Chapter Text
Wendy had known Bob for over a year, and in all that time he’d never talked about his family.
It wasn’t like she could have brought the subject up herself. Living in a place where contact with relatives and friends could be seriously curtailed by security considerations, you just didn’t ask anyone about their family unless they said something first – and Bob never had. He had a slightly blurry photo of Todd, John and Fred dressed up for last year’s summer dance on the mantle, and a picture of Wendy herself on the small table beside his favorite chair. There were no pictures of his family anywhere, not even one of the Aunt Doris whom he’d mistakenly panicked over once because he’d thought she was coming to the island for a visit.
Which was why Wendy was so very surprised the day she stuck her head into Bob’s living room from the office door and found him absolutely surrounded by photo albums and scrapbooks. He’d looked happy enough to burst, and he’d just as happily waved her in and started showing her everything at once. And that was how she’d found out that Bob had a brother.
And not just a brother, an identical twin brother named Tom. Five minutes older than Bob, and currently working in the Arctic on the intergovernmental pipeline project…and until very recently not cleared by Project security to be allowed communication with his younger brother. “He didn’t understand,” Bob told her sadly, putting aside one scrapbook and picking up another. “I couldn’t explain it to him, of course. And I think when Aunt Doris tried she just made it worse. She looks after our parents,” he explained, showing her a picture of an older couple standing on either side of a younger Bob and Tom at what looked like a graduation ceremony. “Dad has Alzheimer’s, and Mom…well, she doesn’t, but she’s sort of followed Dad down the garden path, if you know what I mean. There’s just no way we can tell them about the Project. Aunt Doris told them I’m working in South America, and sometimes I send them letters to that effect through her.” He sniffed. “She tells me they read them over and over again, never throw any of them away.”
Wendy put her arm around him and tried not to sniff herself; her younger sister Jenny had clearance, although sometimes Wendy wished she didn’t, and their parents were dead. She’d had to send the occasional truth-deprived note to this relative or that, but she couldn’t imagine what Bob, who was as honest as the day was long, must go through every time he had to write a letter full of lies to his mother and father. “What about Tom?” she asked him. “Does he think you’re in South America? He must have seen those letters.”
“Oh, he saw them.” Bob shook his head. “They made him furious. He’d even told Aunt Doris a time or two to let me know just what he thought of me for playing some kind of game with Mom and Dad. You see, the Project couldn’t clear him until now. Tom checked out okay but his boss didn’t, and they’re sort of cut off from the rest of the world a lot of the time.” He smiled, even if it was a little watery, tracing the mirror image of himself in the picture. “But then his boss got replaced, and the new guy is okay so the clearance finally went through. The Project contacted him yesterday, and he called me early this morning. He wasn’t sure I’d even want to talk to him, much less have him come for a visit.”
“I’m glad he got up the courage to call.” Wendy hugged him and then removed her arm; even inside and alone, there was still the decency clause to consider. She picked up a pile of pictures and started looking through them, smiling at the sight of two tiny brown-haired, brown-eyed toddlers in footie pajamas sitting beneath the branches of a decorated tree. “So is he going to come see you?”
“He’s going to try to make it for Christmas.” Bob’s smile was just short of beaming, but it quickly fell back into worry. “Unless he gets snowed in – or we do.”
“Oh dear.” Sol Island was sunk deep in the depths of winter, and the heavy snowfalls had closed down the town more than once. Bob had already been out with Muck and Scoop before dawn, clearing roads of the night’s accumulated snow, and he’d be going back out before dark to clear them again. He couldn’t clear the railroad tracks, though, and if the drifts became too high and frozen the valley would be cut off until the railroad manager from up the line managed to get something done about it. Which could take a while if the rail yard was snowed in too, and Christmas was in two more weeks.
It was going to be Wendy’s second Christmas in Sunflower Valley. Jenny had come the year before, right after Christmas, and they’d gone skiing for New Year’s. The ski trip had been fun, she and Jenny got along pretty well most of the time…but then the train had gotten snowed in and Jenny had been stuck in Sunflower Valley for several extra days. Several very long days, from Wendy’s perspective; Jenny was easily bored, and a little on the wild side. She also had a tendency to try to steal Wendy’s boyfriends, a nasty habit she’d had since they were teenagers.
She’d taken an immediate interest in Bob, who it seemed was only oblivious when it came to harmless women; faced with the dangerous, man-hunting predator that was Jenny, he’d all but run from her every time she’d gotten close. Which had only made Jenny more determined to get him, of course, and eventually Wendy had been forced to push the two of them together for a little while so that Jenny’s frustration wouldn’t get the better of her. So Jenny had tried to teach a reluctant Bob to ski on the snow-shrouded hills near Fred Pickles’ farm, which hadn’t gone well judging by how covered with snow Bob had been once they’d made it back to the yard…but after that, Jenny had backed off completely. Which had been a first – Jenny had never, in Wendy’s experience, ever backed off. Talking to Bob about it had been out of the question, of course, so finally Wendy had just come right out and asked her sister what had happened.
Jenny had seemed embarrassed, which was unusual in itself, but she still hadn’t told her older sister exactly what had gone on that afternoon in the hills. All she would say was that Bob was ‘not just another guy for them to wrangle over’ and she wasn’t going to bother him that way any more. Jenny had been back to the island one more time since then and had lived up to her words – she teased Bob, but she wasn’t pursuing him. Having her around had still made Bob nervous, though, so Wendy had compensated him for it by replacing his decaf coffee with the real thing for the duration of Jenny’s stay. Bob’s response to that had been to quietly switch from coffee to Wendy’s favorite herbal tea for an entire week after Jenny had left, and the smell of the tea still to this day gave Wendy a warm glow; Bob definitely wasn’t ‘just another guy.’
Wendy spent the next few hours that morning looking at pictures and listening to Bob talk about his family, hoping with everything in her that the weather would stay clear enough long enough for this special man who meant so much to her to have a Christmas reunion with his brother.
A week went by, and the heavy snows slacked off a little. Bob was ecstatic; Wendy had never seen him so happy. They were working practically nonstop, the harsh weather having all but doubled the building yard’s workload, but Bob still found time to buy and wrap presents, fix up his spare room for Tom, and plan Christmas dinner with Wendy. He talked about Tom constantly, to everyone.
Wendy learned a lot that week – as much about Bob as about his brother. The two of them apparently had complementary personalities. They both had a driving need to get involved, to help, to fix things, and they were both engineers; but where Bob had specialized in structural and civil engineering and then gone back into contracting so he could work with his hands every day, Tom’s interests had been more scientific and he’d eventually ended up working for the U.S. Geologic Survey as a geotechnical engineer, currently stationed in the far North with a team that was monitoring and maintaining a section of the Arctic pipeline system. Tom was on the adventurous side; he liked to rock climb, hang glide, race snowmobiles and ski. And he seemed to be better at getting into trouble than he was at getting out of it, which made it sound like Bob had spent a good part of their childhood figuring out ways to keep his brother’s exploits under the parental radar. “No, not really,” Bob had laughed when Wendy mentioned it. “It wasn’t so much about getting in trouble, our parents weren’t really too strict, but Tom is one of those people who always wants to go higher or faster or closer to the edge, you know? Most of the rules he broke were rules that were supposed to keep us from getting hurt; Dad was really serious about safety. But Tom didn’t usually want to wait for Dad to okay something, he wanted to try it right that minute. So I’d look out for him while he did.” A spark of mischief had flared briefly in his brown eyes. “Besides, if Tom got into trouble, who was I going to play with? He’s the only brother I’ve got!”
Wendy remembered that a few days later when the office phone rang just as she and Bob were rushing out to tackle a repair job that couldn’t wait. “Bob’s Building Yard!” she answered.
There was a second’s worth of silence on the other end of the staticky line, and then an eerily familiar laugh came through, followed by an equally familiar voice. “You are definitely not Bob,” the voice observed. “It’s Wendy, right? This is Tom McKinney, is my brother around?”
“Sure thing, Tom. He’s outside, just let me get him for you.” Wendy set the phone down where Pilchard couldn’t knock it off the desk and hurried out the office door into the yard. “Bob!” she called. “Telephone! It’s Tom!”
“Tom?!” Bob hurried over to the office, but at the door he hesitated. “We have to get out to…”
“I’ll take the machines, you talk to Tom,” Wendy told him. “You can catch up with us.”
Bob smiled; it was the smile that was just for her, the smile that said he just might kiss her if he was able to. “I won’t be long,” he said. “Be careful, everything’s slick. You have your cell phone?”
“Yes, I have it.” She gave him the smile back, wishing that the decency clause had just a little more leeway in it – or at least that the machines weren’t right there watching them at the moment – and squeezed his arm before switching places with him. “We’ll see you there!”
“Be careful!” he called after her again, and then the office door closed. But the smile stayed with Wendy all the way out to the job site. She just loved seeing Bob so happy.
The job was an urgent one, a buried water line that had cracked due to the intense cold, and once Wendy was on site she didn’t have time to think about much of anything else. They had to get the line replaced before the freezing weather made the problem even worse, so their window of fix-it opportunity was a narrow one – the leak had been discovered late that morning, and they had to get the job finished before night fell or another storm could move in. Luckily J.J. at the lumber yard kept replacements for everything vital on hand, and once Scoop had uncovered the cracked line it was easy for Wendy to see what they were going to need.
Unfortunately Trix, J.J.’s forklift, couldn’t carry the large sections of concrete piping used for the town’s water mains, so Wendy and Lofty had to go across town to the lumber yard to pick up the needed piece. Bob was already on the site when they got back, down in the hole using a shovel to finish clearing half-frozen mud from around the damaged pipe. The high-pressure spray coming from the crack had spangled his heavy coat and thick winter coverall with glittering ice crystals. He stepped out of the hole to help guide the new section down to ground level, and one look at his face told Wendy all she needed to know. “Tom can’t make it?”
Her partner shook his head and didn’t quite sniff. “Too much snow,” he told her, not meeting her eyes; his eyes, she noticed, were red-rimmed behind his protective goggles. “The airport he was catching his flight out of is snowed in. And even if he could get here, the tracks are completely frozen over, the trains might not be running for a week or more…and there’s supposed to be another big storm moving in on us tonight, too.”
Wendy had already known about that; Mr. Bentley had told her half an hour earlier, when he’d come down to the job site to see how the work was going. Wendy was glad Bob hadn’t been there. The building inspector had been in a foul mood ever since the bad weather had settled in, and it had brought out the worst in him. “I’m sorry,” she told her partner. “Maybe after Christmas…?”
“Maybe, yeah.” Bob tried for a smile and almost made it. “Come on, we’ve got to get this fixed! If you’ll go shut off the water, I’ll get the pump ready.”
“All right.” Wendy walked to the end of the block where the water cutoff was located and used her public utility key to shut things down. They hadn’t been able to turn the water off in advance the way they normally would have because of the weather, and she just hoped that they could get the job done quickly before anyone’s pipes froze up – or before either of them got wet and cold enough to get sick.
When Wendy got back to the hole, Bob was back down in it with his shovel and Mr. Bentley was standing nearby looking unpleasant. “You’d be further along if you’d have come down here when you were supposed to,” the building inspector was saying. “The longer that water is cut off…”
“We just cut it off,” Bob interrupted him in a monotone voice that made Wendy wince. “And we should have the pipe replaced in an hour at the most.”
“So if you’d started an hour ago, you’d be almost finished now,” the older man snapped. He tugged his thick scarf tighter around his neck, huffing in irritation. “And I wouldn’t have to traipse out here again an hour from now.”
“I am sorry about that,” Bob said, glancing up at him through goggles speckled with ice from the spraying crack. “Why don’t I call you when we’re done? And I could send Scoop up to get you, if you want?”
Bentley scowled at him but nodded curtly, then turned on his heel and trudged back up the street. He didn’t acknowledge Wendy as he passed her, not even with a nod.
Wendy wasn’t sure what she would have done if he had.
Lofty hauled the cracked section of concrete pipe out of the hole and then retreated to a huddle with Scoop while they waited for the water to be pumped out into the nearest storm drain. Conversation was impossible while the pump was running – not that Bob seemed to be inclined to talk anyway – and Wendy thought over the problem with Mr. Bentley while she kept an eye on the slushy brown water to make sure none of it went into the street. Her partner and the building inspector had still had a mildly contentious relationship when she’d first arrived on the island, but that had gradually changed over time. She wouldn’t have said the two of them were friends, but they were friendly when they saw each other and Mr. Bentley had made comments to other people – which had been passed on to Wendy – that he was glad they had someone like Bob in Sunflower Valley.
Since their latest run of bad weather had set in, however, Mr. Bentley seemed to have changed his mind about that. Or it was possible, Wendy supposed, that he wasn’t just acting this way toward Bob. There had been other times when the building inspector had gotten into one of his cranky, curmudgeonly moods, but his fits of bad temper had usually only lasted a few days or until someone had talked to him about it. Sometimes the person who’d done the talking had even been Bob…but right now Bob wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have a talk with anyone, much less to deal with someone else’s problems.
Especially not the problem of a stubbornly unreasonable building inspector less than a week before Christmas – a Christmas Bob wasn’t going to get to spend with the only brother he had.
Two days later, on December 23, a man bundled up in a dark blue parka stepped off the ferry onto the Sol Island dock and tipped his face to the winter sky with a brilliant smile. His brown eyes were sparkling, and dark hair curled against the whitish fur that lined the parka’s hood. Tom McKinney had made it home for Christmas.
Well, he’d made it most of the way to his brother’s home, anyway. Luck had been with him in the form of an NGS helicopter dropping in at base camp, and after hitching a ride to the Sol Foundation’s headquarters he’d managed to catch the ferry just before it launched for the last time before Christmas – it was a last-minute run with a load of supplies, and the captain wasn’t planning to go back to the mainland until after the holiday. In fact, Tom and Captain Jess had been the only people on board the ferry, so Tom had spent the trip over in the wheelhouse helping the older man keep an eye out as they’d cautiously plowed through the light, icy fog. It still hadn’t been a very long trip, and once they’d docked at Sol the fog had considerately stayed behind them, a soft white haze over the water that glimmered faintly in the weak winter sunshine.
Tom pitched in to help unload the ferry, and then followed Captain Jess and the dockmaster, Don, back to the concrete bunker that apparently served as their office cum visitor center. He untied the hood on his parka and shoved it back once they were inside, running his fingers through his longish hair, and had the satisfaction of seeing Don do a double-take. “O-kay, no need to ask whose brother you are,” the dockmaster drawled, smiling. “Welcome to Sol Island, Tom. I have to say, though, I’m a little surprised you came. Didn’t they tell you the train was still snowed in and the phones were down?”
Tom shrugged; the phones had apparently been down for a day and a half thanks to the last big storm, which had explained why he hadn’t been able to get through to his brother before he’d left on his impromptu journey. “They told me. But one Christmas miracle already happened to get me from our base camp to your headquarters, and then I was just in time to hitch a ride over here with Captain Jess on the ferry…so I figured I might as well try for three in a row.”
“It was worth a shot,” Jess agreed, with a smile for Tom; he hadn’t had much time to get to know this man who was twin to their island’s busy builder, but what he had seen he’d liked. “And something could still break, lad, the day’s still young. Speaking of breaking, though,” he said, switching his attention to Don. “We should probably lock the ferry down before we get too comfortable and warm, chain her in tight instead of just tying her in case the next storm brings some wind with it.”
Don had been in the act of unzipping his coat; with a sigh, he tugged the zipper back up. “Yeah, that’s probably not a bad idea – and I’d rather do it now than later. I think the chains are still in the boathouse.” He smiled when Tom immediately started pulling his gloves back on; just like his brother, apparently, always ready to help. “You can stay inside if you want, Tom – the rest of us can get things locked down with no problem,” he said. “Or you can have a look around, enjoy the sun while it lasts; once that storm comes in we’re all going to get pretty tired of the inside of the bunker.”
The younger man shrugged again. “I’m used to that. But I won’t say no to a free pass to stretch my legs a little. And maybe after a while I could borrow your radio setup and try to get a message through to Sunflower Valley, so Bob will know I at least made it this far?”
“Sure thing,” Don agreed. The three men filed back outside, Don and Jess heading back to the docked ferry while Tom took a good look around. Back of the bunkers the gently swelling hills were thick with trees, some down to bare branches and others whose evergreen boughs looked all the brighter for the load of snow they were carrying. The sky was a nearly translucent blue, the sun pale and watery against it. He took a deep breath, smiling. The air smelled good, clean and fresh and sharp.
Tom wandered around the buildings, idly comparing them to the Arctic compound he spent most of his time in. Concrete instead of Quonset, he supposed because of the threat posed by the water and wind, windows small and few most likely for the same reason. These buildings were squat, utilitarian boxes, and the dockyard was bare of anything that could be dislodged by weather from either direction.
Well, almost anything; a yellow snowmobile was sitting unattended near one of the buildings. Tom strolled over to have a closer look, admiring the machine’s clean, sleek lines. “Wow, look at you,” he said, running an appreciative hand over one molded black rubber grip. “You are absolutely beautiful.”
“I am?” The snowmobile turned its front end to look up at him. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called me that before.”
Tom stared at it, dumbfounded. They’d briefed him about the machines once he’d gotten his Project security clearance, but this was the first one he’d ever been close to, or that had ever spoken to him directly. It had two large eyes, and a flexible but depthless ‘mouth’ positioned where he thought a mouth might logically be on a snowmobile. It was looking at him curiously, obviously waiting for more of an explanation. Tom forced his brain back into gear and found one. “I’m sorry,” he told it. “I didn’t realize you were…I mean, I thought you were just a regular snowmobile, like the ones I ride back home.”
The snowmobile angled one eye in a way that suggested cocking an invisible eyebrow. “So I’m not beautiful?”
Tom had to laugh. “Well, yeah, actually you are; you are one gorgeous snowmobile, one of the nicest I’ve ever seen. I hope that doesn’t offend you.”
The machine gave a little twitch of its handlebars that suggested a shrug. “I’m not offended,” it told him. It turned a little more to get a better look at him. “Would you be offended if I said you looked just like Bob the Builder?”
“No, not at all.” Tom laughed again. “He’s my brother, we’re twins – that means we look just like each other,” he explained. “My name is Tom. You know my brother?”
“Everybody knows Bob,” the snowmobile told him. “I’m Scoot. I usually live up at the rail yard, in the mountains, but I’ve stayed the night at Bob’s yard a time or two.” Its expressive mouth turned down. “I thought I’d get to stay there tonight, but they said the tracks are covered with frozen snow so the train can’t move. I had to go to the mainland to get a strut repaired.”
“Zigged when you should have zagged, huh?” Tom was honestly sympathetic; it was easy to break one of the slender support struts on a snowmobile if you weren’t careful with your turns and jumps. He squatted down so Scoot didn’t have to look up at him. “I guess that’s about the same for you as breaking a leg would be for me.”
“So I’ve been told. I didn’t like it.” But the snowmobile was looking curious again. “You’re stuck here too, aren’t you? I bet you were going to go see Bob just like I was.”
It was Tom’s turn to look sad. “Yeah, I was – I was going to spend Christmas with him. But since the train isn’t running, I guess that means you and I are spending Christmas here. Maybe we can find something fun to do, since we both like the snow.”
Scoot perked up. “I love snow!” he exclaimed. “And I like to race! Do you like to race?”
Tom brightened up too. “You bet I do, Scoot! I was in a race just last month, and let me tell you…”
Don and Captain Jess were watching the animated man-machine conversation from near the main office, having gone down to the dock only to find the other dockhands already securing the ferry against the coming storm, and Jess shook his head with a smile. “I guess Tom and his brother have more in common than just their looks. That took what, all of five minutes?”
Don nodded his agreement with that. “Maybe he can keep Scoot from going nuts while we’re snowed in – and vice versa. Because I’m not playing cards with any brother of Bob’s.”
Jess laughed. “Still smarting over that whomping you got up at Fred’s, are you? I warned you not to play poker with the big boys, now didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t warn me that mild-mannered Bob the Builder turns into a Vegas hustler when you put a deck of cards in his hand,” Don accused, half smiling. “Although I’m pretty sure it was the other three who added the slick stuff to his repertoire, I bet he was just a card counter before they got hold of him.”
“From what I understand, that’s about the size of it.” The ferry captain still thought it was funny. “I think we should break out the cards tonight, see if anyone has gotten to his brother yet.”
Don had to chuckle. “Well, I guess we could give him the benefit of the doubt, anyway. And we have plenty of Christmas candy laying around to bet with. So you’re sure you want to stay on the island?”
“If that big storm blows in tonight, I’d rather we had the ferry on this side in case we need her,” Jess answered. “I thought I’d hole up in the bunker with you boys for Christmas, I even brought along a little extra cheer to spike the eggnog with – it’s stashed in my cabin, I’ll go fetch it out after we button everything up for the night.”
“Tom’s probably going to need a little extra cheer more than any of us,” Don told him, shaking his head. “I wish there was some way we could get him out to the valley.”
Steve, the warehouse manager, came around the corner just then, tired, dirty, and carrying a clipboard; he’d been buried in the storage sheds most of the day, checking and rearranging their inventory and making room for the extra supplies the ferry had brought. “Okay Don, everything’s accounted for. But we need to figure out some place to put that snowmobile for the night, because all the sheds are full up. And he’s too big to fit in the office…” He noticed the animated man-to-snowmobile conversation going on across the dockyard just then and stopped, staring. Then he whacked Don on the arm with the clipboard, much to the dockmaster’s surprise. “You jerk, why didn’t you tell me Bob was down here? I can sign Scoot out to him and they can both go back to the Valley – problem solved!” He stalked off toward his targets immediately, flipping dog-eared pages on his clipboard and muttering to himself.
Don looked at Jess, and both men grinned. “I’m not going to tell him,” Jess said. “He’s right, it’s a perfect solution.”
“Yeah, as long as Steve thinks it’s really Bob and nobody tells him different.” Don clapped the ferry captain on the shoulder. “Let’s go get some coffee, eh? I think Steve can handle this all by himself.”
Tom was startled to his feet when a dockworker he hadn’t seen before stalked up to him with a look on his face that meant business. Had he done something wrong by engaging Scoot in conversation? He knew there were rules that covered man/machine interaction on the island. But he realized he’d been mistaken when the stranger started talking a mile a minute without so much as an introduction. “You should have told me you were here, then I wouldn’t have wasted all kinds of time trying to make a place to put Scoot,” the man scolded him. “And you could have been on your way back already, you know that?” He didn’t give Tom a chance to answer, just thrust the clipboard and a pen at him. “Well here, sign it and get going! What are you waiting for?”
“Oh, sorry. Thanks.” Tom took the pen, signed the form with a scrawl as unreadable as he could make it, and then handed it back to the dockworker, grinning from ear to ear. It had been years since anyone had mistaken him for his brother, and it was the kind of thing that had once irritated him to no end. But it wasn’t irritating now, and there was no way he was going to correct this guy, whoever he was. “Wait right here, Scoot,” he told the confused snowmobile with a wink. “I just need to run get my stuff and then we’ll be on our way!”
“Yeah, you stay put, Scoot,” Tom heard the man tell the snowmobile as he pelted off to the place he’d left his bag. “You don’t want to make Bob wait, right?”
Tom’s grin got even wider when he heard Scoot reply, “No, I don’t want to do that.”
Once they were out of the dockyard Scoot was happy to get a chance to run, and Tom couldn’t have agreed with him more. In spite of the bad weather that had come before and the heavy clouds that promised more on the way, it was a relatively beautiful winter’s day. They stayed within sight of the railroad tracks, knowing that was the straightest, shortest path to their destination, but Tom kept a sharp eye out for the safest route for the snowmobile to run on – the last thing they needed was another broken strut. Still, though, the snow was deep and both machine and rider were experienced, and more than one half-frozen drift exploded into showers of crystal ice when Tom and Scoot plowed through it.
About three hours later, Scoot detoured away from the tracks. “You’ll like this,” he told Tom. “Ernie’s brought me up here a few times, he likes it a lot.”
Ernie was Scoot’s regular rider up at the mountain rail yard, and once they reached the spot the snowmobile had been angling for Tom could see why it was a place he’d like to visit. They were sitting atop the crest of a hill that sloped sharply down to the north, and the town of Sunflower Valley was spread out below them like a perfect toy-railroad replica. It was only about twelve blocks square, laid out in tidy, even rows with some sort of walled enclosure in the center. “That’s Bob’s Building Yard,” Scoot told Tom when he pointed it out, wondering what the enclosure was for. “It’s right in the middle of town.”
Tom smiled. Dr. Allen – who had said to call him Charlie – the head of the Project and Bob’s boss, had told him that his brother was the heart of Sunflower Valley; Tom hadn’t realized the man had meant it literally. “It looks like a nice place,” he said, but his eyes were drawn upward, to the dense layers of snow-heavy clouds which were rolling down over the hills. “Let’s get down there – we want to beat that storm.”
It took them about half an hour to get down to Sunflower Valley, and at the outskirts Tom got off to walk; the layer of snow that had collected on the streets wasn’t thick enough for Scoot with the additional weight of a rider. The streets had been cleared at some point, he saw, probably sometime that morning – probably by Bob, Tom thought to himself, and wondered just how hard the ‘heart of Sunflower Valley’ was working. He knew his brother, and Bob had a tendency to do too much, to push himself too hard, especially when he was upset about something. Tom still remembered the phone call he’d gotten from Aunt Doris in the middle of the night a few months after their father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s…
A yell pushed the unpleasant memory aside. At first Tom thought it was one of the kids he’d seen playing in the snow a few blocks away, but then an older man in a heavy wool overcoat and furry winter hat stamped up to stand in front of him, folded-armed and scowling. “Where have you been?!” the man demanded, peering over the rims of his gold-framed glasses at Tom. “You ‘forgot’ to turn your cell phone on again, didn’t you? Everyone needing your help, and here you are just strolling along…well, don’t just stand there! Get over here and fix this!”
Tom gave the wide-eyed Scoot a nod to let him know everything was all right, and then he followed the demanding man, frowning. This guy obviously thought he was Bob too, but Tom didn’t much care for the way the man had spoken to him – or rather, for the way the man had been speaking to his brother, whether his brother had actually been there to hear it or not. The fact that the guy had done it in the first place and then walked away without a backward glance told Tom that he expected Bob to take that from him, which had the unpleasant flavor of the memory Tom had been chewing on when the guy had yelled. Bob’s then-foreman had been a guy like this…
The ‘this’ needing to be fixed turned out to be a section of board fence which, hit by an ice-cracked branch, had collapsed and was now covered with half-frozen chunks of snow courtesy of the same overburdened tree. Tom sized up the problem. The fence was laying in the street just around a blind corner, it definitely needed to be moved, but other than the place it had been standing there really wasn’t any other good place to put it. And the few heavily-bundled neighbors who were standing around looking at it obviously didn’t know where to start.
Okay, he could see why they were wanting Bob. “We need to get it up before it snows again,” he told them. “If it freezes to the ground tonight it’s going to be stuck here until the next thaw. Now if someone could grab a shovel, I need to put all the snow into two piles…”
One of the neighbors, a short, plump man with thick glasses, hurried into another yard and came back with a shiny red snow shovel. Tom took it from him with a ‘Thanks’ and a smile that made the man look at him oddly – one of the few noticeable differences between Tom and his brother was their smile – and set about making short work of the snow that covered not only the fence but also a foot or two of ground near its base. “Okay,” he said when he was done. “Now I need everyone to grab a piece of fence and get ready to lift. Once we’ve got it up, I’ll need you to keep holding it steady until I have it anchored. Let’s do it!”
It wasn’t only the plump man who was looking at him oddly now, but three of the neighbors moved around the fence and wrapped gloved hands around the frozen wood while the bossy man just stood back and watched, holding the snow shovel. Tom spared him a frown before arranging the others where he wanted them, and then he grabbed his own piece of the fence. “Okay, up!” The fence shuddered, fought back for a moment, and then went vertical with a popping noise that told him it had already been half frozen to the snowy road. Tom had the two men helping keep it upright and set the older woman to bringing him rocks and pieces of broken wood. He put some of them on the inside of the fence and some on the outside, and then he packed his temporary braces in place with the very snow that had made them necessary. “That should hold her for a few days, anyway,” he said to none of his helpers in particular, straightening up from pounding more snow around the base of the fence itself. “If someone sprays a little water over this packed snow, it’ll probably freeze solid and last all week – and up where I live, it would hold until spring thaw.”
The tall, thin older man who had been helping hold the fence chuckled at the confused looks that comment produced. “I think introductions are in order,” he announced. “I’d say this has to be Bob’s brother Tom, everyone – the one Bob thought wasn’t going to be able to make it here for Christmas.”
“I wouldn’t have made it, if it wasn’t for Scoot,” Tom told him, waving a hand at the watching snowmobile. “He was stranded up at the dock too, we sort of helped each other out.”
“And we’re all glad he did – Bob’s been dragging around like he lost his best friend ever since that last big snowfall cut us off. I’m Dr. Johnson,” the tall man told him, holding out a hand which Tom readily shook. “And this is Mrs. Potts, Mr. Beasley, and Mr. Bentley.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet all of you,” Tom replied, exchanging handshakes and smiling his not-quite-Bob smile for Mrs. Potts and Mr. Beasley before they went back into their respective houses; by contrast, the nod he gave the flustered Mr. Bentley was definitely on the cool side. “So I guess that since you haven’t been able to contact him, I should assume my brother isn’t at home right now?”
Mr. Bentley ruffled himself up. “I…no, he probably isn’t.” He looked like he was hunting for words, but he didn’t seem to find any until Dr. Johnson elbowed him. “I’m sorry, about earlier. I thought you were your brother.”
Tom nodded slowly. “I’ll accept your apology, but I have to say that I kind of have a problem with that last part,” he told the older man. “I’m guessing you and my brother don’t get along too well, Mr. Bentley?”
“Normally they get along just fine,” Johnson interjected when Bentley once again wasn’t able to find a response. “Mr. Bentley is our building inspector, Tom; he and Bob have a mutually respectful working relationship. But I’m getting the idea that being trapped in the house for days on end by this weather isn’t agreeing with him too well.”
Tom nodded again. “I’ve seen plenty of that up north,” he said, deciding to accept the explanation even though he wasn’t sure he believed it. “Cabin fever I understand. So your winters aren’t always like this?”
Johnson shrugged. “We’ve only been here for three of them, but this one has been worse than the others. You may be stuck here for a while yourself, if that snow moves back in.”
Tom turned a weather-wise eye toward the horizon and shook his head. “It’ll move back in tonight, most likely,” he said, but he was grinning again. “I don’t mind being stranded here, though – and I don’t get cabin fever, or at least I don’t get it very easily. Bob’s the one who can’t stand to be trapped indoors for very long.”
“We found that out last year – the hard way,” the doctor told him. “You know the way to the building yard?”
“Scoot showed it to me,” was Tom’s reply. “You’ve got a nice little overlook on the southwest side of town, we stopped up there before we came down into the valley.” He offered his hand and a small, understanding smile to Mr. Bentley. “Try to get outside for a little bit every day, no matter how cold it is or how much you don’t want to,” he advised the inspector, who he could tell was still embarrassed. “That’s what they make us do. Even a few minutes will help.”
“Just what Dr. Johnson here has been telling me, that I need to get…out of the house more,” Bentley replied gruffly, but he took the offered hand and shook it. “It was…a pleasure to meet you, Tom. I’m sorry we met under such poor circumstances.”
Tom nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Bentley. And I’ll tell Bob about the fence when I see him.”
That seemed to startle the man; he looked at Tom, then at the fence, and then shook his head. “Tell him after Christmas,” he said. “If you tell him now…he’ll come down here and try to fix it.”
So he did know how Bob was, interesting. Tom grinned at him. “You’re right, he would. I’ll tell his partner instead.”
Bentley looked relieved. “That will work,” he said. He inclined his head to the doctor. “Good day, gentlemen.”
“Call me if you need anything,” Johnson told him. “I mean it, Aaron.”
“We’ll be all right.” And with that the inspector trudged across the street to his own house, where they saw him stamp off his shoes on the porch before disappearing inside.
Johnson watched him, shaking his head, and then returned his attention to Tom. “That wasn’t our usual ‘Welcome to Sunflower Valley’ greeting, just so you know.”
“I didn’t figure,” Tom answered, but his mind wasn’t really on exchanging pleasantries. He was wondering exactly what ‘the hard way’ had been last year, and why it had caused the town doctor to find out that his brother couldn’t stand to be stuck in the house. Being cut off from Bob all this time…Tom hadn’t paid much attention to it before, he’d been too angry, but it was like a part of him had gone missing and he’d only just realized that it had left behind a gaping, never-filled hole. He wondered what else he didn’t know about Bob’s life on the island…
Johnson seemed to read his mind. “You and Bob have a lot of catching up to do, don’t you?” he observed with a sympathetic smile. “I’d wondered if he ever told your aunt that he broke his leg last year.”
“No, he wouldn’t have.” Tom didn’t quite flinch. Of course Bob hadn’t told Aunt Doris – even from a thousand miles away, Bob was still trying to take care of everyone. He knew there must be a lot of things Bob hadn’t mentioned in his short fictionalized letters from ‘South America’…and Tom abruptly decided that he wasn’t going to find out what any of them were by standing around wondering. He needed to go see his brother. He held out his hand to the doctor and produced the not-quite-Bob smile for him. “Thanks for telling me. I guess I’ll be seeing you around while we’re all snowed in?”
“You’ll be seeing me around,” Johnson confirmed, returning the handshake. “Now get on over to the yard! I know Wendy is there even if Bob isn’t, so you won’t have to stand outside in the cold – not that anyone ever locks a door around here anyway. Merry Christmas, Tom!”
“Merry Christmas to you too,” Tom returned, waving to him and going back to Scoot. “Well, buddy, what do you say we get ourselves to Bob’s?”
“I say I like that idea,” Scoot told him, and they started up the street again.
The building yard was as neat as Tom had expected it to be – like their father, Bob had always been pretty particular about where his tools and equipment went. The coating of snow layered over everything was pristine in most places, although it was much thinner in and around the tire tracks running from the machine shed to the yard’s street entrance.
There were three machines in the high-roofed open shed, with room left for at least two more and to spare, and Scoot immediately made for them. “Hi guys!” he announced himself, causing three sets of machine eyes to snap open – they’d been dozing off, napping, Tom decided. “Merry Christmas!”
A small orange cement mixer shook itself all over like an excited puppy. “Scoot!” she – it was obviously a she, once he heard its voice – cheered. “You’re here for Christmas!”
The green-painted steamroller beside her seemed equally excited. “Bob, where did you find Scoot?”
Scoot was answering before Tom could even open his mouth. “This is Tom, not Bob,” he informed his three fellow machines. “Tom is Bob’s twin brother – that means they look just like each other,” he explained. “He brought me back from the dock. We had a lot of fun, didn’t we Tom?”
“Yeah, we did.” Tom grinned at the snowmobile, and then forced himself not to take a step back when the little mixer darted close and stood up on her rear wheels to get a better look at him. Her large eyes blinked, and then she dropped back to all fours and reversed backwards a little to look at him from a different vantage point, cocking her ‘head’ thoughtfully. “I look just like Bob, don’t I?”
“You do.” She looked a moment more, then giggled. “Except for the way you smile. And your coat – Bob doesn’t have a coat like that.”
“This is a parka,” Tom told her. “It’s the kind of coat we wear way up north, where I live.” The machines all looked puzzled by that. “Um…up by the North Pole?”
Four sets of machine eyes went round. “You live where…Santa lives?” the mixer asked in an awed voice. “For real?”
“Do you know Santa?” the steamroller queried right on her heels. “Have you met him? He’s really nice, isn’t he?”
Tom swallowed. This was not the sort of question he’d expected from Bob’s machines – from Bob’s children, eventually, but not from his machines. How best to answer… “I’ve never met him,” he said truthfully, deciding that lying might not be a good choice. “The North Pole’s…a big place, you know?”
The mixer looked sad. “Never?” she asked mournfully, but then her smile came back. “I saw him last year!”
The steamroller frowned a little. “Dizzy, that’s not…”
“Oh, o-kay,” Dizzy huffed, and moved conspiratorially closer to Tom. “It was Bob dressed up like Santa, he was being one of Santa’s helpers. But you can’t tell anyone, it’s a secret.”
“I won’t tell,” Tom promised seriously, but he could feel a grin of massive proportions threatening to break free. Bob had been playing Santa Claus? He wondered if someone had pictures…
He stayed with the machines for a few more minutes and learned that the steamroller was Roley and the up-to-that-point silent crane still in the shed was Lofty, and that Scoop and Muck, a backhoe and a dumptruck respectively, were out working with Bob. Who had been working a lot since the snow started, the crane told him in a nervous voice, and was immediately backed up by the steamroller and the little mixer on that. Tom got the feeling they were jealous of the other machines’ opportunity to get out and work instead of being stuck in the yard most of the day, but he was also pretty sure they knew that Bob didn’t see it the same way.
Scoot seemed to be already settled in, so Tom took his bag and left the machines, crossing the yard to the house. He knocked the packed snow off his boots beside the porch step, then stamped off more on the mat before knocking on the right-hand door. A moment later a blue-eyed blonde opened the door with confusion plain on her pretty face. “Bob, why are you…oh!” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Tom? How did you…oh my, come in, come in!”
Tom took it as an excellent sign that Bob’s business partner had known at a glance that he wasn’t Bob – it meant she knew his brother really well. He stepped into the house, or rather into the office, and closed the door behind him. He grinned at the blonde, setting his bag down beside the door and offering his hand. “You must be Wendy, right? I hope I put Scoot in the right place…well, I hope he put himself in the right place, anyway, he just kind of went over there and made himself at home once we got inside the yard.”
She smiled at him, returning the handshake. “Scoot has been here before, it’s all right. If you want to leave your parka and boots here in the office, I have some coffee on. Or I can make you a cup of tea…”
“Coffee would be great,” Tom told her. He made short work of shucking off his boots and parka, and then followed her out of the office and into a small living room. “Any word from Bob?” Wendy looked startled, and he shook his head. “I ran into some people a few blocks over who’d been looking for him, they thought he might’ve forgotten to turn on his cell phone.”
Wendy shook her own head. “He probably just can’t hear it,” she said. “He’s out with Scoop and Lofty trying to clear a fallen tree off a bridge before the next storm hits, and I’m pretty sure he’s having to use the chain saw.” Concern flickered across her face. “Did the…people you ran into happen to say why they were looking for Bob?”
“Well, actually they thought I was Bob at first,” Tom told her with a grin. “Part of someone’s fence had come down in the street, they needed Bob to fix it. I got it braced back up for them; it’s a temporary fix, but it should hold until after Christmas. Speaking of which, your building inspector didn’t want me to tell Bob about the fence until after Christmas, so I told him that I’d tell you instead. Is that okay?”
“It’s fine. That was nice of him,” Wendy said, and she didn’t sound like she was being sarcastic so Tom decided not to mention the rest of his ‘encounter’ with Mr. Bentley; maybe it really was just cabin fever making the man crabby. So he nodded his agreement, and was rewarded with a smile. “Just make yourself at home, Tom,” Wendy told him, waving toward the couch. “I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared, and Tom ignored the couch in favor of exploring the small room she’d left him in. He recognized the overstuffed armchair and footstool from his brother’s old apartment, and was glad to see them dominating Bob’s living room once again. There were pictures on the mantel of the small fireplace behind the chair, one of he and Bob at their college graduation, one of Aunt Doris with their parents on the front porch of the house in Springfield, and one of three men in dark suits at some kind of party. He picked that one up for a closer look, and almost immediately recognized Dr. Johnson. A picture from here on the island, then, probably taken by Bob while his friends mugged it up for the camera. Tom put the picture back, feeling the pang again. Bob’s friends. He didn’t know these people, he didn’t even know anything about them. How much did he still know about Bob?
Tom turned away from the mantle and sat down in his brother’s favorite chair…and found himself eye to eye with another picture, this one next to the TV remote on the small side table. Wendy’s blue eyes and bright smile beamed out at him, telling him one more thing he hadn’t known. Bob hadn’t mentioned that he and Wendy were involved…but then Tom remembered the decency clause. Maybe Bob hadn’t been able to tell him? Charlie had mentioned the clause and some of the restrictions that came with it when he’d first contacted Tom, during the long telephone conversation where the head of the Sol Foundation had explained where Bob actually was and why he hadn’t been able to tell anyone the truth about what he was doing.
The eldest-by-five-minutes McKinney brother was still hauling around a heavy burden of guilt over that, especially since he’d found out that it was Aunt Doris, not Bob, who had concocted the unbelievable South America story in the first place. Aunt Doris had known about Sunflower Valley and the A.I. machines from the beginning, and she was still none-too-happy with Tom for not having had more faith in his brother. And their parents still thought the ridiculous cover story was true, and they’d continue to think that for the foreseeable future because they couldn’t be told the truth. Ever. Which meant that he and Bob and Aunt Doris were going to be reminded of just how much of an idiot Tom had been for a long, long time…
Tom shook his melancholy mood off when Wendy came back into the room, and he accepted his steaming mug of coffee from her with a smile. She smiled back, but sympathetically. “He doesn’t hold it against you, you know. I don’t think he ever did.”
Tom almost dropped the mug, and she was polite enough not to laugh at him. He recovered himself and sighed, shaking his head; Wendy knew how to read Bob, which meant she also knew how to read him, even though they’d just met. “I was the one who held it against him,” he confessed, wrapping his hands around the mug, watching the steam curl up into the air in front of him. “In fact I was a hotheaded jerk, and it cost me two years of my brother’s life.”
“I was lucky, my sister was cleared almost immediately,” was Wendy’s reply. “She’s been to visit me twice now, and even though I’m glad I get to see her, I’m always glad to see her leave, too.” The twinkle in her blue eyes made him smile in spite of himself, a real smile this time. “But not everyone working for the Project is that lucky. There are a lot of people here who can’t tell their families what they’re doing, or where they’re doing it. And not all of those families like the stories they’re getting told instead of the truth.”
Tom almost laughed. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t feel too bad, because I’m not the only hotheaded jerk in the world?”
She smiled. “Something like that. And you’re here now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess that has to count for something, doesn’t it?” He shook his head again. “I’m just kicking myself over it all, I guess. I’ve missed so much of his life!”
To his surprise, she giggled. “That’s exactly what Bob keeps saying.” At his confused look, she explained, “He knows you don’t tell your aunt and your parents everything. And he knows your job is a lot more dangerous than they think it is.”
“Yeah, but so is his.” Tom took a drink of his coffee. It was good, which didn’t surprise him; his brother was serious about his daily caffeine fix. “One of the people looking for Bob was Dr. Johnson. He said Bob broke his leg last year.”
“Yes. He was working by himself…” a look of worry briefly flashed across her face, and was just as quickly gone, “…and he fell off a ladder. In fact, the Project changed the rules because of that, all of us who go out and about around the island are allowed to carry cell phones now.”
Tom decided not to ask her for details; between her reaction and the Project’s he knew the accident must have been bad. He’d find out just how bad from Bob later, and tell him in return about the geologist they’d lost down a crevasse the previous spring. Neither of those stories were ever going to make it home to Mom and Dad and Aunt Doris. “I’m glad to hear that,” was what he told Wendy. “I bet it drives you nuts when he forgets to turn his phone on then, huh? Bob and cell phones never have gotten along too well…” Something bumped against his leg, and he looked down. A sleek gray tabby cat was glaring up at him, clearly offended by his presence in the chair. It jumped up beside him and bumped his arm, and Tom scratched between its ears. “Am I in your chair, kitty?”
The cat bumped again, obviously trying to make him move, and Wendy started to scold. “Pilchard, stop that!”
Pilchard ignored her except for a flick of one pointed ear, circling around behind Tom to the other side of the chair and then squeezing under his arm to get onto his lap – where she promptly lay down. Tom scratched between the cat’s ears again. “You must be the boss,” he told her, and Pilchard rolled over on her side and stretched out, getting comfortable and kicking his arm with her back feet at the same time. “Yep, I knew it. Bob’s cat, right?” he asked Wendy. “It’s spoiled rotten and its name is Pilchard, it has to be Bob’s.”
“Pilchard was here before I was,” Wendy admitted. “She has the run of the house and the yard, and Bob has spoiled her terribly. I always thought it was a strange name for a cat…”
“We had a cat named Pilchard when Bob and I were little,” Tom explained with a grin. “It was some stray, I think, a dumped kitten Mom found in the alley behind our house. She said Bob and I could name it, and we decided to name the kitten Fish.” He laughed at her look of surprise. “Our kitten was kind of scrawny, not like the fluffy kittens in the animal book we had, and after Mom had given it a bath it looked…well, it looked more like the fish in the book than the kittens so that was what we decided to call it: Fish. I think Mom would have just let us leave it like that, but then Dad came home. He told us the kitten was really glad we’d figured out her name, but that we needed to say it in her language: Pilchard.” He shook his head; he hadn’t thought about their cat in years. “When we got older we both figured it out and Dad copped to it. He hadn’t wanted to change the name we’d picked out, but he also didn’t want to be standing outside on the porch some morning calling for a Fish to come back. So he’d thought fast and said the first word for a fish that he could think of in another language – which just happened to be Pilchard.” Wendy started to laugh too, and his grin widened. “Can’t say that I blame him.”
“No, I can’t either,” she agreed, watching the present-day Pilchard stretch out a little more to cover as much of Tom’s lap as possible. “Bob tells everyone that our Pilchard just wandered into the yard one day.”
Tom took another drink of his coffee, hiding a smile. Our Pilchard. “She didn’t?”
Wendy smiled and shook her head. “I’m pretty sure Dr. Lykins – he’s the senior biologist over at the labs – dropped her off here. The Valley’s non-native animal population is strictly controlled, we don’t have any strays.”
“Your whole island is pretty strictly controlled,” was Tom’s reply. He raised the hand that had been petting Pilchard to stop Wendy’s automatic protest. “I understand why – other than the reasons Charlie gave me, I mean. People would go nuts if they knew someone had made machines like Scoot that can think and talk just like a person. At the very least you’d have crazies running around trying to liberate the machines, or unionize them, or who knows what.”
“I doubt we’d be able to make anyone understand that the machines are happy here, doing what they do,” Wendy agreed seriously, but then she smiled again. “Well, Bob might be able to. He knows the machines better than anyone else on the island, and they all listen to him.” She cocked her head at Tom. “They did explain to you about the decency clause, right? I mean, about why we have one, and why Bob’s is so much stricter than everyone else’s?”
“It is?” Tom wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “Why? Because he works with the machines?”
“Because he lives with so many of the machines,” Wendy clarified. “It’s not because Charlie or the Project don’t trust Bob; if they didn’t, he wouldn’t be here. The rules were in place before they ever hired him. I guess they didn’t get a chance to show you the Sodor footage? It was an island a little like this one,” she explained when Tom shook his head. “Only instead of free-running machines, they had trains. But the controllers didn’t handle the trains right, they didn’t know how, and the trains went insane. Then the island’s A.I. tugboats caught it from the trains, and in the end…well, it was so bad that none of the survivors could be convinced to work for Project Sunflower, or even for the Sol Foundation.” Wendy leaned forward, pretty face serious. “That’s what your brother does here, Tom; he doesn’t just run a small-town building yard and fix things for people, he also monitors the machines’ development and makes sure they stay sane.”
Tom had been more than a little shocked by her use of the term survivors, but then he thought about the steamroller outside, about the crane with its swinging steel hook…about the swift, maneuverable snowmobile. If it came down to it, he would never in a million years be able to outrun Scoot in the snow. The knowledge that his brother had been entrusted with preventing such a horrific situation from ever happening on this island, to these people, was overwhelming. “Charlie told me Bob was important to the Project, but I never…god, I wish I could tell Dad about this,” he said, shaking his head. “He would be so proud of Bob – not that he’s not already proud of Bob, but you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Wendy told him with a relieved smile. “And I’m glad you understand. Jenny, my sister, didn’t react very well the first time she heard about Sodor.”
“I can see why some people wouldn’t like the sound of it, yeah,” Tom agreed. “There are guys whose families have pressured them off assignment on our part of the pipeline because they realized our base camp is up where the polar bears live.” Mischief twinkled in his brown eyes. “We’ve taken to telling the new guys not to let their families watch the nature channel as long as they’re working with us. Saves a lot of trouble in the long run.”
He and Wendy were still laughing over that when they heard the rumble of heavy tires outside, a rumble that was quickly joined by a chorus of machine voices greeting someone loudly and enthusiastically. “Bob’s back,” Wendy confirmed, but shook her head when Tom started to get up. “Let him get Scoop and Muck settled for the night first, please. I don’t want him to have to go back out if he doesn’t have to.”
“I can agree with that,” Tom told her, and drank some more of his coffee while he listened to the sound of the machines outside; he couldn’t hear his brother’s voice through the thick walls of the house, but he could hear the sound of the machines chattering away around silent pauses that had to be Bob answering them. They sounded happy, and it made Tom smile. If only he could tell their father that Bob could make a dumptruck laugh.
Some ten minutes later the office door opened and someone stamped their way in, quickly closing the door again to keep out the sharp-edged winter air. “Bob of the North is back!” Bob’s voice called out, but underneath the playfulness Tom could hear a steady chord of melancholy, not to mention a deeper note of pure exhaustion. Wendy was already past him into the office, fussily helping her half-frozen partner unfasten the buttons of his heavy winter work coat while he pulled off his goggles and tried to peel off his gloves. Tom approached a little more slowly, coming up behind his brother to slide the snow-covered coat off his shoulders while Wendy batted her partner’s hands away from the zipper of the winter work coverall that he had on beneath it.
Bob didn’t notice the presence of an extra pair of hands at first. The machines had said Wendy had a surprise for him, but he was tired, he was depressed, and he was trying very hard for his partner’s sake to act like he was neither. He didn’t want to ruin her Christmas…but oh, all he wanted to do was curl up under a pile of blankets and go to sleep, especially since the threatening clouds rolling down into the valley meant he was going to have to go out early the next morning to clear the roads again.
It wasn’t until someone started pulling the coverall off his arms that he realized it wasn’t Wendy doing it. She was right in front of him, so who…Bob turned to look, and his mouth dropped open. “T-Tom? You made it!”
“I would not miss Christmas with my little brother,” Tom told him, taking him by the shoulders and looking searchingly into his face before pulling him into a tight hug. “Merry Christmas, Bob. I’ve…I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too.” Bob returned the hug with equal fervor. “I thought you weren’t…”
“Someone from NGS came up in a helicopter, I caught a ride down to your headquarters and then managed to get on the last ferry over.” Tom sighed. “Your lines were down, we couldn’t call.”
“Doesn’t matter, all I care about is that you’re here,” Bob told him. “You came with Scoot?”
“Yeah.” Tom grinned. “This one guy at the dock thought I was you, lit into me for not telling him I was there earlier. He all but chased me and Scoot out of the dockyard.”
Bob laughed, feeling a good chunk of his depression fall away. “On your way in, did Scoot show you…”
“…the overlook? Yeah, it was great – we had a great ride. Do you need to…”
“Go back out again? Not tonight, no. Tomorrow may be a different story, depending on what that storm drops on us.” Bob detached from his brother and turned his attention to his partner. “Did you hear anything while I was out working on the bridge?”
“Yes, Mike called my cell phone,” Wendy told him. “He said we probably won’t have the regular phones or the Internet back until after Christmas – and he told me to pass along a message from headquarters that you weren’t to even go near the lines unless Charlie himself personally calls and tells you to.”
Bob blushed, but he was smiling. “Mike Rickey is our local constable, and he has a radio setup that he can use to contact the mainland when the phones are down. Our cell phones only work in the Valley,” he explained to his brother, bending over to untie his boots. “And the landline phone system isn’t one of the building yard’s responsibilities. The Project has a technician who takes care of that instead, but he’s snowed in up at the rail yard right now.”
“Dr. Johnson said this was the worst winter you guys have had so far,” Tom observed, nodding. “I…ran into him when Scoot and I came into town,” he answered Bob’s questioning look.
“He was outside?” Bob stopped with one boot off and one still on. “Oh no, I bet Mrs. Potts’ fence came down; I was afraid that would happen. I’d better go…”
“You don’t have to, I fixed it.” It was Tom’s turn to blush. “I…um, they thought I was you. At first, anyway. But my fix should hold for at least a week, you don’t need to go back out.”
Bob looked visibly relieved. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said, toeing off the remaining boot before tugging his coverall zipper the rest of the way down and letting the heavy garment drop around his feet so that he could step out of it. “I think I’m about done-in for the day, to be honest – especially since I’ll probably need to go out early tomorrow morning to clear the roads again. So unless an emergency comes up, the building yard is officially closed until tomorrow.”
Tom was surprised by that. “You’re open on Christmas Eve?”
His brother laughed, moving to pick up his coverall and then giving Wendy an affectionate smile when she beat him to it. “We’re open every day – that’s what happens when you’re the only contractors in town.”
“And the whole public works department too,” Wendy added. She hung the coverall on a hook by the door and started shooing her partner out of the office. “Go sit down, I’ll bring you some coffee.”
Bob stopped in his tracks to look back at her, surprised. “Coffee? I thought…”
“I made it before Tom got here,” she said, giving Bob an affectionate smile of her own. “I thought you’d earned it. Unless of course you want tea instead?”
“Actually, I do, if we still have some of the Christmas tea left. Do we?”
Wendy blushed, squeezing past her partner to get through the narrow doorway and managing to give him a quick hug along the way. “We have plenty, I bought another box the last time I went to the store. I’ll put the kettle back on, now go sit down!”
“I’m going.” Bob had returned the hug and then trailed Wendy into the living room, tugging Tom along with him. He plopped down into his chair with a sigh, stretching…and then noticed the half-full mug on the side table. He grinned at his brother. “So you’re still trying to steal my chair, huh?”
Tom shrugged. “It’s still the most comfortable seat in the house.” He cocked his head. “Tea?”
“It’s good,” Bob defended himself. “And Todd – that’s Dr. Johnson – went on a rampage last year over everyone’s caffeine intake; half the Valley had to switch to decaf or start drinking something else.” He leaned forward, passing over the mug without so much as stealing a sip. “I miss it sometimes, but he was right. I do feel better when I’m not drinking coffee all day long.”
There had been coffee today, though, Tom reflected, and it hadn’t been decaf, but he decided not to mention it. He still wasn’t sure how much of the relationship between Bob and his pretty blonde partner was having to be kept under the radar, so he didn’t feel like it would be a good idea to tease his brother about Wendy spoiling him until he understood the situation better. Instead he sat back into the couch – which was also, not surprisingly, very comfortable – and asked, “So which leg did you break?”
Bob made a face. “Todd has a big mouth. It was this one,” he said, lifting his feet up onto the footstool and wiggling his red-socked right foot at his brother. The other sock was blue and gray. “And it’s fine, it was no big deal…well, it was a big deal to Todd, because it was the biggest injury he’s had to deal with since he’s been here. But other than that, it was just a broken leg.”
“Uh huh.” Tom drowned everything else he wanted to say about that with a mouthful of excellent made-just-for-Bob coffee. ‘Just a broken leg’ didn’t cause the founder of a multi-national scientific think-tank to change the rules for an entire top-secret project…unless of course the vitally important person who broke the leg had been working alone when it happened and hadn’t had any way to call for help. He swallowed, and waved his free hand at the picture on the mantle. “I recognized Dr. Johnson, who are the other two?”
His brother relaxed just enough to give away the fact that he’d been tense. “John Dixon, our postmaster, and the older man is Fred Pickles – Farmer Pickles, to the machines. I play poker with them every few weeks out at Fred’s farm.” Tom’s eyebrows went up in surprise, and Bob shook his head with a grin. “When I’m there, we use a card shuffler and four decks to keep things even. You’ll get to meet Fred day after tomorrow, he and Mrs. Potts are coming for Christmas dinner.” Bob sank a little deeper into his chair, holding back a yawn. “John might stop by tomorrow, but he’s spending Christmas with Mike up at Kenny’s place – that’s one of the Valley’s other farmers. We’d have had everyone over here if we could have, but my house isn’t big enough and neither is Wendy’s.”
Tom smiled to himself at the ‘we.’ “Then I guess you need to build a bigger house, huh, ‘Bob the Builder’?”
His brother’s eyes immediately went to the small picture on the side table, and then just as quickly looked away as he laughed. “Eventually, yeah. I’m guessing you heard that name from Scoot?”
“Yep.” Tom grinned at him. “It sounds like a character from a kids’ TV show, but considering where you live and what you do, I think it fits.”
“I’ve gotten used to it.” Bob sank a little further into his chair. “In fact, I think that if someone called me ‘Mr. McKinney,’ I’d probably look around for Dad. And speaking of…”
“I called Aunt Doris before I left Base Camp, everyone’s fine,” Tom answered before his brother could finish asking. “She said to tell you Merry Christmas. And Mom was glad that I was going to be spending the holidays with you…where it’s nice and warm.”
That made Bob laugh again, unreservedly, and after a startled second Tom joined him with relief and just a touch of chagrin. Wendy had been right, his brother didn’t hold two years of undeserved anger and silence against him. And he probably never had.
They had dinner, and after a very little more conversation they were forced to call it a night – Bob could hardly keep his eyes open, and Tom was starting to feel the effects of his long and varied journey to Sunflower Valley. Wendy made sure Tom was settled for the night before leaving the yard to hurry home through the fluttering curtains of snow that were inexorably swirling down out of the low-hanging blue-white ceiling that was the Valley’s winter-night sky. The streets and sidewalks were already thickly coated, and she sighed as she went into her welcomingly warm house and shed her snow-covered coat and boots beside the door; the snow was beautiful, but it meant another long morning for Bob tomorrow. She had warned Tom about that before she’d left the building yard, after fending off his insistence that he really should walk her home.
She smiled to herself. Bob had been equally insistent when she’d first come to work with him over a year ago. Wendy still remembered how surprised she’d been; her new partner had just put in a twelve-hour workday and had practically been falling asleep on his feet, but he’d said he felt like it was wrong to send her out into the night alone after her first day on the job. Bob and Tom were a lot alike.
Her smile got wider, warmer, and she carried that warmth up to bed with her and on into dreams of snow. She supposed it said something that it was so easy for her tell the two nearly identical brothers apart.