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Chapter or Story
Part 21
Ashe, New York
"Out of the mouths of babes..." the sweeper began.
"So he was right?" Helen eyed Sam, hiding a smile. "I had to wonder."
"Can you doubt it?" Sam reached forward and gently touched the side of her face unmarred by bruising.
"Not after having seen your face when you came in." She leaned against him as he put his arm around her. "After seeing that, you'll never be able to deny any of your feelings to me again."
"You're assuming that I'd want to."
"I assume nothing." Her voice became innocent. "Assumptions are dangerous."
"Oh, really?" He eyed her. "Nothing?"
"What have I assumed?"
"Surely falling asleep on my rug was an amazing assumption," he teased.
"You didn't have to leave me there. You could have woken me up and marched me home."
"But it's the assumption of doing so in the first place I was talking about." He smiled. "Besides, it was still raining."
"And the poor engineering student didn't have an umbrella?"
"Not one that would have reached your exacting standards."
"Well, you can be satisfied that the rug came close to those standards."
"I still have it, you know." He kissed the top of her head. "Or at least Mom has it, and I know she'd happily give it back to me."
"I can't somehow see my brother letting you put it in your room at the Centre."
"But it would look good in front of the fireplace down in the living room."
"I invited you to stay the night, not to move in."
"You invited me to live with you when we were both in Minnesota. I thought it might be able to be extended to here as well."
She laughed softly. "You always did like getting your own way."
"And you've always been very accommodating in that respect." He turned her face to his, kissing her gently. "Can you remember what we talked about during that night?"
"No," she smiled. "I was hoping you'd be able to."
"That child is too observant for his own good," remarked Jarod with a grin as he threw himself into a chair in the living room, which creaked in protest.
"You were exactly the same at that age," Sydney replied. "In fact, if anything, you were worse."
"How could I have been? I never overheard discussions like that."
"No, but there were a number of times when I made flippant comments and then had them thrown back in my face several days or weeks later. I finally learned to keep my mouth shut."
"That must have been an effort," the Pretender responded sarcastically before he looked at the technician. "What's happening in Blue Cove?"
"Well, he hasn't shot anybody since we last watched," Broots responded drily as he shut the lid of the laptop. "But not much apart from than that."
"And Cox?"
"Still alive and kicking for the moment. I think he worked out what was happening and decided not to push his luck."
"So when are we going to take the last few steps and shut the place down?"
"When we come up with a plan to do so that doesn't get us all killed."
"We can always ask Helen and see what she planned."
"Let's give her some time to, er, recover first." Sydney smiled. "In the meantime, I suggest that we see how Miss Parker and Steve are going with lunch."
Sam looked up as the door softly opened and rose to his feet as Jarod entered the room.
"How's she doing?" the newcomer asked softly.
"She's been asleep for the past two hours."
The Pretender smiled. "Should I bring you up a book?"
"I've got everything I need here." The sweeper cast a fond glance at the bed and then looked back at the other man. "Are there going to be any other problems?"
"I wouldn't expect any. The drug should be completely broken down though we plan to do several blood tests to confirm that, and she's sleeping off the rest of the problems, like the concussion. If anything shows up from now on it should be in the next thirty-six hours or so. After that, she ought to be fine."
"I'm fine now," remarked a dry voice from the bed. "But I'd appreciate it if any discussion of my condition wasn't done within my hearing."
"Stay asleep, then, and you won't hear it," responded Jarod quickly.
"I would, except that I'm hungry and that always makes it hard for me to sleep."
"And you called me demanding." The Pretender rolled his eyes.
"I wasn't demanding." Helen smiled and, despite a protesting movement from the sweeper, pulled herself to a sitting position. "I was asking subtly, and nicely, for sustenance. Where's the demand in that?"
"Now you're sucking up again." Jarod crossed his arms as Sam sat next to Helen and she leaned against him.
"As I said, I do it so well that it couldn't possibly be unpleasant." She paused. "Well, do I get food brought up to me or do I have come down and get it myself?"
"You certainly aren't doing that," Sam told her firmly. "I'll bring you up anything you want, but you aren’t getting out of bed yet."
Helen smirked at Jarod. "One man in this room knows the right way to treat me."
"I'm your doctor,” he retorted quickly. “I don't have to."
"If you are my doctor - and I have reservations about that, by the way - then you should know the importance of regular meals, even if it means waking the patient up to have them." She looked at the clock that stood on the bedside table. "And, as it's now almost three pm, and nobody was nice enough to bring up lunch at the proper time, it's no wonder I'm hungry."
"Sam didn't eat either."
"Now that's just plain nasty!" She glared at Jarod. "I can cope if you neglected me, but to neglect him is horrible!"
"Okay, all right, enough!" Jarod raised both his hands in protest. "Fine, I'll feed you both. Sheesh!"
Sam grinned at Helen. "I think we won."
"I know we did." She laughed softly. "As I said, it's so easy with him. Now, if we'd had to do the same thing to Sydney..."
"Are you saying I'm less of a walk-over than Jarod?" the man’s voice demanded.
"You didn't let my finish my sentence, Sydney," she laughed, looking up at the psychiatrist as he appeared in the doorway. "I could have been going to say that it wouldn't even have taken that long."
"My mother was right," Jarod remarked. "You do plan nasty endings to all of your sentences."
"Not all," she smiled, glancing at Sam. "Only when I'm talking to some people."
The Centre
Blue Cove, Delaware
"I've got something of interest to show you."
"Oh, really?" The head of the Triumvirate looked up, expressionless. "As interesting as where any of our twenty most wanted people are at the moment?"
"This has to do with one of them." The second man put a slim folder down on the table in front of his boss. "This is from Cox's office. He was in such a rush to put that information up on the new mainframe - "
"Which is now also destroyed."
"That he forgot to shred the originals. That's Sam's file."
The man opened the file and ran his eye down a list of names. "An invitation list to a graduation ball in Minnesota from fifteen years ago?"
"Three of the names on that list should be familiar to you." The man indicated the first. "Sam."
"And?"
"Peter."
"And the third?"
"Your sister." The man pointed to the other names. "That's the earliest indication of them being at the same place together and Peter, although of course, he didn't know them then, does vaguely remember seeing them dancing together for quite a while, that night."
A smile crept across the other man's face, and a sneer settled on his top lip, as he read over the list. "How very lovely," he commented sarcastically. "And, of course, Sam realized that denying any knowledge of her would tell us he knew something and make us suspicious, so he 'admitted' having seen her in the T-Board room."
"Very possibly." The man took back the file as his boss held it out. "What do you want me to do about it?"
"Order sweepers out to search that town. He might have taken her back there."
"It wouldn't do him a lot of good. She won't exactly know who he is."
"Beside the point. He'll have to have taken her somewhere. And make sure that, once you know everything Peter can tell you about the two of them, he won't get the chance to tell anybody else."
"Should we send teams anywhere else?"
"Whether we 'should' or not is beside the point," commented the third man wryly as he came into the room. "We can't."
"And why not?" His boss glared at him as the man sat down.
"The blockade won't lift. We've been trying for almost three hours now. If there's not a malfunction somewhere then somebody else has overridden our blockade with one of their own."
"And who could...?"
"There's only one person who would know enough of the system to be able to do that. The same person who designed it."
The glare reasserted itself as the head of the Triumvirate sank back in his chair. "Broots."
Ashe, New York
"I'm in trouble," Broots announced laughingly as Miss Parker and Sydney walked into the room.
"From whom?" the woman demanded.
"Helen's brother. They've found out that the blockade's permanent and that I was the only person who, in their words, 'would know enough of the system to be able to do that'."
Miss Parker sat back in the chair and looked at the technician. "But there is one other way out of the Centre. I got out when my step-mother was trying to kill my father and the power was shut down."
"But we only knew about it because Raines told us. As we know, Raines is now dead. Finally."
"Even if they use it, Parker," Sydney commented, "you said to me that the ladder was in a terrible state then, and that was almost four years ago. It must be worse now than it was and that could make it impossible to ascend."
"Besides," Broots added. "Didn't that lead to the foyer? And that's still inside Centre, meaning that they can't get out anyway."
"So they're still trapped," Miss Parker smirked. "Good."
"That's a turnaround," Sydney stated softly. "What caused the change?"
"A hard dose of reality." The woman looked down to where the baby was playing on the floor with Steve. "And it's been a long time coming."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive." She glared at the figure on the screen of the laptop that Broots had put on the table in front of them. "Helen wasn't all that wrong when she said to you that my father had been 'virtually brain-washing' me. It seems to me that it can be the only excuse for the way I changed." Turning to watch Michael begin to read a book with Steve, her glare faded. "Margaret, in her letters, has been telling me all about my mother. That made me realize how much I've grown away from her, and I know she would never have wanted it to happen."
"So now...?" the older man suggested softly.
"Now it's time I became my mother's daughter again, and not my father's."
"Jarod?" the younger Pretender offered.
"What's up?"
"Did you know about this?"
Jarod laughed. "I know about a lot of things, Steve. What particularly thing would you be referring to now?"
"This." The man turned the computer around to show Jarod, and at the sight of which, the look of amusement faded from the older man's eyes.
"Yes, Steve. I knew."
"How?"
"Helen told me. That's what she was telling me about when you appeared in the doorway of the kitchen on your first morning here."
The man looked back at his own death sentence and shuddered slightly, at sight of which Jarod reached out and closed the lid of the laptop.
"It's alright, Steve. They can't find you and they can't do it."
"They would have."
"That's the reason Angelo gave Helen your file and that she brought you here in the first place."
"So she… saved my life."
"Just like you saved hers." Jarod put his hand on the younger man's arm. "If she hadn't brought you here then we might not have been able to undo the problems that the drug caused. Jon told me that the final treatment was your idea, not his."
"Does she know that?"
"Why do you think she thanked you earlier?"
He shrugged. "I thought maybe it was because I was taking care of Michael."
"No, Steve. She knows what you did. She knows all about that project and how hard it would have been to reverse. That’s also the reason why you came up without David. She doesn't want him to know that he caused that to happened to her - and I think she's right in that respect."
"Does that mean you think she's wrong in other respects?"
"He probably thinks I'm wrong in this one," a voice interrupted laughingly and the two men turned around to see Helen, held in Sam's arms, looking enquiringly at them from the stairs. "Wouldn't you say?"
"Very definitely. What are you doing up?"
"Preventing myself from going out of my head with boredom," she smiled. "And a certain person refused to let me walk, so he had to carry me down before I send him back upstairs to get some sleep."
"And you think I'm going to let you stay up?"
"You have no say in the matter. I have no faith in your position as a doctor, let alone as my doctor and having no belief in it means that I don't have to pay any attention to a single word you say to me. I discussed it with Sydney and his professional opinion was that, as long as I don't try to walk around, he's happy for me to sit in the living room. By a fortunate twist of fate, that also happens to coincide with my professional opinion."
Jarod rolled his eyes and spoke to the ceiling. "And this is the person who said, if I made her stay in bed, that she wouldn't complain."
"That was before I had more sleep. Besides it's only for a few hours. Then Sam can take me back to bed again."
"Fine." Jarod threw up his hands. "If you 'medical' people have already discussed it, and you're so ungrateful that my opinion counts for nothing, I guess there's nothing I can do about it."
Sam lowered Helen into a chair and wrapped a blanket around her before kissing the top of head and then going upstairs. Once he was out of sight, Helen glanced at the two men with curiosity.
"So, what was the serious discussion that I intruded into?"
"I found this." Steve opened the computer again and pushed it over to Helen. "I would never have believed that they'd..."
"They didn't, Steve," she responded softly, having immediately recognized the order. "Angelo and I made sure they never got - nor ever will have - that chance."
"Why?" He looked at her enquiringly. "I'm nobody special. At least," he amended his sentence as he saw the smile on her face. "No more special than a lot of other people inside the Centre. And I know you've been getting information about Jarod's family, but I'm not a part of that. I really don't understand why you put yourself in so much danger for somebody completely unconnected with you."
"Because I do believe what the Centre is capable of,” she told him. “And I hate the thought of the damage they could do if we don't stop them. You're right to say that the majority of my attention and energy has been on Jarod and his family, but Angelo knows that I have a healthy interest in other people who have been trapped in that place and that's why, when he found the termination order, he told me about you."
"So why did he want to stay?"
"Help." The voice from beside Helen's chair was soft and the empath peered cautiously over the arm. Smiling, the doctor rested her hand on his shoulder.
"Yes, Angelo, and you do."
"Did," he told her, taking her hand and playing with her fingers.
"No, you still do." She looked up at Steve. "Angelo felt that he could continue to help all of us by having inside knowledge of the Centre. Now, of course, it would be far too dangerous for him to still be there, but we had no idea when I got all three of you out that Willie would stumble across Angelo's treasures."
Jarod looked at her sharply. "How do you know about that?"
"Sam told me. And, yes, he also told me that Willie's dead and how it happened." "And Raines?"
"I saw the DSA footage of that."
"How?" Another voice interrupted the question that Steve was about to ask, and Sydney walked into the room, sitting down opposite Helen. "When we were seeing footage of the time after your brother got back to his office, the security tech told him they couldn’t view pre-recorded footage."
"There was a small loophole, meaning that the system allows the person who set up the blockade to view the old footage, but Broots only remembered that about three hours ago, and he doesn't remember telling it to anyone when he designed the system in the first place."
"How much have you seen?"
"Well, not everything. Just a package of highlights - a 'Best Of My Brother Going Out Of His Tree', if you want to think of it that way."
Sydney smiled. "And was it entertaining?"
"Except for the mindless brutality, yes." She laughed. "So have you come up with a solution yet?"
"You mean apart from just leaving them there to starve?"
"Well, if you feel like sinking to the depths of Raines or my brother..." Helen eyed Jarod severely. "But I wouldn't have thought you'd want to be categorized with such charming people as those."
"Gee, what a toss-up. Their brutality or your sarcasm."
"Your own sarcasm's pretty good and going by what I know of your family, I'd say it has to be a dominant trait in the genes..."
Sydney interrupted softly. "Do you have a plan, Helen?"
"I've had a few ideas but I never really intended to close the place down fully."
"Why not?" Steve glanced at her enquiringly. "When you know how much they're capable of..."
"But I also know that there's a lot they know and we haven't found out yet. If I’d closed them down then a lot of secrets could have died with the place – secrets that it’d be better for us all to know and which I'm yet to locate."
"And where would they be?" A grin appeared on Jarod's face. "We read nearly all the information on the old mainframe, the new one is that same information so that won't help and you've copied the files that were in all of the offices and which are now down in the filing cabinets in your lab..."
"Not all," Helen commented thoughtfully and Jarod, brought up short by the softly spoken words, stared at her.
"What do you mean, 'not all'?"
"I mean there's one office I haven't been in." She paused. "My brother's."
Jarod opened a file on the screen that showed the head of the Triumvirate’s office and turned it around. "And in what non-existent cupboard or filing cabinet is he supposed to be hiding all these secrets? There's no storage space in that room at all."
Angelo crawled over the floor to the table and pulled the laptop onto his knee, typing for a minute before handing it to Helen, who smiled and put her hand on his head.
"I told you, Angelo, you still are helpful." She gazed at the screen again, until the older Pretender got impatient.
"Well?"
She looked up with a smile. "It's lucky I'm not ignoring you today, isn't it?"
"Helen!"
The word came from all three men and she laughed loudly before grinning at the psychiatrist. "Do you share your impatience with everybody you've been working with over the years?"
Jarod got up from the sofa and began to walk towards her, but she closed the laptop and hugged it. "Now, now, don't be hasty. It’d be awful if all your hard work of the last day or two was to be all undone, wouldn't it? And I can become just as flustered and unable to concentrate as Sydney if I want to be."
"So what was it that Angelo showed you?"
"Cupboards," the empath himself commented as he leaned against Helen's legs and began to play with her slippers.
"Correct." She reopened the machine and put it on the table, turning it so the three men could see the screen as Jarod reseated himself with a smile. "These are the blueprints of the construction of my brother's office. As you can see, there are a lot of holes and cupboards built into the walls that we’d never have known of if Angelo hadn't shown us. They just look like the wood panels."
"So that's where...?"
"That has to be where he keeps all the greatest secrets, yes, I think so. Most of the files I’d found during my thefts had to do with projects, not people. Several had to do with facets of the people - medical reports, family connections, personal history, that sort of thing. Nothing I hadn't already known about, though."
"What sorts of things were you looking for?"
"Details like who actually authorized Mirage, Gemini and projects like them; also the names of the people who ordered Thomas' murder and the accident that put Jacob in the coma..."
"Helen, that was just an accident," Sydney corrected, a look of pain in his eyes, and her eyes reflected that pain.
"No, Sydney, it wasn't. If it had been 'just an accident', then Jacob's projects wouldn't have been allocated to other people within the last twelve hours before it happened - they would have waited until afterwards."
He stared at her in shock. "How did you...?"
"Nor," Helen interrupted, the sadness increasing, "would the infirmary have been put on standby that night to prepare for an autopsy. Raines was kept back from going to his house because they expected one or both of your bodies to be brought back to the Centre once it was all over." Helen stared into the fire. "All of your projects were also ready to be handed to other people as soon as they had confirmation about the accident, and that included Jarod. But you were never the main focus. As far as I could find out, that was always your brother."
"How?"
"Well, not the brake-line this time. They did something to the steering column, so you would lose control. It just happened at a point earlier than they anticipated. They'd planned for it to occur on a curve about ten miles up the road from where it did happen and if it had transpired where they wanted it to then Jacob certainly would never have survived and neither, probably, would you."
"And…why?"
"Jacob had found out about Mirage and that, when added to his increasing guilt at his involvement with Jarod's abduction, as well as that of the other children, was turning him against the Centre. That's why, several months earlier, he went to Catherine with the plan to get the children out; a plan I'm sure you know at least something about."
The psychiatrist nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on her face. "How do you know so much about it?"
"Raines' secret hiding place had several memos that related to it. They all used a code, of course, but the dates, times and places all matched. When I discovered a far less discreet message in Mr. Parker's hiding place, it told me everything that I needed to know.” She paused. “More than I wanted to know."
"So somebody ordered it?"
"And other people carried it out. The steering column was damaged within two hours of you both getting into the car that night. A team of sweepers was waiting at the intended site, ostensibly to help but actually, I'd assume, to make sure that everything went according to plan. If you'd gone in that direction to get help for your brother, you would have walked right into their hands." She hesitated, a look of pain in her eyes. "There's no doubt that you wouldn't have walked out again."
"But I didn't..." Sydney trailed off.
"By some twist of fate, you went in the other direction, allowing you to get to a phone and call an ambulance for help. The weather stopped the sweepers from hearing the sirens and they didn't know anything about it until neither of you turned up to work the next day and, several days after that, you put in your report about it to the Triumvirate."
Steve looked up. "Was your brother...?"
The doctor smiled faintly. "Steve, the accident happened in 1967, when my brother was 13. He's good, but that would be pushing it a bit, don't you think?" Helen glanced at Sydney. "If the Centre sees a person as a threat, they get rid of them, as they did to Catherine Parker, to Jacob, and as they've done to anybody else who they saw as potentially damaging."
"As they tried to do to you," Jarod added softly and she nodded.
"If the Centre can't make a supporter, by fair means or four, then they'll get rid of them totally. I do have to say that I think you're lucky to still have both Michelle and Nicholas. I've never understood why they were allowed to live, especially after Jarod brought them to your attention." She glanced at the older pretender. "I was worried when that happened and even thought about interfering and trying to prevent it, but I couldn't bring myself to do that."
"How would you have?" Jarod asked curiously.
"The same way I prevented Sydney and Broots from opening my files. I'd abducted people before so I knew I could manage it."
"Who would you have taken?” the psychiatrist couldn’t help asking. “Me or them?"
"You," Helen responded softly. "If I'd taken them, it would have drawn attention to them, and that was what I was trying to avoid. But I made sure that I was waiting in her street when you turned up, either to keep the sweepers away or else to get the two of you to safety if they did."
"Despite the fact that you found it hard to forgive me for the way I treated Jarod in the Centre, you would still have done it?"
"Much as I was angry about that," she responded, "I couldn't stand the idea of them breaking your heart twice. I know how much she means to you and how much you mean to her..."
"How?"
Helen smiled, confident that this news would be a shock. "Michelle's my aunt."
Sydney stared at her in amazement. "Are you joking?"
"No, I'm not. My mother was her sister. She's known me for my whole life."
"So Nicholas…?"
"Your son is my cousin, yes."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"I didn't think it mattered. I'm no real relation to you - not a blood tie, anyway."
"And did you know all along?"
"Of course. I found out about Michelle when I looked through your file - and I can assure you that yours was one of the first I read. Of course, that gave her maiden name, but I was bridesmaid at her wedding and, being thirteen when it happened, I can easily remember it."
"Did she ever talk about me?"
"Often." Helen smiled. "She loved to talk about you - she still does. I rang her on the morning of the day I collected Jarod with the front of my car. She talked about you at that time, too."
"Why didn't she tell me?"
"Sydney, she has no way of knowing I know you. I never told her what I do at the Centre for the same reason I’ve never told Margaret or Sam about it. I don't like getting lectures for my awful deeds, any more than Jarod does." She grinned at him and he laughed, before looking at her curiously.
"So, if you had surviving relatives, why weren't you brought up by them?"
"According to what I found out, my mother was ten years older than Michelle and, when she and my father died, Michelle was considered too young to be able to look after me properly, so I was put into the convent. By the time she was old enough to adopt me, she was already working at the Centre and the people from the convent and from social services thought that she didn't have enough time to spend with me, and then she had her own child to bring up. They thought about it then, but when Nicholas developed his heart problems, they decided that I was better off where I was. Of course, I kept in touch with her through letters, and she visited me often, but that was all, especially after I moved to Minnesota."
"So my relationship with her prevented you from having a home when you really needed one?"
"No, Sydney," she assured him. "Fate prevented me from that. You were just one of many things that conspired to make it happen that way." She laughed. "If I had been adopted by Michelle, I'd never have met Margaret and never learned about her sons. That means I wouldn't have been in Delaware to hit Jarod, which was the start of reuniting his family, rescuing Steve and the others and thus we wouldn't have been sitting here, having this conversation because, I'm assuming, you would have already known who I was." Helen laughed at the expression on Sydney's face. "Fate, you see?"
Jarod grinned. "How can a good Catholic girl like you believe in that?"
"Oh, it's easy." She laughed again. "I’ve told you that I don't hold with every one of the Church's maxims and, although I've prayed to God often enough in my life, I do also enjoy the thought of something as random as that."
Sydney smiled weakly. "Will you tell her you know me?"
"Unless you tell her first, I planned to." Helen glanced at her watch. "Actually, she should call any time now. We talk to each other every other week and as I called last time it's her turn today." As the phone rang, she reached forward with a laugh. "You see? I told you."
"For that," Jarod commented before she answered it, "I hope it's not Michelle."
Helen stuck out her tongue at him as she turned on the speaker. "Hi, Auntie."
"Hi, sweetie." At the familiar tone, Helen raised an eyebrow and Jarod returned her gesture. "How are you?"
"I'm fine." Helen smiled at Sydney's raised eyebrow. "How's everything at your end?"
"Slightly hectic, actually. Nick reminded me to call or I might have forgotten."
"Why?" Helen's voice took on a note of innocence as she smiled. "You two aren't on the run from the Centre or something like that, are you?"
There was a moment of hesitation before Michelle spoke. "Helen, what aren't you telling me?"
"Why does everyone always suspect me of hiding things when I'm making simple statements?"
"Because," interrupted a male voice, "you never make 'simple statements'. They’ve always got a deeper meaning."
"Oh, thanks, Nick." Helen rolled her eyes. "I feel really good about myself now."
"You're welcome," he responded, laughing. "What else are cousins for?"
"Being nice, supportive, helpful and kind, I was hoping."
"You're the oldest,” he teased. “You set the precedent."
"Some people think I'm nice." Helen met Jarod's eye, laughing. "Other people are still making up their minds."
"Which category can I fall in to?"
"Whichever one you want, but don't fall too hard or you'll probably hurt yourself."
"And you wouldn't fix me up?"
"Only if your Dad didn't get in ahead of me." She eyed Sydney with a grin. "Have you heard from him lately?"
"He called yesterday, as a matter of fact," Michelle broke in. "And that assumption of yours was impressively accurate, Helen. Styling yourself as a psychic now?"
"No, but inside knowledge is a wonderful thing."
"What, is Dad sitting on your sofa or something?"
"No, Nick." Helen rolled her eyes. "My armchair, not my sofa. My sofa's otherwise occupied."
She listened to the laughter, and, fighting to suppress her own amusement, nodded at the phone. Sydney smiled.
"Hello, Nicholas."
There was sudden silence on the other end before the young man spoke again.
"Helen, tell me we've got a crossed line."
"I don't think your father will be at all pleased to hear you call him that."
"Tell me he hasn't been sitting there for the whole conversation."
"If I was to tell you that, I'd be lying, and I don't like doing that. But you could ask him yourself." She waited for a minute but there was no reply. "Oh, and you might want to make sure your mother hasn't fainted from shock or something."
"Sydney?" a voice on the other end choked out.
"Hello, Michelle," the psychiatrist responded warmly.
"What are you doing there?"
"The same thing I suggested you do by leaving Albany - staying safe from the Centre."
"And…why Helen?"
"Well, after she so nicely abducted me and brought me here, I couldn't refuse."
"Oh, thank you, Sydney," Helen interrupted, glaring at him. "You're not wanting to get me into trouble, are you?"
"Wanting, no. Succeeding, probably."
Michelle's voice broke in on Helen's response. "So you send me away from New York, only to go there yourself?"
"Actually, my intention was to send you away from Albany, not the whole state," Sydney corrected.
"And how do you know that you can trust Helen?"
"Because she's your niece, and surely that counts for something?"
"Not if you knew who her brother was."
"Oh, I do." Sydney raised an eyebrow as he saw the expression of astonishment on Helen's face. "But I'm rather surprised that you do."
"And does she?"
"Yes, Auntie, I do, but how do you know?"
"You think I haven't been keeping an eye on the Centre since they tried to get rid of me?"
"I hadn't really thought about it. But why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't want you to do anything silly."
Helen smothered her laughter, avoiding Jarod's eye. "And what sort of 'silly' thing might I do?"
"The same thing that got your parents killed." Michelle's voice suddenly lost all trace of its earlier humor. "And you do know what I'm talking about."
"Yes." Helen stared at her hands.
"And that tone of voice tells me that you've been doing it already, haven't you?"
"Perhaps." She raised her head. "But after the lecture Nick's father gave me, I wasn't planning on doing it anymore."
"If I could see its impact, I'd give you one as well."
"So come visit. We're all safe from the Centre for the moment."
"Why?"
"They're in a state of blockade."
"What?!" Michelle's voice was incredulous. "What major event triggered that?"
Helen grinned faintly. "My brother capturing me as I was about to sneak in."
"So you were trying to emulate your mother." Michelle's tones became harsh, causing Sydney to raise an eyebrow. "I would have thought losing my sister was enough, without losing my niece due to similar reasons."
"It didn't happen, Auntie. I'm all right."
"Thanks to whom? I don't believe you got out unscathed under your own steam."
"Possibly not," Helen admitted.
"No, I didn't think so." There was a moment's silence. "We'll be there in a few hours, and you've got a heck of lecture coming."
"You'd better consult my doctor first and make sure I'm in a fit state for it."
There was a note of concern in Michelle's voice "I thought you said that you were okay."
"I think I am. Sydney may disagree."
"Not at all." The psychiatrist spoke firmly. "She's quite well enough to receive a lecture, as long as I'm allowed to hear it."
"Oh, thank you for your support," Helen remarked drily. "It's nice to have friends."
"We'll see you soon, Helen," her aunt broke in.
"I'm looking forward to it, I think."
Reaching forward, she disconnected the call, before sitting back in the armchair once more and glaring at Sydney. "Why couldn't you have said I wasn't up to it?"
"Because it would have made her worry," he responded immediately.
"You have no idea what I'm going to be in for when she gets here."
"Well," Jarod interposed, "it's always nice to get a little revenge."
Helen shrugged. "I can't deny that I don't deserve it. But now she'll worry about me anyway, for at least until the whole time until she arrives."
"Why?" Sydney looked at her curiously. "And what did she mean about 'the same thing that got your parents killed'?"
She looked up at him. "How did you imagine they'd died?"
"I had no idea." He shrugged. "You said something about getting the books that Debbie loves in a parcel when you turned thirteen so I imagined it wasn't something quick – such as an accident. I suppose I imagined them dying of a disease or something."
"Not quite." She stared at the fire for a moment. "My parents met when they began to work for an organization called NuGenesis." Hearing gasps from two people in the room, she grinned. "Yes, I thought that name might be familiar. My father was one of the earlier geneticists at that place and my mother was allotted to be his researcher within a few months of his employment. As you may or may not know, NuGenesis was started in 1951."
"By the Haring brothers," Sydney put in.
"Yes, exactly. A few years after my parents began to work at NuGenesis, a lovely man started up an organization in Blue Cove that we're all familiar with."
"Gee," commented Jarod in tones of extreme sarcasm. "It couldn't be the Centre, could it?"
"They don't call…"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that part. Get on with it."
Helen smiled. "My father found out about Project Prodigy, and the abduction of you and Kyle, and protested to Dr. Haring. According to the letter my mother wrote to me, and which I received with the parcel of books, my father was threatened in a similar manner to the way Jacob would be, just a few several weeks later. Only two weeks after that, their car wrapped itself around a tree."
"Was it deliberate?"
"The police who found the severed brake line certainly thought so."
"Who had…?"
Helen's head lifted slightly. "The same person who founded the Centre."
"Mr. Parker?"
"Yes." A faint smile hovered at the corner of his mouth. "He founded the Centre as opposition to NuGenesis, but eventually felt that they could be useful and then convinced the two organizations to work together."
"So your parents knew they were going to die?"
"I think so. In her letter, my mother spoke vaguely of threats that they had received, and that was why she made up the package. She was concerned that the person who was threatening her might also try to hurt me and that was why she left me to the convent, and not to her sister, who might have been more easily found by somebody who wanted to kill me, too. My future there was outlined in her will."
"And did you know?"
"I never knew for sure if it was the Centre or NuGenesis she meant until I found the memo detailing my parents' death in a safe at Mr. Parker's house."
Sydney's expression was one of shock and horror. "He… he kept it?"
"If it hadn't been too obvious, he might even have framed it." She spoke bitterly. "After all, that was the start of the Centre, and his great power."
