"Okay, okay," Henry said, walking over to his tablet. "I'm still working on getting a lock on who's trying to sell these things...since we don't exactly have any contacts in this market, but until then, uh..."
"Henry..." Helen murmured, trying to get him to speed up, as he spoke to Will, Helen, Gregory, Magnus and Audrey.
"Right, uh," he said, unevenly maneuvering around his small technological lab. "But I managed to get you these."
"Visiting Curator badges?" Gregory asked, studying the badges with a raised eyebrow.
"Yeah, well...it's not like we can pretend to be nebulous Feds because they're already all over the scene." He said with a sigh. "But I managed to hack into the system and send a couple of emails to the key figures in the museum's management. They think they're going to be hosting visiting curators from the British Royal Museum – Dr. Helen Magnus and Dr. Will Zimmerman"
Helen tried to hide an amused smile before she turned to her technician. "Good work, Henry."
"Thank you." He said with a grin.
"When are they expecting these visiting curators?" She asked, picking up her ID badge.
"Tomorrow morning, eight a.m."
"Excellent." Helen said, looking at her protege. "We leave for the museum at seven-thirty then."
He nodded.
Helen turned to her daughter and son-in-law. "I want you to be ready in case Henry receives a tip leading us to the seller of the stolen items."
"Mom, why are we looking into this?" Audrey said, her brow furrowed in confusion.
Helen turned to her daughter. "You don't find it interesting that the thief didn't trip any alarms, made no artificial entrance into the building, and was never caught on camera?"
"No, Mother, I don't." She said, shaking her head. "It's called an inside-job."
"In five different countries within five months?"
"Did anyone check the janitorial staff?"
"Look, I read the files," Will interjected. "As far as INTERPOL is concerned, there is no one who was in even just two of the museums at the times of the robbery."
"What about not at the time of the robbery. Maybe it's a group."
"INTERPOL already investigated this and got nothing. Maybe we can come up with something that they might not have thought of," Will said with a shrug.
"Mom, the only person who could have gotten in there without triggering alarms is me." She said with a steely gaze. "So unless you think it's me..."
Helen swallowed.
"You think it's Ashley," Gregory said, reading his mother like a book.
"Ashley?" Audrey asked, faintly. "Like the sister we never met?"
Helen's silence seemed to speak volumes to everyone in the room.
"Ashley?" Henry asked, shocked.
"I...I thought I saw..." She began, slowly.
"She died, Doc! Over forty years ago!" Henry said, looking at her incredulously. "It was sad, and there's not a day that goes by where I don't think about what it was like growing up with her, but...she's gone." He shook his head. "She teleported inside the EM shield, and..." He choked on his emotion. "She was my best friend and I miss her, but she's gone, Doc."
"Look, Henry, it's just a possibility we want to eliminate," Will said, ever the clear-headed psychologist.
The HAP turned a hateful look to his friend. "We know what happens to people when they teleport into the EM shield. And it's not pretty. There's no way that she could be here, and you know it."
"Stop it!" Helen cried. "All of you! Regardless of who may or may not be the perpetrator of these thefts, it is our obligation to look into them if we have even the slightest idea of what could be behind them."
"Our obligation, Mother?" Audrey asked, skeptically. "To which abnormal?"
"None of you need to join me. Ashley was my daughter." Helen said, soberly. She swallowed, trying to keep from letting her emotion show on her face.
"You said seven-thirty?" Will asked after a moment.
She nodded, slowly.
"I'll be there."
"Well, she was my sister." Gregory said after a moment. "If you need anything..."
She managed a grateful smile. "Then, I'll make my rounds and prepare for tomorrow." She said, softly, before she walked out of the lab.
Gregory turned to the rest of the group. "Look...I know it doesn't sound exactly plausible, but...I think I can speak for all of us when I say that she's supported us when we thought no one would. And even if it turns out that it wasn't Ashley...she's got a point that there's something...abnormal...going on here."
Audrey tensed before she turned to Henry. "Keep an eye on the buyer situation. I'm game."
"Me too." Her husband piped up from beside her.
"I think it's this...birthday..." Gregory said, his thoughts still on his mother.
"Yeah well, she's not exactly jumping up and down to celebrate." Henry said, soberly.
"But after the first thirty or so birthdays, weren't they all the same?" Will asked, turning to his friend who shrugged, noncommittally.
"No, it's not that." Gregory said, shaking his head. "It's...it's staying the same while so many of us are growing older."
"It's not that different." Audrey said, rolling her eyes.
"You're forty-one." He said, turning to his twin. "That's one-fifth of Mom's age. Do you understand that? Every major scientific breakthrough we've seen in the last two centuries...our mother was a part of every single one of them. Do you understand that?"
"I've seen her photos, Greg." Audrey said, glaring at her brother.
"Then, do you realize that all of her friends – all of the people she went to school with have...great-great-great-great-great grandchildren now? And they've all been dead for at least 150 years?"
Audrey bit her lip, looking away from her brother and her husband.
"Look, I'm just..."
"It's the kids' bedtime." She interrupted, abruptly. "I need to go say good night to my kids." She leaned over and kissed her husband's cheek before turning a conflicted look to her brother and leaving.
Gregory and Magnus watched her go as Will swallowed.
"She, uh...saw one of her friends from high school." Magnus said after a moment. "She had a daughter in college and a couple kids in high school."
"For a woman who seems to be twenty-five and has a kids who aren't even old enough to start grade school, that must have been a revelation." Will said after a moment.
"Yeah." Magnus said, swallowing.
"She couldn't look at us," Gregory said after a moment.
"How could she?" Magnus asked after a few moments. "When she knows that we're the first generation she's been destined to watch like her mother watched her schoolmates. Forty years old, and already there's a difference. Forty-years-old, and she see our mortality write it will upon us as she stays immune from its effects."
Magnus sighed. "I've got to join her. The kids can be a handful at bedtime."
Gregory, Henry and Will watched him go before Gregory turned to the other men in the room. "All this time, I thought she didn't understand Mother. Now, I'm starting to believe she's just afraid of admitting how much she does understand."
"She's a lot more like your mother than she realizes." Will said after a moment.
Henry swallowed. "Carbon copy," he agreed. "Unlike Ashley."
"You know, I haven't heard more than a few snippets about her," Gregory said after a moment.
"Ashley's hard to describe." Henry said with a fond smile. "But, uh, she's a lot like you. Just...a little more...American 21st century than you. You tend to take after your mom with the...old-school British taste."
"I think I'm starting to get...some picture...of what she was like..." Gregory said, thinking deeply.
Henry nodded. "She was one hell of a good gal. Maybe a bit too impulsive to run a place like this, but...definitely a good tracker."
Will nodded, slowly, his thoughts drifting back to his late wife, who had died while helping to catch an abnormal nearly twenty years earlier.
"Anyway, I guess it wouldn't surprise me if Ashley turned up that she stole these things. She wasn't into pretty things really...not even really into money, but guns? That was her thing. Man, she loved her weapons."
"Yeah, well," Will murmured. "She kind of took after Jack the Ripper in that respect."
Gregory's eyes widened, and Will swallowed, having forgotten for a moment that the forty-one-year-old man had never learned his father's true identity.
"Uh..." Will began, slowly.
"Don't apologize." Gregory said after a few moments. "I think that sentence right there just made everything I've ever heard about my father make sense."
"Yeah, but you shouldn't have heard it from me," Will said with a grimace. "I should have been more careful."
Gregory bit the inside of his cheek before he turned to Henry. "Thanks for sharing about my sister. It, uh, helped me decide for sure that I want to help Mother look for her." He turned to Will. "And, uh, thanks for telling me about my dad. It probably wasn't the best way you could have told me, but it's still nice to know. I won't tell Mother you told me."
"I'd appreciate it." Will said, seriously. He turned to Henry. "I'm going to turn in. Got a long day ahead of me at the museum tomorrow." He said, picking up his badge.