A/N: I think this moves the plot along, although some of you might be wondering when the supervillain will make his appearance. He will, eventually. Lots of Myka and Helena, although somewhat less melodrama than I had originally anticipated when writing this. For those of you who also read Reset, I am slo-o-wly making progress on the chapter, but I'm not going to post it until I get the chapter after that one written. It's too dark even for me, without doing a double posting. I know my posting has slowed on all the fics, but believe me, I'm writing, so it's all going to get done.
She adopted a pace that was somewhere between the lap-devouring running that was part of her normal workout and the speed-walking of an elderly woman. She had to appear somewhat competitive - who knew what crap Helena had been posting about her (it would be like her to claim that her wife was a triathlete) - and yet attuned to where her "family" was in their circuit of the park, their progress adapted to a four-year-old's microsecond attention span. At the same time, she had to engage with Bryce DeWitt during the race if she could manage it, further encourage him in his suspicion that she was a spouse seeking distraction, whatever it took to get a lead, a break in this case. Of the three demands upon her, she knew which one called the most powerfully to her. Without asking herself if it was the best use of her time, she slowed, letting the crowd of runners, and speed walkers, pass her, and she walked back along the path, skirting groups of children and mothers until she saw her child, well, her child for the day anyway.
Christina was walking with two older children, their heads bobbing a few inches above hers. Whose were they? Charlotte's? Meredith's? Usually she kept track of even the smallest details, the under-the-radar conversations, the oblique glances, all the things that other agents missed, or forgot. Myka's lips thinned in exasperation. Helena had given her all the facts she knew about the Barrington wives, including the names of their children. But driving past those winding driveways and imagining what the homes at the end of them looked like, what the people inside them looked like, she had gotten the faces of the Marstons stuck in her mind, their lovely, feral faces, and then there had been Helena telling her that she still loved her. She had lost focus.
"Hi, Myka-Myka," Christina said cheerily, waving at her. In the next moment, she was completely absorbed in the other two children's whispering and pointing at the runners far ahead of them. Myka smiled, tousling Christina's hair and looking toward the mothers, Helena among them, who were doing their own murmuring and pointing at their children. Her smile froze when she heard one of Christina's newfound friends ask her, "Why did you call her Myka-Myka? I thought she was your mother."
Christina said simply, as if what she called Myka was as timeless and immutable as a star, "It's what I've always called her."
The answer seemed to satisfy the other girl, and breathing easier, Myka waited until Helena and the Barrington wives caught up to her and then fell into step next to Helena. "Thought you'd be setting the pace for all of us, darling." The reproof in her tone was mild, but the look in the dark eyes was several degrees cooler. It was clear that, for Helena, the priority wasn't checking in on her and Christina. "We're quite all right here at the back of the back of the pack." She grinned at the woman walking on the other side of her, blond, of course, her appearance impeccably tended, as though she were going to host a charity ball after the charity 10K, her hair recently and expensively colored, her make-up expertly blended and unsmudged. Charlotte? Laura? Dammit, how could she not know? She had been introduced to them less than an hour ago. Not Laura, Laura would be with Bryce. Charlotte offered her a regal nod, glancing toward some ill-defined spot on the path far ahead, where Myka obviously should be, setting the pace. Mulishly, Myka decided to stay where she was, and Helena cut her an icy glare before amping up her grin at Charlotte and leaning her head in closely enough that their shiny hair almost touched. Myka knew the interest was an act, but the tilt to Helena's head, the wicked curve to her grin, she had once thought they meant something real, that Helena's absorption in her had been real.
What would happen if a strand of perfect blond hair (no matter that its color was artificial) intertwined briefly with a strand of hair as deeply black as a luxury sedan? Would that intimate commingling produce a new color, both black and gold, jewel-like, the dazzling combination of onyx set in a gold brooch or a gold necklace nestled in black velvet? Not that new, really, because oil was black and gold, liquid gold, and the Marstons had floated on it as if it were water. It had swept Helena and her indisputable talent at forging paintings into the Marston Gallery and the Marston home and then swept her back out, millions richer. It had carried her into the Marstons' beds as well, and there black and gold had commingled, too.
Without so much as a word to Helena and Charlotte, she broke into a run, flying out to the grassy border of the path and increasing her speed as she ran along it. It wasn't the measured, disciplined running that concluded her workouts; it was the pell-mell, limb-flailing running of a child, all energy and no control. Myka thought she heard Helena cry "Myka!," but she was listening to the thudding of her heart and the only slightly less rapid thudding of her feet on the ground. She passed teenagers with the leggy, loping strides of cross-country runners and middle-aged parents sneaking glances at their Fitbit watches. She passed the slowest of DeWitt's friends, too portly to play lacrosse now, and drew even with DeWitt. Matching him stride for stride was the last of the Barrington wives, Laura, and Myka was dismayed that she could have mistaken Charlotte for her. Both were blond, yes, but Charlotte carried herself with the self-regard of someone who believed her family was deserving of greater honors than an ambassadorship to Uruguay. Laura's regard, on the other hand, was all for Bryce. Her eyes lifted up to him frequently, and her expressions chased his, shadows following the sun. He was frowning, watching Myka, and his speed increased; he was determined not to let her outrun him - or get away. His friends seemed not to care that he was leaving them behind, all except Laura, who, frowning when he had frowned, let her frown lengthen as she recognized who had captured his interest.
His pursuit made Myka want to run only the faster, but this, this panicked flight, it was an indulgence, the privileged ones, the golden ones surrounding her, who were running, jogging, sauntering, power striding along the path weren't the Marstons. Even if Helena turned out to be the Helena of eight years ago, she wasn't the same Myka, and Helena couldn't hurt her like that, not anymore. Reluctantly Myka slowed and veered farther into the grass, placing her hands on her hips and bending at the waist as though she were seriously winded; it wasn't entirely an exaggeration.
A hand was on her back, rubbing, patting, attempting to comfort her. She wanted to shrug it off but resisted the impulse. "Are you all right? You were tearing up the park." Amusement was layered over the concern, and she had an image of that voice, so smooth, its pleasantness so practiced, shining, like his newly highlighted hair, in the sun. Myka suppressed a sigh; if she never saw anything remotely resembling gold again, it would be too soon. Unfortunately yellow, sun-bright yellow, was Christina's favorite color . . . . "What happened?" Bryce persisted. "I saw you go back to talk to your wife, and then you just took off."
This was her opportunity to play to the sympathy he was so willing to offer, to show her appreciation that someone cared and, by exaggerating her appreciation, suggest that her wife no longer cared. He needed to believe that the bickering he had witnessed between the two of them about Christina's schooling signaled a deeper rift, yet she couldn't make the invitation too obvious. Helena had said that it was her coolness to him, her indifference to the hair, the teeth, the smile, the charm that was her appeal. There was no challenge, and no sense of victory, in seducing a woman who hungered to be seduced. To seduce a woman who thought she was wise to every ploy, however -
"Nothing," she said curtly, drawing away. She didn't have to pretend that she wanted to put some distance between them.
"Your wife, she has a strong personality," he said, following her wandering course across the perfectly trimmed grass. Myka imagined a team of park employees on their hands and knees using nail scissors to snip each blade. "She reminds me of our biggest donors, wonderful people, the lifeblood of Barrington, extremely generous, but they want things done a certain way. It can get a little difficult when you have to tell them that other ideas have to be considered."
"Are you saying my wife is a difficult person?" Myka stopped, turning to face him.
She had confused him. He wasn't certain if she was teasing him, about to launch into him for insulting her wife, or seeking his concurrence. Shaking his head, he said with a wryness that acknowledged he might be saying exactly the wrong thing, "I think I said that she was a wonderful person, and they're only difficult when you have to get them thinking on a different track."
"Do you always parse your sentences like that?"
"I beg for money for a living. I say whatever I have to." He had closed the space between them, close enough now to touch her, but his hands were busy doing other things, scratching the back of his neck, plucking his sweaty t-shirt away from his stomach, and flashing her, probably not accidentally, with a glimpse of ridged muscle.
"I better get back to the race. I still have most of it to finish." Myka was tempted to sharply angle away from him as she returned to the path, but she forced herself to cut in and virtually brush against him as she passed him. A misstep would have her stumbling into him. "My wife, Bryce, is a pain in the ass, especially so today." He laughed, the explosive grunt a man might expel when someone he deemed weaker managed to land a sucker punch.
When she said that, she hadn't been pretending either.
Myka finished the race with a respectable time . . . for a woman ten years her senior. She hadn't tried to make up the ground she had lost, keeping to a steady, if unremarkable, pace and emptying her mind of everything but the sound of her breath going in and out. An ersatz meditation, but she had employed it a lot as a child trying to shut out her father's hectoring. She finished behind the teenagers and the Fitbit wearers but, thankfully, ahead of the speed walkers and even DeWitt and his friends. Helena and Christina had long since quit the race, but they were there at the finish line when she crossed it. Christina ran up to her and hugged her around her legs. "Did you win?" Her bib number with all the emoji stickers was streaked with melted chocolate ice cream.
Her mouth and the skin around it were streaked as well. Myka instinctively rubbed away a smear with her thumb as she said, "I didn't win, but it looks like you won the ice cream eating contest."
Christina giggled, drawing her arm across her mouth. Helena, who had been slower to join them, leaned over and tentatively kissed Myka on the cheek, murmuring "You're not going to run off on me again, are you? I do have to play the wife, you know." Her smile was easy, fond, but her eyes were narrowed with worry.
"I'm not going to freak out on you." Myka accepted the kiss but circled Christina to put her between them.
Helena didn't hide her exasperation, but she said only, "Good, because we've been invited to the post-run cookout that Barrington is sponsoring." She looked down at Christina and then at Myka. "I don't know why you're putting your faith in a four-year-old to protect you, but you're safe from me." Christina sunnily smiled up at the both of them, and Helena caressed her head, her tone indulgently scolding, "I don't know which of you is the bigger mess, but you," she tapped Christina's nose, "I can fix with a Wet Wipe." Directing her words at Myka but still gazing lovingly at her daughter, she added, "I told Charlotte that you were still upset with me over schools."
Myka lifted her hair and let it drop. She had bound it tightly this morning, but it was too thick, too wiry to stay bound for long. Her hair felt damp and tired, she felt damp and tired. "I'll apologize to her. Anyway, I got DeWitt's attention, and I thought that's what you wanted."
"Not at the cost of everyone else thinking you're erratic." Helena blew her breath out in an attempt to will away her irritation. "What was going on in that mind of yours? Tell me."
"It's not important now."
The event over, the three of them were just another obstacle for the volunteers to move around as they started to clean the sign-up area and path. Tables and chairs were being folded and stacked, and some volunteers young enough to be Barrington students were picking up discarded bib numbers and paper cups. One was shutting and locking the lid of a portable freezer unit covered with pictures of popsicles and ice cream cones. Christina looked longingly at the freezer, reaching out and clutching at the air like a toddler might, sending a wordless message to the volunteer that she could do with another treat. Helena put her hand over Christina's and curled her daughter's fingers into her palm, saying, "Come on, pumpkin, there will be hamburgers and hot dogs and all sorts of goodies where we're going," and gently but inexorably turned her away. "Highway robbery," she grumbled to Myka as she began to lead Christina farther into the park. "A tiny paper cup of soft-serve ice cream that some local Tastee Freeze sold them at a discount."
"It's charity, Helena." Myka shaded her eyes and pointed to an area of the park beyond the playground equipment, shaded by trees so tall and straight that she imagined them wearing the equivalent of back braces as saplings, the bent and knobby trees she had played among as a child, their trunks molded by harsh winds and a harsher climate, obviously not permitted here. There were picnic shelters under the trees and one of them had been claimed by Barrington alumni, a banner with 'Barrington' in the center draped, imperfectly, surprisingly enough, over the shelter's eaves. "Do you know how far that is from here? Christina will never make it." She crouched and gestured at Christina to climb onto her back. "Hey, sprout, let me give you a ride over there." Christina immediately dropped her mother's hand and jumped onto Myka's back. Grunting in dismay as Christina landed solidly on top of her, shoes digging into her ribs, Myka carefully straightened under Helena's jaundiced eye.
"Show-off," Helena muttered, but she helped to center Christina on Myka's back as Myka rose, Christina shrieking in delight and clutching at Myka's head. "If people are going to be asked to hand over seven dollars for a cup of ice cream, it should be something that might, at one point, have come from a cow. If you skimp on the food, people will think you're skimping on everything."
"Since when did you become a matron?" Myka said sarcastically. She grabbed Christina's ankles to steady her - and to keep the heels of Christina's shoes from drumming against her chest. "Are you going to start complaining that the other women in your bridge club serve off-brand cocktail peanuts and cheap gin?"
"Appearances matter. They're crucial when you're trying to pull off a scam. If things don't look the way people expect, if you don't behave the way people expect . . . that's when they start asking questions, not when you're promising them they'll double their money in six months." Glancing at Christina, she said, "Stop pulling on Myka's hair, pumpkin." In the same mildly chiding voice, she said, "It's why I dragged Christina halfway across the park to make sure we were at the finish line. I'm your wife, and I support you even if we are having a bit of a tiff. And it is just some garden variety marital tension. We're not putting on a two-woman show of a Tennessee Williams play, Myka."
Clamping her forearm across Myka's forehead, Christina asked, "What's a tiff, Mommy?"
"Remember when Nonni tells you to eat all your vegetables, and you say no? That's a tiff."
"Are you and Myka having a tiff about 'tbles?"
"In a manner of speaking." Her eyes narrowed again, but not completely in frustration. Myka could see that the concern in them hadn't gone away. "Myka needs to eat her broccoli."
Truth be known, she didn't mind broccoli. If Myka had to characterize this day as a vegetable, she would call it a pea, something that might have a pleasantly round appearance but was soft and squishy and smelled on the inside. Yet she had learned to eat peas, it was preferable to what happened if she didn't. She would banish her unease at spending time among people who reminded her of the worst moment of her life because, in the end, as privileged and unself-conscious about that privilege as they might be, they were children compared to the Marstons. The Marston family had had decades, over a century, of living, floating, as if what supported them bore no connection to the labor of others. Today she wasn't walking out of Marston Oil, sick with the knowledge that they knew she couldn't touch them, that they had known it when Helena had slipped under the sheets next to one of them and whispered, "I have the FBI wrapped around my little finger." DeWitt and his former lacrosse teammates might be robbing insurance companies blind, but they weren't literally or figuratively in bed with Helena Wells.
She let Anthony Williams take her to the airport, though that hadn't been her intention. After the interview with the Marstons, she had wanted nothing more than to leave on the first flight out, but she and Anthony needed to debrief the Houston office, more as procedure on his part and courtesy on hers, because there was nothing that Houston, or New York, could do. Helena had seen to that. Myka had known before the debriefing started how ugly it would be, and it was one of the very few things she could say she had been right about. They had all gathered into a conference room, she, Anthony, Anthony's supervisor, and a few skeptical-looking agents, and she summarized what the Marstons had told them. Which had been both nothing and everything, but the everything, not said but smiled, Myka decided to leave out, even though the Houston agents probably knew that too. There had been no questions, and the agents, all except for Anthony and his supervisor, had silently filed out after she finished. Anthony's supervisor said only, "Thank you, Agent Bering," in a voice so dry that Myka thought the humidity in Houston might have dropped a degree or two. The Myka before the meeting with the Marstons would have already been scrambling, fighting for an opportunity to change what Anthony's supervisor, what the other agents, what Anthony thought of her, but the Myka who had emerged from that meeting, could only put her head in her hands. The Myka who had been sent to Houston, as devastated and humiliated as she was, was, nonetheless, a Myka preferable to the one she was now. This new Myka was leprous in her pitiable state, the other agents leaving the room unable to make eye contact with her. This Myka could sit in her shame like a baby would sit in its own . . . .
She left the conference room to unsteadily walk down the corridor, fish her phone from her bag, change her reservation. She could make a 5:00 p.m. flight to New York if she hurried. All she had to do was take the elevator to the lobby and raise her arm to flag a taxi once she was outside. She could do that much. A very large hand hesitantly touched her elbow. "Why don't you let me take you to the airport?" Anthony suggested.
Of course he didn't just take her to the airport. He took her to her hotel, waited patiently in her room's one armchair, which seemed much too small for him, as she threw everything, including a complimentary shower cap she hadn't used, would never use, into her roller bag. He bought them both sandwiches at a fast food drive-through, and, in the calm, quiet voice he had been using with her since they left Marston Oil, urged her to eat the sandwich she had simply rested on her lap because "everything is worse on an empty stomach." She ate it, more at his bidding than because she was hungry. They must have carried on some sort of conversation; it was a long drive to the airport and the freeways were crowded, but she couldn't remember what they talked about. She was a teammate stumbling back from the bars, the quarterback who had tossed the game-losing interception; he treated her with a relaxed kindness that, as he guided her from place to place, handed her the sandwich, took her bag from the trunk at the drop-off area told her he had looked out for the lost and forlorn many times before.
She tried to thank him, but he had merely nodded. Squinting into the distance, as if he suspected that what she might say next would be the thing to break her fragile self-control and he wanted to give her what shred of privacy he could, even if it was nothing more than turning his eyes away from her, he asked, "Are you afraid of what you'll do if you catch her?"
Yes. "I'm afraid I'll find a way to forgive her."
Eventually she had forgiven Helena or what she let pass for it, an acceptance that Helena had acted as she had been trained to act. She was Gentleman Jim Wells' daughter and to have expected her to be something other than that, better than that wasn't Helena's fault but her own. In a world of snakes and mice, a snake became a mouse only when she faced a more dangerous snake, and Myka knew that she had never had the ruthlessness necessary to frighten Helena into divulging or abandoning her plans. She had never had the love that was necessary to change her either, although she couldn't have loved Helena more than she did. More than she had loved anyone before and probably more than she would love anyone in the future, but not enough.
The breeze had strengthened, the hazy sunlight obscured by clouds foretelling rain. Helena was tucking strands of her hair behind her ears or pushing it away from her face, the gesture reminding her of Christina, and Myka felt a tenderness so overwhelming that she didn't care whether Helena was a friend or an enemy or something in between. Instead of looking away, she watched Helena more intently as she mingled with the Barrington alumni, chatting, introducing herself, pointing at Christina, who was chasing herself when she lacked other children to chase, and then pointing at her. Canted above those cheekbones, the eyes shone with an interest purchased, like the tank and the running pants, for the occasion, the lips drawing up into continuous smiles; she was a performer, and Myka submerged the tenderness in admiration for how convincingly Helena could play a role, whether that of a lover or, on this afternoon, a woman resembling those around her, unburdened by her advantages. The rock of a ring on her finger, the BMW, the house on the Island, the private school shopping - some of it wasn't even fabricated, so perhaps the interest and enjoyment weren't either. This was the life that her father had aspired to, the goal of his schemes and cons. In fact, he had aspired to a life more princely, but this hopped-up Connecticut bedroom community wasn't a bad station along the way. Maybe Helena thought she would be content to rest here for a while.
Myka turned her attention to DeWitt, who was drinking a soft drink and flashing those white, white teeth at a small circle of alumni, mainly young, coincidentally pretty, women, younger and prettier than the Barrington wives. Very young professionals, just a few years out of law school or their MBA programs, if he lined them up now as donors, Barrington would have them for a lifetime. He caught Myka looking at him, and his smile became knowing, smug before he dipped his head to entertain a question.
"He can work the magic, can't he?" The words sought Myka's agreement, but the tone suggested the speaker was spoiling for a fight, hard and aggressive. Laura was standing next to her, arms not crossed over her chest but held tensely at her sides. Myka noticed that Laura's eyes were flicking between her and the women surrounding DeWitt, unsure which posed the greater threat.
"He does seem very capable of charming people out of their money."
Laura's eyes flicked back to stay on her. The dissatisfaction that she had worn throughout lunch, which had seemed to make even eating an imposition, surrendered to a stronger emotion, and Myka swore silently at the telling turn of phrase. Helena had warned her about being clumsy, and all she had done was further justify Laura's paranoia. "Is that all you think he is, some glad-hander for the school? Just because he doesn't manage a hedge fund or serve as a CEO doesn't make him any less smart or ambitious than Alex or Meredith. He has more drive than my husband."
Maybe she hadn't been as clumsy as she feared. While Laura clearly didn't appreciate another woman's interest in DeWitt, she resented what she perceived as another woman's slighting of him just as much. Not shrinking from Laura's half-disdainful, half-anxious regard, Myka said, "I saw the pictures in his office. He was the captain of the lacrosse team. Your husband was on it and Charlotte's too."
"They won everything the year Bryce was captain. Chris was a year behind him and Alex, and he aped everything they did. He still adores Bryce. I thought Bryce was pushy when I met him. He sees something and he wants it . . . ." Her voice softened, becoming dreamy and remote simultaneously. Aware of how she sounded, she blushed. "That was years ago, but they still follow him, Alex, Chris, and the others. He's smarter than all of them put together," she finished dismissively. Tilting her head in a gesture that managed to be both a dismissal and a polite withdrawal, Laura strode with purpose into the circle of women surrounding DeWitt and positioned herself next to him, edging out a woman who had been appreciatively patting his bicep.
Thinking she should try her luck with DeWitt's other ardent fans, Myka spotted Laura's husband Chris and Alex McCrossan at a mini wet bar, incongruously included as part of the picnic. Lunch had been a catered affair, offering as entrées grilled chicken, grilled (buffalo) burgers, and grilled portabellas on compostable paper plates and, as dessert, sliced fruit of various kinds. Many of the men and a fair number of the woman had fled to the bar for relief from all the nutritional earnestness on display. Aged premium whiskey, top-shelf Sonoma and Napa Valley wines, craft beers, even the water was branded as artisanal, and Myka could see the alcohol lapping in Alex's eyes. Practically giggling, he asked her if he could buy her a drink, and he did give the bartender, either bending down to pull a bottle from one of the shelves or turning and twisting to locate the right cooler behind him on the grass, a generous tip for a bottle of the artisanal spring water. Alex was taller and broader than Chris, possessing a voice that could easily carry across a boardroom and a meticulously razored haircut that left no hair longer than a quarter inch. She didn't have to prompt him for information, he was full of stories, mainly about his and his former teammates' escapades as students. He did, however, drop more current, and more relevant, information; the friends and their wives routinely vacationed together - "Whenever we can coordinate our schedules" - and often spent the better part of weekends at each other's homes - "Mine or Chris' or Meredith's, hardly ever Bryce's though." He held up another bill to catch the bartender's attention. "Bryce says it's because it's a mess. I think it's because that's where he has all his women stashed." He winked at her as he took the beer from the bartender. "If I still looked that good and wasn't married, I'd be collecting them too." He thumped his stomach, which did have the compact roundness of a melon. "But I'm fat with a wife and three kids, so I live vicariously through him." As Chris scoffed, Alex slyly grinned at him. "Don't pretend that you don't do it."
Chris rolled his shoulders. "This isn't the best conversation to have if we're trying to leave Myka with a good impression of Barrington." He hooked his thumb at Alex. "He still has the mind of a teenager. Don't listen to him about Bryce or Barrington. Bryce is hardly some slick ladies' man. He's got a lot more going on . . . ." Like his wife had earlier when she realized she was on the verge of being more open than she should about DeWitt, Chris let his voice trail off. "Anyway, give Barrington a good hearing. It's a great school." He nudged Alex and pointed at a few older kids sitting at a picnic table, heads bowed over the phones in their hands. "Let's go over there and make sure our sons aren't posting anything that could get us arrested."
Myka watched Alex lumber across the grass while Chris followed at his heels, guiding him with a push to his back when he began to drift too much to one side or the other, a herding dog keeping his much larger charge on course. People were beginning to leave in search of their children and their cars. The sky was steadily darkening, and rain wasn't far off. Tossing her empty bottle in a strategically placed recycling bin, Myka looked for Helena and Christina. Darting around and squeezing between families, women from the classes that graduated in the '90s and '00s saying farewell as if oceans were about to separate them instead of expressways and men promising to see each other next on the driving range, she didn't actively listen to what she was hearing, indifferent to the boomeranging pleas to call and text. Indifferent, until, as she avoided colliding with two men more intent on looking at a picnic table behind them than watching where they were going, she overheard the name McCrossan as in "Lucky for McCrossan that his father-in-law has connections because he's a fucking idiot." Slowing and flexing one of her legs as if she had developed a cramp, she followed the men's gazes, fixed on Chris and Alex at the picnic table. Alex was holding up his son's phone and taking goofy selfies of them sticking out their tongues and holding their fingers like rabbit ears above each other's head as Chris observed them with resigned amusement. It was pretty hard to disagree with the other men's assessment. On the other hand, maybe all she was eavesdropping on was some alcohol- and testosterone-fueled carping.
"I wouldn't invest in a piggy bank he represented."
"He and Chris Jeffries were the ones talking up Galter Pharmaceutical, remember? There was some new diabetes drug that was going to work wonders. The drug went bust, the stock went bust, and I heard Jeffries lost close to a million himself. But next thing I hear, Jeffries was plowing cash into a new golf resort on Hilton Head."
"You know they got that insurance money last year. Their house was robbed and some of his wife's jewels were taken -"
"But my wife heard it wasn't all that much, $30,000 or $40,000. Not enough for the kind of investment he was making."
"Maybe money grows on trees where they live."
They passed out of her hearing, and Myka stopped flexing and massaging her leg. She was about to rub a cramp into it. Interesting conversation, but not enough to get a warrant for Chris' or Alex's financial information. She hoped that Helena had found out something more helpful. Twisting her head to take in a 180 degree view of the park, she was surprised to discover that Helena and Christina were so near. Amazing what she could see when the golden ones weren't obscuring her vision. Helena was holding Christina and the sight of the two dark heads touching had Myka battling against another wave of tenderness, as if today really had been just a picnic and the family they pretended to be the reality and the con artist and agent they actually were a game, a secret joke that she and Helena would laugh about when they were home.
Legs clamped around her mother's waist, Christina was nestled against her shoulder as Helena talked with DeWitt and Laura. The young women he had been charming were gone, maybe frightened off by the lowering clouds or murdered in a jealous rage by Laura. Seeing Helena shift from foot to foot as she tried to comfortably balance Christina's weight, Myka started walking faster. Without asking or taking much note of the fact that she was doing it, she held out her arms and Christina drowsily leaned over and looped her arms around Myka's neck. Going through her own foot-shifting dance as she tried to manage the solid weight that was Christina, she ignored Helena's strange, blinking look at the two of them and focused on the body language of Laura and DeWitt. As Laura attempted to eliminate the space between them, DeWitt seemed determined to widen it, stepping forward and smiling his aggressive grin at Christina. "She's been running around all afternoon. This is the first time I've really gotten to see her." He looked from Myka to Helena. "She's an angel."
Christina was unimpressed by the flattery, letting out an unangelic whine and burying her head in Myka's shoulder. Myka couldn't help but agree with her. She would have sworn that DeWitt's teeth had gotten brighter as the day progressed. He was talking now about another charity event being sponsored by another school, and he was so close and his teeth so sharp and white, that she could almost feel them nipping at her, eager to tear into her flesh.
"You'll want to do that, darling, won't you?" Helena said, striking the perfect balance between suggestion and command. "You'll get to compare what you've heard about Barrington with what you'll hear about Lynley. Just think of the lists of pros and cons you'll get to make." She mock-whispered behind her hand to DeWitt and Laura. "She loves making lists."
The sweetly nagging wife. The wife who didn't miss an opportunity to point up her spouse's foibles. Myka had no difficulty rolling her eyes, which elicited a polite laugh from DeWitt and no reaction at all from Laura. "Sounds like a great opportunity," she said with an interest she hoped sounded sincere. "Next weekend?"
"Two weeks," DeWitt said genially. "It's on the Island. You probably won't need directions, but I'll e-mail you the packet." He blinded Helena with a smile. "Will we see you there?"
"Unfortunately I have another obligation, so I guess I'll have to entrust the care of my wife to you," Helena said, her smile showing even more teeth than DeWitt's.
"I'll take very good care of her," he assured her, while his eyes bored into Myka's. "You won't mind if I'm your escort, will you?"
Myka made some noncommittal gesture, and then Laura was practically dragging him away, muttering a cool and uninviting "Make sure to look us up" in Myka's direction.
Watching them leave, Helena said, "It's been a good day . . . that way." Turning her gaze to Myka and then to Christina sleeping against her shoulder, she let her lips crook disbelievingly before shaking her head. "I never thought I would . . . . " She didn't finish, instead saying with an exhaustion that was utterly unfeigned, "It's time you take me back to my cell."
Yet, after another long crawl back to the Frederic home, when she was lifting a fussy, crying Christina from her car seat, Helena wasn't quite ready to be locked away for the night, saying plaintively, "I know we need to deliver her to Jemma, but can I have her for a little longer? She'll be such a bear if we take her back now." Smoothing Christina's hair away from where strands had stuck to her cheek, feathered against her skin like flowers pressed between the pages of a book, Helena murmured, "Do you want to stay with Mommy or go back to Nonni's?" And when Christina said with a gulp that was part yawn, part sob, "Mommy," Helena sent Myka a victorious look that declared the matter settled.
Fighting with the car seat as she tried to lock it into place in the back of her car - Mrs. Frederic's BMW returned to the garage, undented and unscratched - Myka argued with herself that Helena's keeping Christina for another hour or two made little difference at this point. Given the hostility that characterized his relationship with Helena, if Ben Winslow were to learn that she and Jemma had violated the terms of the custody arrangement, whether Christina had been with her mother 15 minutes or 15 hours outside their allotted visits would be the same to him. Besides, she wasn't ready to face the traffic out to the Island, not yet. To make the most of their endangerment of Helena's visitation rights, she and Helena should at least pool what they had learned from their afternoon with DeWitt and his friends, but Myka suspected that Helena was no more enthusiastic about the prospect than she was. While the purpose of the day had been to further an investigation, Myka had felt less like an agent than a parent, and a worn-out one at that, lugging a child and their gear back and forth, pretending a sociability she didn't feel with people she didn't know, and creeping along freeways at 40 miles an hour. The agent could be resurrected tomorrow.
However, greeted with the spectacle of a crying Christina flying toward her, shouting "Nononononono," as Helena glowered at her daughter from the kitchen, Myka gave herself a moment to rethink the wisdom of delaying the trip to the Island. Christina, wholeheartedly sobbing now, was holding up her arms for Myka to pick her up, and Myka, bewildered, asked, "Do I hold her, do I send her to a corner, or do I stand here and continue to look helpless?"
"You're doing the latter very well," Helena said dryly, slumping into a chair at the small table in the dining area. "Pick her up, and we'll see if that puts her in a better mood. She said she was hungry, I said I would cut her up an apple, and the next thing I knew she was throwing a tantrum."
Myka settled Christina on her hip. Still sobbing, but at a quieter volume, Christina rubbed her eyes and yawned. "What's so terrible about an apple? What did an apple do to you?"
"Don't want it," Christina said mutinously, tossing her head and coming within an inch of clipping Myka in the chin.
Myka, her head tilted uncomfortably, tried to point it to the sofa. "Why don't we sit and think of something you would want to eat?" Christina seemed unpersuaded, but she let Myka set her down on a cushion without protest and then burrowed into her side as Myka sank into the corner of the sofa. Food had never been a negotiating tool in the Bering household. That wasn't quite true, her father had threatened to withhold it from her and Tracy when they had been guilty of some infraction or another as in "If you damn kids don't shut up, I'll send you to bed without your supper," but that she and Tracy might have a voice in what they ate, the thought had never entered their minds, and even if it had, their father would have been sure to shout it down. Twizzlers obviously weren't an option, though Myka believed she could consume an entire package herself given the chance. Recalling the snacks she had seen Jemma give Christina, she dropped her head over the back of the sofa and looked at Helena. "Got any crackers and peanut butter?" Helena made a face at the suggestion, which Myka ignored. She poked Christina in the shoulder. "How about crackers and peanut butter?"
Eyebrows drew together over the nose that was Helena's in miniature. Adopting the brisk authority that had always had Pete swallowing whatever he had just crammed into his mouth and sitting up straighter, Myka said, "I'm going to have some, and if you want some, you're going to have to promise not to shout at your mom. You hurt her feelings."
Christina grimaced, although Myka couldn't have said whether she was considering the suggestion, hating the idea of crackers and peanut butter, or regretting giving up the opportunity of shouting at her mother. She pushed herself to her knees and then pulled herself up and practically over the sofa. "I won't shout at you, Mommy, if you give me crackers."
"Not quite the surrender I was looking for, but I'll take it." Eyeing her daughter suspiciously, as if she knew a Wells wasn't to be immediately taken at her word, Helena said warningly, "You promise?"
"Promise."
They ate the crackers in the living room; the saltines were stale, but Christina didn't seem to mind, a pile of crumbs growing in her lap. As the peanut butter gummed against her teeth, Myka acknowledged to herself that she had enjoyed peanut butter and crackers more when she was a child, but it was keeping Christina quiet and content. She had tried to give up her spot on the sofa to Helena, but both Helena and Christina had firmly shaken their heads. Helena was sprawled in an armchair, eyes almost closed. Christina was becoming a heavier, warmer weight against her side, but as Myka shifted to get up and let her stretch out on the cushions, Christina snuggled tighter. "Story."
"I'm not much of a storyteller," Myka protested. "Maybe your mom will tell you a story."
Helena's eyes opened briefly. "I made those blasted peanut butter crackers, you have to tell her a story."
"I'm not very good."
"It won't matter. She's half-asleep, I'm half-asleep."
Like indulging a child's preference for what food she ate, Myka had thought that parents reading or telling their children bedtime stories was largely a myth. She couldn't remember asking for bedtime stories, although they had lived above a bookstore. Her father would have seen it as a sign of weakness. "What? You're too afraid of the dark to go to sleep?" Her mother, more willing, would have interrupted herself a thousand times. "Goldilocks found the first bowl of porridge too hot . . . that reminds me, we need to go grocery shopping, we're almost out of cereal. Warren? Warren, we need to go grocery shopping tomorrow." Myka figured she couldn't do any worse than her parents. She could start with a princess, a bedtime story staple, and Christina liked princesses.
"There once was a young princess," she began. Distractedly patting Christina's head as she fumbled for the next sentence, Myka elaborated, "A young princess with beautiful dark hair."
"Are you going to draw her?" Christina looked up at her blearily. "Mommy always draws the princesses."
There was a muffled laugh from the armchair.
"Not unless you want stick people. This mommy doesn't draw." It had sounded perfectly natural as she said it, and then she heard it. Her face and chest expanded with heat. "I'm sorry, it just came out -"
"It's nothing, and you were a mommy today, whether or not you realize it." Helena still had one leg slung over the arm of her chair, and her hair, freed from its ponytail, draped itself over her shoulders. Her smile was lazy, but the eyes were open and alert. Myka felt them on her as she haplessly stitched one absurdity to the next, such as setting the princess on an adventure to find her lost hair. Maybe it was the shimmering fall of Helena's that had put the idea in her head, but why the princess had lost her hair and how, she left unexplained, although she did offhandedly refer to an encounter with a dragon. Similarly unexplained was how the princess acquired a companion, a knight seeking a place in her father's court. His blundering and insatiable appetite were Pete's, but so too were his loyalty and knack for delivering the right solution at the right time. His description of pulling it out of his ass, Myka G-rated to "found it on the tip of my lance," not that it made any difference to Christina. Ass, lance, armor, she didn't understand what any of it meant, interrupting only when Myka put "princess" and "dragon" in close proximity. "Don't let the dragon hurt the princess," Christina would solemnly counsel her, "'cause she's got to wear the glass shoe and marry the prince." Thankfully Christina had written the end for her. All she had to do was get the princess and the knight into the dragon's cave and back out of it with the princess' hair intact. Helena unhelpfully asked, "Wouldn't the dragon have incinerated it already? Not to mention the princess, but I don't mean to be a critic."
Myka stared at her stonily. She had said that she was a crappy storyteller. Taking a breath, she led the princess and the knight into the dragon's cave. By the time she had them running out of it, hair hastily clapped onto the princess' head, there was no need to insert the glass slipper and the prince; Christina was asleep, and Helena had apparently been driven from the room. Moving her hip out from under Christina's head and then slipping a sofa pillow underneath it, Myka went in search of Helena. She found her in her bedroom. The room was dark, the curtains having been drawn over the windows, and Helena was curled in the center of the bed, but it was defensive and protective the way in which she was curled, and Myka sensed the unhappiness before she heard Helena's voice, thick and clogged, asking if it was time for them to leave. Not thinking about what she was doing, acting on impulse as she had been doing for most of the day, Myka sat on the bed next to her and gently ran her thumb under Helena's eye.
"I wasn't crying."
"Was my story that awful?"
"It was awful but not that awful." Helena wriggled to the edge of the mattress, leaving room for Myka to lie down on the bed with her.
Myka tried to ignore the invitation. "It put Christina to sleep."
"How else was she to escape from your storytelling?" Helena laughed quietly, but it was more sigh than laugh and didn't last long. "You haven't told me what was going on with you earlier today. You were walking with me and Charlotte and, out of nowhere . . . ." Her voice became unsteady, and Helena didn't try to disguise the catch in it. "Out of nowhere, you gave me a look of utter loathing and then you started running, as if you couldn't get away fast enough." She pressed her lips together for a moment before she said, her tone level, even. "It wasn't out of nowhere. I can't miss the 'if looks could kill' glares and I can tell when you would like nothing more than to rip into me. I understand the hatred, Myka, I really do. You probably won't believe it, but I even share it. But this morning, it was though as I was some pile of shit you had stepped in. It's your contempt that guts me." She laughed again, the kind of thin, humorless laugh that Myka recognized was the sound people made when they feared that their next sound might be a sob. She had laughed a lot like that too when she had talked about Helena, until she had realized it was easier to simply stop talking about her. "I'm not saying I don't deserve it, I'm saying it guts me."
"It's not contempt, Helena." She got up from the bed only to walk to the other side of it and stretch out on the mattress next to her. If she were thinking, she wouldn't be doing this. If she were thinking, she would have already left the room in search of the monitor, because she wasn't ready to have this discussion, not the way it was happening. It was supposed to happen more dramatically; she was supposed to have her hands around Helena's throat and Helena was supposed to be drowning in tears, so ashamed and so contrite that she had no defense against weeping. She certainly wasn't supposed to have enough pride, enough dignity to laugh that thin little not-laugh. The room should be thick with "I'm sorry's" so Myka could cleanse it with her righteous anger, but she didn't feel all that angry right now.
"Bates sent me down to Houston a second time, to interview David and Hilary Marston. He knew they weren't going to give you up, he just wanted to punish me. So I sat in a conference room with them for half an hour as they basically laughed at me." Helena had rolled over to look at her, and Myka felt her suddenly still. "So, yeah, hanging around with a bunch of people who remind me of the Marstons puts me on edge, but I encounter the rich and spoiled all the time. It was seeing you with them that tipped me over. You say I gut you. You broke me, Helena, because I didn't know until I was in that conference room . . . I didn't know there was nothing that you . . . I didn't know." She felt stupid repeating "I didn't know" over and over, but it seemed the truest to what she had experienced. 'I didn't know that you had fucked them' was too literal. 'I didn't know how deep the betrayal went' sounded too theatrical. But 'I didn't know' captured the innocence she wasn't aware she had had tucked away somewhere until it was gone. How there had remained a pocket of it after 18 years with Warren Bering and two years with the FBI was a mystery, but it had existed. Then.
"What do you need to know, Myka? Which one it was? How many times? How much do you want me to hurt you?"
"You can't hurt me with it. Not anymore."
She felt Helena's thumb skimming the skin under her eye. "That's not true." Myka touched her face, and it was wet. Eight years, and she was still a mouse in Helena's presence.
Helena turned over again but worked backward across the bedspread until her butt bumped against Myka's legs. Unresisting, Myka let Helena take her arm and place it around her waist. "Do you want to know what I gave you up for? Not for the Marstons or for the money. I gave you up for two words, 'Good job.' For years I painted what my father told me when he told me, but the Marston Gallery was mine. I would do what he couldn't, pull off a truly successful multi-million dollar heist. David and Hilary, greedy little bastards, they were just a bonus. I had met them doing a restoration for one of their friends, and they made the plan all that much easier to put into motion. Then it all went to shit."
"Because of me," Myka said sardonically.
"Yes, because of you. He took it away from me, you know, Jim did, at the very end. Joshua Donovan told him I was going to fuck things up, and Jim sent me to some place tropical where I took many, many drugs for a long time. There was never going to be a 'Good job' from him after that." She issued another not-laugh, but it wasn't thin and metallic. Instead it was bitten-off, as if she had had occasion to laugh that way many times before and she had worn it out. "Jim never had me work another job for him, said he couldn't trust me. Which was fair, I couldn't trust myself, not for a big score. I cobbled together odd jobs from old friends and business partners, nickel-and-dime scams for the most part. And when he died, I fed at his corpse; he would have expected no less. Forging his paintings was the most ambitious thing I had done since setting up the Marston Gallery theft." Myka didn't know how much of it was true, but Helena sounded remorseful, sincerely remorseful. Perhaps it was only about the loss of her father's approval, but that was something. "I'm not expecting you to feel sorry for me, I'm only trying to tell you how it was for me afterward. There was no big payout, Myka. The Marstons took a hefty cut, and Jim took the rest." She sighed. "Joshua never forgave me for it, but that's another story for another day."
For a long time, or so it seemed to Myka, there was only the sound of their breathing and the occasional rustle of the bedspread as they made slight adjustments to their positions. Helena hadn't rolled away from her, and she hadn't taken her arm from around Helena's waist. It wasn't comfortless this intimacy they were sharing, not exactly, but Myka felt she was reaching down from the moon to hold her. "I don't want to hear about how sorry you are or how I was the cross you hung yourself on. What I need to hear, Helena, is how whichever Marston it was made you come until you were inside out. I need to hear how the two of you laughed about me. I need to hear how you couldn't wait to see David, or Hilary, again. Don't ever tell me you hated it . . . because I know better." Although she was reaching down from the moon, her face was pressed against the back of Helena's neck, and she didn't need to feel its wetness to know that she was crying again.
"I didn't hate it," Helena said. She said it soothingly, as if she were talking to Christina. "Sometimes it was a relief. There was only so much of your goodness and devotion I could stand, Myka. The Wellses, we're alley cats, and if I have some sliver of morality it's because you and Christina put it there." She twisted around, her grip on Myka's arm iron, and her free hand went up to stroke Myka's hair and she pressed tiny, hard kisses on the bulge of Myka's jaw. "It was a job, with them, before I met you, and it remained a job. It was part of the deal. One of them was satisfied with the money and the thought of screwing over their parents, and the other one wanted more of a . . . guarantee." Her breath was warm and peanut buttery, and Myka felt it move up closer to her ear. "I know what you really want to hear. You want to hear that no one made me come until I was inside out except you. You want to hear that I wanted no one like I wanted you. And that part was always true, Myka. I've never lied about how I feel about you, not all those years ago, not today."
Myka heard the muffled thumping of Helena's heart. It was beating as fast as her own. She knew Helena wouldn't resist her rolling down the running capris and parting her thighs. Myka knew what she would find because she knew what Helena would find if Helena were to push down her shorts. It was there in their breathing, no longer relaxed and measured but shallow and rapid. She understood wanting relief from her discipline and her conscientiousness; she wanted relief from it. But Helena was pushing away from her, telling her to go and bring back the monitor while she woke Christina. She was almost out of the room before Helena's voice stopped her.
"I want all of you, Myka, not what you're willing to give me now." Helena was shrugging, looking embarrassed and proud and pleading all at once. "If the Wellses had ever been content with what they could have, the lot of us might have escaped prison. But we're not built that way, we dream big. And I want what I saw this afternoon, I want us with our daughter."
Myka went downstairs and searched much harder than necessary for the monitor. She didn't see Irene Frederic, but it didn't mean that Mrs. Frederic wasn't quietly waiting, surveilling, spinning her web in another room. The monitor was in plain sight on an end table, but Myka had overlooked it. She had been too busy forcing herself to think about snakes. Snakes could go for months without eating. She had heard that somewhere. She wondered if they dreamed of their future meals as they hibernated or did whatever they did when they weren't eating for months on end. She was honest enough to admit that she had wanted to hear what Helena whispered in her ear and she wanted to have what Helena had just held out to her. Maybe Helena even believed her own fantasy about what they could be to one another, but Myka couldn't afford not to recognize that Helena had been in hibernation for a very long time . . . and she was hungry.