Table of Contents
From Part 5:“You said yes. I understand,” he said softly, realising that she was waiting for some kind of reaction from her. “I guess you were still in some kind of shock.”
Lois shrugged. “I probably was. I certainly wasn’t thinking clearly - though I can’t deny all blame. I said yes to him. I knew I didn’t love him, but I think I was trying to persuade myself that I liked him enough to make it work. That I’d be a fool not to be able to fall in love with him - I mean, he was so charming and attentive and loving; how could I not?” Her mouth turned down at the corners. “Another of my many flaws is that I’m impulsive. Always have been. Someone once told me that I always jump in without checking the water level. It usually works for me - I mean, when I’m on the trail of a story. My instincts have almost always been pretty good. Okay, sure, things haven’t always panned out; I’ve got hurt a few times, too. But most of the time I’m
right. So I acted on impulse this time too - and married him.”
“And regretted it?” Clark ventured.
“And regretted it,” Lois agreed. “Even before he tried to kill me.”
*********
Now read on...For the first time, something struck Clark with the force of a blow. Her
husband had tried to kill her. A man she’d trusted enough to marry. A man who had claimed, she’d just told him, to love her. A man whose bed she’d shared, with whom she’d shared her body. A man she’d been completely intimate with, with whom she’d joined her life.
That man had tried to kill her.
What would as appalling a breach of trust as that do to someone? He was surprised that Lois wasn’t a gibbering basket-case in the circumstances. It was no wonder that she’d been terrified on the island; that she’d refused to let him take her anywhere that her husband could find her. It would be a miracle if she could ever feel safe again. If she could ever trust anyone again.
“Yeah,” Clark said, his lips twisting. “You said you thought it was because you asked him for a divorce.”
“Yeah. But there’s a story to that too,” she said. “But first, I want to tell you
why I want a divorce.”
“Well, you already told me - you regretted marrying him. You thought that things weren’t working out, right?” He tried to hide the faint twinge of disapproval he felt again; it
was none of his business, after all. And anyway, her husband wasn’t a man anyone should stay married to. And she clearly didn’t love him...
What mattered was finding out exactly what Luthor had done to her. He already knew some of it, of course - doping her, trying to drown her - but he didn’t know exactly how. And he wanted to know if Lois had enough evidence to convince the police. He wanted Lex Luthor behind bars. Today.
“I don’t love him, Clark,” she said bluntly. “Well, okay, I just got finished telling you that I didn’t love him when I agreed to marry him, but what I mean is that things weren’t changing. I didn’t love him, and I wasn’t going to fall in love with him. It took me a long time to admit that - but meeting you made me face the truth.”
“Meeting
me?” he questioned, taken aback, his attention distracted from the need to hear what Luthor had done.
She couldn’t possibly mean what her words seemed to imply... that maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d been falling in love... could she?
No, of course not. He was being pathetic. What she meant was obvious: she’d realised, through her conversations with him, how little she had in common with her husband. That much had been obvious to him while they’d talked - how grateful she’d seemed to be for the interest he’d taken in her writing, for instance. The interest her
husband should have been taking...
“Yes, you.” She gazed directly at him, and there was something almost like defiance in her expression. “And now you’re going to say I’m fickle on top of everything else, but... you weren’t the only one who started falling in love with someone you shouldn’t have.”
His heart skipped several beats and he felt as if someone had taken the contents of his stomach and put them through a milk churn.
“Lois...” he began, his tone husky. He wanted to tell her again that he loved her, and how much what she’d said meant to him. But sanity hit him before he could frame the words. Now was not the right time to talk about emotions - not while she was on the run from a husband who’d tried to kill her. After all she’d been through, she was probably in no fit state to hear what he wanted to say. He’d only be putting unfair pressure on her.
Deliberately squashing his own feelings, he said softly, “I wouldn’t call you fickle. Not when you said you never loved him in the first place.”
She shrugged, sitting forward and frowning. “But you might say that I’m... oh, I don’t know, shallow or something for saying I wanted a divorce just because I spent a few days with a good-looking, interesting guy.”
Something about her tone was telling him that it wasn’t that simple. And, while he was painfully anxious for her to tell him exactly what the man who called himself her husband had done to her, he knew that, for some reason, she needed him to hear this first.
So he would control his impatience and listen. They had time, after all. It wasn’t as if Luthor knew that she was alive and was hot on her trail.
“Come on, Lois. You expect me to believe that’s all it was? That somehow spending a few hours with me over the space of - what? Four days? - made you decide all of a sudden to walk out of a two-month-old marriage?” Whatever else, he knew that she wasn’t that shallow. And anyway, he hadn’t come to mean
that much to her over a few afternoons. Had he? It wasn’t possible. “You had to be having doubts long before I showed up.”
“How do you know?” she challenged him.
He shrugged. “I just do. Okay, so I haven’t known you very long - you could say I don’t know you at all - but it just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d do. I mean, you’re not some moronic pop star who doesn’t know what she wants and marries someone on a whim and divorces him two days later,” he said dryly. “Seriously, Lois, if you’d been happy in your marriage then meeting someone else - no matter how much you liked that someone else - would never make you think about getting a divorce.”
Lois seemed to be more comfortable at that; her body posture relaxed and she sat back against the sofa cushions again. “You’re right. I’d been having doubts right from the day I married Lex. Well, from the day I said yes to him, really, but I was just determined to make it work. And... It hasn’t been that horrible. Really. I mean, like I said, when we were dating he was always charming and attentive. That continued - well, okay, the attentiveness wore off a bit, but he was still charming and affectionate and he told me he loved me all the time. And if I even hinted that there was anything I wanted, he got it for me. I got to the point where I stopped letting him see that I liked things, because I didn’t know what to do with everything he was giving me!”
Trinkets. Affection. It sounded as if Luthor had treated her like a child. Not a spouse - an equal.
“I stopped working at LNN when I married Lex,” Lois continued. “I couldn’t carry on - not as the wife of the owner. It would’ve been too difficult. I told him I wanted to look for a reporting job at another newspaper, but he didn’t like the idea. He... god, I don’t know why I ever let myself be persuaded by him! - he said he’d prefer if it I didn’t. He wanted me by his side, he said. But I got bored with the dinner-parties and functions and so on. I never felt that I was much more than arm-candy. I mean, Clark, I have a
brain! And I used to think that Lex respected that. But he didn’t seem to be interested in my opinions. Not any more.”
As he’d suspected over the course of the past few days, Lex Luthor hadn’t appreciated his wife for what she was, Clark mused. No wonder she’d turned to a stranger for companionship.
“But I thought he still understood me,” Lois went on. “It was his idea for me to go to the lake house. I’d told him ages ago that I wanted to write a novel some day - so he said I should just go and do it. And it was then - once he left and I was on my own for the first time since our wedding - that I started to realise what I’d been feeling ever since the engagement. I just hadn’t had the time to stop and think before - there were always people around in Metropolis. But once I started to think, I realised that I’d been feeling... trapped. And then meeting you, and the time we spent together, showed me that I didn’t love Lex and that, even worse, we had very little in common. But I didn’t know what to do about it. Until...”
“Until I almost kissed you?” Clark asked; it seemed to fit, given that she’d told him she believed she’d been falling in love with him too.
“Yeah. Well, until you walked away, and I realised what had been happening between us all week. Clark, call me naive, but I didn’t see what was right under my nose. Or maybe I was in denial. I kept telling myself that I just found you good company. Nothing more than that. That there was nothing wrong with spending time with a guy I found interesting to talk to but would never see again after you left the area. And then... it all came to a head and I saw the truth.”
“I was the same,” he confessed, feeling his heart lighten at being able to tell her the truth. “Well, I guess not exactly. I mean, I knew I never should have come back after the first day. I think I fell in love with you the second I looked up and saw you. And since I realised pretty quickly that you were married... But I told myself that I just liked your company and that I wasn’t hurting anyone by spending a little time with you. I was wrong,” he finished, sighing.
“It felt almost like a dream, Clark,” Lois said softly, her eyes half-closed, clearly remembering. “A fantasy - something apart from the real world. And then, when you told me you were falling in love with me and walked off, reality came crashing back. And I just had to face it - accept what a mess I’d made of my life and decide what to do about it.”
She ran her hands through her hair, as if pausing for thought. “Anyway,” she said at last, “I decided to ask Lex for a divorce. I figured that, since the marriage was a mistake - for me, anyway - the best thing to do was make a clean break and start again. Get back to my life, figure out who Lois Lane was now and - well, I even thought about trying to see if the Planet could be saved after all and finding you to offer you a job.” He saw a blush creep up her cheeks.
“I’m flattered, Lois,” he said, realising too late that his voice was husky with emotion. “I’d love the chance to work with you.”
“I think we could make a good team.” She shrugged. “So... well, I’d decided to go back to Metropolis the next day - this morning, I guess. It seems so long ago now. But then Lex arrived unexpectedly - that was around about eleven. And I... You know I said that I act on impulse?”
He nodded.
“Well, I’d been doing some more thinking. Wondering if I was being fair. I mean, Lex had always said that he loved me. And - a bit belatedly, I guess - it dawned on me that, while I might think it was best to end our marriage, he might not be so happy about it. And even though I didn’t want to stay married to him, I didn’t want to hurt him. So by the time he arrived, I’d pretty much talked myself out of asking him for a divorce straight away. I decided that I should take some time to think about what I wanted - and also I should start getting back to my old assertive self. Tell him what I wanted, rather than just accepting what he wanted all the time. And... just see if we could make it work after all. If... what I’d started to feel for you was just a crazy crush.”
It still could be just a crazy crush, Clark thought wryly. As she’d said, it had been a summer fantasy. Not real. Not living, breathing love. Just a couple of strangers detached from their real lives and thrown together. *He* knew that he’d fallen in love - but why should that mean that Lois had too?
“And, too, I was... angry with myself,” she added, biting her lip again. “It’s like what I said about being in denial. I was pretending that I wasn’t attracted to you. Yet all the time I was looking forward to seeing you every day. I was thinking about you all the time we weren’t together. And then you almost kissed me - and I wasn’t the one who stopped it. You were.
I was almost unfaithful to my husband!”
Shocked, Clark exclaimed, “You weren’t! Lois, there’s no way you would have...”
“Slept with you?” she finished dryly. “
You wouldn’t have. I hope I wouldn’t... though I’d like to think that if you hadn’t stopped that kiss I would’ve as soon as it had dawned on me what I was doing. It was all part of the dream, if you know what I mean,” she said, grimacing. “And I
don’t sleep around. I’ve never dated more than one guy at a time, either. But, regardless of what happened or didn’t happen, I wasn’t being faithful to Lex in my head. That’s what I was feeling guilty about. And when he arrived unexpectedly, I felt even worse about it.”
“So...” Clark prompted.
“Well, he came into the bedroom - I was in bed, reading. And I could see as soon as I saw him that he was in a strange mood. He came over to the bed and said, “Lois, I’m very disappointed in you.” Not angrily, but...” She trailed off, as if she couldn’t find the words to describe her husband’s mood.
“It sounds patronising to me,” Clark offered. “I mean, what he said. ‘Disappointed in you’,” he quoted. “It’s the sort of thing you’d say to a child.”
“Exactly!” Lois exclaimed. “That’s exactly the way I felt! Anyway, I asked what he meant. And he said he’d called the house earlier, looking for me, but Betty told him that I was out walking with my man friend. And he said she told him that I’d seen this friend every day this week. So, of course, he wanted to know who you were and what I’d been doing with you.”
Stricken, Clark stared at her. “I’m sorry, Lois! I never meant to cause problems for you...”
“
I never knew that the housekeeper was spying on me for my husband!” Lois retorted. “And that’s what I said to him - well, the way he spoke to me made me angry. I asked him what the hell he thought I’d been doing - having a torrid affair behind his back or something? And the look on his face told him that he’d suspected that. Which only made me feel worse, because I couldn’t deny that nothing at all had gone on. Even if we hadn’t almost kissed, I was at fault because I knew I had feelings for you.”
“And you told him that?” Clark asked, wondering if, at last, he was hearing what had made Luthor attempt to commit murder.
Lois shook her head. “I’m not that crazy! I mean, yes, that would’ve been honest, but since I had no idea whether I’d ever even see you again, and I wasn’t intending to leave Lex for you, I didn’t think it was sensible. I told him that you were just a friend. But he didn’t want to accept that - he wanted lots of details about who you were, why I’d even given you the time of day in the first place, how you’d got onto the beach, what we’d talked about... everything. I didn’t tell him everything - the way he was acting just made me mad anyway, so I told him that what we should be talking about wasn’t you, it was our marriage.”
“Ouch,” Clark said softly. “After you’d decided not to bring up the subject. And... was that what pushed him over the edge?”
“Oh, no. Actually, he seemed very shocked then. But understanding - well, sort of. His anger just disappeared and he came over to the bed and sat beside me. He took my hands and told me that he’d obviously made a mistake by leaving me at the beach without him - that I must have felt that he’d been neglecting me. That he thought he’d been helping by giving me time to work on my book, but that I obviously needed people around me. He said he’d take me back to Metropolis and we’d forget any of this had ever happened.”
“Interesting reaction,” Clark said dryly. Again, it sounded as if Luthor had been treating his wife as if she were a child who didn’t know her own mind and had to be guided. Controlled.
“Try downright patronising!” Lois growled. “Oh, all right, I didn’t feel that at the time. It did feel as if he was talking to a child again, but I was still feeling guilty because he hadn’t done anything to deserve what I did. So I said I’d go back to Metropolis with him and we’d see if we could work things out. And that was it, I thought. Lex said he had some work to do and I should go to sleep.”
So... a husband who’d been angry and jealous about his wife spending time with another man, but who changed his tune once she talked about ending their marriage. Who treated his wife as if she were a prized possession rather than an equal partner. That still didn’t add up to murder.
“What then?”
“I woke up a couple of hours later,” Lois said. “I was thirsty, and Lex still hadn’t come to bed. It occurred to me that he might’ve decided to sleep in another room, maybe because of what we’d talked about. And... part of me was glad about that, but another part felt guilty. So I got a drink from the kitchen and then went to find him. He was in a room at the back of the house - I heard his voice and realised he was on the phone.”
Lois got to her feet abruptly and started pacing about the room. “This is what I still can’t put together. I’ve been puzzling it through in my head pretty much ever since I woke up on that island with you and realised I was alive. There’s
something here - something I should know about, but I can’t work it out...”
“You’re not making sense, Lois,” Clark told her.
“I know.” She paced again, running one hand agitatedly through her hair. “Okay. This is what happened. I was going to stick my head around the door, just to let Lex know that I was up and looking for him. But as I got closer, I could hear him say something like ‘It looks like I’ll have to play lovey-dovey for a while longer.’ And he sounded distinctly unhappy about it.” She shrugged. “Of course, I had to stay outside and listen.”
Clark nodded. In the circumstances, he probably would have, too.
“I mean, it was the first time I’d had any hint that Lex was pretending about his feelings for me,” Lois continued. “I know now that he was lying all along, of course. But I still don’t know
why. Anyway, I waited. And then he said, ‘I thought I could just leave her up here and carry on with business as usual in the city. And now it seems that this Clark person was more of a problem than I first anticipated. She’s starting to talk as if she isn’t happy with the marriage. It sounded as if she was about to say she wanted a divorce.’ I remember that word for word, Clark,” Lois insisted. “I learned long ago to develop total recall about stuff like that - it’s one of the things you need if you’re going to be any good as an undercover reporter.”
“Makes sense,” Clark agreed. “But this... It doesn’t make sense. You mean that Luthor married you and then didn’t even want to be with you? But then why marry you at all?”
“That doesn’t make sense to me either,” she agreed. “There’s something else - it’s obviously related to why he married me, and this is the thing I’m still trying to figure out. By the way, I should tell you - Lex was talking to his assistant, a guy called Nigel St John. I never liked Nigel much - I always found him kind of creepy, as well as a dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist. But Lex likes him because he’s excellent at what he does. Apparently, he’s a former British spy - Lex didn’t tell me that, by the way. Someone on his staff did.”
Lois stopped pacing and stood, eyes half-closed as if she were deep in thought. “Anyway, the rest of what I heard went like this. Lex said, ‘You know why I want to keep her safely married to me. This is Lois Lane we’re talking about. One of these days, she’s going to remember what she saw and she’ll put two and two together. In the meantime, if I’m her loving husband it won’t ever occur to her that I’m anything other than the public perception. If she’s married to me when she does figure it out, she’s not going to be able to hide it - and I can deal with it. Take whatever action appears necessary.’ Then he said that he knew Nigel had always thought he should just have had me killed in the first place.” She pulled a face. “That’s when I knocked against the wall.”
“How did you do that?” Clark exclaimed. He’d been listening to her account with growing horror. Luthor was clearly not the upright businessman he pretended - that much was now obvious. The conversation Lois was relating was sinister in the extreme.
What could Luthor possibly have done that he would kill to cover up - kill his own
wife? Though it was clear from what Lois had overheard that Luthor had only married Lois to keep her quiet.
She pulled a face. “It was stupid. I was standing just outside the room, beside the door. There was no reason he should ever have known I was there. But my ankle started to itch. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, so eventually I stood on one leg and tried to rub it against my other foot... and I lost my balance.”
“And he heard you?”
“Oh yeah. He slammed the phone down and came charging out of the room. I tried to run, but he caught me. And the look on his face was vicious. He told me that I should have been asleep, but that he should have known that I never do as I’m told. And that I’d regret it, because he was going to have to do something he’d always considered a sign of failure.”
The fear was back in her eyes, and Clark ached to take her in his arms, but he sensed that she needed to tell the rest of her story without distractions. So he just gave her an encouraging nod.
“He steered me into the kitchen. I was trying the whole time to get away from him - I have a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do, Clark, but he’s good at martial arts too, and he’s a lot stronger than I am.”
Clark frowned and was unable to resist pointing out, “But you don’t have any bruises. I checked.”
She shrugged. “He’s clever enough not to leave any. I was screaming at him to let me go, too, hoping that Betty or her husband would come and he’d have to stop. But he said that he paid them well enough not to interfere.”
“What about the sleeping pills? Assuming he really did make you take some.”
“Well, I guess I’ll find that out soon enough, once your doctor gives me the results of the blood test,” Lois said with a shrug. “He held a gun on me - yes, my husband carries a gun,” she said scathingly. “And I never knew. And he took the glass I’d drunk from - oh, he was very careful to use a towel when he handled it. And he poured some water into it. I didn’t see what else he did, but he made me drink it. And it tasted funny.”
“It seems odd that he’d have had sleeping pills, though,” Clark pointed out. “I mean, by the sound of it he didn’t even have to look for them.”
Lois frowned. “I’m trying to remember - to picture the scene.” She spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “He’d pushed me into a chair and told me to stay there. He had the gun trained on me as he moved around the kitchen. I saw him look at the glass. Then I saw him open a drawer and rummage in it. Then he opened another one and took out a towel. I guess I thought he was looking for a towel in the first one, but...”
“But it could have contained medicines?”
She shrugged. “I guess so. I know, it still sounds like a heck of a coincidence that there were sleeping pills in there. I don’t know - maybe they were Betty’s? Though in that case I don’t see why they weren’t in her bedroom.”
“So he made you drink whatever was in the glass. What then?”
“He put the glass in the sink. Then he told me to stand up and start walking. So I did. He made me go out of the house and along the beach. Then, I had no idea what he was planning. I kept asking him where we were going and what he intended to do. He just told me to shut up and keep walking. And then we were at the water’s edge. He stopped. He held the gun to the side of my head and he... oh, god, Clark, he kissed me. He told me that it was such a waste. That I was an attractive woman and he’d enjoyed f... Well, you can guess,” she amended.
Anger was roiling up inside him at every word of Lois’s. The only way he was managing to stay silent was by imagining the most painful possible ways of ending Luthor’s life. Forcing himself at least to give the appearance of calm, Clark gave Lois an encouraging smile, waiting for her to continue.
“I told him that he’d never get away with shooting me. That it would obviously be murder and he’d be one of the few suspects. He laughed. He told me that he would never dream of being that obvious - and then he asked if I was feeling tired yet. And I realised that he was right. I was tired. In fact, I could barely keep my eyes open, and my legs didn’t want to hold me up any more. I didn’t put it together then, but when you said earlier that the newspaper report said I’d taken sleeping pills it was obvious.”
“So he pushed you into the lake and left you to drown?”
“Not quite. I guess just pushing me in wouldn’t have been enough - I mean, I might have just floated ashore a little way along the beach. No, I remember him wading in with me. He said that we were going for a swim. And he kept telling me to swim out to sea. I remember - I was very sleepy, and it felt like a dream. And when he told me to swim, I did. And... that’s all I remember.”
“Almost the perfect murder,” Clark mused. “You’re drugged, so you don’t know what you’re doing. He forces you into the lake - and persuades you to swim to your own death. At least, it would’ve been your death. He wouldn’t have expected someone like me to swoop down from the sky and find you! And even his footprints on the sand could be explained by following your prints to the water’s edge because he was looking for you.”
Lois nodded. “You... your doctor said I was very lucky to be alive. That... that I should have... have died of hypothermia within an hour.”
She was shaking, he realised. And her teeth were chattering. Reaction, as if the realisation that the man she’d trusted enough to marry her had almost killed her had finally struck her.
With one step, he was beside her. And, as the tears began to fall, Clark enfolded Lois Lane in his arms, holding her close and promising that he would never let anything bad happen to her ever again.
*********
...tbc
