Smallville: Chloe Chronicles

Chloe Sullivan, editor of the Smallville Torch, has a theory that the seemingly inexplicable and allegedly unrelated events occurring in Smallville are the result of the meteor rocks deposited during the 1989 meteor shower.

Chloe interviews Belinda Jenkins, the widow of Earl Jenkins. Her husband's condition came on him suddenly. A green dust they were spraying on crops on Level Three infected him. Their son Johnny is a handful, more than your average toddler. He's not ill, but doctors can't explain how he is different. Earl thought that if he could get back to Level Three, he could find the answers to his problem, but when Lex took him down there, it was all cleared out. Belinda reports that Dr. Arthur Walsh might have believed Earl's story. He called after Earl died, expressing remorse as if he was somehow responsible. As evidence that her husband's story is true, Belinda shows Chloe his work boots. The soles are stained with green dust.

Chloe journeys to Edge City to interview Dr. Arthur Walsh. He used to be a professor of genetics at Metropolis University, but now teaches high school biology. He initially expresses reluctance to talk about Earl Jenkins, but he does invite Chloe into his office. He tries to hide some envelopes with a strange green logo. When Chloe mentions meteor rocks, Dr. Walsh mumbles something about Dr. Steven Hamilton's results being replicated outside of the lab, and someone named Donovan. Chloe tries to encourage him to talk by mentioning all the people who have been killed and hurt by the meteor rocks. When the bell rings, he agrees to meet with Chloe again next week, and they can exchange notes.

Opening up with the ending scene of Chronicle (from Smallville #7), Chloe receives an email from Dr. Walsh the former genetics professor she interviewed at Edge City High in Video Two. She is apprehensive about opening it, but Chloe never turns away from a mystery. The email contains a video message from Dr. Walsh. He was working in a lab and afraid for his own life. He asked Chloe to find his family. Chloe tries to trace the email but it was bounced off so many servers that it is untraceable. Further searches for Dr. Walsh and his family turned up no result at all. Someone has tried to delete them completely.

Chloe finds Mrs. Walsh and goes to her house. She shows her and her ten-year-old son Max the video she received. It contains a message just for them. He tells them that whatever they heard about his disappearance was a lie, and Chloe can tell them what really happened. He tells them that he loves them, and he tells his son to "take his lucky lure and go catch that big monster fish they never managed to catch together." After the video, Max says they never went fishing together. Chloe finds the tackle box and Max points out the lucky lure. Inside, Chloe finds a computer chip and when she plugs it in to her handheld computer, she receives a coded message: GHOST NECK SS 942565362509.

Back at the Torch, Chloe and Pete are trying to crack the code. Pete gets a call from his mother who explains that Ghost Neck is what the teens used to call the cemetery because they used to go there to neck with the ghosts. At Longneck Cemetery, Chloe finds Earl Jenkins' tombstone. She checks the coded message again and discovers that the numbers in the message almost match the GPS coordinates of the grave site. She walks across the cemetery and finds the grave of Sarah Strossberg matches the coordinates exactly. SS stands for Sarah Strossberg. Back at the Torch office, Chloe discovers that Sarah was a Smallville resident who went to Met U and wrote a few articles about the meteor rocks before she disappeared. Her body was found alongside the highway in unincorporated Lowell County.