Conestoga wagons. Cattle. Barbed wire. Land rush. Dust Bowl. Helena rubbed her back against the spindles of her chair before she put down the History of Cimarron County by Joseph and Ruth Ridley, a brother-sister pair if she had read the acknowledgments correctly. The book was published in 1948, so, if the artefact at work in Ellis came from a more recent period of its history, then she had wasted an hour immersed in a history of the American West. If she had to be schooled in some telling of it, she would choose the 1950s Technicolor versions, dreadfully biased though so many of them were, over books like the Ridleys'. Histories, whether personal or larger-scale, were the saddest stories of all, and if she could lose the plot and the truth it generally obscured in an appreciation of the aerodynamic perfection of the brassieres and the inexplicable availability of Max Factor cosmetics worn by the actresses, she would - quite happily.
The one note of interest in the Ridleys' History was the radio club formed by a group of Ellis high school students in the 1920s; for a few years, the club produced a one-hour program, broadcast in the late afternoon, that provided news of the school's sports teams, theatrical and choral offerings, and, especially for the girls, recipes and household hints, courtesy of Lorraine Owens, home economics teacher. Given the equipment and the budget likely available to the club, the signal would have had a range of only a few miles. Helena studied the picture of the club's members, all boys, grouped around a desk with a microphone; the broadcasts had happened almost a hundred years ago. It was foolish to think that any of the equipment was left, although the school building was still standing, if the pictures of Ellis on one of the museum's walls were to be relied upon. By 1948, Ellis' population and importance had significantly declined; the school was closed and the students bused to a consolidated school several miles away. The building had had varied uses made of it since then, housing an antique store, apartments, and county extension offices at different points in time. At three stories, it remained the tallest building in Ellis, having served as elementary, junior high, and senior high school all in one.
When an artefact is in play, Helena reminded herself, you can't expect science to apply. Stop thinking of sound waves and amplifiers and antennas. The artefact could just as easily be a rubber duck someone is squeezing periodically in a tornado shelter below ground. Meaning the artefact could be anything anywhere. What was it Doyle had put in the mouth of his most famous creation? When you have eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Clever phrasemaking, but it assumed that 'whatever remained' was still within the realm of the possible, the logical, the explainable - the connection waiting only to be discovered. No why's or how's were ever sufficient for an artefact, not really. In the end, an artefact beggared explanation, it just was.
Myka pulled out the chair across from Helena and sat down with a loud, discouraged sigh that expressed Helena's own sense of futility. "Please tell me that you've found something more helpful than I've been able to dig up." She glanced at her watch. "We're now at 68 hours before Lowry shuts us down."
Helena shook her head, pushing the History of Cimarron County over to Myka. "I've looked at countless maps, read ancient editions of the Ellis Bugle on microfilm almost as ancient, and perused the History. I can tell you how Ellis got its name, why the county seat was moved to Boise City, and what the secret is behind Doris Petrie's prize-winning strawberry-rhubarb pie, which apparently swept the 1918 county fair by storm, but I haven't the foggiest idea of why an artefact was used in Ellis or what that artefact might look like."
"Lowry let me look at some surveillance video and photographs. Streets are empty, and there's no activity outside the homes and businesses. Ellis is virtually a ghost town. Then I went back to the sheriff's office. He gave me access to their records. I read arrests and citations for the last 12 months. Other than I learned that you don't want to tangle with the Carter twins on Saturday night, I didn't find anything. No skulkers, no peeping Toms, no one wandering around Ellis without a reason to be there." Myka ran her fingers through her hair, which looked like it had had several encounters with her hand. She began to leaf through the History. "'Our thanks to our parents, who taught us that you can never lose your way when you remember where you came from.'" She glanced at Helena. "Wonder if they collaborated on anything else."
"Not unless Ruth got her brother to admit that it was her labor that made the book possible." Helena sniffed. "You'll see at the very end of the acknowledgements that he thanks her for the 'hours spent poring over county records and collections of letters.'"
"Did Charles not sufficiently acknowledge you?" Myka teased.
"He convinced me that no one would read fiction with a scientific, albeit imaginative, bent written by a woman. Her realm was the domestic and her mission that of self-improvement, thus H.G. Wells rather than Helena Wells. How convenient that Charles' middle name was Herbert." While Helena's voice betrayed exasperation, her smile was fond. She remembered him bent over the manuscripts, writing over passages she had originally written that he considered too daring. Perhaps the works were better for their removal. "We argued for days over the middle initial. He wanted 'F' for a family name he was besotted with, I wanted a firmer, more decisive sound. This H. Wells was imagining things that hadn't yet been invented." She smiled smugly. "Not to the knowledge of anyone outside the Warehouse, at any rate. 'He' needed a middle initial that didn't sound like someone on the verge of wheezing. H. F-f-f-f." Helena derisively sputtered the 'F.' "See what I mean? Charles eventually conceded, and it was H.G., not H.F., Wells. He said the 'G' stood for my grandiosity."
Myka was laughing, but a surprised note bubbled through it. "i thought 'G' was your middle initial, we all did."
Helena responded to her surprise with an admonishing look. "That's what you chose to assume. I never said it was my middle initial."
A man emerged from a room in the back with an "Employees Only" decal on the door. He was thumbing through the pages of a pocket notebook as he approached their table. His eyes touched lightly on Myka before focusing on Helena. "I looked up the students in the radio club," he said. "It won't surprise you that none of 'em are alive anymore, but a few still have family in the area. One's got a daughter in a nursing home in Guymon; she might be able to tell you something. Another's son is still living, just outside of town here, but he's not doing too good. Not sure how much help he'd be." He tore the page from the notebook and handed it to Helena.
"Thank you, Pete," she said appreciatively.
"I'll be behind the desk, if you want anything else." With the heavy, padding steps that had followed Helena around the small space of the museum, he went to sit behind the well-lacquered desk at the museum's entrance. The museum hadn't been open when Helena had first climbed to the third floor, and when she had returned to the sheriff's office to find out if it could be opened for her, Sheriff Paulsen had taken her to the records office and called out to a man bent over a drawer in a file cabinet. Pete would open the museum for her and provide her with anything she needed. This Pete was as slow-moving and laconic as Pete Lattimer was hyperactive and full of chatter. He led her up to the third floor and unlocked the museum door, turning on the lights. With an abashed smile he asked her to sign the guestbook - she saw that she was the first visitor in four months - and then, moving his arm in a slow arc, he pointed to the pictures on the walls, the few exhibit cases, and a harvest-gold microfilm reader before pointing to the closed "Employees Only" door. "Take a look around, and if what you want isn't out, we may have it in storage." Thankfully the History had given her the radio club, which provided her a reason for shooing him away from the semi-permanent position he had taken by her elbow. She didn't believe talking to the descendants of the original radio club members would result in any useful information, but right now she and Myka didn't have any information, let alone enough to judge what was useful and what wasn't.
"So eager to be of service, so tractable. I want to trade our Pete for this Pete," she whispered to Myka. "I honestly think Drew would come to love him in time."
Myka narrowed her eyes. "What's this about the radio club?" she asked finally.
"There used to be a radio station of sorts in Ellis, in the school building. It's possible that if the artefact isn't a replica of Aimee Semple McPherson's Bible, it might be associated with the club. I know I'm grasping at straws, darling, but straws are all we have at the moment."
Myka twitched her shoulders, as though she were trying to get her blazer to lay more comfortably on them. "I'm starving. Let's find lunch somewhere and then drive out toward Ellis. I don't know that what we'll see will give us any ideas, but, like you said, all we have are straws."
With a last look at the History, Helena followed her. She could ask Pete on the way out if he knew what had become of the Ridleys, whether there were other collaborations, as Myka had wondered, or if they had worked on separate projects, or if there had been anything that followed the History. Her immersion in bronze certainly hadn't been an impediment for Charles, although she had stopped providing him ideas and roughed-out scenes long before then. It was also true that, in the years when dreaming of time machines and other marvels had been among her favorite distractions, she had given him enough material for countless works. She had recognized elements in his later writings, the ones he had published after she had been bronzed, from conversations they had had sitting on the lawn behind one of her many rented summer cottages or in front of the fireplace in their parents' parlor or while they watched Christina toddle about in the kitchen, she sketching the design of her latest device in the air and throwing out bits of dialogue, he, slouched across from her or next to her, ankles indolently crossed, listening and following her flying hands.
She touched the desk, Myka was already in the hallway, at the top of the stairs. Fingers rubbing an ancient groove, Helena asked Pete as casually as she could, "Do you know what happened to the Ridleys, the ones who wrote the book you gave me?" Casually because it didn't matter what had happened to the Ridleys, brother and sister, no more than which one had been the smarter or the more talented or whether their relationship had been close and loving or filled with jealous bickering. They were both likely long gone from this earth, as was Charles, and who was there left to care, except their families and her, and she should be concentrating on more urgent matters.
Pete studied the ceiling. "Joe, he was a professor of history or something like that at Oklahoma State. Became sort of a bigwig, they named some building on campus for him, or so I've heard. "Ruth," he shrugged. "I think she was married to a professor at the university. Don't know much about her. Probably did what was normal for a woman back then, stayed at home to raise the kids."
"Yes," Helena said noncommittally, "I suppose she might have."
She hadn't gotten far from the desk when he said, louder, so they both could hear him, "Speaking of the Ridleys, they had a cousin, younger, although she's pretty old now. She's, uh, she's kind of different. Hears voices and all that. But she's been telling people she's gone into Ellis. I mean, that's what the two of you are here for, right? To figure out what's going on - the whole town's been buzzing about it."
Helena turned and Myka began walking back to the museum entrance. "Gone in - after people were affected?"
He nodded. "Esther's okay, she's just, I mean, she's been in and out of mental hospitals most of her life. She'll tell you she had a conversation with the pope or her husband, who's been dead 20 years, and yet she always knows what's going on. Sharp as a tack, really." He played with the guestbook, fretting one of its corners. "When it comes to everyday things, you know, like, 'Pete, I went to Guymon,' which she wouldn't say because she can't drive, but, you know, something like that, it happened, she went there. It's only when she's talking about telling the president what to do or the governor asking her for advice that you have to. . . you know, take it with a grain of salt. It happened only in her head."
Helena gave him back the page he had torn from his notebook. "Write down her name and contact information."
He fumbled for a pen. "You'll have to go out to her farm. She doesn't have a phone. Or a television. Or a computer." He scribbled the address. "The farm's north of Ellis, not too far from the barricades they got up."
As they took the stairs down to the first floor, Myka murmured, "Are we really looking at a woman who suffers from auditory hallucinations as a source?"
"Straws, darling," Helena counseled, "straws."
After a hurried lunch in a cafe in which they drew the unhurried looks of the other diners, they took the highway south out of Boise City, the SUV a crucible from hours parked in the sun. The jet roar of the air conditioning promised relief, but Helena was convinced that she would turn into one of those desiccated corpses, all flying limbs and skeletal grins, that seemed to spring out like jack-in-the-boxes in horror movies. Perhaps it was having wandered, and sat, and wandered, and sat again in the county museum reading about people long since dead, seeing photos of people long since dead that made her so aware of her own age, all 148 years of it. By rights she should be a desiccated corpse instead of looking like - she flipped down the visor and critically assessed herself in the mirror - a woman barely. . . 50. She couldn't say 40, not the way her eyes were drooping and her skin was hanging slack under her jaw. She could blame it on exhaustion - although she would gladly repeat last night, anywhere, anytime - but as she pushed the visor up and moodily plucked at her slacks, she knew she would have only to roll up a pant leg to see the reddish, broken lines beneath her skin, as if her arterial system were fraying, unraveling, shedding bits of itself like so much thread.
'What was normal for a woman back then.' Helena didn't know which part of it bothered her more, the lack of imagination it revealed, as if he literally couldn't think of anything else Ruth Ridley might have done, or the lack of curiosity, as if what had become of her after writing the History wasn't worth speculating about. She knew it was unfair to label Pete, if only in her mind, as some close-minded traditionalist who secretly thought that she and Myka had no business wearing slacks and pretending they were the ones to solve the problem in Ellis when the obvious man for the job was Major Lowry. But it gnawed at her, it really did, that Ruth appeared to have no existence outside the History, which would have a slim claim on almost anyone's attention. She had provided the material from which her brother had fashioned the book and then she had seemingly disappeared. There would be no buildings anywhere named after Ruth Ridley.
"What are you brooding about, Helena? Is it about the Ridleys? I heard you ask him about them." Even though Myka's eyes were hidden by her sunglasses, Helena could feel the unrelenting patience of that gaze. Like the heat, it would bear down on her until she succumbed. It was what made Myka an effective interrogator, but, at this very moment, when Helena suspected that she would sound only self-pitying, a rather unsatisfactory lover. An unMyka-like lover wouldn't have noticed how she had frowned as she looked at herself in the mirror or picked at her slacks; she would have attributed Helena's quietness to her concentrating her considerable mental powers on Ellis. Or better yet, an unMyka-like lover would be driving the SUV off the highway, seeking the privacy of some trees and asking her to find the snack cakes. But Myka, her Myka, wasn't as gullible or, sadly, as sex-driven.
"Then you must have heard him say that he didn't know what had become of Ruth Ridley and, what was worse, acted as if it didn't matter what had happened to her."
"I wouldn't say that," Myka said mildly, "he simply didn't know much about them, especially her. You were expecting a lot from someone whose job is clearly not running that museum." She didn't try very hard to hide a smile. "So, you're no longer as eager to replace our Pete with County Museum Pete?"
"That's what you're taking from this?" Helena exclaimed. "That I have a renewed appreciation of Pete Lattimer?"
"No, although I am relieved for Drew's sake." Myka pulled her sunglasses down, looking steadily at Helena. "Something about the Ridleys resonates with you, and don't tell me that it's because Charles got all the credit."
"Why does it have to be anything more than indignation at how women. . . ." Helena faltered as Myka, eyes once more hidden behind the carapace of her sunglasses, flashed her a look that Helena knew was stern just by the dipping line of her eyebrows. "Thinking about the ignominious end to my own contributions to H. G. Wells led me . . . ." She exhaled and tried again. "When I was going to be bronzed, there was considerable debate among the regents about how it should be explained to my family. They were worried that, if not properly explained, my disappearance would lead my family to raise questions no one would be eager to answer." Helena leaned her head against the side window, seeing not the highway in front of them but the smoke-filled room in which she had met with the regents - all men back then - for the last time. "So although it galled them to do it, they decided that my family would be given the standard Warehouse 12 explanation for an agent's death or. . . permanent alteration. . . resulting from an artefact. My family would be told that I had died in the service of my country. A train might derail or a boat might sink, whatever it would be, I would have been on an important assignment, and Her Majesty's government would deeply feel the loss. Maybe even that last bit was partly true." Her voice, already quiet, dropped further. "I was give a day to 'settle my affairs' and to tell my family that I would be away for some time on work-related travel. I told the lies easily to my parents. We had barely spoken since Christina's death, but I couldn't lie to Charles, not that baldly."
"You told him the truth?" Myka's voice was as quiet as her own.
"An approximation." Helena's laugh was wry. "Despite everything that had happened, I couldn't bring myself to commit that betrayal. I told him that no matter what he might be told later, I wasn't dead. I had done nothing noble either. I had done awful, horrible things, and the government had no choice but to punish me. I thought about telling him that I was being sent to prison, but then I imagined him asking which prison and whether anyone would be allowed to visit me. So I told him I was being banished, where I didn't know, but that I could return to England only at the forfeiture of my life. Moreover, I was expected to sever ties with family, friends, and associates as part of my punishment. Ridiculous story, but there was truth in it, and he must have heard it since he didn't once question me."
Closing her eyes, she pictured him as he had been that evening, rumpled, irritable, and displeased at the interruption. He had been working on one of her, their stores when her sister-in-law had shown her into the parlor and called him to come downstairs. As he entered the room, he was rubbing his forehead in the fretful manner of a child unsure whether he wanted to fuss more visibly, reminding her so sharply of Christina that she was aware only of the furious pounding of her heart. "I thought for the longest time that I had told him what I did because I couldn't bear the lies. Someone needed to know the truth of what I had become because the Warehouse would never willingly reveal it, and the others who knew were dead. But even that explanation gives me too much credit. I told him because I wanted someone to know I was alive. I wanted to think that he might occasionally wonder where I was, what I was doing, if I had found some relief from my sins. Murderers still hope their mothers love them, and I was no different. I needed someone to care."
"That's not horrible, Helena, it's human -"
"To have burdened him like that? He wouldn't have shared it with anyone, I impressed upon him the need to keep it secret. So all those years when I was staring into the blackness of my own mind, he left flowers on my grave and wiped away my mother's tears - assuming she wept - and reassured my father that I had died a patriot's death. He would have been curious about where I was sent - he was a writer, it would have intrigued him - and he would have thought, 'Did they exile her to Australia? How is the old thing faring in the outback? Maybe he imagined me among the untouchables in India. At least my parents had peace. I didn't give him that." Helena whipped her head away from the window, but Myka was concentrating, or pretending to concentrate, on the road ahead. "Come to think of it, maybe banishment would have been the better solution. Perhaps I could have found salvation toiling with the missionaries in some remote jungle, or just as easily, if not more likely, I could have contracted malaria in that very same jungle and died. At any rate, what happened, almost did happen after MacPherson released me wouldn't have."
"You do know that everything you did, good and bad, brought you here, where you're complaining that you should have died 95 years earlier." Myka said it, flatly, to the windshield.
Helena remembered last night with Myka, looking into her eyes, and feeling incredibly, wondrously, balanced. It had been marvelous that moment and it had given her the hope that such moments might multiply for her, but it was hard to keep that moment from being erased by all the other ones, the ones that reminded her that her world, the one in which her American counterparts had fenced in and plowed under the plains, buried victims of cholera and typhoid, and died at 60, was now nothing more than a narrative comprised of greater or lesser anecdotes and lists of names that books like the History called history. Moments that reminded her that people far more deserving than she of the jury-rigged immortality the Warehouse had given her had lived their lives and died, only to be spoken of with uncertainty or dismissiveness, 'Don't know much about her. . . probably did what was normal for women back then.' It was very difficult to keep her balance, to feel balanced in a world, in a time in which she was an imbalance. Everything she had done, good and bad, might have brought her here, but she didn't belong here.
Myka's voice was still flat, still angry as it cut into her thoughts. "Yes, Helena, if you're speaking in some larger sense then, yes, banishment would have been better. MacPherson wouldn't have died, the boys in Egypt wouldn't have died, Pete and I wouldn't have nearly died, and I wouldn't have held your gun to my forehead in the wild hope that some part of you, deep down, didn't want to instigate another ice age. Is that what you want to hear? Do you want me to go a step further? If I thought in a larger sense, I would have killed you in Yellowstone. Fundamentally, that's what I'm trained to do, Helena, I'm a Secret Service agent, I eliminate threats." The sunglasses swung toward her once again, although Helena had no idea what type of look Myka was giving her now. "You were a threat, and nothing had been able to stop you, not the bronze, not MacPherson, not how much we all loved you."
"Did you think of killing me then?" Helena remembered how white Myka's face had been, the color leached from it by fear, but while her eyes had been wet with tears, they had fixed unblinkingly on hers.
Myka let the question hang between them. Sounding more tired than angry, she said, "I can't believe in some cosmic scale that weighs our strengths and weaknesses. How we act, how it affects others, it's a daily thing. And though the mistake I make on Monday may not cancel out the kindness I do on Tuesday, how long do I let it follow me, Helena? Do I let it outweigh everything else? Do I let it destroy every relationship I try to form? If I believed I should let people's failings solely determine how I felt about them, I never would have spoken to my father once I left for college." She sighed, finally reaching over to grip Helena's hand. "Kill you? I was so absolutely fucking devastated, I barely had the strength to call for help after it was over. I wasn't an agent then, I was . . . me, nerdy, straight-arrow Myka crushed out on this dashing, dangerous woman who had ripped her world apart despite the fact that the other world was just fine." She released Helena's hand and pointed to the patrol cars parked across the highway a short distance ahead. "Look, we need to. . . ." Hesitating, she finally applied the brakes, slowing the SUV well before the barricade. "I get it," she said rapidly. "I get that there are going to be black days for you, Helena. But when you say the world would be better off without you, I can't accept that, because my world isn't better off without you."
The SUV crawled up to the barricades. Myka turned off the engine and opened her door, saying her over shoulder. "What happened in Yellowstone was one of the worst moments of my life. Of the top five worst moments of my life, you're in four of them. If that isn't a sign from the universe about you, I don't know what is. Yet when I look at you. . . ." She shrugged helplessly. "Let's go talk to the troopers."
The troopers were bored and glad for the distraction. Surveying the fields around them, some green with the benefit of irrigation, others brown and lying fallow, Helena couldn't imagine spending eight hours standing (or sitting in a car) behind concrete barriers. Birds skimming the grass for prey provided the only relief from the utter stillness. She was already sweating under her linen shirt, and they had been outside the SUV for only a few minutes. In response to Myka's questions, the troopers would look at each other and then one would gravely accept the mantle of responsibility and state -
No, no one had tried to get past the barricades, not here, not at the other end of town.
No, no one had come out from the town.
No, in the time they had been patrolling this part of the highway, nothing had changed.
No, nothing smelled different, nothing looked different, nothing sounded different.
Myka rocked back on her heels a little, working her hands into the pockets of her slacks. There was nothing more to ask them. Nothing a logical, reasonable person would ask. So Helena asked it. "We've heard there's a woman claiming she's been in and out of Ellis since the roads were blocked. You haven't seen her around here?"
The troopers looked at each other, Myka looked at her. "You must be talking about Esther Price," the older of them said. "She's not all right in the head, they should have told you that." He glanced from her to Myka, letting his eyes linger on Myka as if to ask her why she had let this other woman, obviously not all right in her own way, take over.
The younger trooper, after a sideways look at his partner, obviously judging whether it was worth it to seem to be disagreeing with him, planted his feet wider and carefully directed his eyes to a spot just above Helena's head. "She could have walked or ridden her bicycle through the fields to get to the town. There aren't enough of us to block all access, but Nolan's right, she's. . . um . . . touched." He cleared his throat. "That said, a couple of years ago when a tornado went through here and carried off the Anderson boy, she was the one who found him. We had been looking for hours, but she said she 'heard' him, and she took us to a culvert, and that's where he was. Naked as a jaybird and dazed but fine."
His partner said scoffingly, "It's not as though we weren't going to search that culvert, Aaron."
"She'd been saying that all day, Nolan, and nobody believed her." The younger trooper swallowed, refusing to glance at his partner. "But that boy's parents were desperate, and they pleaded to have the search teams sent to that area. That's why we were there when we were there."
The older trooper took off his hat and rubbed the back of his arm against his forehead. "You're free to think what you like, but Esther Price's just a crazy old woman." He put his hat back on and nodded toward the SUV. "You're looking a little wilted, ladies. The heat's nothing to trifle with. You're welcome to look around here, if you want, but we've kept a pretty good eye on things."
Myka had stiffened at "ladies," but her expression and her tone remained pleasant. "Agent Wells and I appreciate your time, officers." The emphasis was slight but unmistakable.
As they began walking to their SUV, Helena throwing her shoulders back to show the troopers that the sun wouldn't beat her down, at least not in their view, Aaron shouted after them, "If you want to talk to Esther, her farm's up the highway toward Boise City. That gravel road you passed about about a mile and a half from here, take a right on it and down about another mile, you'll see her farmhouse."
Myka was silent as she turned the car around and headed north on the highway. As the air conditioner roared to life, Helena groaned and slumped against the seat. "The younger one tried to be helpful, don't you think? Maybe we should drop in on Ms. Price." Myka didn't respond, leaning toward Helena only to adjust the controls of the air conditioner. "I don't think we properly ended our conversation," Helena ventured. "It's not that I don't want to be here, Myka. I do, never more deeply than I have these past weeks, but even you can't say that I haven't been given more second chances than I deserve."
"It's not a matter of deserving or not deserving to be here, Helena. We just are. . . here, and we make the best of it." Helena could see the white of the gravel road ahead, a lighter scar against the land than the highway. Myka could see it, too, and she lifted the hair at the back of her neck, tugging gently at the strands. "I'm thinking of that line in the acknowledgment in the Ridleys' book, about not losing your way if you remember where you came from. That's true. But another saying comes to mind, about missing what's in front of you if you insist on looking back."
"Point taken," Helena murmured as Myka made a right turn onto the gravel road. "You do know where you're taking us, don't you?"
"Maybe I get a little contrary when men get paternal and tell me I can't do something or that I'm looking 'wilted.' Or maybe when I stop to consider that I'm sitting next to a 148-year-old woman chasing a magical knock-off of a magical Bible. . . and I'm trying to convince that 148-year-old woman that she has a life with me and my son, I think I have no right to judge who's sane and who's not." Myka flashed her something that was too uncertain to be a grin, but it was, nonetheless, a smile.
The farmhouse was narrow but with two full stories. With its coat of white paint and unadorned windows, the house presented a long, solemn face as did so many of the farmhouses Helena remembered seeing farther north, as if they could stand in for the long, solemn faces of the farmers in Grant Wood's American Gothic. The yard was covered by a patchy layer of brown grass, and the lane that wound from the road past the house to the barn and sheds beyond was empty. The only indications that the house was occupied were the bicycle propped against the side of the house and the woman standing in the yard impassively watching them as they turned off the road. When the SUV came to a stop beside her and Myka lowered the window, the woman looked at them incuriously. Tanned skin, pulled as tight over high, sharp cheekbones as a freshly made bed, gave no clue to her age; she might have been 65 or 85.
"I'm Esther, and you must be the folks from Washington." Neither welcoming nor suspicious, the tone was as matter-of-fact as her words.
The eyes, dark, unreadable, swept through the SUV's interior once more, slowing as they studied Helena. Myka had pushed her sunglasses into her hair and was preparing to explain the reason for their presence, when Helena leaned in front of her, saying ironically, "You heard us coming, did you?"
Esther looked no less impassive, but something Helena was positive was amusement had crept into that dark gaze. "You're the smarty pants of the two of you, aren't you? Somebody send you to talk to the crazy lady who claims she's been in Ellis?"
"Have you?" Helena asked.
"Why don't we talk about Ellis where it's cooler."
Like a phrase that was untranslatable, the meaning of "cooler" could only be poorly approximated, Helena decided. In the heat of the living room, fans placed on the floor and an ancient window air conditioner managing to stir the air but not cool it, Helena and Myka sat on a loveseat, holding perspiring glasses of sweet tea, which, in Myka's case, wasn't sweet at all. Esther Price occupied an armchair, her head cocked to one side, the long white braid of her hair dangling like a bell pull over her shoulder, apparently listening to an inner dialogue because every time Helena or Myka tried to speak, she waved a hand to quiet them.
Finally she raised her head and pointed her finger at Helena. "You're too noisy." She turned to Myka. "You don't bother me as much as her." She lifted a shoulder in Helena's direction, and Helena rolled her eyes. "You're much quieter than that one. Not that I can't hear you. There's someone who's telling you that he's disappointed in you, that you can do better, and there's someone you spend most of your time shushing. Your boy. . . ." Esther shook her head. "No, not your boy. You don't tell him to shush - he might need you." She smiled. "How old is he, your boy?"
"Eight," Myka said, returning her smile, but it was tight and tense.
Esther tilted her head and closed her eyes. "That's the voice you're always listening for, isn't it? Hers. Agent Smarty Pants.'"
From the corner of her eye, Helena saw a blush rise in Myka's cheeks. Myka put her glass down on a side table as the buzzing vibration of her phone became audible. She tucked her hand in her blazer's inner pocket and pulled out the phone. She barely glanced at the screen before she was pushing herself off the loveseat, saying curtly, "I need to take this."
"So you're 'hearing' only us?" There was the sound of the door being shut, and Helena glimpsed Myka beginning to pace the yard, the phone held to her ear.
"You, her, others. They're quieter because they're farther away. But I'm sure as hell not hearing the Queen of England," Esther snapped, her brows drawing together. More softly, she said, "When I was younger, much younger, and making the mistake of trying to explain what I hear, people said I went around thinking I had a radio in my head. They joked about me tuning in on the 'wrong frequency,' asked me when the aliens were coming. Eventually it was easier to let people think what they wanted. But I'm not carrying on conversations with the president, and I don't see little green men."
Helena drank her tea, wanting to roll the glass across her forehead. "I believe you. You can hear people's . . . thoughts. . . if they're within a certain range."
"I can't read minds, if that's what you're asking." Esther's voice had regained its irritability. "I hear voices, that's the only way I can describe it."
"We were told you were able to rescue a little boy because you 'heard' him. How did you hear him, like you heard Myka? How far away were you?" Helena leaned forward.
"I was here in the house when the tornado touched down, but it went the other way. The culvert where they found him is maybe ten, 12 miles away. He was crying out for his mama. Not out loud, though he probably was doing that too. In his head, like you might wish for your mama to come hold you. That's what I heard." Esther's eyes roamed the living room, which offered only the loveseat and armchair. There were no rugs on the scarred floorboards, no pictures on the walls, a paperback was splayed on the same table as Myka's abandoned glass of tea, but it had the undisturbed look of a book that was picked up and read only on rainy afternoons. "You're even noisier now that she's not here. Too many voices for me to sort through." She nodded to herself as if she had figured something out. "You're a lot older than you look. Only way to explain all those voices." She cocked her head. "Also explains why so many of them are dead, the ones you listen to. I hear my husband. He's always asking the same thing. 'Got dinner on the stove?' Dead 23 years this past May and still asking where his dinner is. Shouldn't be surprised. That was all he was interested in when he was alive. I married him because he rarely had a thought in his head. He was restful for me that way." She gestured toward a spot next to the loveseat. "That's where his recliner was and where I'm sitting, the TV. Now that he's dead, it kind of gets on my nerves that 'Got dinner on the stove?' That's the problem with the dead, they say the same things over and over."
"So do some of the living," Helena reminded her.
"Eh," Esther lifted her shoulders in dismissal. "Comforting in some ways, I guess, to be listening to the dead like you do. They're always where you're looking for them." The dark gaze became shrewd, appraising, uncomfortably like Irene Frederic's, Helena thought. "Some of the voices don't really say anything, they're just screaming. Why do you listen to it, the screaming?"
"Because I caused it."
The door rattled open, and Helena heard Myka's quick, decisive stride. The familiarity of it made her smile in relief, although her smile faded when she saw Myka's glower. Myka gave her a jerk of her head to signal that they would talk about whatever it was that had infuriated her later. Much as she smoothed out the line of her blazer before she sat down next to Helena, Myka curved her lips slightly to ease her frown as she faced Esther. "What have you learned about Ellis?" She nudged Helena.
"Nothing yet, but we're getting to it," Helena said, directing her own dark gaze at Esther. It was bad enough that Esther had access to the horror show of her mind, she didn't want Myka to know about the screams of the men she had tortured; the recriminations that an eight-year-old Christina had never grown old enough to utter; the groaning collapse of her time machine; the sharp crack of the ground as it fissured under the trident.
"What do you hear when you go into Ellis, Esther?" Myka had picked up her glass, more Helena suspected because Myka wanted to give her hands something to do besides playing with her hair than because she wanted to drink the rest of her tea.
"A voice, not loud but persistent. How some sales people are, always at you. That's what it's like. It starts worming its way into your brain, and it's hard to think about anything else, though I can't really tell you what the voice says."
"Where does it come from?" Myka asked, her expression intent but abstracted, and Helena knew that she was recalling, in detail, the the images of the town she had seen in Major Lowry's office, ready to target the location if Esther could name it.
"Everywhere, nowhere. There's no one in the street with a megaphone, just people in their houses or the bank or the grocery store sitting around screens. Not that they can't get up for the necessities, you know, but then they wander back. I've tried to talk to the ones I know best, but they don't recognize me." Esther looked at the glasses Helena and Myka were holding. "More tea? Got some cookies, if you're peckish. I always have a couple this time of day."
Helena shook her head for both her and Myka. "Could you tell if people have tended to gather more in one place than another? Have you seen anything that would suggest some might be less affected, or more affected, than the rest?"
Calling out on her way to the kitchen, Esther said, "Ain't like it's church in Ellis. They're scattered all over the place. Like I said, they're at home or in the bank or stores. That voice - I bet it works quick if you're normal, kind of catches you where you are." There was a flurry of banging as she opened and closed cupboards. "If I didn't see that their eyes were open," she shouted, "I might think they were asleep. I don't hear anything from them. If it weren't so damn spooky, I'd go into Ellis more often. I rarely hear the quiet like that - it's nice, except for that voice." She came back into the living room, holding a napkin piled with cookies. Settling back in her armchair, she extended the cookies toward Myka and Helena. "Sure you don't want any? They're just Archway, but the molasses ones are pretty good."
"Thanks, no." Myka's glass was on the side table again, and her hand was lifting hair away from her neck. "Everyone seems fine, as if they're asleep but fine?"
"No one's died yet, if that's what you're asking," Esther said bluntly. "I suppose, though, if this goes on long enough, they'll get sick. They look like they're asleep, but they're not sleeping. Not eating much either, as far as I can tell." She had spread the napkin across her lap and pushed the cookies to one side. "You'll end up like them, if you're thinking of going into town." She broke a cookie into halves and used one of the pieces to point at Helena. "You'd last longer than her because you got more noise in your head, easier for you to shut the voice out. But even I'd end up like those poor souls if I stayed."
"How long would it take before that happened, do you think?" Myka asked. At Helena's alarmed look, she said, "I'm not going to ask Esther to do our jobs for us, I'm just trying to figure out how long we would have before we'd end up sitting in front of a screen."
Esther broke the half into quarters and popped one into her mouth. "I don't know, maybe a day, probably not much more than that."
Myka muttered, "And we might have, at most, a fraction of that."
"But I would have more time than you," Helena said, "because I'm 'noisier.'" She smiled in an effort to coax a smile from Myka.
But the thin line of Myka's mouth didn't relax. "We can discuss that later. We're not making any decisions right now." The worried crease between her eyebrows was only deepening, but she tried to say as reassuringly as she could to Esther, "We've been throwing a lot of questions at you, but the information you've given us has been invaluable. Helena, unless you have anything else?" Myka was rising from the loveseat.
Helena wasn't sure where to put down her glass. The side table was on the other side of the loveseat. She could be flummoxed by a momentary indecision about where to put an empty glass but unruffled by the thought that they had to retrieve an artefact whose effect everyone was defenseless against. Unless you happened to be an old woman who heard other people's 'voices.' "Has it grown any stronger, the voice, since you first heard it?"
Esther worked her mouth, the question something to chew, like the cookies. "Not that I can tell. But it's not gotten weaker either. Those other folks from the government, the CDC, I see 'em milling around in their special little suits in the gas station. The station's the first thing you see when you're coming into Ellis from the north. Looks like they stopped there and that was it for them."
"And here I was hoping the voice might have become a croak, didn't drink its honey tea or whatever singers do," Helena sighed. "Not that I believe Major Lowry can be persuaded to see reason, he's the Mount Rushmore of obdurateness, but if we -"
"You're not going to persuade anyone about anything if you tell them you got your information from a crazy old woman," Esther interrupted. Her napkin of cookies placed carefully on the seat of her chair, she was impatiently motioning to Helena to surrender her glass, her braid seeming to twitch in sympathetic irritation. "Give me that before you drop it."
"I wasn't going to drop it, I'm quite capable of taking it to the kitchen," Helena protested, but she gave the glass to Esther, who snorted in derision as she led them from the living room.
"I bet you're one of those types who'd let the house burn down while you solve a crossword puzzle," she growled.
"She's known for ruining skillets," Myka volunteered. "It's why Leena insisted we keep the fire extinguisher next to the stove, not under the sink." Her voice fell, and she paused just inside the kitchen. "She saw what she called auras. I think you hear something similar, Esther."
"And how did your friend deal with it?" Esther nudged a chair closer in to the kitchen table and smiled wearily at them. "Sometimes I didn't mind when they hospitalized me. The doctors kept everyone so drugged up that I found some peace. Sometimes."
"She baked when it. . . when we . . . got to be too much for her," Myka said softly. "She'd banish us from the kitchen for an afternoon, and she would bake cookies and brownies and all sorts of things. She would sing along to the radio and make a mess and not worry about any of us. It wasn't much, but it eased some of the stress."
"Not too good at baking. Can't bear any extra noise - that's why I got rid of the TV after my husband died. Phone, too. If people want to talk to me, they have to come see me, and that tends to discourage them." Esther slapped the back of the chair, as if it was as close as she could get to an affirmative gesture, and then opened the door for them.
"We may come out again, if we have more questions about Ellis." Myka briefly touched Esther's hand. "I'm sorry if we're a burden, but this really is -"
"I know," Esther interrupted. "Something's gotta be done about the town. Anyway, you're not the problem, it's this one whose mind is yammering." Esther presented Helena with a scowl that seemed entirely sincere. Helena gave her an apologetic look before she followed Myka out into the yard. The heat beat up through the soles of her sandals and the SUV, an overlarge charcoal briquet under the sun, promised an auto-da-fe on the return to Boise City.
A hand fumbled at her arm, and Esther was insisting somewhere between Helena's shoulder and ear, "Remember, it needs to be you that goes into Ellis. Your partner, she's one who likes order and for things to make sense, isn't she? The voice'll shut her down just like that." She snapped her fingers for emphasis. "You just gotta let it say whatever's it saying and keep your mind on your other voices. All of them. You'll need 'em." Esther merrily waved at Myka, who was staring at them over the hood of the SUV, acting as though she had wanted to do nothing more than say good-bye one more time or urge them to take some cookies for the road.
Myka waited until Esther had gone back into the house before she asked, "What was that about?"
"Just some travel advice from Glinda about staying on the yellow brick road," Helena said lightly.
The first few minutes in the SUV were excruciating, and Helena thought that, if the passenger door were to open right now, she would simply pour onto the highway. Rather like the character in the Star Trek show who turned into what looked like melted gold lame when he couldn't keep his form. Was that how Esther experienced all those voices? Hers, Myka's, neighbors', the troopers' at the barricades, a cacophony that would shatter her, make her a part of endless noise. Shunting the thought aside, she said, "Obviously we're not going to tell Major Lowry how we obtained the information, but if we can convince him that Ellis poses no immediate threat to a larger area -"
Myka cut in, the tension that had marked her earlier evident in the clipped voice, as if each word was a bullet she had to load into a gun. "It was Claudia who called earlier. We've inspired no confidence in Major Lowry. We don't have three days anymore, the DHS has cut it to two. Then the Guard can do whatever it thinks necessary."
Later that night when they were in the bed in Helena's room - her room being marginally cooler than Myka's - Myka curled into herself and radiating a heat that shouted "Don't touch me" while it more quietly spoke of an anger at an increasingly impossible artefact retrieval, Helena said, "Yes."
"Yes to what?"
"Your proposal."
"What proposal?" Helena couldn't see the furrow in Myka's forehead, but she could hear it in Myka's voice. The bed complained as Myka uncurled herself enough to turn over.
"The proposal implicit in your saying that you were trying to convince me that I had a life with you and your son. And my answer is yes."
"Esther was telling you not to let me go into Ellis, wasn't she?"
"Changing the subject doesn't make the proposal go away," Helena said admonishingly, falling silent when Myka turned over again and pulled Helena's arm around her waist, pressing herself against Helena's chest, hips, thighs. She was hot and sticky and Helena felt their skin adhere, but she squeezed Myka closer and kissed the curve of her shoulder. "I'm not trying to be a martyr."
"She said it herself, she's a crazy old woman. Maybe she made it all up, about going into Ellis." Myka's stubbornness was plaintive, the kind of stubbornness a child engages in when she fears most she'll be convinced she's wrong.
"She didn't. And you know she's right about which one of us has to go into Ellis to find the artefact."
"Because you're the more complicated of the two of us," Myka said jeeringly, but it wasn't much of a jeer, trailing off as she pressed her face into Helena's arm, giving it feverish little kisses.
"Because I'm older." Because I'm the more scarred. Because I know what madness feels like. Making her tone more playful, although it was hard work given Myka's mood and the sweaty suction of their bodies, Helena said, "You haven't said you didn't propose."
"There's no same-sex marriage in South Dakota, Helena."
"That's still not a denial. You proposed and you know it, Myka."
"You come out of Ellis with that artefact, and we'll talk about it."