Paperquake (31 page)

But the best news of all, the newscasters continued, was that more people had not been hurt or killed. The hospitals were caring for the several dozen unfortunate people injured by crashing brick, falls, or car collisions during the quake. But hundreds more people were thankful that the Golden Gate Bridge had been closed just as they'd hoped to drive across it. "Sure we were annoyed," said one man cheerfully. "Most bomb threats are crank calls, anyway. This one was, too, wasn't it? There was no bomb in the end—but thanks to that girl who called in the threat, my car wasn't on that bridge when the cable snapped. That's what I call a piece of good luck!"

Violet went up to bed early. She felt exhausted and fell asleep almost as soon as she pulled up her quilt. In the morning she was awakened by her sisters, who climbed onto the bed, shaking a newspaper at her.

"Look at this!" cried Rose.

"Whaa—?" moaned Violet, groggy and disoriented. She sat up and took hold of the paper Rose was thrusting at her.

"Read the headlines!"

Violet squinted through sleep-filled eyes.
EARTHQUAKE!
blared the black letters.
BAY AREA ROCKS AND ROLLS
. And then in smaller letters, farther down the page:
GOLDEN GATE MIRACLE.

Jasmine tapped the page. "Read this, Vi."

"Yeah, and then tell us again how you didn't have a thing to do with it," Rose added softly.

Violet's heart began thumping harder as she read the article, but she tried not to let any expression in her face betray her.

 

GOLDEN GATE MIRACLE

During yesterday's earthquake a cable snapped on the Golden Gate Bridge, its entire length collapsing down onto the road's surface and smashing through the side railings on one section of the bridge. Saturday traffic is typically heavy with shoppers,
tourists and
families out for the day. Normally a hundred cars would be traveling the bridge at any one time. And yet yesterday, when the earthquake hit just after noon, the Golden Gate Bridge was entirely empty. It had been evacuated and closed down by police after they were notified of a bomb threat.

The bomb threat was called in to a 911 dispatcher at 10:34
A.M.,
police report Police dispatcher Margaret Grady, who took the call, described the voice as that of "a young girl, perhaps in her teens. Her voice sounded scared, nervous. She said she'd overheard her brother and his friends making plans to bomb the bridge at noon on Saturday. I tried to get her to give me more details, but she cried out that I should get everyone off the bridge 'before it starts.' I thought that seemed odd, and she quickly corrected herself and said 'I mean before it blows up!' Then she hung up. Later I remembered what she'd said. It almost sounded as if she knew there would be a quake—not a bomb—but of course that's nonsense."

Nonsense or not, police hope to find the caller. Police Chief Parker is quick to assert that the caller will be hailed as a heroine. "There was no bomb," he says." So whether she really believed there was or not is something we don't know. What we do know is that her phone call prompted us to close the bridge and ended up saving a hundred lives or more. We would like to thank her."

Anyone with information is requested to report to the San Francisco police.

 

Violet lowered the newspaper. "So?"

Rose grabbed the paper. "'Anyone with information is requested to report to the San Francisco police.'"

"What? Do you have information?" asked Violet.

"Yes." Rose arched an eyebrow. "I have a sister who told us the bridge was going to fall in an earthquake at noon on Saturday. She wanted to close the bridge somehow but knew no one would take her seriously if she called the police to tell them a quake was on the way."

"That's not information," muttered Violet.

"It's logic," returned Rose. "And logic tells me that this sister of mine thought of another way to get the police to close the bridge."

Logic,
thought Violet with an inward smile. She tapped the newspaper. "It couldn't be me," she said. "It says here the girl who called had a brother. I don't have a brother."

"Oh, Vi!" Jasmine bounced on the bed. "I can't believe you had the nerve to call 911. That's really illegal, you know—making a bomb threat! And now they're calling you a heroine!"

"They're not calling
me
anything," said Violet coolly. She would admit nothing. "Now get off the bed. You're sitting on my legs."

She couldn't tell them the truth, couldn't tell anyone. It had to remain her secret. It was better that way. Because how could she ever explain to people that what had led her to make the call in the first place were messages from the past? How could she explain that screwing up her nerve to call had been less real courage and more newfound confidence in herself?

She still didn't know what had set everything in motion. Magic? A ghostly messenger? Or, possibly, the earth itself? She remembered the pamphlet from the street fair about the Gaian principles, about how disasters such as earthquakes were said to be no more than the earth's attempts to balance itself. Was a force of nature behind all that had happened?

She remembered Verity's dream, and Laela's, and her own.
The people! The earth will take care of itself, but who will help the people?

The pattern was there, part of the earth's fabric, and it was nothing to do with coincidence: Two girls with sisters who looked alike. Two girls who suffered ill health. Two girls who were not fully in charge of their own lives. Two girls who lived in a place where the earth was unstable, where the cracks showed through.

The pattern was there, but it was not about Verity and not about Violet. Verity had died from her illness, but Violet's heart troubles were a thing of the past. Verity had died without ever becoming friends with her sisters, but Violet was finding her place in the Jackstone threesome and no longer felt so left out. Verity had trusted her companion to be her friend, but Laela couldn't be trusted. Violet, on the other hand, had trustworthy friends in both Beth and Sam.

Somewhere, sometime, there would be another girl, another combination of sisters and friends, illness and health, and shaking bridges and shifting ground. "
There's nothing new under the sun,
" Mr. Koch always said. "
It's the same old story.
" And while there was some truth in those trite sayings, Violet now knew that her future—everyone's futures—was shaped by the past, but not
bound
by the past. She was looking forward to taking charge of her life.

"Was the man really afraid?" she asked on impulse. "The one not wearing the mask, I mean."

"What are you talking about?" asked Jasmine, darting a startled look at Rose.

"The man who was afraid to come home because of the man in the mask," repeated Violet patiently. "Was he really
afraid?
"

"Well, not exactiy," said Jasmine. "Not really afraid. He was—"

"Sort of nervous," said Rose. "But you're just trying to change the subject, Baby. We solved this one already. Ages ago."

"
You
did, maybe,
I
didn't." Violet wanted very much to solve this puzzle as well.

"Okay," said Jasmine agreeably. "He wasn't afraid. Not really. Take it from there."

"So the mask wasn't really a mask and the home wasn't a house," Violet remembered. "And no one is really afraid. So what's the story?"

"You can do it," said Jasmine encouragingly.

Violet thought about why people wear masks. "Masks," she mused aloud. "People wear them to scare people. To hide behind. Maybe to protect themselves, like a surgeon's mask or a welder's mask or a ... a catcher's mask."

"Bingo!" said Rose.

"And so the home isn't a house, it's home plate!" cried Violet. "And there's a player on third base afraid to run home because the catcher might put him out."

"There you go," applauded Rose. "It sounded so sinister, but it was just a simple game of baseball all the time."

"See how easy it was?" asked Jasmine. "Once the pieces fall into place?"

Violet knew all about pieces falling into place.

"Speaking of puzzles," began Rose slyly, "there's still this little matter of the mad bomber saving the day. I want to know where
that piece
fits into everything."

Violet shoved back the quilt and swung her legs over the side of the bed. "Speaking of puzzles, I've got a science paper to write today. And if I'm lucky, school will be closed tomorrow due to the quake and I'll get an extra day to work on it. I've got to make a
logical
story out of all this mess—somehow." First she would call Sam, though, and see how he was doing.

"But about the bridge—" Jasmine put her hand on Violet's quilt-covered knee.

Violet met her gaze unwaveringly.

"Oh, all right. But even if you
won't
admit anything, I just want you to know—Well, we won't tell anyone what you did. And we think you're pretty amazing."

"Yeah." Rose nodded. "We're proud of you, Baby."

Tears sprang to Violet's eyes.
They love me,
she realized.
But they're not sorry for me anymore.

Maybe someday she would tell them everything—someday when the quake and the letters and the struggles of a left-out triplet fit like puzzle pieces into the past.

"Don't call me
Baby!
" was all she said for now, but she said it with a smile.

A new time-travel mystery from
award-winning author Kathryn Reiss

Something is terribly wrong with Connor's mom. Suddenly she is wearing old-fashioned clothes, cooking dinner from scratch, and she has removed all of the TVs from the house What's even more troubling is her descent into increasingly disturbing trances. Connor suspects that an old art book full of paintings of a woman who looks
exactly
like his mom is the key to her strange behavior. But since the artist who created them died before she was even born, he's not sure what the connection could be.

When Connor is unexpectedly transported back in time to the 1920s, he realizes that it's up to him to solve the mystery—and to break the evil hold an obsessive artist has over his mom before it's too late.

When the wind finally stopped, I found myself lying all curled up, weak and tattered, like a piece of newspaper blown across the playground. It felt like I was waking up from a deep sleep. I wanted to stretch, but was too tired and too heavy to move a single muscle. All the energy had been blown right out of me. I lay completely limp, with a sort of sick feeling in my stomach. I felt the fuzz of rug scratch my cheek.

Then I smelled smoke.

Cautiously, I lifted my heavy head. My eyes smarted as smoke puffed right in my face.

"Hold it right there, boy!" a man's gruff voice roared at me. "Don't move a muscle!" His face loomed in front of me. My stomach clenched. As I drew in a smoky breath, I remembered
everything:
Mom's tortured face, Dad's panic, the sketch—

Had the wind knocked me unconscious? I could see I wasn't in my bedroom anymore. And who was this man—maybe a doctor? But why would a doctor be puffing on a pipe? And where were Mom and Dad and Crystal?

I closed my eyes, dizzy again. My brain wasn't working right. In all that wind, my brain must have gotten rattled. Something had happened to me. But what?

I heard the man's voice in the fog. "That's good. Stay nice and still till I finish your face. Good, very good."

I opened my eyes again carefully. I could see that I was now lying on a brown rug in an atticlike room, with streams of soft afternoon sunlight glinting through the open window. A warm breeze touched my face, and I smelled flowers. The breeze fluttered the cloth that covered a large canvas propped on an easel by the opposite window.

"All righty then, boy, turn your face toward me, just a bit to the right. There—just there! Perfect. Now hold it just like that!"

I obeyed the voice slowly, fear pumping adrenaline through me.
Who is this man?
Mom's eternal warning seemed to echo in my ears:
Stay away from strangers.

"Lift your chin, and turn toward me, for crying out loud!"

I lifted my chin and looked over, holding my breath. All I saw was a tall, skinny guy standing by an easel. He had gray hair all over the place like a mad scientist, but his face looked youngish—and he wore pants with red suspenders, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was chewing on a pipe, puffing hard, and the smoke billowed around his head in a cloud. His face was creased with concentration, and he was dabbing at a canvas on his easel with a paintbrush.

"I've almost got it—just a little more blue right here," the painter said, and stabbed his brush into a jar of other brushes. "That's all for today." He clapped his hands at me. "All right, lad, get up and out of here—nap time's over! And next time you take it into your head to settle down for forty winks in my studio, let me know ahead of time so I can set up. It gave me a turn, I don't mind telling you, when I came in and saw you lying there like something the cat dragged in. I'd have preferred you to be over there on the sofa rather than beached like a dead fish on the floor—better lighting. And those clothes! I'd choose a different shirt." He frowned at me as I struggled to stand up. My legs felt as weak as if I had been scaling mountains.

"What's that mean, boy?" The man was scowling at my T-shirt. "'Rolling Stones Revival'—that some kind of revival meeting? Are you one of them religious fellows going door-to-door proclaiming the Lord cometh?"

I glanced down at my shirt. "It—it's just an old rock group." My voice came out hoarse and raspy, as if I'd been sleeping for a long time. "My dad got me the shirt—"

"Rocks? Your dad is a geologist, is he? You must belong to that family on the next block. Heard the fellow teaches at the college."