Sure, he'd had some late-night sex ed classes with Sue Hemming out at the abandoned Stanford quarry. That hadn't prepared him for a purple-haired Martian who didn't seem to own a bra and who, if she was wearing underpants at all, was wearing a damned small thong. Those slits in the skirt showed nothing but girl. Sue might have been an enthusiastic partner, but she waited for him to make the moves. That was sex. This was interspecies sex.
But the purple-haired alien had moved on to the next display case, masks and spears and penis-sheaths and fetishes from New Guinea. "Ethnologist's stew," is what Caroline had called the collection. And implied that some collector should have been added to the cannibal's pot.
He'd been hanging around Aunt Alice and Caroline too much. Some of this stuff made him . . . queasy, stuff that had been buried alive and left there waiting, watching, hungry. Not "killed" like that Zuni bowl. Stuff that felt nasty, like that flint Ben kept selling and stealing back.
He really ought to tell Aunt Alice about that. Recognize that "Haskells" and "Morgans" had become one big happy family. Even though Ben would shit enough bricks for a garden wall. Sideways. He'd turned the flint into an obsession.
Jane turned back, noticing his pause. She squinted at him and chewed on one purple fingernail. "Naskeag Indians, eh? Stonefort? How many Alice Haskells do you know?"
Gary blinked and waited for the cold shivers to settle down. Alien or not, cyber-outlaw or not, this girl made too many connections to let her loose around Morgan family history. "Aunt Alice? Ain't but the one. World couldn't survive another. Why?"
She chewed at that nail for a bit longer. "Kid I knew, back on the streets. Hell, everybody knew her. 'Tiny Tina' we called her, 'cause she wasn't. I never knew her real name. Big girl, about my age, brain fried by street chemicals. Dead girl, judging by the police sketch in the paper. Your guardian helped find her body." Chewed some more. "A couple of months, one way or another, that could have been me."
Small town. He'd grown up thinking Naskeag Falls was the big city, but it wouldn't rate as half a suburb around Boston. If the dead kid came from Naskeag Falls, odds were that Jane would have known her. They'd have gone to the same schools, hung out on the same midnight street corners. Not that many choices.
She was staring through the wall behind him, chewing on that nail. He hadn't really looked at her hands before, but all the nails were ragged, most gnawed clear down to the quick. The purple paint hid that. One high-tension girl, under that spiky façade.
And he'd never had a course in understanding women. All the ones he knew were off the chart. Mom had been a hair-trigger volcano tangled between love and hate, Dad and Ben. Not necessarily in that order. Aunt Alice and Aunt Kate were lesbians, Caroline was . . . Caroline, a law unto herself. The most practice he had for dealing with a scared girl would be Mouse and Ellie, and Jane was most definitely not a little sister.
He started to reach out to her, and suddenly she was burrowing her nose into his chest. Shaking. So maybe the little sister subroutine would work, after all.
"How'd you get off the street and end up here?"
"Luck." Her voice came through muffled by his shirt. "A woman at the King shelter said she wouldn't let me kill myself. Clamped on to my ear and dragged me left and right and backwards until we hit computers and something clicked. Hauled me out of bed in the mornings and drove me to school, waited at the door to pick me up in the afternoons. Kicked my butt as needed. Wouldn't let me fail.
"To Mom and Dad, I was just another weapon in a thermonuclear war. Dana cared. She lasted about six months at the teen shelter before the place burned her to a crisp. Just long enough. After that, I couldn't let her down."
One of the museum guards was staring at them with a narrowed-eye half smile that said "Get a room." Gary added him to the mental map. And reminded himself that he didn't want to do anything memorable in this place. Morgan men were supposed to be invisible, and standing there with Jane plastered all over him sure attracted attention. He gently peeled her loose and moved on to a case filled with Maine split-ash and sweetgrass 'fancy' baskets, antique and modern stuff that made him smile in spite of Jane's problems. Three of the makers were named Haskell, one of them Aunt Elaine.
"Last news I saw, the police were still asking for information on that girl. You talk to them?"
"Buddy-boy, I'll walk a mile out of my way to avoid seeing a cop. I don't want them to realize I'm still alive and within reach."
Maybe Ben would like this girl. Still, Gary made a mental note to pass that name along to Caroline, who would pass it to Aunt Kate, who could point some people at Naskeag Falls street kids without naming her source.
Then Jane cocked her head at him, armor back in place and deviltry in her eyes. "So what are we trying to steal? I mean, 'locate for a totally legal Native claim?' Are we looking for Naskeag stuff?"
Or maybe Ben would tell him to run away very very fast.
"What gives you the idea we plan to steal anything?"
"The fact that you're running a map of the alarm system in your head. The fact that the museum denies holding whatever you're looking for. Even if you do find it, odds are that it's cataloged wrong. Probably labeled as Tibetan. Otherwise, it would have shown up on your legal search."
She waved at the
