Chapter 92

SATURDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 19

The kitchen door opened as Frank and Margaret came in. Although both were smiling, it didn't take a genius to tell that neither had much sleep last night. Margaret's steps were also a little shorter than usual. As she turned toward the others who were beginning breakfast, Arlene intercepted Margaret and gave her a hug.

"Sit with your new husband. You're certainly not going to cook this morning."

"I can help. I'm perfectly..."

But Arlene had already started steering her back to her husband. Smiling, Margaret sat on Frank's lap at the table with Captain Madison and Dave ribbing him about his wedding night and looking bedraggled. Actually, he just looked a little sleepy, but to hear them tell it, he was only one step from the grave.

Tina, who had already been helping the other women, came over to hug Frank and Margaret. "Still planning to leave after the guests are gone?" she asked, knowing that was their original plan.

"Wellll..." Margaret said, stretching out the word as she looked at Frank, then back at Tina. "Actually, we might have a slight change in plans. We'll get together and talk later this morning. Okay?"

Frank spoke up. "We neglected our guests yesterday, so we're going to try and spend at least a little time with each of them this morning, and also see them off as they leave. We thought we would start with a little catch-up as they eat breakfast."

Jeff chuckled. "Judging by the looks the Corrigan's were giving you last night, I'll bet they have some questions about Tina."

"They can have all the questions they want," Margaret said. "But they should have put a stop to Gregg's activities long ago. Turning a blind eye to the things he has obviously been doing is inexcusable."

Embarrassment flushed across Tina's face. "As I said before, they were good to me. And Gregg could be very charming, something that he always turned on when his parents were around — at least he did while I was with him. I really don't have any animosity toward them — just Gregg. I have a lot of animosity toward him, and that's putting it mildly."

A grim smile crossed Jeff's face, but before anyone noticed, he changed the subject and got Frank started telling about the island.

A small figure peeked around the corner to inspect the hallway. (Six-year-old Selina.) The hallway momentarily clear, she ran to the basement stairway door, opened it and slipped past. Turning the knob, then slowly releasing it when the door closed, she prevented the click as the lock engaged. Quietly, she walked down the stairs, the lights coming on automatically in the stairway.

She checked out the weight room, trailing her hand over one of the big weights on its bar as she walked past. In the next room, she casually looked around, the machines familiar to her, looking much the same as their own gym did at home, although there were multiples of each type of equipment here. She was too small to use the machines, yet, but she was anxious to be big enough to use them like her mother and father did. She absently noted the smell of human sweat, both male and female, although the ventilation system accompanied by Diana and her sister-wives' rather zealous regime of cleaning would have prevented most people from smelling anything, but again, Selina was not most people.

There was just too much to see; the place was far too big to search everything before she would be missed, and the large open space in the huge basement was intimidating, even though she had found the master light switch that turned on the lights to a large part of it. Later, she opened a door and stood for a few moments looking into the firing range. It looked like a big, dark tunnel until she gathered her nerve and slid her hand up the wall to find the switch that turned on the range's lights. She scanned the room with its firing stations, her eidetic memory bringing forth a picture of a firing range she had seen on the Internet.

Smiling, part of her mind on what she was remembering, another part still scanning the range, she remembered how upset her mother was after discovering that she had managed to get past the silly little program that purported to block children from parts of the Internet. After that, Selina had been more careful. The caution had paid off when she found the key logger shortly after her father slipped it on an unused USB port on the back of her desktop. That had taken a few more minutes to bypass without leaving a trace.

She walked over, reached up and pressed the button to bring a target frame back to the station. The machinery was almost silent, even in the quiet of the soundproofed range. Her eyes focused on the end of the range. What is that? her inquisitive mind asked. She looked around, then saw the switch on the back wall with "FALLS" written in small block letters over it. She went over and pressed the button. Turning, she saw the liquid cascade down the artificial falls at the other end of the range. Bullet trap, came instantly to her brilliant mind. Back at the firing station, she ran her hand idly over the shelf beside her, her mind quickly ascertaining what the shelf was for, then ran the target frame back to where it had been. Turning, she looked at the gun case that ran along the back wall and the cleaning table that paralleled it.

She stepped closer, looking through the glass wall of the case, but she didn't touch anything. She assumed the long case of weapons was locked, maybe even alarmed, not that she couldn't pick the lock, and with time, bypass the alarms if she had her tools, but she had left them at home. Even her mother and father would notice if she had brought something like that with her.

At home, she had thumbed through the household credit cards in the kitchen drawer when the cook wasn't looking. Quickly memorizing the numbers, expiration dates and codes, she had returned the cards. The numbers were all she needed to buy most anything she wanted on the Internet. She rotated the use of each card, forestalling the chance of someone noticing several unusual accounts listed on the billing for one card. Of course, she doubted that the accountants would bother to check, but she used discretion, anyway.

She smiled as she shut the falls off. Turning the lights out, she eased the range door closed behind her. Adults were so easy to fool. "That song," she thought as she remembered what she had said to her mother when she had caught her (Selina) listening at the door of the big living room. If she had said, Wagner's Bridal March, she might have let slip more than she intended and it would not have fit the child persona she tried so hard to maintain. She had to be on constant vigilance to act like a six-year-old. But sometimes it was amusing to stay in that persona, although, there were occasions when it became really boring to do so. But something was going to have to change. School was almost more than she could stand. For crying out loud, she had taught herself to read when she was two. And now, she read faster than any adult she had ever seen read.

They had another wedding, though. Of that, she was certain. Why would they do that? I don't have enough information — yet. But I will have.

She usually entertained herself while in her silly little school by exploring her own thoughts. Her mind was a sponge. She giggled at her use of the cliché. But she wanted to learn, and just how much was she going to learn while wasting all day in a first grade class? Still, she didn't want anyone to know just how smart she really was. She knew she was different; had known before she was two. It didn't take long to realize that people were uncomfortable with a genius, although, she was fairly sure her mother and father didn't have a clue that she was that smart. That one doctor though; he had just about figured her out before she noticed and started acting her age. The doctor had talked to her parents, and she had seen the look on her father's face a couple of times as he watched her. He was suspicious. She had to be careful.

She ambled along through the basement, occasionally opening a door, or looking into a closet. She was an enigma, particularly to her mother. More than that, she was a frustration to both her parents. She wasn't supposed to have happened. She had heard enough over her short life to know that she had been an "accident." Her mother and father had planned for two children. The first had been her sister, now twenty and in a small and very elite college for young women. Her brother, now seventeen, almost eighteen, had also been planned. He had opted to come to the wedding because he wanted to go skiing in Winter Park, otherwise, he would be at his equally elite, live-in, high school. Both of her siblings were in very expensive schools. The expense, she knew, was to salve her parents' consciences about wanting their offspring out of the house, and out of their hair — and for something to brag about to their friends and acquaintances.

Selina would normally be home while her parents attended the wedding of this very important business associate, except her live-in nanny had started having pains and was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Her mother had been frantically looking for a boarding school for Selina. The school she was attending in the interim was not a boarding school, although it was a fairly exclusive private school. Her mother had looked at two boarding schools that might have worked, but she had not been satisfied with their qualifications so far — nor had Selina. The main qualifications as far as her parents were concerned, Selina thought, was a place that would keep her 24/7 and never call her parents no matter what. Oh, and it had to be elite and ... expensive, so that all her parents' friends would know how much they loved their children. Yeah, right, she sarcastically thought. She had listened as her mother griped to a friend about not being able to travel the world as they had planned — something they had been planning to do when the first two children were out of the house and securely locked away in a boarding school somewhere. Then they had to wait until Selina was old enough to be packed off, too.

They had planned to ski the world over, among other things, and now that Selina was old enough to be boarded out, they hadn't been able to find just the exclusive school — well, the exclusive school that Selina hadn't thrown a temper tantrum over (contrived) when they began to discuss it with her. They were just a wee bit intimidated by her, realizing that she was a lot smarter than she ought to be, even though they had no real clue just how smart she actually was.

The door to Jeff's lab was locked, piquing her curiosity. But she didn't have time to look for the key or figure a way to get in. She shelved the thought for the moment, and continued her wanderings. She liked this place — the whole retreat — and the people in it. She had long since noticed that people paid little attention to her if she were quiet and didn't look directly at adults. If she just stood by a drape, for instance, sometimes slowly spinning around, supposedly for her own amusement, and presumably not paying any attention to anyone, generally people just ignored her. It had worked at the reception last night, and usually worked when her parents had parties at their home. In this manner, she had listened attentively to several conversations yesterday and last night.

She had also listened at doorways, her phenomenal hearing picking up things that few others could hear under the circumstances. She had noticed relationships here that she did not understand. But it was obvious to her that there were several women associated with the men who lived in this beautiful building — multiple women for each of the men who lived here. She had at first thought that some of the women were sisters, but had noticed more than one woman kiss the same man, and most of the women wore wedding bands. Something was different about the bridesmaids, too. Maybe not wrong per se, but something different. One of the tall men, Mr. Matthews, had seen her as she stood concealed in the thick drapes looking through the tiny crack between the folds of heavy cloth. He had looked straight at her and smiled. He couldn't have seen her — but he had. She had suddenly had an urge to go sit in his lap. Somehow she knew she would be safe with him, but she had resisted. Eventually, he had looked away and had not revealed her presence to the other people nearby — at least as far as she could determine.

A little later last night, she had listened as the women talked. Some of them were hardly more than girls, and one woman who was older, but somehow didn't look as old as she seemed. Selena had heard her full name when the woman had introduced herself to one of the guests. Her name was Helen Boswell, and the girls with her were talking about a school project. Obviously, Helen was a teacher. She wondered if this woman was the Doctor Helen Boswell she had read about. She would have to look into that. Later they said something about their old classroom, and mentioned their new classroom that was nearing completion on the second floor. This school is becoming more interesting all the time — something else to check out before we leave, she thought.

She continued to listen. Eventually, it all came together. They not only had a school here, but it was a very, very private school. She didn't know a lot about high school, at least from personal experience, but she could read almost as fast as she could turn the pages of a book, and not just children's books, either. She frowned as her thoughts skated across the memory of having to read the dumb little sentences aloud to her first grade teacher. Of course, she had glanced through her school books when they were passed out, instantly memorizing everything, so when her turn came to read, she had focused her mind on something else, bored, and deliberately stumbled through the kiddy words in the book, actually reciting, instead of reading. The teacher bought it, though. But this school didn't sound like the schools she knew about. Also, the girls, though not old enough for college, were taking college courses.

She was intrigued and had to know more, but breakfast would be served soon, and if she didn't show, her mother would come looking, probably becoming even more suspicious than she already was. She returned the lighting to the way it was before she began her basement explorations, then hurried back up the stairs. Peeking out the stairway door, she then walked casually out and skipped along toward the dining room, the persona of a normal six-year-old firmly in place. Now to find out more about these people and the school here. Her parents were trying to find a school to dump her in. Maybe she had just solved their problem.