But turning my back like that still sucked...especially because I’d been turning my back too much lately on good people who’d needed my help. A very wise woman had warned me about it time and again, telling me I needed to focus on watching over the world and Landkind because we were all in great danger.
That woman was Phaola, and I realized now that she’d been right. I’d been pretending my true nature didn’t matter, that my personal life was more important than my friends and their well-being. Now look what had happened to them—to her.
I swore I’d come back and save them all before it was too late.
“Duke?” I called the office over the speakerphone in the Highlander as I pulled away from Doc Yough’s. “I need you to get rolling on some research right away.”
“Sure, Gaia.” Luna, not Duke, had picked up the call. “What kind of research?”
I almost asked for Duke—then decided Luna must be trustworthy if he was letting her answer the phone. “Anything you can find on a fracking company called EarthSave Unlimited.”
“EarthSave? Are you sure that’s a fracking company?”
I smirked at Ashanti, who couldn’t help listening in. “I’m sure,” I said. “They’re operating some kind of site near Shawnee State Park in Bedford County. Find everything you can on that, too.”
“You got it, boss,” said Luna. “When are you coming home?”
“We’re on the way right now,” I told her. “And we need to move on EarthSave ASAP.”
“Roger that,” she said briskly. “By the way, an F.B.I. agent was here to see you a few minutes ago. A guy named Frank Wagner.”
I frowned. “What did he want?”
“He said something about recruiting you,” said Luna. “And he mentioned meeting with you over lunch.”
Frank had mentioned recruiting me at the site where I’d taken down Crystal, and now it sounded like he was serious. Either that, or he was coming on to me. Either way... “I don’t have time for him right now. If he calls or drops by again, I’m not available.”
“Understood,” said Luna. “Anything else?”
“Negative,” I told her. “Just get on that research and hold down the fort.”
“Ten-four,” she snapped. “Luna out!”
Just as she hung up, Briar dialed in, and I took the call. “Hey, Dale.”
“Gaia.” He sounded dead serious, positively grim. “I need to show you something. Now.”
Alarm bells were ringing in my head. “I’m on my way back from Doc Yough’s. Still a couple minutes out from Confluence.”
“Get here as fast as you can,” he said. “And come alone.”
The alarm bells were more like alarm thunderbolts now. “Where should I meet you?”
“At your place,” he said. “It’s about Ellie Grenoble.”
I frowned, unable to guess what he wanted me to see—except that it had something to do with Ellie’s murder. That fact alone made me drive faster.
“All right, Dale,” I said. “I’ll see you there.”
“Come alone.” He hammered the point home. “And hurry.”
Without another word, he cut off the call.
“What was that all about, Miss Glow?” asked Ashanti.
“Beats me,” I told her, putting even more pressure on the accelerator pedal. “But I guess I’ll have to drop you at the office before I find out.”
“I don’t want to wait,” said Ashanti. “Would it help if I commanded you as the Great Lady of the Canyon to take me along?”
“Briar still wins,” I told her. “This is Pennsylvania, not Arizona. You are way outside your jurisdiction, Grand Canyon.”
After depositing Ashanti at Cruel World Travel/Charmer Investigations, I raced straight to my place, parked behind Briar’s cruiser, and hurried inside. The whole time I was in transit, my imagination ran wild, conjuring the possible things Briar might want to show me at the dead woman’s house. None of them were good.
Briar had a key to my place, and he was waiting in the kitchen, looking about as grim as he’d sounded on the phone. “Hi, Gaia.” He was leaning against the counter by the sink, sipping from a cup of coffee. Glancing at the coffeemaker, I could see he’d recently brewed a full pot.
“I came as soon as I could,” I told him. “What did you want to show me?”
“These.” He put down the coffee cup and stepped over to the kitchen table, where what looked like three fat scrapbooks were arranged in a stack. “They belonged to Ellie Grenoble. As soon as I realized what they were, I sneaked them out of the place.”
Frowning, I approached the table. I could tell from the spines and edges that the books were in varying degrees of deterioration—the top one dark green and slightly worn, the one under it black and more ragged, and the gray one on the bottom frayed and ancient. I wondered what the hell lay inside them.
A feeling of dread washed over me as I sat at the table and stared at the books. “You removed evidence from a crime scene during a murder investigation?”
“It was important,” said Briar. “You’ll see.”
I looked him in the eye and hesitated. Briar wasn’t big on unnecessarily dramatic scenes. Whatever was in store for me, I had no doubt it was going to be a bombshell.
Reaching across the table, I slid the dark green book off the stack and put it in front of me with the spine facing left, cover side up. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly...again flicked my gaze from book to Briar to book.
And then I opened the cover.
And I was shocked to see myself staring back at me.
It was me in black and white, a clipping from a newspaper. I recognized it without checking the date on the clipping; it had been published five years ago, when I’d first come to town with Duke and opened Cruel World Travel/Charmer Investigations. In the photo, I stood in front of the storefront for those very businesses, grinning with pure joy on the cusp of a new beginning.
Travel Agent/Private Eye Sets Up Shop. That was the cutline under the photo. Businesswoman Gaia Charmer offers travel planning and investigative services under one roof.
I remembered it had been the first time I’d appeared in the local newspaper, The Confluence Chronicle. I’d been so happy and proud, so thrilled to launch what to me was the first adventure of my life. Because the truth was, in my current human incarnation, I hadn’t been alive very long by then; though I’d looked to be in my early twenties, I’d only walked the surface of the Earth for a few weeks.
So I was practically a newborn in that photo pasted on page one of the book. It wasn’t the first day of my life, but close to it.
Which, once the nature of the image fully registered, made me wonder. “What was this doing in Ellie Grenoble’s house?”
“There’s more,” said Briar. “Keep going.”
As I flipped through the pages, I saw one photo of me after another, one news story after another. In chronological order, they traced my life and career in Confluence, highlighting accomplishments (aiding in the apprehension of a killer), good deeds (sponsoring Earth Day events at local schools), and the occasional political action (talking to City Council about local water pollution). There was even a photo and story about my rescuing the kidnapped baby from Crystal Ruby Hayes.
What amazed me the most, though, were the stories about incidents I’d been involved with anonymously...the ones in which I’d used my powers to stop a crime or fend off a disaster or make a difference. I wasn’t identified in these stories because I’d never taken credit or been seen in the process of working my magic. There was no way Ellie could have known I’d had anything to do with those events—yet there they were, pasted into the scrapbook right along with all the other moments from my life.
Stunned, I closed the scrapbook and looked at Briar. “What the hell?” I said.
“You understand now why I removed it from the crime scene?” Briar’s face was stony, his eyes like steel. “A scrapbook about you, in the home of a woman who was murdered by someone cla
iming to be Mother Earth.”
I shook my head slowly as the mystery took shape. “I barely knew this woman. How could she have been this obsessed with me all this time without me knowing it? And why?”
“All I know is, it’s a good thing I found these first,” said Briar. “They were hidden in a nook behind a wall panel, so the initial search missed them. I happened to notice a draft from around the panel and pried it open.”
“I’d be a suspect,” I said. “I am a suspect.”
“We’re in unknown territory here,” said Briar. “I’d never expose you...but what if something else turns up?”
“Like what?”
He cleared his throat. “Something that implicates you.”
Impossible, I wanted to say, but I hadn’t expected the scrapbooks, either. Was this the true endgame of the crime—framing Mother Earth for Ellie’s murder? If so, why? And who was behind it?
Uncertain of where events were taking me, I reached for the next scrapbook on the pile—the black one, which looked much older than the first. I slid it across the table, then hesitated to open the cover. The fact that Briar had brought it for me to see meant there had to be something important inside...perhaps something damaging.
But when I finally pulled the cover up and looked at the first page, I was more baffled than anything else. A newspaper photo was pasted there, but it was much older than any of the ones in the first scrapbook had been—and it wasn’t a shot of me. Instead, the photo featured a slender woman with short, dark hair, performing on stage in a sequined black dress. Microphone in hand, she stood in the spotlight, belting out a song with such intense emotion that her eyes were pinched shut.
Below the photo, the cutline read: Mid Silvergone Lights Up Cabaret!
“Who’s Mid Silvergone?” I flipped to the next page, and there she was again, as Auntie Mame. “I’ve never heard of her before.”
“An actress and singer, apparently,” said Briar. “She got her start in Pittsburgh in the mid-‘70s.”
I flipped another page and found a review of a 1977 production of Fiddler on the Roof. “What does she have to do with me? Why did you bring me this scrapbook?”
“The three scrapbooks were together in the nook,” explained Briar. “I didn’t recognize Mid Silvergone, but I figured I’d bring hers along because the other two are so interesting.”
The other two? I closed the black scrapbook and reached for the gray one, the oldest of the three. This time, I recognized the woman in the yellowed newspaper photo on page one the second I saw it. She was much younger than the age at which I knew her best, but her face was unmistakable.
I didn’t even need to read the cutline under the black-and-white photo to know who this appeared to be.
“Ellie Grenoble?” Her aquiline features were framed by blonde hair that was cut in a short, tight bob. She wore a gray sweater and a gray ankle-length dress, like something out of the 1930s or ‘40s.
Sure enough, the clipping was dated Wednesday, May 5, 1937. Doing the mental math, I quickly realized how impossible it was for Ellie to be in that photo.
“I’m guessing that’s Ellie’s mother,” said Briar. “Though I haven’t followed up on it yet.”
The woman in the photo did look like she was at least in her mid-to-late twenties, though I couldn’t be sure. She was standing in a classroom setting with a blackboard behind her and two children beside her—a little dark-haired boy and girl who looked like they were in second or third grade. The boy had a high-and-tight crewcut, and the girl had baby doll curls on either side of her adorable face. Both kids were holding up an apple for her to take.
Apples for the teacher, read the cutline. Miss Ellie Grenoble, English Teacher at Confluence Elementary, is rewarded for her efforts by prize students James Sydney and Hope Martin, both 8.
“It couldn’t be her.” I kept staring at her face in the photo, mystified by the close resemblance.
“Wait till you see what else she did besides teaching,” said Briar.
Turning more pages, I saw photos of Ellie in classroom settings and attending community events. Then, I came to a photo of her in a World War II military uniform, smiling.
Local Woman Serves as Army Nurse in Europe, read the cutline.
“She never told me her mother was in the war,” said Briar. “She never mentioned her mother at all.”
The pages after that were full of clippings from Stars & Stripes, detailing various battles and troop movements...plus commendations for Ellie. Eventually, the war-era stories ended, and I came to a new set of clippings—each one detailing an environmental incident or natural disaster of some kind.
They flew past as I flipped through the pages—flash floods, mudslides, forest fires, earthquakes, avalanches. One after another for dozens of pages, they paraded through history, always without any explanation as to why they were in the scrapbook at all.
“What the hell?” I said as the disasters kept coming. “Why would she even care about this stuff?”
“I don’t know,” said Briar, “but you should skip to the last page.”
I did as he asked, exposing the last clipping on the final page of the gray scrapbook. And as I gazed at the photo and read the text, I couldn’t help gasping.
“This is...I can’t...” The headline read as follows: Local Woman Missing.
“See what I mean?” Briar said grimly.
I did...and I didn’t. Because what I was seeing didn’t make any sense.
Gaia Grenoble, 23, of Confluence, was reported missing on Friday. That was how the news story started.
And the photo that went with it...
“It’s impossible,” I told him.
“Is it?” he asked. “After all the things we’ve been through and everything you’ve told me about?”
I couldn’t tear my eyes off that photo. The dateline above it read June 6, 1947. “Impossible.” Even as I said the word, I couldn’t deny what I saw.
I couldn’t deny that the woman in the photo looked just like me…and I had no memory of living as a past incarnation with that name, appearance, and mysterious fate.
12
Hours later, asleep beside Briar as Ashanti slept in the guest room of my apartment, I dreamed about her. The woman who could have been my twin, whose photo I’d seen on the last page of the gray scrapbook.
I dreamed that I was in the office at Cruel World/Charmer Investigations, and she walked in the door, dressed in a World War II uniform. She wanted to arrange a trip to Germany, but not for her. She wanted me to travel there while she ran the businesses.
Then, suddenly, I was in Germany, wearing her uniform...but I liked it there. The people were drinking beer and dancing, and they all knew me. They’d known me my entire life, and they all loved me like family.
But then, somehow, I was lost in the Parapets compound, which was in the Bavarian Alps instead of Pennsylvania. And Phaola was supposed to meet me there, but instead she was screaming in the distance, her cries echoing over the snow-capped mountains. She was speaking Russian, for some reason, but I still understood what she was saying.
Save me, Ellie. Save me while you still can.
And then, breathing hard, I woke from the dream. Sunlight was glowing through the curtains, and Briar was gone.
And I had such chills racing through me that I pulled the covers over my head and shivered, fighting to get back to sleep.
The best thing about going into the office that morning was the coffee. A fresh pot of it sat in the coffeemaker, just when I needed it most.
Drawn by the aroma of blonde roast, I headed straight for the steaming pot like a shot. Without hesitation, I dumped coffee in my Earth cup, then added double cream and double sugar the way I liked. I didn’t care who’d made it; I’d gotten up way too early and needed to caffeinate immediately.
“Good morning, everyone!” It was then I realized Luna was a big, fat liar. She’d said she was a night owl, yet there she was, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first th
ing in the a.m. “Look what I have to go with the coffee!”
Lo and behold, she was walking out of the back room carrying a big, rectangular box from Hole in the Grounds, the awesome doughnut shop up the street. She put it on my desk and opened the lid, exposing all twelve perfectly hole-shaped goodies resting inside.
“Help yourselves,” said Luna. “My treat.”
I’d taken exactly one sip of Joe and still had my grouch on big time. “Where’s Duke?” I knew I sounded grumpy and didn’t care. “He should be here by now.”
“I don’t know.” Luna shrugged. “I was here all night, and he never called in.”
“You were here all night?” Ashanti sounded surprised.
Luna nodded. “Ever since Gaia picked you up and took you home with her.”
“And I thought I didn’t have a life,” said Ashanti.
“You’re sure Duke didn’t leave a note?” Even as I asked, I checked the email on my phone for a message from Duke. The fact he wasn’t there, and those close to me were in danger, had me worried.
“I’m sure.” Luna left the room, then came back with paper plates. “He left no message, Gaia.”
Duke had plenty of tricks up his sleeve and could take care of himself. That didn’t make me worry any less...but I had to get moving with the business at hand. Other friends of mine were in greater danger still.
“All right then.” I took a long swallow of coffee and let the warmth fill me like liquid sunshine. “Let me know when you hear from him, Luna.”
“Ten-four, boss.”
I reached for my favorite flavor of doughnut—chocolate honey-glazed—and took a bite. It was still warm, and I closed my eyes with pleasure as I chewed. “Let’s talk about EarthSave Unlimited.”
Luna cleared her throat and headed for her desk. “You were right about them, boss.” She grabbed a tablet computer from the desk and flicked on the screen with the touch of her fingers. “They’re all about the fracking.”
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