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“Sometimes, but mostly we talked about life and about people. Mrs. Rutherford was a student of human nature. She taught me how to see past what people say to what they mean. Past what they did, to who they were.”
“That sounds like psychology,” Hugo said. “I thought she taught English?”
“She did, but English is stories, and stories are people. ‘I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.’”
“A quote?” Lancelot asked.
“Sylvia Plath. I was named after her, so I went through a phase of being obsessed. I learned everything I could about her, read all her books and journals.”
“She wrote The Bell Jar,” Hugo said.
“Yes, she did. You know I’m afraid I don’t know many French poets, except the most famous. Perhaps you could recommend a few to me.” Her eyes met his through the rearview mirror.
“I could, though my favorite contemporary poet is an American.”
She grinned at his compliment.
“I’ve read poetry,” Lancelot mumbled.
“Here we are.” Sylvia turned the car off the road onto a gravel drive flanked by trees. There was a quaint wooden mailbox, and then a less quaint large steel box that looked like the package box in Hugo’s building, where the postman left items too large for a letter slot.
They bounced down the drive, gravel crunching. To their left was a straight line of trees that was probably the property line. To the right was a large grassy area, far too large to be a front garden, though that was apparently what it was, given the pretty white house that sat nearly fifty meters from the road. A branch off the driveway led to a small gravel lot beside the white house, but Sylvia kept driving past it.
What he’d taken to be woods behind the house was actually a copse of trees. Once they passed through those, they came upon a rather unexpected sight. It looked like this area might have once been a farmyard of some kind—there was a tall red barn with white trim, horse stables with a covered arena, and two more small houses, painted the same white as the front house, plus numerous buildings that might be called sheds.
What gave Hugo pause was the massive satellite dish mounted in concrete beside one of the houses, and the plethora of wires leading from a telephone pole to the northernmost house. Hugo peered at the horse arena—was that a massive Tesla coil in the middle of the manicured dirt?
Lancelot cursed and he whipped around to face forward just in time to see a drone drop out of the sky to hover in front of the car for a moment, before zipping up into the blue above.
Lancelot looked grim, and for the first time, Hugo slanted an uneasy glance at Sylvia. She kept inching the car forward, skirting around a pile of what looked like copper coils and finally parking in front of the house with all the wires leading into it.
“Your, ah, brother, lives here?” Lancelot asked.
“Yep. This is his Batcave. Can I have my tote?”
Hugo passed it up, trying to convince himself that her easygoing attitude meant they weren’t about to become victims of some insane American serial killer or captives of the Trinity Masters. While Franco had appeared harmless, Hugo wouldn’t want to find himself in a dark alley with Sebastian.
“And you’re sure he’s home?” Lancelot asked.
“Yep, I checked.” She tapped her watch.
Apparently, her brother was always home at this time of day. Hugo shrugged and got out on the driver’s side.
Sylvia shot him a smile and then started for the steps that led up to the small covered porch. Unlike her own, this porch lacked any inviting seating. What it did have was a handprint scanner and a large camera mounted above the door. Out of the corner of his eye, Hugo saw Lancelot detour back toward the pile of scrap metal they’d driven around. When he came jogging up to join them, he had one arm down at his side and slightly behind him.
Hugo had a sneaky suspicion the knight was hiding something behind his leg—a pole or board that could be used as a weapon.
Sylvia tried to turn the doorknob, and then made a disgusted sound when it proved to be locked. She put her hand on the palm-print scanner.
“Welcome, sister of the great inventor,” a mechanical voice said. “His brilliance is home and accepting petitioners.”
Hugo blinked in surprise. “Is that the voice of C3PO?”
Sylvia sighed and looked at Hugo. “Do you have siblings?”
“I do.”
“Then please, don’t tell him if you think that’s impressive. It will only make him worse.”
