by Alec Peche
He and Ariana sat in the bleachers surrounding the pool watching the coach put her through the paces. Then he had her swim a few different lengths and strokes and then brought the session to an end and walked over to talk to them while Hermione went and changed.
“She’s quite a swimmer. I’ve never in my twenty years of coaching had a mid-season walk-on that passed my testing, so congrats to your daughter. She’ll need to be at swim practice three times a week, with meets after school or on weekends. There’s just enough meets left that she’ll have time to qualify for sectionals if she performs well,” said the coach. He then handed them a sheet that repeated what he’d gone over with them and left. The first meet was in four days.
They sat alone waiting for Hermione to return.
“So, did I make the team?” she asked.
“Yes,” chorused Ariana and Damian at the same time with the same prideful grins on their faces.
She relaxed and threw her fist in the air and then fist bumped the two of them.
“You have two meets to qualify for sectionals and one of those is this Thursday,” Ariana said. “So the treadmill is going on high speed for you sweetie. I hope you can handle it between the new classes and the swim workouts and meets. You did really well today at both the testing for classes and the pool. Let’s head to my favorite café for ice cream and we’ll sit down and plan the week.”
“I can’t help you swim faster, but if you need help with your homework, just ask,” Damian said.
Later over ice cream, they discussed her classes and swim schedule and worked out a plan. Ariana would ferry her to school and back unless she had a meeting regarding one of her companies, then Damian would step in and provide the transportation and escort home and stay with her until Ariana arrived. It would create quite a hole in his schedule as he would have to head to the Richmond Marina, get his truck, and then go over the bridge and into Marin County to pick the kid up for a five minute ride, but he felt it was important for her peace of mind to know that one of her guardians was always close-by.
It was a little smothering for a fourteen year old; but in time either her parents would return or she would push them away as a part of growing up. This week, Ariana had cleared her schedule so the first time Damian would hang with them was Thursday at the swim meet although he did intend to keep up with her through texting.
He had a laundry list of items to work on in regards to her parents. Who were they, what to do about the house - should he pay the utilities and taxes to keep it someday for Hermione? If her parents were dead, it was her inheritance. The utility bills question he would answer immediately by paying their bills, the longer term what to do with the house could wait. First he needed to make sure the parents owned the house. They could have been renters and in that case, the only inheritance to Hermione was the contents.
After the ice cream, Ariana stopped to grab some groceries and then the three of them sat at her kitchen counter going over books, subjects to be studied, and assignments due. They discussed nutrition and training. They worked out a complete schedule for the remainder of the week accounting for swim practice and the meet, assignments due and food to power her through the day. Tomorrow would be the real test for Hermione as she entered all her classes as the only new kid and she wouldn’t have Ariana and Damian paving the way for her.
It was clear that Hermione had a handle on organizing herself for school work. Ariana and Damian admitted to fumbling around as neither had been in school for over two decades. Heck, they had constant reminders of how difficult it was to be a parent even to a highly cooperative kid. They realized that at least they lucked out on the kid and Damian thought it would be a real pleasure caring for Hermione until her parents returned or perhaps the remainder of his life. He was excited to help her succeed and decided to invite himself to dinner tomorrow to hear how her first day went.
Damian reached his island late; thankfully he kept a little fish in the freezer for rainy days or other days when the fish were not biting. His cats lined up while he was at the stove cooking it for them. It suddenly occurred to him that he could just filet the fish and serve it to them raw as that was how they ate things in the wild. Maybe he’d try that next time. After five years of making them fish dinner perhaps they’d developed a taste for cooked fish over raw.
His mind was going a thousand directions, yet he was tired and excited too. He felt like his sleep had been disrupted for the past week between dealing with Natalie’s and Hermione’s problems. He also felt very satisfied that he’d served others well this week. His late wife and daughters would have been proud of everything he did this past week, he thought, and let out a great sigh at that thought. Maybe he would put on some music and grab a beer to watch the gradual darkening of the sky.
One moment he was relaxed and thinking about what he’d need to build a guest room on his lower level, then a thought struck him and he reached for his cell phone to text Ariana. He’d never asked her about her security set-up but had assumed she had a top of the line system. She had given both him and Hermione keys so they could come and go as they pleased, but Damian couldn’t recall seeing her set a security system. He would fix that tomorrow if need be. He could install the same underwater sensors on her beach as he did with the island to protect her house from a water invasion. Ariana texted back that she had a security system but rarely used it, but he’d be pleased to know that she’d turned it on after getting his text.
Advanced warning was what had allowed Hermione to escape the kidnappers twice. It hadn’t saved her parents, but the kid was quicker and that’s what they needed to build into Ariana’s home. He would survey her property tomorrow and look for a way to build an invisible fence around the perimeter. It was interesting that she hadn’t asked for a safe room to be built for her. Okay, time to put those thoughts to rest if he was ever going to get some sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The next morning, Damian tried to establish his old routine: working out in his gym and spending some time with his wave technology. He’d figured out how to collect the energy, but he wasn’t satisfied with his storage idea. Batteries were the common storage solution, but he wanted something different. He was experimenting with salt and hydrogen as were other researchers around the world. Given that he was aiming to help third world countries with his technology, all of them were located in tropical climates. Sure there were islands like Ireland or New Zealand that didn’t have tropical climates, but they weren’t impoverished countries. So he needed a storage solution that worked in hot climates. He’d convert the energy into something for storage and again back at the time of usage. Enough of that invention, it was time to move on to something else.
He wanted to solve the DNA problem now that he understood how large the backlogs were, the cost of performing the test, and the time involved. Maybe if he could fix the processing of some specimens, he could solve part of the backlog. He started by going to the U.S. Patent Office and read the patents on a few machines designed to read DNA. Some took as little as twenty minutes to read and others up to ten days yet they were all in the 99.9% accuracy range so why would you use an analyzer that took a long time? He decided then that his next engineering project was to significantly speed up DNA analysis and he worked out a plan to approach the problem.
Then it was time to move on to Hermione’s parents. He had their pictures from the phone he recovered. He also had facial recognition software that he ran the pictures through and he couldn’t say he was surprised that no matches came back. Either they had work done on their facial features or someone had managed to wipe their identities off of all systems. The house had been purchased about three to five years prior by a company that went from the Cayman Islands to Iceland, on to Russia and Damian had to give up tracing who actually owned the company or even when the Sherwoods had moved in. He guessed based on the ‘Hannah Sherwood’ pictures in her school yearbook that they had been there perhaps three years. Next he wormed his way into the
utilities and found the same corporation paying the bills. He would check again in a week to see if that continued. He’d need to talk to Hermione over several conversations to see if she could drop any random information about her parents. He’d check their facial recognition and the fingerprints daily for any new entries. He had grabbed the toothbrushes from her parent’s bedroom when he visited the house and dusted them in his own laboratory. He could only guess that the larger fingerprints actually matched her father. He wondered if they were in some witness protection program and his matching their fingerprints would alert whoever was monitoring the Sherwood family; nothing like a heavy dose of paranoia to worry about as he searched for the identity and location of Hermione’s parents.
Okay now to move back to Natalie’s cases. He looked up at the clock and realized he would have to head over to Ariana’s house soon as Hermione would be finished with both school and swim practice. Since he only had a few minutes, he took a look at the emails over the last few days between Aryan Brotherhood members. He was curious as to whether there was any conversation about Natalie and if so, between what members? He was also curious as to whether they changed their language again. Both questions were negative.
It was time to head across the bay. He thought about the boat he had to use and if he should purchase some kind of faster, but compact boat he could stay dry in. He’d looked on line and found a few models that would keep him dry and still fit in his watercraft garage. He paid a retainer to Mike for his parking spot and unlimited transportation and delivery from the Richmond Marina, but in Hermione’s case he was heading the opposite direction and he would be traveling there several times a week.
After the slow trip across the bay, he pulled into the dock at Ariana’s house. Miguel came out to greet him and gave him this look as if to say, ‘follow me inside’, and so he did.
“Hello ladies, how was your day?”
‘We’re just talking about it,” Ariana said with a smile. “Would you like some iced tea or lemonade?”
“Iced tea would be great,” Damian replied as he pulled out a stool at the counter.
“We’re just chatting about the name ‘Hermione’; it was apparently a big hit and from the start, teachers and students alike expected our Hermione to be smart and she was!” Ariana said beaming with pride.
“I listened to the first Harry Potter book while I was working on your identity on Sunday, and while you may be as smart as that Hermione, I don’t recall her being gifted athletically unless that happens in one of the later books.”
“She’s not the best flyer on a broomstick, but she’s great at disapparating, so she has a way to get there.”
“It’s all about making your way in this world,” Damian noted. “How about swim practice? Was it good to get in the pool again?”
“I was worried what would happen to my hair color. I had visions of black and purple dye leaking out from my swim cap as I swam, but then I remembered that it hadn’t happened yesterday. The other kids weren’t excited to have another swimmer as they are all a competitive bunch and I beat some of them in time trials. I know that I might knock someone out of qualifying for sectionals, but they should all be competitive enough to want to beat my time rather than beating me on a personal level.”
“That’s a very mature way of looking at the situation, Hermione, but not everyone is that analytical, so be careful of hurt feelings; they may be masked as other things like bullying,” Ariana cautioned.
“I know. I already had that conversation with one of the girls on the team. She backed off when I challenged her to swim harder to beat me, but I have a feeling I’ll hear more of that from her.”
“Did you tell the coach about her?” Ariana asked.
“Of course not! I can handle my own problems without snitching to the coach on the first day. Gosh, I’ll never make friends if I do that!” Hermione said with perfect teenage angst and eye rolling.
Damian and Ariana’s eyes met briefly as they delighted in seeing normal behavior for one her age.
Damian had a small panic attack on the way over wondering how he was going to communicate with Hermione. He had planned a few questions in his head if the conversation stalled but it was going fine.
“So tell me about your classes; are they at all challenging; do you need any help with schoolwork?” Damian asked.
“There are a lot of smart kids at this school and the teachers must have had word of my test scores, because they asked me questions in class on materials from the books. It was fun.”
Again Damian and Ariana caught themselves grinning. How lucky were they that they were guardians to a kid who said school was fun.
“I caught a couple of kids talking about me behind my back in Spanish and then Chinese, and once I answered both back in their own language they stopped doing it, but I’m sure they’ll find another way to torment me, it’s the way of teenagers.”
Ariana had to speak on that note, “Kiddo, you’re far too wise for your years. Congrats for speaking those languages by the way, I only know a smattering of words in each language. How about you, Damian, do you speak a second language?”
“Latin and German because they’re convenient to science. With the Latin background I can sometimes decipher Spanish, French, or Italian, but I’m not fluent to speak. Where did you learn those languages?” Perhaps this would be his first clue about her parents.
“When I was growing up, we lived in both China and Columbia. I was home-schooled but it was easy to pick up the language when we went shopping or anywhere outdoors.”
“Why were you living there?” Damian asked.
Hermione gave him an evasive look and said, “How would I know why we lived in a particular country?”
Perhaps she was used to hiding this information from strangers so he asked, “Do you know if you lived there because your father or mother had a job there? Who home-schooled you?”
“Dad worked for a drug company and mom home-schooled me.”
“Does your father still work for a drug company?”
“I don’t think so.”
Jeez getting information from the kid about her parents was like pulling teeth. “Listen Hermione, I’m trying to help by finding your parents, but I don’t know who they even are yet. There’s no fingerprint match for them.”
“Fingerprint match? How did you get their fingerprints?” Ariana asked.
“I took their toothbrushes when I invaded the house a few days ago.”
“Wow.” Ariana said. “You’re a little scary. Not only do you have the ability to collect fingerprints, but you also know how to hack into databases looking for a match.”
“Once you learn the finesse of hacking, you can pretty well tackle any database. So back to your parents,” Damian said looking at Hermione. “What can you tell me about them to help me identify who they are and where they might be?”
There was still silence from the girl and so Damian sighed and said, “I can see you don’t trust me yet. When you’re ready, answer my questions, okay?”
Hermione nodded, glad to have the spotlight off of her parents. Her parents had spent years teaching her to trust no-one and reveal no personal information about herself and while on one level she really trusted these adults, she couldn’t ignore the lifetime of warnings from her parents.
“So all in all, this was a good first day in this new life of ours, would you agree?” Ariana asked smoothing over the tense silence.
“Yes and I realize that this new coach and pool are going to be good for me; they’re much more competitive. At my old school, there weren’t as many swimmers and I can’t recall the coach working on technique for getting off the starting platform. He worked on every swimmer’s technique and he cut about half a second off my start time through better positioning.”
“Is half a second a lot?” Ariana asked.
“It’s the difference between first and last place in a short race like fifty meters, so yes it’s a big deal.”
“Is that one of your races?” Damian asked.
“It was at my old school, but it won’t be this year at this school as I’m too slow. I’m also fourteen and some of the swimmers are seniors and they’re seventeen or eighteen so they have a lot more muscle than I do.”
“From a physics point of view, they may be larger but then they have more resistance against them in the water. So don’t sell yourself short simply on size,” Damian noted.
“I won’t, but I’m realistic too.”
They moved on to having dinner and playing with Miguel outside. Damian checked in with Hermione on her homework in detail and decided that there was nothing he could lend a hand to there. It was close to sunset and he preferred traversing the bay in daylight so he departed with plans to show up at her meet on Thursday. It was away at another high school, so he’d drive to the school in northern Marin County.