Chapter Text
The Zhangs' mansion is more cinders than structure.
It must have retained some of its structural integrity, or it wouldn’t have remained standing these past five years, but it’s really leaning into maximising its cross-ventilation—Will can see straight through the building into the backyard in some places. And it’s not like he hadn’t read the news articles. Will knew it had burned down, but this is really something else.
The house has taken a beating, it seems. Large concaves exist where it curls in on itself, and every visible surface is charred. Cecil’s foot goes through the front porch at one stage, drawing a curse from the boy and a frantic scuffle to recover his balance.
“What the hell happened here?” Lou Ellen mutters, picking up a scorched elephant statue that had survived the destruction.
“According to the authorities, a forest fire. A falling tree hit the house and…” Cecil mimics a small explosion, complete with sound effects.
Will raises a sceptical eyebrow with a pointed glance at the massive hole in the floor ahead of them, “It looks like a meteor crash-landed.”
“Minus the meteor.”
Because there is no space rock to be seen, only a deep, empty crevice that the three of them have to skirt past to get to the staircase. The stairs themselves are partially concealed by pieces of fallen ceiling, though this does not discourage Cecil from clambering up the rubble.
"Cecil!" Will calls after him.
"Yeah, yeah." Cecil waves him off. "I'll be careful."
"Actually, I was going to tell you not to rob the place."
Cecil is up the stairs and out of earshot before he has to reply.
"He's definitely going to steal something," Lou Ellen says from behind Will in what remains of the mansion's kitchen—burnt-out cabinets and a cracked splash-back.
Cecil has a shelf full of so-called souvenirs from their mystery-solving travels, none of which are your traditional snow globe or collectible teaspoon but rather whatever shiny thing he can swipe without notice. He's a damn magpie, really, with an incurable case of sticky fingers.
Will shrugs; he'd only discouraged it for plausible deniability later on, anyway. "There's no one here to miss it."
Mrs Yùlán Zhang, nee Shen, grandmother of Frank Zhang—their person of interest—hadn't been seen since a few days before the fire. She was presumed to have died in the incident, and there have been no sightings of her grandson near the mansion since. No one to notice anything missing, and chances are, wayward teens have already been through and cleared the place of anything valuable long before.
They're lucky the house is even still around. The property had been left to Frank Zhang in his grandmother's will, but when he was unable to be found, it was relinquished to the Public Guardian and Trustee—the Court of Justice most likely having declared that 'due and satisfactory' inquiry had been made to locate the original beneficiary. Will had come across the 'missing' notices in the paper, no doubt required of the state trustee and complete with a picture of young Frank Zhang—wearing an unflattering mustard-coloured school hockey jersey—offering the camera a shy, dimpled smile.
Given the boy was a minor who couldn't manage the property regardless, when he was unable to be located within the three-month window, it's clear the Court allowed the land (and manor ruins) to be put up for sale, given the 'For Sale' sign staked into the front lawn.
Most of this can't be confirmed, given Mrs Yùlán Zhang's will isn't public, but it seems pretty cut and dry to Will.
"This place is obnoxious, really," Lou Ellen mutters into her portable microphone, peering into what seems to have been a rather large pantry room before it had been burnt beyond utility. "According to the Historic Registry, it was built in 1910, had several different owners until 1940 when someone decided it wasn't big enough—" she scoffs, "—and added an expansion."
The sudden history lesson is for their listeners more than Will himself, who has read the file on the house.
"Because the five bedrooms clearly weren't enough."
"Obviously," Lou Ellen says, tone dripping with sarcasm. "And you can't talk—Mr 'I-Live-In-A-Fancy-Dare-Enterprises-Apartment'."
"Hey! I came from humble beginnings," Will argues, "College dorm rooms ain't luxury."
"Don't I know it."
Because Lou Ellen, with her two degrees under her belt, spent all of her undergrad in crammed student dorms with a roommate who had no concept of shared space and a tendency to grow mould in her collection of takeaway containers. Lou Ellen says she spent the better part of those years avoiding her apartment—and her roommate by extension—working the night shift behind the reception desk of the Plaza Hotel, until she could afford her own place half-way through her masters.
It's a hole-in-the-wall sort of apartment, the kind that has the kitchen, living, dining, and office space all in one small room with a landlord who dares to advertise it as 'open plan'. Her bedroom is the size of a large closet, and her bathroom shares a wall with the washer-dryer unit, making the tiles vibrate whenever she washes a load. But it's hers, she worked for it, Lord knows how hard it is to find an affordable apartment in Manhattan, so she stayed even when Will and Cecil moved into their contractually-provided Dare Enterprises accommodation.
"Cecil seems to think our apartment is still a dorm room," Will grimaces, thinking of the sheer amount of empty instant noodle cups and energy drinks he'd thrown out before they'd left for San Francisco. He amends, "Actually, Cecil just hasn't realised he's not a college student anymore."
Lou Ellen chuckles, turning away to peer into the pantry and instantly wrinkling her nose when the smell of rancid food hits her full force. "I don't think they were here."
It takes Will a bit of mental acrobatics to follow her train of thought before he recognises that she's back on the case.
"So, what? The house burnt down on its own?"
"No, obviously. I just can't see any way that three missing teenagers crossed the border from Washington into Canada. They'd have been stopped at any of the entry ports or airports the moment they showed their identification, which one of them doesn't even have."
"But we've got witnesses placing them in Alaska?"
"I know!" Lou Ellen tosses her hands up. "It makes no sense! But Zhang showing up at his family's home just to burn it down and steal the car? That makes even less sense—I don't buy it."
"They did steal The Arion from Amazon, maybe they have a thing for sports cars?" Will muses, only partially joking. "Do we have anything placing them here? Witnesses? Footage?"
Lou Ellen had taken the liberty of posting their standard 'Did you see these teens?' query on the local Facebook groups a few days prior to their arrival. The last that Will had heard, there had been an overwhelming response of…well, nothing. Usually, with these kinds of posts, they get lucky; the town gossip who spends most of their time on Facebook and digging into the lives of their neighbours will reach out saying something like 'oh, those delinquents? I saw them loitering by the store, I'd never seen 'em faces before, so I thought it was strange…', offering the trio a lead on a silver platter.
"Nothing," she says, "The only response we got was some weirdo plane-enthusiastic telling us we should be more concerned with this random-ass plane that apparently took off when it shouldn't have that same day."
"I still think there's something to that," Cecil says, climbing back down the stairs with too much enthusiasm for someone stepping on floor boards that look—and sound—like they're one wrong step away from snapping.
"They didn't steal a plane!" Lou Ellen cries, exasperated. Clearly, they've had this conversation before. "Even if they did, they certainly couldn't fly it."
"So, they had a pilot accomplice!"
"Uh-huh," Lou Ellen says with the same air as a parent might say 'sure, sweetie,' when their child says something so preposterous but they can't be bothered to correct them. To Will, she says, "We've got nothing. Just a pretty big coincidence that this place burned down, when the kids have been confirmed to have been within a couple of hours of this location around the same period of time."
Will doesn't like it, that's for sure.
"Did you find anything upstairs?" Will asks Cecil.
"Nothing that proves they came here, and nothing we didn't already know about Zhang. The guy definitely lived here beforehand: all his school shit is here. And we were right, his mother was killed in action before Frank went missing. I found an invoice that escaped the fire: the family was receiving money—a death benefit—from the government."
"Did you take anything?" Will asks, eyes narrowed.
"Nope."
Will knows it's a lie instantly. Call it intuition or just that he's known Cecil long enough to recognise his sticky-finger tendencies.
Seeing Will's blatant distrust, Cecil admits, "Ugh, alright, alright! It's just a pocket knife, let me tell you they've got a million weapons up there—must be a military thing—no one will even know it's gone."
The pocket knife in question is a shiny thing. As in the whole thing is made of gold, which seems impractical to say the least. Why make a weapon out of a precious metal? Especially one so malleable. But Will can see why Cecil chose it since it's certainly unique.
"What are you even going to do with a pocket knife?" Lou Ellen asks, derisively.
"Stab your kneecaps, obviously."
"Careful, Short-stack, you're sounding awfully bitter. It's alright, not all of us can be tall."
This predictably results in Cecil (not wielding his new knife, thankfully) lunging for the woman, paying little mind to their fragile surroundings as he chases her unceremoniously through the mansion.
"You take that back!" The thin walls do nothing to muffle the sound of his yelling, nor Lou Ellen's answering cackle.
With his shorter strides, though, Cecil never does catch up to her and is, instead, forced to yield.
<< | | >>
"That was useless," Cecil groans.
He's perched on the armrest of their hotel room's sofa, staring rather miserably into his steaming coffee cup. Will should probably be concerned that this is Cecil's third coffee for the day—not to mention the two energy drinks he'd slammed back during the return ride from the Zhangs' mansion—but he has long since learned it's just easier to make himself scarce for the inevitable caffeine crash that wouldn't set in for a couple hours, than try and pry the coffee from Cecil's grip.
"It wasn't useless," Will argues from where he is lying on the sofa itself, legs draped over the available armrest and his head tipped back to view Cecil upside-down. "We confirmed that the forest fire story was bullshit."
"But we don't know why what really happened was covered up. We don't even know if the kids were involved!" Cecil says, and pure panic flashes across his face. "Oh my god, we won't have anything for our episode!"
"We've got another witness interview tomorrow—"
Cecil pays Will's interruption no mind. "We'll be ridiculed, the laughing stocks of the podcast community. Known only as the people who took on the mystery of The Seven and failed. Our contract is over, we'll be kicked out of our flat—we'll have to move into Lou Ellen's shoebox-that-she-calls-an-apartment."
"Are you done?"
Cecil has a hand tangled in his hair now, pulling lightly on the strands like it'll corral his brain-cells into doing something more sensible than superfluous stress.
Lou Ellen decides to enter the room, then, stepping in from her designated bedroom, she is midway through tying her dozens of braids into a lazy bun. She's changed since their visit to the mansion, eager to be rid of the smell of ash and smoke that clung to the fabric, now replaced with a simple lounge set.
"What's wrong with him?" She asks Will, jutting her chin at the idiot next to him.
"He's on his third coffee…"
"Ah, caffeine overdose."
She, like Will, had begrudgingly seen this before—the seemingly random bout of anxiousness that would take hold of Cecil upon consuming a few too many caffeinated drinks. Will had first encountered it the middle of their of sophomore year, when he'd genuinely thought Cecil was having a mental breakdown—or a fucking heart attack with the way he was clutching his chest—only for Cecil to open his mouth and start blubbering about how he might've left the iron on and their flat was most certainly burning down as they spoke…the boy doesn't own a clothes iron—he never has.
Cecil narrows his eyes at the two of them, de-tangling his fingers from his hair to jab a finger in their direction. "You should be more worried about this."
Lou Ellen rolls her eyes. "I can't deal with this right now."
She turns away, marching over to the kitchenette to gather her phone from where it's plugged into the wall. She puts it to her ear, her back to the two boys, which Will obviously chooses to take personally because what did he do to annoy her?
"Is this the office of Mr Tristan McLean?" Lou says into the phone, bending to lean against the countertop as she listens to the response on the other end of the line. "…This is Lou Ellen Blackstone. Calling again from the 'If You DARE…' podcast."
Cecil gapes at her back before stage-whispering to Will, "She's ignoring me!"
"You say that like she doesn't usually ignore you," Will says dryly, thinking about the three other occasions, just today, that Lou Ellen had said something along the lines of 'I'm done with your bullshit, Markowitz' and then proceeded to ignore Cecil. In her defence, ninety-percent of what comes out of Cecil's mouth is utter nonsense.
"Her loss," Cecil huffs. "One day, when it comes to light that all my 'ridiculous conspiracy theories' were right, she'll be sorry."
"Yes, I have called recently—" Lou Ellen cuts off abruptly as she is interrupted.
"Yes, I understand that Mr McLean is a very busy man," Lou Ellen says, and Will can practically hear her rolling her eyes. "We'd just like to sit down and have a quick chat…Yes, about his daughter…It's been a while since he was last cast in a film, hasn't it? Surely, any publicity is good publicity—"
A second later, she yanks the phone away from her ear, muttering a curse. "The damn woman hung up on me."
"Must feel shitty, being ignored," Cecil jabs with a smug smile.
"Grow a pair," Lou Ellen shoots back.
"Not to say 'I told you so' but…I told you so," Cecil says, standing up and beginning to pace. "We've got nothing—the Zhangs' house was a bust, Tristan McLean won't give us the time of day, and we still don't know anything about Mystery Girl."
He's right in that sense, they haven't come any closer to figuring out who the unidentified girl travelling with Jackson and Zhang is. Their community tip-offs have been little help in that regard, too; actually, they've been getting out of hand lately. Yesterday, somebody claimed that the famous 'Times Square Hack'—in which someone managed to reprogram all the electronic billboards in Times Square to read: 'ALL DA LADIES LUV LEO'—was the very same Leo Valdez that the podcasters were investigating. Never mind that the kid would've been twelve at the time.
It's safe to say Will had deleted that submission.
"We've still got plenty of leads," Lou Ellen says. "We've got the interview tomorrow, which will hopefully give us some information on what our trio was doing in Alaska. And if that doesn't work out, we can just start investigating the others—we've already had plenty of people contact us about encountering Piper, Jason, Leo, or Annabeth in 2010."
"I still think we should have investigated that plane in North Vancouver," Cecil mutters. He's no longer anxiously pacing, at least, which is a good sign.
"They didn't steal—and pilot—a plane!" Lou Ellen tosses her hands up, exasperated.
<< | | >>
Will is sick of talking about the weather.
Every person they've met since landing in Anchorage has greeted them with some variation of 'I bet you're missing those blue skies, you've caught us on a Smoke Day', or 'not the best day for you tourist folk, I'd stay indoors with this haze around '. Will presumes it's an Alaskan thing, and it was all well and good the first few times, but this latest guy is particularly…passionate.
"—crazy winds these past few days, some kind of storm cell off the coast, the radio folks were saying just earlier," their cab driver is saying as he pulls out of the airport's internal roads onto the freeway. "I turned on the station on the drive back from Palmer, and they were talking about it. I suppose they're expecting more, too—aren't those fancy scientists saying it's only going to get worse? What with the oceans boiling, or whatever—"
Cecil is already fully sleeping against the window at this point, or at least pretending to. Honestly, Will is kicking himself that he didn't think to do the same thing because now the driver is pinning him in place with an awkward, green-eyed stare in the rear-view mirror.
Will can't even feign interest in the view out of the car windows when all he can see is heavy smoke and the faint outline of buildings passing them by.
"—as if we need more of this weather. The damn roads are already littered with potholes, and what's the council doing about it? Nothing," he takes his hands off the wheel to gesture wildly in the air. "Instead, they're burning the forests. I can hardly do my job when I can't see more than a few feet ahead of me."
What a lovely thing to hear from the taxi driver who holds their lives in his hands. If this is the way Will goes, he'll be pissed, honestly. He whispers as much to Lou Ellen, who muffles a laugh from where she is pressed tightly against Will's side in the middle seat.
"You picked an awful time to visit, really—is this your first time in Anchorage?" The driver asks.
And because it's Will that the man is drilling into with his eyes—and who Lou Ellen elbows in the side because she doesn't want to have to engage with the man, her gaze permanently glued to her phone at this point in an obvious effort to discourage any and all interaction—Will admits, "Once, a few years back."
He would have been seven or eight years old at the time, and truthfully, Will isn't sure it counts when he didn't even leave the motel room—a common occurrence when Will was travelling on tour with his Ma; barely staying in each location for longer than a day. He has a vague recollection of her bringing a tub of ice cream back after her show in Anchorage, and the two had nearly made themselves sick eating it all in one go.
"I drove this girl once, still in school, if I had to guess, she told me she visited seventy years ago. Can you believe it?" The man muses, his eyes having returned to the road. "And I was sitting there thinking, you really think I'll believe that? But then I looked at her, and I tell you, she said it with a proper straight face."
Lou Ellen and Will exchange a glance, the kind that says 'how does one even respond to that?'. Will misses the taxi drivers of New York who exchange the typical small talk and then have enough skill to recognise when their passenger has no interest in further discussion.
But this man has no such skill, so Will tries to redirect the conversation instead. "…So, have you lived here long?"
And off the driver goes again, mouth moving a mile a minute while his passengers tune him out.
<< | | >>
Moose Pass does, in fact, have a large population of moose, much to Cecil's delight. And now that they are south of Anchorage, the smoke has let up—nothing but a distant haze over the horizon—which means Cecil can clearly see the small herd up the road as they inspect a retired snowplough by headbutting it.
Will isn't totally understanding of Cecil's apparent fascination with the creatures, but as long as he doesn't try to pet them—or heaven forbid, take one home—Will is content to leave him to his new hobby: moose-watching.
"Oliver, this is Will Solace and Cecil Markowitz, my colleagues." Lou Ellen introduces, as she walks back from the nearby store, leading their latest witness over to the picnic bench where Cecil and Will are waiting.
The man with her—Oliver—is middle-aged with salt and pepper hair, smile lines around his eyes and mouth, and a spattering of facial hair on his chin. Next to Lou Ellen, he looks absurdly short, helped by the tall boots the girl has decided to wear today. He shakes both of their hands with genuine enthusiasm—Cecil actually takes his eyes off the moose for their introduction; apparently drawn in by the promise of new leads and the possibility of answers.
"Do you consent to being recorded?" Cecil starts them off, leg bouncing as he speaks.
"Yeah, that's all fine."
"And can you state your name?"
"Oliver Hoffman."
"Thanks for that," Cecil says. "Now, you reached out to the 'If you DARE…' team a few months ago, after stumbling across our social media? Tell us about what led you to get in touch with us?"
"Well, my kids would tell you I'm a serial caller—radio channels, game shows, those advertisements that say you'll get twenty per cent off if you call to purchase. I like the human connection, I suppose—though you wouldn't know it, where I live."
"For context, listeners, we are currently meeting Oliver in his hometown: Moose Pass," Lou Ellen chimes in.
"Which I'm pretty sure has a larger population of moose than people," Cecil says.
Oliver laughs, "You're not wrong. But my dad left me his shop when he passed, and I couldn't bring myself to sell it, so I moved back. It was quite the shock; city life to the small town lifestyle, but I don't mind it."
"You seem like quite the social butterfly. You don't get lonely here?"
"That's why I'm always calling people," Oliver winks. "So, when I saw some old advertisement for your second season—the one with that Jackson fellow—I had no qualms about getting in touch."
Now, Will is by no means an introvert; it's hard to be in his line of work, but unlike Oliver, Will takes no pleasure in making phone calls. Typically, he leaves it to Lou Ellen, who somehow has an even more commanding presence over the phone.
"So, you met Percy Jackson?"
"Yes, and two friends. They'd stumbled away from a train wreck and wound up outside my store here."
"We came across mentions of this train accident in our research, but it wasn't exactly clear what happened," Will says, thinking back to all the articles he'd skimmed in preparation for this interview. Most of the accounts he'd read made no mention of the cause of the wreck at all, saying something like 'authorities are still investigating' and then, in the five years since, no further updates were released.
"That's because the NTSB doesn't know what to think when the passengers claim the train was attacked by a 'huge eagle'. I reckon they chose to just bury the incident instead of embarrassing themselves with that headline."
Will finds himself agreeing with the NTSB, the department in charge of investigating railway accidents, and so does Lou Ellen, it seems, as she clarifies, "The train was attacked by…an eagle?"
She simply couldn't sound any more sceptical if she tried.
Oliver shrugs, "Apparently. Word on the street is that it swooped the train, managed to shatter the glass roof of the car and sent the whole train off the track. There are supposedly pictures of the creature, but I've not seen one."
A quick internet search assures Will that even the largest eagle—a type of sea eagle weighing in at twenty-two pounds—wouldn't be able to produce enough force on impact to rival a modern train's own mass, stability and momentum. He's no expert, but it doesn't seem all that feasible that one bird managed to derail the thing.
Cecil, reading over Will's shoulder, scoffs aloud.
"And you said the kids were involved?" he asks.
Honestly, Percy Jackson being involved in the train wreckage is the most realistic part of this whole scenario.
"Yeah, they looked damn tired when I found them so I treated them to breakfast, asked them where they were headed and sent them off with a friend who was driving that direction."
"Do you remember where they were headed?"
"Oh, yeah, Seward; the girl used to live there, I think, said she wanted to visit home. It's, say, a thirty-minute drive south of here," Oliver answers, gesturing vaguely in the direction that can only be southwards. "The only reason I remember it after so long is that my friend doesn't venture far. Just here to visit me, really."
He chuckles, "Ah man, I'm making him sound like a real hermit, aren't I? He won't be very happy with me. I swear he's a real social guy—part of a big community of Sugpiaq Peoples in and around the Seward area."
"And your friend, he drove them out to Seward? Any chance he remembers where he dropped them off?" Lou Ellen asks.
"Ah, see, they never made it. I've been telling him for years he needs to sell off that damn Ford; I'm pretty sure it's from the 30's, and it shows. But yeah, the piece of junk broke down, and the kids decided to walk the rest of the way."
Of course, because it would be too much to ask for them to just be handed the address. That would be too easy, apparently.
"Then I guess we know where we're headed next," Cecil says, "Say, how do we get to Seward from here?"
<< | | >>
It's about time the investigative trio have some good luck, Will thinks, snapping a picture of the framed photo on the diner wall.
And it is good luck. Because what are the chances that the three of them selected this random diner on Third Avenue, Seward, to eat at?
It had looked popular enough, drawing a good crowd of fishermen and railroad workers, which indicated it had the locals' approval, with still a few tables spare. There had been no big red arrow pointing to the restaurant reading 'Answers Found Here!'; nothing to separate this place from any of the streets they'd wandered down in an attempt to locate where Percy and co., could have visited.
Sure, they'd been walking for over an hour looking for a clue, a lead, anything of substance, but the walk at least had been pleasant enough. The air here is so starkly fresh, and the buildings have that cosy sort of look: weather-beaten, and trimmed with copper-coloured rust, the houses all lean into each other as if huddling together against the sea-breeze. And each street has the backdrop of the Chugach Mountains—snow-tipped like the ones featured on postcards.
And if Will ignored the numerous giants his brain had conjured up, it was peaceful—the thirty-foot-tall, bright-blue men wandering the outskirts of town were not the easiest to turn a blind eye to, but Will did his best.
Despite the wasted time spent wandering, Will still thinks they had gotten lucky in the end.
"Marie Levesque," Lou Ellen reads the name from the list beneath the staff photograph— as the only woman in the photo, it's not difficult to figure out her name from the group. "She was the hired help here in—" she squints at the text "—1942."
The quality of the picture is poor, slightly over-exposed as most black-and-white photos are, but Marie's features are clear enough.
"She looks exactly like our mystery girl," Cecil says.
"Definitely family. Her grandmother, maybe?"
"I'd say," Will murmurs, pulling up a photo of the mystery girl on his phone and holding it up so that she and Marie are side by side. The only clear difference between the two is their age and their eyes. The modern girl—and their person of interest—has amber eyes that, when photographed at the right angle, appear like liquid gold. Though this photograph is monochrome, it's clear this lighter eye colour isn't inherited from this woman, whose irises were far darker.
"So, she might've been visiting family back in 2010?"
"Or at least laying low at a family property," Lou Ellen suggests.
None of this explains why some random girl from Seward, Alaska, has no identification records. Nor how she travelled across national and international borders without any government notice.
"What now?" Cecil asks, frowning up at the photograph.
"Now, we ask some questions," Lou Ellen says, unhooking the frame from its nail and carrying it to the diner's service counter.
Will and Cecil exchange a glance before hurrying to follow. Cecil has his handheld recorder in his hand the next second, nearly running into a table full of children and parents celebrating a young boy's birthday as he calibrates the settings.
Lou Ellen slides the picture across the desk, a bright smile plastered on her face. To the cashier she asks, "What can you tell me about this picture?"
<< | | >>
"This is it?" Cecil wrinkles his nose at the warehouse on stilts over Resurrection Bay. It's in rough shape, the wooden pilings covered in barnacles and algae, and the structure itself boarded up with rotting planks. It seems to feel the tide's pull, the roof angled as though ready to slip below the waves.
If the Zhang mansion was nothing but bare bones, the Levesques' home is flesh—rotten and chewed up by the sea.
Will checks the address scribbled on the diner napkin. He confirms, "This is it."
"Come on," Lou Ellen says, striding up the pier. She tries the door, pulling against the wooden slats boarding it up, but despite their flimsy appearance, they don't budge. She steps back with a frown, letting Cecil dart forward to try.
Their friend gives the door a tug, just testing, and nearly slips backwards when the wooden slats come loose and the door swings open on groaning hinges. Cecil turns with a smug smile and a teasing remark no doubt on his lips, but Lou Ellen is swift to interrupt with a short, "Not a word."
She sweeps into the house without a look backwards—probably for the best when Cecil is flexing his biceps like he's just won a weight-lifting championship. Will rolls his eyes, shoving the idiot forward lest he get lost in his own ego.
The warehouse is largely full of boxes, stacked along the walls and piled about the space, all coated in a thick layer of dust and water stains.
"Who needs this many greeting cards?" Will says, swiping the dust away from the box labels to reveal box upon box of assorted cards: birthdays, Easter, Christmas, you name it, it's here.
"Obviously, the Seasonal Card Apocalypse is coming; this is the only safe house," Lou Ellen responds dryly.
Cecil reaches into an open box and pulls out a stack of cards that just read 'I'M SORRY' in block text. "You never know when you’ll need to send an apology card—" he peers into the box, "—or ten thousand."
In tandem, they move to inspect the rest of the room. Will finds what he can only describe as a makeshift camp; old blankets—moth-chewed and dust-coated—cover a bed of cardboard boxes to form three sleeping-roll-sized 'mattresses'. The whole setup looks like a recipe for waking up with a sore back. And as much as Will would like to say the existence of the 'camp' is evidence of the trio's presence here in 2010, it could just as easily be the work of the local homeless population.
"Guys? Check this out!" Cecil calls from across the room. He's pulled away an old sign reading, 'GOLD PROSPECTING SUPPLIES ' and is staring wide-eyed at what looks like a wall of drawings and pictures.
Lou Ellen beats Will there, having been only a few steps away, breathing out an awed, "Holy shit."
She pulls a photo off the wall, its pin falling to the ground and slipping between the slats of the floor. She hands it to Will as he approaches.
"Marie," he breathes. The woman is younger in this photo, a cheery smile on her face as she stands in front of a business. She's gesturing to the building's sign with clear pride, the hand-painted text reading: QUEEN MARIE’S GRIS-GRIS— CHARMS SOLD, FORTUNES TOLD.
"Queen Marie?" Cecil asks, peering over Will's arm.
"Seems like she was a fortune teller, it must have been her performer name."
Will looks back at the wall of drawings and photos, some faded beyond recognition, but most miraculously preserved despite their obvious age. There are charcoal depictions of a bakery and a jazz club, among sketches of travelling musicians with their instrument cases.
Will points to one that catches his eye, "Is that—"
"Mystery girl!" Cecil interrupts, tugging the film loose.
The kid—no older than eleven or twelve—smiles at the camera. She's got brighter eyes than Maria, her irises almost reflective in the monochrome ink. A carnival tent fills the background behind her, only visible because her curls are slicked back into an updo, else Will suspects her hair would fill the frame.
"It can't be," Lou Ellen says, "It's too old, right? Still black and white, and that dress she's wearing is certainly the fashion of the forties."
"So her mother?" Will says.
Cecil flips the photo over to find a single word scrawled across the back: a name—Hazel.
"Must be. The resemblance is uncanny."
Uncanny is one word for it. Truthfully, it's disconcerting how much Hazel Levesque and their mystery girl look alike, the same eyes and hair, right down to her bone structure.
Cecil has a gleam in his eye that suggests he's more partial to his all-time favourite conspiracy theory: time travel.
"Cecil, no," Will sighs.
"Oh, come on!" He cries out, "Even you have to admit this is suspicious. They look too much alike."
"That doesn't mean time-travel."
"It's not the first time Percy has been spotted with a 'dead kid'," Cecil argues.
Right. Because during their first season of 'If You DARE…', they'd discovered a Bianca di Angelo look-alike Percy had run amok with back in 2007, alongside Thalia Grace. Will doesn't subscribe to Cecil's 'she's either immortal or a time-traveller' theory but even he had to admit that the girl caught in the security footage at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, looked like the living mirror of 'Bianca' from the 1940 'Portrait of the di Angelo family'—a painting formerly owned by Italian diplomat, Mr di Angelo.
Cecil continues, "Once is weird, but twice? Twice is a coincidence."
'They don't believe in coincidences', goes unsaid.
"Umm, guys? I hate to break up this riveting debate, but you're going to want to see this, " Lou says, flipping the picture in her hand around to face them.
"Is that—" Cecil starts, but is apparently too shocked to finish the question.
Will feels his jaw drop as he stares at the boy in the picture, frozen in time with a crazy grin, his curly black hair curling around his pointed eyes, and a mischief in his eyes that would've put fear in his teachers' hearts.
Will chokes out, "…Leo Valdez?"