"Good Evening. I was wondering if I might speak with Myka? My name's Helena, Helena Wells."
The young woman, Helena, offered her hand out boldly in greeting. Pausing expectantly, her arm remained out stretched as she raised a quizzicle eye brow in response to Warren's lack of reciprocation.
"We're friends from university." She added, her tone more serious and her brow furrowed but peppered with the remnants of her previous smile.
"From university?" Warren questioned as Helena finally withdrew her hand, un shaken, burying it again in her coat pocket.
"We share literature and history classes." Helena replied.
"And you're here, at this hour because...?" Warren questioned, his tone demanding.
It was honestly a fair question. The middle of a Colorado winter, on Christmas break, thousands of miles away from the university that they shared and at approaching 11 o'clock at night was hardly a typical time to call. Especially for someone whose accent seemed to suggest home as far away from Colorado Springs. Helena's demeanour remained bold and cheerful however. She was seemingly oblivious to the inconvenience these matters posed and in drawing through other emotions, her expression retained the daring smirk she had worn upon Warren's first arrival at the door. It was not helpful in ingratiating her to his good favour.
"Just calling." Helena insisted.
"Christmas greetings and all that!"
"Well young lady it's late and she's only just arrived herself. This is hardly an appropriate time." Warren replied almost awkwardly, his tone only growing in annoyance.
The reply was pausing, he carefully over emphasised and narrowly avoided tripping up on the words she and her in relation to his child.
Helena pressed on.
"I promise I'll just be a moment." She continued.
Before Warren could reply, before he could finish his lengthy contemplation of this stranger's
insistence, a voice broke from upstairs.
"Warren, you still there? Everything okay honey?" Came Jeannie's voice, accompanied by the creak of her passage down the apartment's stairs.
"I'm fine!" He called back into the store.
"Nothing to worry about!" He completed before turning back to the young woman at the door.
"Just the tiniest moment I promise." Helena insisted again, raising her hand to barley form the distance of an inch between her thumb and index finger.
Warren took a thoughtful breath, furrowing his own brow and completing his thoughts on the matter. With arms crossed over his chest he simply announced.
"Wait here."
Upon meeting Jeannie at the bottom of the stairs and with his own firm insistence in full force, he turned back to Helena.
"We'll go and get her."
Helena raised her right hand to her forehead in jovial salute to acknowledge her understanding.
Myka responded quickly and in surprise to the news of Helena's arrival. She carefully avoided her family's curiosity at the stranger's presence but she was unable to suppress the wide smile that broke onto her face, unable to hide that fact that she was pleased by it.
Myka had only recently met the young literature and engineering student. Helena, "H.G." Wells was both apparently and distantly related to the author from whom her nick name stemmed and she shared Professor Nielsen's history class with both Myka and Pete. She was very smart but non the less seemed unable to avoid the Professor's wrath for one reason or another. Either through open criticism of his teaching methods or from the unavoidable and brilliant but narrow escapes from academic failure that where her stock in trade and came as a consequence of her regular lack of attendance in class.
Myka had always admired the only slightly older student's mind and her abilities but they didn't begin to grow close until meeting by chance in the waiting room outside of Dr. Frederick's office. Until that point Myka hadn't even known that Helena was trans. She'd transitioned years ago, during high school back in the U.K. and apparently the transfer of her medical documents to the States was more complicated that it could have been. Helena had even been prepared to forgo the need for a Doctor and she considered herself quite capable of procuring, or producing the necessary medication for the up keep of hrt herself. She eventually found her way to Dr. Frederick's office only by virtue of recommendation from the university medical school's vice principle Dr. Kosan.
Their conversation went, in quick succession, from the often adversarial nature of trans health care to the themes present in late 19th and early 20th century science fiction, including whether it was best to read Jules Verne in English or French. Myka would barley admit to it at the start, even with Pete, but the more she got to know H.G the more fascinated by her she was and the more comfortable, the more desiring of her presence she became. According to Pete and often to his concern given Helena's unpredictable nature, her crush was increasingly obvious.
Making her own way into the store, Myka appeared in greeting, smile and surprise still written over her face.
"Helena?..." She questioned, quickly moving from stairway to front door.
Reaching out to draw the visitor further inside, her hand lingered and remained gently resting on Helena's arm.
" ...What're you doing here?"
Helena grinned back at the question, returning Myka's smile. Stepping in further and closer she replied.
" Well, every family enjoys a visit from Carol singers you know!"
Myka dipped her head, shaking it in amusement.
"You're gonna sing me Christmas Carols?" She replied with a raise of an eyebrow as she met Helena's gaze.
"Well..." Helena began.
"I might... but I've also found something."
Her expression grew serious and intent with the admission. She moved quickly to the store's counter and removed her messenger bag, retrieving her computer and a manila file, stamped N.S.A. Special Investigation on the cover.
Myka drew in closer, equally as intent. She flipped on the counter's light and paused only briefly to look her companion over before drawing her attention back to the counter and it's new content.
Helena flipped the file open, spreading several specific documents and photographs from among it's contents over the surface. She took a breath and looked them over for a moment.
"So.." She began.
"What we know so far is that decades ago an N.S.A. agent, one Arthur Weisfelt was investigated on suspicion of treason against the United States. He apparently sold secrets, including a number of rare antiques and historical artifacts to the Soviet government. He was charged but very quickly disappeared, never to surface again..."
Myka nodded in agreement and in concentration, her attention equally trained on Helena and the documents before her.
"Until, that is..." she continued seamlessly from Helena's sentence.
"... "Professor Artie Nielsen." begins to teach history at a certain university. They're in fact the same man."
Helena pulled two photographs to the center of the table, one a black and white mug shot featuring a sturdy young man with dark, curly hair. The other was a far more modern and candid picture of what appeared to be the same man. Except, now he was decades older with graying hair, a goatee and glasses. The photograph featured him busily making his way through a hoard of students on a college campus. He was the very picture of a stern and crotchety old academic carrying a pile of papers under one arm and an inexplicably old, leather medicine bag in the other.
"Right." Helena confirmed.
"We also suspect that a series of recent thefts from the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York City may in fact be linked to Mr Weisfelt. He was present, ostensibly for the purpose of academic research trips, during each corresponding time frame and we also know that his supposed visits to Columbia University were bogus."
"Columbia had never heard of him." Myka added.
"But it's all circumstantial. The timing of his trips, his intimate knowledge of items, some of which have been lost for over 30 years, his past..."
"The fact that he disappeared without conviction, without record of even a day spent in federal prison for his crimes!" Helena clarified, fire rising in her voice.
Myka remained calm, taking in Helena's passion. The case that they had been forming, initially by the "coincidence" of documents uncovered by the British student during her reading on cold war spy rings, at first seemed incredible. She had quickly conceded however, that Helena's evidence made a very compelling case. One that, in an earlier form, university authorities had dismissed out of hand. Even levelling threats of academic suspension or harassment charges should Professor Nielsen be bothered with such ridiculous claims. Helena had been un deterred by the threats and Myka found herself unable to dismiss the apparent validity of their case, or the mystery it posed about either the Professor or the darkness it seemed capable of drawing out in the young woman she was growing increasingly close to.
"The key fact, remains..." Helena calmly began again.
"That if he is doing this, then he can't be doing it alone. There must at least be an accomplice or a contact, probably one through whom items are being fenced."
"That's very high end fencing!" Myka offered, drawing back to look up from the papers at her companion.
"Indeed." Helena confirmed.
"But..." She continued pulling a second file from her bag.
"I have a name, James McPherson."
Opening the second file, Helena revealed an array of documents, most of which seemed to match the first in age. They included pictures of Weisfelt, aged somewhere between the previous two photos and standing next to a tall, skinny man with a mop of dark hair. The pair were pictured from some distance, next to a river in an un determinable European city.
"McPherson..." Helena began again.
" ...is former British S.I.S. and a confirmed cold war era college of Arthur Weisfelt. Unlike Weisfelt he was never charged with treason. He did however quit British intelligence services in the early 1990's and is subsequently the prime suspect in a series of high end robberies and counterfeiting cases."
"Weisfelt and McPherson are working together?" Myka announced.
"This is what I think." Replied Helena.
"But..." She started again, turning away from the papers to face Myka, arms crossed.
"...if we are going to link them together, today then we'll need hard evidence. Both men have travel arrangements to be in Chicago, their trips coincide with a holiday gala that the city's Art Institute is holding in the next week. Various visiting collections are being shipped in for the event..."
"...and it would be a perfect opportunity to grab items in transit." Myka, again completed.
"Exactly." Helena confirmed.
"If we're going to catch them, then we'll need to be there."
Helena reached back into her bag and retrieved two plane tickets, holding them out to Myka.
"Now?" Myka sputtered in surprise.
They'd been building the case, fervently and she had every intention of following through to find proof of their suspicions. Helena's expectation that they fly off at no more than a moment's notice, to confront or at the very least to follow potential art thieves, art thieves who were quite possibly involved in a very high end heist however? It was more than she had expected and there were other things on her mind besides the criminal career of a college professor.
"Helena," She began, gesturing around the store as she spoke.
"I'm here trying to re build a relationship with my family. I can't just leave at a moment's notice. I barely arrived hours ago!"
She saw the flinch, the vulnerability in Helena's expression that her words drew out. It also drew her closer to her companion as she felt her own gut twist at the hurt on the other woman's face. It was a side of Helena that she barely showed, just a hint of the darkness that Myka had sometimes sensed in her. Reaching out, even closer to again gently grip Helena's arm, her tone softened.
"I know this is important to you. It's important to me too but what am I supposed to tell my family ?"
Helena's face twisted again and her eyes grew cold as she nodded in understanding. Myka knew that there was more to this case, more to Helena's obsession with it than she'd shared. Myka also knew that she cared more about the other young woman than she'd admitted and whatever the unspoken reason for Helena's need to follow it, she cared about that too. She cared about it beyond the fact that it was a mystery to be solved.
Nodding for a second time, Helena looked up, back to Myka and drawing herself together through an unsteady breath, she spoke again.
"Please." She offered, holding Myka's gaze.
Before Myka could speak, before she could respond in either the positive or the negative, the store's main lights flickered on to reveal her mother and father, newly arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Their silent moment broken, the intimacy of it too much for either the sudden and harsh glare of the lights or the gaze of outsiders, Myka turned to face her parents, quickly removing her hand from Helena's arm.
"Sweetheart ?" Jeannie began.
"Won't you invite your friend upstairs ?"
