A/N: I tried to bring some of the strings of the plot together since we're nearing the end of the fic - yes, really. There'll be a chapter of fluff after this, then a couple of grim chapters, then an ending chapter of fluff. For those interested, many, many chapters ago, I mentioned in an A/N that I was thinking of a sequel to Reset; well, that sequel's going to become a completely different season 5 fix-it that I'll start up about the time I end this one. Maybe a little before, if I get inspired.
She snapped out the pair of cargo shorts she pulled from the dryer, giving them a once-over before folding and placing them on top of the stack of Drew's shorts. They looked clean despite the assortment of stains they had collected in the short time he had worn them: grass stains from wrestling with Shep in the backyard, dirt and splinters of wood from climbing over and around and down the tree house, pink splotches from failing to eat all around a strawberry ice cream cone, and a few whose origin she hadn't wanted to determine. Viewing the baskets of freshly laundered sheets, Drew's clothes, and Myka's underwear (which she had given a keenly appreciative appraisal), she noted that the baskets holding Drew's clothes outnumbered the others by two to one. She was less struck by how laundry was now a minor investment of time and effort than by the housefly-like lifespan of children's clothing. There was no magic in the transition from the witches' cauldrons of her childhood and adulthood, with their boiling water and ill-smelling cleaning compounds, to automatic washers and dryers, just the usual human desire to turn a profit from making a process more efficient. There was magic in how an item of clothing that fit a child one day was too short or too tight for him the next. Drew wouldn't be able to wear most of these shorts next summer, and some of the t-shirts and polo shirts that he continued to wear were already too small. In a few years' time, he would look at a pair of shorts this size and wonder how he had managed to pull them up his legs.
She ran her hand over the material, thinking that as Drew grew bigger and the boy clothes became smaller, she was beginning to approach the age - was the age- when she would become smaller and her clothes larger. As her bones and muscle lost mass, she would shrink and, even without a dowager's hump (were she to be so lucky), she would still resemble a turtle, the sagging necklines of blouses and sweaters a carapace from which her thin neck and rounded shoulders would emerge. That was a depressing image and not one to dwell on when Myka's panties, bikinis to be specific, were nearby.
The door above her banged and then Drew was thundering down the steps. The cargo shorts he had put on this morning had been clean until he stuffed himself with the powdered donuts he had persuaded her to buy at the grocery store yesterday. "Colton's mom wants to take us to the pool. Can I go?"
Silently she held out her hand for the phone he was clutching to his chest and confirmed with Colton's mother that such an outing was indeed planned and that she would be watching over the boys. When she gave the phone back to Drew, he complained, "It was just like I said."
"Of that I was reasonably sure, but I've no intention of entrusting your care solely to a 16-year-old lifeguard daydreaming about the YouTube video of him rescuing a child."
"Huh?"
"That means I want an adult with you at all times."
He wagged his head in disgust. "You're worse than my mom sometimes."
"I take that as a compliment." As he climbed the stairs, she called after him, "Make sure you have sunscreen on before you get into the pool."
He bent over the handrail to look at her. "When does my mom get home?"
"Not for another couple of days." She put the pile of folded shorts into one of the baskets filled with his clothes. "You know, I'm not leaving when she returns. That's the new deal, and you agreed to it." She locked eyes with him until their mouths began to twitch, threatening grins. "Go get ready," she said softly.
"Tonight you're going to sleep in the treehouse with me, you promised," he shouted, slamming the door behind him.
A few days before, when Helena had stopped at Pete's apartment to pick Drew up, two bulging suitcases behind her, she had questioned Myka's wisdom in suggesting that she move in, although, since Myka hadn't suggested so much as told her that she was moving in, she was really only obeying orders. She couldn't be blamed for being swept up in Myka's uncharacteristic rashness. She and her suitcases, the one that was especially bulging attesting to her fondness for shoes, which was only a natural overreaction for one accustomed to nineteenth century footwear and its limitations - after all, there was only so much even the most talented shoemaker could do with the basic boot - they were there at Myka's behest. If she were to be no more highly regarded than the live-in boyfriend of Colton's mother, whose usefulness outside certain not-to-be-explored, grown-up contexts was decried by a universe of eight-year-old boys, it wasn't her fault.
But when Drew opened the door and his eyes fell on the suitcases, he said only, "Dad bet you'd have a lot more stuff." Then the suitcases and the changes to his life they heralded dispatched, he raced to his room, Shep lunging after him.
Pete was leaning against the breakfast bar, his elbows propping him up, a coffee cup between his hands. "I do have a lot more 'stuff,'" she said, "in New York. But we'll have to sort that out later." Helena gave him an embarrassed smile, feeling defensive and guilty at the same time. Yes, the fact that she was shagging his ex-wife was now being made official - and permanent - but he didn't have to look so . . . normal . . . about it.
"Hey," he said, spreading his arms like wings and slopping coffee over the rim of his cup in the process, "why are you the one who's looking like you're not okay about this?"
"It's sudden. For him." She tilted her head toward Drew's room.
"Yeah, but he's a Warehouse kid." Pete sucked at his coffee, and Helena almost winced at the sound of it. There weren't many things she would ever readily volunteer about Pete Lattimer, but one of them was that he wasn't passive-aggressive. The slurping was a sign only of his atrocious table manners. "He's used to his mom and dad leaving him at a moment's notice, never really telling him what they're up to. He may not know what we do, but he knows what it means. Expect the unexpected." He flashed Helena an evil grin. "Plus, he thinks he's getting a new bedroom out of it."
With a series of thumps, Drew emerged from his bedroom, leaning into an invisible harness and dragging a large sports bag behind him. Pete put his coffee cup down and jogged over to his son to take the bag from him. Below the gray t-shirt bearing the Nike swoop was a pair of Spiderman pajama bottoms. Half of him literally was a man, and half a child. Hefting the bag over his shoulder, he led them out of the apartment, Helena bringing up the rear with her wayward rolling, oft-colliding suitcases. When she pointed to the Land Rover in the parking lot, he whistled.
"Nice, but what are you doing buying a housewarming gift for yourself?"
"It's for all of us," she said primly, banishing thoughts of snack cakes and licking the cream off Myka's mouth. "There's plenty of room for Drew and his friends -"
"And the dog." Pete flashed her another evil grin. Shep was on his back paws and clawing at a side door. Helena shuddered at what he would do to the leather seats. Pete stowed the bag and the suitcases in the Rover's cargo area, and once he had finished, he turned a face toward her in which amusement couldn't quite hide the wistfulness. "Are you sure you're ready for this? Myka and the Drewster act all nice and polite, but they're kind of trying to live with, you know? She's always referencing some internal manual, and he's eight; half the time he'll forget to flip the toilet seat up, and the other half, he's bringing all sorts of crap into the house, treasures that he's discovered in the yard, Shep's old toys, baby birds that have fallen out of their nests. There's not a whole lot of 'endless wonder' to it."
"They'll have to accept my vagaries as well - calisthenics in the nude, house music blasting in the background . . . . I'm not going to cut and run, Pete." She wanted to thumb away the worry lines in his forehead.
He laughed, the humor genuine. "Like she would let you now that she's got you. You're hers if you don't know that already." The laugher trailing off, he said, "You don't have to make her happy, H.G. You just need to be you - that's all she's ever wanted."
Yes, one of Myka's few lapses in judgment, Helena thought wryly. Unworthy, she would always be that, but the realization didn't crush her, and she felt no need as she had years ago to save Myka from the consequences of loving her. If Myka's internal manual didn't already have a big chapter titled "Helena" with generous margins for notes, it would.
She wouldn't say that she had developed a routine in the days that had passed since she drove out of the B&B's parking lot with a boy and a tongue-lolling Shep trying to hang out of the windows, but she had made a few gestures toward claiming a place for herself in the house. She had found space in the dresser in Myka's bedroom - her and Myka's bedroom now, she reminded herself - and the closet in the office for both her clothes and shoes, and she had made a minor investment in a tea kettle, strainer, and tin of loose-leaf Earl Grey. She hadn't made herself tea on a regular basis since the turn of the last century, and she couldn't honestly say it tasted any better than what would come out of a Keurig, but she enjoyed the process of making it while Drew poured cereal into a bowl and then proceeded to eat it with a slurping satisfaction reminiscent of his father. Christina, when she had grown old enough, had clamored to measure out the tea leaves; Drew wouldn't, if the past mornings were any indication, but the differences between then and now made Christina seem closer to her than if Drew had perfectly mimicked her daughter's every gesture.
When she wasn't make merely passable tea for herself, ferrying Drew between math camp and soccer, occasionally remembering to pick up after the both of them, which meant collecting Drew's toys and found "treasures" and her own scattered notes and dirty mugs and dumping them in their respective bedrooms, Helena was trying to find an answer for the replicated artefacts. Answers, rather. She didn't know the mechanics of the replication, but she had theories. On the other hand, while she knew, at least strongly believed she knew, who was behind the artefacts, all she had were hazy ideas of how to prove it. After discovering the doctored surveillance footage and the relationship of some of the victims to PAWL, the organization that had strong links to politicians far to the right of those on the right, the rest of the team had come around to her view, which was that the replication wasn't a mercenary venture; the retrieval in Ellis only confirmed her suspicions that these so-called masterminds had another goal in mind.
The replicated lab coat and dice - and who knew what other artefacts had been copied that the Warehouse agents didn't know about - had been experiments, limited efforts to determine how successfully the properties of the original artefact had been reproduced. Although the results had been decidedly mixed, they hadn't deterred the ones behind this mess, who had then launched a larger-scale trial in Ellis. Having proven, if only to themselves, that replicated artefacts were as powerful as the originals, they had increased the stakes by using a single replicated artefact on a larger number of people. The fatal side effect of possessing a replicated artefact, the worrisome tendency of the replicated property to "drift," these were, to all appearances, acceptable costs. What goal, what end would possibly justify the damage the replicated artefacts caused? Not money, vengeance perhaps, and that she could understand better than most people, although even vengeance would have glutted itself on the bodies the replicated artefacts left behind. Maybe love, though what beloved would stomach the lengths to which her lover had gone? Power. She had thought it before, and it seemed all the more likely now, after Ellis. The malefactors weren't scientists and hardly ethicists; they were politicians.
Jacqui had yet to find any connection between the Oklahoma legislators and Congressman Jaffee or Perkins, but Helena knew it was there, just as she knew the slight throbbing that had begun after her journey to Ellis and had yet to stop, although the fragment was buried in a Wyoming field hundreds of miles away, argued that she was the trigger for the explosion of the artefact's power that morning. Well, she and the . . . amplifier . . . working in tandem. And the fragment was only that, a fragment, chipped from or broken off something bigger. Possibly much bigger.
"They" had known, or guessed, that she would be sent to Ellis, which meant "they" knew who she was. And what she was to the Warehouse. Expanding the search into her own records, she retrieved itineraries and e-mails and account statements from travels she had made over the past five years, which was when Pete had begun to feel his vibes about her, and tried to cross- reference them, to the extent she could, with the retrieval "schedule" that Artie and Myka would have used to flag artefacts that they particularly wanted to neutralize. The agents still relied on a database that compared reported anomalies with the properties of unretrieved artefacts and "pinged" when it found a match. Artie had always been silent about how the database, despite being housed in hardware that wouldn't have looked out of place on a WWII-era submarine, all knobs and switches and porthole-sized screens, processed information faster and more accurately than any modern-day computer. Helena strongly suspected that the technology was artefact-enhanced, but when she had suggested as much Artie had only shrugged indifferently.
She itched to get her hands on it one day, but that day wasn't going to happen anytime soon. While asking Jacqui or Claudia to query the database for the dates when the original artefacts had first pinged would remove some of the guesswork from her cross-referencing, it would also raise questions she didn't want to answer. To enter through the database's back doors without setting off the trip wires Claudia would have set would be onerous even if she had all the time in the world to spare, and she didn't have that kind of time. She might be overestimating the warmth with which she had been welcomed back, but she suspected that no one would like the conclusions she was drawing, and Myka . . . Myka was the primary reason she wasn't asking for anyone's trying to hack into the database. It wasn't that what Myka didn't know wouldn't hurt her, it was that what Myka didn't know wouldn't hurt her. Myka would be more than capable of shackling her to the basement furnace or the Land Rover, and though she would welcome being restrained for other purposes, she needed to be able to prevent "them" from taking what had happened in Ellis and trying to make it both bigger and better.
Consequently, her dataset was less precise than she desired, and it had less data than she would have liked, but the graph she was able to create from it told her enough. The lines she plotted that represented her trips and the lines that represented the necessarily rougher time frames of when she thought the lab coat, the dice, and the bible had been replicated intersected where she had suspected they would, Washington D.C. Connections to Washington D.C. and people Helena knew had already been made, the fact that some of her clients were on PAWL's list, that Wade Farraday had donated money. Those clients as well as others for whom she had done a fair amount of work lived in Washington, as did Suzanne, and Suzanne's boss, so to speak, was Wade Farraday. Both Jaffee and Perkins, as well as a senator who shared their views, had visited the Warehouse, and they had all supported greater DHS oversight of the Warehouse. Somebody with influence and access had had Warehouse security video edited, and somebody with money had created - somewhere - a workspace, a laboratory in which to experiment with replication. What those somebodies needed was someone with knowledge of Warehouse artefacts, of her. Had the replication been happening 12 years or more ago, Helena would have said finding the disaffected scientist or former agent would have been easy. Although the Warehouse didn't officially exist and, therefore, couldn't have a budget to be slashed, something very much like a budget had been slashed, repeatedly, and the scientists who had once had their own labs in the Warehouse had retired or been let go decades earlier. The population of people with the necessary knowledge would have been very, very small. Since the DHS had taken over, however, the number of people flowing in and out of the Warehouse had increased, more than a few scientists interested in discovering how the artefacts worked and how their properties could potentially be put to other uses.
Shep, whom she had left snoring in the family room, started barking, and a few seconds later, after more sounds of barking and a child running through the house when he knew he wasn't supposed to, she heard Drew calling out to her from the kitchen, " 'lena, when's dinner? Can I have a peanut butter sandwich?"
Helena looked at the clock in the bottom corner of her laptop screen, 5:00 p.m. How had it gotten so late? Colton's mother had picked up Drew at 1:00. Four hours and she had accomplished nothing. She had spent most of it researching connections, again, between Farraday, Jaffee, Perkins, and those of her clients who had made donations to PAWL and/or the two congressmen but had found little more than a couple of charity golfing events. She had become so desperate that she had contacted one of the researchers at her hedge fund; she had little active involvement with the firm anymore, but his name had cropped up more than once in the monthly information packets she received. When he had gotten over his initial amazement at her call, he was more than happy to do some extracurricular work for her, especially when she said that she would recommend that he receive a large bonus for his efforts. That apparently had tugged at his conscience enough that he felt obliged to remind her that his researching skills were investment-related. Anything he could find on the Farraday companies or on the businesses of certain of her clients would be greatly appreciated, she had reassured him. Or anything of interest, for that matter. She had ended the call feeling old and outdated and . . . inept. There had been times when she had been able to retrieve an artefact and divine the solution to a particularly vexing experiment all in four hours. More than once she had rendezvoused with a lover at a hotel only to have a messenger find her and deliver a curt command from Caturanga to come address a problem at the Warehouse and she had managed to satisfy all parties concerned, all within four hours.
What had happened to her? And here she was looking down into those eyes, which reminded her so much of Myka's, and saying, "How about an apple instead? And while you're eating it, I'll get dinner started." The old Helena would have already had dinner made . . . no, she wouldn't have, not with nineteenth century stoves and refrigeration. The old Helena had a cook in addition to a nanny, and Cook would have already had the meal prepared. In fact, Christina would have already eaten it and readied herself for bed by the time Helena returned home. She may not have accomplished anything with regard to artefact replication, but at least she would be home to eat dinner with Drew. That was something.
Generally she wasn't a recipe-follower, mainly because, despite having no solid evidence to support her, she believed that her own thrown-together concoctions were better than most recipes. Finding a package of sausage in the refrigerator - the real goods, no turkey- or chicken-sausage for her when Myka wasn't around - and a can of baked beans, she put them together in a pot. Frowning, she added some frozen carrots. That would take of the vegetable requirement. Finally she diced a jalapeno or two and scraped it off the cutting board into the pot. That would take care of the Helena requirement, although the spiciness might be overmuch for Drew. Adelaide had never liked spicy foods. Not every meal can be macaroni and cheese or chicken tenders, she silently remonstrated with eight-year-olds and their insistence upon blandness. Motioning Drew over to the stove, she held out to him a wooden spoon with a dab of the sausage mixture. He chewed it and then immediately took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water. "Not too bad," he said after he had drunk half of it.
"What do you suggest we do to make it better?"
Ten minutes later, she was looking down at the mound of cheese that nearly obliterated the sausage, carrots, and baked beans on her plate. Of course. Drew, meanwhile, was shoveling it in, stopping periodically to blow his nose into his napkin or drink more water.
"You don't have to eat it, you know, if it's too hot for you," Helena said. "I probably should've done without the jalapeno." She poked at the cheese . . . poncho protecting her meal from both inclement weather and her appetite.
"No, it's good, especially with the cheese" he said. "Really. And Dad and I are always putting extra hot sauce on stuff. He says it'll put hair on my chest." Drew pulled out the neck of his t-shirt and looked down. "Not yet," he said and grinned.
"Well, I won't be at all surprised if I need to be 'manscaped,''' Helena said wryly. "That, in combination with . . . ." What was she doing bringing up perimenopause and hormonal changes with an eight-year-old boy? Clearing her throat and wishing she could indulge in a third glass of wine, she searched for a more appropriate topic. "Did you enjoy yourself at the swimming pool today?"
He shrugged. "Mostly. It got crowded, and some of the bigger kids hogged the diving boards. Colton said he was going to take one of them on, push him into the pool, I guess. But that kind of thing can get you thrown out, so I asked his mom for some money for ice cream."
"And did the ice cream help?"
"Ice cream always helps," he said seriously.
He bent his head over his plate, chasing a piece of sausage. His hair was matted from the pool – later she would make him comb it out – but all she wanted to do in that moment was hug him to her, which no doubt would scare the hell out of him. "That was very wise of you," she said. "To distract him like that."
He was chewing the piece of sausage. Unlike Pete, he swallowed before responding. "He likes ice cream, and I didn't want us to get thrown out of the pool. You would've probably made me do chores or something if I had come home early." He shrugged. "Colton's pretty easy to figure out sometimes."
He started to push his chair back, then stopped. "May I be excused?" He said it with the weary patience of someone who doesn't see the necessity of the request.
"Certainly." She watched him as he dropped himself in front of the TV and dug out the controller. Her phone buzzed. Jacqui, not Myka, but the disappointment was short-lived. If Jacqui was calling her, she had something. Eyeing Shep suspiciously, Helena took the plates to the kitchen sink and gave them a quick rinse. She had fed him his evil-smelling dog food while dinner was cooking. If she were him, she'd be willing to take on jalapenos to get at something tastier, and Drew said the meal had been good. If you couldn't trust a child about food, even a compliant one like Myka's son, whom could you trust?
"Finally found a link between Jaffee and one of the Oklahoma legislators," Jacqui said, equal parts triumphant and exhausted.
"Hang on a minute, let me take this in the office." Helena rechecked the family room. Drew had put on his treasure-hunting game, and Shep was just now stretching out beside him. Satisfaction giving her a boost, she quickly made her way to the office and closed the door behind her. "What did you find?"
"One of the legislators is Jaffee's cousin."
"That's what you found?" Helena demanded incredulously. "You didn't have to call me about that, you could have sent it to me in the mail, third class."
"Ah, this is the Wells charm that Claudia was warning me about. Just sit down and open your ears," Jacqui said. "A cousin who had worked on one of Jaffee's campaigns a few years back, before he decided to run for office himself." She paused, and Helena set her jaw, unappreciative of the dramatic effect. "He also sat behind the legislator who had the bible."
"Well, that's different," Helena grumbled. "Why didn't you lead with that piece of information?"
Jacqui ignored her. "We're not going to be able to prove that he ever took the bible, but we know he had access, and we know he's sympathetic toward Jaffee's platform, which suggests that he and Jaffee probably have a good personal relationship. It's what you were looking for, H.G."
"Yes, you're quite right, thank you. A very big thank you, Jacqui." She drew in a deep breath. "Now, we need to find the other connections - "
Jacqui cut in. "I've been assigned to other projects, H.G. I'm not going to be able to ransack the Internet for you any longer on this."
Helena took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. "Why would Claudia or Myka have done that?"
"Hey, don't go breathing fire after them," Jacqui warned. "It was Mrs. Frederic's decision. I just found out today."
"Irene?" Helena hardened her stare at the phone, but, much like Mrs. Frederic, the phone seemed unaffected by the heat of her look.
"I've got to get going, H.G. Somewhere there's a lounge chair and a margarita for me. You'll have to take this up with Mrs. F. Sorry."
Helena distractedly swiveled the desk chair back and forth. It was unlike Irene to interfere so directly and in a manner that was distinctly at cross-purposes with an investigation. Myka would be calling her and Drew later this evening; perhaps she would know why Irene had reassigned Jacqui. Opening her laptop, she woke it from sleep mode and stared at the graph on the screen. Obeying an impulse that was more felt than thought, she started to revise her dataset, inputting dates for trips she had taken to Washington D.C. that had been solely to see Suzanne. There hadn't been many; she had usually worked in a night or two with Suzanne when she was there on business, appraising a client's purchase or assisting him in buying an antique. Other times Suzanne had flown to New York, and they had occasionally hooked up in other cities as well. Yet when the lines appeared on the graph, she was surprised at how close some of them were to the lines representing the replication dates, even closer than the business trip lines were. She searched her memory for why she had flown to Washington D.C. to see Suzanne. Had she done it on a whim? No, Suzanne didn't welcome whims any more warmly than she did, even warning her early on, "The only kind of spontaneity I like to see is in the bedroom." Because she had missed her? Their relationship had been predicated on the certainty that neither of them would long for the other; a series of one-stands, that had been their relationship. She had flown to Washington D.C. when Suzanne had let her know that she had had to cancel a trip to New York, when Suzanne had suggested that Helena come to her rather than forfeit the time together. Neither might spend much time or thought on missing the other, but neither was also going to give up a planned weekend in bed with a desirable and accommodating sexual partner. At least Helena believed that Suzanne had reached a similar conclusion.
Maybe Suzanne had reached no such conclusion because she didn't find Helena an equally desirable and accommodating sexual partner, had never found Helena a desirable sexual partner, had needed to establish a relationship with her and used sex as her means for doing so. Helena knew she bore some part in the replication; as flat-footed as it sounded, maybe Jaffee and his cohorts needed her physically to be in Washington. And if so, they wouldn't want to depend solely on the needs - and purchasing power - of her clients. Enter Suzanne, a Farraday employee who looked like a supermodel, as Myka had put it, and, as their first meeting had proved, was eminently fuckable. Crudely stated, but true. Helena put her head in her hands. A honey trap. She had set up more than a few of her own when she had been with 12. Why hadn't she recognized it?
She had. When Myka had talked about encountering Suzanne at the Farraday Gallery and questioned why someone so seemingly warm and engaging could be satisfied with Helena's arctic version of a relationship, she, not Myka, had been the one to suggest a chameleon-like quality to Suzanne, only to belittle it as a fundraiser's ploy to charm money from potential contributors. But what was the most important factor in setting up a honey trap? Convincing the victim that the seduction was his idea. Suzanne had offered her everything she had wanted: no demands, no conditions, no interest in anything more than what Helena could do in a bed. After the failures with Nate and a string of others, Helena had stopped searching for more than the occasional sexual encounter. Oddly, or not so oddly, enough, she had found them far safer. No need to worry that the secrets she couldn't share and the people she couldn't talk about would build a wall between her and her lover, because in an hour, two hours, the next morning at most, he or she wouldn't be her lover any longer. What wondrous, wondrous luck then that she had found a woman who didn't care about her secrets, her life before they met, or her strangled love for someone else. Because she had given Suzanne no importance, she hadn't given any serious consideration to the possibility that Suzanne could be involved in the replication, even when others had suggested it. She was H.G. Wells, after all, and who was a curator of a tiny art museum to get one over on her? She exited Excel and accessed a search engine. It was a humble start, to Google the names of Wade Farraday and Suzanne Emory, but she had been thoroughly humbled. She wouldn't overlook the seemingly insignificant again.
There was a knock on the door, and before she could answer it, Drew had swung the door open. He stood in the doorway, knuckling his eyes. "I'm ready for ice cream," he announced. "Then we can go out to the treehouse." He shuffled farther in, peering at her laptop. "Are you working on my new room?"
"Yes," Helena said, not quite slamming the laptop shut. "Now you'd best scoot and get out to the kitchen before you ruin the surprise." She rose and gently turned his shoulders toward the door. "Put the bowls and spoons on the island, and I'll be right with you."
He ran down the hallway, shouting to Shep, and Helena, as she turned out the light, predicted that she would be spending a good chunk of the night after Drew fell asleep working on plans for renovating his bedroom. A rough penance for ignoring him for most of the evening. Of course, "ignoring" suggested that she had been aware of his presence and chosen not to spend with him the hours she had spent instead searching for information on Farraday and Suzanne. Oblivious to his existence would be closer to the truth, but she usually had more to show for her bouts of child neglect. When Christina had been alive, she had been a frequent guest of her Uncle Charles and Aunt Jane, frequent enough to have been given her own room. It wasn't only the retrievals that had resulted in her visits; Helena's scientific pursuits were causes as well. Unlike the retrievals, which could go on for days, a night spent in one of her makeshift laboratories was all the longer she would let an experiment run before she went, red-eyed and yawning, to claim Christina in the morning. Her dress would be unchanged from the day before and streaked with chemicals and, sometimes, scorch marks. But even if she hadn't yet perfected the process or device, she had generally made enough progress that she could enthuse about it over a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal to a marveling Christina and a far more skeptical Charles. Charles would invariably roll his eyes the more enthusiastic she became, until Helena, somewhat sharply, would remind him that a number of her inventions had already found uses in fields as diverse as medicine and engineering. "Not to mention your personal favorite," he said dryly, "the field of study that has Helena Wells, genius, as its object of study."
She flushed now, remembering. She would have nothing to enthuse to Drew about over a half-eaten bowl of ice cream. All she had been able to discover about Wade Farraday was that there was little to discover. The absence of information corresponded to Suzanne's description of him as a virtual recluse. What she did find concerned his apparent mania for collecting; it was of a mind-numbing volume and evidenced no discretion. She could as easily imagine him dumpster diving for Star Wars-themed Big Gulps as submitting a multi-million dollar bid for a Van Gogh for the gallery. If possible, there was less information about Suzanne. A few articles profiling her work at the gallery, an old résumé on LinkedIn. She might have emerged whole from the skull of Wade Farraday for no more than Helena had been able to find.
Myka called while they were still eating ice cream or, rather, Drew was. Noisily scraping his bowl as he told her of his day, he asked plaintively at the end, "When are you coming home, Mom?"
"Soon, buddy, I promise." She sounded tired and dispirited but, obviously gathering herself, she said, with a laugh that sounded only a little forced, "Has Helena been driving you crazy? Have you been driving her crazy?" The laugh became genuine as Drew slyly responded, "Not so crazy that she didn't let me have ice cream tonight."
After Helena sent him to take a bath, "No, a shower, you need to wash that hair," following that command with the usual admonitions about washing ears and elbows, she queried Myka about the doubtful "soon." "You didn't sound very confident," she said quietly.
"I'm supposed to undergo a psych eval before the DHS makes up its mind whether to suspend me or fire me." Myka sighed. "Send me some of that ice cream, will you? A pint or two would really be great."
"Fire you?" For the second time that night, Helena stared at her phone. Yes, their last night in Ellis, Myka had said that she might be fired, but Helena didn't think either of them had seriously believed it would come to that.
"Jane and Claudia tried to argue that if I hadn't stopped Lowry, the situation in Ellis would've turned out much worse, and I think some at the DHS, the ones most familiar with the Warehouse, understood that. It's probably why I haven't already been fired, but everything's just mushroomed. I guess Secretary Johnson was dressed down by the president. Someone has to pay for an embarrassment like that, and I was the one who caused it." Another gusty sigh. "Not the moment of recognition I was hoping for."
"They won't fire you, Myka," Helena said it more uncertainly than she had intended. Myka sounded tired and bruised, but not crushed. The Myka she had known 12 years ago would have taken, if not to her bed, then one of the worn armchairs in the B&B's library and disappeared for several days between the covers of a book, her unblinking scanning of one line of text after another like the automatic return of a typewriter carriage. Anyone who knew her would recognize her absorption for what it was, the equivalent of a rollover on a highway, tires spinning in the air.
"I'm not so sure." Helena imagined Myka rubbing the tensed muscles of her neck or working a Twizzler out from its package. "It would be tough, and I'd be horrible to live with for a while, but the Warehouse, it's not everything." With more forcefulness, she said, "I knew that holding a gun to Lowry's head could be the end of my career as an agent, especially under the current regime, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat, Helena. There was never a choice."
"I know." They were silent until the sounds of banging coming from Drew's bedroom had Helena announcing, "Your son's packing, I believe, for our stay in the treehouse."
"Just make sure the air mattresses haven't leaked. There should be a pump somewhere in the captain's quarters. Oh, and be prepared to feel a muzzle in your armpit by morning. Crickets, frogs, bug zappers, all of those nighttime noises tend to frighten Shep."
Ah, there was the return of the confidence and authority of her list-lover. The manual of "How to Survive an Overnight in the Treehouse" was being written as they spoke, but Helena already had edits, particularly as they concerned the care and comfort of Shep. "I issue daily threats against his continued existence," she complained. "Why would the beast look to me for protection?"
"Because you are trustworthy, even the dog knows it."
"I would much rather it be your muzzle in my armpit. When can we arrange it?" As Myka laughed, Helena thought it might be a propitious moment to ask about Jacqui's reassignment. "Did you know that Irene took Jacqui off researching the artefacts' connections to our favorite congressmen and their supporters?"
Reluctantly Myka answered, "She and Claudia and I had conversations about it."
"You won't mind my saying that I find it completely at odds with resolving the problem," Helena said mildly, more baffled than outraged.
"It may be at odds with incarcerating the people responsible, but it's not at odds with concluding that the threat has, um, diminished." More gusty sighing came over the phone. "There's been more going on here than the DHS raking us over the coals. I'll fill you in once I get home. That is, if I'm still officially associated with the Warehouse."
No phone sex, no verbal cuddling, and no satisfactory explanation for why the crisis of replicated artefacts was no longer a crisis. Helena tried to school her expression into something cheerier when Drew, backpack slung over his shoulder, dropped a sleeping bag at her feet. "Get your stuff ready. It's time."
After a dozen trips between the house and the treehouse, Drew declared they had sufficient stores for the night. Looking around at what had once been a roomy space, now stuffed with pillows, blankets, cartons of juice, water bottles, bags of pretzels and cookies, comic books, and several flashlights, including a few floor lanterns that were providing illumination, Helena marveled at how he had managed to combine his mother's methodicalness and his father's bottomless appetite for snacks and distractions. Tucking a grubby sheet of notepaper having his list of essentials into a back pocket, Drew crawled into his sleeping bag and positioned his head against a tower of pillows. With one hand, he clicked on a flashlight, with the other he opened a comic book.
Helena unzipped her own sleeping bag and gingerly tried to find a comfortable position on her air mattress, which felt suspiciously low to the floor. When both the flashlight and the comic book slipped from Drew's hands, she moved them out of the way and shut off all but one of the lanterns. Shep snuffled uneasily at his side. Taking her laptop with her, she went out on the observation deck and sat cross-legged on the planking. The battery was fresh, so she could probably get a couple of hours in on the redesign of his bedroom. She became engrossed by the challenges in recreating the Fortress of Solitude's crystal array so that when Drew removed a crystal a corresponding dresser drawer would open. The object would be for the drawer to glide open, not be ejected with such force that it would knock Drew into the opposite wall. Inventive not injurious would be her mantra.
She didn't know how much time had passed, but she knew that something shouldn't be gleaming at roughly eye-level at this time of night, unless it was the fangs of a predator about to devour her, and, really, what sort of predator would be on the observation deck? She looked harder at the gleam, which was the moonlight or a flicker of the lantern in the captain's quarters glinting off the silver buckle of a fashion belt, which, in turn, was wrapped around the waist of a conservative skirt. She hadn't guessed wrong; a predator was standing in front of her, complete in blazer, blouse, and color-coordinated pumps.
"I don't suppose you own a pair of pajamas," Helena said. "If you did, you could join our sleepover. Juicy Juice and Chips-Ahoy are in the far corner, just in case you want an early breakfast."
Mrs. Frederic leaned her back against the railing and crossed her ankles in what was meant to suggest a relaxed posture, although Helena was put in mind of a jaguar or panther, something sleek and deadly, trying to curl up like a house cat on her lap. "My father built us a treehouse when I was a child," Mrs. Frederic said. "Then the man whose land my father sharecropped had him tear it down because it would only encourage our 'natural laziness.'" The lenses of her glasses flashed as she tilted her head to look up at the stars. "Lovely view. You should enjoy it. You should enjoy the life you're making for yourself here."
"I would enjoy it more," Helena said, setting the laptop down and pushing herself to her feet, "if I knew that Jaffee or Perkins or both of them weren't out there trying to magnify an artefact's power." She leaned against the railing next to Irene. She wasn't about to let the woman stand over her, literally or metaphorically.
"I was something of a fly on the wall during the meetings in Washington." Mrs. Frederic ignored Helena's sardonic "Wearing three pairs of pumps, I presume" and adjusted her blazer, as if she were chilled. "Not everything that came out of them was bad. The replicated artefacts have taught Homeland Security that they can't open the Warehouse to anyone who says he has a reason for seeing it, including powerful congressmen. In that sense, we're returning to the way things were before, when we were unknown, unlocatable, and, I fear, underfunded."
"But not out from under its aegis," Helena said grimly.
Mrs. Frederic smiled, and Helena could almost feel the edge of it. "The regents have been demoted to what amounts to an advisory board, and the senior agent-in-charge will report directly to a Homeland Security officer. All decisions concerning retrievals go through their office first. And, by the way, your employment as an efficiency consultant has been terminated, Helena."
Helena shrugged. "I wasn't looking forward to writing the report. The recommendations for streamlining operations here would have been overwhelming." She jammed her hands into the tiny side pockets of her lounge pants. "What happens to Myka?"
"It's unclear. They're questioning her fitness, given her actions in Ellis, to oversee the other agents and to represent the Warehouse."
She had said it so neutrally that Helena turned to peer at her. "You know she had no choice. Lowry was about to order someone, the Guard, the Air Force, a joystick jockey in a Nevada bunker, to -"
Mrs. Frederic interrupted no less harshly. "And I doubt that Myka was thinking of anyone or anything but you when she took Major Lowry hostage. For all agents, but especially for the senior agent, the Warehouse has to come first."
"Thank God, I gave up on that a long time ago."
"Did you?" Mrs. Frederic said, her voice becoming silky, and Helena had a vision of the jaguar or panther beginning to stalk her. "You remind me of a child who, in a fit of temper, threatens to run away but goes no farther than her room. Have you ever really asked yourself why you let the regents sentence you after your time machine collapsed? Or why you let Myka stop you at Yellowstone? Or why you've never forgiven yourself for Christina's death?"
"Don't say it, Irene. Don't you dare." Helena's hands were pressing so hard against the pocket seams that she felt her pants begin to slide down her hips. "You were the one who said my soul had shrunk to the size of a walnut, you were the one who questioned my fitness to work with you on the replicated artefacts, you -"
"Said what I needed to say to get you to help us. You don't respond to pleas, Helena, or compliments, but if someone seems to slight you, you're at the ready to prove her wrong. Basic psychology."
Unbidden, the memory came to her of Suzanne, next to the Klimt, readjusting the skirt of her dress and giving her a cool kiss on the cheek. She had said, "Maybe we'll meet up again, although it's bound to be a letdown after this." She had shown no interest in seeing Helena again, and Helena felt she had been reduced to no more than a wet mouth and a couple of adept hands. She had been the one to call Suzanne back, to suggest they leave the party and return to her hotel room. She had simply been an older Colton, seduced by her version of an ice cream cone.
"It's not over for them, Jaffee and Perkins. They don't need the Warehouse anymore, so banishing them from it won't end the replication. You know that, just like you know I've been what they needed to make the replication work."
Mrs. Frederic shook her head. "I don't know anything of the kind, Helena."
"You, Claudia, I, and who knows how many innocent people happily going about their lives have been marked by the Warehouse. Most will never know it. But a catastophe has killed all the agents and regents, or maybe you, Irene, have finally taken a vacation and Claudia is unavailable, and the Warehouse has to find someone to watch over it. So we carry its signature." Helena paused, remember how she had shivered, on the inside, when she had stepped onto the hotel's parking lot in Univille. "The artefact in Ellis wasn't strong enough to affect anyone outside the town limits until I went there, and then the gates of hell opened." It was impossible to tell whether Irene was listening, she had tipped her head back to gaze at the stars again. "I found something in addition to the artefact - "
Mrs. Frederic dismissively waved her hand. "Yes, I know. You think it boosted the artefact's power."
"Only after I arrived in Ellis, Irene. He had it on him all along, but it needed me, my connection to the Warehouse to amplify the mind control. I still feel it, even though I buried it far from here, so I know that you must feel it, too. It's dozens, hundreds of artefacts fused together, and it's only a chip, a fragment. Guess what a larger version of it would do if it were put with another artefact, with one of us." Helena spun away from the railing to face her. "We can't just walk away from this and pretend that they won't use it again."
"We will have no support from Homeland Security if we pursue the investigation. They've determined that cutting off access should neutralize the threat. Any replicated artefacts still in circulation will be retrieved in the normal course." Mrs. Frederic lowered her head to look at Helena. "If we're caught acting without their authority, they will not hesitate to replace every one of us. Like every government agency, Homeland Security needs a place to unload its undesirables, the ones they can't fire and who won't leave. The Warehouse will be that repository for them. Who better to guard a collection of oddities than oddballs and malcontents? The Warehouse needs unusual people but unusual because of their talents, their gifts, not because they're incompetent cranks. We would end up with agents and caretakers without skills, knowledge, or understanding. I cannot and will not risk that happening. I know you believe that men like Jaffee and Perkins can act with impunity, but they live in the sun of public opinion. If that threatens to become a searchlight . . . ."
"I can't be that sanguine."
"I'm not sanguine, cautiously hopeful is closer to the truth." Mrs. Frederic brushed past her to stand just outside the captain's quarters. "He'll be a marvelous Warehouse agent someday. He'll have his mother's analytical mindset and his father's intuition. But he'll also have flashes of inspiration that will have come straight from you."
"You can't see into the future," Helena said flatly.
"What I see are endless possibilities. That's just a possibility I happen to like." She patted Helena on the arm as she walked away from the room. She casually leaned her hip against the railing, although the tone of her voice wasn't remotely casual. "You have no proof, Helena, tying anyone to the replication. All you have are theories and some wounded vanity, I believe. Let it go . . . for now."
"It's precisely his future I'm trying to protect," Helena said in frustration. "One which will not have him sacrificing himself on the altar of the Warehouse." She practically shouted the last, but Irene was already gone.
She reclaimed her laptop and settled on her air mattress, noticing with relief that Drew was still asleep. But she aimlessly scrolled through shots from Superman movies, unable to refocus on the design for his bedroom. She could only gaze at him as he curled into a ball and then uncurled, digging his head deeper into his pillows. She had never forgiven herself for Christina's death because she hadn't put her daughter above her own needs and desires. It had everything to do with her self-centeredness and nothing to do with the Warehouse. Just as choosing to be bronzed and surrendering to Myka at Yellowstone had had nothing to do with protecting the Warehouse from her sins; she had been trying, not well or soon enough, to protect other humans. The Irenes of this world and, by the looks of her 24/7 traveling between dimensions, the next several worlds could look after the Warehouse.
She put the laptop aside and got up and moved her air mattress closer to Drew's. She wouldn't sleep, but she would feel better, more relaxed, the nearer she was to him; she could wrestle Irene to the ground if the old bat thought to return with some kind of child's miniature Tesla or Farnsworth. She crossed her arms behind her head and considered where she might screw in hooks for hammocks next summer.
. . . something was trickling onto her face, as if someone were releasing a tiny stream of sand above her. She groped to brush the sand away from her mouth and out of her eyes, but something warm and wet and carrying more than a whiff of dog food was beating her to it. "Get off me," she yelled, sitting up and pushing Shep's head away. Frantically scrubbing at her cheeks with the sleeve of her top, she glared at Drew, who was kneeling at her side, eating a cookie.
"You're up," he said brightly. "We're hungry and we've been waiting forever."
A shower and quick change of clothes later, she closed the door into the garage on an unhappy, howling Shep and shooed Drew into the Rover. She desperately wanted a good cup of tea, which meant not of her own making. Had Drew had math camp or soccer today, she would have kept him out because it was just that kind of day. Not a beautiful day that put her in the sunny, slightly roguish frame of mind to play hooky, but a gloomy, humid day that felt as oppressive as her mood. Last night's conversation with Irene continued to leave a bad taste in her mouth, or maybe it was just Shep. She would try to find comfort in a cup of Earl Grey and a pastry. Perhaps two.
A past trip through Rapid City's downtown had introduced her to a bookstore that shared space with a coffee shop. She recalled that the coffee was pretty good, which gave her hope for the tea. Drew contented himself with a book of mystery stories and a bottle of strawberry-flavored milk - and the better portion of a chocolate chip muffin that Helena thought she had bought for herself. They whiled away the morning in the bookstore, Helena buying additional cups of tea and, to ensure Drew's compliance, several comic books. When his squirming grew so pronounced that she couldn't ignore it, she rapidly flipped through the last few pages of the fashion magazine she had been skimming, rating the appeal of both the clothing and the models wearing them. An especially shallow diversion, but she wasn't above ogling; in fact, she had been quite shameless about it when she was younger, most of the objects of her admiration more titillated than outraged by such a breach of decorum by a woman . . . .
"Can we go now? I'm bored," Drew said.
Helena blinked, her memory of what had followed an impudent look at a parson's daughter unfairly cut short. Apparently she had been transformed overnight from an attractive woman in her forties (early forties on a good day) to a memory-befogged old thing hunkered over a cup of tea. She had been fired from a job she had forgotten she had as well as from an investigation that she had been coerced, yes, coerced into assisting in the first place, and now her only occupation was taking care of an eight-year-old boy, a temporary position from which, it seemed, she was on the verge of being dismissed, based on the sour looks of her charge. Already she was adrift, purposeless . . . withering as she sat, used up, unwanted, unloved, soon to be forgotten -
"Can we go home now?" Drew whined, jerking her back from the entertaining spectacle of her self-pity.
She could clean the house, make it look presentable for Myka when she came home. There were towels and sheets yet to be washed, and the yard needed mowing. She could become the housewife she had so assiduously avoided becoming for so long. Even when she had lived with Nate, he had done the majority of the housework, brushing off her admittedly infrequent offers to clean the bathrooms or sweep out the garage. Looking back on it now, she thought that it had been a signal, none too subtle, but if she had been reading signals correctly, or at all, she wouldn't have moved in with him. He didn't trust that she would stay or didn't trust that he would want her to stay. So she had cooked in her fashion, taken out the trash, driven Adelaide to and from karate lessons, violin lessons, gymnastics, nothing that marked Nate's house as her own, nothing that ever threatened to displace Jennifer.
Suddenly she pushed herself back from the table, causing Drew's elbow to skid off the edge and his head, which he had propped on his hand in a demonstration of how bored he was, to almost hit the surface. "Not yet. We've got a makeover to start."
When they returned home, Drew had fallen asleep in the backseat, surrounded by bags of feather pillows, sheets having the highest thread count she could find, and, somewhere in those bags, a receipt for a custom-made bed for the master bedroom. In the cargo area were towels and throw-pillows and boxes of glassware. Pulling into the driveway, Helena didn't notice that the garage door was up, nor that Myka's car was in the garage, absorbed in plans for the redesign of their bedroom. But when she had to brake to avoid hitting a bounding Shep, who was throwing himself at the Rover's doors in his eagerness to greet them, she looked up and saw a grinning Myka mouthing "Nice ride."
"You have no idea yet," Helena murmured wickedly to herself.
Flinging pillows over the backseat and the front seat in his haste to get out, Drew yelled in delighted surprise, "Mom, you're back," only to immediately abandon her when, after a squeeze and a kiss, Myka said, "There may be a Nationals jersey for you in the house."
Helena more sedately exited, in part because she thought if she didn't she would end up in an ungainly sprawl on the concrete, although she felt that her reciprocal grin was splitting her face.. Myka was running her hand across the hood and shaking her head. "I don't think we can get both of them in the garage."
"We'll build a bigger garage."
Myka laughed at that, but her eyebrows were arching as she took in all of the items filling the back of the Rover. She didn't comment, however, linking her hands with Helena's as she leaned in to kiss her. She started laughing again as Helena's lips remained firmly closed. "He's in the house. Besides, he's going to have to get used to this."
"Perhaps we can lead up to it gently. Week one, firm handshakes. Week two, pecks on the cheek. Week three -"
"He kisses the dog all the time. He has no room to complain." Myka was more authoritative in her second kiss, and since Helena never wanted to be a match for Tamalpais Myka, she parted her mouth only to find that Myka had moved on to nuzzle her jawline and then her ear. "Too late," Myka said under her breath.
"Speaking of time," Helena said softly, rubbing the tip of her nose against Myka's skin. "While I'm ecstatic to see you, I thought you had a psych eval today."
Stepping back from her and recapturing Helena's hands, Myka said, "What were they going to do with me once I told them I was in love with a 148-year-old woman? We were never going to get past it." Her smile faded, and her eyes took on the searching look to which Helena now knew "Yes" was the only answer. "I woke up last night stressing out about the evaluation and my future with the Warehouse, and I remembered what I had told you, that there were things I loved more. So what the hell was I doing there when I could be here? I got the first flight out that I could." She lifted her shoulders, a little helplessly, a little sadly. "You and Drew will always come first, and if that means leaving the Warehouse, so be it."
This Myka wouldn't be shutting herself away in her bedroom or losing herself in a book for days. This Myka had already let go of her hands to open the Rover and examine the plunder. "What did you do, empty Bed, Bath & Beyond?"
"Hardly." Helena sniffed. "I do not bargain hunt, something you'll have to learn to live with." Was it strange to feel so much love for someone in the midst of bath towels and fitted sheets? It didn't matter. The towels and pillows and linens could be returned if Myka didn't like them; the bed might be more difficult to return, but it would go as well if Myka couldn't come to love its plushy softness and wonderful back support. The things weren't important, the statement they represented was. This was her home now too, and she was staking her claim. She hadn't made a home with someone in over a hundred years, and she was making it with potentially Warehouseless Myka, another inconceivability. She would concede one thing to Irene, given those two jaw-dropping events, the possibilities were indeed endless.