observing the clouds as well. "I'll be a patient who's heard of this miracle treatment. You'll be my devoted daughter, coming with me to every appointment."
She had done even less palatable things than play a loving child of Artie Nielsen. She could handle it for a few days, although she really would have appreciated an opportunity to exercise her cat burglar skills. "Aren't we going to need Claudia to invent the appropriate medical history?"
"Not necessary. I have congestive heart failure. Vanessa will send my records."
Helena stopped looking at the clouds. Artie didn't. "Arthur . . .," she said softly.
"Oh, for God's sake, I'm not going to drop dead. Not yet, anyway. I'm on medication, and I have every intention of outliving you, but it's going to serve as our 'in' to Dr. Oliver. And if he says he's booked, Vanessa promised me she'd see to it that I got an appointment." He turned his head, and Helena was relieved to notice that the derision with which he greeted virtually everything she said hadn't lessened. "You need to hold up your end. You need to brush up on your American accent, and you'll need to start pretending that there's someone's well-being you care about."
Even with Vanessa's influence, the earliest appointment Artie was able to get was Thursday morning. That meant they had at least three full days in Boston . . . together. Helena was determined to make their togetherness as theoretical as possible, and so, evidently, was Artie, since she saw him in person only once. Otherwise he communicated with her through the Farnsworth or by text. If he was communicating through the Farnsworth, occasionally she caught glimpses of what was in the background, enough to guess that he was spending a lot of his time in coffee shops and libraries. He was searching public records for sales of medical equipment and having Claudia search the Warehouse records for any reference to Edison. His use of Claudia's time cut into her availability for the projects that Helena wanted her to work on, which Claudia all too readily found opportunities to emphasize.
"Do you know much we have on Edison? He helped to freakin' build this place," Claudia complained during a call on Helena's third night in Boston. "I haven't had time to read the metaphorical thermometer we have up the Warehouse's metaphorical ass, let alone search every Victorian-era periodical for references to wacky shit going on in Brighton."
"I did not describe it as 'wacky shit.' I said 'supernatural sightings.' I am not interested in 130-year-old advertisements for palm reading and articles on a two-headed calf born to Farmer Brown." Helena shifted on her bed. The mattress had wallows, one on the right side and one on the left. If the sheets had smelled of unwashed bodies and displayed traces of bedbug feces, she might be in a London rooming house circa 1890.
"There's some wacky shit going on here right now," Claudia said, with the kind of leading delivery that all but invited Helena to beg for more. Helena remained silent. She didn't beg . . . not for gossip. "Aw, come on, H.G., I've got no one to talk to here. Jinksy shuffles around wrapped in a comforter and drinking herbal tea, Abigail's off Abigailing, and you have Artie. I love Mrs. F. but she's not . . . I mean, I can't just tell her like I would Jinksy that I think Myka and H2 got it on up in Whoville. They've got that weird thing going where they can't look at each other and they're as jumpy as cats if they accidentally touch each other. I'd feel sorry for them if it wasn't so hilarious." The response only Helena's continued silence, Claudia blew out a long, exasperated-sounding breath. "You've chosen today to be all Sensitivity and Let's Show Some Discretion?"
"No, I've chosen today – just as I choose every day – to be someone who doesn't speculate about her fellow agents' personal lives." Of course, one could speculate about the wisdom of sleeping with a person whose origin and origin story were dubious at best, but then the one engaging in such speculation probably shouldn't be a woman who had slept with a spy for imperial Germany.
"Shut up and let me speculate then. Do you think they got down and then Myka was all 'Sorry, that I cried out H.G., do me again!' or that Diane whipped out some moves they know only in her reality and Myka was freaked out? Let's face it, missionary style probably puts her on edge. Myka's not —"
"Stop. It. Now." Helena had used that very tone with the junior agents Caturanga would have her train. They would prod her, provoke her, unable to believe that she wasn't part of an initiatory test dreamed up by the regents because, of course, no woman could be an agent. A threat didn't have to be explicit or said loudly; it just needed to promise that utter destruction hung in the balance. Only once had a junior agent continued to provoke her. He had lived to leave the Warehouse that day, but he never came back.
Claudia quieted but not before issuing a sulky, "Jesus, did you have another bronzer?"
Bronzer. When she had first been with Warehouse 13 that had been Claudia's term for the nightmares that would have her bolting from bed, screaming as she ran to the door. Leaving a light on wasn't enough some nights. She had to be able to find a way out. Once in the hallway, she would stop, the screaming dwindling to deep, shuddering breaths. The only one she never woke was Pete. The nightmares faded as she developed her plans for gathering the artefacts that would bring her pain – and that of billions of others, not coincidentally – to an end. Ironically, the vision of being hurtled into the coldest, deepest, and most eternal of all sensory deprivation tanks had calmed her. Surrendering to Myka at Yellowstone had brought her a different peace. An uncharitable person, such as Artie, might call it the numbness of being broken, but she hadn't had a bronzer since.
"I'm sorry. I know you're worried about Myka, but whatever happened between them . . . my double won't be spiriting her off into the ether. Myka may let her head get turned, but her feet are always on the ground." Who had said that about her? Artie? Irene? Helena figured that it would come back to her later. At the moment, she had the lonely, overtired future of the Warehouse to soothe. "I know we've, I've been asking a lot of you lately, but the sooner we can figure out why Diane's here, the sooner we can get things back to normal."
"That's right. Back to normal, meaning Myka pining over you instead of screwing your clone and you running away to wherever you've picked out next, H.G."
Myka
She wasn't hiding out in her room. Leena's was an old, old house with all sorts of drafty corners, and her room was a warm corner. Of course, she would choose to spend time in her room rather than in the parlors, the sun room, or the kitchen. They were colder . . . and populated. She rolled off her bed in self-disgust and went to stare out the window. She couldn't see anything beyond her reflection, which was just as well. She didn't need to be searching for something, a particular something, such as a light shining from the guest cottage. It wasn't as though Diane would be anywhere else. No driver's license, no unaccompanied visits to the Warehouse. She hadn't been in Leena's since Myka, returning from her morning run, had had to cross the length of the kitchen when Diane was fixing breakfast for Claudia and an ailing Steve. Steve had been too miserable, blowing his nose and shivering in the quilt he had brought down with him, to notice how awkwardly she and Diane greeted each other. But Claudia hadn't missed one stumbling step, one listlessly said word. Myka felt Claudia's eyes following her everywhere. She wasn't proud that a sprite, even a snarky, child prodigy one, could chase her out of a room, but Myka had no defense, no counterattack. How could she? She had never felt this way before. Pulled in opposite directions, yes, when wasn't she? But she had never hungered for someone like this and, at the same time, felt so helpless to bridge the distance between the two of them. This was no morning-after awkwardness. For one thing, there had been no morning after; she hadn't even the transitory pleasure of a release to feel ashamed about. For another, "awkwardness" didn't come close to capturing the combination of frustration, confusion, tension, and guilt that her one failsafe, her morning runs, failed to let her outpace. She had felt both guiltier (see Lattimer, Pete and Martino, Sam) and unhappier (see Martino, Sam; see also Wells, Helena, specifically "betrayal by"), but she had never felt so miserable without being able to point to a cause. Diane thought she wasn't "over" Helena, but she didn't know what it meant. The half-formed question of what she and Helena were to each other, which hadn't preoccupied her but clouded her view, like fog, from time to time, had vanished like fog under the sun of what Helena, free of the Warehouse and, apparently, of the burdens she carried, had chosen for herself. Maybe more than vanished, maybe burned to a cinder under one of those big, blindingly yellow suns in a children's picture book. The point was, it was gone. In fact, if Diane's resemblance to Helena hadn't basically stopped at their appearance, Myka knew she wouldn't have been so strongly attracted. Yet she hadn't found a way to convince Diane of that.
She wheeled away from the window at the knock on her door. This late it would be only Claudia or Steve. Helena was on a retrieval. She almost did a double-take upon seeing Irene. "Mind if I come in?" Irene inflected the words into a question, but she entered the room before she had finished. Past 11:00 at night, and Irene was still in a skirt suit, which bore no wrinkles, no sign that she hadn't just put it on. Her expression provided no giveaways either, but her eyes were watchful. "Did something happen with Diane when you were looking for the anomaly?" If the Warehouse weren't the Warehouse and Irene weren't Irene, Myka would have concluded that Claudia had been gossiping. Claudia may have been gossiping, but Irene wouldn't be here solely because of that. Irene tilted her head, her eyes no less watchful but her tone amused. "Let me rephrase. Did something happen with Diane that we should know about?"
"I wasn't aware that anything involving Diane would be granted privacy." Myka fought the temptation to cross her arms over her chest.
"I think it would be unwise for any of us to forget that we know very little about her, but it's also unwise to forget that, apart from the Warehouse, there are only us humans here."
"Some more enhanced than others," Myka responded wryly.
"Did you sleep with her?"
The directness caught Myka by surprise. "No," she paused, then audibly inhaled, "but I wanted to . . . want to." She had never understood why she so readily told Irene the truth. She didn't like lying, but she did it, had done it with everyone at the Warehouse upon one occasion or another. But not Irene. Maybe because there was no judgment from Irene, not in the usual sense. Irene was quick to offer her opinion on whether something was helpful, or the contrary, to the Warehouse, confident in her belief that something was wise or unwise, but she almost never couched things in terms of bad or good. At least not with her. It was as if she knew that Myka would unhesitatingly apply those labels herself and that what she needed to emphasize with this particular agent were the practical consequences.
Irene settled herself on the bed and patted the mattress. Myka obediently sat down next to her. "If you were Pete, I wouldn't be here." She chuckled at her own joke. "If you were another woman, I wouldn't be here, but you're you. You have feelings for her."
"Isn't that what you and Artie and the regents were counting on? My feelings? Artie said it was because I was the one who was always open to giving Helena a chance, but he was buttering me up, wasn't he?"
"Fairness, sympathy, call it what you will, but yes, we were relying on it, and we knew the risk." Irene looked at her over the half-moons of her glasses. "It's a situation custom-built to appeal to the best and worst in us, the appearance of a stranger in our midst. Suspiciousness, distrust, and cold calculation on the one hand and, on the other, generosity, friendliness, curiosity. You were our counterbalance."
Post-Yellowstone, she and Helena hadn't had the time or the opportunity or, to be honest, the unblemished trust she needed for the hours-long conversations they used to have, but they managed to have a few, and in one of them, Helena had railed against precisely this, the manipulation, "the bloody experimentation they subject us to, as if we were a prototype in my lab." Myka hadn't tried to deny it, offering only "It's to protect the Warehouse." Helena had barked that angry, sarcastic laugh of hers. "It's always in 'protection' of something. That's how they get away with it." She felt it more strongly, the sense that her strengths and weaknesses had been tallied like a quartermaster might an army's supplies and that, like a poorly equipped draftee sent to the frontlines, she had been placed in the room in the CDC where Diane had been both inventoried and interrogated to see how she survived. It wasn't quite that simple, though, nor so one-sided. Irene and Artie and the regents might have rolled the dice with her, but they wouldn't have needed to if they had been able to control the outcome. They didn't know any more about how things would turn out than she did, and that did give her some power over her situation.
"This isn't a crush, Irene, and she has feelings for me. I don't know what it all adds up to, but I'm not going to run away from an opportunity to find out."
Irene's gaze didn't waver. "I know."
"What happens if Diane and I do become involved? Are you going to fire me or loan me out to a Secret Service detail?"
"That wouldn't be my preference." Irene's tone became amused again. "She might try to follow you, and we wouldn't want that to happen." She sobered. "I don't think it would be wise, entering into a relationship with her. But as to preventing it, that's not something, ultimately, that we can do." Finally she glanced away only to fix an even more intense look on Myka. "There were concerns that you had grown too close to Helena. Of course, these were all expressed after Yellowstone. Some of the regents believed that we had grown lax and let ourselves be lulled by your trust in her. Another agent, they argued, would have divined her plans earlier and stopped her long before." Myka felt heat build within her chest and spread up into her face. "While the regents have always had a healthy appreciation for Helena's cleverness, I don't think they have ever appreciated how lonely she was. Another agent might have discovered her betrayal earlier, but Helena would have simply sped up her timetable or disappeared altogether, and we never would have been able to find her. She was stopped at the only time she could have been stopped by the only agent who could stop her." She gave a grandmotherly pat to Myka's knee. "I believed it then, and I believe it now. Regardless of what this other Helena Wells may have in store for us, I trust you, Myka."
Myka stared at her knee for a moment before she looked up, not entirely certain whether she was going to thank Irene or accuse her of evading the question about what would happen if she and Diane were to get beyond their impasse and . . . start something. It didn't matter, because Irene was no longer there.
Helena
Dr. Kim hadn't been exaggerating. The waiting room was the size of a closet. She squirmed in her chair, her shins all but banging against the coffee table occupying most of the space between the row of chairs she had chosen and the row opposite. Two rows of four chairs, one coffee table with six-month-old magazines fanned out on it, and one end table with a lamp. Only a few feet away was the nurse-cum-receptionist-cum-medical secretary, staring blankly at a computer monitor. Helena checked her phone. Artie had been in with Dr. Oliver for over 20 minutes. In addition to the scant furnishings and the tiny nurse's station, there were two doors in the far wall. Dr. Oliver himself had emerged from behind one of them to take Artie back with him, telling Helena with a paternal smile that she would be brought in later, after he had had a chance to talk with her father. He had been wearing pressed khakis and a plaid shirt; he might have been a part-time sales associate at a DIY big box, enlivening his retirement with some extra cash and social intercourse. His hair was white but still thick, and he had greeted them without having to fumble for their names, "You must be Arthur Nielsen," he had said, shaking Artie's hand and nodding courteously at Artie's corrective "Artie," and then turning to her, shaking her hand as vigorously. "It shouldn't be too long before you're called in, but please help yourself to coffee and donuts." He waved toward a slender stand next to the in-take counter that managed to hold a 2-cup coffee maker, cannisters of sugar and powdered cream, a stack of paper cups, and, somehow, a box of half-a-dozen donuts.
He had seemed exactly how his former neighbors had described him, hale, confident, reassuring. "The very picture of a doctor," one of them had described him. While Artie had been researching sales of medical devices and ordering Claudia to ransack the Warehouse's archives for any reference to Thomas Edison, she had been conducting her own investigation, making the kind of door-to-door inquiries more common on TV shows about cops than in most police work. After a quick call to Lydia Kim and a morning spent searching public records, Helena had taken an Uber to Newton, where the Olivers had lived for many years. In fact, Tom Oliver had continued to live at that address until a couple of years ago. Given the most recent tax-assessed value of the property, someone who hadn't lived in Los Angeles might think, as the Uber pulled in next to the curb, that it was a surprisingly modest-looking home, a two-story white clapboard house with a barn-like roofline. Helena guessed that it would have been assessed at twice the value or more in Los Angeles. The homes on either side were equally as modest, but Helena's gaze skipped over their features. She didn't care about what they looked like; she cared about who lived inside them and how helpful they would be. She really couldn't have called ahead for this, she had to hope that Tom Oliver's former neighbors were home. From what she had been able to glean, both the Frobishers and the Taylors had owned their homes for decades. With any luck, not only had they been neighborly with the Olivers but they would extend a similar friendliness to her as well. The backstory she had was thin, but she had worked with worse.
She fixed a bright smile on her face – it had been so much easier 110 years ago –and walked toward the house on the left. When a child opened the door, she felt her smile sag as she wondered if her information on the neighbors had been wrong, but when he turned his head and shouted "Mimi, a lady's at the door," she hoped she was looking at a grandchild. He was too old to apprehensively put a finger in his mouth, but he shuffled backwards from the door. When "Mimi" approached the door, he slid sideways behind her, but her expression, if not friendly, was at least mildly inquiring. Although she invited Helena in, they never left the foyer. Nancy Frobisher offered the excuse that her youngest grandchild was asleep in the living room, which, as she never spoke above the volume of someone sharing an explosive secret, might have been true. Even the rebuke she issued to her grandson when he brushed against an ornate mirror was no louder than a church-volume hiss. However, standing in the foyer limited the amount of time she was willing to spend talking about her former neighbors. Relieved of having to pretend she was uncomfortable, Helena let herself indulge in a few nervous tics, twisting her gloves and flicking her hair over the collar of her coat, as she explained that she and her husband were house hunting in Newton and had "heard, incorrectly it appears, that the house next to yours was for sale." Mrs. Frobisher sympathetically confirmed that a "lovely family bought the house a little over two years ago" but offered nothing more. Helena tried again, adding that "our agent said this was a great family neighborhood. The family who owned the house before, did they own it long?" That elicited a few comments about the Olivers, but after vaguely noting that Tom Oliver was "sociable but always busy, very busy" and that his wife, Karen, "bought Girl Scout cookies from my daughters every year," Mrs. Frobisher looked off toward the living room and then back at Helena. Helena took the hint, thanking her for her time and looking with determination at the house on the other side of the old Oliver home. She had to do a better job with the Taylors.
Walking up to the Taylors' door, she glanced back at the Frobisher home, making sure that Nancy Frobisher hadn't emerged from the foyer to track where the stranger with the British accent was going. She didn't want to come up with yet another story to answer for why she was in the neighborhood asking about the Olivers. The Taylors, Gary and Pam, let her past the foyer. In fact, they all sat at the dining room table and Helena politely sipped at a cup of coffee, but, as it turned out, the Taylors and Olivers had had little occasion to socialize. "You're too young to remember Marcus Welby, but Tom just had that 'doctorly' air. He wasn't your typical G.P., though. If he wasn't at the hospital, he was flying to conferences. He was a rock star oncologist, if that isn't a contradiction in terms." Pressed for more, the Taylors looked at each other helplessly. "We were running our own consulting business. We were working 14-hour days, and so was he. Karen worked, but she didn't have our crazy hours or Tom's, so our kids spent a lot of time at their house with their son, Ed. But other than to say hi and retrieve our kids, we didn't really get together. No barbecues, no cocktail parties." It was with the Taylors that she had embellished her backstory to give her husband a name, Nate, and the both of them a daughter, Adelaide.
She didn't question herself about it until after she had left the Taylors', and she was about to call for an Uber back to the hotel. It was natural that those were the names she had thought of since, however briefly and incompletely, she and Nate and Adelaide had been a family. Yet the assurance with which she had said, "My husband Nate wants an older house, one that's full of family histories and memories," had more often than not been absent when she referred to the real Nate and his preferences. The fact that she knew he didn't like dark beers, rooted for the Cubs rather than the White Sox, rose with the sun, and shuddered at cauliflower was meaningless. Which she had learned all too well after Pete and Myka had descended upon Boone and her not-quite-forsaken former life had been revealed. Everything she thought she had known about Nate wasn't wrong – it was superficial and pitifully small next to all of the things that, frankly, she hadn't committed to finding out about him. She had told herself that she had time to get to know him, but when had she ever willingly allowed time to dictate how quickly or how much she would learn? She had scrabbled for every scrap of knowledge about Judith, devoured it with a hunger that she rarely brought to food. For that matter, she had found Myka more interesting than she had thought she would be, the seemingly compliant, rule-abiding agent not so compliant or rule-abiding on closer acquaintance . . . Helena switched her attention to across the street, anything to change the direction of her thoughts. Only a matching series of older family homes with narrow lots, but at least one displayed a weathered, partially melted snowman in its yard. A fedora was cocked on its head and a men's plaid shirt, square-bottomed with short sleeves, hung off its shoulders, figuratively speaking. Sunglasses had been poked into its face, and a cardboard sign was pinned to its chest. I'd rather be in Florida. Helena stowed her phone and walked with purpose across the street. She had nothing to lose.
She knocked. She waited. She was about to knock again when the door was flung open, and a man, one child locked around his right ankle, another tugging at the bottom hem of his Howard University sweatshirt, greeted her a little breathlessly. "Sorry, you caught me in the middle of making their mid-morning snack." He cupped his hands around his mouth and said in a stage whisper, "If I don't get back to it soon, they're going to devour me." The children, a girl and boy, giggled but didn't deny it.
"I don't want to keep you," Helena said, but her attention and her smile were directed at the girl, dressed in corduroy pants and a fuzzy pink sweater. Her brown eyes gleamed with mischief, and the pink ribbons in her hair waved in agreement. Christina had been like that, too, at this age, unafraid of strangers and ready to break out into giggles . . . because there was no one like a child to whittle a grown-up down to size. Glancing up at their father, Helena said, "I was going to ask if you knew much about the Olivers. I understand that they lived across the street for many years." She paused, ready to discard the fake Nate and fake Adelaide. "I'm writing a story about some very experimental cancer treatments, and Tom Oliver figures pretty large in it. I'm here trying to fill in the background."
"Tom and crystals that cure cancer?" The man asked incredulously. "He was a pretty solid doctor when I knew him."
"That's changed." With another smile at the children, Helena turned as if to leave. "Maybe there's a more convenient time to talk."
"If you like hot chocolate and Teddy Grahams, you can join us. My wife and I always wondered what would become of Tom with Karen gone. Sounds like there may be a good story here." He rubbed his son's head. "The twins are entertaining, but I'm dying for some adult conversation."
This time Helena directed her smile at him. "Yes to the hot chocolate, but I think I'll leave the graham crackers to the children."
He laughed. "They don't eat them either. The kids like running their trucks over them." Stepping back from the entrance, the children, unpersuaded by Helena's promise to leave their Teddy Grahams alone, continuing to cling to him, this friendly and, with any luck, forthcoming neighbor welcomed her in. "Mike Garrett, and these hostage-takers are Daria and Devin."
"Twins?"
"Eight minutes apart." He gently peeled them from him. "And that's the longest they've been apart from each other. Daria was running a temperature this morning, and Devin refused to go to daycare without her." He sighed. "It's easier for me to work from home than my wife. Of course, a couple of hours later, Daria's temperature was normal and they've been hopping around the house like rabbits." Hearing the word "hop," the twins immediately began hopping, and their father mock sternly said, "Hop into the kitchen and take a seat at the table."
Maybe it was the reception she was being given by the Garretts, but she found the house brighter and warmer than the Frobishers' or Taylors', although the floor plans were similar. Paintings and family photographs decorated the walls, and rugs festooned with toy trucks and cars softened the gleaming hardwood floors. Helena enviously took in the comfort radiated by, first, the living room and then the big kitchen in its creams and greens. She sat down at a table that could snugly fit a family of five (the family photos had told her that Daria and Devin had an older brother) in an eating area, which had surrendered the lion's share of the space to the working part of the kitchen. The twins had climbed into booster seats and Devin had turned around, balancing himself on his knees, to watch his father as he reached for mugs in a cabinet.
"How long have you lived here?" Helena asked.
"A little over eight years." Mike shook his head in disbelief. "Levi was just learning to walk. Carmen had gotten a job offer she couldn't refuse, and we came up to Boston one weekend to house hunt. We liked this house the minute we saw it." He reached in another cabinet and took out a cannister of hot chocolate mix. "The neighbors . . . ." His hand made a waffling motion. "Not a lot of Black families here, and I think there was some, ah, discomfort." His smile turned lopsided.
"But the Olivers were different," Helena said quietly.
He nodded. "They were the only ones who came over to welcome us. A lot of people, they might come over with brownies or cookies, but Karen brought over an entire meal." He filled a tea kettle that was on the stove and turned on a burner.
"Dad-dee," Daria said impatiently, "crackers."
"Coming, princess," he mock growled. He opened and shut several cabinets before finding the box of Teddy Grahams. Grabbing a couple of child-sized plates from the dish drainer, he placed them in front of the twins and shook out a small pile of crackers on each one. "We didn't see a whole lot of Tom. If he wasn't at the hospital, he was at conferences or seminars, but Karen, she babysat Levi, she was interested in art like Carmen. They became friends." He gestured toward the photographs in the living room. "The paintings are Carmen's, but Karen took some of the photographs, the ones with Carmen and Levi when he was little." His fingers curled tightly around an object materialized from a pocket or a corner of the chair, Devin, who had turned around to stare at the graham crackers with a calculating expression on his face, held his hand over his plate. He opened his hand, and a Matchbox car dropped onto the Teddy Grahams.
Mike groaned and rubbed his goatee. It was shot through with gray as was the hair that was slowly receding from his forehead. It was possible that there had been no gray before the twins. Redirecting his focus, Helena said sympathetically, "It must've been especially difficult for your wife when Karen became ill."
"It was weird. She hadn't been feeling well for a long time, and Carmen, we both really encouraged her to talk to Tom or go see a specialist, but she kept saying it was nothing, and Tom, it wasn't that he was oblivious, but he wanted to pretend that it was nothing, too." The teakettle started to whistle, and Mike went to the stove to tend to it. After moving it to a cool burner, he spooned out the hot chocolate mix and poured the steaming water into two ceramic mugs. He more judiciously poured water into the two plastic mugs, with lids, that were for the twins. "It was really hard for Carmen, seeing Karen grow weaker. By the time they diagnosed the cancer, it was too late, we all knew that, except for Tom." He stirred the hot chocolate in the mugs and added ice cubes to the plastic mugs. He stirred again.
"What makes you say that?" Helena asked, watching Devin pulverize Teddy Grahams with his car. Daria looked on with equal interest.
"He was pushing all sorts of treatments on Karen. She'd tell Carmen about them. She went along with them for a while, but we'd go over with food or a book for her, and she never looked any better. Eventually she put her foot down with Tom." He gave Helena a sad smile as he brought over the mugs. "In a manner of speaking, she could barely lift her foot by then. We'd taken some dinner over to her, chili that we had made that weekend. She didn't each much, mainly just moved her spoon in the bowl, but Tom was there, talking about some experimental treatment in, I don't know, France or Germany, someplace, and she said, 'No. I'm okay with letting go.'" Mike pulled out the chair at the head of the table and collapsed into it with a sigh. "Tom made the mistake of arguing with her, and she shouted – Karen wasn't a shouter – 'No, I'm tired. I want to spend what time I have left with my family and my friends.' She reached out for Carmen's hand, and Carmen just about lost it. Tom shut up, and that was the last we heard about any exotic treatments." He stared unseeingly down the table. "She died a couple of months later."
Devin released his car long enough to eat a Teddy Graham, which gave his sister an opportunity to take it. Making car noises, she stacked Teddy Grahams in a row and floated the car above them only to drop it on the crackers at the end of the row. They skittered off the plate in pieces, and Daria clapped her hands and giggled. Helena reminded herself that she was in the Garretts' house to learn about Tom Oliver not to watch Daria and her brother play. She had always been bored by infants, including her own, but once they grew old enough to walk and talk, she admired the way their minds leapt to the most outlandish of games and fantasies and the abandon with which they threw themselves into the effort of making what their minds saw a reality. There were no lines for them between facts and magic; everything was possible and everything was true. A number of her inventions had had their roots in Christina's explanations, for why the sun and moon rose at different times of the day, how frost appeared on her bedroom window, and why her Uncle Charles, in the language she had heard her mother often discuss him, was "such a bloody bastard." The latter explanation had led to no wonder treatment for improving Charles' character, but it had cut down on how frequently Helena swore in front of her daughter.
There was joy in science, but Helena had learned, as Tom Oliver himself had discovered, there was desperation, too. The fantastic could be equally fueled by both. "What happened to Tom after his wife died?"
Mike shrugged, leaning over to grab the box of Teddy Grahams. He dug his hand into the box. "He seemed to disappear. We saw him a couple of times, but, after that, nothing." He frowned at the Teddy Grahams in his hand, shrugged again, and tossed them into his mouth. He crunched them, a ruminative expression on his face. "We would've thought he moved, except there wasn't a For Sale sign in the yard. It was like that for a couple of years, and occasionally we'd see people drive a car into the garage or water the flowerbeds. He must've been renting out the place. Eventually he did sell it."
Helena sipped at her hot chocolate. It was warm, that much could be said for it. Now, a hot chocolate made with whole milk, cocoa, and a generous splash or two of brandy . . . . "You've not seen him since then?" At Mike's shake of his head, she asked, "Did you know their son, Ed?"
"Just to say hi. He was over a lot when Karen was sick but not much before or after. Nice enough, but he had the look of someone who was trying to find a purpose. Like he's always hunting for a place at the table." Mike grunted softly. "Reminds me of my cousin Ronnie. His dad, my uncle, played pro football for a few years until an injury ended his career. Ronnie was good enough to play for Texas, but he wasn't pro caliber. He could never get his balance after that, drifting from job to job. I couldn't hang onto a football for the life of me, but I was always good with computers. It didn't seem like such a great trade-off when I was 18 and 19 years old, but it feels pretty good now."
Helena noted the similarity in Mike Garrett's and Lydia Kim's assessments of Ed. She would ask Claudia to take a deeper dive into information on Ed Oliver when she got back to the hotel. Maybe he had more of a role in his father's self-reinvention than she and Artie had been inclined to credit him with. She took another sip of the hot chocolate. It hadn't improved on the second taste. "Do you remember Tom Oliver expressing an interest in Thomas Edison?" She hazarded.
Mike shot her a baffled look. "Edison? Tom played golf, and he worked. Those were his interests. Where is Edison coming from?"
Helena tipped her head and let a smile quirk her lips. "One of Tom's friends said he talked about revolutionizing medical science, claiming that it needed someone like Edison, capable of inventing devices that completely transform our lives."
"He wasn't handy. If there were repairs around the house, Karen did them, or they hired out. He didn't have a workshop – or a secret lab."
Secret labs weren't the stuff of pulp science fiction or, even worse, Verne. Sometimes they were a necessity, when you needed time to work out the plans and drawings in your head and an employer, say, supranational and unaccountable to any government, wanted the prototype before you had even finished testing it, before you knew whether it was effective or safe. "Wouldn't have pleased the neighbors, at any rate."
Mike laughed appreciatively. "They're not too keen on anything, or anyone, that would drive property values down."
She would have liked to stay longer, make herself a proper cup of tea, maybe join the children in their games, but this wasn't her home or her family, and Mike was beginning to show signs of restlessness. Like her, he had a job to do, and she should let him get back to it. When they slowed in front of the front door, she repressed a shiver at having to venture out in the cold again. "Who built the snowman?" She zipped her coat, wrapped her scarf tight.
"My father-in-law, Cesare. He lives in Miami, and that's where Carmen grew up. He was with us for Thanksgiving." Mike tucked his hands in his jeans pockets; the twins, having lost interest in their guest, were playing in the living room. "She hates winter, and she says the kids would see more people like us if we moved there. I grew up in Philadelphia, and I like the change in seasons. Newton isn't the most diverse place in the world, but it's getting better. In fact, the Olivers' home? The Nguyens live there now." He moved to open the door but stopped. He looked at her quizzically. "Are you really a reporter?"
"What makes you ask that?"
"Maybe just the spidey sense Black and brown people get when a white person comes around asking questions." His smile remained friendly. "No offense."
"None taken." She paused. "Why did you invite me in?"
"Because you looked cold, because I was curious, because the twins can't really hold up their end of a conversation." His face grew serious. "If Tom's out there selling the equivalent of snake oil to sick people, he needs to be stopped, but he's a good man, remember that. He just got . . . something must've snapped in him after Karen died. You understand that, right?"
She only nodded since it would take a lifetime to tell him. Outside, she took a deep breath. Lots of people who ended up doing bad things were good in the beginning. If they were lucky, they got the chance to make up for the damage they had done. But it never felt like enough.
Briskly she walked to the curb. That kind of thinking . . . she didn't have time for it. She had a job to do. If nothing else, she could always count on the Warehouse for that. She took out her phone and called for a ride. It wasn't noon yet, and to quote Conan Doyle, who had been almost as insufferable as Charles, the game was afoot.