“That’s not real?” This question came from one of Robert’s companions, the one who’d introduced himself as Carey. No more. No less.
Emily shook her head, her gaze dancing between all of them, as she tried to figure out why Robert popped out of the mini-hunk cluster. Not that it hurt to spend time looking at any of them. They were all eye worthy. She had no clue how long they’d planned to stay. One should look while the looking was good. No way they’d stick around once they realized how little there was to the museum.
“Luckily, it doesn’t suffer from the weather, which is pretty bad. I mean, this is northern Wyoming. We get a lot of weather, bad weather, I mean. And some good.” She sounded inane, but Emily couldn’t help it. Maybe it was a side effect of the curious quartet. Each guy had a high level of hotness and combined, their hotness factor was like the sun or something. Okay, so she didn’t know that much about the sun, but she did know cute guys when they walked into her place. Heaven knew she’d been waiting for that almost as long as she’d been waiting for someone to sign her guestbook.
She studied each guy, curious why Robert seemed to tangle her tongue and the other guys didn’t. They were fine, almost like they’d emerged from the covers of romance novels—she frowned a bit—there was something a bit off about the one who’d said his name was Fyn, but Carey called “Chewie.” And it wasn’t just the guy braids and the height that made it a good fit. He had a definite aura of “Chewiness.”
Then there was the Carey. Totally cute. Adorable even, but he gave off taken vibes. Ric no-way-his-last-name-was-Jones reminded her of a young Tommy Lee Jones in
Men in Black
. Not any of his other movies. Just that one.
Her attention drifted back to Chewie. He seemed taken, too. Now that she considered it, there were no “I’m available” vibes until her gaze returned to Robert.
Oh my darling
. Okay, now that she’d gone where she’d been determined not to go, maybe she could get over him and do her dang tour. It’s not like he was here for a date. He wanted to see the museum. It shouldn’t be this hard. She’d been rehearsing for this moment for most of her life. And if that wasn’t sad, she didn’t know sad. But she did know sad. It was her dang zip code. She felt a longing for a counter to lean on, a place she could prop her elbows, rest her chin in her hands and gaze at the guys, even the taken ones. The moment begged for it and she hoped the powers-that-be would forgive her for devoting the most attention to the untaken guy. Those eyes demanded it. Face that looked a bit aristocratic and intelligent, but with a sweetness that kept him from snooty. Tumbled brown hair with lots of gold highlights that begged to be smoothed and light blue eyes that tempted a girl to forget just how broad those shoulders were. Her mom used to say, look at the shoulders and imagine delivering them on a baby. It worked better than birth control until now. Those shoulders could make you forget those shoulders.
He was tall enough she had to look up to him, which didn’t happen that often. Her friends called her “leggy” when they were feeling kind. When they weren’t they called her beanpole. And freaking weird. They weren’t wrong. Robert knew it, and his friends appeared to know it, too, but Robert didn’t seem to mind. He did look curious. Was it just the museum that made him curious? Was there a smidge of it in there for her? Since he stared at the museum, she had to conclude not.
“That’s paint?” Ric not-Jones sounded and looked disbelieving.
The effect was remarkable. One had a hard time not believing that the ceiling arched high overhead, like a real warehouse or that one walked across wooden planking. The lack of creaking gave it away, of course. It was hard to pick the real wood beams from the painted ones. Her mom’s elevator hadn’t always made it to her attic, but she could slap paint on any surface that wasn’t canvas. Well, she could slap it on canvas, but it almost made the eyes bleed to look at the result. Her non-brick work sucked, but Emily had seen photos of the outside murals. Of course, they were beyond boring—even to someone with steam in her veins—but beautifully done.
Fyn didn’t say anything. Emily suspected that was his norm. Robert didn’t talk much either, but she had no idea if it was his norm. She sensed shy in there, and there was that heaping helping of geek, but he moved, she mulled it for a few seconds, like a panther. Smooth and dangerous. It didn’t mix well with shy, which made her even more curious. He was like a puzzle with some wrong pieces—one of those complicated ones that you had to be a genius to finish.
She wasn’t a genius.
All four of them stopped in the center of the workshop, looking around with an inappropriate-to-the-situation intensity. It’s not like Uncle E achieved fame or fortune with his scientific studies. His main claim to fame was disappearing with or without his comely assistant. And if he disappeared without Olivia, that made him sadder than his great-great-great niece. She paused to add up the greats, but still wasn’t sure how many there were supposed to be. Math wasn’t her strong suit. She liked geeks, but her science skills were mostly fictional, if one didn’t count the steampunk stuff. Mostly no one did.
Carey moved into her sightline, momentarily blocking her view of Robert. How weird was it that any mention of Olivia bothered Carey? He’d gone from relaxed to defensive in about a second. He’d stopped in front of the newspaper article with her picture featured prominently. Looked a bit lovesick, now that she thought about it. But he couldn’t be. That would be as weird as, well, her.
Robert gave up studying the ceiling and headed for Uncle E’s big, old desk, increasing her longing to lean on something and admire his tush. She’d always liked jeans on a guy. Maybe that’s why she stayed in Wyoming. Lots of denim. And when the denim was wrapped around smart and yummy?
Oh my darling.
Okay, so maybe she hadn’t gotten it out of her system yet.
A smaller desk for the comely assistant sat close by Uncle E’s desk. Robert stopped, a brow rising. It was a bit original Spock, but still cute.
“A laptop?”
“Oh, sorry.” Emily felt heat sting her cheeks. “That’s mine.” She hurried around Olivia’s desk, and tucked it under an arm. Not even Eddie knew she worked on her book down here. She’d hoped a book about her uncle might boost the museum’s profile, but she had to figure out how to end it. So far nothing felt right. The best ending would be figuring out where Uncle E went, but her study of his life, his inventions, and the time period had netted no clues.
Robert’s companions stayed in the center, staring up at the ceiling, looking a bit gob smacked, except Fyn who didn’t seem to do expressions.
“It smells,” Carey gave her a crooked, apologetic smile, “old.”
“My grandma got the beams that aren’t painted from Uncle E’s actual New York warehouse. I think she chose them because they did smell. She was a bit crazy.” Okay, that wasn’t in the spiel, even if it was the truth. “My mom wanted to put in those rope things, you know, with the gold posts? But grandma didn’t want anything that interfered with her reality.”
Grandma had been obsessed with preserving Uncle E’s memory. Not good at it, just obsessed. Emily was, she suspected, the first who’d wanted to know what really happened all those years ago. She’d spent enough time with his papers and his space to think she kind of knew him. A lot of it she didn’t understand, but she suspected he’d been a genius of sorts and a jerk for sure. Anal and as obsessive as his sisters, but with the power to do something about it because he was a man, when men ruled. All of it only made his disappearance more odd, not less. He wasn’t the kind of person to disappear. Despite his whacky inventions he was conventional to a fault. In fact, disappearing and hiring a woman to be his assistant were the most interesting things about him, trumping even all the inventing stuff.
“She did have to take steps to preserve the papers and drawings in the file cabinet. Lucky for us, Uncle E was tidy, or Olivia was.” No surprise when Carey shifted a bit at the repetition of Olivia’s name. Emily had been around crazy long enough to recognize it when it walked into her museum. That it didn’t bother her should trouble her, but repeated exposure had shut that switch off a long time ago. She did wonder why it bothered him, of course, but not enough to ask.
The museum was so familiar to her she could walk around it with the lights off. She knew it better than her own bedroom, but the curious quartet changed that by entering it, forcing her to study it as a stranger might. As museums go, it should have gone. Anything interesting about it was buried in the files, not in the stuff. With an almost painful internal shift, she began to see it the way it looked to them, like a past-its-time movie set. Only thing that saved it from being completely sad—it wasn’t dusty.
Some years beyond one hundred, her ancestor had lived and worked in a reasonable facsimile of this space. The geography had changed, but that was all. His desk area looked like an office straight out of an old movie. The desk had a rolled top, lots of drawers and compartments. True to the period accoutrements were neatly arranged around a blotter. Olivia’s desk was a smaller, as neat version, and had an early version typewriter on a stand close by. But it was first and foremost, a workshop with tools. Old tools. Big and small tools. He’d built stuff here, and according to great-grandma, one of them had been big. Massive even. And there’d been other stuff scattered around the big-being-built. She’d tried to draw from memory later, though not successfully, and there were drawings by Olivia in the ancient file cabinet, whacky drawings, but kind of cool, too.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, Robert headed toward the ancient file cabinet. He set his museum guide on the top, pausing when his hand was on a drawer handle. “May I?”
Inside another of those odd wobbles, she felt an unexpected urge to ask what was going on, but they wouldn’t tell her, so what good would breaking her question ban do? They weren’t happy they’d given their names—or versions of them. She joined him at the file cabinet, her hand holding the drawer closed and waited. She’d had years of practice at not asking things.
“It’s important,” he said, his light blue eyes intense and sincere.
How did she know he was sincere? She didn’t. She wanted to believe she knew it. Did that count? It didn’t matter. She nodded and stepped back, but stayed close enough to watch him. Not that she thought he’d take anything. She just liked watching him. She’d gotten a bit of a zing from touching him. She’d read about zings in romance novels, but this was her first non-fictional zing. She flexed the fingers of the zinged hand, getting zing echo thinking about getting zinged.
He pulled out a file and opened it, sifting through the contents with swift thoroughness. He froze, then liberated a drawing. Unlike the other drawings, this one didn’t have a label and had been filed in a miscellaneous folder. Might have been Uncle E’s to-do file.
“I call it the bug.” Because it looked like a metal bug with crazy, bent legs and wheels and a pointed nose. Olivia had signed the drawing, so Emily assumed she’d also added the “helpful” labels, like “correct angle to overcome issues of torque & inertia during transmogrification,” and “facilitates Emergency Absquatulation Device.” She tipped her head to one side. “I think Uncle E was a few quarts short on his mental lubricant when he came up with that one.”
Robert turned, gesturing for Carey to join him. When he was close enough, he held up the drawing. He didn’t ask anything but Carey answered with a short, deliberate nod that he couldn’t possibly believe she wouldn’t notice, could he? Maybe Uncle E wasn’t the only one missing a few quarts of lubricant. Weird enough that they were interested in Uncle E, but now his bug?
Ric not-Jones joined them. His eyes widened, but he didn’t speak. She could tell he wanted to. Her presence was inhibiting, but it was her museum. Three of them exchanged looks of a significant nature, like she wouldn’t notice them doing that either. The big one, Fyn, just looked. Maybe he didn’t do significant. She shifted her laptop to her other arm and waited. The silence stretched. Her curious quartet excelled at not talking. They weren’t as easy with silence as she was though. The silence stretched some more. Ric not-Jones shifted. Fyn didn’t. Carey drifted off toward a workbench and fiddled with the display. Emily shifted the laptop to the other arm, and then off loaded it to another workbench. Whatever had brought them here, it wasn’t historical accuracy.
Robert cleared his throat. More silence, then, “Your uncle’s filing system is…unusual.”
“Everything about Uncle E was unusual.” She paused. “But I believe the system was Olivia’s.” Carey limited his response to a rapid blink this time. She resisted the temptation to repeat the name a few times, just to see what he’d do. Besides, she already knew what he’d do.
“Is there anything in the files that indicate what went missing?”
Why would he care? Uncle E lived, worked and disappeared in the 1890’s, as had Olivia. Technology had moved on since then. Way on. One hundred plus years on. A sudden thought almost got her to ask a real question. Could one of them be a descendent, too? Of Olivia or even the nefarious Professor Smith—
“What’s this thing?” Carey held up a small, black box.
She couldn’t resist. “It’s a black box.” Robert’s perfectly arched brows arched some more and somehow she heard herself add, “I think it’s the Emergency Absquatulation Device.” Emily felt them still, saw it, too, and felt tension surge into the air around her. Crazy was in there, too. Funny how it always was. “He invented some crazy stuff. The Gyrocompass isn’t too weird, but Individual Discovery Velocipediator? Mapulator Retrieval Apparatus?”
“Transmogrification machine is my personal favorite,” Carey muttered, prompting his companions and Emily to turn and stare at him.
Emily frowned. A question almost made it to the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t imagine an answer to it she really wanted to know.
“Oh-oh.” Carey held up the box. “It’s humming.”
The floor tilted again, hard enough to make her grab the edge of the file cabinet to keep from meeting it with her nose. Robert didn’t notice because he’d joined the two guys not holding the black box in stampeding to the one who was. Carey handed it to Robert. Emily, once the floor dropped back into place, joined them at her normal pace, though she had mixed feelings about it.