“You can’t hold her here,” Lois said as she stepped into the room on the other side of the mirror. “She clearly needs psychiatric treatment.”
“It’s been considered,” Agent White said, looking up.
“She thinks she comes from Metropolis, in a world where the Batman is some weird urban legend in Gotham City and Charleton Heston is the President.” Lois said. “A world where our parents are still alive but divorced and our father is some sort of mad scientist.”
“I’ve heard crazier stories,” Agent White said.
“She’s delusional!” Lois said. “She’s created a fantasy world where superheroes are real, and our parents never died. This is just her guilt over what happened expressing itself!”
“So how is it that we have a corpse in the ground with her name on it?”
“I don’t know how she ended up alive;” Lois said impatiently. “Maybe she ditched my parents when they went to pick her up. It wouldn’t have been unlike her. They must have picked up some kind of hitchhiker on the way home. The bodies were pretty badly burned.”
“There are no missing person’s reports matching a body like that of your sister.”
“Tens of thousands of people go missing every year,” Lois said. “If we knew where they were, they wouldn’t be missing.”
“She didn’t know some pretty elementary information about you, Lois.”
“Stuff that anyone would know…like me going to Columbia or having Susan as a roommate, sure. But she knew the things that nobody else would know…private things.”
“Is there any way someone else could have found those things out,” Agent White asked. “Maybe your sister told someone before she died.”
Lois shook her head. “So Lucy’s hypothetical friend just happens to decide to go into international terrorism?”
“Then why doesn’t she know where you went to school, who your roommate was, what happened to your parents?”
“It’s all part of the delusion,” Lois said. “If we grew up in Metropolis, then of course I went to Met U. She must have gotten the name Linda King from the old TV series. She always was more of a fan than I was. It was the one thing that she shared with mom a dad.”
“Yet she claims to have never heard of Superman,” Agent White said.
“What?” Lois asked. It hadn’t even occurred to her to ask the question. If you were from Metropolis, of course you knew who Superman was.
“She made fun of the whole notion of a man who could fly.”
“Well,” Lois said, “I’m not a psychologist, but I can’t see how she’s a danger to national security.”
She glanced at Susan, who stood up. “I’ll file papers in the morning seeking to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital. I’ll also file a motion to have any charges dismissed.”
“You haven’t even heard what they are,” Agent White said. “Do you really think if this was all that we had on her we’d have held her this lo0ng? We have an urgent need for cell space, and as much as it costs to house these people, it’s in our best interest to get them out of custody if they aren’t persons of interest.”
“So what could my sister have possibly done that’s a threat to the security of the United States?”
“Counterfeiting, forging identification, forging credit cards,” Agent White slipped a pair of gloves on and began pulling objects out of a bag beside him.
Lois froze when she saw the familiar face of Grover Cleveland on a ten dollar bill. Her heart sank when she saw the credit cards made out to the Bank of Metropolis and Lexcorp.
“She’ll also be up on charges of conspiracy.” Agent White said. “According to the terms of the nondisclosure form, if you breathe a word of this to anyone outside this room, we have the right to throw both of you away and lock away the key.”
“Conspiracy?” Lois asked, dreading what he was going to say next.
“Every person on that plane is telling the same cockamamie story,” Agent White shook his head grimly. “Try to sell a jury on the idea that one hundred and ninety five people are all crazy, sharing the same delusion. They’ll throw her ass in jail so fast your head will spin.”
“Everybody on the plane?” Lois asked.
She glanced at Susan, whose face had settled into a noncommittal mask. “There isn’t much of a chance that I’m getting my sister into some nice secluded hospital anytime soon, is there?
Susan shook her head slightly while Agent White laughed.
“There’s not much chance I’m going to see the end of this case before I retire, not if somebody doesn’t break.”
Glancing through the window, Lois saw her sister sitting on the bunk, staring disconsolately at her hands.
“There’s got to be some kind of evidence as to where the plane came from,” Lois said.
“We’re working on it,” Agent White said.
What had Lucy gotten herself into?
“If I can get her to turn State’s evidence against the others, could she get a deal?”
“If she cooperates first,” Agent White said. “I wouldn’t wait too long. We’re working on all the others.”
Lois froze for a moment, and then said, “Lucy had a shoplifting conviction when she was younger. Her fingerprints are on file. Why would you need to dig up the body if you had proof of her identity already?”
Agent White’s face settled into a neutral expression. “We had to be certain.”
“Hoping to find an excuse to ship her off to Guantanomo?”
For the first time Agent White’s face showed a sign of irritation. “I didn’t have to tell you anything. As it is, I’ve pulled as many strings as I could because I thought you deserve to know.”
“Because you thought I might be able to get Lucy to talk,” Lois said.
“She didn’t recognize me,” he said. “Not even after I talked with her.”
“It’s part of the delusion,” Lois said, “or the act. You don’t exist in Superman’s world, so she doesn’t know you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “DNA results will be available in a couple of days; this was a priority. If she’s some kind of an imposter we’ll know about it.”
Glancing back at Lucy through the window, Lois wondered if she could possibly be wrong. Was this some sort of well prepared imposter? There had been a news story not so long ago about a mother who identified the dead body of her son, only to learn that he was alive two days later when he’d returned from a trip. If someone could look so like another person as to fool their own mother…?
But this wasn’t a body on a slab. The mannerisms, the voice…it was impossible.
Lucy was alive and she was in trouble.
“I’ll do what I can to help.”
**************
“You have to be careful what you say to them,” Susan was saying. “They’ll pretend they are just trying to get information on Lucy, but you can bet they are still trying to get information on you.”
“So telling them I starred in a Girls Gone wild video at an Al Qaeda training camp would be a mistake.”
Susan glanced at her irritably. “Are you paying me to talk to myself?”
“Fine,” Lois said. “I’ll keep my nose clean. I’m due a few days off anyway.”
“I need to be with you every time you do a session with Lucy,” Susan said. “If anything comes to trial, they are less likely to try something with me there.”
“Lucy isn’t a terrorist,” Lois said. “I don’t care what any of them think. The girl I knew didn’t have it in her.”
“It’s been five years. How much do you really know about your sister? You left for college when she was eleven.”
“I know enough to know that she wouldn’t be involved in anything like this, not if she was in her right mind.” Lois said sharply.
“They’ll try to get under your skin, make you lose your temper. They can lie to you and it’s perfectly legal. You need me.”
Susan pulled up in front of Lois’s building.
“I must be paying you a lot for roadside service.” Lois said.
Susan pushed the gear shift into park and shifted in her seat to face Lois. “What are you going to do if it turns out that Lucy is guilty?”
“She isn’t,” Lois said stubbornly.
“Have you thought that this might be some kind of Superman cult?”
“They don’t believe in Superman.”
“They believe in Gotham and Batman. What if they are waiting for a Superman as a sort of messiah?”
“Like a Heaven’s Gate sort of thing…poisoned Cool Aid and the Hale Bop Comet?”
“There were kids on that plane,” Susan said. “You have to indoctrinate them pretty hard to get them to all follow the same line. Kids don’t do politics much, but religion…”
“That would make Lucy pretty important,” Lois said.
“That would make you even more important.” Susan said. “Like the Virgin Mary or something. Be careful around these people. You don’t know what they are capable of.”
“So you think they went up in a plane and tried to crash it, hoping that Superman would save them?” Lois laughed slightly. “You’ve been watching too much bad television.”
“Be careful,” Susan said. “My mother would never forgive me if I got you killed.”
“How is she anyway?”
“Still cooks a mean spicy tofu soup.”
“We’ll have to get together when this is all over,” Lois said. “I guess I’d better let you get home.”
Susan nodded. “Jacob gets worried if I’m not home to read him a bed time story.”
Lois nodded and grabbed the door handle. “We’re scheduled to go back there the day after tomorrow. Apparently that’s when they’ll have the results they need to convince them that Lucy is actually my sister and not somebody they can start water boarding right away.”
“Don’t talk like that in front of them.” Susan said sharply. “Get on their bad side and they can make your life a living hell.”
Lois nodded shortly. “Tell that to my apartment.”
As she stepped out of Susan’s Lexus, Lois wondered briefly how it was that she and Susan, so similar in college in terms of determination and goals had ended up living such different lives. Susan had a career, but she’d somehow managed to balance it with a husband and a child.
Lois on the other hand looked to always live alone. She wondered sometimes if she was still going to be in the same apartment fifteen years from now, living alone with only a wall filled with trophies and awards.
She grimaced as she thought of her apartment. She hadn’t bothered to clean the place in the rush of the morning, and she thought irritably of all the cleaning she still had to do. The feds had torn the place apart and she hadn’t bothered putting it right this morning.”
Lois sighed and stepped up to the doorway. The doorman smiled at her and said, “Good evening, Ms. Lane. How was Iraq?”
Forcing a smile, Lois said, “About like you’d expect.”
Heading inside, Lois headed for her mail slot. A service had been taking care of her mail and bills, but now that she was back the mail had resumed.
She scowled at the junk mail which she’d accumulated in only two days, then froze as she saw the familiar package.
The wallet had already come back to her. It was supposed to have gone to her P.O. Box, the one she kept for sources and other confidential business.
“Insufficient postage.” Lois grimaced. She’d used old stamps and the prices had gone up again.
The last thing she needed was for federal agents to catch her with the same kind of counterfeit bills and identification that Lucy had. It would make her look guilty.
She needed to get more postage and resend it.
Trying not to glance around in case she was being watched, Lois put the package under her arm along with the rest of her mail and headed for the elevator.
Hitting the button, she tried not to fidget. There were cameras in the elevator, and she didn’t want to give anyone reason to suspect anything.
Everything was so confusing. She didn’t know what to believe. Susan’s theory was insane, but Lois couldn’t think of anything other than religion that would get two hundred people to stick adamantly to a story that was obviously crazy.
Lucy had been a troubled girl growing up. Whereas Lois had learned to avoid dealing with her parents’ arguments by burying herself in her work, Lucy had always had her heart on her sleeve. She’d rebelled, acted out, tried to get attention.
Toward the end, Lois hadn’t been able to come home once without there being some sort of scene between her parents and her sister. If there had been time, Lois had no doubt that Lucy would have grown out of it, grown up.
Lois realized that she very desperately wanted to know her sister. Before she’d always been the annoyance, the embarrassment. There had been good times when they were younger, but there was so much that they’d missed.
Sisters were supposed to bond when they got older and out of the house. That was supposed to be their time together.
The door to the elevator slid open and Lois headed down the hall.
She was already opening the door when she realized that something was wrong.
The lights were on, the apartment was spotless, and she could hear the sounds of her shower running.
Someone was in her apartment.
Given the day she’d just had, Lois wasn’t in a mood to run.
