Page 11 of The Mouse and the Maestro

Go you.Is he cute?Emily texted in reply.

Jane sneakeda glance at Blue who stared raptly through the windshield.

Definitely yes.But it was filled with signature Jane awkwardness and bad timing.

Oh,Jane. Only you,Emily replied. Come home and I’ll slip some Klonopin in your tea.

Jane smiled,albeit slightly.My favorite bedtime snack, she replied before stuffing her phone in her pocket. She didn’t have to be told it would come off doubly crazy to kiss a man and then spend the next two hours of traffic texting on her phone. But without Emily as a buffer, however tenuous, she had nothing to do but think.What is wrong with me?It wasn’t the first time she’d had the thought, and it wouldn’t be the last. She seemed unable to function in normal society. Granted, she’d had an unusual upbringing with unusual parents, but her sisters did all right. They were social creatures, fully able to function among other humans. It was only Jane who had seemingly never been able to maintain a normal conversation that didn’t involve her job. Give her an artifact, and she could lecture for hours, and often did, in the course of her work. But put her one on one with another person and ask her to delve into the world of small talk, and she became a blabbering, blithering idiot. And apparently now she kissed people at random.Great, I was really hoping to add another quirk in there to entrench my status as a pariah.

What was even worse was that Blue had spent the last few hours watching her interact with Charles, one of only a handful of men on the planet she felt comfortable enough to flirt with. She and Charles went back decades. He was one of the only people who knew how she grew up, who understood how it was with her dad. She had a comfort level with him she had only with members of her family. And it was her bad luck Blue had to witness it. Maybe he thought her bi-polar. How else to explain her split personality that was so standoffish and awkward with him and so warm and affectionate with Charles?

She would have to try to explain. It would undoubtedly make everything worse, but she couldn’t say nothing. So she thought for a long, long time and tried to put together workable sentences. After practicing the reasonable little speech in her head a few times, she opened her mouth and tried to begin.

“You’re really cute,” she blurted the phrase that had been in absolutely zero parts of her rehearsed speech. She doubled over, touching her forehead to her knees.

“Are you okay?” Blue asked.

Jane held up a finger, took a deep breath, and sat up. “I get very anxious around new people. Bear with me.” She took another breath. “Okay, here we go. There’s this running dialogue in my head that tries to tell me things. Usually it tries to tell me I’m someone I’m not. Tonight, for instance, it tried to tell me I’m the kind of woman who can kiss an attractive stranger and get away with it. But I think we both know I’m not that person. So I’m really sorry for crossing that line with you. It was a whim, and I clearly can’t do whims.”

“I’m going to come back to that in a minute, but for now I have to tell you some bad news.”

Cheeks flaming, she forced herself to look at him. What could be worse than what she’d already said and done?

“We picked up a tail.”

“Oh.”

“Find me a detour.”

Jane sprang to attention and began looking around. “Where is your atlas?”

Blue sputtered a laugh. “I was talking to the car.”

“I’ve located your detour,” the car responded in a smooth computerized voice.

“Has the car been eavesdropping on us this whole time? Because I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the OnStar people knowing how awkward I am and making judgments.”

He laughed again, but his eyes slid to the rearview mirror.

“Should I call the police?” she asked.

“Bad news, Jane. I kind of am the police.” He mashed his foot on the accelerator, gunning it to a hundred as he wove in and out of traffic. The car behind them kept pace for a while, but eventually Blue shook them off. Then he did a U-turn on the divider, doubled back, got off the interstate, and took the alternate route the computer had provided. The tail didn’t find them again.

“Who do you think that was?” she asked. She seemed unnaturally calm, and Blue’s earlier suspicions returned. From what he knew of her, she was high anxiety. Yet they’d just endured a high-speed car chase on one of the busiest freeways in the country and she sat calmly still, her hands folded in her lap.

“I have no idea. The people who know what we’re working on are few,” he said, his eyes darting to hers again.

“I hope it’s no one at the Smithsonian who leaked it,” she said, a tiny bit of worry easing back into her tone.

“Me, too,” he said, but he was thinking of her. “So, an atlas. Are you by chance a defrosted cavewoman?”

“Confession: I have never used GPS.”

“Never?”

“Never. My job deals with artifacts and relics thousands of years old, so to me maps seem new. And I grew up in places without a lot of technology. I never learned to depend on it. But I’m aces at reading a map.”

“It sounds like you had an interesting childhood,” he noted.

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