I knocked while Miles unlocked our door, and led Xander inside.
“Hi, Anika, what’s going on?” Jenny greeted me.
“I have no idea! That’s what I’d like to know!” I said. “Just—come with me, please, and then maybe Miles will explain.”
Jenny stared at me in confusion as I took her by the arm and encouraged her to walk.
“What in the world is going on?” she asked, worried now.
By then we were already in our apartment, so I shut the door behind us and waved her toward the living room.
“Xander and Miles are in there.”
Jenny sat beside Xander, even more confused and concerned by the look on her fiancé’s face. I sat beside Miles. He reached for my hand. He looked resigned, but nervous.
“Are John and Annette here?” he asked me.
“Miles Delevan Bannerman, you better start talking right now!” I said. “What happened? Was there an angel with a flaming sword behind me in class, because that’s how you two are acting!”
Jenny was startled.
“Delevan?” she asked.
I smacked myself on the forehead with the palm of my hand, and collapsed against Miles. If I pretended to faint, would that be the same as lying?
“Jenny, Xander,” said Miles. “There are things we haven’t told you. And the truth is… we’ve let you believe things that aren’t true. We’ve sometimes lied to you, to support your belief in those things. I am deeply sorry for that, and I know Anika is, too.”
Jenny had her hands on each side of her head like she was trying to keep her mind from exploding.
“Miles… Delevan… Bannerman…” she said faintly.
“Yes,” Miles said. “Not Miles Jonathan Bannerman.”
Jenny grew a little pale. Xander still looked confused. Jenny started breathing hard. I hoped she wouldn’t hyperventilate.
“I knew it. I knew something, anyway. I knew… Oh my goodness, I may pass out.”
I jumped up and sat beside her before she did, and put my arm around her.
“Lean over so all the blood doesn’t rush out of your head,” I said. “It really does help. You should have seen me when I first met Miles. He was semi-transparent then, talk about a shock.”
“What are you saying?” asked Xander, looking at Miles like he’d never seen him before. I decided to do the talking. I was the one who found Miles and freed him, after all.
“Two years ago next month, I fell through the rotten cellar doors of the estate during a freak thunderstorm. Miles kept me from falling to the floor and being injured. That’s when he first saw me, but I didn’t see him. I just thought I was freakishly strong, and managed to pull myself out, which of course was impossible. I met him a few days later, when Grandma Polly hired me to take care of the estate. When I first saw Miles, I thought he was his great-great nephew, Polly’s grandson who was at that time in a coma. But he wasn’t. He’s Miles, the guy that was falsely accused, and who I felt driven to prove innocent.”
“Anika is the only person who was ever able to see and hear me. Once I got over the shock of that, and she got over the shock of me not being all there…”
Xander shook his head as if to clear it, and Jenny slowly sat back up again. I rejoined Miles on the couch, and held his hand.
“We worked together to prove Miles was innocent. We became best friends. We tried not to, but we fell in love. We didn’t talk about how we felt, but… we both knew. We never kidded ourselves that we could be together, though. I didn’t want Miles to be alone again someday, I loved him too much to be that selfish. I knew he would be left alone again, if I didn’t free him…”
“And I loved Anika too much to want her to waste her life and stay with me, semi-transparent like I was…I wanted better for her.”
“So, because we loved each other, we found all the evidence, and we read the letter from my great-great-great grandmother together, and he faded away.”
“But I appeared in my great-great nephew’s place in the hospital.”
“See these scars?” I pointed to Miles’ knee. “You can’t see the one on his shoulder because he has a shirt on. But they’re from gunshot wounds in 1870, not from being thrown off an overlook.”
“I know this is crazy… but it’s true,” said Miles. “We can prove it.”
“No…” said Jenny. “I believe you. This… makes sense. What Luke, Nate’s brother, said. He saw you and Anika the day you came back to the estate. There’s no way she was meeting you for the first time, not with that reaction. He thought you had been in Afghanistan, and declared dead because of what he saw. And the way Anika grieved, and then Miles was here, and suddenly you were fully recovered and madly in love. It is crazy, but it makes more sense than it did before. I knew there was something different about you. I remember Miles… your great-great nephew. I knew there was something different. I’ve always known, and wondered.”
We all looked at Xander. He cleared his throat.
“You said… you can prove it?”
“Yes. I had what Anika called cool superpowers when I was semi-transparent. When I appeared in the hospital, I thought I’d lost them. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t… I didn’t expect to have them, so I never really tried to use them like I did during the hundred and forty years or so that I’d been semi-transparent. But when George Frank aimed that gun at Anika and fired, I reacted, and…”
“Surprise, he had his powers after all. And amazing reflexes. He stopped the bullet, and sent George nearly through the wall.”
“That’s… how it happened,” said Xander.
“Today, when Mead tried to put his hand on Anika’s shoulder, I wasn’t going to allow that. I stopped him.”
“He tried?” I asked in surprise.
“Yes, honey, he tried to. Tried and failed. Several times. It freaked him out, too, I could see from the webcam. I don’t want to mess up your investigation, but there is no way I’m letting him touch you.”
“Thank you,” I said, hugging Miles. “Thank you. I don’t want the guy touching me, either.”
“So… that’s why you really wanted the webcams,” said Xander.
“Right. I need to be able to see in order to use my abilities effectively.”
“Well… can you do something? What can you do?” asked Xander, looking slightly more excited than freaked out now.
Miles looked around.
“I think Night looks like he could use a lap to sit on,” said Miles. As easy as that, Night floated over and came to rest gently on my lap.
Jenny and Xander stared.
“No—way,” said Xander, his eyes bugging out. “Oh, man, that—is so cool! I can’t believe you can do that!”
“It’s hardly the extent of what he can do,” I said. “How do you think you got into the locked classroom on Thursday?”
“No wonder you know so much about history!” exclaimed Xander, and Miles and I both laughed.
“Yeah, pretty much from the day I met Anika she’s tried to convince me to become a museum curator.”
Our friends laughed at that, a good sign they were moving past the shock.
“So what did you see in class that had you stunned, Xander?” I asked.
“I saw Mead trying to put his hand on your shoulder. At first it was like there was an invisible wall around you. He acted kind of like a mime. Then it looked as if his arms were pinned to his sides, and he was shoved.”
“I didn’t want him near her, even though he couldn’t touch her. The way she sometimes becomes dizzy and nearly blacks out… I don’t want her to ‘become lost,’ whatever Trix means by that.”
There was stunned silence again, and four very large eyes focused on us.
So, we explained Trixie to them, as much as it’s possible to explain her. There’s so much we don’t know. We answered a ton of questions, and then John and Annette came over, wondering if we’d seen their roommates.
Phase two of telling the truth to our friends, began. It went as w
ell as it possibly could, and it helped that Jenny and Xander already knew and accepted it.
Eventually we realized we’d skipped right over lunch, and were starving. So Miles ordered Chinese, and we ate together as we continued talking.
“So you knew each other for almost a year before you got engaged,” said Annette. “That makes so much more sense now, you didn’t just know each other two months.”
“That’s right, and by the time we got married, we’d known each other almost two years,” I said. “Not one, as everyone thought.”
“I totally get it now,” said Annette. “You were separated by that semi-transparent business, then you thought you’d lost him forever, and then you waited an additional year to get married… no wonder you complained about how long it took for your wedding to get here!”
“With everything we’d been through, and as well as we’d come to know each other as friends, and then being separated as we had been, we weren’t rushing into things like everyone around us thought,” I said.
“Our relationship was much deeper and more developed than anyone around us knew,” Miles said. “I would have married her the day I came back from the hospital, but I didn’t want to worry her parents.”
“I would have married you that day if you gave me the option,” I said. “Miles is much more mature than I am.”
“I wonder why!” said Jenny, and we all laughed.
“It feels very good that you know who I really am, and that from now on we won’t feel we have to continue to support a lie around you. It’s been a weight on our shoulders, doing that. Please though, and this is critical. Do not say a word about this to anyone. Chances are, people would think you were joking, but if the wrong person heard… Anika would be in danger. The only way anyone could control me is if they had her, I couldn’t find her, and they used her as leverage. I can’t tell you how important it is that no one ever know.”
Every face was serious now.
“We totally get it,” said Xander. “We’re your friends. No one will hear a word about either of your abilities from us.”
Jenny, John, and Annette all agreed.
“Thank you,” said Miles. “You are truly the best friends we could ever ask for.”
“Do you realize what we have not even discussed?” I suddenly said. “No one has even asked what I learned today in class.”
“What did you learn?” asked Miles. “I can’t believe I completely forgot!”
“That’s okay, you were busy blowing our friends’ minds,” I said, and our friends all laughed. “What I learned though, is that this man is not Ryan Mead.”
“Who is he, then?” exclaimed Xander.
“I don’t know, he was too far away for me to get that information. It was frustrating how he moved around so much. He constantly went in and out of range.”
“I know someone who could hold him still for you,” said John, and we all laughed at that.
“There’s one other thing,” I said. “When he said he fully supports murder if it’s the only way to get what he wants… he was telling the truth.”
Everyone looked grim upon hearing that.
“Well… it wasn’t more than we already suspected,” said Annette. “But still, for him to say that…”
“It’s chilling,” said Miles. “But with Anika’s abilities…”
“And my bodyguard, and our friends,” I said, “whoever he is, he won’t get away with what he’s done.”
Chapter 10
I was trying to fold laundry. Trying instead of succeeding, because Night and Pandora sat on each side of the counter in the laundry room, waiting for a chance to grab whatever I tried to pick up. I didn’t particularly appreciate the way they snagged their kitty claws on the clothes, and tried to wrestle them away from me. That was their goal in life at the moment.
“You two are being a couple of little monsters, did you know that?” I scolded.
I gave them a narrow look. Their fascinating yellow-green eyes remained fixed on the pile of laundry, waiting for me to pick up something else.
“Fine, here,” I said, tossing one of Miles’ socks at Night. It landed on his head, and he grabbed it. Pandora wanted it too. She leaped on him, and wrestling over it, they both fell to the floor with a thud. That had to hurt! Then they jumped up and tore out of the room, leaving the sock behind.
Laundry folding went very smoothly after that.
I carried the laundry basket with the neatly folded clothes through the kitchen and living room, on my way to our bedroom to put them away. Miles had been on the phone with Grandma Polly, but he was talking to someone else now.
I paused briefly to listen. From Miles’ side of the conversation, I could tell it was our PI.
I stowed the laundry safely in the drawers of the dresser to keep the cats out of it, then ran back to the living room. In spite of my hurry, I was too late to listen in.
“What did Jackson say? Anything new?” I asked, joining Miles on the couch as he pressed the end button on his phone.
“Nothing new. It’ll be interesting to see what he turns up though, now that he’s looking for the real Ryan Mead.” Miles sat back and put his arm around me.
“He’s probably dead,” I volunteered.
“Yes, he probably is,” agreed Miles. “At some point in time he came in contact with the professor. If we can find that intersection, it may clue us in to who he really is.”
“It seems like it would be hard to take over someone else’s life.”
“But, then again, the real Ryan Mead lost all of his family before he started college. His identity couldn’t have been stolen while he was in high school, everyone there knew who Ryan was, and would have known the difference.”
“So this had to happen after the grandmother died. What do you bet it had to do with money? The real Ryan was probably left fairly well off after his parents’ accident. They surely had life insurance.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” said Miles. “That does seem to be a frequent motive for murder, one we’re certainly familiar with.”
“No kidding,” I said. “His identity also had to be taken before college started, because after that, same story, people would recognize if someone else took his place.”
“Think, too, of how drastically different Ryan’s last years of high school and his first year of college are. He went from zero involvement in extracurricular activities after his parents died, to being heavily involved after starting college. He chose a school several states over, too, probably to minimize the risk of seeing someone that knew him, or the real Ryan. It makes sense that the real Ryan’s identity—his life, really—was stolen during that summer.”
“Stolen by someone near in age. Another kid, how crazy is that!” I exclaimed.
“Are we old folks now, at twenty-one?” smiled Miles.
“Well, I did marry a much older man,” I smiled back, and Miles laughed.
“Jackson’s going to look into who his friends were when he was in high school,” said Miles. “That might give us something. Think of how Second-Miles’ disappearance could be pinpointed almost to the day, because his contact with friends suddenly stopped.”
“If Pretend-Mead had parents, then there’ll be a missing person report filed on him,” I said.
“Unless he came from such a bad home that his family didn’t care that he disappeared,” said Miles. “If there’s no missing person’s report then we’ll know his background was less than ideal. Either no family, or a messed up family.”
“So is Jackson going to concentrate on the time between when the grandmother died, and college started that fall?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s exactly what he’s going to do,” said Miles. “I can’t think of any way that someone could step in and take his place at any other time. The imposter went to college right here, and the professors in his department recognize him.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “That’s a fairly narrow corridor, so surely Jackson will find an
unsolved murder, or… what if he didn’t leave behind his own identity, but is using both? I’m not sure how easy that would be to manage, but still…”
“It’s a possibility though, you’re right,” said Miles. “Whatever the case is, you’re our very best chance at finding out the truth and proving it.”
“How appropriate that my gift is knowing the truth then,” I said.
“Speaking of truth, feeling better now that our friends know?” asked Miles.
“Yeah, I am. How about you?”
“I feel like a weight’s been lifted. It says a lot about our friends that they took it so well.”
“Yeah. Jenny suspected something all along, too. It says a lot about her, that she never demanded answers,” I said.
“If it’s safe to trust anyone outside of Grandma Polly, it’s our friends. I just hope they never forget how important it is to keep secret what they’ve learned about both of us.”
“I think they’ll remember,” I said. “And really, if they did talk about it, no one would believe them.”
“You’re probably right,” said Miles.
“I wish it was already Wednesday. I want to stay on this and get it solved. My only chance is during class, and even then it’s only when he’s in range, and even then only when he’s answering the right questions, within that range.”
“Don’t forget what you’ve accomplished in spite of that,” said Miles, rubbing my shoulder. “We know a lot more than we did.”
“You’re right, I won’t get discouraged,” I said. “We do know a lot more than we did.”
“Until you spotted this guy and saw what no one else can see, then as far as we know, no one suspected him of murder.”
“True,” I said.
“If you get as much information from Wednesday’s class as you did from today’s, just think how much further along in this case we’ll be.”
“Thank you, Miles,” I said, hugging him. “You’re right, I just needed to be reminded. Thank you for being so supportive.”
Miles hugged me back and said, “Always.”
~***~
The heat from the sun baked the fresh cut grass which lay on one of the many large grassy areas that were sprinkled throughout the university. The humid air was filled with its scent. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself in a field of hay.
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