Lisa took the bracelet and frowned. The old familiar feeling of relief wasn’t there. The bracelet looked the same as the one her mother had once had, but the jewel wasn’t glowing.
“It’s ruby,” the skeleton called Joshua said. Its voice was hesitant. “I used to make these with something else, but I didn’t know it was bad for people.”
“Why would you give me something like this?” Lisa asked, trying to push her disappointment away. In her experience, men didn’t give young girls jewelry without wanting something in return. The things she’d seen and heard were proof of that.
“It’s my way of saying I’m sorry,” Joshua’s voice became serious. “I hurt a lot of people with those bracelets, and I can’t really do much to help them, although I’m trying.”
Lisa stared at the bracelet. Without the glowing gem, it didn’t seem nearly as fascinating. In fact, it seemed a little cheap. “Would it be all right if I gave this to my mother? She…lost hers a little while back.”
The skeleton nodded.
Lisa felt a breeze at her back and she realized that her mother had returned. Turning, she saw the familiar shape of her mother’s skeleton, delicate and petite. In the past few months she’d gotten to know the look of it well, and now it looked as different from everyone else’s skeleton as her mother herself did.
Blinking, Lisa fought to keep her jaw from dropping. Her father didn’t look like a skeleton at all! He looked the same as when she saw him last, including his costume, except that she couldn’t see his cape.
She could hear it whipping in the wind, which meant that it was as invisible as the walls of the house.
She turned to Joshua, who was still a skeleton. “Thank you for this.”
Glancing around, Lisa could see skeletons working in the kitchen, out in the garage, and a few cleaning in various parts of the mansion. Some were on the second floor, which gave them the curious appearance of being suspended in mid air.
When her sight was like this, Lisa had to be very careful. She was effectively blind and would tend to run into walls and doors if she wasn’t careful. Luckily, she’d had a lot of experience faking it.
She smiled at her mother as she entered the room. She couldn’t see her expression, so she had to judge by the tone of her voice, but she’d had a lot of experience with that as well.
“Hello,” her mother said, seeing the man in the wheelchair for the first time.
“My name is Joshua Lang,” said the skeleton, holding out one hand for a bony handshake. “I live here.”
“Oh?” her mother said.
“I did the genetics testing on Lisa’s father,” Joshua said. “I’m also the one who made the jewelry you’ll be helping get rid of.”
******************
Blindly, Lisa speared a piece of meat off her plate. Everyone was still skeletons, and she was starting to worry. It had never gone on for this long before. She could tell the general location of the meat from its smell, but she still had to be careful, or someone would notice.
“I was working out on the Irig farm helping to move rocks and clear the fields for planting,” Joshua said. “It was late in the evening when I stumbled across the first of the glowing gemstones.”
Lisa nodded, chewing her food slowly. Mr. Kent hadn’t showed up for dinner yet, and her father had left for some sort of unnamed emergency hours ago.
“I had it checked out with a Geiger counter.” Joshua’s voice was defensive. “I wasn’t entirely stupid. What I didn’t realize is that Geiger counters aren’t as sensitive to high energy radiation.”
Her mother nodded encouragingly.
“I’d been working with crafts since I was small; my mother taught me, and she had all the equipment I needed. For ten bucks and a little chip of crystal that Wayne Irig gave me for free, I could make a piece of jewelry that I could sell for fifty. Better still, I could make five of them in a night.”
“Your money problems were over,” Lois said.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that, but it did help pay my way through college,” Joshua said. “I kept the crystals under my bed, and I slept with them every night.”
“And that’s what happened to you…” her mother said. “Mr. Kent told me about the tumor.”
Joshua chuckled bitterly. “Something keeps glowing for years, you’d think it’d occur to me that it was radioactive.”
Lisa heard the sound of someone coming in from the other room. Her eyes widened as she saw Mr. Kent stepping inside the dining room.
Unlike the others, he was not a skeleton. Instead he seemed to be wearing boxer shorts and an undershirt and nothing else.
Lisa frowned. Usually, when her vision went strange, it saw everyone the same way. Everyone was a skeleton, everyone was nude, or everyone was a collection of floating intestines. It didn’t work one way for one person and another way for another.
He looked at her and then looked away. Lisa knew she probably was staring, and it was probably rude, but she couldn’t help herself.
There was a familiar smell in the room; fish and oil. It was fainter than it had been before, now being covered with the smell of soap and shampoo, but it was there. Lisa looked around wildly. Was her father going to join them all for dinner?
No matter which direction she looked, she couldn’t see him.
“Lisa?”
Lisa glanced back up at her mother and was relieved to see familiar flesh instead of bones. A quick glance showed that everyone else looked normal as well.
Joshua looked older than she would have thought, given his voice, but he seemed nice enough.
Clark Kent was seating himself and whispering to a servant…something about bringing coffee.
Lisa stiffened as she realized she was hearing something else. A familiar heartbeat, faster than anything human was in the room with them.
Was invisibility going to be one of her powers? Why was her father spying on them? They’d be happy to have a meal with him.
“Kal El had to help with a dam that collapsed in China,” Mr. Kent said. There was a strange sound of pride in his voice. “He saved two thousand villagers and helped divert waters that would have destroyed their homes.”
Lisa turned her head. If she could only pinpoint the sound, she’d be able to find out where her father was hiding.
The sound was coming from Mr. Kent’s part of the room, which would make sense. Lisa hadn’t heard it until he’d come into the room. Her father must have slipped in behind him.
Lisa took a bite and winced as the sound of her own chewing thundered through her head. There was so much she had to learn about all of this; she only hoped her father would be able to find the time to help her.
“I understand that the Foundation is doing a lot of work in foreign countries,” her mother said politely.
“It’s enlightened self interest really. Malnourished people have suppressed immune systems, which make them the perfect incubators for new and deadlier diseases. If you’d seen some of the things I’d seen…” Mr. Kent’s voice trailed off. “I haven’t been doing this very long, and I’ve already seen a lot of things I wished I hadn’t.”
There was a weird sound of guilt to his voice. Lisa tried to ignore it and hone in on the sound of the heartbeat. When she found her father, she was going to throw something at him- probably a carrot.
The surprise that her father was invisible would help her mother forget her rudeness at the table.
“How long have you been doing this?” he mother asked.
Lisa didn’t hear the reply. She stiffened as she realized that the sound of the heartbeat wasn’t just coming from near Mr. Kent. It was coming from Mr. Kent himself.
**********
The look of realization and shock on his daughter’s face was an unwelcome addition to the meal. He’d hoped to be able to keep his secret for at least a while longer, but given the senses that they obviously shared, it wouldn’t have lasted forever.
It hadn’t lasted more than a few hours, and Clark suspected that if he hadn’t had to leave, the disguise wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he murmured under his breath. Although the words would have been inaudible to a normal listened, Lisa clearly heard them. The look of doubt on her face prompted him to say, “I’ll explain later.”
Damn. He’d promised to be honest with Lois about his relationship with Lisa, and here he was already screwing it up.
But he had his reasons. After what had happened before, he wasn’t going to share his secret with anyone who didn’t already know it. It was too easy for people to take advantage. It was too easy for him to get hurt.
Now it was even more imperative that he keep his secret. Before, he could have always flown away. If he’d been found out, there was enough money in secret accounts in the Caymans and in Switzerland for him to live in luxury for the rest of his life.
But Lisa couldn’t fly, and she was emotionally attached to her mother, who was even more vulnerable. It would be very easy for someone to use Lois to get Lisa. He’d told the truth when he’d told Lois that her safety was his highest priority.
Lisa was in as much danger from the red poison and the green as he was, but her mother wasn’t. He didn’t know her mother; other than one night together and what little time they’d spent together recently, he wasn’t sure he could trust her.
He’d been betrayed in the worst way a man could be betrayed, and sometimes he wondered if it was always going to leave a scar on his soul.
He and Lisa were going to have to have a serious talk. He wasn’t ready to tell her mother yet, and he had to convince the girl of that.
What had happened with Lana could never happen again.
