Chapter 37: Failing Grade
They looked around; Milford was a city, but it didn’t seem much bigger than a town like Smallville. Clark folded his arms. “Maybe we should scout around a little? Get the lay of the land, like Mr. Wells said?”
“Clark, can’t we go straight to the police? Maybe they know where Kara is. Maybe we could see her right away?”
“I thought we could see if there’s a library, find out a bit more about this world…”
Lois closed her eyes. “Please, Clark. Now that we know we haven’t landed in Jurassic Park, I want to find her. I want to see her. Can’t we start with that?” She ended in a whisper.
Clark grasped Lois’s arms gently and pulled her into his embrace. “I understand, honey. Believe me, I want to see her too! Sure, we can try the police first. But we need to be careful; we don’t know what they’re like here, or how they’ll react to us — look at what just happened with Mr. Reynolds. OK?”
“OK,” she replied, with a teary smile.
Clark kissed her gently and released her. “Now all we have to do is figure out where the police station is. I hope we don’t need a car.”
There was a kind of bakery/coffee shop further down the block, and Lois pointed it out. “Maybe we could ask there?”
Clark nodded, so they set off again, hand in hand. It was a few seconds’ walk.
Inside there was a short line of people waiting to be served. Clark didn’t want to cut, so he waited a minute or two in line while Lois stayed outside.
“What can I get you, sir?” asked the woman behind the counter.
Clark smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, I’m just looking for directions. Could you tell me how to find the police station here in town?”
The woman nodded. “Sure, just head out the door, turn left, and in a few steps you’ll be at Front Street. Turn right onto that, and it’s about a half mile to the police station, on the right. You can’t miss it.”
“Got it,” said Clark. “Thank you!”
“No problem.” She smiled. “If you find yourself in the mood for coffee or a pastry later, come on back, OK?”
“Sure thing,” agreed Clark. “Thanks again.” He nodded to the woman, and they were off.
• • •
Ten minutes later they were walking up the steps of Milford Police headquarters. Clark held the door open for Lois, and they went straight to the reception desk.
“Excuse me,” said Clark politely, “is there anyone we could talk to about finding a missing child?”
The receptionist, a civilian woman, answered, “If you would have a seat, sir, ma’am, I’ll see if one of the detectives can talk to you.” She waved at a small waiting area to one side.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
The woman smiled; then her eyes settled on Lois. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“Has anyone ever told you you look a bit like that actress on
Desperate Housewives? She plays Susan.”
Lois frowned. “Desperate
what? Who?”
“The TV show?”
Lois and Clark looked at each other.
“Anyway, you look enough like her to be her sister, but… Huh. No one’s ever mentioned it?”
Lois shook her head.
“Maybe the resemblance isn’t as strong as I thought. Sorry…” The woman blushed.
Lois laughed nervously. “Um, don’t worry about it.” They went to sit down.
Lois looked around. The room was empty at the moment, save for a man dressed in dirty clothes, holding an ice bag to his head. He looked to be around thirty. Lois had been in enough police stations that her gaze traveled over him almost without stopping.
After about ten minutes’ time, a young man with close-shaved hair, wearing a leather jacket and sporting a single earring, came out from the office area of the station. He looked around the lobby, spotted them, and came over.
“Are you the folks looking for a missing child? I’m Detective Leo Maury.”
Lois and Clark stood, and Clark reached out to shake the detective’s hand. “Thank you, Detective. I’m Clark Kent and this is my wife, Lois Lane.”
The man with the ice bag laughed once, then winced and went silent again.
Maury was eyeing them coolly. “Well, most folks have been going straight to DHS these days, but Detective Spalding usually handles the ones who come here. He’s out at the moment, so I guess I can talk to you.” He sighed. “Follow me; I think the conference room is open.”
He turned and walked away; Lois and Clark followed him. Lois looked at Clark questioningly, and Clark shrugged back.
• • •
Lois and Clark took their packs off and took seats across the conference table from Detective Maury. He had a notepad, and looked rather more uninterested than Lois thought a public servant ought to in a situation like this.
“So, who is the child you’re looking for?”
Clark and Lois exchanged glances. “She’s our daughter,” answered Lois. “Her name is Kara, Kara Zoe Kent.”
“Of course,” replied the detective. “Can you give me a physical description?”
Clark nodded. “She’s eleven and a few months; her birthday’s at the end of June. Blonde hair, down about to her shoulder blades, blue eyes, height about…” He looked to Lois. “When was the last time her height was measured?”
“When she saw Bernie in August. It was four feet nine and a quarter then. Weight, around eighty-four pounds. Right about fiftieth percentile for both.” Lois thought a moment. “Oh, and she was wearing a pale blue turtleneck and jeans.”
“We have a photo,” offered Clark. He rummaged in a pocket of his pack, and pulled out a color photocopy of Kara’s fifth grade graduation photo. She had a huge smile on her face.
“Here; it’s a copy, you can keep it.” Clark slid it across the table to the detective, who picked it up, looking not the slightest bit interested.
“Uh-huh.” He slid it under his notepad. “Can you tell me when the last time you saw her was?”
“It’s been nine days,” replied Lois immediately. “She was on her way home from school when she was seen being taken by a man in a car. We, uh,” she hesitated, “we think she might be in this area, based on some things the man left behind.”
“What was the exact date?”
“Umm, October 19…” replied Lois. She’d forgotten that the date might not be the same here; she had no idea what it was. She looked to Clark nervously.
“I see. Just got here from Metropolis, then?”
Lois and Clark relaxed somewhat and smiled at each other. “Yes, as a matter of fact. We just now arrived in town,” replied Clark.
“OK. What’s your home address?”
“348 Hyperion Avenue, Metropolis,” replied Clark confidently. It seemed this world wasn’t that different after all. Of course, they didn’t live at that address in Metropolis
here, but Clark liked to be truthful if he could.
“Uh-huh. Is there somewhere I can reach you locally?”
“Um, not yet,” replied Clark. “We just got here, and, uh, we haven’t found a place to stay yet. We wanted to come right here and get things rolling.”
Lois asked, “Detective? Has anyone seen her? Do you think you can help us find her?”
“Oh, plenty of folks have seen her.”
Lois burst into a smile so radiant that Clark thought it might restore his powers on the spot. “Oh Clark!” she said emotionally, “They know where she is!”
She turned back to the detective. “Can you take us to her?”
“Well, that depends on whether the glass slipper fits.”
Lois’s and Clark’s smiles vanished. “Excuse me?” replied Clark. “Glass slipper? I’m not sure I follow, Detective.”
Maury smirked; it wasn’t a kind expression. “You’re Clark Kent, right?”
“Uh… yes?” replied Clark uncertainly.
“OK, let’s see it, then. Come on, Superman. Show me something.”
The response was automatic, honed by years of practice. “I’m sorry… Superman? What makes you think I’m Superman, Detective?”
“If you want to prove you’re Clark Kent, show me a superpower. Come on, fly, lift the table, whatever.”
Clark frowned. “Detective, I don’t know what you’re getting at but this isn’t a joke. We’re just trying to find our missing child and I don’t see what Superman has to do with it. As you can see,” he showed off the cut on his hand, “I’m clearly not invulnerable, so how could I be Superman? Can we please get back to finding our daughter?”
“Well, that’s pretty conclusive, I agree.”
Clark and Lois looked at each other.
“We’ll be in touch if anything comes up. If you get local contact information you can leave it to my attention at the front desk.” He got up and walked over to the door, opened it, and motioned for them to leave.
“Good day.”
• • •
“That rat bastard knows where she is and
he won’t tell us!” Lois strained against Clark’s grasp as she struggled to head back the way they’d come. “Just let me get back there and I’ll show
him who’s not invulnerable!”
“Honey,” soothed Clark, “I don’t think assaulting a police officer is the best way to get them to cooperate.”
“I’ll
kill him!”
“Or that, either.”
Lois sagged, the fight leaving her. Suddenly she burst into tears.
Clark wrapped her in his embrace. “Oh, honey…”
Lois pulled back to look up at him, and Clark saw she was smiling broadly as she cried. “Oh Clark… she’s alive! She’s all right! She’s
here!” She hugged him tightly. “We
found her! Oh
God, I was so worried…”
They gazed at each other for a long moment. Then, they locked lips in a passionate kiss.
After a few seconds a passing teen girl called out, “Geez, you guys! Get a room!”
They pulled away from each other, blushing lightly. “Clark, do you think this is like that other alternate universe, where that other Clark’s secret was exposed? Maybe that’s why Detective Jerkface said what he did?” Her face fell. “What if that other you has a daughter Kara too, and that’s who he’s talking about? Maybe it’s not our Kara?”
“I don’t know, honey. But let’s go to the library and do some research. There’s obviously something going on here we don’t understand, and we need to find out what it is.”
Lois sighed and nodded. “We need to find a place to stay, too. We can’t camp out in town, and we both could use a shower.”
• • •
“Hey, Leo, anything come up while I was out?” Malcolm Spalding threw his jacket over the back of his chair.
“Not really. Just another Mr. and Mrs. Kent.”
“Huh. I thought they were all going to the house now, and talking directly to DHS. I haven’t seen one here in weeks.”
“Well, maybe these folks didn’t get the memo. They looked like they’d been camping. Had packs and everything.” He snorted. “I mean, at least most of the rest knew to come in dressed like professional people, not like an ad for L. L. Bean.”
Spalding frowned. Something was tickling the back of his mind. “Anything else about them?”
“This was the first guy who’s ever been in who denied being Superman. All the rest have always been, like, ‘oh, my powers are on the fritz today’ or ‘it’s cloudy so they don’t work.’” He shook his head. “They did have the address right. And they had a photo, but they all have a photo.” He rummaged on his desk, pulled out the photocopy from a stack, and passed it to Spalding.
“They went into this whole shtick about a doctor’s visit, too, and how much she weighed and her height. They were good actors, I’ll give them that. Man, that woman was
pissed when she left.”
Spalding looked over the photo. It was Kara, no doubt about that; it looked like a typical posed school photo. He frowned. Kara hadn’t had any such photo with her when she was found, and he doubted she’d posed for a photo like this since she’d arrived. She wasn’t wearing glasses.
He supposed it could be Photoshopped, but there was something about the picture… He couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe it was that he’d never seen her smile quite so broadly since she’d shown up here. It was certainly not the same as any of the photos that previous couples had brought in, all of which had been obviously Photoshopped from news sources, and usually badly.
Was it his imagination, or did she look slightly younger?
“When did they come in?”
“Oh, about two hours ago.”
Spalding frowned. The tickling was getting stronger. “Leo, hypothetically…”
“Yeah?”
“Say you were her real parents…”
“Do you really believe her story? I mean, Congressman Munroe… what he says makes a lot of sense, even if I don’t like what he’s doing to the Jordan sisters.”
Spalding sighed. “Humor me?”
“Yeah, yeah, OK…”
“You’re going to some parallel Earth. You have no idea what it’ll be like when you get there. Maybe the Nazis won World War II. Maybe it’s all post-apocalyptic, Mad Max. Maybe there’s no human life at all. How would you dress? What would you take with you?”
“Well, I’d… umm… Hmm.”
“You wouldn’t dress in a business suit, that’s for sure.” Spalding felt a chill. “And say you’re Clark Kent and you’ve been Superman for… what did Kara say? Eighteen years. You’ve kept your secret identity a secret for that whole time. And then someone accuses you of being Superman. How do you react?”
“Huh. But he did have a cut on his hand. In fact, he made a big deal about it: ‘Look, I’m not invulnerable, so I can’t be Superman.’ … Oh.
Oh! You think… ?”
“Kara didn’t have powers when she got here, either. Maybe something about the travel drains their powers, like Kryptonite?” He rubbed his eyes. “Two hours ago, you said?”
“Uh, yeah. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know if they’re the real deal, but they’re the first ones to show up who could be.” He got up and grabbed his jacket. “I need to talk to them.”
He walked out to the front desk. “Marcie?”
Marcie looked up from her desk. “Yes, Detective?”
“Do you remember a couple that was in here about two hours ago? They had backpacks, talked to Leo…”
“Oh yeah, them. I remember them. The woman looked like an actress on a TV show I watch.”
Spalding frowned. Could they be professional actors? It seemed unlikely; someone who worked in Hollywood wouldn’t get involved in a scam, would they? Then again, people did all sorts of stupid things or he wouldn’t have a job. “Did they say anything when they left? Like, where they were going?”
Marcie frowned. “Not really, no. They did ask for directions to the library.”
Spalding felt that mental tickle again. That’s exactly where he’d expect them to go. “Thanks. I just hope they’re still there.”
• • •
