Previously:
She groaned. Just what did he qualify as ‘making a fool of yourself?’
“Did I really…” She chickened out before she could complete the thought.
“…do the Dance of the Seven Veils?” He nodded ruefully. “All seven.”
“I was more worried about the stuff on the coffee table,” she blurted out before remembering that she was never going to talk about that degrading affair.
He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t remember you dancing on the table.”
Dancing? Was that the worst thing that happened? She danced a little bit? She thought back to the state of her attire this morning. While there was a lot of flesh showing, at least the important parts were all covered. Perhaps she hadn’t even danced a complete striptease.
What a relief! “So that other stuff must have been just a dream—not that I was dreaming about you or anything. I was just… Well, I guess I was…”
“Not yourself,” Clark decided firmly. “Just forget about last night. It doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe not to you, but it matters to me.”
“The important thing is getting to the bottom of this. Somebody deliberately infected us with this stuff. I have a theory.” Clark scrambled through some magazines which had been dumped on the floor by the sofa. “Do you remember this woman? Miranda?”
She nodded as comprehension dawned. “She was the one spraying that nasty fragrance on everybody. You think she put something in the perfume?”
“That’s my theory, but I’m going to need my partner back to normal if I’m going to find out the whats, whens, wheres, and whys.”
“Give me an hour to wash off that dreadful perfume and change into something more professional.” Her purse lay in a heap next to the door, surrounded by a pile of translucent fabric, undoubtedly the seven veils she had worn over here. She patted down her coat to find her keys in the pocket. “I’ll be back here in an hour,” she confirmed again. “But don’t forget that no matter whose daughter I am, I wasn’t drunk, and no matter who you are, I wouldn’t have seduced you if I was sober. You better be ready to go when I get back here, cause if I ever catch you slacking off fantasizing about something that may or may not have happened last night you’ll be looking for a new partner.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she heard her partner agree as she slammed the door shut in her haste to exit.
Part 2:
The hour raced by, but if Clark noticed she was running late he didn’t say anything. He had tracked down an address for Miranda’s nasty perfume shop. It was easy to sit quietly on the twenty-five minute subway ride, but the silence was stretching thin on the ten minute walk that followed.
She slowed as they past a newsstand. “Have you seen today’s edition?”
Her partner shrugged. “Pretty sappy.”
“Not only is it an inane story, but they’ve also got the date wrong.” She handed the paper to her partner and jabbed a finger at the masthead.
“No, it’s not. It’s Thursday, November 6.”
She felt her stomach lurch. “What happened to Wednesday?”
Clark avoided her eyes. “You shopped. You wrote love poetry. You danced.”
“But I didn’t write…” Lois stopped herself before she said too much. Her novel was her own business.
“Your article was on page three.” Clark stuffed his hands in his pocket, rocking on his heels and looking rather smug. “It was rather…” He stifled a chuckle. “…moving.”
“Give me that!” she demanded, snatching the paper back. She flipped the page open and scanned for her byline. “Of all the drippy, sentimental fluff! Why would the editorial staff publish this stuff? My only source was an e-mail from Lucy.”
“Perhaps the editors thought that the warmth you displayed demonstrated clear emotional growth in your journalistic skills.”
“Or perhaps they were just as shnockered on Chanel Potion Number Nine as I was.”
“Did you notice that Ralph had a page one story?”
“Get out!” Ralph couldn’t write his way out of a box. She flipped back to the front page. Thankfully it was published under the fold. She read aloud, “Finding Love at the Dog Show. Oh please, tell me he isn’t covering his conquests on the front page.”
Clark’s face split into a grin. “Miniature poodle and schitzu.”
“Of course. That sounds like front page news. The Daily Planet is an international laughingstock.”
“This edition did have a few talking heads raising their eyebrows.”
“So where’s your story?” She impatiently flipped through pages, scanning as she went.
“Page twelve,” he helpfully supplied.
“Don’t tell me. ‘Mating Rituals of the Knobbed-tailed Gecko.’”
Clark pulled the paper away from her face in a snit. “I was covering the dockworkers strike. You know, my personnel files aren’t open for your perusal.”
“It wasn’t in your personnel files. Perry never keeps samples of your work; he just reads them over. You left them on your kitchen table. I read them way back when I first met you, on that day that you were standing around in a towel when it was time to go to work.”
“Are yous guys gonna buy that paper?” the balding man behind the counter demanded. “It’s lookin’ like birdcage liner.”
“Have you read the headline? Who would buy that drivel?” Lois discarded the paper on the countertop and resumed their quest toward the witch’s lair. She paused to see Clark pulling out a dollar bill and some change and tucking the discarded paper under his arm. He jogged to catch up. He was such a do-gooder.
Or not. Maybe he just wanted to keep that edition as blackmail material. She would do it in a heartbeat if she thought it would get her ahead.
For now all that mattered was taking down the Morgana that had poisoned her. If Clark wanted to play good cop, she had the bad cop mastered.
~*~
“I can’t believe you made nice with her,” Lois complained, yanking her chair away from the desk in a vain effort to vent frustration.
“I didn’t make nice with her, I was playing a part,” Clark defended himself.
“And you got nothing for it. She was lying, if you hadn’t noticed.”
He flipped through his business card index distractedly. “I know. Her pulse rate was over 150. But I didn’t want to keep you in that shop any longer than I had to. You haven’t recovered from your last dose of Miranda’s perfume; I didn’t want to risk another exposure.”
“What are you talking about? Her pulse rate was over 150? And why would I be exposed again?”
“Forget it,” he mused, pulling out a card. “It’s just an idiom. Kind of like talking a mile a minute, right? Anyway, I didn’t want to be the one to expose you.” The corner of his mouth tweaked up in a grin as he pulled out a familiar-looking atomizer and placed it on his desk. He picked up the phone and dialed a number from a business card.
“Nice,” she accidentally confessed. She eavesdropped on Clark’s phone call while she booted her computer.
Logic dictated that she should check out her business files first, but her heart had her look at her novel. She couldn’t believe that she had lost a full day and a half’s work during November. There was nothing that forbid her from finishing the writing process in December, except that she had promised herself that she would finish on or before November 30. That gave her only twenty-four more days to work.
If she remembered correctly she had written somewhere around 8,350 words. She pulled out her calculator and crunched the numbers. That meant that she needed to average writing just over seventeen hundred words a day, which was difficult but doable.
She gave a glance over her shoulder as the document opened, but nobody was paying attention. Quickly she clicked on the file’s properties and checked her statistics. Her calculator clattered to her desk as she double-checked the figures.
According to the computer’s calculations she had written 14,271 words on her novel. But that meant that she must have devoted a lot of time and energy to the writing process while she was under the influence.
She scrolled down to read the new material. Apparently she had introduced a new character, a protagonist named Kent who had olive skin, a mole just above his lip, rich brown eyes, buns like Michelangelo’s David, and a ton of other physical characteristics that Lois didn’t want to think about while she was on the job.
She picked up a folder from her desktop and fanned her face.
She read the last fourteen pages slowly, with a proofreader’s eye. All in all it wasn’t bad material. The style of writing had changed dramatically as Wanda spoke in a much more sophisticated voice than she had in the beginning, but she was still a strong character.
It was a pity she would have to ax the entire office supply closet scene. On the one hand, it was passionate, vivid writing. On the other hand, it didn’t fit the mood one would expect down at the docks. Still, there was something about the raw emotion that touched her heart.
She reread it again, more slowly.
“Lois, are you okay?” Clark asked her. So transfixed was she with the story that she hadn’t even noticed him walk behind her desk. She turned off her monitor as he placed a gentle hand on her cheek, as if checking her temperature. He fussed over her like a mother hen. “You don’t have a fever, but your face is flushed and your breathing is rapid.”
“Must be leftovers from the perfume. The headache never did go away.” The headache problem was true, and the other confession was mostly true. Her new material was definitely left over from the perfume, although she had no idea why her face would flush as she read it. It wasn’t embarrassing at all. Obviously Kent and Wanda felt genuine love for each other, and they were consenting adults.
“Maybe you should go home and sleep it off,” her partner worried. “I’m just making a trip to the lab to have this analyzed anyway. With the commute and the paperwork, that could take hours.”
Of course, Lois wanted revenge against that evil woman and her manipulative ways. There was no excuse for making her so drunk that she would make a pass at her hick partner.
However, it was difficult to keep her ire up when she saw the unintended side effects. With her inhibitions loosened Lois obviously wrote more prolifically. Perhaps she should hurry back to her apartment, pick up a notepad and write before the drug completely left her system.
The only question was whether she should begin writing at the end of where she left off or whether she pretend as if the new material was just a little sidebar. Even if it was beautiful, there was no way it fit into the rest of the story.
~*~
In the end it was Clark who brought down Miranda. The newspaper gave credit to Superman and Detective Watsyong, but it was Clark who put all of the pieces together to figure out where Miranda would strike next. On his tip, Superman was able to catch the Jezebel red-handed.
As for Lois, she was at home, purportedly recovering. Perry hadn’t batted an eyelash at her extended recoup time—probably because he was still recovering from perfume-induced humiliations. Clark had mentioned something about Perry going through his own hard time with a co-worker. It sounded pretty bad, but Lois had been writing in her notebook with the phone crunched to her shoulder at the time. She had murmured all of the right “hmmm”s and “oh”s, but she didn’t remember the details. It was probably for the better though since what she didn’t know wouldn’t change her impression of Perry any. As long as he didn’t end up with any strange diseases he could just put the whole sordid mess behind him.
Apparently Jimmy had also put himself in harm’s way while under the influence for the sake of some model or actress or something. It was understandable that his life was risked. If Jimmy had come onto her, Lois would have threatened him with bodily harm too.
As for herself, her muse must have wandered off when the headache arrived. She continued to write but the words no longer flew off her fingertips. She still had haunting dreams left over that left her confused as to what was the reality of her past and what was inspired by her writings.
Much of her remembrances didn’t make sense when compared to Clark’s reactions from when she regained her senses. He acted as if she had only been over for a little bit of dancing and conversation. She remembered much more intimate activities.
Just to be certain that her memories weren't accurate, she had set up a doctor’s appointment for the beginning of next week to test for pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. She had arranged it for the mid-afternoon so she could take a half day of medical leave and spend the afternoon writing. That was more than fair since she had gone into the office on multiple occasions to finish up a story when she would have easily been excused to go home sick.
Clark and she were beginning to fall back into their comfortable rhythm, although she didn’t come into the bullpen as early as she had in October and she didn’t stay as late. Her partner still scooted out, leaving her to cover for him, on a semi-regular basis. At the moment, though, there were no monumental stories out there, so it was just an annoyance when he left her holding the bag.
In her free time, Lois had been taking her notebook down to the docks to get back to that salty feeling in her novel. Sitting under a streetlamp she had ignored the curious looks from the dockworkers and the rude comments from the other riffraff. She had no time for them; she was letting the song of the streets cast its spell in her writing.
Last night she had almost dozed off in the edge of an alley. It was a good thing she only had brought her keys, her pen and her notepad or else she may have ended up a statistic—not that she was worried about it. She could handle herself on the streets of Metropolis any day of the week.
Still, her game was a little off at work the next day.
Clark was putting in some kind of a bid to travel to some boring news story that wasn’t local at all. She was halfway through the conversation before she realized that Perry was not only buying his plug but also was considering sending her along.
It was bad enough that she had to cover for him in Metropolis, but there was no way she was going to cut him any slack in Pig Slop, Kentucky.
“If he needs a partner he can take Carl from Travel,” she’d argued.
“Carl doesn’t do hard news,” Perry had stated firmly. She raised an eyebrow in contempt. As if the EPA messing with the FFA was hard news!
“Exactly,” Clark had sided with him like a good little brownnoser. “I just have a feeling that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Whoever covers this one is going to have to have the ability to dig beneath the surface… kind of like the first reporters at Love Canal.”
It didn’t sound a bit like Love Canal to her. It sounded like the same government runaround spin that happened in every city in every state of every country. Besides, she wasn’t sure she could continue to keep the grit going for Wanda if Lois were writing in some soybean field in the Heartland.
“You’re gonna’ let me cover a big story like that? Wow! I should be so honored,” she sniped in return. “You gonna’ buy me a Greyhound ticket? I’m not sure they can land airplanes on Podunkville’s gravel roads.”
“It’s Smallville,” Clark interrupted, correcting a perfectly good slur. “The airport is only about an hour’s drive away by paved, divided, four-lane highway, and I think the story will be worth your while. Big government versus everyday American. It’s the kind of thing that resonates with the reader.”
“Maybe you would have a point if this were the Reader’s Digest, but this is The Daily Planet. We report on cutting edge stories for a sophisticated readership.”
“Part of sophistication is diversity,” Clark retorted.
“We have plenty of diversity here. We don’t need to export it. Besides, this story is better suited to the Little League Press.”
“Just in case you two hadn’t noticed,” Perry interrupted, “I run this little shindig. I decide who covers what story. I say the who, where and when, and if I pick you I expect you to go.”
“Fine,” Lois agreed with a flip of the watch. “But right now I say that I’m late to my doctor’s office.”
Clark switched gears on a dime. The snooty farmboy was gone, replaced by the gentle boy-next-door who wrote touchy feely like it was front page news. “You okay?” She halfway expected him to kiss her forehead like her grandma used to do when she was worried young Lois might be feverish.
“I’m fine.” She pulled her purse from the bottom drawer, stuffed her notebook inside and slammed the drawer shut with the sole of her pumps. “I’m sure it’s no more serious than any of the—what was it, three?—visits you took to the dentist last week. Let me know what you decide, Chief. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As she got to the elevator she overheard Clark giving another of his lame excuses. “That reminds me. I need to go see my pharmacist.”
