A/N: This is the second of what will be three "grim" chapters. It was not an easy chapter to write for various reasons, so I may try to work this over a little bit more before I publish the third chapter. I had hoped to squeeze everything bad into two chapters but there was simply too much to cover. The next chapter, though it begins grim, will end happily. However, before I get to it, I need a palate-cleanser, so I think I'll try to squeeze out a chapter of Burned and maybe Journey's End before coming back to Reset.
A large black SUV was waiting for them, effectively double-parked because it hulked across two lanes, the driver unaware of or indifferent to the cacophony of horns that sounded behind, beside, and in front of it. Helena would have been reminded of Myka's picking her up at the Denver airport except for the fact that Myka would have never parked so aggressively and the burly agent who came around the hood to open a passenger-side door for them - after casually leaping down from the SUV into traffic, prompting another blare of horns - didn't sweep her up in a kiss. He didn't offer them a greeting either, silently returning to the driver's side and rapidly accelerating away from the hospital, forcing at least two cars to abruptly stop to avoid a collision.
She wasn't being chauffeured through a city by someone who signaled before she merged into a lane and who frequently checked her side mirrors; she was being chauffeured by a drug lord's bodyguard who, whether he was driving his boss or shadowing him in public, was accustomed to muscling aside the people in his way. That or he was a federal agent swollen with the importance of his mission, probably imagining bombs or vials of anthrax, not Walkmans and lunchboxes and fountain pens imbued with something "extra." Helena was sure that had he known he was helping to save the world from magical Walkmans, the SUV would have slowed to a crawl and he would be craning his head around the headrest to stare at them in disbelief.
But she left his intact his belief that he was ferrying two chemical weapons experts, not a man who spoke of his vibes as casually as a medium might of the spirit world and a 148-year-old woman who had spent the better part of her life essentially mummified in metal. Never knowing that his world had been on the verge of being spun off its axis, their chauffeur deposited them at the entrance of a building, nondescript and bearing no signage, one of several with the same generic architecture and similarly lacking in memorable features. After a curt thank-you, Helena said, "When we're done here, we'll need a car. No driver." She jerked her head at Pete. "He'll drive."
The agent made no response to her request, but she supposed the flicker of his eyelids was assent enough. Helena glanced at the glass of the entrance; there would be agents behind those doors who would take them to Suzanne, and there would be yet more agents behind more doors watching them, not a moment of their visit going unrecorded. It was a woman this time, in a navy skirt suit, who took them to a room furnished with a conference table, its pressed wood surface showing not a few thin brown rings attesting to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of coffee cups that had rested on it, and three or four chairs. Suzanne was already sitting at the table, her hair messily gathered back in a twist. She was wearing clothes that had obviously been slept in, likely the same clothes she had been wearing when they brought her in for questioning. Their lines were more flowing than crisp and the colors were striking but not overbold; Helena didn't recognize them, but they were the kind of clothing Suzanne would wear to the gallery, not quite formal and not quite casual but always expensive, highlighting the long legs, the slender neck, and the fall of dark hair that in one light could appear a rich coffee brown and in another as black as her own hair . . . used to be.
She had lain next to that body countless times, had known it intimately, but it was hard to recall anything distinctive about it. She had only to close her eyes and she could see the dagger-meant-to-be-a-foil tattoo on Myka's back, the mole precisely in the middle of her left hipbone, the faint white trail of a scar down her calf; Myka had gotten it when she was ten and ice skating with her sister, Tracy tripping and her skates swinging as she fell, one slicing into Myka's leg. Suzanne's body had been responsive, pleasing, willing, much like Suzanne herself, and that was all Helena had ever required or wanted.
Looking up as they entered the room, Suzanne's eyes locked onto hers, the relief that flashed in them immediately chased away by fear. "I didn't do anything to her, Helena. She was unconscious when we . . . I found her."
Helena took the chair opposite her, Pete pushed a chair away and perched on the table, close enough to touch Suzanne if he reached out a hand. Instinctively she leaned away from him; he only smiled, thinly. "She was at the gallery." Helena said it flatly, as a statement; she didn't expect to be contradicted.
"In the room where we held the items, the artefacts, after Scott and his team had 'cooked' them."
"You kept artefacts like, like that in a storeroom?" Pete erupted. "Jesus, do you know what they could have done -"
"Not without - what do you call it - a neutralizer. They always came packed in some . . . substance . . . that Scott swore worked as good or better than what was used at the Warehouse." Suzanne's eyes had never left Helena's. "We frequently received deliveries of art works. Only some of the vans were transporting other kinds of fragile objects. We kept them in a special room at the gallery until they were ready to be shipped out. How your girlfriend got into the room, let alone the gallery after hours, without setting off alarms, I don't know. Unless you taught her all that?" Her eyes were still filled with fear, but there was humor lurking in her voice.
"Who's this Scott guy -"
"How many of these 'cooked' artefacts were in the room when you found Myka?" Helena demanded, her voice riding roughly over Pete's question.
"I don't know . . . not many," Suzanne said, casting her eyes down at the table and scratching at a groove in its surface. The once-impeccable fingernails, products of weekly trips to a manicurist, were almost even with her fingertips and ragged where she had been chewing them. "Ever since what happened in Oklahoma . . . there's been no work on the artefacts." She hesitated. "Not very much, anyway," she amended.
"Were there any artefacts near her, out of their neutralizer?" Helena pressed.
"That's just the thing. Everything was where it should have been, except her." Suzanne began to scratch more vigorously at the groove. "We knew what happened with the artefacts if you were around them long enough, the ones Scott and his team made. Scott said he was going to fix it, but there was never enough time, there was always another . . . ."
"Experiment?" Helena finished for her. "So you found Myka unconscious in the room in which you kept the artefacts, and you assumed that she had succumbed to one or more of them, although none appeared to have been disturbed?" Suzanne nodded. "And then, since the artefacts were sparing you the job of killing her yourselves, you dumped her in a vacant lot or abandoned building?"
"We didn't know what was going on, except that we couldn't stay in the gallery any longer. It wasn't safe - Scott was going to have to come and take care of the artefacts - but we couldn't leave her there either." She ran her thumb over the groove. "The gallery is closed on Mondays, you should remember that. You always made sure you stayed over on a Monday . . . ." Suzanne's voice dropped, but her eyelashes fluttered as if she were thinking of looking up at her, and Helena recalled, with no pleasure, how she would keep Suzanne imprisoned in her hotel suite for the day, sometimes, with Suzanne's willing acquiescence, literally tied to the bed. "Mondays were the days when I . . . we would finalize the arrangements and ship the artefacts out. Wade was with me that day . . . and Jerry, he's another . . . um . . . helper, I guess. They took her some place, I didn't ask where."
Pete twisted around, glancing worriedly at Helena. "Weren't DHS agents or somebody's agents searching that place?" He looked at Suzanne, worry changing to contempt. "You had to know what the agents would be doing when they brought you in for questioning, and you didn't warn them that they'd walking into Chernobyl?" Suzanne only continued to scratch at the groove. Pete cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward the surveillance camera mounted in a corner of the room. "You get all that? You need to be following up with those agents you sent out there."
"There's nothing you can do for her, Helena." Suzanne had paused her scratching and rubbing long enough to regard her with a gaze in which a cool sympathy had come to overlay the fear.
"You may be right," Helena conceded and then her voice hardened. "But I have to try, so you're going to tell me where this motherlode of cooked artefacts is and how I get to it."
"And then what? You're going to seal me inside with them?" The cool sympathy in her eyes was losing ground to the fear. "I knew about you long before I met you. I know what you've done, I know what you're capable of. There was a time I found it . . . titillating." She nervously inhaled. "But not right now."
"I always like my prey to be unaware when I take them," Helena said. "You can consider yourself safe for the moment." The malice wasn't difficult to summon - she could as easily lunge across the table and strangle Suzanne as listen to her - but the silkiness in which she had enveloped it, that had taken years to perfect. Years of learning, over and over again, that the men she worked with and the men she pursued in order to capture an artefact never respected her abilities. The inventions that made the retrievals easier, the kenpo and the street fighting that turned her into a worthy opponent physically, the learning, the languages she had so assiduously practiced, none of it won her their admiration. But when she had to bed down someone to gain his secrets or to secure an artefact, her fellow agents had been all agog to hear the details. So she had learned to lower the natural register of her voice, to infuse it with a suggestiveness so smokey that combustion seemed imminent, and when she married it to a threat that no one of them would have otherwise taken seriously, it achieved what her holding a gun or a Tesla never had. "Where are they, Suzanne?"
"In an old Farraday factory in Maryland, just outside the capitol. It's not hard to get to, but it'll be virtually impossible for you to access the place where Scott and his team worked on the artefacts." She said it with no arrogance but with a certainty that Helena found irritating all the same.
"There's not much that's impossible for me." It was more boast than truth, but she had learned to deliver such statements with a carelessness that seemed to enhance rather than undermine belief.
"The security's biometric. To get in you have to pass a retinal and fingerprint scan."
She was about to say more when Pete bluntly interrupted. "We don't have to have anyone's cooperation, including yours, to get past those."
"Then it gives you a randomly generated series of numbers that you have to repeat. The voice scan is sophisticated enough that it can tell the difference between a recorded voice and a live voice. It also can register stress, for example, if someone's being told at gunpoint to repeat the numbers. So, Mr. Lattimer, you do need my cooperation." She clasped her hands, and she looked from Pete to Helena, the look still fearful but strangely sly as well. "I've been very cooperative with you, as I've been with the other agents." She blinked, her expression becoming one of wounded innocence. "I've come to believe that I've been under the influence of an artefact as well. My years of supporting Clint Jaffee's dreams, my assistance with the artefacts, I understand how reprehensible it looks, but I wasn't in command of myself. I wouldn't have willingly given my allegiance to a cause so destructive unless I had been subject to an influence beyond my control. I want to help you, Helena, I do, but I can't go back . . . to that place. I'm finally free, I hope, of Clint and his artefacts. I can't go back."
She was good. Part of Helena couldn't help but admire her. The nervousness, the fear, and now the almost-but-not-quite penitence, not quite because none of it had been her fault, not really. When had she decided to pitch the "I've been under the control of an artefact" defense? When Jaffee had turned on her - if he hadn't already, he soon would - or had she had it in mind from the beginning? The problem with superior beings was the itch to be the most superior, the "superiorist," as Pete would say. She herself hadn't been immune to it; her last act, her choice of the bronze, had had in it the certainty that she couldn't be humbled, not even by the face of eternity. At the end, there could only be one, and Suzanne had determined that she would be the survivor, not Jaffee. Or perhaps it was simpler and sadder than that. There was no artefact involved in Suzanne's participation, of that Helena was sure, but she must have tired of being at his beck and call, carrying out his orders, no matter how sincere her belief in him was.
It didn't matter. She didn't care what motivated Suzanne, she cared only about what Suzanne wanted from them. "How can we ensure your further cooperation?"
"I believe my cooperation should be worth more than a reduced sentence, especially since my participation in Clint's schemes was guaranteed by an artefact." Her tone grew knowing. "His grandfather used to work at the Warehouse as a scientist, back in the '50s. That's how he learned about artefacts." She shook her head regretfully, sorrowfully. "I was no match for that, Helena. If you want me to risk my life by being 20 feet away from a roomful of cooked artefacts that apparently can't be neutralized any longer, you'll have to give me something commensurate in value." There was no fear in those eyes now.
"Such as?" Helena asked dryly.
"Full immunity, your guarantee that I leave that factory alive and intact once I get you into it, and a permanent restraining order against you," she said as readily as if she had been rehearsing it.
No one here had the power to grant to Suzanne what she wanted. Helena, after a long steady look at her, which Suzanne met unblinkingly, or so it seemed, left the room and called Dave on her phone. He grumbled over the first for a few minutes, claiming that Scott, a disgraced scientist from a military weapons laboratory at which a fatal accident meriting a Congressional investigation had occurred, and his cohorts were requesting the same for their cooperation. The fact that Jaffee had helped to shield him from more severe consequences than the loss of his position had instilled no loyalty, as Scott was willing to confess all he knew, which would implicate other politicians besides Jaffee or so he hinted, but only if his conditions were met. "Who would you rather have walking free on the streets?" Helena wearily asked. "A woman who colluded in the distribution of highly dangerous objects or the man who created the highly dangerous objects she helped to distribute?"
Ten minutes later, Suzanne was sitting in the backseat of a black SUV - Helena was left to surmise that the federal government's supply of them was endless - between two powerfully built male agents. She had insisted that she would not get into any car with Pete and Helena unless she was under the protection, and she underscored "protection," of agents not directly associated with the Warehouse. Directing Pete to take Interstate 495 to 95, she settled against the back of the seat and said nothing more. Helena looked out the window. The light was dimming, the gray clouds overhead steadily darkening, although it was only early afternoon. They, she had wasted so much time already, time that Myka didn't have. She pulled her jacket tighter around her, feeling a chill she hadn't felt when standing outside the building, waiting for Suzanne and her escort of agents to appear. She should be at home, buying Christmas presents for Drew and Myka online, including a few for Myka that she wouldn't allow her to unwrap until they were alone, naked, in their bed. Myka would pretend to be shocked, but Helena knew the look on Myka's face when she was curious to understand how something worked. Resting her forehead against the window, Helena closed her eyes. If she concentrated hard enough, she could pretend that no one was with her in the SUV except Myka, and they were on their way to Boise City -
"The next exit," Suzanne said suddenly, breaking the silence. "You'll follow the highway east a few miles. You can't miss it."
Shortly after Pete turned onto the highway, chain link fencing with barbed wire at the top marked property whose privacy appeared to be zealously guarded, although nothing disturbed the emptiness behind the fence until, a mile or two farther along, buildings appeared, some low-slung and close to the ground and others crowned with smokestacks. No clouds of steam and smoke overhung the buildings today, nor was it likely any had obscured the buildings in recent memory. Both the rust and the worn exteriors attested to the plant's age. Helena felt her stomach roll at the prospect of entering whichever building it was that housed Wade Farraday's hoard of collectibles. The main entrance was off to their left, and the SUV followed the road through an unmanned security gate, the barrier arms locked upright. They drove past employee parking lots long empty until the road broadened into a wide, cracked expanse of pavement fronting a building that, as attested to by its flagpole (lacking a flag), stone bench, and once-trimmed shrubbery, must have functioned as the administrative office. A number of smaller access roads led to the buildings farther in, radiating from the center area like spokes from a hub, and Suzanne directed Pete to take one of them. It wound between buildings that looked like hangars, although no planes were inside them, and others that looked like vintage Quonset huts, which suggested - and it would take no leap of faith to believe it - that the plant, decades ago, had been part of the military build-up during World War II.
Suzanne leaned over the front seat and pointed at a building set off from the others. "That's it."
Hair that had escaped from her clip brushed across the shoulder of Helena's jacket, and Helena remembered how it would fan across a pillow; she would cup the strands like water and let them spill over her hand. A more idle than tender moment, and idle moments had been almost as rare as tender moments between them, but something far different from this, Suzanne pointing out the building in which Farraday's collections had provided a steady supply of artefacts, some used as the objects of replication and others used . . . somehow . . . to power the replication. "My trips to see you, because you said getting away from the gallery was always difficult, they powered what went on in there?" Helena gestured toward the building that Pete was having the SUV cautiously approach, as if it might leap from its foundation to crush them. Which it might, Helena thought as she eyed the virtually windowless walls; she didn't find it difficult to believe that it might have developed a sentience like the Warehouse's. How could it harbor so many artefacts without borrowing something of their energy and, albeit at a greater remove, that of the artefacts' originators, the people whose emotions had given birth to the magic? So, yes, the building might be aware of their arrival and already sense the threat to its existence that they presented. Crush them or lock them forever behind its impressively new-looking door, which appeared to be the kind of door that would remain firm in its frame after everything else had been obliterated . . . in an explosion like the one she felt her bumbling efforts to save Myka's life would inevitably bring about.
As Pete slowed the SUV to a stop, Suzanne was still leaning over the seat, her lips close to Helena's ear. "Clint said that you had a special connection to the Warehouse. At first, he thought you might be willing to replicate artefacts for us -"
"Because I'm one of the natural elect?" Helena said derisively.
Suzanne laughed softly. "Because your file said you were an inventor and because you dealt with memorabilia. Like Wade, only smarter." She sat back on her seat and began to nudge one of the agents to let her out. "But you came to the gallery one day when Scott was there, and he has some sort of meter that can detect energy peculiar to artefacts. He thought one of the sculptures we had recently acquired might be an artefact, but you were the only thing that lit his meter up. He was so excited . . . he thought if he could capture whatever was emanating from you, enhance it . . . ." Her voice trailed off as if Scott and his ideas about artefacts and their energy was a subject of conversation that she had had to suffer long enough.
They gathered around her as she entered a series of numbers on keypad beside the door. It swung open, and, with an ironic quirk of her mouth, as if she realized her ushering them into the building wasn't unlike her ushering visitors into one of the Farraday Gallery's special exhibits, Suzanne followed them inside. The door's closing virtually eliminated the only light in the room, and Suzanne ran her hand along the wall for a switch. The fluorescents illuminated only empty space. Across from them was an overhead door, wide enough to let a car or truck in, which was shut and padlocked; next to it was a large elevator shaft, and she led them toward it. Like the door through which they had entered, it had a keypad beside it, and Suzanne typed in another series of numbers. After a few seconds, there was a loud rattle, and the elevator doors opened. There was no panel with floor numbers, no Stop or Alarm buttons, and as Pete stood against the side of the car, he muttered, "I'd love to get stuck in this with See and Hear No Evil," he jerked his thumb at the two agents who remained impassive, "and Harley Quinn over there." Once the doors closed, the elevator immediately began to descend.
When the elevator stopped with a jolt, Helena estimated they were several hundred feet below ground. They stepped into a dim, dingy hallway, its only light an incandescent bulb screwed into a socket overhead. At the end of the hall was a set of double doors, each having a square inset of wire-hatched glass. The hallway, doors, and light bulb were far older than the blinking array of scanners that took up a significant portion of the wall to the left of the doors. Their shoes sounded loud on the cement floor, and, sweeping her eyes over the crudely plastered walls, Helena guessed that this had been, at one time, an underground laboratory for experiments, which, because they were too incendiary for any number of reasons, had been shielded from public curiosity or outrage by being literally shielded from view. Yet the caution that Jaffee and his scientists had taken apparently hadn't been enough, given the reports of activity occurring at a closed Farraday plant just outside Washington D.C. Or, perhaps, once the replicated artefacts had been sufficiently "cooked," they had been moved to another building for testing before being distributed.
"This place was basically a bunker in the 1940s. Scott kept asking Wade what his family had going on here, but Wade would only shake his head." Suzanne grimaced, although Helena thought there was something, perhaps some passing fondness for the man, which prevented the contemptuous slant of her mouth from digging deeper into her cheek than it might have. "Wade acted like it was a big secret, but he didn't know what it was. He knows what he has a passion for collecting, and that's about it." She crooked a finger at Helena. "Stay close. The doors don't stay open long once I say 'Open Sesame.'"
Pete grabbed at Helena's arm before she could follow her. His face had an unwonted sternness. "I'm coming back for you once I can ditch Peter, Paul, and Mary here. This is not going to be like it was between Spock and Kirk at the end." He released her arm to rapidly move his finger between them. "You know, when Spock goes all noble and saves the Enterprise by going into that chamber with the mushroom cloud and Kirk runs to him but it's too late 'cause Spock's been irradiated and he's gray-looking and he has lumps on his face." The finger suddenly jabbed at her stomach. "It's not going to be like that, H.G."
"Of course not," she said, pushing his finger away, "because, darling, you're Chekov."
Suzanne was waiting for her in front of the scanners. "Any last words before I start the process?" Narrowing her eyes, as if she wanted to underscore that she wasn't joking, Suzanne added, "Scott lost more than one member of his team to those things in there. Until he developed a protectant, they walked around in hazmat suits, not that it did them much good."
"And yet that wasn't cautionary enough for Congressman Jaffee. Or you."
"You should understand the commitment to achieving a goal better than most," Suzanne said frowning, Helena's response seeming to have disappointed her. Then the frown was consumed by an innocent smile. "I was helpless under an artefact's power. But you weren't. You knew what you were doing when you killed all those people, the men who murdered your daughter, the Warehouse agent, the boys you sent to Egypt. You were committed to a mission, Helena."
Not a goal or a mission, because they implied a purpose, and there had been no purpose in trying to raise Christina from the dead. Bringing her back wouldn't have stopped wars or fed the starving multitudes. She had been a grieving mother, who, unused to loss or remorse or the recognition that there were forces larger than she, had decided not just that she couldn't accept her daughter's death but that she wouldn't, she didn't have to. After all, she was H.G. Wells, the brightest sun in her universe or any other. Not a goal, not a mission, only the blind, heedless submission to a toxic combination of pride and rage, because to truly grieve would have been to accept that Christina was beyond any power she could summon to reach her. She didn't know if she could save Myka, she wasn't entirely sure she understood what it was that she needed to do, but there would be nothing beyond this. She would succeed or fail, but it would end here, with her. There would be no one else swept along with her in this particular madness. Irene . . . Claudia would protect Irene.
No last words, really, but she did have a last question. "When did you stop needing me?"
"One day Scott's team wasn't careful enough with some of Wade's collections. That was always Scott's excuse, but an accident was bound to happen, wasn't it? Playing with things more powerful than you?" The mocking glint in Suzanne's eyes was unmistakable. "I don't know whether some items touched each other or what it was, but there was an explosion. It took out part of the lab, and three team members died. The only thing that was left was this black rock-like thing. It kind of looks like lava - you'll see it in there. But Scott said it was powerful enough to move the Earth from its orbit. He was able to stabilize it, and it made the replicating so much easier." Another frown, but it had a sarcastic slant. "Or were you asking about us? It wasn't always about the artefacts with you . . . you are gifted, I can't deny that. But I never saw anybody run so hard and yet stand in one place. Then she came to the gallery that one afternoon, and I knew what it was you had been running from."
Helena only stared at her. After a moment, Suzanne shrugged and turned around to face the scanners. Once the retinal and fingerprint scans were completed, a string of numbers appeared on a monitor and Suzanne leaned in closer to say them, clearly and calmly. The doors, with a shudder, began to open.
"Good luck," she whispered.
Suzanne might have been sincere. She might not have been. It didn't matter. She didn't matter now that she had served her purpose, but Helena couldn't resist brushing Suzanne's ear with her lips and saying just as softly, "I'll see you soon." Suzanne flinched, but Helena was already past her, slipping between the doors.
She had expected to see heaps of board games, snuff boxes, nineteenth century firearms, and everything else Wade Farraday had ever purchased with his fortune, but there were only a dozen items or so lining a few tables, which were dwarfed by the size of the room. It had the shape of a cavern, more round than square, with a definite arch to its ceiling. She was vaguely reminded of the churches she had visited in Rome when she had been a very young Warehouse agent sent to the city to retrieve a surplice said to have healing powers. Many, especially the grander ones, had been shadowy and cool and vaulted like this. She should have been humbled by the vastness those arches had contained and the greater vastness at which they had pointed as metaphor, grateful that she wasn't crushed by such divine omnipotence, but she had been excited instead, pirouetting and marveling at how high she might climb if the ideas bouncing around in her brain could be realized.
Off to her left was an enclosed room, walled entirely in glass, in which she suspected Scott had more or less safely observed the work of his team while they had exposed themselves day after day to the random combination of multiple properties. Had he even been here the day of the explosion? She couldn't see any evidence of one; there were no marks on the walls, no gouges in the floor. Approaching the closest table, she surveyed the items on it. None of them looked familiar to her, a metal lunchbox, a pair of workboots, a wire rack holding old LPs, a fishing rod, a half-deflated basketball. Feeling a surge of frustration, she glanced at the objects on the other tables. She could inspect them, turn them over in her hands, and be no closer to figuring out how to "de-artefact" them than she was now. She didn't have the luxury of being stymied. From her researcher's description of Wade Farraday's various enthusiasms, she had been hoping to see something of his collection of nineteenth century true crime memorabilia. She needed to start from something of hers. She didn't think it, she felt it, as unerringly as Pete must feel a vibe. And where was that black rock, as Suzanne had called it, that seemed both to generate the replication and increase the replicated artefacts' power? She would need that too.
Then to the right of her, hidden in the dark reaches of the lab was another enclosed room. Its walls weren't made of glass but of something thicker, like cement, and she had noticed it only because the area had seemed too square, too block-like to be natural. She ran to its door and shook its handle, fearing that it would be locked, but the door opened, and lights automatically flickered on as she entered the room. It was much larger than it had appeared from the outside, and in the center of the room, on a large workspace, encased in the substance that had protected the piece of black glass she had found on Gene Butler, was the . . . rock . . . that Suzanne had described. Next to it was a plastic tub, nothing more dramatic or unusual than the kind of storage container she could purchase at a department store, the kind she might use to store Christmas decorations should she be so sentimental as to want to decorate a tree with Myka and Drew. And she desperately wanted the opportunity to be that sentimental.
It was hard to move, as hard as it had been to mount the stairs to the top floor of the school in Ellis. But now she knew what force she was pressing against, the remnant of the artefacts - and the people - caught in the explosion, all the fear and anguish and whatever else had been trapped in those objects, and in the scientists, and her need to move was even greater. So she forced herself to take a step and then another until she was in front of the tub, and her lungs were laboring so hard that it wasn't difficult to believe that the next breath she would expel would be filled with blood. Part of it was caused by that artefact-like thing, but part of it was caused by what she realized was in the container, the evidence from the crime scene at her cousin's home. Much it was brittle and crumbling, but she recognized the sheets from the bed and Christina's shift. Something rusted lay underneath the fabric, and Helena realized that the objects weren't only from her cousin's home but also from the warehouse in which she had tortured and killed Lebecque. She knew without taking out the rusted bit of metal that it was a knife, or what remained of it. Michaud must have kept all of this, long after Poule and Lebecque were dead and she had disappeared into the ether, still obsessed with the killers of her daughter and then, later, the killer of the killers.
She didn't know if she would be able to touch more than one of the items, the pressure that had initially bore down on her like a collapsing wall was narrowing and concentrating its force; she could almost feel it drilling through her seeking what was in the container. So she would hold the most precious of the items, if she could hold only one. If she would have time for only one. Gently, she gathered the decaying folds of her daughter's gown and began to lift it up and out, and as she did so, she no longer saw it but a woman hurrying toward a hospital. It was the unevenness of her gait, her feet seeming to skim over the pavement then stagger forward, that told Helena who the woman was. Not the woman's old-fashioned dress, whose long skirt she carelessly ground into the street as she hurried, nor her hat, an elaborate structure of fabric and frame that the woman had heedlessly crushed to keep it on her head as she ran. The gait was the peculiar hobbled gait of a woman who was running or, more accurately, attempting to run in a multi-layered dress that was designed to coerce a woman's body into a prescribed shape not conform itself to her. The horse-drawn carriages that the woman flung herself between and the brick or amalgam of crushed rock that the woman's feet scraped across only told her the woman's time period, not her identity. Helena hadn't needed to see her face, only her gait, because its unevenness wasn't solely the product of the dress or the pavement. It was the manifestation of a halting, incomplete understanding that her daughter was in that hospital, in an operating theater turned temporary morgue, a disbelief so profound that she stumbled every time she recalled reading the telegram that had told her Christina was dead.
Helena remembered the dizziness, the inability to coax her body into coordinated movement, when she had climbed down from the cab she had taken from the train station to run clumsily, lurchingly across the busy street, as if she were literally drunk on the shock of it. Then the woman stopped and turned around, which Helena couldn't remember having done because there had been nothing in her awareness except the hospital, and the dark eyes, her own, stared at her, and Helena no longer only remembered the disbelief and strange sense of panic that had enveloped her, she felt it as she had first felt it 115 years ago. Something began to loosen within her, and although she had to grit her teeth before she could suck in a breath, the power in that makeshift lab bending her, breaking her, she cried out, not because of the pain caused by the force filling the room but because she realized that she would experience what was to come all over again and be just as helpless to stop it . . . .
Charles had refused to let her go alone into the operating theater. He and Georges had been waiting for her outside the room, Georges turning his eyes away from her, his hands working the brim of his hat so violently that he seemed about to tear it off. She stilled his hands, but he continued to look away from her, saying to the wall in a rapid French, the words brokenly tumbling out, "It was so hot and she had been so trying. Patrice and the boys and I took a stroll along the river and left her with Marie, thinking we would all be in a better humor later." She didn't say anything but left her hands lightly resting on his until Charles cupped her elbow and led her to the doors opening into the theater. He hesitated, his hand on the door. His eyes were red-rimmed and his moustache, usually tidily groomed, was wet and the hairs askew. As he regarded her, his eyes brimmed with tears and he worked a handkerchief from his pocket, rubbing it under his nose. "You don't have to do this, Helena. Georges and I can take care of all the . . . necessities. I've seen her, and no mother should see her child like that."
Giving no sign that she had heard him, she entered the room, her glance instinctively avoiding the table in the center of the room and the small figure on it. Instead she focused her attention on the two men standing next to it. The taller one, with the oiled beard and the air of command, she quickly dismissed, concentrating on the other, more diffident-appearing man approaching her. His suit was workaday, although freshly cleaned and pressed, and his hair, notwithstanding being thin and unremarkable in color, had been parted with precision and brushed flat to his head. "Miss Wells," he said in carefully enunciated English, "I am Inspector Michaud." Helena appreciated the fact that he didn't resort to the false delicacy of calling her Mrs. Wells. She had never been ashamed that she was an unmarried woman with a child, and she sensed no disapprobation from Inspector Michaud. What she did sense from him was a preference for accuracy, regardless of how uncomfortable it made others, such as the man, the doctor it must be, behind him, who had grimaced at the "Miss." Inspector Michaud didn't attempt to take her hand, offering her instead a slight bow and then turning and inclining his head in Charles' direction. "What happened to your daughter is insupportable, but rest assured, Miss Wells, I will not rest until I have brought her killers to justice."
Had it come from anyone other than this man who had the mien of a head bookkeeper she would have made some withering comment about letting competence take the place of grand pronouncements, but he had said it with such earnestness and quiet certainty that she believed he would literally go without sleep until Christina's murderers were found. Deceptively mild blue eyes were fixed on her, and she nodded under the inspector's unwavering gaze. The doctor was intoning his condolences, in French, and while Helena had no difficulty understanding the rhetoric of his sympathy, his solemnity irritated her. Charles was reduced to blinking, recognizing only "H.G. Wells" among the doctor's words, and Michaud hastily explained, "Dr. Tailleur wishes to express his deepest sympathy and he regrets meeting the famous H.G. Wells," Michaud again dipped his head toward Charles, "and his sister under such tragic circumstances." With a delicate cough, he added, "We are fortunate that Dr. Tailleur could assist us. He is a physician of much renown, and the investigation will benefit from his expertise." He half-turned toward the doctor and, in much more fluid French, repeated the flattery. There had been a perfunctory quality to it, in both English and French, offered as if the inspector well knew that the doctor's self-importance did not easily suffer the presence of another who could expect even greater deference.
That was why Christina was here, in her own private morgue, rather than sharing space with the nameless whores and pickpockets in the city's great public morgue or being consigned to the care of whatever mortuary Patrice and Georges would have chosen, the Inspector Michauds of the Sureté having already shuttled the investigation to a dusty file room in favor of pursuing the newest one to which they had been assigned. Without the name of H.G. Wells attached to it, the murders of a little girl and maid during a failed burglary would have received no more than a mention in the newspapers and prompted no more than some rapidly sketched signs of the cross from the men and women who read it. The surge of bitterness was automatic, but Helena had only to look over at Charles, once more wiping his eyes and nose with his handkerchief, to feel an equal rush of shame. He had been more father than uncle to Christina, the only father she would likely have ever known, and he had provided her with a constancy that Helena hadn't. Christina had never trailed woebegonely after her beloved Uncle Charles asking him when he was coming back from Spain or 'Rocco. Helena had never fallen short in letting her daughter know she was loved, but that was the only thing she had given Christina in abundance.
There was one other thing she could give her daughter. Her voice sounding hoarse and uncertain, she asked, "May I see her?" It didn't seem an odd question to ask because that body on the table wasn't only Christina, wasn't only her daughter, she was also evidence of a crime, property, in a sense, of the Sureté. Now she also belonged to Inspector Michaud.
"Of course," he said gently. He escorted her to the table, which wasn't large, but Christina was short and slight for her age, and she made it seem bigger than it was. The inspector motioned to Dr. Tailleur to step aside. A sheet had been drawn up to Christina's chin and her head was turned to the side, as if she were still angry with her mother, even now. Helena knew why Christina's head had been placed in that position, what it was attempting to hide; the flurry of telegrams she and Charles had exchanged while she was in Vienna had provided her a few details about Christina's death, but she needed to see it, just as she needed to know everything that had happened that afternoon.
She waited until she was sure that her hand wouldn't tremble, and then she touched Christina's chin and moved it carefully toward her. She heard the doctor sharply inhale and twist away from the table muttering an imprecation, against her she was fairly certain. Perhaps she was unnatural. Charles uttered a choked "Dear God, Helena, she's not one of your damnable experiments," but she paid him no attention. Christina's skin was cool but not too cool to the touch. In the morgues, bodies were often frozen, stored with ice to slow decomposition. She would have started screaming if she had had to imagine Christina shut away in a drawer or compartment, slowly stiffening, freezing. She bit down on the inside of her lip, hard enough that she could taste the blood, when the other side of Christina's face came into view. Her daughter's face had become a macabre drama mask, one half the little girl with black lashes so long and thick that they seemed to sweep her skin like fringe and a nose more like an adult's than a child's, the bridge prominent and well-defined. Helena had always believed it foretold of a woman of strong convictions, which would have made for an . . . interesting . . . adolescence. But the other half . . . . The bones and eye socket were crushed and her temple had been so battered that the side of her head was bowed in.
"Christina favored sleeping on her side. She had been asleep."
"That is my thought," Michaud said as softly. "She never knew they were there."
"She slept through bells, train whistles. Her room was upstairs, away from the kitchen. If that's where they entered, she wouldn't have heard them or the maid." Helena had withdrawn her hand, but her eyes hadn't moved from Christina's face. It was Michaud who pulled the sheet completely over her; Helena seemed unaware of the gesture, her eyes continuing to bore through the sheet. "They were angry," she said. "She hadn't woken. She wasn't any threat, and even if they had wanted to ensure that there was no one who could have heard or seen them in the house, one blow would have been enough for such a small child."
He nodded. "They robbed the wrong house. Down the street from your cousin's home, there is a family, the mother, who came into an inheritance. The rumor was that she had inherited some fine jewels. The house numbers are similar and the family has two young boys, like your cousin and her husband." He hesitated. "They were animals, doing what they did to your daughter and to the maid. But they didn't . . . ."
"They didn't violate her," Helena said calmly, which evoked another "Dear God" from Charles. "Then I will spare them that." She didn't realize she had said it aloud until, with the inching progression of a minute hand on a clock, she turned her head to look at him and saw, not surprise, but a strangely pleading expression.
"You must give me time, Miss Wells."
She didn't reply. Instead she leaned over her daughter and folded the sheet back just enough to reveal the unmarred portion of her forehead. She kissed it and then walked away from the table, her steps gaining speed and authority. Nearing Charles, she said crisply, "We must make arrangements to take her back with us." Pivoting toward Dr. Tailleur, who was staring at her as if she were more monstrous than Christina's killers, she said in a voice that would brook no objection, "You should be through or almost through with your examination, doctor."
"Helena, Helena," Charles was saying. She impatiently spun around. There was much to do, so much to do, and yet he wasn't walking with her to the doors. They had to arrange for a coffin and for the delivery of Christina to the ship and, yes, book passage for themselves as well on that ship to London, whichever ship it was. Not tomorrow, there wasn't enough time, but the day after - "Helena," he said urgently. The pity in his face was worse than the revulsion in Dr. Tailleur's. "Helena, it's too late . . . ."
"What do you mean it's too late?"
"It's been three days." When she continued to look at him in puzzlement, he repeated patiently, "It's been three days . . . it's too late. Too late to take her with us to London, to arrange for her to be buried there." He drew back his shoulders, ready for her outburst. "Georges and I have already made arrangements for her to be buried here." Almost coaxingly he said, "She'll be in the same cemetery as our great-grandparents. She won't be alone."
She remembered Christina's resentment at having to come to Paris, her refusal to look up from her book as their cab rolled through the streets, her glowering at Patrice and Georges' house, her rudeness to their children, the boys who, in Helena's mind at least, would have become her daughter's boon companions by the time she returned. Of all the things she had imagined about Christina's month in Paris, the landmarks she would visit, the streets she would wander - always within sight of Patrice - her efforts to speak French like a true Parisian by the time she next she saw her mother, Helena had never imagined this room or Christina in it. "She hated Paris," she whispered. "I can't lay her to rest in a place she hated, Charles."
"She hated it as children hate," he said, a fond half-smile briefly appearing, "with a great temporary vehemence. You would have come back to find her refusing to leave." He began to rub her arms as if he were trying to warm her against a chill. "The cemetery is very nice, you'll see. It will remind you of the parks in London that the two of you played in . . . and that little grove close to the cottage you rented last summer. She'll feel at home there, I promise you." Suddenly, she didn't know how, he was the one taking command, hooking his arm around hers, looking over his shoulder and nodding twice, signaling their leave-taking to Michaud and the doctor. A part of her scolded her for the breach in manners she was displaying by not thanking them, but it wasn't gratitude she felt for being permitted to see her daughter's ravaged body and to hear how she died, why she died. Helena knew that when she allowed herself to feel she would feel many things about being in this room, but gratitude wouldn't be among them.
Georges clapped his hat back onto his head as she and Charles came out of the operating theater, the brim so torqued from his worrying of it that the hat didn't rest evenly on his head but slanted to the side, as though he had put it on after an afternoon spent at a brewery. Which seemed much the more appealing place to her than the hotel room that Charles had reserved for her. She could easily crawl into a bottle and never crawl out. Georges took her other arm, and they shuffled, the three of them, down the hallway. Half-an-hour ago, no, a hundred years ago, she had walked unsupported down this hallway, staggering under the weight of what she couldn't comprehend but leaning on no one, because she had never had cause to rely on anyone but herself. She didn't need Charles and Georges' assistance now, but she didn't refuse the courtesy, didn't resist the condescension always at the heart of such gestures. She was no weak, helpless thing in need of a man's greater strength, but her knees felt strangely unhinged and the hallway seemed to stretched into infinity.
They buried Christina the day that she and Charles were scheduled to depart for London. The cemetery was as he had described it, park-like and quiet, and Christina's grave was close to her great-great grandparents'; it was shaded by the boughs of a tree whose trunk was so wide and gnarled that it might have been a sapling when Charlemagne ruled Europe. There had been just the four of them at the gravesite, and afterward she and Charles had returned to the hotel, declining Patrice and Georges' invitation to join them at his sister's home for the noon meal. Patrice and Georges and their sons were staying with his sister and her family, temporarily they said, but they showed little inclination to return to their own home. When they had asked her if they should send Christina's things to her in London, Helena had curtly told them they could feel free to burn every item or to give it all away. She wanted none of it.
When she and Charles arrived at the hotel, she went to her room to pack while he went on a stroll, determined to experience a few minutes of peace or, better yet, forgetfulness. Having never completely unpacked, Helena listlessly stuffed back into her trunk what little she had taken from it. A knock sounded at her door, and the youth who stood outside it handed her a slip of paper and then remained standing in the doorway until she remembered to give him a coin. The note was from Inspector Michaud asking her to meet him in the hotel's lobby.
He was sitting with military stiffness on one of the benches that lined the lobby's walls. When he saw her, he sprang to his feet to intercept her. As he bowed slightly in greeting, she noticed that the part in his hair was no less straight, and that the hair itself had been subdued by the dint of much brushing to lay close, very close, to his head. Asking her to walk with him in the hotel's garden, he set a businesslike pace toward a side door that let onto an abbreviated but well-tended garden. It offered a gravel path that wound between flower beds in which late summer blooms drooped like sleepy children under the August sun.
"Are you sure you don't want to wait for my brother to return?" Helena believed she could identify every occasion when a man had chosen to discuss a matter of import with her first rather than Charles, her "husband," or the male Warehouse agent with whom she was partnered, and they hadn't been numerous.
Michaud decisively shook his head. "I wish to speak to you." Clasping his hands behind his back as they followed the path, he said, "It didn't take me long after you entered the operating theater to recognize what you were. I had thought until then that it was your brother or your cousin who had asked me to meet with you at the hospital. Of course, one of them had arranged it - I suspect Mr. LeCompte since Mr. Wells' French may not have been up to the task - but you wanted to meet me there." He had offered her no more than a slight upturn of his lips when he commented on the adequacy of Charles' French, and she didn't realize until it was gone that it had been a smile. "For a moment I believed I was there to offer you the platitudes and assurances that every grieving parent wants to hear. But you didn't want those." He stopped to look at her intently. His eyes were bloodshot, and she suspected that he hadn't slept much, if at all, since she had seen him. As he had promised, he was taking no rest. "You're a hunter, Miss Wells, as am I, and you were there to pick up the trail of your quarry."
She didn't attempt to deny it. It was strange to think so, though she had known only strangeness the past few days, but this man with his clerk's demeanor and, apparently, a clerk's devotion to precision knew her better than her brother or even Caturanga. He said quietly, "That's why I asked you then, it's why I'm asking you now to give me time. Give me time to bring them to justice."
"Because justice is what separates us from the beasts in the field?" Her sarcasm beat angrily against the inspector's pale, perspiring face.
He shook out a neatly folded handkerchief and blotted his forehead and cheeks. "Many things separate us from the beasts in the field, including vengeance." The look he continued to give wasn't diminishing in intensity. "Justice is what separates man from God."
"You need to read your Bible more closely." Her sarcasm was no less harsh. "God, if He exists, may be different from man, but He is not just."
"Being just does not require being merciful or loving," he countered softly. "Justice views us all with a dispassionate eye. I am no more important than you, and you are no more important, before the law, than your daughter's killers." He refolded his handkerchief before putting it in his pocket. "Vengeance takes more than it gives. I hope you don't have to discover that, Miss Wells."
"Then you and justice had best hurry, inspector."