Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Clark TOC can be found
Here Where we left off in Part 166 …“Precisely, Ma’am,” Reed snapped, shoving the box at her. “Since the charges against Mr. Laderman were dropped due to his innocence, I was told I should return all the evidence collected from your apartment the night he was apprehended here. Good day!” She turned and marched down the hall.
“G’night, Detective Reed,” Lois called with bewilderment. She hadn’t realized any other evidence, besides her computer, had been collected at her apartment that night.
She flipped up the lid and looked into the box.
Eugene’s tie, which Reed really should have returned to him. Lois pulled it out and set it aside to give to the man, along with his toothbrush, which she would just throw in the trash.
Her reporter’s notebook on Eugene’s case. It was one of her earlier ones, from when he had first been arrested, and she had already written her stories from those notes over a month before she had been arrested, which was why she hadn’t even realized it had been missing. It was nice to have it back, though.
A diskette with an early edition of her novel on it. Lois flushed. God, she hoped nobody in the Metropolis Police Department or the D.A.’s office had read
that. Instead, she knew the truth. She would be the laughing stock with the MPD, if she wasn’t already. Veiled innuendoes from her novel would be tossed at her whenever Mad Dog Lane tried to intimidate any officer ever again. Terrific.
It wasn’t evidence against Eugene or her. It was private, but they hadn’t known that until it had been examined. It was a computer disk, and there had been a huge computer virus taking down the country, which Eugene could have launched from her computer. Lois had been lucky that they had returned her computer within twenty-four hours of her clearing Eugene’s name.
Maybe that was why Mayson Drake had been so helpful with Lex’s prenup. Lois rolled her eyes and scoffed. Right. Because Mayson was a fan of Charles King, the ghost of Lola Dane’s former love, whom she was trying to save from dying in the past. Of course, Lois had eventually changed Lola’s name to Wanda Detroit, but not in this version. In this first draft, her heroine was still named ‘Lola’.
A nostalgic half-smile threatened to brush Lois’s lips as her thumb ran over the name on the disk:
Lola and Charlie. Since meeting Clark… and Superman, she had given up working on her novel, mostly because they made her life more exciting than fiction.
Lola’s troubles kept becoming more complicated; first, Lois shut her up in an insane asylum and then had her kidnapped by a psychotic ex-boyfriend, while inside the asylum. Terrance Tempest was her villain. God, wasn’t that an awful name? Wherever had she come up with that?
Lois had lost inspiration about the time she wrote about that crazy flood, which washed Metroville away. Tempest had fallen out of a helicopter and into the murky waters as they fled Metroville for higher ground. Lola persevered, moving to Tempest’s hunting cabin in the Alps, because she was a fighter and survivor, she lived to see another day, but Charlie… even though he remained steadfast with the woman he loved, he was stuck as a ghost living within her mind after the destruction of Metroville, any hope of saving him gone. Lois had fallen in love with her hero, but she couldn’t figure out a way to rescue him. It wasn’t the happily ever after Lois wanted for either of them.
Shortly thereafter, Clark Kent had entered the Daily Planet and interviewed for a job. He was everything she had dreamed Charles should be: tall, dark, handsomely bespectacled, with killer abs and a modest smile. Lois could see it all clearly, now. That was why she had initially pushed Clark away. He was her perfect fantasy man… until she met Superman and realized
he was even better.
Together Clark and Superman were almost as good a man as she dreamed Charlie was.
But the Clark she had first met had major flaws, which kept stacking up against him, and Superman… She rolled her eyes. Well,
he wouldn’t commit.
Lois chuckled softly to herself, with a shake of her head, as she set the disk on her desk next to her computer.
Maybe, someday, if this thing with Clark (aka Chuck, alias Superman) worked out, she would show him her novel and he would know the perfect way to save Charlie, so Lola…er… Wanda could finally live happily ever after, too. They deserved that.
Part 167Lois glanced back down into the shoebox to see one more item, an unlabeled diskette. She sat down at her computer and stuck it in, wondering what it contained. Old stories? Notes on articles? Transcripts of interviews?
Double clicking her mouse to open the directory listing the files on the diskette, she saw it only had two: Asteroid_F2794.wk4 and Asteroid_F2794.fits. Lois wasn’t sure what kind of file the ‘.fits’ was, but the other she recognized as a spreadsheet file.
The spreadsheet file she had given to Jimbo to figure out what was hinky about it.
The very spreadsheet file, which Eugene had said was infected with a virus… the Nightfall Virus.
Lex hadn’t gotten hold of her diskette after all. She had wondered when it had disappeared after the story broke, if it had been stolen. The only person Lois could see stealing the only known physical copy of the virus, outside of EPRAD, was the one man who had told her that Nightfall Major wouldn’t have hit Earth had Superman just left it alone. The very same man who had hired someone to break into her apartment and plant surveillance devices, so that he could spy on her.
She had always suspected that Lex had something to do with the Nightfall Virus, but to this day, she couldn’t understand why he would want to create worldwide panic unless there was profit in it for him. Sure, she could see Bureau 39, her second major suspect, attempt to discredit and/or kill off the ‘alien threat’ by staging this elaborate hoax. They didn’t seem to care about collateral damage.
Mostly, Lex had stayed Lois’s number one suspect for one reason and one reason alone. Why would someone who knew that Asteroid F2794, aka Nightfall Major, would miss Earth, build a doomsday bunker five hundred meters underground? Why prepare for something when one knew it wouldn’t happen? That seemed like overkill in the “just in case” department. She knew Lex could be eccentric, but nobody was
that eccentric.
Lois tapped her lips with her index finger in thought. She could just ask Lex
why he built the bunker and hope that he told her the truth. She chuckled to herself. That would be a nice change of pace.
What was it about her that attracted liars? Was she so intimidating that all men felt the need to compensate by lying to her?
True, Lex, Claude, and Paul had all lied to her because they were out for numero uno. If Claude and Paul had told her they were using her, she would have walked out and they would’ve ended up with nothing. Actually, that was what had happened with Paul in a roundabout way. He had taken Linda
and Lois’s story and dropped her like a hot potato, because she wouldn’t put out after two dates. Okay, technically, Linda had stolen her story and given it to Paul, but same difference. Claude had told her that he loved her in order to steal her story. That was an open and shut case.
Did Lex lie to her just to save himself from heartache when she left him for being a horrible man and a criminal? Or did he think she was so shallow that she would buy all his lies? Maybe most women did.
Lois could only see two incentives for Lex to use her. Firstly, because she was the best investigative reporter Metropolis, and possibly the world, had ever seen and the sexist pig thought he could distract her from the foul stench emanating from LexCorp by romancing her. Secondly, he needed her as a way to get to Superman. Were those the only reasons Lex had proposed? Not because he was in love with her, but because he, somehow, knew how Superman felt about her and it was the best way to knock her off her game?
No, she decided. Lex genuinely thought he loved her.
On the other hand, Lex had tricked her into quitting her dream job at the Daily Planet, bought it, and closed it down by bombing it so she could never return with the exposé of the year. Meanwhile, he ruined her professional reputation so that she was forced to take the dead-end job at LNN. He had undermined her at every turn, making it next to impossible for her to find the evidence she needed to lock him up forever.
Lex had also given her two pieces of jewelry, which contained a meteorite that would kill Superman. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Then, again, not that this was any rational justification, Lex might have done it all out of jealousy. Lex knew that he couldn’t win in a fair race against Superman — what man could? – so he had made the race unfair. It would explain the Kryptonite jewelry, the bugs in her apartment, and even possibly the underground copy of her apartment he had made for her. Could Lex have created his underground lair and the Nightfall Virus just to capture Lois?
Lois shuddered at this thought. Nobody was
that crazy, were they?
No, Lois shook her head. There was no way that Lex could have completed the bunker in the amount of time between when they had met and Nightfall, even with his type of money. It was a ludicrous idea, anyway. What exactly did she think Lex’s plan had been? That he would entice her down into his bunker out of fear for her own and Earth’s future, due to an out of control asteroid, that she would choose safety over reality? Ridiculous. If he wanted to trap her underground, he could have locked the door while she was there and nobody would have been the wiser.
No, Lex must love her, or what his peculiar mind thought was love. It wasn’t a pure love, as she felt from Clark. She doubted that Lex would give up his entire world just to be with her as Clark had. Although, truth be told, she didn’t know why Clark had left Krypton. It could have had more to do with leaving his ex-fiancée than being with Lois.
Okay, she understood the reasoning behind Clark’s lies… well, the reasoning his deluded mind thought was logical. He hadn’t been able to trust her. Firstly, she had been enamored with his Super side, while rejecting the so-called human side he had created so that they could date in safety. Clearly, Clark was just stubborn enough to insist that she love him for Clark, even though he
was Superman. Then, again, Lois didn’t know what he had been like on Krypton. His true personality did seem to fit better with his folksy human persona than with his stiff hero side. The former being harder to fake.
Secondly, she had dated and then remained on friendly terms with, and constantly played devil’s advocate for a man he despised, and despised for good reason, Lex Luthor. Clark hadn’t known that the only reason Lois had kept Lex around was to use him… first to make Superman jealous, second as a source, and third because Clark kept telling her to keep her distance from him.
Once this investigation was over and Lex secured behind bars where he belonged, Clark would have no motives left to distrust her. He already knew that she loved him. He would know a hundred percent that she wouldn’t throw him to Lex’s wolves or under the bus, or whatever the correct saying was. She wished Clark believed that now, but she understood why he didn’t. There was still a part of her that wondered what would be the next thing to send Clark bolting for the door to leave their relationship. Lastly, Clark had to know that Lois would never reveal his secret to the world. Hell, she had risked returning to jail to help him create a false identity and history under the name of Clark Kent. If that wasn’t someone he could trust with all his secrets, she didn’t know who was.
Lois dug into her desk drawer and found a blanket diskette and popped it into her other 3.5 drive. Being careful not to infect her own computer with the Nightfall Virus, she copied the files from the diskette that Detective Reed had just returned to her onto the second diskette.
With another couple of clicks, she ejected the new diskette from her computer. Her heart was racing. They had him. All they needed to do now was somehow tie the virus to Lex.
As if reading her mind, someone knocked on her door. She bet it was Clark with her pizza. Perfect timing. She was starving.
Lois grabbed a twenty out of her purse and walked to the door, pulling it open. “About time you showed…” she said to the short man holding her pizza. Her brow furrowed as she sputtered, “Jimbo, what are you doing here? Where’s…?”
That was the stupidest thing she could have possibly said. So much for his undercover gig as her pizza delivery boy. ‘
Where’s Clark?’ was what she had wanted to ask. Thankfully, she had stopped herself.
“Hi, Lois. I thought this was your address,” he replied.
“What do you mean ‘you thought’? Jimbo, you practically lived here when you were dating Lucy,” Lois tossed back at him. “Are you bringing me a pizza for any reason in particular?”
Jimbo blushed. “Right… um… here, you go,” he said, holding out the box with the bag of cannoli sitting on top. “I got a job delivering pizzas for Carlo’s Restaurante. His last delivery guy quit to play guitar in some grunge band.”
Quit? Clark? But… but… What about their trash dates?... Grunge band? She could have hit herself for the stupidity of her thoughts.
Right. Cover. Blond Clark had been there too many times and must have felt that someone was getting suspicious. She only wished that he had warned her somehow.
“I can see that,” Lois said, passing him the twenty wrapped around the 3.5 diskette under the box and out of view of the cameras. Since Clark didn’t make her delivery, she doubted he’d show for her trash run. Her heart sank. She really needed to talk to him. “How’s Jimmy?” she said, not wanting Jimbo to leave her with these thoughts quite yet.
“In jail… still,” Jimbo replied with a frown. “His lawyer thinks he has reasonable doubt due to the name thing, but all that does is make either one of us look guilty when neither of us is.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Henderson says…” Jimbo started, and then pressed his lips together and shook his head. Good, he remembered her surveillance. “It doesn’t matter. It’s a long shot anyway.”
“Well, I hope it pans out,” Lois said, setting down the pizza on her table next to the door.
“We could use the break. How’s Lucy?”
“Good. Good,” Lois replied vaguely. “She’s been hired for a sitcom pilot, but who knows if anyone will pick it up.”
“Good for her! Is she coming out for the wedding?” Jimbo asked, his eyes widening with interest.
“Her pilot starts filming that… that week,” Lois said softly, thankful for small miracles and lies Lucy had said at her request. There was no pilot. Clark had told her that Lucy was ranting to anyone who listened about how angry she was at Lois for not making her maid of honor. Truth was, Lex had decided it best to forgo the wedding party. There wouldn’t be ushers or bridesmaids for their festivities, just the bride, groom, and guests. She didn’t know why Lex had made this call, but she suspected that it was because neither of them had friends close enough to ask to do the duty.
Well, Lois did, but not for a wedding where Lex was the groom. She pushed that thought out of her head.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” he mumbled.
Jimbo looked nervous about something. Lois didn’t know if it was the faux deliveryman gig or what, so she decided to cut him some slack and let him go.
“Well, thanks for the pizza,” Lois said, stepping back from the door.
“Uh… Lois?” Jimbo said, sticking his foot in the door instead of moving away. “Could you talk to Mr. Luthor… um… you know… about my scholarship with his foundation?”
Lois tried hard not to appear shocked. Did he really want Lex’s tainted money to finish college, or was it part of the act? “I don’t know, Jimbo…” she said slowly.
“I understand,” Jimbo said. “He blames Jimmy and me for the Daily Planet…”
“No, it’s not that…” Lois lied through her teeth. Well, publicly Lex did blame Jimmy Olsen for the bombing of the Daily Planet, but called him ‘a mixed up kid who hadn’t meant to hurt anyone’ and to whom he ‘held no personal animosity’. That had been Lex’s line when he hired Jimmy’s first lawyer after she insisted that neither of the Olsens had bombed the Planet. Privately, Lex had griped to Lois about trying to help Jimmy, only to have him fire the lawyer, the hack lawyer in her and Clark’s opinion, in order to hire some woman straight out of law school. Lois had bristled from Lex’s implication that a female lawyer wasn’t qualified, merely because of her gender. Canceling Jimbo’s scholarship to M.U.T. had been more evidence that Lex didn’t see either of the Olsens as innocent of the crime for which he had set them up.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she told Jimbo softly.
Jimbo nodded, but didn’t look hopeful. They both knew that Lex wasn’t going to change his mind and, even if he did, she expected Jimbo to turn the money down on principle. The man had framed him for the murder of the two people who had died in the bombing. “Okay, thanks, Lois,” he said with a wave, stepping back. “It was nice seeing you.”
Lois waved and gave him a weak smile as she shut her door. He was a nice kid, and knew how to do things on the computer she only dreamed possible. It was another skill she was sorely lacking. As in cooking, she wasn’t averse to passing the gauntlet to someone to do that kind of work for her.
She carried the pizza box to her coffee table and flipped it open as she turned on her television. Slowly, she changed channels, pausing now and again, so no one watching her would know that she was headed for LNN to see where Superman was. She hoped that a national or natural disaster was the only reason for not showing up for their weekly pizza date. Unfortunately, LNN’s talking heads were discussing the Fed chair and whether interest rates would go up. Despite LNN’s lack of love for Superman, their reporters still showed up for every ‘baby down a well’ incident at which Superman assisted, because it was news and they were in the news business. Either Clark had been detained by something small enough not to catch LNN’s roving reporter’s eye, or international enough that LNN’s camera crew and/or person on the ground hadn’t arrived on the scene yet. She watched the LNN anchors drone on for fifteen minutes before switching off the channel. There had been no breaking Superman story.
Lois sighed and opened the bag of cannoli, hoping for a note from her absent date inside. Sadly, only cannoli. Without expectation of seeing Clark’s happy face or words of encouragement, she didn’t feel in the mood to consume the sweets. She had lost her appetite, even for chocolate. She took the remains of the pizza into the kitchen and wrapped it in foil, putting it and the cannoli bag into the fridge for later. What was the point of wasting perfectly good pizza, if Clark wouldn’t be making personal deliveries to her anymore?
She took the now empty pizza box and, out of habit more than anything, headed for the trash chute in the hall by the elevator. The door to the stairwell opened, startling her, just as she dropped her pizza box down the chute.
“Clark!”
His hesitant smile grew to beaming as he leaned casually against the doorjamb. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten my name,” he said as she rushed into his arms, pushing him back into the stairwell. He lowered his lips to hers as the door closed.
Lois stepped back to catch his eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” he murmured, pulling her close again.
This time, she decided she would let him kiss her lightly before stepping back to ask again, but as soon as their lips joined, she realized how much she was hungering for him. Without Clark re-charging her self-worth battery after days of Lex draining it, she figured she’d be little more than a zombie by now. She kept moving closer to Clark until she had him pressed against the wall.
‘
I missed you,’ she thought, deepening the kiss. ‘
I need you. Don’t ever leave me again.’ But she didn’t speak these words aloud, knowing they sounded needy and clingy, two terms which she never wanted to use to describe herself. Instead, she said, after resting her head against his shoulder, “You’re late.”
“It was becoming too much of a coincidence that you always got the same delivery guy no matter when you called Carlo’s,” Clark explained. “I had a meeting with a source, so I asked Jimbo if he could take this one.”
“You know that Jimbo fired you, right? Your cover persona now plays guitar for some grunge band, instead,” Lois said, running her fingers down his arm. It was nice seeing him in a short sleeve t-shirt. This one was heather blue.
Clark had such nice arms, which only served to remind her that those arms were attached to his equally nice and broad shoulders, which in turn led to his jaw-dropping gorgeous chest, which was right under her ear with only a micro thin piece of fabric separating them. She licked her lips wondering what he would do if she tried taking off his shirt. She flushed, surprised at herself for allowing her thoughts to go there, and happy that he couldn’t see her face or read her thoughts.
She heard his soft laugh emerge from his chest as he wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “Ooops. I guess he wanted the job more than I thought he would.”
“I was so surprised to see him, I blew his cover,” she admitted. “Lex now knows that Jimbo works for Carlo, so I’ll probably not be able to order from you again. I was able to sneak Jimbo a copy of the Nightfall Virus. Detective Reed had gathered it as evidence that night when she arrested me and Eugene Laderman.”
“That’s terrific!” Clark said, tilting down his face to kiss her again. “We’re getting closer to closing
that investigation, at least. I was able to get in with Professor Daitch. He said that EPRAD’s internal investigation said that the virus had been sent to him from Metropolis, but that it had been routed through six different countries first.”
“Big shock that it was a professional job,” Lois stated flatly. “Did they know which computer sent it?”
“A shared computer from the public library. I’ll send Jimbo to check the library’s records tomorrow,” he said. “They require a photo I.D. from everyone who accesses the Internet from the shared computers, so maybe we can narrow it down to a list of names.”
“You should have Inspector Henderson give you a list of everyone who showed up at the morgue that next week and the week before to compare names. I doubt whomever you find that sent it is still alive,” she said.
Clark relaxed his hold on her, so that he could look her in the eye. “You think he was killed?”
Lois nodded. “Henderson stopped by my office at LNN this morning. Three men matching my description of the Suicide Slum attackers were found floating in Hob’s Bay. Their throats had been slit.”
“You said that Luthor had warned people not to touch you,” Clark murmured, tightening his hold.
An echo of Lex’s words from Henderson’s office that day floated through her mind. ‘
I would hate for them to get away with what they almost accomplished.’
“Yeah, or he had them killed, so they couldn’t talk and tell someone who’d hired them,” she suggested.
Clark didn’t say anything as his arms drew her close enough for her to hear his heart beating. It sounded faster than normal. “Just say the word, Lois, and I’ll extract you,” he murmured, his words softly caressing her ear.
It felt so good to be in Clark’s embrace that she couldn’t move, but she wanted to see his face. She set her hand over his heart and glanced at him. “Octopus?”
Suddenly, her feet were whisked off the floor and she was being rushed up the stairs. Three seconds later, they burst into the night’s sky above her apartment building.
Lois chuckled as they settled among the clouds. “Jumpy much? I was only clarifying.”
He grinned sheepishly. “A man can dream.” They slowly drifted downwards. “Are you sure? I could have you safely tucked away in Kansas in less than five minutes. Martha and Jonathan keep asking when I’ll bring you back for a visit.”
The Kents were strangers even to Clark and she speculated again, why they had bonded, despite him stealing their son’s identity. Perhaps it was because of it. “If I wanted to be ‘safely tucked away’ somewhere, I wouldn’t be an investigative journalist, now would I, Chuck?” she asked.
She saw sadness in his eyes. “I’d rather have you safe than dead,” he replied.
“So would I, but I wouldn’t accomplish much either way, now would I?” she retorted, continuing before he thought she wanted him to answer. “I found Denny.”
“Who?” Clark asked. They were still hovering in the clouds.
“I can’t stay long, Chuck. I’m only taking out the trash, remember?” she said. “The kid I met at the Luthor House for Homeless Children Christmas party. The one who said his brother was being punished because he talked back to Mrs. Cox. His brother Jack is ‘Rat’.” She had wanted to slap herself for the obviousness of it all.
“You lost me.”
“My informant at the Mission,” she clarified as they landed back on her roof. Clark had to let go of her to open the door, and she wished she hadn’t been so hasty about insisting they return. “The runner, who delivered my notes to you. He told me his name was ‘Rat’, but it’s actually ‘Jack’. Jack…” She paused because Clark stopped walking down the stairs, turned to face her, and placed his hands on her shoulders. “What?” She would have guessed that something horrible had happened to Rat…er… Jack, except by the excitement showing on Clark’s face.
“Jack! Or ‘Rat’. Whatever! Oh, this is good news,
Minha,” Clark said, pulling her into his embrace. “We finally have a lead.”
She pulled back to look at him skeptically. “Jack’s a lead?”
“He has Jimbo’s lunchbox.”
Lois’s expression didn’t change.
“The one Jimmy took his lunch in that day. The one which apparently had the bomb in it which blew up the Daily Planet. If Jack has Jimbo’s lunchbox…” Clark paused to let her piece together what he was saying.
“Then it proves that someone switched out the lunchboxes, and Jimmy will be set free!” They were one step closer to pinning something to Lex. She could sense this investigation coming to a close. Lois pressed her lips to Clark’s, knocking him down the stairs.
Luckily, he caught them and floated them safely to the landing. Yet, despite this, he returned her kiss just as fervently. When they stopped to catch their breath, he whispered from where his cheek lay against hers, “We still have to find Jack first. He ran off when Jimbo answered the door instead of me, but I recognized him from the sketch Superman made of Jimbo’s description as the kid who brought me your Octopus note.”
Clark talking about himself in the third person brought a half-smile to her lips. Just like old times. “Jack’s still homeless since he escaped from the Luthor House. I met him down at the Fifth Street Mission. There’s a cook who volunteers down there named Bobby…” She realized she didn’t know Bobby’s last name. “Bobby Bigmouth, everyone will know who you mean. He’s friends with Rat…er… Jack. The files at the Luthor House have him and Denny’s last name listed as Miner.” She spelt it. “Their mother ran off on them when Denny was a toddler. Mostly their father, Ed, raised them. Denny said he didn’t know what happened to his dad. He just never came home one day. Eventually their apartment was padlocked, and he and Jack ended out on the streets.”
Clark nodded. “I can understand them wanting to stay out of foster care, where they could’ve been separated,” he murmured. “It’s hard enough to go through that on your own. I can’t imagine losing one’s siblings due to the system as well.”
Lois had forgotten that Clark had spent his youth bouncing from home to home as well. Not forgotten per se, more like hoped that part of his back-story had been more fictional than fact. Apparently not. It didn’t matter what planet one was from, one never really recovered from the death of one’s parents. Speaking of which, “Any word on my mother?”
Clark shook his head. He appeared as if he wanted to say something else, but changed his mind. The dejection of his decision seemed to age him. “How’s the mobile phone holding up? You haven’t used it in the last few days,” he said, changing the subject.
“It’s out of batteries,” she explained, pulling it out of the small of her back. She had put it there earlier in hopes of running into him. “I can’t really charge it without Lex seeing.”
He nodded and handed her another phone. “Take mine. It’s fully charged.”
She ran her fingers down his cheek, memorizing everything about it before finally kissing his lips and stepping towards the door to her floor. “I’m going to do laundry Sunday night again.”
“If this is an invitation to touch your undies, you’re on,” he teased.
Lois merely glanced back at him with a wink.
***
Clark sat at the Kents’ dining table, his hands surrounding the hot mug of coffee Martha had placed there a few minutes before. He wished the heat of the coffee would warm that part of him, which felt evermore cold, his conscience. “I should be doing more to find her,” he finally admitted.
“I thought you exhausted all avenues in searching for Mrs. Lane,” Martha said as she brushed his shoulder before sitting down.
“Not all,” Clark confessed, and the coldness inside him seemed to grow. “Superman didn’t scan all of the clinics on Lois’s list to see if he could find her.”
“Have you ever met Lois’s mother?” Jonathan asked from beside him. “Do you know what she looks like on sight?”
“Not really. I only saw her once, briefly, when Lois introduced her to Luthor and…” Clark said, his voice fading. He didn’t want to admit that he had flown off, hurt that Lois had introduced her mother to Luthor before him. “I’m worried though that if I did scan the clinics, I would be invading hundreds of people’s privacy searching for a woman I’ve never met, and one I’m not sure I could recognize if I did see.”
“And you want someone to tell you that it would be okay for you to use your powers in this ethically grey area?” Martha asked. “I can’t do that, Jerome.”
He set his hand on hers and smiled. “Neither can I. I know that Lois would want me to leave no stone uncovered in my search, and if Lois was missing, I know I just… Whom are we kidding? We know almost nothing would stop me from finding her, but…” He gazed down at his mug of black coffee. “I really cannot remedy the fact that I would be invading all those other people’s privacy merely to make Lois feel reassured that her mother really was where Luthor said she had gone.”
“Have you told her this?” Martha asked.
“Are you nuts?” Clark retorted. “I just got her back.”
“And you’re worried that you’ll lose her all over again if she finds out that you didn’t do everything you could do to find her mother?” Martha patted his hand.
Clark nodded. “She’ll never forgive me.”
Jonathan took a sip of his coffee, and then said, “You thought she’d never forgive you for proposing before telling her you’re Superman.” He glanced over at Martha and they exchanged a smile, which Clark interpreted as they had always known that she would.
“It isn’t as if we have definitive proof that Ellen Lane is at any of these clinics. If we did, the answer would be more black and white. We could send in the police or get a warrant to search the place, and in that case Superman’s actions couldn’t be interpreted in a hazy manner, but…” Clark sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. When it comes to Lex Luthor, usually there isn’t any doubt which side he lands on right or wrong, but here…” He shook his head. “We only have Lois’s gut feeling that Luthor took her mother.”
“And has her gut ever steered her wrong?” Martha inquired.
Clark closed his eyes as he winced in emotional pain. “In that other dimension, you know the one where the Lois and Clark actually
are together, before they were married, Lois almost married Lex Luthor.” If that wasn’t a major wrong signal from her gut, he didn’t know what was.
“Oh, Jerome,” Martha said, leaning over and resting her hand on his. “I’m sorry.”
“They do say there’s a fine line between love and hate,” Jonathan murmured.
“She didn’t marry him, but they had a wedding and everything. It was busted up before the ‘I do’s’,” Clark said in that Lois’s defense. The nightmares from Herb’s unexpected pronouncement had been keeping Clark from sleep recently, especially as Lois’s wedding date neared. He knew that Lois loved him and not Luthor, but there was just enough fear that those doubts kept resurfacing.
“Are there some other, not so ethically grey areas where you could check for Mrs. Lane?” Jonathan asked.
“Cat said that Luthor had a manor house between Metropolis and Gotham City. Superman
did scan that as well as a few outbuildings. There wasn’t anyone there but a few servants. Jimbo, Perry, and I have been compiling a location list of all of LexCorp’s holdings. Unfortunately for us, the list is vast and the businesses spread all over the world. Luthor has residences here in the States, in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, and Switzerland. Lex Luthor has a fleet of private jets his executives use for LexCorp business. He could have easily hidden Mrs. Lane away on one of those and taken her anywhere in the world.” Clark rubbed his hand through his hair in frustration. “I could spend until the wedding searching them all, plus all his business locations, and still never find Mrs. Lane. If I did that, I wouldn’t be around Metropolis to keep an eye on Lois, or be able to fly out to Los Angeles to check on Lucy.”
“I’m sure Lois will understand, honey,” Martha said softly.
He looked at her skeptically. “Only if her mother turns up alive and well, and completely alcohol-free.”
“Have faith,” Jonathan recommended.
“In Luthor? Not happening.”
“You said that his father was an alcoholic as well. Surely, he understands what Lois went through as a child and truly wants to help,” Martha said.
Clark shook his head. “That’s just it, Mom. We don’t know if what Luthor told Lois about his childhood is true. Perry and I have been checking records, but since we haven’t been able to find a birth certificate on the man, let alone any record of Lex Luthor before 1962, we can’t verify any of it. All five of his unofficial biographies list his childhood in the same vague manner: orphaned before he was a teenager and a self-made man. None of them list his parents’ names nor where he grew up, nor even if he had been a ward of the state as I had been.” He scoffed. “He has even less of a history than I do, and he’s from this dimension.”
Martha and Jonathan exchanged another look. Jonathan spoke, “Are you sure that he is?”
Clark held up his hand. “Since Luthor existed in that other dimension I visited as well, let’s not even try to go there and just stay in the realm of the known. I’m still trying to figure out how to explain to Lois that I’m not only a visitor from another planet, but also another time and another dimension. I don’t even want to consider if Luthor took her mother off planet.” He thought about this idea before chuckling. “I really don’t have the same problems as other men, do I?”
Martha leaned towards him. “You still haven’t told her?”
“When this whole investigation mess is over… or, at least, when I can get her away from Luthor once and for all,
then will be the time to broach the subject of how much out of this universe I really am.”
“I’m sure in the end you’ll do what’s right,” Martha said, patting his hand. “You usually do.”
Clark wished he had as much faith in himself as she had in him.
***End of Part 167*** Part 168 Author notes to this part can be found on the
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