by Julie Drew
“I’ve got a headache, I’m gonna head out,” she said abruptly and left the table for the ballroom door before Lydia could respond. Tesla recognized the familiar, dark mindset that was descending fast, the sense of loss and loneliness that always preceded it, and she didn’t want to be here when it really hit and overwhelmed her. That feeling crushed her periodically, with the accumulated weight of the never-ending desire to have known her mother, to have her here and now. Tesla knew exactly how the rest of the night would play out, as it did each time her grief built up to this point: the desperation for a sense of herself that she knew, she knew, would be so much stronger if she only had her mother.
How I wish you were here, she thought, rocked to her core to find that it wasn’t her mother at all that she wanted this time. It was her father.
CHAPTER 30
Tesla walked in the front door—after she’d opened it with the key she now had to carry everywhere, thanks to Finn. He’d told Aunt Jane that they never locked their doors and she’d made a huge deal out of it. Tesla stood in the doorway to the living room and watched Jane, who clearly thought she was alone.
The TV was on, a sappy Lifetime movie by the looks of it, although Jane paid no attention to it. She looked instead at the photograph she held in her hands, a framed picture of Tasya and Greg, taken on their wedding day, the one that usually sat on the mantel.
The look on Jane’s face was what gave Tesla pause. Some war clearly waged within Jane as the play of emotions changed the expression on the woman’s usually placid, unreadable face. Tesla saw anger, then tenderness, watched Jane close her eyes briefly as she flung the photo away from her onto the sofa. A look of disgust distorted her pretty features, and then it was gone as her eyes flew open and she looked right at Tesla.
“Tesla,” she said lightly as she placed a magazine over the photograph on the sofa next to her. “You’re home earlier than I expected. How was the party?” Jane deftly picked up the magazine—with the framed picture of Tesla’s parents safely hidden beneath—and moved them to the coffee table. She patted the sofa cushion next to her. “Come tell me all about it.”
Tesla sat and bent down to unlace her boots. “It was fun,” she said, her voice somewhat muffled. After she’d kicked off her boots, she sat back against the cushions, faced Jane, and curled her legs up under her. “Really fancy—it’s a gorgeous place—and everybody was all decked out.”
“Did you dance?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. The music was old, but I liked it. No vocals, just jazz. Big Band, Lydia called it.”
“She’d know,” Jane laughed. “What is she, a hundred and eight by now?”
Tesla laughed, but felt a little uncomfortable. Lydia was really very sweet to her. And to Max. “I danced with the new director. He said some nice stuff about my mom and dad. You know, professional stuff.”
Jane nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me. Your parents are actually pretty well-known in their field, you know. Your dad’s work is widely read around the world, it’s considered very important.”
“Yeah, it seems weird, though. You know, he’s just my dad.”
Jane smiled. “I know, and I think that’s how he wants it. To just be your and Max’s dad to you guys.”
“I miss him.” Tesla looked at her hands in her lap.
“I know. Maybe you could tell him that when he gets back.”
There was no condemnation in Jane’s tone, no reproof, but Tesla felt it nonetheless. “It’s not just me, you know,” she said, defensive despite her efforts. “If we don’t get along, it can’t just be me.”
“I’m sure he would agree with you,” Jane said. “But in order to figure out what happened between you two, and figure out how to make it better—you actually have to have a conversation.”
Tesla said nothing, and Jane refused to help her out.
“Yeah. I guess.” That was as much as Tesla would admit, and Jane was wise enough to let it go.
“Your dad’s absence is tough on Max,” Jane said. “I’m a little worried about him.”
Tesla looked up again, alert and no trace of sullenness left on her face. “What can I do?” she asked quickly.
“I’m not sure there’s anything you can do,” Jane said immediately. “He doesn’t remember his mother, and his father is gone, possibly in danger, and now you’re the one who has to jump each time. He’s still just a little boy. He’s scared.”
“God, could I be any more of a shit?” Tesla wailed suddenly.
“This isn’t on you, Tesla. You’ve been brave to go, and you’ve done what you’ve been asked to do. I’m here at night, but I have to work. And frankly, even when I’m here, it’s not the same. I’m not really part of the family.”
Tesla opened her mouth to assure Jane that she was, indeed, part of the family, but then she closed it again. There were too many unanswered questions. Why Lydia was so suspicious of Jane. Why Jane seemed so evasive when Sam identified her as the woman he’d seen with Sebastian Nilsen. Why she’d looked angry and disgusted at the photograph of her parents.
The truth was, Tesla had to admit, that she didn’t trust Jane. Why would she hide information about her dad, about Nilsen, if it wasn’t because she was somehow involved?
Tesla excused herself then, said she was tired and wanted to go to bed, and she went upstairs, closed her door, and uploaded from her camera to her laptop the photos she’d taken at her dad’s office. While the files transferred, she tossed the bronze boots into a corner, thankful she had become adept with her cast. She pulled the dress over her head and prepared to send it in the same direction as the boots, but instead she stood in the middle of her room, looked at the dress for a moment, and then hung it up—on a hanger—in her closet. Whoa, she thought, a wry twist to her lips.
She left the velvet and copper wire choker around her neck, but not because Finn liked it, and her hair still loosely gathered in what Beckett had called a chignon. She pulled on an old brown T-shirt—it actually said “Brown” on it, from the university in Providence—and her crumpled boyfriend jeans, which she picked up from the floor. She sat on the bed with her laptop until the early hours. She studied the images, read and reread the one document she’d found with the drawings, blissfully unaware that at least two people watched her lighted window from outside and wondered what, exactly, she was up to.
There didn’t seem to be any mystery at all about what she’d found in that last drawer in her father’s office. The one-page letter, on Institute letterhead, merely confirmed her father’s appointment to the board of the organization, and thanked him for his service on the ad hoc committee for Facilities Development. Whatever that was. And the two architectural drawings were pretty easily decipherable, at least to Tesla. The exterior elevation appeared to be set on the university campus, on the quad, but it certainly didn’t exist there now. Tesla knew the campus too well not to recognize the setting, and in particular the L-shaped physics building adjacent. The plan was for a small structure, at least for a university, with a few offices and classrooms, an auditorium, a posh conference room on the second floor, and not much else. The elevation suggested it was an important structure, though; its classical lines, fluted columns, and other ornamentation suggested a formality and a solemnity usually reserved for high level administrators or alumni, the ones who either raised lots of money, or gave lots of money to their alma mater. The edges of the hospital sat to the left of the property, the physics building, clearly marked, to the right. But oddly, the new structure—had it existed—would have sat in the center of a very large piece of land that, at least in the drawing, would essentially go unused. It would have been unusual, to say the least, for the university to allow so much green space, unless it was dedicated to student-use, like the quad, which was what this piece of land had eventually been used for. On the drawing, however, all that undeveloped property was heavily landscaped, filled with trees and bushes, but without paths or benches or open spaces, like the quad, where students co
uld study, or play ultimate Frisbee, or lay out in the sun with friends.
The other drawing, Tesla realized within minutes, was surely a blueprint of the Bat Cave. At first she was confused by the lack of windows—there wasn’t a single one—but when she realized that the majority of the space was dedicated to one enormous room, she knew. So her father had been a part of the Bat Cave from its conception, or at least privy to it, but she didn’t see how that could be significant.
Tesla sat quietly, a worried frown on her face, and wondered what, if anything, either Jane’s or Lydia’s agencies had found. Had they found any new leads? Had they heard from Nilsen? There must be a way for her to help move things along.
She was frustrated, and suddenly she just couldn’t sit around any longer and wait for someone else to keep her informed and give her some chore to keep her busy. She pressed her lips into a hard, unyielding line her father would have certainly recognized, and with swift, assured movements she shut down her computer, pulled on her Teva sandals, and snuck out the front door and into the cool dawn air.
“Has there been any progress in my dad’s case?” Tesla asked without preamble.
“Nothing concrete as of yet. I’m sorry,” Lydia answered, her hands folded on her desk.
This was the first time Tesla had been in Lydia’s private office. She’d arrived at the old house just as the sun began to light the sidewalks outside, and Bizzy, rumpled from sleep, had answered the door. Lydia had appeared, fully dressed, before Biz had even shut the door behind Tesla. The older woman had taken one look at Tesla’s face and ushered her into this room.
“You’ll just have to be patient,” Lydia said. “We’ve all got to be patient, and trust the professionals—they work around the clock, my dear.”
“Okay, but we maybe need to approach this differently,” said Tesla.
“What do you mean?” Lydia asked.
“I mean, let’s look at what we found the last two times I jumped.”
“Alright, let’s,” Lydia said.
“First, we found audio tapes of my arrythmia,” Tesla said. “Then we found evidence of Nilsen’s theft of my mom’s data, and a copy of the article he published from it that ruined his career.”
“Yes, Tesla, I’m aware of all this,” Lydia said.
“I know, but wait,” Tesla said hurriedly. “Next, I find blueprints of the Bat Cave.”
“I thought you deleted those files,” Lydia said sternly.
“I did,” Tesla replied smoothly, without even a twinge of guilt for the lie. “But not before I looked at them.” She had decided she was under no obligation to tell anyone what she did or thought. The others all seemed to have agendas, not to mention secrets, so she’d keep her own counsel from now on.
“And what did you find?” asked Lydia as she took her hands off the desk and put them in her lap.
“Not much,” Tesla said, a little deflated. “At least not at a glance. It seems pretty clear the interior blueprint is of the Bat Cave, and that it was originally intended to be underneath a building that was never built.”
“Yes, Finnegan’s research has already uncovered that part of the story.”
“Oh,” Tesla said, surprised. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Perhaps because you don’t sign his paychecks, dear.”
Tesla bristled. “Yeah, fine, but this is about my dad, and it’s not like you’ve changed your mind and decided to keep me out of the loop, right?
“That is true, but Tesla, you both just returned, he had to write up his report, and he turned that report in yesterday just before the gala—and you left early, so there was no time for conversation later, I might add. I was up at four a.m. to read his report. You’d have been filled in this morning, whether you had marched over here to demand it or not.”
“What did Finn find out?” Tesla asked. She refused to be sidetracked by Lydia’s attempted guilt trip.
“It appears the building that was supposed to be over the Bat Cave, where the quad now sits, was intended to house the Institute, but the necessary funds were never procured and they came up short.”
“What does that mean—and how is it important to us?”
“What it means is that the Institute’s board—which, by the way, included both your parents—approved the plans, oversaw fundraising, acquired all of the necessary permits and so on, but in the end there simply was not enough money to complete the project. The Bat Cave was constructed—obviously—but the plan for the Institute’s home—the public façade—had to be abandoned.”
Tesla’s disappointment was obvious. “So none of this is relevant to my dad, to Sebastian Nilsen? All that work, and the additional jump back in time, were for nothing?”
“That, I’m afraid, is mostly what we do in this business,” Lydia said, her voice sympathetic. “We chase leads, we do the research, we dedicate untold man—and woman—hours, and most of the time we hit dead ends. It’s often an agonizingly slow process, and filled with disappointment. We learn not to get our hopes up.”
“But why would my dad have this stuff locked up?” Tesla asked. She stood up and began to pace, no longer able to sit still as the days went by and they seemed no closer to an answer.
“I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. It doesn’t make sense to me, either,” Lydia said smoothly. “Have you discussed this with your Aunt Jane?”
“No,” said Tesla absently. She knew it was obsessive, this focus on why her father had locked up these particular documents, when it seemed they could have sat out on the coffee table for all they were worth.
“Good. I think it’s best to let her do her work, not distract her with these unproductive avenues. And you should try to get some rest, dear. You look tired.”
“I’m not going to go lie down,” Tesla snapped. “My dad’s been kidnapped, and you obviously think my aunt is somehow on the wrong side of all this. I’ve got too much to worry about and try to figure out to think about a nap, for god’s sake.”
Lydia looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and Tesla felt the heat rise to her face. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
“I understand completely,” Lydia said. “Some rest would help, though.”
Tesla nodded. Afraid of what else she might say if she opened her mouth again, she walked out of Lydia’s office, tears of anger and worry welled up in her eyes.
As Tesla rounded the corner of the hall, where early morning sunlight reflected off the walls and made her way toward the parlor from Lydia’s office, she heard voices she recognized and stopped.
“—I don’t see how this is any of your business, Ford,” said Sam, his voice pitched to a conversational volume, but cold and steely in tone.
“This kind of thing is everybody’s business,” Finn said easily, casually. Too casually, Tesla thought in alarm. Couldn’t Sam hear the controlled anger in Finn’s voice?
“And what, exactly, is ‘this kind of thing?’” Sam asked, his voice now equally dangerous.
“Abusive, creepy. You know, restraining-order worthy.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” Sam demanded, angry but clearly confused.
“Where were you last night, after the party at the Institute?” Finn asked.
“What?” said Sam, startled. “Who do you think you are?” He switched to offense. “Are you spying on me?”
“Hang on, mate, take it easy,” Joley said, and Tesla heard the sound of hurried footsteps. What is going on? she thought as she inched closer to the doorway of the parlor so she could hear more clearly.
“I asked you a question,” Sam said, his voice like a whiplash.
“Yes, you did,” said Finn, unfazed. “And I asked you one. Where were you last night?”
“It seems you already know the answer to that question. Which means you were there, too. Maybe you should tell us why.”
“Finn doesn’t answer to you,” said Bizzy, her sweet voice uncharacteristically aggressive.
�
�And I don’t answer to him, either,” said Sam.
There was silence for a moment, and then Finn said, “I was there, you’re right. I’m there most nights.”
“And you have the nerve to accuse me?” Sam said, his voice much louder now, and accompanied by the sound of hurried steps, perhaps even a brief scuffle punctuated by Joley, who shouted, “Both of you, bloody calm down,” with such authority that all the other sounds ceased.
Tesla’s heart pounded, and she recognized the fight-or-flight response coursing through her body, the adrenaline, that new tautness in her body, a sense of being pulled. She knew she shouldn’t eavesdrop, but there was pretty much nothing she could think of that would make her stop at this point.
“I was there, and I’m frequently there, because it’s my job,” Finn said, his voice deliberately calm and matter-of-fact. “What’s your excuse?”
Sam waited before he spoke, and when he finally did, Tesla understood why. His voice now matched Finn’s in its quiet, calm delivery.
“I keep an eye on Tesla, too, though I don’t get paid to do it,” Sam said. “And I followed her over here because I was worried about her. I don’t know you people at all. I intend to make sure she’s safe.”
“That’s your explanation?” Finn said, his voice now pitched, maddeningly, to suggest amusement. “You’re just here to serve, to make the planet safer for everybody? Nothing personal in this for you?”
“No more than there is for you,” Sam said, his words heavily weighted.
Finn laughed. “At least I know the difference between liking a girl and stalking her.”
The sounds of a struggle, an incomprehensible shout from Bizzy, all in a split second, sent Tesla around the corner and into the room before she’d thought it through, her body acting on instinct alone as her entire being was reduced down to one coherent thought: protect him.
“Stop it!” she shouted at the sight of Sam and Finn desperate to get their hands on each other, Joley in between to keep them apart. Bizzy stood nearby, wide-eyed and horrified.
