Per several people's request that I re-work the scene in Miranda's shop, due to Clark and Lois's lack of reaction to finding Miranda's dead body... Here is the updated scene for the Archives:
They looked around the small boutique and at many of the bottles of perfumes Miranda had on display for several minutes, and still no one came to answer the tinkling of the bells.
“We might as well poke around,” Lois hissed under her breath, in case someone really was in the back room. Perhaps Miranda was there, only hiding from them because she recognized them from her visit to the Daily Planet.
“Hello?” Clark called, pushing aside the beaded curtain, leading to the back room, as Lois went to check the bottles of perfume behind the register.
“Lois,” her partner called to her.
“What did you find?” she asked, peeking through the curtain.
Dangling from the rafters above the worktable was the blonde haired, flouncy shirted perfumer with a rope around her neck.
Lois gasped and turned away from the sight. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath so she wouldn’t be tempted to step into his arms for comfort as she had when they had discovered Dr. Platt’s dead body. Back under control, she turned around and faced Clark again, avoiding looking at Miranda as she did so.
“She’s cold,” Clark announced softly, a hitch of concern permeating his voice. He let go of Miranda’s ankle. “She’s been dead a while.”
“Terrific,” Lois grumbled, swallowing down the bile that naturally arose during these types of occasions. She forced herself to focus on the story. With Miranda’s death, there went their only lead. They might never find out why the woman had gone after the Daily Planet with such vengeance. Lois saw several familiar perfume bottles on the counter behind Clark. “Hey, isn’t that the bottle from the photo?” she asked, pointing. “Grab one, and we’ll have it checked out by Dr. Freidman at S.T.A.R. Labs to see if Miranda was indeed our culprit.”
Clark raised a disapproving eyebrow. “This is now a crime scene, Lois. The less we touch, the better.”
I've also cut the Bet from the end of that scene and just mention it at the beginning of the next scene (with Lois being the instigator, this time):
Monday morning, despite her waiting on hold, Clark walked up to Lois and dropped a faxed copy of Miranda’s autopsy report on her desk. “Murder. That’ll be five bucks, please.”
She snatched up the paper and quickly read it. Clark had been positive that Miranda’s death was a murder, and that the city’s favorite resident billionaire was to blame. His reasoning had something to do with the temperature of the store being colder than one would expect in February. Clark had hypothesized that the murderer had most likely lowered the thermostat to hide the true time of death. Lois had in turn bet him it would be ruled suicide by the cornor’s office.
“Evidence of multiple strangulation points and bruising consistent with an attack from another person,” she summarized, tossing the paper back at Clark. “But it also says that it was the rope that killed her, not the hand-to-hand strangulation. Murder was inconclusive. You didn’t win.”
“It shows that someone strangled her until she passed out and then put a noose around her neck and strung her up to die. That sounds like murder to me,” Clark retorted.
I hope these fixes for the Archive version are acceptable to my readers. I apologize for taking so long in getting the rewrites done. Sometimes, my muse is a fickle friend.
