Leverage Reverse Big Bang: Daffodils, Chapter One
Title: Daffodils
Author: downbythebay_4
Rated: M
Summary: Nate/Sophie. Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.
My submission for the Leverage Reverse Big Bang at thebigbangjob; art by crescent_gaia. Many thanks to alinaandalion for beta-reading; all remaining mistakes are, of course, mine.
You can view the wonderful fanmix and cover art by crescent_gaia here: [Fanmix] Daffodils
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter One
“We’re all addicts, Nate. We’re all addicted to our pasts…You want it to feel how it used to feel.”
--Sophie Devereaux, The First David Job
“We weren’t sure about letting her go climbing with her University friends.”
The bedroom was dark as Sophie clutched the phone to her ear with one hand, and held the sheets over her sweat-damp breast with the other, her heart uncharacteristically ascending to her throat as she listened to the woman on the other end of the phone. The only light in the room came from the few stray beams of Boston streetlamps through cracks in the blackout curtains.
“We didn’t know anything about them, but she was such a good hiker, smart.”
There was a five hour time difference from Boston to England. Though it was only seven a.m. in Northern Yorkshire, in the summer months the sun would already be shining brightly, and after being up most of the night Sophie had to suppress a yawn in spite of the adrenaline flooding her body.
“She always checked in, always.” Sophie had known Barbara a long time, and never before had the woman sounded so afraid. “Richard and I have already asked around the pubs. The owner of their B-and-B didn’t remember seeing Aine-”
Like all the Siobhans and Aoifes and Niamhs of the world, Aine Daly had been cursed with a half-Irish father who had given her a name that you never would have guessed was pronounced awn-ya just by looking at it. To this day, Barbara was the only woman Sophie knew of who had agreed to sentence her child to being awkwardly stumbled across during role call all through the school years when she could have prevented it. It must have been the first and last time Barbra had given her husband an inch on anything.
“He said that the others came in late last night, but they’ve already gone. Richard is taking a group up to look for her, but it’s already been twelve hours. Our youngest is supposed to be getting married in three days, now she’s talking about flying out from Cork to help the search. I convinced her not to call off the wedding, but I don’t know what else to do.”
Sophie swallowed and gathered the sheet closer. She had done her share of comforting bereaved and anxious family members and loved ones in the past, but this was different. Barbara wasn’t just another client, someone she could manipulate, even if for her own good. It was more than a lack of clothing that left Sophie feeling suddenly exposed.
“Stay strong, Babs,” Sophie kept her voice low as Nate shifted in bed beside her. “You know Aine; she’s tough as nails, she can take care of herself. I’m going to be on the next flight out.”
Sophie hung up the phone and dropped it on the bedside table. She pinched the bridge of her nose against a migraine as Nate stirred and propped himself up in bed, his dark curls standing up at odd angles.
“What is it?” he said, his fingertips brushing her bare arm as she slid out of bed. “What’s wrong?”
“Get the others up,” she said, shimmying into her slip and dress from the night before. “Tell them to pack a bag for an English summer; I’m going home to change.”
Nate sat up in bed, leaning back against the headboard, and flung one arm out to peer at the electric alarm clock on the nightstand. “It’s a bit early for a case, don’t you think?”
Nate groaned and set down the alarm clock to gingerly examine the soreness of his still-healing shoulder.
“I’m afraid this can’t wait,” Sophie sat on the edge of the bed to slip on her heels. “Friends of mine from England, their daughter has gone missing. I said we’d help.”
“I thought we were going to take a break,” Nate said. “To make some changes.”
Sophie dropped down onto the edge of the bed and set a hand on Nate’s led beneath the covers.
Sophie thought of her time away from the team. Coming back, she thought things would be different, somehow better. But coming back, having to rescue Nate; it was the same song and dance as ever. Nate putting himself at hazard, trying to martyr himself, again, getting shot, again. As much as they tried to be more honest with the team and themselves, she couldn’t see how this time it would be any different.
“Nothing ever changes,” she gave his ankle a gentle squeeze. “You should know that.”
“Okay. Shouldn’t we at least get Hardison to do some reconnaissance before we jump into this case,” Nate said.
Grabbing her purse, she paused just a moment longer to jot three names down on a piece of paper and left it on the night stand.
“Have Hardison get started on these names,” she said. “And a flight into Heathrow; I’ll be back.”
Nate sat up, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“There’s an innocent girl in trouble,” Sophie said, already on her way out of the bedroom. “What more is there?”
Her mother had been an actress, from what she had managed to piece together from fractured childhood memories, in both the modern and the Roman sense. She had grown up on Shakespeare and crocodile tears and making up stories to entertain herself on long nights alone. She learned to think of things that made her uncomfortable as adventures, and being able to get anyone to do anything was her magical power. That was how she made her living; it was a good life, comfortable.
By twenty-five, she had grown sick of London, the all-night parties, the frivolous, wealthy friends who were even more counterfeit than she, the fog and the pollution, the crowds and the queues at the Costa Coffee down the stairs from her flat. All the conveniences of the city. Even thieves and grifters had their limits. At twenty-five, she had had enough.
With some forged credentials she found work as a curatorial assistant at the ancestral home of the Calvert family, near the civil parish of Northallerton. It was there that she met Richard and Barbara Daly, the caretakers and their two young daughters, Aine and Naomi, who lived in a little cottage on the estate. They called it Bryony Cottage, for the white flowering hedgerows that surrounded the property.
They often invited her over for afternoon tea and biscuits, and afterwards Richard would read a bit of poetry from Shelley or Keats or Coleridge and the girls would bring her out to the lake to show her how to skip rocks on the glassy surface. And she could stare so long at the clouds and the trees reflecting off the water, she could almost feel “that serene and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul,” which Wordsworth had perceived above Tintern Abbey.
In the winter, the sun would set so early, even before they could polish of Babs’s latest tin of biscuits and the girls could run about outside searching for the beavers they had read about in the Narnia books. Richard would drive her home in a truck that smelled like fertilizer and peat moss to her little room on Scotch Corner, above a pub called the Heifer. It was world away from her life as a London socialite, and though her amassed wealth and trinkets were only a train ride away, despite the lack of creature comforts, she stayed on Scotch Corner, spending her days cataloging silverware and bed curtains, waiting for afternoon tea to feel like she was alive, something real.
It took weeks for them to convince her to come with them on a Sunday stroll. After church they drove an hour to a place called Greenhead Ghyll in the Lake District where the great romantic poets once trod, and had lunch in the stony ruins of an ancient sheepfold. They spent the rest of the day picking their way on hands and knees up the face of the mountain. Richard led the way, and Babs stayed behind her to offer encouragement and the two girls bounced back and forth between their parents, passing her five or six times before they reached the peak and the slow descent back to the village. It was the single filthiest, exhausting, and exhilarating thing she had ever done. Even the cottage pie she had eaten at the pub that night at the base of the mountain had tasted like victory.
She had stolen a Degas in Paris, and Grecian Marbles, and had recently acquired the Rembrandt seascape, not to mention the hearts of thousands of men. But she couldn’t con a mountain, when there was nothing for miles but stone and grass and foxglove and sheep. There was no lie she could tell yourself that could change the way her heart beat so hard she could feel her blood rushing in the crooks of her elbows and in her groin and down the backs of her knees. She had done that of her own power.
She fell into bed that night with blistered feet and dirt staunchly clinging to her cuticles, and yet somehow elated at discovering something that was all her.
At the end of the year, the estate no longer needed the extra help with collections. She returned to her London flat without even nicking anything. Through the winter and the spring she fell back into her usual routine, pulling off small jobs here and there where opportunity beckoned, toying with royal aliases. But in the summer, when the fog descended so thickly upon London that even her whitest furs seemed dingy after she strolled too long on Piccadilly with a rich acquaintance, she boarded a train for North Yorkshire and the stone fences and shining tarns that belonged just to her.
When Sophie returned to the apartment, Hardison had compiled three profiles. Sophie set her bag down at the door and slid into seat beside Parker on the sofa without interrupting his presentation.
“John Powell, Michael Lyons, and Grace Sloan, all three are students at University of London, all three from wealthy families, a hand full of drug and other misdemeanor charges between them, and all three were questioned in the disappearance of Maria Laraichi, a student from Morocco, who went missing in the spring of 2007. The local bobbies found cocaine and blood at her apartment, no one was ever charged.”
From his seat at the bar, Nate looked expectantly at Sophie.
“I’m as proud of mother England as the next patriot, but racism is just as much a problem there as it is here. Under the circumstances, it would be easy enough to write off the disappearance of a foreign student. These three,” Sophie said, pointing at the three faces displayed on the flat screen. “Were the last to see Aine Daly, they spent the last week training for the three peaks challenge, to raise awareness for the protection of rainforests. Babs-Aine’s mother-said that they were supposed to climb Helvellyn yesterday, but had to change their plans because of the weather. That was the last she heard from Aine.”
“This is a friend of yours?” Eliot asked.
“You might say that,” Sophie agreed.
“It’s three o’clock in the damn morning,” Hardison yawned as he began another search, this time bringing up Aine’s transcript, grant applications, and one news article on the Calvert House. “I’m not saying these kids came up looking squeaky clean, but are we sure they aren’t just messing around, doing college kid things: another case of a grown-up woman emotionally stunted in adolescence?”
Parker glared accusingly and Hardison swallowed.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with maintaining a youthful lifestyle.”
“Not Aine,” Sophie said. “She’s a very serious student. She wouldn’t lie to her parents.”
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Parker offered hopefully, then frowned. “That your friend is the second person to go missing after hanging out with these people.”
“No such thing as coincidence,” Eliot grunted.
On either side of her Parker and Eliot sat like to opposing forces of nature. Eliot sat, focused and painfully still, the lack of motion quite the opposite of relaxation, watching and listening like a stone. Parker on her other side was twitching eagerly, he head snapping back and forth with each new voice added to the conversation, like a cat chasing after a glint of light.
“People do change,” Nate said.
Sophie shook her head. “Most students in England take time off before university to travel, to spend time with friends. Aine spent her time earning money for school and volunteering with children’s education programs-it was all she would talk about the last I saw her.”
Sophie paused a moment to consider her next words. “We spent some time together while I was on sabbatical.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now,” Nate lifted one eyebrow, burying himself up to the bridge of his nose in a mug of coffee. Even outside of sniffing range, she knew it was more Irish than coffee.
“We’ve all had ghosts creeping up from our pasts,” Sophie adjusted her seat indignantly. “It’s just another job.”
“I know we’ve got a girl out in the elements,” Eliot said. “But we’re going to need more time to prep this. She could be anywhere.”
“According to my contact, the winds kept them off the edges of Helvellyn, but the others were still in Grasmere as of last night,” Sophie said, rifling through the recesses of her memory. “Besides Helvellyn, the closest mountains are Langdale Pike, Skiddaw, and Scafell. Odds are she’s on one of those.”
Hardison tapped a few keys and brought up several images of the rolling landscape. Huge expanses of green, broken by the grey of boulders and the crystal blue of tarns hundreds and thousands of miles above sea level. Parker bit her lip and bounced on the sofa cushion excitedly.
“That is a lot of nature,” Hardison squinted at the pictures. “I don’t like this; I don’t like this one bit. Do they even have telephone lines?”
Eliot looked to Sophie and narrowed his gaze.
“You think all I do is drink champagne and where little dresses?”
“If she’s only been gone twelve hours it’s likely the police can’t begin a full investigation. We’ll start with the co-eds,” Nate pointed to the television screens. “They were the last to see her; we find them, we can narrow the search for the girl, to give mountain rescue a better chance of bringing her home.”
Sophie rested her chin in the palm of her hand and tried not to think of the alternative.
“So we’re stealing a mountain again…again?” Parker looked between Sophie and Nate expectantly.
“We’ll steal all of the Lake District if we have to,” Sophie said with a dramatic tilt of her chin.
“Let’s just focus on hashing out the details before we bring out the big guns,” Nate offered and Sophie wondered when he had become the one to temper her.
“These kids have been off the grid for days, but luckily,” Hardison said, bringing up further details on the screen. “I did get a hit on one of daddy’s credit cards, a room for three at the Caesar Hotel in London, so unless John Powell, Sr., esquire has a kinky little secret, I’m guessing the kiddies stopped in for a little R-and-R after a long day of abandoning their friend to torment and death on the side of Mount Doom.”
“Clean passports all around,” Hardison handed them each a small packet. “Our flight leaves in less than two hours. I certainly hope y’all don’t intend to check baggage.”
“Let’s go steal a romantic landscape,” Nate declared, with some degree of irony in his voice.
The team rose from their seats and gathered their bags, save Eliot, who still did not travel with luggage, and shook the car keys on his way out the door. Parker unzipped her bag to check on her gear one last time; Sophie suspected she might have been tucking it into bed. Hardison closed up his computer and gathered extension cords and Bluetooth headsets into his messenger bag before heading out the door as Nate sidled up beside her.
“Something tells me this isn’t just another job for you,” he said, leaning in sotto voce.
“It’s never just another job with us; there’s always someone needing justification,” Sophie brushed her hair off her shoulder and lifted her bag.
Her earlier conversation with Babs had left her feeling unsteady. They never talked about it, but she had left to find herself, perhaps even to try to remake herself, to burry Sophie Devereaux and rise from the ashes. But to tell the truth, she had spent most of her time retracing her steps, picking up the pieces of her past. Her life with the Daly’s had been a happy one, but if her sojourn back to her old haunts had proved anything, it was that you can’t go back.
“It’s more than that,” Nate put out an arm to bar her passage from the apartment. “You’re the one we trust to keep us balanced-”
“Because we’re the paragon of balance? It’s going to be hard to go back,” Sophie admitted. “But I know what I’m doing.”
“We will find these people; we’ll figure out what happened,” Nate said. “But you should be prepared to face the idea that your friend knew what she was getting into with these people.”
“I can’t believe that,” Sophie said. “Not without hearing her side of the story-”
Nate cut her off. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”
“You’re not listening,” she protested. “To me. I understand what it must be like, coming from a small town, how it could be easy for her to be misled by people who seem to have such glamorous lives. But she told her mother they were trying to raise awareness to preserve the rainforest. Aine thought she was doing something good. I know what it looks like, but maybe she thought they were turning over a new leaf and put her trust in the wrong people.”
“If there is more to this,” Nate broke the silence between them. “We deserve to know.”
“It’s been a long time,” Sophie said. “I don’t have the same relationship with them that I used to, but hearing Babs on the phone like that, brings all those feelings back, you know. I just want to help them any way we can.”
“And we will, but we need you to keep your head on straight for this one,” Nate began tentatively, as though it were strange for him to try on the words he had heard so often from others. “The rest of us are following you into uncharted territory right now.”
“The truth is,” she said. “The Dalys are the closest thing I had to a real family; I’ve known Aine since she was in pigtails; she used to steal my clothes, my makeup. I’m not the same person I was back then, but I’ve never had anyone else like Aine in my life.”
“A thief?” Nate asked.
“Someone who wanted to be like me,” Sophie dipped her head toward the doorway.
Nate pulled the door open to allow her out. “Let’s bring her home.”
Next Chapter
Author: downbythebay_4
Rated: M
Summary: Nate/Sophie. Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.
My submission for the Leverage Reverse Big Bang at thebigbangjob; art by crescent_gaia. Many thanks to alinaandalion for beta-reading; all remaining mistakes are, of course, mine.
You can view the wonderful fanmix and cover art by crescent_gaia here: [Fanmix] Daffodils
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter One
“We’re all addicts, Nate. We’re all addicted to our pasts…You want it to feel how it used to feel.”
--Sophie Devereaux, The First David Job
“We weren’t sure about letting her go climbing with her University friends.”
The bedroom was dark as Sophie clutched the phone to her ear with one hand, and held the sheets over her sweat-damp breast with the other, her heart uncharacteristically ascending to her throat as she listened to the woman on the other end of the phone. The only light in the room came from the few stray beams of Boston streetlamps through cracks in the blackout curtains.
“We didn’t know anything about them, but she was such a good hiker, smart.”
There was a five hour time difference from Boston to England. Though it was only seven a.m. in Northern Yorkshire, in the summer months the sun would already be shining brightly, and after being up most of the night Sophie had to suppress a yawn in spite of the adrenaline flooding her body.
“She always checked in, always.” Sophie had known Barbara a long time, and never before had the woman sounded so afraid. “Richard and I have already asked around the pubs. The owner of their B-and-B didn’t remember seeing Aine-”
Like all the Siobhans and Aoifes and Niamhs of the world, Aine Daly had been cursed with a half-Irish father who had given her a name that you never would have guessed was pronounced awn-ya just by looking at it. To this day, Barbara was the only woman Sophie knew of who had agreed to sentence her child to being awkwardly stumbled across during role call all through the school years when she could have prevented it. It must have been the first and last time Barbra had given her husband an inch on anything.
“He said that the others came in late last night, but they’ve already gone. Richard is taking a group up to look for her, but it’s already been twelve hours. Our youngest is supposed to be getting married in three days, now she’s talking about flying out from Cork to help the search. I convinced her not to call off the wedding, but I don’t know what else to do.”
Sophie swallowed and gathered the sheet closer. She had done her share of comforting bereaved and anxious family members and loved ones in the past, but this was different. Barbara wasn’t just another client, someone she could manipulate, even if for her own good. It was more than a lack of clothing that left Sophie feeling suddenly exposed.
“Stay strong, Babs,” Sophie kept her voice low as Nate shifted in bed beside her. “You know Aine; she’s tough as nails, she can take care of herself. I’m going to be on the next flight out.”
Sophie hung up the phone and dropped it on the bedside table. She pinched the bridge of her nose against a migraine as Nate stirred and propped himself up in bed, his dark curls standing up at odd angles.
“What is it?” he said, his fingertips brushing her bare arm as she slid out of bed. “What’s wrong?”
“Get the others up,” she said, shimmying into her slip and dress from the night before. “Tell them to pack a bag for an English summer; I’m going home to change.”
Nate sat up in bed, leaning back against the headboard, and flung one arm out to peer at the electric alarm clock on the nightstand. “It’s a bit early for a case, don’t you think?”
Nate groaned and set down the alarm clock to gingerly examine the soreness of his still-healing shoulder.
“I’m afraid this can’t wait,” Sophie sat on the edge of the bed to slip on her heels. “Friends of mine from England, their daughter has gone missing. I said we’d help.”
“I thought we were going to take a break,” Nate said. “To make some changes.”
Sophie dropped down onto the edge of the bed and set a hand on Nate’s led beneath the covers.
Sophie thought of her time away from the team. Coming back, she thought things would be different, somehow better. But coming back, having to rescue Nate; it was the same song and dance as ever. Nate putting himself at hazard, trying to martyr himself, again, getting shot, again. As much as they tried to be more honest with the team and themselves, she couldn’t see how this time it would be any different.
“Nothing ever changes,” she gave his ankle a gentle squeeze. “You should know that.”
“Okay. Shouldn’t we at least get Hardison to do some reconnaissance before we jump into this case,” Nate said.
Grabbing her purse, she paused just a moment longer to jot three names down on a piece of paper and left it on the night stand.
“Have Hardison get started on these names,” she said. “And a flight into Heathrow; I’ll be back.”
Nate sat up, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“There’s an innocent girl in trouble,” Sophie said, already on her way out of the bedroom. “What more is there?”
Her mother had been an actress, from what she had managed to piece together from fractured childhood memories, in both the modern and the Roman sense. She had grown up on Shakespeare and crocodile tears and making up stories to entertain herself on long nights alone. She learned to think of things that made her uncomfortable as adventures, and being able to get anyone to do anything was her magical power. That was how she made her living; it was a good life, comfortable.
By twenty-five, she had grown sick of London, the all-night parties, the frivolous, wealthy friends who were even more counterfeit than she, the fog and the pollution, the crowds and the queues at the Costa Coffee down the stairs from her flat. All the conveniences of the city. Even thieves and grifters had their limits. At twenty-five, she had had enough.
With some forged credentials she found work as a curatorial assistant at the ancestral home of the Calvert family, near the civil parish of Northallerton. It was there that she met Richard and Barbara Daly, the caretakers and their two young daughters, Aine and Naomi, who lived in a little cottage on the estate. They called it Bryony Cottage, for the white flowering hedgerows that surrounded the property.
They often invited her over for afternoon tea and biscuits, and afterwards Richard would read a bit of poetry from Shelley or Keats or Coleridge and the girls would bring her out to the lake to show her how to skip rocks on the glassy surface. And she could stare so long at the clouds and the trees reflecting off the water, she could almost feel “that serene and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul,” which Wordsworth had perceived above Tintern Abbey.
In the winter, the sun would set so early, even before they could polish of Babs’s latest tin of biscuits and the girls could run about outside searching for the beavers they had read about in the Narnia books. Richard would drive her home in a truck that smelled like fertilizer and peat moss to her little room on Scotch Corner, above a pub called the Heifer. It was world away from her life as a London socialite, and though her amassed wealth and trinkets were only a train ride away, despite the lack of creature comforts, she stayed on Scotch Corner, spending her days cataloging silverware and bed curtains, waiting for afternoon tea to feel like she was alive, something real.
It took weeks for them to convince her to come with them on a Sunday stroll. After church they drove an hour to a place called Greenhead Ghyll in the Lake District where the great romantic poets once trod, and had lunch in the stony ruins of an ancient sheepfold. They spent the rest of the day picking their way on hands and knees up the face of the mountain. Richard led the way, and Babs stayed behind her to offer encouragement and the two girls bounced back and forth between their parents, passing her five or six times before they reached the peak and the slow descent back to the village. It was the single filthiest, exhausting, and exhilarating thing she had ever done. Even the cottage pie she had eaten at the pub that night at the base of the mountain had tasted like victory.
She had stolen a Degas in Paris, and Grecian Marbles, and had recently acquired the Rembrandt seascape, not to mention the hearts of thousands of men. But she couldn’t con a mountain, when there was nothing for miles but stone and grass and foxglove and sheep. There was no lie she could tell yourself that could change the way her heart beat so hard she could feel her blood rushing in the crooks of her elbows and in her groin and down the backs of her knees. She had done that of her own power.
She fell into bed that night with blistered feet and dirt staunchly clinging to her cuticles, and yet somehow elated at discovering something that was all her.
At the end of the year, the estate no longer needed the extra help with collections. She returned to her London flat without even nicking anything. Through the winter and the spring she fell back into her usual routine, pulling off small jobs here and there where opportunity beckoned, toying with royal aliases. But in the summer, when the fog descended so thickly upon London that even her whitest furs seemed dingy after she strolled too long on Piccadilly with a rich acquaintance, she boarded a train for North Yorkshire and the stone fences and shining tarns that belonged just to her.
When Sophie returned to the apartment, Hardison had compiled three profiles. Sophie set her bag down at the door and slid into seat beside Parker on the sofa without interrupting his presentation.
“John Powell, Michael Lyons, and Grace Sloan, all three are students at University of London, all three from wealthy families, a hand full of drug and other misdemeanor charges between them, and all three were questioned in the disappearance of Maria Laraichi, a student from Morocco, who went missing in the spring of 2007. The local bobbies found cocaine and blood at her apartment, no one was ever charged.”
From his seat at the bar, Nate looked expectantly at Sophie.
“I’m as proud of mother England as the next patriot, but racism is just as much a problem there as it is here. Under the circumstances, it would be easy enough to write off the disappearance of a foreign student. These three,” Sophie said, pointing at the three faces displayed on the flat screen. “Were the last to see Aine Daly, they spent the last week training for the three peaks challenge, to raise awareness for the protection of rainforests. Babs-Aine’s mother-said that they were supposed to climb Helvellyn yesterday, but had to change their plans because of the weather. That was the last she heard from Aine.”
“This is a friend of yours?” Eliot asked.
“You might say that,” Sophie agreed.
“It’s three o’clock in the damn morning,” Hardison yawned as he began another search, this time bringing up Aine’s transcript, grant applications, and one news article on the Calvert House. “I’m not saying these kids came up looking squeaky clean, but are we sure they aren’t just messing around, doing college kid things: another case of a grown-up woman emotionally stunted in adolescence?”
Parker glared accusingly and Hardison swallowed.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with maintaining a youthful lifestyle.”
“Not Aine,” Sophie said. “She’s a very serious student. She wouldn’t lie to her parents.”
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Parker offered hopefully, then frowned. “That your friend is the second person to go missing after hanging out with these people.”
“No such thing as coincidence,” Eliot grunted.
On either side of her Parker and Eliot sat like to opposing forces of nature. Eliot sat, focused and painfully still, the lack of motion quite the opposite of relaxation, watching and listening like a stone. Parker on her other side was twitching eagerly, he head snapping back and forth with each new voice added to the conversation, like a cat chasing after a glint of light.
“People do change,” Nate said.
Sophie shook her head. “Most students in England take time off before university to travel, to spend time with friends. Aine spent her time earning money for school and volunteering with children’s education programs-it was all she would talk about the last I saw her.”
Sophie paused a moment to consider her next words. “We spent some time together while I was on sabbatical.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now,” Nate lifted one eyebrow, burying himself up to the bridge of his nose in a mug of coffee. Even outside of sniffing range, she knew it was more Irish than coffee.
“We’ve all had ghosts creeping up from our pasts,” Sophie adjusted her seat indignantly. “It’s just another job.”
“I know we’ve got a girl out in the elements,” Eliot said. “But we’re going to need more time to prep this. She could be anywhere.”
“According to my contact, the winds kept them off the edges of Helvellyn, but the others were still in Grasmere as of last night,” Sophie said, rifling through the recesses of her memory. “Besides Helvellyn, the closest mountains are Langdale Pike, Skiddaw, and Scafell. Odds are she’s on one of those.”
Hardison tapped a few keys and brought up several images of the rolling landscape. Huge expanses of green, broken by the grey of boulders and the crystal blue of tarns hundreds and thousands of miles above sea level. Parker bit her lip and bounced on the sofa cushion excitedly.
“That is a lot of nature,” Hardison squinted at the pictures. “I don’t like this; I don’t like this one bit. Do they even have telephone lines?”
Eliot looked to Sophie and narrowed his gaze.
“You think all I do is drink champagne and where little dresses?”
“If she’s only been gone twelve hours it’s likely the police can’t begin a full investigation. We’ll start with the co-eds,” Nate pointed to the television screens. “They were the last to see her; we find them, we can narrow the search for the girl, to give mountain rescue a better chance of bringing her home.”
Sophie rested her chin in the palm of her hand and tried not to think of the alternative.
“So we’re stealing a mountain again…again?” Parker looked between Sophie and Nate expectantly.
“We’ll steal all of the Lake District if we have to,” Sophie said with a dramatic tilt of her chin.
“Let’s just focus on hashing out the details before we bring out the big guns,” Nate offered and Sophie wondered when he had become the one to temper her.
“These kids have been off the grid for days, but luckily,” Hardison said, bringing up further details on the screen. “I did get a hit on one of daddy’s credit cards, a room for three at the Caesar Hotel in London, so unless John Powell, Sr., esquire has a kinky little secret, I’m guessing the kiddies stopped in for a little R-and-R after a long day of abandoning their friend to torment and death on the side of Mount Doom.”
“Clean passports all around,” Hardison handed them each a small packet. “Our flight leaves in less than two hours. I certainly hope y’all don’t intend to check baggage.”
“Let’s go steal a romantic landscape,” Nate declared, with some degree of irony in his voice.
The team rose from their seats and gathered their bags, save Eliot, who still did not travel with luggage, and shook the car keys on his way out the door. Parker unzipped her bag to check on her gear one last time; Sophie suspected she might have been tucking it into bed. Hardison closed up his computer and gathered extension cords and Bluetooth headsets into his messenger bag before heading out the door as Nate sidled up beside her.
“Something tells me this isn’t just another job for you,” he said, leaning in sotto voce.
“It’s never just another job with us; there’s always someone needing justification,” Sophie brushed her hair off her shoulder and lifted her bag.
Her earlier conversation with Babs had left her feeling unsteady. They never talked about it, but she had left to find herself, perhaps even to try to remake herself, to burry Sophie Devereaux and rise from the ashes. But to tell the truth, she had spent most of her time retracing her steps, picking up the pieces of her past. Her life with the Daly’s had been a happy one, but if her sojourn back to her old haunts had proved anything, it was that you can’t go back.
“It’s more than that,” Nate put out an arm to bar her passage from the apartment. “You’re the one we trust to keep us balanced-”
“Because we’re the paragon of balance? It’s going to be hard to go back,” Sophie admitted. “But I know what I’m doing.”
“We will find these people; we’ll figure out what happened,” Nate said. “But you should be prepared to face the idea that your friend knew what she was getting into with these people.”
“I can’t believe that,” Sophie said. “Not without hearing her side of the story-”
Nate cut her off. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”
“You’re not listening,” she protested. “To me. I understand what it must be like, coming from a small town, how it could be easy for her to be misled by people who seem to have such glamorous lives. But she told her mother they were trying to raise awareness to preserve the rainforest. Aine thought she was doing something good. I know what it looks like, but maybe she thought they were turning over a new leaf and put her trust in the wrong people.”
“If there is more to this,” Nate broke the silence between them. “We deserve to know.”
“It’s been a long time,” Sophie said. “I don’t have the same relationship with them that I used to, but hearing Babs on the phone like that, brings all those feelings back, you know. I just want to help them any way we can.”
“And we will, but we need you to keep your head on straight for this one,” Nate began tentatively, as though it were strange for him to try on the words he had heard so often from others. “The rest of us are following you into uncharted territory right now.”
“The truth is,” she said. “The Dalys are the closest thing I had to a real family; I’ve known Aine since she was in pigtails; she used to steal my clothes, my makeup. I’m not the same person I was back then, but I’ve never had anyone else like Aine in my life.”
“A thief?” Nate asked.
“Someone who wanted to be like me,” Sophie dipped her head toward the doorway.
Nate pulled the door open to allow her out. “Let’s bring her home.”
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