"Who will I be, who will I be?"

  It was so hard to decide. Chelsea Clinton? Naw, no privacy. An Eskimo chief?

  Too cold. How about a Parisian pastry chef? A Caribbean deep-sea diver? The choices were all too wonderful!

  When I got ready for bed that night, I was still mulling things over.

  I gazed at the rough log walls of my loft. I looked at my tattered thin quilt.

  At my taped _ up shoes, tossed in the corner. And, in the mirror, at my skinny, sallow cheeks.

  Whoever I morphed into, I decided, she was going to be pretty. And well fed!

  Hmm, maybe a Pari-sian pastry chef would be a good choice after all... Then my eyes fell on Mamaw. She had become so weak. Her lips moved feverishly. But, as usual, no sound came out.

  Slowly, I tiptoed over to her bed and kissed her furrowed brow. She relaxed a little. I think she even tried to smile.

  And that's when I knew. I knew what I had to do. It was going to be the biggest sacrifice of my life!

  Chapter Eight

  The next day was Sunday.

  Some Sundays, we go to church services conducted by Reverend Bluestone, the traveling preacher. The morning is filled with hymns. Then there's Sunday school. Then Reverend Bluestone gives a very loud, fire-and-brimstone sermon.

  It's a long day.

  But luckily, Reverend Bluestone was preaching in some other holler today. So all I had to do was listen while Daddy read a few bible passages after breakfast.

  Then I was free!

  I'd stuffed the magic recipe book and all my morphing ingredients into my book bag. I ran up to the loft to get it from under the bed.

  I checked all the contents. The bottle of almond flavoring. The husk from a dead cricket. . . . Yup, I had everything I needed. I slung the heavy bag onto my shoulder.

  Then I went to Mamaw's bedside.

  I gazed at her face. Her cloudy, blue eyes were filled with sorrow. "Mamaw," I whispered, "I'm going now. I'm on a mission. I'm going to find our fortune.

  I'm going to change our destiny! I know you can't understand what I mean. But just hang on, Mamaw. Stay with us! You'll see!"

  I tried to wink at her. But all I did was squeeze out a tear. Then I scurried down the stairs.

  Mama was ironing in the kitchen while Daddy scanned the Sears Roebuck catalog.

  I could see Jud out the back window, plowing our land.

  "Well," I announced. "I'm leaving. For the day, I mean. Going, uh, fishing!

  With Sarah. You know, Sarah from school?"

  "I know who Sarah is," Mama muttered. She didn't look up from the worn shirt on her ironing board as she said, "Well go on, then. Try to catch us a few catfish for dinner, y'hear?"

  "I will," I said shakily. Then, on impulse, I kissed Mama on the cheek. I kissed Daddy too.

  "Well," Daddy huffed, embarrassed. "Are you gonna go or aren't you?"

  "I'm going," I called.

  I went.

  Chapter Nine

  I ran through the woods next to our house. There was a brambly path through the trees that only I knew about.

  It led to my secret hiding place.

  Actually, it wasn't a secret. It was the mouth of the old coal mine, condemned, boarded up and overgrown. Everybody knows about it, but I'm the only one who goes there. Some kids at school say it's haunted.

  But I've never been scared of this place. I love it.

  It's like a cave, a cradle made of cool, red clay. About ten feet in, you hit a wall made of haphazardly nailed boards. Crumbling tin signs are propped against the wall. They read, "Danger. Mine shaft. Condemned. Do not cross."

  Behind that wall is a tunnel that leads deep into the dead mine. When I want to be alone, this is where I go. I take something to eat, a candle and a book.

  And this is where I was going to mix my potion and change into ... I couldn't even think about it. If I thought too hard, I knew it wouldn't work. I just had to plunge in.

  So I did.

  I laid out my ingredients. I flipped open my dusty book and read the instructions carefully. On the next page, I noticed, were the instructions for morphing back into myself.

  "That's funny," I muttered. "The return trip has all these different requirements." I glanced at another long list of ingredients. I sighed.

  "I'll just deal with this when the time comes," I decided. "First things first, after all."

  Then I commenced to mixing. The book said I had to grind up the dead cricket with the skillet scrapings and rotten cheese. Then I was supposed to whisk the mixture with the broom straws, bind it with the hair and steep it in hot water to make a tea.

  Over the flame of my candle, I boiled some water in a tin cup. While I waited, I dabbed my temples and wrists with the almond flavoring. The puzzling, poetic instructions said:

  "For remembrance sake, This scent you'll take."

  "I don't get this part," I mused as I rubbed the nutty liquid into my skin.

  "Not that the rest of this recipe makes any sense, either."

  My stomach fluttered as I moved on to the last step.

  "Chant the name of who you'll be. Drink the tea and he is thee!"

  I took a whiff of the water, with the bundle of bug, hair and rotten cheese still in it. "Ugh!" I cried. "It's disgusting!"

  My stomach lurched.

  But then I thought of Mamaw's distracted eyes.

  And then I took a deep breath.

  "I will be," I chanted, "my grandmother. My mamaw as a girl. I will solve the mystery of my family's lost fortune. I will change my family's fate!"

  I said it over and over again: "My mamaw as a girl. I will be my mamaw as a girl."

  Then I held my breath. I held my nose. I slammed back the cup of tea in one revolting gulp!

  I grunted at the awful taste of it. But I swal-lowed it all down.

  Then I gasped.

  I lurched to my feet. I stumbled towards the mouth of the cave. But I couldn't... get... to ... it.

  The cave was spinning, spinning!

  A wave of nausea swept through me. And my throat was closing up!

  I wheezed.

  I choked!

  I fell to my knees. It... was . . . getting . .. dark.

  Blackness!

  Chapter Ten

  I was staring at the roof of the cave. Blinking. Slowly. My eyelids felt heavy. My whole body felt heavy.

  "What... happened?" I groaned.

  Like an evening fog, the memory came to me. I had made the tea. I had drunk the potion. Then I must have passed out. Weakly, I turned my head towards the mouth of the cave. It was still sunny. Maybe I hadn't been out that long.

  Slowly, I turned my head to the other side. Then I gasped!

  "Wh-where's th-th-the wall?" I stuttered.

  The entire wall, at least ten feet of boards and nails had disappeared into thin air! I was staring into a long dark tunnel.

  I struggled to sit up. I heard a sound! It was coming from the tunnel. It sounded like somebody whistling!

  And then, deep in the darkness, I saw a pinpoint of light. It was bobbing towards me.

  With a surge of strength, I scrambled to my feet and ran to hide in the shadows at the side of the cave. I was almost at the dirt wall when I lurched to a halt. I was teetering at the edge of a hole in the ground! It was about a foot and a half wide, with a ladder made of flexible cables running up one side of it. It was so deep I couldn't see the bottom.

  I was going to fall in!

  I flapped my arms.

  I swayed forward.

  I swayed backward.

  Finally I fell safely on my side, huffing and puffing and staring angrily at a wooden sign: "Emergency Exit. Watch yore step."

  "Now you tell me," I hissed. I heard the whistling again. The light was al-most here! I hopped around the emergency exit hole and flattened myself against the wall. The whistling was replaced by a man's voice!

  "Well, we made it through another day, eh, Tweety?"

  The man stepped out of the tunnel's inky dark-ness and sucked in the fresh air. He was so strangely dressed! Underneath a layer of black coal dust, he wore baggy trousers held up by suspenders. His hair was parted in the middle and slicked down. And his mus-tache! It was waxy and long and it stuck off of either side of his lip like a handlebar. In one hand, the man held an old-fashioned lantern. In the other, he held a cage with a little yellow canary inside.

  He was peering into the cage and chatting with the bird. I suppressed a giggle as he walked down a dirt road away from the mine.

  Then it hit me!

  There was no dirt road leading up to the mine! There were only trees outside of my cave.

  I gulped.

  I looked down.

  My jeans and T-shirt had disappeared. My duct-taped sneakers were gone!

  My legs, which looked a little plumper than usual, were sticking out of a flowery dress with a dropped waist. On my feet? High-ankled brown leather boots!

  The ends of my hair were no longer blond. They were brown! And corkscrewed!

  And tied with shiny ribbons.

  I gasped. Mamaw's hair used to be brown! I gaped at the working mineshaft. I flashed to the man with the old-timey hairdo.

  I had traveled back in time!

  I'd become my grandmother as a twelve-year-old girl!

  I whispered, "_I have morphed!"

  Chapter Eleven

  I dashed out of the cave and ran down the dirt road. I hopped over a strange mini-train track with some big carts of coal on it.

  The trees looked different, too. Kind of gray.

  I touched one and my finger came away smudged with black. Coal dust!

  Even with the unfamiliar road not to mention the unfamiliar shoes, which kept making me trip it wasn't hard to find my way home. After all, I've known every inch of Bearhead Holler since I could walk. But when I saw my house, I almost didn't recognize it! I skidded to a stop. I felt my new cork-screwy hair bounce around my ears.

  My house was lovely! It looked almost new!

  I slapped my forehead. What was I thinking? It was almost new. Mamaw's parents had built the house as newly-weds.

  It had a shiny tin roof, a front porch that didn't sag and an outhouse out back that wasn't rickety.

  The house also looked, well, more like a home than it did in 1999.

  Clay pots of flowers sat all along the porch rail. On the porch's long picnic table, I saw a bowl brimming with red and yellow apples.

  A brown-haired, plump lady in a long dress stood by the front door. She was churning butter.

  She saw me!

  She waved and shouted, "Betty Marie, where have you been, girl? You have a lot of work to do here!"

  I stared at her dumbly. I looked behind me. Nobody else was there.

  "Betty!" the lady scowled. "Have you gone deef?"

  Deef? Betty?

  Suddenly I jumped! Mamaw's name was Betty Marie. Which meant that lady was my great-grandmother! Whom I'd never met before. I stared at her with my mouth hanging open.

  "What is wrong with you?" my great-grandma yelled. "Don't make me come down there and take a switch to you!"

  "Oh!" I started running towards the house. "Yes, um, Mama," I called.

  With a gulp, I headed inside after this strange woman who, for the time being, was my mother!

  Chapter Twelve

  Great-grandma immediately put me to work in the cozy, old-fashioned house. As I explored, I found a bank calendar that said 1920!

  The loft was still my bedroom. And I recognized some of the sturdy rockers that we still had in 1999.

  But everything else was different.

  Bright rag rugs covered almost every part of the splintery floor. All the bowls and dishes in the kitchen were of pretty homemade pottery. There was no refrigerator. After all, you couldn't have a refrigerator with no electricity!

  Great-grandma sent me out into the woods with the new butter sealed in a crock. I discovered that she kept food cold in the creek, floating it in the water inside a little house called the springhouse.

  Wow!

  On my way back from the springhouse, I met my great-granddaddy, a serious, almost scary, bearded man who seemed to spend all his time stooped over his plow in the fields.

  The stove was a black wood-burning hulk. Pretty soon, I was sweating over it, helping Great-grandma make bread and cakes and pies when I wasn't dusting,

  sweeping, polishing or washing!

  "So this was what life was like in 1920," I muttered. "They don't call 'em

  'hard times' for nothing."

  As I pulled a steaming pie from the oven and set it on the window sill to cool, I said, "Can I ask, Great-, I mean, Mama, what all this fuss is about?"

  My great-grandma wiped the sweat off her brow and planted her fists on her plump hips.

  "Why, you know what, missy!" she declared. "Our guests are coming from Lexington tomorrow. Those important land surveyors who are going to help us with our new discovery."

  Land surveyors! New discovery! I made a little squeak of excitement. Maybe, I thought to myself, these visitors would offer a clue to the mysterious fortune.

  Great-grandma continued, "Now I hope you haven't gone and told anybody about our guests, after I directly ordered you not to."

  "Oh no, Mama!" I assured her. "How could I have? As you can see, I'd forgotten myself."

  I laughed nervously.

  Great-grandma squinted at me.

  "Something wrong with you, girl?" she asked. "You've been acting queer all afternoon. You know what you need? More to do!"

  "What?" I gasped. I had worked harder today than I had in my whole life!

  "You think too much, that's your problem," Great-grandma declared. "Idle hands are the work of the devil. Here!" Into my trembling hands, Great-grandma thrust a hatchet.

  "Uh, what's this for _ firewood?" I quavered.

  "Firewood! Girl, what's come over you?" Great-grandma barked. "No, my dear.

  That is for to-morrow's main course. I'm putting you in charge of it!"

  She pointed out the back window. I peered past her finger. I saw a crowd of hens scratching and pecking in the dirt. I gulped.

  "Y-you don't mean..." I whispered.

  "Oh, yes I do!" Great-grandma cackled. She leaned over and thrust her grinning face into mine. "Go on. Kill us a nice fat one!"

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next morning, Great-grandma stood in the kitchen holding a milk pail. She pointed me to the cow barn.

  "Get to work, lazybones," she ordered. "Your father's already been out in the fields for two hours!"

  My shoulders sagged. As I trudged to the back door, my eye fell on the calendar. It was a Monday.

  "Hey," I said hopefully. "You know it's Monday, Mama! Shouldn't I be on my way to school?"

  "School?" Great-grandma sputtered. "Why I do believe you are tetched in the head! You finished sixth grade in the spring, girl! There is no more school for you. You're done!"

  My mouth dropped open. Poor Mamaw! Uh, make that poor we!

  And good morning cows. I trudged to my first chore of the day. After I had milked the cows, Great-grandma put me to work setting out a huge lunch for the land surveyors. A lunch that included _ ewww _ fresh fried chicken. Finally, everything was in place. I actually had a minute to breathe. I glanced around the living room. I wonder if there's a good book here I could read, I mused.

  Then I froze!

  The book! The book with the morphing potion recipe! Where was it?

  I flashed back to the mine. I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured the scene.

  No, I was sure the book hadn't been there. Which must mean it hadn't traveled back in time with me!

  That also meant I had no idea how to morph back into my present-day self!

  I started to shake. What was I going to do? Would I be trapped here, cooking and cleaning and killing chickens forever?

  I had to find that book!

  Then I remembered the copyright date _ 1916. And this was 1920. That meant the book was published just four years ago. Surely I could track it down somewhere! Somehow!

  I scanned the walls for a clock and spied our old, broken cuckoo clock. Now, of course, it looked almost new, and it worked!

  "Wow," I whispered, as the clock struck half-past and little mechanical birds popped out and chirped. It was 11:30. The surveyors _and maybe the secret of my family's fortune _ would arrive in fifteen minutes. I would just have to worry about my future granddaughter, Amy Fay Jones, later.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A sharp knock rattled the front door. It was the surveyors!I ran to answer it.

  I opened the door to two men. They were both tall, one skinny and the other roly-poly. They were elegantly dressed. The skinny one removed his hat and pressed it to his chest, covering a vest with shiny buttons and a gold watch chain.

  "Ah, little girl," he said, smoothing his pointy waxed mustache with a gloved finger. "Fetch us your mother, won't you? I am Mr. Spindler and this is my associate, Mr. Ratzman."

  The other man's face was oily with sweat. He twitched his nose at me. Then he took off his hat and thrust it into my hands. He lumbered past me as if I was no more than a servant.

  "Mrs. Jones?" He called. "Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Jones!"

  Rude!

  I hated the land surveyors at once. Great-grandma rushed out of the back bedroom. She smoothed her hair, untied her apron and offered her hand to the men. Suddenly, Spindler and Ratzman transformed! They had been bossy as could be to me. But when they saw Great-grandma, they turned sweet as syrup. Hmph, I thought to myself. Kids sure don't get a lot of respect around here.

  "Betty!" Great-grandma's voice was sharp. "Now why haven't you fetched these nice men some lemonade yet?"

  See? But all I said was, "Yes, Mama."

  For the next half-hour, the surveyors devoured our food like it was their first meal in a week. I stayed on my feet, constantly fetching them more potatoes, more peach preserves, more coffee.

  Finally,after Ratzman had stuffed three slices of apple pie into his greasy little mouth, he spoke.

 

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