A/N: That creaking sound you hear? It's the plot. There'll be more of it in the next chapter.
Helena had arranged for an interview with the head of admissions at Barrington Academy, and the day of the interview Myka was called in for an emergency meeting with Pete and an attorney from Justice about one of her previous cases. It had been a good assignment as assignments went, a clear suspect, a relatively unbroken chain of evidence, and, just as important to its success, no mistakes by local law enforcement that would result in key evidence or the case itself being thrown out of court. Or so Myka had thought. As she hurried to Pete's office, attracting a few stares and hiked eyebrows, she expected that Steve and Helena were in the midst of a commute that, despite being in the opposite direction, would be nearly as tortuous at the one to the city; what had once been a Connecticut farming village was now only another exceedingly expensive bedroom community almost in view from the 90th floor of a skyscraper but hours by car. If her meeting ended soon enough, she would join them. If it didn't, she would have worn a sweater set and skirt, which wouldn't have looked out of place, or out of time, on the set of a Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie, for no reason. No good reason, anyway. She had spent far too much time last night, a grilled cheese that wasn't as good as the one Helena had made alternately clamped between her teeth and placed on a dinner plate, evaluating which of her outfits was the most appropriate for an interview she and her fake wife would have about the 'school of choice' for a daughter who wasn't hers.
The meeting with Pete and the attorney from Justice ended quickly enough for her to make the drive to Barrington with a reasonable hope that she might be only a few minutes late for the interview but the meeting's conclusion had left a sour taste in her mouth. The defense attorney had managed to successfully argue for the suppression of some of the evidence, enough that the outcome of the trial was in doubt. For once, Justice hadn't come to harangue them but to plead for a reexamination of the case files in the hopes that something might have inadvertently been left out. Myka was on the verge of volunteering when Pete quieted her with a look before she could open her mouth; he informed the attorney that a new agent would have to be assigned to the review. Myka wasn't sure what frustrated her more, that a seemingly airtight case had deflated in front of her or that she would have to endure being Helena's wife for the day.
As she clattered down the hallway of Barrington's administrative building, her heels beating out an uneven tap dance on the marble floor, she spied Helena and Steve outside an office halfway down the hall, and she knew then that the collapse of the case bothered her less than the prospect of pretending to be Helena's wife. Gesturing toward her, Helena was already curving her arm in anticipation of the embrace that a wife – a real, loving one – might want to greet her spouse with, and that the spouse – a real, loving one – might want to return. But this was just some needless theater, in Myka's opinion. Trying to hide her reluctance behind an overly bright smile, Myka didn't let the smile dim when Helena wrapped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her close.
"Darling," Helena said warmly, indulgently, nodding her head toward a middle-aged woman in a sweater set remarkably similar to Myka's but graced with a string of pearls that Myka would probably never have the money to own in her lifetime. "This is Mrs. Carmichael, and she's going to tell us why Barrington may be just the school for Christina when she's a little older." She pressed a kiss against Myka's temple. "I love it when you bring out the Deborah Kerr look," she murmured, "so very prim and proper, though I can't remember seeing you in that twin set before."
Myka's smile tensed as she suppressed a surge of irritation. "It's been in our closet for ages, sweetheart. You need to pay more attention." As Helena gave her a look of wounded innocence, Steve shook his head in amusement.
Mrs. Carmichael took another glance at Myka's outfit and her somewhat messily upswept hair. "I can see the resemblance," she said uncertainly, "but I have to admit that it's all about Cary Grant for me when An Affair to Remember is on." She welcomed them into her office, which, given Barrington's neo-Georgian exteriors - the red brick, white columns, and banks upon banks of windows that seemed required elements on any campus - Myka was expecting to display a similar Augustan authority, overburdened with wood and featuring more than a few busts of ancient philosophers or emperors. However, it was an altogether warmer, more casual room, dominated not by a desk or bookshelves but by a seating area in front of a fireplace, which though unlit and scrupulously clean of ashes, looked well used. A tea service was set on a table in front a long, low-slung sofa, and Mrs. Carmichael invited them to sit down while she poured tea - coffee for Steve and Myka -as she shared Barrington Academy's origins. Before Myka could impose a certain amount of distance between her and Helena by taking one of the chairs, Helena discreetly pulled her to the sofa. Sitting far too closely to each other for her comfort, Myka couldn't move away, not without Mrs. Carmichael noticing, and, as though sensing her unease and frustration could be ratcheted up a little more, Helena possessively rested her hand on Myka's knee.
Sipping her coffee when what she wanted to do was to grind her heel into Helena's foot, which peeked from beneath the monitoring-covering drape of the leg of her pantsuit, Myka tried to pay attention to the conversation about class size and course offerings, but Helena's hand burned into her knee. Steve interjected a question about tuition, and, while noting that Barrington's tuition and fees might not seem competitive with those of its peers, Mrs. Carmichael said with just the right amount of pride, not so much that it could be considered overweening or that she could be considered devoid of self-awareness, that Barrington had no peer. Hastily then, as if to underscore that Barrington's superiority was based on the quality of its students and not their parents' money, she added that scholarships and other types of financial aid were available to those students in need of assistance. Helena shrugged, implicitly suggesting that money was no issue, her hand unmoving on Myka's knee, but Myka was focused on the cover photograph of a brochure that Mrs. Carmichael had given to them, a "rainbow of diversity" shot of students in front of the admissions building, as unreal as it was oddly arresting, and Myka heard herself almost angrily asking, "Everything here smacks of privilege, and you're asking us to believe that the income of a student's family doesn't matter? That a kid who gets a financial aid package to attend the equivalent of a high school isn't treated differently?"
Helena's hand was squeezing her knee now, not affectionately. "Darling, perhaps you can lower your Occupy Wall Street banner and let yourself be occupied by a sense of humor. Having a bit of school spirit does not necessarily translate into a disavowal of the social safety net."
Myka wasn't sure why she had become angry or why such a deliberately inoffensive picture had offended her. The disappointment of having a case fall apart, the tension of pretending to be Helena's wife, hell, maybe even the ridiculous matron-in-waiting outfit she was wearing, all needles working their way into her skin. She was a product of the Colorado Springs public school system and a family who lived over a bookstore because they didn't have the money for a house. In truth, she knew nothing of the lives of the people who could afford to send their children to Barrington. Sometimes she arrested people like them, sure, but they couldn't all be scumbags, and they weren't the ones who had shrunk from sitting next to her in class or the lunch room, as if her thick-lensed glasses, brown bag lunches, and Russian novel-reading were symptoms of a communicable disease. The kids who had scorned her had had waitresses, telemarketers, deliverymen, and cashiers for parents. It was senseless this wallowing in self-pity; she was no longer sixteen years old, and . . . none of this was real. Why was she having to remind herself of that? She and Helena weren't a couple, and they weren't planning to send Christina to Barrington. She was supposed to be playacting, and instead she was a brooding study in cashmere.
She glared at the brochure one last time, at the perfect adolescent models with their clear skin, 20/20 vision, and blindingly white grins, before assuming an apologetic smile that was partly sincere, and saying to Mrs. Carmichael, "Sorry, Christina's being raised with a silver spoon, but I was raised with a stainless steel one, and sometimes I let it show." Thinking she had never smiled so much in one setting, or with as much effort, Myka laced her fingers through Helena's and squeezed back, hard.
"Perhaps," Helena said, narrowing her eyes at Myka before turning to Mrs. Carmichael, "you know of some former Barrington students or parents of students currently attending the school who would be willing to talk to us? I think it would be helpful to hear their impressions, and it might put my wife's mind more at ease."
Mrs. Carmichael nodded as if she had been expecting the question all along. "Bryce DeWitt is in charge of our alumni affairs, and he's a Barrington graduate. Let me see if he's in." As she rose, she gazed down at their cups of tea and coffee, a sardonic expression fleetingly overtaking her face. "Don't let it get cold." She paused, winking at Myka. "It's all fair trade."
Once she left the room, Helena flexed her hand to free it from Myka's grip. "Thank you oh so much for insulting the school, the students, and their parents," she said in an acid hiss, rubbing her fingers.
"I'm a little off my game this morning," Myka responded with a not-quite-apology. "But it doesn't matter now, she's doing what we hoped she would." Feeling Helena's glare, she drank more of her coffee.
"So what did the children of privilege do to you when you were a teenager that prompted that outburst?" Helena was still irritated, but there was something in her look that Myka could mistake for curiosity or, if she was truly willing to make a fool of herself, sympathy. She tried to find refuge in meeting Steve's eyes, but he was studiously surveying the room.
"Nothing," she finally said. Not that her high school had had that many children of privilege, most of them attending the private schools or living in school districts with a much higher per capita income than her own, but there had been a few. Golden, weren't they always golden? Literally golden. Even though tanning was a relic from previous decades and a cancerous one at that, they had been tan, their hair tawny and sun-streaked. They had been impervious to the gibes and put-downs that the ranks of students below them had futilely, enviously hurled upward like spears. She couldn't help but be aware of them, even the Tolstoyan doorstoppers she read couldn't block them from view.
He had been one of them or had learned to mimic their look so perfectly that he could be mistaken for one of them. The same tawny hair, although he was old enough to have to style it to disguise a bald spot, the same flawless tan, the teeth so white and even in a professionally welcoming smile that they had to be veneers. "Linda was called away. I'm Bryce. Why don't you come with me and I'll show you around. I want you to feel like you've always known Barrington." He was dressed in what could have passed for a school uniform, had Barrington still enforced such a rigorous dress code: blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt.
Myka glanced swiftly at Helena. The curiosity, the incipient sympathy, whatever emotion had gentled the glares and frown was gone. Instead she seemed intensely alert, her shoulders thrown back, her eyes fixed on Bryce DeWitt, as if she sensed he was prey, or another predator. They followed him out of Mrs. Carmichael's office, out of the admissions building, and onto the campus. Myka had been in too much of a rush when she had arrived to pay any attention to the grounds, but gazing around her now, she noticed that the grass was long and in need of mowing and, between the buildings, so crossed and crisscrossed by students that it had been worn down to the dirt.
Hearing her thoughts, or so it seemed, DeWitt flashed her a deliberately disarming grin. "You're thinking 'they charge the students an arm and a leg to go here and they have no one to mow the grass.' C'mon, admit it, it's all right." When Myka continued to give him the blandest of expressions, he tilted his head in a gesture that might have been concession or a silent entreaty to play along with him. After a few seconds, he straightened his neck, the grin likewise moderating. "We want our students to think of Barrington as they would their home, we want it to look lived in, comfortable."
Helena was standing beside him. When he had invited them on the tour, she had casually taken up a position next to him, and they had slowly but steadily drawn ahead of Myka and Steve. Myka recognized the slanted smile, the quick, light touches on his arm, the ready laugh. Steve had leaned in, whispering, "She looks like she wants to eat him. Should we intervene?"
Myka minutely shook her head. She hadn't seen Helena in action like this in, well, more than eight years. It varied by investigation, by the victims and suspects they questioned, sometimes Helena would act aloof or distracted, allowing Myka to take charge, at other times, she would charge to the fore, acting flirtatiously or aggressively. She wore the mask she thought would be the most effective in eliciting the information they needed. At least Myka thought they had all been masks, that the real Helena had been reserved for her, until Houston, until she had met David and Hilary Marston.
It was weeks after the theft; after Helena had disappeared; after Myka had returned to the cramped confines of her own apartment, the empty, echoing space of the loft no longer an expression of Helena's taste, an aesthetic preference, but the truth of who she was had Myka only been wise enough to see it, an illusion, a dream, her own desires cleverly, deliberately reflected back to her. It was after she had been interrogated, investigated, suspended and then reinstated, brought back but never fully embraced, maybe, in part, because she held herself tight and unyielding within the agency's arms. She didn't want to be back, felt she didn't deserve to be back, but she had nowhere else to go.
Bates was on his way out, but until the transfer was finalized, he was taking his misery out on everyone. Myka accepted her assignments uncomplainingly, although the majority of them involved serving as another team's back-up, their assistant, their dogsbody. Pete, who had already been tapped to replace Bates, at least on an interim basis, was spending most of his time in Washington, attending training. Or that was the reason given for his absences. He called her every day in between classes or meetings or whatever it was his new bosses were having him do. Sometimes he explained his calls by saying that he was driving a pregnant Amanda crazy, at other times he said he wanted to know if the agents had risen in revolt and shipped Bates off to Illinois ahead of schedule, but they both knew why he was calling. Myka wanted to find it comforting, but she couldn't. The fact that he wasn't there with her, that he wasn't her partner any longer, it was another reminder of how badly she had fucked everything up.
That was why when Bates called her into his office and told her he was sending to her Houston, again, she knew it was only punishment. On his desk, already cleared of the photos of his family and the small mantel clock honoring his 15 years of service to the agency, only the dust-free spots marking where they had been, there was a slim report. He pushed it over to her (there was no sitting at a conference table with Bates, the hierarchy always had to be observed), grimly indicating that she should read it. She skimmed the first page, mainly a bullet-point list of the artworks stolen from the Marston Gallery, which she knew by heart. Paintings by Cezanne and Monet, Matisse and Picasso, Pollock and Rothko. The thieves had clumsily removed some of the paintings from their frames, leaving behind tatters and scraps that were stuck to the wood. The agency had sent them as well as anything else that might hold DNA or fingerprints for analysis. She had already seen the results of the tests, which had found nothing conclusive, and wondered why Bates was giving her another version of the report until she flipped to the second page. This was about a different analysis. Those tatters and scraps had undergone tests to determine their age, and the Cezanne and the Picasso had been painted within the past few years, not over a hundred years ago. When the theft at the gallery had occurred, there had been a special showing of the Marston family's collection; several of the works that had been stolen had been theirs. But if the report she was reading was correct, those paintings had actually been stolen much earlier, when they were still in the Marston family home.
"You're going to talk to the Marston family again because they were in on it. Some of them, anyway." Bates had removed his glasses, knuckling his eyes. He pushed the glasses back on, his eyes, normally unremarkable in their size and color, now inflamed, like the rest of him, Myka glumly supposed.
She wasn't any more welcome in the Houston field office. Maybe they knew of her relationship to Helena and the subsequent investigation of her – gossip, if it was about something sufficiently scandalous or shocking, had a way of hopping among the offices – but more likely it was that the agents had no enthusiasm for questioning members of the Marston family as suspects. Months before, when she and Pete had worked with the office on the theft, agents had bent over backward to provide them assistance. Such a high profile heist had been an embarrassment, and they were eager to help solve it; there had been no foot-dragging about questioning the Marston family then, they were victims not co-conspirators. Myka remembered the interview with Robert Marston and his wife, Cecily. He had been ashen, and he had fumbled for answers, hardly giving the appearance of a forceful oil company CEO. Mrs. Marston's responses had been just as frustratingly vague, but less from the shock of the theft than from a concern for her husband's health, which had been well-founded since Mr. Marston had suffered an incapacitating series of strokes only days after the interview. Their children, David and Hilary, they had interviewed briefly, and Myka, despite the pride she took in remembering even the most trivial aspects of a case, could barely bring them to mind. She recalled that they had looked much alike, handsome . . . golden.
They would be the Marstons she and the agent assigned to her would interview. Robert Marston was too sick to be questioned and his wife was refusing all requests, claiming that she couldn't be away from her husband's bedside. Interview, the agent-in-charge had emphasized in her office, looking first at Myka and then looking harder at Myka's temporary partner, as if to underscore that it was his responsibility to ensure that this unwanted agent from the East Coast didn't overstep the line. Interview, not interrogate. He had all but nodded, this Anthony Williams, a former lineman for Texas A&M, and he towered over Myka, all 6'6'' of him. He had a surprisingly soft voice for such a big man, although that soft voice made it clear in the curtness with which he directed her to the workspace they would share that he held no enthusiasm for his latest assignment. He was the youngest agent in the office from what Myka could tell, and his desk was decorated with Aggie memorabilia.
He was the one who contacted David Marston, pleasantly, softly requesting time for an interview, to discuss "new facts in the case," passing his hand over the shaved skin of his head, which gleamed like polished walnut under the office lighting, as he spoke. David Marston had replaced his father as CEO of the company, and it was apparent that he was using his increased responsibilities as an excuse to get out of the interview. But to his credit, Anthony was firm, the soft voice never becoming any less soft, but he began hunching his shoulders as he pressed David Marston over the phone, as though he was preparing to block all objections and protests back to the Gulf of Mexico, if necessary, and eventually Mr. Marston conceded to the interview, agreeing to bring Hilary with him.
On the drive to Marston Oil, she and Anthony were silent, until they pulled into the parking lot. As soon as he turned off the ignition, Myka was opening the door, but he touched her arm, gently holding her back. "You've spoken to the Marstons before." It was a question that he turned into a statement, trying to remind her of some fact about them that should be readily apparent, but she only stared back at him, impatiently.
"Texas has a small town mentality when it comes to its big families. Everyone around here knows of the Marstons. Big Daddy Robert, First Lady Cecily . . . and their two spoiled kids. You look like you want to charge in there and nail them to the wall."
"Because they're guilty," Myka's tone was as impatient as her look. "The Marston paintings were forged, and someone in the Marston family hired Helena Wells to do it. It wasn't Robert, and I doubt it was Cecily. The theft at the gallery, David and Hilary are trying to double dip. They sold the real paintings behind their parents' backs and now they're planning to collect on the insurance for the stolen forgeries."
"We're going to go in there, and they're going to play with us, you know that, right?" This time he phrased it as a question, not a statement. He wasn't reminding her, he was telling her something he wasn't sure she had figured out. "Doesn't matter whether they did it. If their father recovers, he'll sweep it under the rug. As for Cecily, David and Hilary are her babies. The Marstons'll deal with any transgressions on their own, they won't bring the law into it."
"The insurance company that's going to have to pay out on the gallery's losses may have a different opinion," Myka said stubbornly.
Anthony laughed without humor. "You may have interviewed the Marstons, but you don't know them."
They met with the Marstons in a conference room off David's office. David kept them waiting for fifteen minutes before he entered, smiling but offering no apology for the delay. Hilary was even later, David had had to call her from the conference room, reminding her that they had a meeting with the FBI. "She's busy with Marston Oil's new public relations campaign," he said, looking down at his Blackberry and reading his messages. When Hilary came into the room, Myka was struck again by the resemblance between brother and sister. Her hair was longer than his, his features were hers but larger, more blunt and aggressive, but their eyes, an amber virtually the same color as their hair, and the honeyed Southern accents were the same. The smugness, which had been missing from Myka's first meeting with them, was the same as well.
When Myka asked them if they knew Helena Wells, they smiled at each other, the same sly smile, before David shook his head. Of her, yes, Hilary lazily corrected. Friends of the family had hired Ms. Wells to repair some damage to a painting they had recently acquired. "David, you know, it was possible that we did meet her. The Grants threw that party, you remember? There was that gorgeous woman, I think your jaw dropped to the floor, and the Grants said that she was their specialist. . . ."
"That's right." David grinned at his sister. "It's coming back to me now. The two of you had quite the conversation, tucked away in a corner. Too bad we never saw her again after that night."
She grinned back, and that's when Myka knew. Not that they had hired Helena, she had known that from the moment she had read the report, but that one, or the both of them, had slept with her. It didn't surprise her, or so Myka told herself. But then Hilary turned the grin on her, as if she and Myka and David were all sharing the same secret. "Ms. Wells worked in your office as a consultant, that's what we heard. You must know better than anyone, I'm sure, just how charming she could be." The grin became triumphant. And that's when Myka knew what she didn't want to know, ever. That the Marstons had known about her, not since the theft but before it, long before it. Helena had lain in bed with one or the other of them and told Hilary (or David) about the love-besotted FBI agent, reassured him (or her) that no one would tumble to their plan because she was doing her part by tumbling Agent Bering.
Characters in novels would discover something so shocking or devastating that they couldn't literally take it in, and they would rush to the bathroom or the nearest trash can to vomit it up. She didn't feel like vomiting, she felt like she was drowning. The knowledge wasn't weighing on her stomach, it was spreading through her too fast for her to expel it. She couldn't run to the executive washroom or throw up in the conference room wastebasket because it was filling her lungs, closing over her head. And if she looked up, she wouldn't see Hilary or David looking down at her, confident in the belief that they were untouchable, she would see Helena, regretful but resolved. Con games didn't have players; they had winners and losers, and Helena had determined before she knew there was an Agent Bering to dupe that she would be the winner.
She must not have hesitated long because Anthony hadn't taken over the questioning, and Myka, for one of the few times in her life, was grateful for her father. The constant realization that she was falling short, that she was a disappointment had become white noise, always in the background, but never so intrusive that she couldn't focus on the task at hand. And she still had questions to ask the Marstons. So she asked them, and it wasn't true that you couldn't talk when all you could breathe in was water. You could talk and listen and nod and still be drowning.
When they finished the interview, she and Anthony, and returned to their car, he had had to look only once at her white, pinched face. "Now you know what talking to the Marstons is really like," he said, his soft voice barely above a whisper.
He couldn't know what she knew, what she and David and Hilary knew about each other, but he had been right and she had been wrong. She would return to the city, and she would spend her free time, what little she allowed herself, putting it all together, the scheme to rob the parents and then to rob the insurance company. But it would be for her satisfaction only, if the perverse pride she would take in uncovering just how stupid she had been could be called satisfaction. She would never be able to fully implicate the Marstons, brother and sister, in the forgery or in the theft, not enough to bring charges against them. Helena was clever enough and the Marstons were rich enough to have seen to that. Bates wasn't punishing her by grinding her face into the fact that the true criminals were out of her reach, he was punishing her by inviting her to never stop punishing herself.
She hadn't thought she was looking, staring at Helena, but Helena had turned away from DeWitt, and those dark eyes were searching hers, anxiously, even beseechingly as Myka might have been tempted to characterize the gaze, if she and Helena weren't who they were, if they had had a different history . . . in a different lifetime. It was almost as if, for those few moments when she had been sitting in that conference room again, hearing the Marstons laughing at her – despite the fact that there had been no actual laughter, just the constant smiles – Helena had known where she had gone and was asking her, with those uncertain, flickering glances, if she was truly back. Myka resisted the impulse to shrug. She didn't revisit that Houston conference room often, but she didn't have to; she always carried it with her. Feeling Steve's arm hooking around hers, she trained her attention on him, steadying herself, more often than she would ever let him know, in the openness and honesty of his face.
The tour DeWitt gave them was abbreviated, a rapid in-and-out of one of the academic buildings, a circuit around the exterior of a dormitory (the interior was off-limits while school remained in session), and then a brisk walk to the athletic fields. He began shepherding them back to the admissions office, and though Helena wasn't letting up on the coy observations and the casual patting of DeWitt's arm, she would throw her head back more frequently, confirming that Myka was within view. The animation she displayed with DeWitt was belied by the seriousness with which she focused on Myka, uncertainty still evident in the way her eyes lingered, seeking reassurance.
Now Myka did shrug, irritably, and Helena took it as an opportunity to give DeWitt a tiny push, saying laughingly, "I've been neglecting my wife." Dropping back to fall into step with Myka and Steve and curling her arm around Myka's free one, she informed them with a show of casualness, "Bryce is going to take us to his office and give us the names of some former students we might call. Just what we were hoping for." She affectionately leaned into Myka's shoulder. It might have been real, but Myka disengaged her arm from Helena's, giving Steve a fleetingly apologetic smile as she released his too. If she increased her stride, she could catch up with DeWitt, whose carefully gauged charm was a form of insincerity she could accept.
His office was on the second floor of the admissions building and was as much school museum as alumni office. Framed photographs of the drama department's productions shared space on the walls with photographs of some of Barrington's more prestigious alumni. Display cases held trophies from various academic and athletic competitions and yet more photographs of graduating classes, stretching back decades. DeWitt led them between the cases to his desk, massive and antique – "the desk of Barrington's longest-serving president," he informed them with a mixture of both pride and wryness, "back when you held the same job for 40 years" – and turned on a sleek, slim laptop that looked as small as an old-fashioned cigarette case on the desk. Tapping a few keys and waiting for the computer to respond, he said, "Other than a few display cases in the halls of some of the buildings, the school wasn't really showing off its students' achievements. It took me awhile to collect all this," he swept his arm in an encompassing gesture, "since a lot of it was just squirreled away. But if you're representing alumni, you need to remind them of why they came here and why they want to send their children here. Like Christina." He glanced at Steve and Myka with practiced winsomeness.
Helena had been studying a series of photographs of Barrington's sports teams decorating a wall, and she called to Myka with a delight that managed to sound genuine, "Darling, come take a look at these pictures and tell me you can't see Christina on the field."
An image of the four-year-old Christina in a field hockey uniform several sizes too big for her flashed across Myka's mind, but it wasn't that improbable to imagine Christina pushing the ball to the goal with an unerring instinct for wrong-footing her opponents, just like her mother. Funny how a four-year-old could make ruthlessness endearing. Helena was standing in front of a newspaper photograph of Barrington's lacrosse team. It wasn't a recent photograph, although the newspaper page showed little sign of yellowing. Myka recognized a teenaged Bryce DeWitt standing in the back, his arms slung around the necks of two of his teammates. A large trophy had been placed in front of the boys in the first row, who were sitting cross-legged on the ground. Exclaiming about the virtues of team sports, Helena pointed to the print below the photograph, and Myka spotted the names of three of the families who had reported jewelry stolen.
"You must have been quite good, Bryce," Helena said, the teasing note in her voice underscored by a playful smile meant just for him.
He continued to tap on the laptop's keyboard, frowning at the screen. "Oh, the lacrosse trophy. No star, but good enough to assist the guys who were better."
With a final demanding tap, he was able to retrieve the document he wanted. With satisfaction, he said, "Here you go." A printer jolted and whirred on a stand half-hidden by the drapes at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, producing a sheet of paper that DeWitt gave to Steve. "Phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Call anyone on this list for the nitty-gritty about Barrington, not that there's much gritty about the school." He was pleased with his joke and sent a belated but equally playful grin to Helena. "And if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to give me a call." He took out a stack of business cards from a desk drawer and handed them out, vigorously shaking Steve's hand and then Myka's, only somewhat less vigorously. But the smile he turned on her was strangely intimate. "You don't mind me giving your wife my card, do you? I don't want you to get the wrong idea." He let his eyes trail down her face to her lips, where they traced the shape of her mouth before finally, slowly lifting to meet her gaze. "If you think of questions she doesn't," he hitched a shoulder in Helena's direction, "I'm always here to answer them."
Myka had the feeling he would be willing to answer her questions at other locations beside the school and outside working hours as well. She watched him press a card into Helena's hand and laugh politely at her remark that she ought to take another card to give to Christina, just in case; as a potential Barrington alumna, she might have questions – in a few years. He offered to take them down to the entrance, but Helena mock regretfully waved him off, saying, "We need to compare notes, though I can assure you that we're feeling very positive about Barrington and its staff."
The three of them were silent as they descended the stairs and walked to the main doors. Myka wondered if DeWitt's comments about his contribution to the lacrosse team, "No star, but good enough to assist the guys who were better," spoke to something more fundamental about him. She wouldn't be surprised to learn that he had been a scholarship student at Barrington. The eagerness to accommodate them, the desire to anticipate their questions and concerns, a skill set needed for his position, yes, but traits he exhibited so naturally that she had to assume they had always been a part of his personality. To be accepted by the children of privilege required putting their needs above your own. Or making a good show of it, anyway. Just because he was at the beck and call of others didn't mean he was helpless to crook his finger at someone else. Flirting with Helena, he had made time to play up to her shy, quiet wife – when he thought Helena wasn't looking. But perhaps it was strategy as much or more than a knee-jerk need to manipulate. A con artist needed to know that he was believed; if one person began asking questions, others might start asking them as well. A mark couldn't be allowed to stand off to one side, she had to be drawn in. DeWitt had to reassure himself that Helena's wife was no more immune to his charm than Helena was.
As they walked to the visitors' parking lot, Steve asked, "Did you find a connection between DeWitt and our victims?"
Myka nodded. "He used to play lacrosse with some of the men. It's not much, but it's more than we had before."
Helena was appraising the cars in the neighboring staff parking lot. She pointed to a red convertible, parked away from the others, with a vaguely triangular front-end that gave it a viperish appear. "That's a Ferrari, and I would wager that it's DeWitt's," she said, narrowing her eyes. "The naughty child amongst all the staid elders." It was true, the other cars, which formed a loose perimeter around the Ferrari, were in shades of black, gray, and dark blue. Although it was unlikely that staff meetings were populated with ancient conservatives who viewed DeWitt as a slick youngster destined to lead the school to ruin, surely Helena wasn't the only one looking at the car and wondering how the head of alumni affairs at a private school, even one of Barrington's caliber, could afford a $300,000 convertible. If the car was his . . . .
"There's nothing about him that can't be explained by what he does. He's a fundraiser for a private school that caters to the wealthy. He has to have the personality and the tools," Myka tilted her head toward the car, "for the job."
"He's a predator and a crude one," Helena said disdainfully. "He could have waited until I was out of the room before engaging in that bit of foreplay with you."
"He needed to ensure that I was charmed," Myka said quietly. "It was reflexive, not personal, you should know that." She immediately regretted her last four words.
Helena had registered them, her eyes widening before she recovered with a cynical twist of her mouth. "You don't have to convince me of that, dear. It wasn't jealousy speaking, only disappointment in his technique, or lack thereof." She rummaged in her purse for her phone and touched the screen. "I think we can consider our marriage over at 12:38 p.m." She dropped her phone back into the purse.
"Next steps," Steve interjected, fixing the both of them with an admonishing look.
"We're going to have to build a better case against him before we can ask for anything substantial," Myka said, gingerly touching the twist into which she had bound her hair. She wouldn't be running her hand through that. "So we re-review the case files and set up surveillance on him."
Steve groaned. "I hate having dinner in the car, and I hate the dinners I have in the car." He scowled at Myka. "I will not subsist on Twizzlers, either."
"While the two of you are eating lukewarm take-out in front of DeWitt's home and pouring over the case files, I'll be living in the 21st century and reading Facebook pages and checking out Instagram," Helena said sardonically. "This is the most exciting thing to have happened to DeWitt's partners-in-crime since Daddy made them senior vice president or the family trust distributed its assets. Someone's had to have said something he shouldn't have." She turned to squint at the Ferrari again. "Given how DeWitt was practically groping you in front of me, Myka, I suspect he's been sleeping with some of their wives. That might provide us some leverage, if we can find a smoking gun, better yet, a picture of a smoking bedsheet. It's amazing what people will admit to in a public forum." She faced Myka and Steve with a cocky grin. "I bet I find something useful before you do."
"Tortoises and hares, Helena," Steve replied, angling across the visitors' lot toward a nondescript sedan whose Kelley Blue Book value was worth several thousand dollars less than that of any of the other cars, except for the one Myka had driven.
"Snakes and mice," Helena countered, the cockiness vanishing. "Races are a luxury when it's eat or be eaten. We need to stop DeWitt before he finds another mouse."
"Won't argue with you about that," Steve said, fishing the key ring out of his pocket and pressing the button on the remote to unlock the car doors.
Myka had started toward her car, when Helena said, "Myka." She stopped and looked back at Helena, whose face displayed an unwonted earnestness. "Earlier I thought . . . I want the best for Christina, but I don't think I could send her here. If this had been real, if I had been looking for a high school ten years before she needs to be enrolled at one," she hastily amended, as if embarrassed that Myka might think she had been seriously considering Barrington, and then adding wryly, "If I weren't a prisoner on special probation, which, I'm sure, isn't on the list of desired qualities in a Barrington applicant." Seeing Myka's brows arrowing together in confusion, Helena made a dismissive motion. "When we were on the tour, you went . . . somewhere . . . and when you came back, you looked at this school and at me as though we were something horrific." She exhaled a frustrated sigh. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? You were probably just counting down the minutes until this charade could be over. But I want Christina to be a better person than I was, than I am. I'm not sure she would learn how to be that person here."
And she had been foolish enough to believe that Helena had been in that conference room at Marston Oil with her, that, occasionally, Helena's conscience stung her about the Marstons, about the smaller betrayal, if not the larger one that was the only one the agency, the art world, the world at large knew about. Or would care about even if they knew the full extent of Helena's deception. She could continue being foolish, and childish, begrudging the fact that Helena was more focused on her daughter than on lies she had told eight years ago, or she could appreciate the fact that Helena wanted more than what privilege could buy for Christina despite DeWitt's touting of all that Barrington could offer. So she said, not unkindly, "But when the world is full of snakes and mice, what are her choices? If Christina's destined to be a mouse, at least here she would be a cosseted one."
"There are moments when I believe there's more in the world than snakes and mice," Helena said with a short laugh. "If it hadn't been for you, I'd be coaching her on how to scam the other kids at her preschool out of their snacks."
She hadn't been looking at Myka as she said it, instead letting her eyes follow Steve to their car, but Myka saw something vulnerable all the same in Helena's face, if only in the intensity with which she trained her eyes on Steve. It was enough to stop Myka from saying that she no longer believed in a world that wasn't divided between snakes and mice. She wasn't above trying to hurt Helena, but she would prefer to do it with the truth, and, when it came down to it, she didn't believe that people were either snakes or mice, not really. They could be both, and they could also aspire to be better than a snake, stronger than a mouse. She wished only that people could be better and stronger more often.
"He's waiting on you," Myka said. Steve was twisting his head out of the driver's side window, looking at them, lips pursed as if he were about to whistle.
"You haven't asked me what you are in this new world of mine," Helena gently chided her. "If you showed me that it wasn't all snakes and mice, you had to be something else."
I was the mouse that you momentarily regretted eating. There's your difference. But Myka didn't say that either. "I'm afraid to guess," she said as she resumed walking to her car. That was true enough. Rabbit, deer, lamb, they were more appealing than a mouse but as easily killed.
"A dolphin." Myka stopped again and gave her an incredulous look. Helena's eyes flared, and she matched the look. "What's not to like? Dolphins are beautiful, graceful, intelligent creatures." Softening, a smile that was almost wistful briefly appearing, Helena said, "And at home in an element completely foreign to me. My kind of snake can't swim, and dolphins can't survive on land."
Unsure how to respond, unsure how she wanted to respond, Myka said, with an attempt at lightness that was only partially successful, "Then it was never destined to work out for us."
"Unless one of us changes," Helena said it quietly but clearly.
Snakes don't shed their nature, only their skin. Yet one more thing Myka chose not to say. Not because it would have hurt Helena to hear it – she wouldn't spare her the truth – but because she would have hurt saying it.
A/N II: Somehow this fic will have a happy B&W ending, but this particular Helena and Myka have a long way to travel to get there. So, if you're in the mood for a fic the size of a doorstopper, subcompact, tiny house . . . .