?
“More often than I probably should,” she admitted.
She sat down on the old bench. He stood next to her. “So you come and stare at a grave of someone you may or may not be related to and call it, what, mental health time?”
“Don’t be a git. Everyone has quirks.”
“Okay, what about your known family?”
“What about them?” she said a bit too defensively.
“Are they living?”
“No. How’re your kids doing? Fix that problem with your son back in the States, did you?”
“My first memories were of a fat old nun in an orphanage. And I never married. No kids.”
“The truth this time?”
“Yes.”
“But a grave outside of Frankfurt. Anna?”
Shaw inclined his head at the sunken trough of earth. “But I knew the woman in that grave.”
Reggie looked in that direction. “Like I said, quirks. But I would like to know more about her.”
“Who? The woman in my grave or yours?”
“Both.”
Shaw stared off, eyeing a bird riding a breeze across the sky. “So what happened to your family?”
“They died,” she said sharply. “They just died,” she added more quietly. She looked over at him. “People do, you know. Every second of every day.” Her expression changed. “So what have you learned about us so far?”
“That you’re lucky to be alive.”
Reggie frowned. “How do you mean?”
“You might be good in the field, though I’ve only witnessed the debacle in Gordes. But this place has no perimeter security, little internal safeguards, and most of the people I’ve met would never pass a basic security clearance check. Whit, for example, is a wreck just waiting for a train to come by. And your fearless leader Professor Mallory looks like a reincarnation of C. S. Lewis only with a homicidal edge to him.”
“Actually, I believe he’s partial to Tolkien.”
“Doesn’t really change the equation. You guys are skating on thin ice.”
Reggie stood. “Well, you know what? We’ve gotten by just fine. Until you showed up.”
“If I hadn’t shown up, you’d be dead,” he reminded her.
“Fine. You want me to get down on my knees and attest to your superiority? We don’t have big budgets and planes and all that crap, but we get the job done.”
“Most of the time you get the job done,” he corrected.
Now she looked away, her face reddening. When she stared back, Reggie said, “Any other insults you want to send my way while you’re in such rare form?”
“They’re not insults. They’re critiques. You asked me what I thought and I told you. If you didn’t want to know, then you shouldn’t have asked.”
“You really are something,” she said heatedly.