She was sitting in Sheriff Paulsen's office, nibbling on a homemade caramel roll, when the door swung open, and Claudia rushed in, wearing the same linen pantsuit she had worn at Artie's retirement party. It looked about as rumpled as it had then, and she looked as harried, hair sticking out in back as though she had been pulling at it or nervously rubbing her head.
"You're eating? All hell has broken loose and you're eating." She looked on with disbelief as Helena pulled away a mailing-tape-sized strip of roll and carefully ate it down to her fingers, licking caramel frosting off her fingertips.
"Because I didn't eat anything before I saved the town that time forgot." Helena gestured toward the pan of rolls on the sheriff's desk. "You should have one, darling, you look in need of a sugar fix."
Muttering "I thought Myka was the adult," Claudia began pacing the floor. Her voice grew louder. "Assuming I can fix the mess you've made down here, the two of you are never going to work together again, not on a retrieval." She spun around, going to the doorway and looking down the hall. "I'm supposed to be meeting with Major Lowry now, but I was told that 'he would get to me when he has time' and sent away like a kid selling Girl Scout cookies." Frustrated, she exhaled a stream of air that was a cross between a comic book "pffft" and a raspberry.
"He's an utter arse, and my only regret about this assignment other than the heat, the dismal accommodations, and the fact that I nearly lost my mind, again," Helena said, grinding through the 'again,' "is that Myka didn't shoot him." As Claudia stared at her once more, Helena finished the roll and wiped her fingers on a napkin. "What's that line from Flannery O'Connor? He would've been a good man, if somebody had been there to shoot him every minute of his life." She paused. "That may not be an exact quote, but I think my meaning is clear."
Claudia slammed the door shut and faced her with a thunderous expression. "What is wrong with you? Myka's on the verge of being courtmartialed or found guilty of treason or whatever they do to you if you pull a gun on a major in the Air Force, and you're in here, the sheriff's office, for Christ's sake, saying she should have shot him." She grabbed at her head with both hands. "Just . . . just shut up."
Helena made a moue but kept silent. Claudia dug out a caramel roll from the pan, managing to sigh in appreciation after the first bite while trying to mortally wound Helena with the visual equivalent of ninja throwing stars. Feeling the heat and intent of Claudia's looks, if not actual pain, Helena was reminded of her infatuation with telekinesis and the experiments she had conducted with various artefacts purloined from the Warehouse. A narrowly avoided collision between Caturanga and a bank safe whizzing across her workshop had brought a swift end to her efforts. It had also resulted in the termination of her access to all "wish fulfillment" artefacts, the Warehouse agents having coined the term long before Freud was given credit for it.
"Is the artefact secure?" Claudia asked, perching on a corner of the desk, taking another bite and hungrily looking at the pan.
"Yes." Helena thought she was safest with a one word reply.
"Did you find who was using it? Do we know anything about them?" Claudia sounded no less angry with her, but Helena heard in her contented munching the possibility that someday, far off in the future, she might be forgiven. However, Helena knew that her response was only going to extend the time before Claudia would consider forgiveness an option.
"Yes, but -"
"But why the hell aren't you out there going through everything they own? You're not so old, H.G., that you've forgotten the drill. Bag the artefact and ensure there's nothing else that's hinky." Roll forgotten, Claudia slid off the desk and resumed her pacing. And her ninja throwing star glares.
"I could say that it was because I was virtually apprehended before I had a chance to, but I was . . . concerned about Myka." Helena found herself reluctant to tell Claudia about Esther, feeling oddly protective of her. "I needed to know that she was all right." Claudia finished a circuit and tried to impale her with another glare. "And I'm staying here, as close as I can get to her, until I'm sure there's going to be no Air National Guard version of a rendition," Helena finished, casually picking at her grimy pants with the holes at the knees as if they were tailored slacks she was ridding of fluff. For no more weight than she gave to her words, she might have been expressing a preference to stay that Claudia, by dint of persuasion - or authority, as the de facto agent in charge - would be able to change. But Claudia wasn't fooled, she stopped pacing and her expression became more wary than angry.
"H.G., we need to know everything we can about this guy." Almost gently she reminded her, "The job comes first."
"No, it doesn't," Helena said, "she does." She smiled sweetly but implacably at Claudia.
Claudia's wariness deepened, and she said with extreme care, as though the wrong word would have Helena lunging at her, fangs bared, "I don't want to have to pull rank on you, but I need you tossing his place to see if we can find anything linking him to the people behind the replicated artefacts. I need you to act like Myka's partner, not her girlfriend. You know that she would be telling you the same thing."
"But she's being interrogated yet again by Major Lowry, so she's not here to tell me the same thing. I don't trust him not to spirit her away somewhere off limits to us." Helena leaned over to pick out an especially gooey roll. "Sheriff Paulsen is keeping an eye on her for me, much to the major's chagrin." She bit into the roll, chuckling as she wiped a dab of frosting from her nose, but her eyes, when she raised them to Claudia's, were so blackly obdurate that Claudia looked away. "I'm not leaving until I can take Myka with me."
"It's not going to be that easy. I've been on the phone with the DHS all morning, with the secretary himself. Even if we're able to calm the governor down as well as the four-star general who runs the National Guard, the DHS is already pissed at us. Let me tell you just how bad it is." Claudia crossed her arms over her chest, adopting a defensive stance as if she were a teenager expecting to be grounded by her parents, one of whom just happened to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. "Remember how I said this replicated artefact investigation was on the q.t.? You were Emily Lake, the efficiency expert, and you were going to accompany Myka on a few quality assurance checks? That's how we were papering it over with the DHS until this morning, and they just blew through our paper, H.G. They know there was no previous retrieval in Boise City to do a quality assurance check on, so it's all why did you send Myka and the efficiency expert instead of 'real' field agents? That was the first question. Then the secretary's minions whisper in his ear again, and he asks me why Emily Lake's resumé doesn't check out. Either the companies she worked for don't exist or they've never heard of her. But the best part happens after more whispering in the secretary's ear, and he asks me who the hell Emily Lake is because she didn't exist until eleven years ago. The DHS is operating on all cylinders for once. That's how bad it is."
As Claudia had worried out loud, she had drifted over to Helena's chair, standing so near that her pant leg brushed against Helena's scraped knee. At first, Helena thought the burning sensation was her skin's response to the irritant of the linen, but it wasn't centered in her knee; it was all through her thigh. "Claudia, you don't happen to have an artefact in your possession, do you?" She tried to keep from touching the fragment of black glass, although she half-expected to see wisps of smoke floating up from her pocket.
"It's not like my broomstick has a back seat," Claudia said. "I thought we could use an extra pair of hands, maybe more, what with Myka getting arrested." The glare wasn't a ninja throwing star, but it was meant to be withering. "So I decided to expedite the travel of a couple of agents."
"Expedite how?" Helena felt the burning extend into her calves, her feet.
"It's a drawing pencil of one of the artists for The Flash. I think you can take it from there." Claudia restlessly returned to the door, opening it to look down the hallway.
The burning sensation hadn't subsided once Claudia walked away, and Helena started feeling it in her hips. "What's the side effect?" She stared at her roll, thinking the extra glaze of caramel frosting seemed to have a reddish sheen. It was nothing more than her imagination, but the gooey goodness of the frosting suddenly wasn't so appetizing. She threw the roll into the wastebasket. What she wanted was a tall glass of ice water.
"The most common is that you want to eat everything in sight - and I mean everything - for a few days, but, supposedly, there were some incidents of spontaneous combustion." Claudia flapped her jacket. "Speaking of spontaneous combustion, is it me or is it starting to feel warm in here?" She only grinned at Helena's alarm. "Didn't they ever tell you at 12 that caretakers are natural neutralizers. Don't sweat it." Her grin grew wider. "Really, H.G., don't sweat it."
But Helena was sweating, and not just from the heat flooding her abdomen. Quite possibly there would be no Myka to protect if she and Claudia remained in the same room, the same building. She needed to tell someone about the other object she had found, but not Myka, and after a swift encompassing glance at Claudia, which didn't miss the nervous pacing she had resumed, Helena concluded that it wouldn't be Claudia either. She knew whom she needed to tell, and she wouldn't be able to tell her if she kept sitting in this chair and letting the heat build.
"Do you promise that you'll stay here with Myka, that you won't surrender her to Major Lowry or anyone else?" Helena had risen, trying to loom over Claudia to the extent that her slight advantage in height permitted her.
"You're standing on tip-toe," Claudia said. "It's undercutting the whole 'I'm scary H.G., world destroyer' thing you're trying to work."
Helena sighed and rocked back onto her heels. "You haven't promised me," she said softly.
"No one's taking our girl anywhere," Claudia responded, no less softly and no less seriously. "Now go and do what you're best at."
Helena didn't think she meant rain mayhem and destruction, so that left being an agent, which, when she managed to put aside all the other interests that claimed her attention and put her mind to it, she sometimes thought more than justified Caturanga's faith in her. There was no one in the hallway to stop her and ask her where she was going, and the deputy and administrative assistant in the outer office lifted their heads and watched her pass by them with placid disinterest. Didn't they recognize that she was the other half of a team that, in the eyes of some, was most likely the perpetrator of the 'suspicious activities' in Ellis? Never mind the fact that she and Myka had been the ones to put an end to the scheme, the plot, the coup - whatever people wanted to call it - it was only further proof of their guilt.
And then the deputy was calling her back. Of course she wasn't going to be free to walk out of this place. They would lead her back to the sheriff's office, where she would sit with Claudia, and her fragment and Claudia's artefact would continue to interact until she, or Claudia, or the both of them combusted. At least it would satisfy those who expected their terrorism and anti-American malefactions to be straightforward, not strange, inexplicable influences that left people mute and transfixed in front of computer screens and TVs. It was all going to come to an end, she, finally, was going to come an end. Fine, fine. She had never wanted to live to be 148 . . . .
"You'll probably want these," the deputy said laconically, giving her a bag that contained her keys, phone, and wallet. "You'll find your SUV in the parking lot." He turned his back on her, unafraid that she could end his life with no more than than a key hanging from its fob, which she could, she wanted to shout at him, except that bragging about that particular skill wasn't only in bad taste it would probably result in her occupying the cell next to Myka's. He just took it for granted that she would walk out the doors and drive away. Which she did, because, despite Major Lowry's suspicions, her only interest in subversion was in ensuring that he and fools like him couldn't interfere with what she needed to do, and what she needed to do was to find out what it was she had in her pocket. She could be first things first. She would start with Gene Butler, as Claudia wanted her to do, and work backward from there.
As she pulled into the motel's lot, getting an address for Butler from Jacqui and trying to field an incoming call from Pete, she didn't notice until the SUV's tires bounced against the concrete block at the end of the parking space that two very young, very overdressed agents were standing outside her and Myka's rooms.
"Who are you?" Forgetting for the moment the phone clamped between her ear and shoulder, she bumped one of them aside, memorable only for the towering wave of black hair being held back, with copious amounts of sculpting gel, from breaking over his forehead.
"The same person I was a minute ago," Pete said. "What's going on with Myka? Before she blinked her eyes and disappeared, Claudia was shouting that Myka was in jail and that the Warehouse was going to end as we knew it and all sorts of end of the world stuff. And if you're going to be the voice of reason, then I know we're in trouble." The gentle poke at her was further blunted by his worried tone. "I've been calling the both of you for hours."
"Cabrera. Ernesto Cabrera. Ernie," the one she had bumped said nervously, still managing to block her path to the door.
"We'll get along better, Mr. Cabrera, if you don't stand in my way." She unlocked the door, hearing the wheeze of the air conditioning unit over Pete's reassurance in ear that she could rely on junior Agent Cabrera. "Ernie's okay. He's young, but he's solid." Then the worry crept back into his voice. "What's going on down there that Claudia had to send other agents? Is my son going to have to get used to seeing his mother in an orange jumpsuit?"
"I'll take the Janus Coin again before I see her in a jumpsuit. They should have been put to rest with Elvis. And orange is definitely not her color." Helena peered into the dimness, trying to survey the contents of the room. Nothing looked out of place, and her laptop was cabled to the bed frame. She had expected to see evidence that her room had been searched, if not men and women in fatigues carrying out her few belongings in evidence bags, then an open dresser drawer or the portrait of the mushrooms, no, cattle at the river crossing hanging askew or, better yet, flung to the floor. She motioned to Ernie to go a far corner, distractedly recording Pete's bellow, "Drew, your mom's going to be a felon," and turning around to narrowly miss colliding with the other agent, a woman who had the irrepressibly cheerful expression of the indulged youngest child of a sitcom family and the freckles and upturned nose to go with it.
"Megan Reeves," she said, holding out her hand.
Helena reluctantly shook it as she erupted into the phone, "Don't you dare tell him that. She's temporarily being held for questioning. I want to hear you tell him that, Pete." There was silence on the other end. "Now," she ground out, "or so help me God, I'll -"
Pete was laughing. "That's the only funny I've had all day. Thank you." Still laughing, he let himself wind down before he said, "Drew's not here, H.G. He's with one of his friends from soccer. In fact, I need to go get him in a few minutes." Finally sobering, he said, "Drew's going to be expecting Myka's call around 8:00, 8:30 tonight. Will she be making that call?"
"Yes," Helena said curtly, pressing the receiver icon and feeling a spurt of satisfaction at seeing it change from green to red and from up to down. She would have enjoyed cutting him off more had she been able to slam the receiver in its cradle as she had seen happen in old movies and TV shows. She didn't miss much about the nineteenth century, but life back then had been tactile in a way that life in this new one wasn't, sometimes repulsively, sometimes delightfully so . . . .
Agents Cabrera and Reeves stood uncertainly in the corner where they had been relegated, and she impatiently waved them out. "You're going to die of heat stroke before the day is done, and then what bloody use will you be to me?" She tried to soften her bark with a smile. "We'll be searching a house. You've at least done that before, haven't you?" At their nods, she said, "Who told you Warehouse agents wear suits on the job? Claudia?" Another series of nods. "Change out of them and meet me back here in ten."
In fifteen they were all in the SUV and on the highway to Ennis, Ernie at the wheel. After her shower, she had looked for her keys only to have Ernie, more sensibly dressed in cargo shorts and a polo, dangle them in front of her, saying with a wiseass grin, "Claudia gave us five rules for dealing with you. One is never to let you drive."
"What are the other four?" She shifted against her seat belt, so she could see both Ernie and Megan, who was in the back seat.
"Another is to keep you guessing for as long as we can." Megan tried out her own version of a wiseass grin, but on her, it managed just to look sweet - and endearing.
Gene Butler lived in an unprepossessing ranch house on a county lane off the highway less than a mile from Boise City. Wincingly stepping down from the SUV, the occasional brushing against her knees of the other tropic-weight pants she had packed surprisingly painful, Helena smiled to herself as she saw Ernie and Megan carefully approach the front door, guns drawn. Ernie pounded on the door, and a dog howled from within.
"I'm fairly certain the dog is unarmed," Helena said as she joined them. She tried the knob; the door was unlocked. For a law enforcement fan, Butler was strangely trusting of his neighbors. She had no sooner pushed it open than Ernie and Megan rushed in ahead of her, guns up and extended as they fanned the room. The dog, a beagle happy to see them, whined and snuffled at Megan's legs. "Put the guns down," Helena said, "no one's here. If you don't believe me, take the dog's word for it." As Ernie and Megan holstered their weapons, Helena walked farther into the living room. The furniture was old but in good repair, though the floral pattern of the upholstery didn't seem to match with the preferences of a middle-aged man. Helena suspected that Butler had inherited the furniture, if not the home itself, from his mother. He was a middle-aged bachelor who had lived with his mother, and she flashed back to the election posters she had seen in the Ellis school, Butler with a cowboy hat, promising to bring back law and order "the way it used to be." It was going to be hard to see past the stereotype. She thumbed her phone's screen and called Jacqui, who was researching whether there were any connections between Butler and the legislator who had owned Aimee Semple McPherson's bible.
"I'm still running his name against those of the other legislators, nothing's kicked out so far on the bible owner," Jacqui tiredly sing-songed. "Give me some time, H.G."
Helena was about to respond when she felt Megan's hand on her arm. "You should come back to his bedroom," Megan said, looking down and smiling, cheerfully, at the beagle, still whining, still snuffling at her feet. "He looks pretty well fed for a puppy left on his own for a week."
"Better check the kitchen for what's left of Mother Butler," Helena said dryly, tucking the phone into her shoulder bag.
Megan grimaced, casting an anxious look, which didn't rest well on her features, toward the back of the house. Helena left her to find Ernie in one of the bedrooms, which were off a narrow hallway from the living room. He was powering on a computer, which shared space on a drop-leaf table with a printer. The table was set against the one area of the wall that wasn't covered with movie posters and old black and white stills of Westerns. The other walls of the room were similarly papered with posters and shelves held lunchboxes and games featuring the names and characters of television Westerns. Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, My Darling Clementine, Gunsmoke, Bonanza. Helena made a circuit of the room, noticing that many of the posters and stills featured John Wayne. On the nightstand next to the twin bed were stacks of paperback Westerns. A cowboy hat hung from a bedpost.
"It's slow," Ernie said, frowning at the monitor.
"Turn it off. We'll take the CPU and work on it at the Warehouse." Helena opened the drawers of the nightstand and then the dresser. Nothing of interest. She hadn't found a phone on Butler, and she didn't see one here. Perhaps he had left it in his car, which was parked somewhere in Ellis more than likely. She wasn't venturing there again unless she knew she wouldn't be given another unasked-for courtesy ride to the sheriff's office. A cursory check of the closet revealed nothing of interest either.
With Ernie clutching the CPU to his chest, she quickly searched the other bedroom. It looked like it had been undisturbed for years, if the dust on the bureau was any indication. The bed was old-fashioned, the mattress and box springs set in a heavy, dark frame. The bedspread was patterned with roses as were the curtains at the windows. There would be nothing of Gene's in this room. When they returned to the living room, Megan was sitting on the couch, the beagle sitting next to her.
"Dillon had chewed opened a bag of dog food," Megan said, petting him. "There's a little doggie door cut into the back door so he can -"
"Yes, I think we understand," Helena said dismissively. "I know that you and, Dillon is it, have become fast friends, but we can alert the county's animal control -"
"Where they'll put him down in a couple of weeks when no one claims him. Mr. Butler's not going to be able to claim him, is he?" Helena only looked at her impassively. "There's no one here to take care of him. There's a dog carrier on the back porch, it's how I learned his name."
"How is a beagle an asset in this investigation?" Helena shouted at Megan's back as she hurried to the kitchen.
Ernie gave her another wiseass grin. "You're a soft touch. That was rule number five."
When they came to a stop at the intersection with the highway, Dillon barking from the cargo area and Megan trying ineffectually to shush him, Ernie began to turn left to go back to Boise City, until Helena clamped her hand on his arm. "We have somewhere else to go first." She directed him to the turnoff to Esther's farm, and while he frowned at her uncertainly, he obediently drove the SUV down the narrow road. The house looked no less unoccupied than Gene Butler's, and Helena heard Ernie mutter under his breath, "No one's home," but he had no sooner said it than Esther came out onto the front porch, shading her eyes as the SUV entered her driveway. She held the neutralizing bag at her side.
"Wait a minute," Ernie said, eyebrows arching, "she's an agent, too?" He let the SUV roll to a gentle stop, and he stared at Helena in disbelief.
"Honorary." Helena looked at Ernie and Megan in turn. "I won't be long." Feeling that she was addressing them as she might the beagle, whose barking had decrescendoed into anxious whines, she said, "Be good and . . . keep your mind clear."
Esther's hair, in its customary long braid, was dark in places, as though she had recently showered. The black eyes were intent and faintly amused, showing no traces of the cloudiness that Helena had seen when they were trying to retrieve the artefact. She looked past Helena toward the SUV.
"New friends?"
"No, new agents."
Esther craned her head a little, as if she were trying to peer into the SUV's cargo area. "Got a dog back there, don't you? Gene Butler has a dog. I imagine there's no one to look after it." Her gaze held no judgment, only a mild curiosity.
"I didn't know your talent included hearing the voices in a dog's head," Helena said dryly.
"They don't, but I can hear the ones in the agent who wanted to take it. She's still half-afraid you're going to make her give it up." Esther glanced at the neutralizer bag. "He's in the hospital, in a coma." She looked back up at Helena, smiling slightly. "Mrs. Warner down the road told me that. I didn't 'see' it." The smile disappeared. "He's not going to come out of it, is he? But I expect you knew that already. That's why you weren't in any rush to get him help." She handed Helena the bag. "What happened in Ellis, it's happened elsewhere." Helena didn't answer her. "It's been interesting meeting you but can't say I'll be sorry when you go. You're upsetting my quiet."
Helena shifted the bag to her other hand, the one that wouldn't brush against the pants pocket that held the fragment of black glass. A useless precaution, more likely than not. The shadows starting to creep across the yard signaled that it was late afternoon, about the time of day for Esther to eat her cookies, if she hadn't already. Helena wondered which it would be, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip, peanut butter. After she had moved out of Nate's, she had developed routines. When Christina had been alive, she had reluctantly followed a schedule, and those few short months with Adelaide, she had done so as well, but she had never liked repeating the same thing over and over. Not without a change in the variables, not without the hope that this time it would be different. But after the misadventure of 13 and the disaster with Nate and Adelaide, she hadn't wanted to change variables and she hadn't expected anything to be different. No matter where she lived, no matter how else she spent her time, no matter with whom she spent some of that time, the routines never varied. They were small and private, she shared them with no one. Every day she would picture Adelaide and apologize to her, every day she would tell herself that 13, and by that she had always meant Myka, was better off without her. At least once a week, she would sit in a coffee shop or café - the city was unimportant - and savor a cup of Earl Grey. It didn't matter how strong or weak it was; the tea she was drinking was not the one she was remembering, which was the tea she had every morning when Christina would chatter through her breakfast rather than eat it. Once a year she would pick up an H.G. Wells novel and read a few pages in it, less to remember the writing than to hear Charles' voice in the words. In the end, she couldn't say what purpose Esther's routines held for her, but her own, they hadn't been about security, they had been the boundary markers of her isolation, her self-imposed quarantine; they had been what gave her loneliness shape and helped convince her that it was a life. Adelaide still came to mind frequently but the impulse to apologize to her had lessened, and Helena hadn't thought Myka was better off without her since she had seen her in her black dress the day of Artie's retirement party. She remembered Christina more powerfully when she was with Drew than she ever had drinking Earl Grey and conjuring up a breakfast from a 120 years ago. And as for reading one of her own books, the next time she did that, she would do it with Drew and Myka.
"If the quiet ever gets lonely, you might try where I live," she said casually to Esther. "We're an odd bunch, misfits the lot of us, but then we know how to appreciate the unusual, what doesn't fit in."
"It sounds like you're offering me a job." Esther chuckled and shook her head. "Never thought I was the employable sort."
"Not that we couldn't find a use for you, but I was thinking more along the lines of a haven." The word was out before Helena could stop it, before she knew it was a word she should stop herself from saying, but it had never occurred to her that she might use "haven" to describe the Warehouse since a haven was the last thing she had found in it. She had meant the people associated with the Warehouse, Myka, Pete, Claudia, Steve. A simple mistake, an elision in her thinking, that was all.
Esther was regarding her with that shrewdly knowing look that reminded her of Irene. Perhaps the one anomaly the Warehouse couldn't absorb was the presence of two Mrs. Frederics. "I've finally got things where I like 'em here. Took me awhile, but I'm content where I am. Appreciate the offer though."
She was silent long enough that Helena thought Esther might simply be waiting for her to leave, but as she was wondering how best to acknowledge the debt she owed Esther, made all the more impossible to repay since the woman had risked her own life to save hers, Esther said musingly, "Hard to believe Gene stumbled onto something that could shut down a whole town." The tone was casual, but the eyes bore into Helena's. "Always kind of a sad sack, you know? Worked as a sheriff's deputy a month or two, but they had to let him go. Lost his gun trying to break up a bar fight, shot himself in the foot, literally I'm telling you, another time. He kinda went from job to job, nice enough but if there was a banana peel somewhere, he'd be the one slipping on it. That's why his running for sheriff year after year became such a joke. Even outside the county people made jokes about it. One year a station in Oklahoma City sent a reporter up here to cover the election. They interviewed him at his 'headquarters,' which was the diner in Boise City, and tried to hunt up a few supporters. They were making fun of him, but he didn't seem to notice."
"Sounds like he's someone people could take advantage of," Helena said, making an equal show of idle speculation. How did someone who couldn't hold down a job and lived in his parents' home afford a replicated artefact? How would he have found out about them? Or, to rephrase the question, how did he come to the attention of those behind the replicated artefacts? She turned her head, from left to right, as if leisurely taking in a panoramic view of Esther's driveway, the SUV, the road, and, beyond, the unending sweep of pasture and tilled fields. There was nothing to suggest that the four of them - and the beagle - weren't the only inhabitants for as far as she could see. As desolate as the moon but lacking the moon's star quality. People wanted to go to the moon, no one wanted to go to the panhandle. Hard to find a better place to test an artefact, especially one that was paired with something special, an accelerator or amplifier. If the experiment went poorly, the collateral damage would be minimal, relatively speaking. All you needed was just the right trigger, one that could be absorbed by the reaction without anyone noticing or, more accurately, caring.
"You need to go now," Esther said, giving her a gentle push. "Your mind's getting busy, and it's been a tiring day for me." She opened the screen door but didn't immediately go in. "If you and the other agent make it down this way again, look me up. I like her, and she settles your mind some. Makes you tolerable."
Esther's grin was wide and teasing, but Helena answered her more seriously than the jab merited. "Yes, she does."
"Then hang onto her." The door banged shut, and Helena caught a glimpse of Esther's white braid swinging behind her before she lost sight of that, too.
Jacqui didn't pick up until Helena called her the third time. "Hey, sorry, but Travis called in with an emergency request, and I had to deal with that first. So -"
"The connection isn't between Butler and one of the legislators," Helena said rapidly. "It's between the legislator who first took the bible and Congressman Jaffee, or possibly Perkins."
"Hold on," Jacqui said. "I'm not following you."
Of course she wasn't. No one was ever able to ride her runaway trains except Myka, Helena thought moodily. Sometimes Claudia, if the train was hauling equations and theories designed to upend the laws of physics. "The Warehouse team that retrieved the bible, they swapped it for another one. But what if that had been done before, to replicate it? And then put back without the legislator who owned it any the wiser. Maybe it was done during a holiday recess. First, you'll need to find out - "
"I can take it from here," Jacqui interrupted her. "But, Helena," she added sternly, "you know this is going to take longer, right? Don't start bouncing off the walls if you don't hear from me when you think you should. Even though Jaffee and Perkins don't represent Oklahoma, they're still national politicians. More than one legislator may have a connection to them or possibly multiple connections. It will take time to get you the information you want."
"It always takes time," Helena muttered irritably and then regretted her pettishness. "I know I'm asking a lot of you."
"We both want Myka home," Jacqui sighed.
The call over, Helena stared at the farmhouse for a few moments before asking Ernie to unlock the cargo area. She put the neutralizing bag by the beagle's carrier, which occasioned a cacophony of barks and yips. Perhaps by some alchemy the bag could be made to swallow Dillon. As she buckled herself into the passenger seat, Helena said, "I suppose another one of the rules is 'Remind her to be patient. Not everyone is Myka or Claudia.'"
Megan was half-over the backseat, trying to soothe Dillon's fretting. She twisted her head over her shoulder and, with the beaming smile teachers adopted when awarding gold stars (a silly practice but one, Helena had learned living with Adelaide, a gold star Olympian, that remained a staple of elementary education), she assured Helena, "You're 100% right."
Helena convinced Ernie and Megan to try the diner, although they were ready to drive the hour to Guymon to have dinner "somewhere recognizable." Suspecting she was overselling, Helena nevertheless made much of the daily specials, which today, if she was correctly deciphering the scrawl on the diner's chalkboard, was fried catfish and hush puppies. The interior was rather redolent of cornbread and fish, she had to admit. So far she had avoided eating fish sporting whiskers, but today . . . today seemed the perfect day for fish with whiskers. Though Ernie and Megan were wrinkling their noses, Helena decided to attribute it . . . to nothing. She was tired, and she didn't want to go to Guymon to sit in a Pizza Hut. If they wanted "lite" fare, there was the house salad, which came accompanied with a package of saltines.
Helena's appearance with two new agents raised little more excitement than the usual spectrum of wary-to-suspicious glances. Occasionally she caught the words "Ellis" and "government" and "screw-up" in the conversations around them, and she thought there could be no Mad Libs version of them that wouldn't make sense. At one point, she caught Ernie viewing her with a certain kind of calculating gaze that she hadn't lived to be 148 without knowing what it meant. When Megan excused herself to go to the restroom, Helena leaned over her partially eaten special (the hush puppies were shaped like mini cannon balls and weighed about the same) and murmured, "You're never going to get a chance to find out."
Ernie flushed, but he tried to brazen it out. "I was just wondering what it would be like to tap 150 years' worth of history, you know. I'm sitting across from someone who may have met Queen Victoria."
"She never knew the Warehouse existed, but I had the dubious honor of fending off Prince Edward's advances. He never got to 'tap my knowledge' either."
"At least I'm in good company," he said, unrepentant.
After Megan secured a doggie bag for the dog, they walked back to the motel. Helena lingered in front of the county building, tempted to go in and browbeat, or sweet talk, her way to whatever room Myka was in, although the building had the somnolent air of businesses closed for the night. If the law didn't sleep in other places, it couldn't sleep in Boise City, but Helena suspected it often pretended it was reading, surveilling would be more accurate, its eyes closed. The anxious thought crossed her mind that Myka might have been removed, transferred to Oklahoma City or elsewhere despite Claudia's efforts to keep her under the Warehouse's protection, oxymoron that it was. If Claudia didn't have the support of Homeland Security then all she would have would be her own futile, and profane, protests, the kind that Artie would raise whenever the regents acted without consulting him.
Helena had hoped that Myka might be in their rooms, waiting for her, but the only thing that greeted her was the odor of old bedcovers and carpet that hadn't (ever) been shampooed. Ernie and Megan went to their rooms, in the short arm of the motel's L, and Helena restless flopped onto the bed. There were certain records she needed to review, cross references she needed to make, suspicions she needed to confirm, but she wanted to use her own computer, with its Claudia-proof encryption, not the government-issued laptop she had had to bring with her from Kenosha. She dug out the fragment of black glass and put it on the nightstand. She needed to deal with it as well. But not tonight.
Her worries about Myka and the trips to Butler's home and Esther's farmhouse had kept the voices that the artefact had stirred at bay. But in the silence of the room, she could hear them, Christina's, Charles', Caturanga's, and those of all the other victims of her obsessions or, as equally, her indifference. What had Charles accused her of being? A sun that couldn't allow another star to shine? She could do him one better. A sun so mesmerized by its own radiance that it was unaware that other stars could shine.
Something scraped outside the door, and she raced to fling it open, crying loudly, gratefully, "Myka." But they weren't Myka. Ernie held out a six pack of Miller and Megan a deck of cards. Megan's cheerfulness wasn't so much dimmed as modulated by a note in her voice that suggested she was far wiser than the sitcom kid sister she resembled. "The other thing Claudia told us? 'She'll never admit it, but she doesn't like to be alone at night.'"
Helena was on her third beer, perhaps her fourth, and their umpteenth game of hearts. Megan didn't like beer, and Ernie tended to nurse his as though he had only a couple of dollars to stretch over the course of the night. He didn't have to be so careful; they weren't actually babysitting her. But planting her hand on the mattress to steady herself as she viewed her cards, she had to admit that that's exactly what it looked like. If Ernie had any hopes of putting her to bed, however, he would find out that, unsteady or no, she still had a wicked left hook.
When the door opened, she didn't notice it, busy ordering the suits in her hand. She looked up only when she felt an inrush of heat, and she saw Myka leaning against the doorjamb, a tired smile on her face. "She's got you on the bed, but everyone's still wearing clothes. This can't be an H.G. Wells' card party."
Helena knew her answering smile was more woozy than seductive. "That's because I was waiting on you, darling."
"And that's our cue," Megan said hastily, leaning over to find her shoes, while Ernie gracelessly slid to the end of the bed, dragging the bedspread and cards with him.
Once they had gone, Helena reached over to deposit her bottle of beer with the others on the nightstand and then patted a spot on the mattress next to her. "Come tell me every horrible Major Lowryish detail."
"That's going to have to wait," Myka said, crossing the room to the connecting door, leaning down to kiss the top of Helena's head on the way. "There's a patrol car outside that's going to take Claudia and me to Oklahoma City. An escort, they call it. That's one way of putting it, I guess." Thumps and the rattle of hangers started coming from the other room. "Bright and early tomorrow, I'm to apologize to the governor and a representative of the Air National Guard. An explanation of the situation, they call it. And then onto Washington for a meeting with the DHS. I've been told that my responsibilities are going to be 'reevaluated.'"
Helena, with more flailing that she felt three, perhaps four, beers should be causing, pushed herself off the bed and entered the other room, standing uncertainly in front of the doorway. Myka was throwing clothes and toiletries with unMyka-like carelessness into her suitcase. "They won't fire you. They don't dare."
"The regents can't unilaterally call the shots anymore, and that's assuming they aren't as angry as the DHS. It's been a huge embarrassment, and one thing you learn working for bureaucracies, they hate being embarrassed." She tossed her make-up bag and a sleep shirt she had never worn into the suitcase and zipped it, yanking it off the bed. Walking over to Helena, her expression softened, and she lightly touched the side of Helena's face. "Don't look so troubled. It's not the end of the world if they fire me."
"You remember who I am, don't you?" Helena demanded. "I know all about what it takes to end the world, and though I haven't reached that level of outrage, I'm thoroughly displeased." Hoping her look was fierce but not so fierce as to make Myka fear that she would begin searching for the Minoan trident before long, Helena repeated, "Thoroughly displeased with the American tendency to draw conclusions before you have all the answers."
Myka bent her head, kissing Helena at the corner of her jaw. "Because you, of course, never do anything like that."
"When I do," Helena said, arching her neck and pressing Myka's head closer in, "it's called genius." She felt Myka's laugh as a hum against her skin and enjoyed the shiver of it. They could almost be laughing together, at the idiocy of cabinet secretaries and four-star generals and regents (why not throw them in for good measure?). But she said with utter seriousness, "You don't need any of it. I have enough money to support us for several lifetimes, and we certainly don't have to remain in South Dakota. We can go anywhere, the three of us." As Myka leaned away from her, frowning in disbelief, Helena said falteringly, "We'll fly Pete in for his paternal visits. As many times as he wants." Myka's frown deepened. "All right, we'll take Pete with us, although he's living in a home of his own -"
Myka leaned in again, silencing the rush of her speech with a kiss. It was a shushing kiss and a consoling one, sweet and unyielding at the same time. "We're not going anywhere, Helena, no matter what happens with the DHS. That's our home. I mean, I want it to be our home. You told me you came back because you had nowhere else to go. So stop running. We'll deal with whatever the DHS throws at us."
"Of course we will," Helena said with a hint of exasperation. "I wasn't suggesting that we run away, I was suggesting that we might bear our disappointments in a more attractive locale."
"South Dakota has its flaws," Myka wryly conceded, "but it's grown on me."
"Ow," Helena said indignantly. "The metaphor was heavy, by the way, and I think it raised a few lumps on my head."
Myka laughed under her breath, giving Helena another kiss, one that was completely sweet and promised much yielding at a future date. She broke the kiss to fumble in a pocket of her jeans for a key ring, which she pressed into Helena's hand. "If you could do a couple loads of laundry, that would be great. And if you have the time, we need the staples - bread, milk, ice cream, cereal, coffee. Take Drew with you, he loves going to the grocery store."
Helena stared down at the house keys. "Is Pete going on a retrieval? Are you expecting enhanced interrogation methods at the hands of Homeland Security?"
Myka grabbed the suitcase, towing it behind her as she headed for the door. "Yes and possibly." Her smile was casual, but Helena felt Myka's searching gaze asking her the question for which she could never find the answer. "But there are two things you need to do first when you get back tomorrow. You need to call Drew, because while he was wildly excited that I was calling him from the back of a police cruiser, he was disappointed that he had to go to bed before he could talk to you." She hesitated and then said quietly, "And you need to move out of the apartment."
"Because Homeland Security is going to fire me as well?" Helena asked sardonically.
Myka shook her head, but her eyes never left Helena's. "Because you're moving in with me and Drew. You said I asked, so there's your ring. For now." She shrugged, embarrassed. "Not very romantic, I know. But you made me wait for over 12 years, and I'm tired of waiting. Plus. . . . " Now she did look away. "I'm afraid of what will happen if we keep dragging this out. I don't have that many more Warehouse explosions or Ellises in me. Will you stay, Helena?"
So that had been the question all along, and Helena finally knew the answer.
….
Helena insisted on driving the SUV to Denver. Ernie and Megan looked at each other and Dillon woofed uncertainly in his carrier, but no one tried to take the keys from her. A large container of something that one of the diner's waitresses had said was coffee was in a cup holder in the console. With several injections of caffeine and a foot unrelentingly holding the accelerator to the floor, she might make it back to Rapid City before midnight. She wasn't flying out of Denver with Ernie and Megan, she had other plans.
She didn't bother to keep an eye on the speedometer, and Ernie, after the SUV almost took flight when it hit a dip in the road, kept his attention fixed firmly on his phone. Megan passed the time by talking to Dillon, telling him stories of her unsurprisingly idyllic childhood and assuring him that, assuming they made it to Denver in one piece, he would love the B&B and its campus.
"How do you know that Claudia will let you keep the dog?" Helena asked after observing Megan cooing to the dog, who, this morning, had his carrier next to her on the back seat.
"She's said more than once that she misses Trailer."
"I think that's her way of saying she misses Artie."
Megan shrugged. "We always had dogs when I was growing up, and it's nice having someone to come back to. They're more dependable than men, and, really, they're not that much messier." Ernie twitched in a manner that might have been a prelude to an objection but he kept silent, perhaps believing that the Nike swoop of his hair, groomed and styled to perfection, was objection enough about men being messy.
With the help of the SUV's GPS and much hollering from both Ernie and Megan, Helena made it to the passenger drop-off at the Denver airport, roaring away from the curb after Dillon's carrier cleared the car door. Airport security whistled and one guard jogged toward a car as though he might give her chase, but Helena bumped and squealed her way onto the expressway, determined to stop at the first dealership she saw. It happened to be a luxury car dealership, but money wasn't a concern, the salesman's ability to provide what she wanted on immediate notice was. The only SUV available was a custom-ordered claret-colored Land Rover that the owner had returned after having it for only a few days. Helena walked around it once and listened with boredom as the salesman described its many features, but she took a great deal of interest in the back seat, wriggling and stretching out her legs, finally pronouncing it roomy enough. She bought it without any further investigation or a test drive and left the SUV for pick-up by the rental agency. On her way out of Denver, she stopped at a discount supercenter that sold everything from groceries to tires and bought more coffee, a couple of boxes of snack cakes, and a shovel. She would take the SUV for the only test drive she cared about later, once Myka returned from Washington, and there would be snack cakes in the glove box.
In Wyoming, she turned onto a county highway and drove for several miles until all she could see was empty prairie. She parked on the side of the road and, carrying the shovel with her, she dug a hole in the earth and placed the fragment of black glass, secured once more in its special box, deep within it. She felt a pulse, a tug toward it as she buried it, and she was confident that she could find it should she need to.