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Patrick Gates has a nice house. Most houses seem nice to Riley, of course, because he’s never lived anywhere but cruddy little apartments and cramped college dorms and roach-infested duplexes, but the point still stands. Riley can’t honestly say he ever expected to meet Ben’s dad.
Actually, he’s not sure he ever thought of Ben Gates as someone who had a dad, much less one a poor relationship with him. (It was practically mind-boggling to look back and forth between the two of them, identical in height and hairline, and realize Patrick is somehow disappointed in his son.) It probably says some not-so-great things about Riley that in his mind this whole time, Ben’s been some sort of heroic figure who probably strolled into the world fully formed and spouting obscure historical anecdotes. It doesn’t seem like any normal person should know the things he knows, much less talk about them the way he does.
Then again, the scary Declaration lady—Dr. Chase, that is—is turning out to be an awful lot like Ben, so hey, what does Riley know? Maybe that’s just what people are like when they live in close enough proximity to the Smithsonian. Riley grew up among orange groves and tech startups, not museums about American history.
The Declaration of Independence is spread out face down on the dining room table, which is not a sentence Riley ever expected to encounter in his life. He didn’t expect most things about his life post-Ben Gates, though, to be fair. Regardless, the Declaration is spread out on the table before them with the last traces of a Freemason symbol fast-fading away as the parchment cools. Abigail looks at Ben, and Ben looks at Abigail, and Riley looks at them both, hardly noticing he’s holding his breath in anticipation of whatever they’re going to say next.
Reaching for the bowl of lemon slices, Ben says, “We need more juice.”
Kind of an underwhelming thing to say after discovering secret writing on the back of one of America’s most influential historical documents, but fair enough. Riley maneuvers around the table and heads into the kitchen to get more lemons out of the fridge.
“Uh, Ben?” he calls a moment later, peering back through the dining room doorway. Ben raises his eyebrows at him as if to say, go on. “We might have a teensy-weensy little problem. With the juice.”
*
“Dad,” Ben yells, head and shoulders deep in the fridge, as though if he ventures in far enough he’ll find something Riley missed, “don’t you have any more lemons?”
“Why would I?” Patrick calls from the den.
“Because I need more,” Ben says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
Patrick sticks his head into the kitchen, Styrofoam soda cup in one hand, TV remote in the other. “How many lemons do you think one person needs, son?”
Riley hates to admit it, but he’s got a point.
Under his breath, Ben mutters, “Not enough, apparently.”
“I heard that!”
There’s nothing outright hostile in either of their tones—just a general kind of disappointment that has long faded into resignation. Riley knows that tone all too well. Ben, thankfully, ignores the comment instead of taking the bait.
Dr. Chase steps up next to Riley where he learns against the counter, her arms folded across the front of her now-rumpled party dress.
“It’s not like people can be expected to keep a full bag of lemons in their fridge all the time,” she whispers to him. Riley snorts.
“You,” he whispers back, “don’t know Ben.”
At length, when Ben has admitted defeat on the lemon-finding front, the three of them stand huddled in the dining room, debating what to do in low voices. Patrick, they’ve noticed, has a bad habit of “wandering by” the doorway as they’re trying to discuss fairly sensitive things, such as the priceless historical document they’ve burgled and spread out on his dining room table; or the police, FBI, and British criminals hot on their trail. He’s about as subtle as Ben (which is to say, not at all), but it is his house, and his dining room, and his son, so Riley has a hard time blaming him for his curiosity.
It's still inconvenient, though.
Currently, the argument about who should pick up more lemons has been ongoing for a good ten minutes. Ben insists he can’t go because he might be caught and taken in.
“At a convenience store?” Dr. Chase asks skeptically. Riley and Ben both stare at her flatly.
“Cameras,” is all Riley says.
“Oh.” She shifts from foot to foot. She’s shorter without her heels, which she took off a half-hour ago and left by the door, apparently fed up with having to wear them. Glancing towards the currently Patrick-free doorway and lowering her voice, she hisses, “Well, I’m not leaving you alone with the Declaration.”
“I could say the same thing of you,” Ben points out unhelpfully.
“I said it first.”
Ben rolls his eyes heavenward. “Fine. Then I’m not leaving you alone with Riley.”
Riley is momentarily (and oddly) flattered by this, and yet—
“Literally what’s she going to do, Ben,” he can’t help asking, “carbon date me? Stick me with a q-tip? She’s a historian, not a criminal.”
“She’s an archivist, actually,” Ben corrects as she rolls her eyes, but he’s got a thoughtful sparkle in his own eye that Riley knows is not a sign of good things to come. He looks over at Dr. Chase, who glares back before reading some hidden message in the way he raises his eyebrows, and then they both swivel to look at Riley in a creepily perfect unison, and wow, he absolutely does not like the twin contemplative looks they’re giving him right now.
“What?” he asks, watching them size him up and exchange glances. They’re having an entire conversation with their eyes and leaving him out of it, and Riley doesn’t like it one single bit.
“You know,” says Ben, “they might not know you’re with me yet.”
And suddenly Riley understands.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh no. Absolutely not.”
“You’re the least conspicuous of us,” Ben continues as though Riley hasn’t spoken at all.
“Yeah, because I didn’t get to go to the fancy gala,” Riley mutters. He got to sit in the van in his hoodie. (Which, to be fair, was probably better than having to wear a tuxedo, but it’s the principle of the thing.) It probably also helps that he’s not drop-dead gorgeous or ridiculously tall and thus does not stick out in a crowd.
“Please?” Ben tries, which is so unlike him that Riley falters momentarily, resolve wavering. That moment is all Ben needs.
“Look,” he says, hands landing on Riley’s shoulders, “we don’t know how much time we have here. If the FBI shows up and I get arrested, I’ll need you on the outside.”
Riley raises his eyebrows. “What, to bust you out? Ben, I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
“No,” Ben answers patiently. “To keep up the hunt so Ian doesn’t get the treasure.”
He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. It’s not. This hunt is the Gates family’s legacy, after all. Legacy or burden, that is, depending on whom you ask. Either way, it makes Riley’s chest warm a little at Ben’s faith in him.
Riley says, very quietly, “Oh.”
“Look, they don’t know I’m with you,” Dr. Chase pipes up, taking a half-step forward to insert herself back into the discussion, and also because Patrick is once again lingering in the doorway like the world’s worst eavesdropper. “If Riley doesn’t want to go, I can—”
“No,” they both say in unison. She scowls.
“Don’t you trust me?” she asks, sounding surprisingly wounded for someone who was trying to make a break for it with the Declaration not an hour or two ago.
Riley snorts. “No offense, lady, but—”
Ben gives him a look, stopping Riley mid-sentence, and smoothly takes over. “I need you here, Abigail,” he says, nodding towards the Declaration, which Patrick is once again eyeing with suspicion that makes Riley itch. He’s going to figure it out eventually—it’s just a matter of time. He’s a Gates, after all.
It’s Abigail now? Riley thinks. He wonders when that happened, and he’s been here the whole time.
“Fine,” Dr. Chase—Abigail—says in exactly the same way Riley does whenever Ben wears him down about some wild plan, like quitting his job to join a treasure hunt for a treasure nobody thinks is real, tracking down a lost ship in the Arctic, or, oh, stealing the Declaration of Independence after telling the FBI that someone was going to steal…that’s right…the Declaration of Independence.
You and me, he thinks, eyeing her briefly now that no one is scrutinizing him, we’ve got it bad, huh.
“Why all the fuss?” Patrick asks, making them jump and whirl.
While they were distracted, he’s been edging towards the table. Ben moves to block him so casually it hardly looks purposeful, just a shifting of weight, really, a hip leaned and a hand placed so perfectly it might well have been an art form.
“I told you,” he says calmly, an edge of warning rippling through his voice, “we’re in a little trouble, that’s all. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
“And yet here you are,” Patrick sighs, “in my dining room.”
They stare at each other wordlessly, locked in some battle of wills that’s probably been at a stalemate for the last twenty years if Riley had to guess, which he doesn’t but still takes a stab at it anyway. The air in the room is so thick with unresolved tension and unsaid things that Riley feels like he’s going to be smothered in someone else’s familial strife. It’s a terrible feeling and reminds him far too much of his not-so-long-ago years of teenage angst. He has never wanted to be somewhere less than he wants to be here right now.
“Okay,” he says, if only to break the suffocating silence. “Okay, geez, I’ll go get the lemons.”
*
And that’s how Riley Poole ends up at the only open grocery store in a fifteen-mile radius, humming nervously to himself under the flickering fluorescent lights as he walks as fast as he (casually, unsuspiciously, incredibly normally) can towards the produce aisle. It’s simple enough in theory. Just get in, get the fruit, and get out, he tells himself. Not that hard. No hacking cameras, no faking fevers, no breaking and entering. Simple.
Except, for some unfathomable reason, being in a grocery store currently makes him far more nervous than anything else these past few weeks has, which doesn’t even make sense considering he’s been held at gunpoint in the belly of a frozen ship and shot at in a high-speed car chase and is currently on the run from the FBI, but then, emotions and messy brain things have never made as much sense to Riley as computers and binary logic do.
So, he's in the grocery store and he’s more jittery than the time he stayed awake for thirty-seven straight hours (running on twice as many cups of coffee) during finals. That’s fine, he can handle it. There’s not anyone else in the store he can see besides one very bored and very tired-looking cashier over at the registers, so there’s no one to hear the pep talks he gives himself under his breath as he shuffles along and hunts for the lemons.
“Piece of cake,” Riley tells himself, spotting a bin full of the bright yellow fruit.
It is most definitely not a piece of cake. This is for several reasons, first and foremost being that Riley, in his hurry, does not think to grab a bag to put the lemons in, just palms a few of the larger ones out of the bin before realizing (reason number two) that he has no idea how much juice, exactly, they’re going to need for this whole thing. How many lemons does it take to decode a Declaration, anyway? God, that sounds like the setup for the world’s worst history joke, but Riley genuinely hasn’t got a clue. It’s not like Ben gave him any idea before he left the house.
He considers, albeit briefly, the merits of running calculations for the surface area of the Declaration (Will they need to cover the entire back? How big of an invisible map are they talking, here? Why didn’t he ask?) versus the volume of juice in a lemon, but he gives up pretty quickly. He’s too stressed for math at the moment, which is not something Riley would ever have thought possible.
In the end, he grabs a few more, just to be safe. He’s made it halfway up to the register when a vision of getting back and then having Ben run out of juice when all they might have needed was just one more lemon sends him spinning right back around and piling three more lemons precariously into the crook of his elbow. Then he stuffs another into his hoodie pocket for good measure, nearly dropping half his load as he does. He’ll bring back as many lemons as they need and then some. He’ll bring back so many that they’ll have leftovers for lemonade if they want.
Not, Riley thinks, making his careful and citrus-laden way up to the front of the store, that we’d have time to drink it. What with them being on the run and all. Maybe they could leave some behind for the FBI agents who will inevitably come calling, who knows. When life gives you lemons, right?
It’s with a head full of thoughts such as these that Riley arrives at the single open checkout kiosk at the front, tripping over his trailing shoelace and nearly dropping everything he’s holding onto the dirty linoleum floor as he does. As it is, he sort of awkwardly fumbles everything down onto the conveyor belt, hunching over and flailing out a crooked elbow to catch one that tries, valiantly and nearly successfully, to roll off onto the floor.
The cashier stares. Riley cringes.
This stalemate continues for a supremely awkward moment before Riley remembers he’s still hunched over the fruit he’s supposed to be buying, which is probably holding up the checkout process, and hurriedly straights up, pushing his glasses back up his nose as he does. The cashier continues to stare.
“Hello,” Riley says awkwardly, poking at one of the lemons so that it rolls just slightly up the conveyor belt. “Nice night, huh?”
This earns him the absolute barest raise of an eyebrow. And to think he thought Ben was sarcastic. Clearing his throat, he tugs at his hoodie, straightening it as best he can. The action causes him to remember there is, in fact, another lemon still in his pocket, which he quickly and not at all surreptitiously removes and places with the others.
“Forgot about that one,” he explains, laughing nervously. “Sorry.”
Whether it’s his words or the desire to have him out of the store that spurs the cashier into action, Riley will never know, but she finally stirs and, reaching for the lemons, begins to ring them up, one by one. She does not break eye contact, and Riley really, really wishes she would. Her gaze pins him down like a butterfly to a corkboard, and he has the distinct feeling that he’s going to end up being a story she tells one of her friends or coworkers or boyfriend when she gets off. Hey, want to hear about this guy who came in and bought twenty lemons last night? He was a weird one, all right.
Riley scratches at the back of his neck, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I, uh, I’ve got a sore throat, you know. My mom always swears by lemons for sore throats.”
His mother does no such thing—it was his college roommate who taught him that one—and as he says the words he’s distinctly aware of how un-sore his throat sounds. He considers feigning a cough, but the look the cashier gives him (flat and dead-eyed as a stuffed fish in a museum) shuts that down pretty quick.
Neither of them says anything for the rest of the interaction.
Finally, finally, she finishes ringing him up, and he practically throws the cash at her in his desire to leave the store. God, Riley hates grocery stores. And talking to people. And lemons. He can’t get out of the store and back into the van fast enough.
“I,” he tells the bag of lemons dumped in the passenger seat as he pulls out of the parking lot and back onto the road, “am never doing this again.”
*
He gets lost twice on the way back to Patrick’s house without Ben there to navigate, wasting a good ten minutes pulled over and peering at a map from the glove compartment. Riley refuses to call Ben for directions, and only partially because he’s not actually sure where he is right now.
“Why don’t you figure out the map,” he tells the lemons. The lemons do not reply.
At last, he makes it back to the house and parks a few blocks down, shivering in the night air as he hauls the bag of fruit up the front walk. It feels like he’s been gone for hours, but the whole experience only took about an hour and change. Riley’s personal theory, not that anyone’s ever asked, is that supermarkets are actually one of the circles of Hell and thus don’t operate in Eastern Standard Time.
In the dining room, he upends the bag rather unceremoniously over the table, sending the lemons bouncing and rolling. One tumbles all the way across the tabletop and nearly over the corner of the Declaration, but Abigail’s hand shoots out to catch it before it can. A second lemon drops into her lap, and she makes a face at him. It’s a less-than-scary one, though.
Abigail says, rather tartly, “Gosh, do you think you’ve got enough lemons there?”
“Sorry,” Riley says, not actually that sorry at all.
“Perfect,” Ben says, beaming, two lemons in each hand and the map nearly at his fingertips. For once, his enthusiasm isn’t catching.
“Next time,” Riley says wearily, flopping down in a chair at the end of the table, “you get to make the midnight lemon run.”