Steamrolled by Pauline Baird Jones Page A

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