Previously - Chapter 15 ***
Chapter 16 ***
“I don’t understand,” she shook her head. “Why would he run from me like that? It was like he thought
I was the bad guy.” Lois was pacing in the small space of the hotel room she would stay in that night. Scott’s room was attached to Lois’s by a door separating the two. Now, Scott sat on Lois’s bed, watching her as she struggled to understand what had happened and ranted about what didn’t make sense.
“Remember, Lex put some pretty rotten things in Clark’s mind,” he answered. “I don’t know all of what he put there. But he wanted Clark to be miserable.
Miserable. Don’t give up, though.”
Lois stopped to look out the window. There wasn’t much to see, just the thick tree line that the hotel butted up against. She knew the highway was on the other side, just as loud as it could be. At least the evergreen trees were nice to look at. Not that she was in a position to enjoy it.
She hung her head. “It hurts,” she whispered, “to see him like this.” She only saw him for a moment, but his jarred expression was already etched in her mind. The look in his eyes was one of disbelief and concern, haunting her. She saw it again every time she closed her eyes. What had Lex done to him to make him afraid of her?
“Were you able to sing any of the songs I gave you?” Scott asked.
“No, I didn’t even get that close to him.” She threw her hands up in frustration, turning to face him. “He was with a woman. Who was she?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, shaking his head.
She hadn’t expected that. Of course, she hadn’t really known what to expect. If she had believed for the past two months that she was happily married to Lex Luthor, it was possible that he could have been with someone else as well.
She swallowed, unwilling to allow herself to think about that any further. “As soon as he saw me, he bolted.”
“Give him time,” Scott said encouragingly. “We’ll figure out where he is.”
How would they? Columbia was a dwarf next to Metropolis, but, as a college town, it was filled with people this time of year. All they knew at this point was that he worked for the local paper covering city government issues.
“Looks like I’ll be a stalker for a while…” she said sarcastically. She turned and leaned against the window sill.
“Don’t worry,” Scott said, chuckling, as he stood from the bed and made his way to his room. “It will all work out in the end. For now, let’s get some lunch.”
“Sounds good, I’m starving.” And she was. She hadn’t been able to eat breakfast that morning. She’d been too nervous, knowing she would have some time to talk to Scott and worrying that Lex would want to do more than just say goodbye. Then she hadn’t eaten much on the plane or since they arrived. “Know any good places to eat?”
“Yeah,” Scott answered from the other room. “I heard from the guy at the front desk that Shiloh is good.”
An advertisement for the restaurant laid on the table. Lois looked it over. “A bar and grill? Sounds great. Looks like they’re right downtown, so maybe afterwards we can walk toward the paper and see if we see Clark there.”
“Sure.” Scott entered her room again and leaned on the doorway.
She looked at him standing there and, for the first time, noticed the lines around his eyes. The question she hadn’t had a chance to ask yet popped into her head. “Scott, why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m hungry,” he answered with a frown.
“No,” she said with a laugh. “You work for Lex. And you had a hand in all this. Why are you helping me? And why now?” She pinned him with a serious stare. After finding out that he had been part of the plan, it didn’t make sense. Something was missing for her to understand. Had he just had some prick of conscience?
He looked at the floor and shook his head. Seconds passed. Lois waited as patiently as she could for him to answer. “I made a promise,” he finally said without looking up.
“A promise? To whom?”
A long heavy breath escaped him. He fiddled with the treble clef on his wrist, tied with a leather strap. When he said, “My sister,” Lois finally realized where she’d seen the charm before. It had been Samantha’s. He’d started wearing it just after she died.
“Samantha? How-” she began, brows knit, but was interrupted by the look on Scott’s face when his head came up. His eyes were filled with grief and anger. She sat silently, waiting for him to continue. Lois couldn’t imagine how Samantha could possibly be involved in this. She was young and sweet and innocent.
“She made me promise just before she died that I would stop this.” Scott admitted. “She-” he stopped and let another heavy breath out.
It was plainly written on his face that this was hard for him to talk about. She offered him a way out. “Look, Scott, you don’t have to explain.”
“No, it’s okay. My … uh … therapist has been encouraging me to talk about what happened instead of bottling everything up inside.”
Lois briefly considered making some snarky comment about therapists but stopped herself knowing full well that now wasn’t the time.
Scott sighed again. “Hightower. He … used my sister when we were testing the device. She was a test subject.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, clenching his fists into tight balls. “I was part of the test, too, in a way.” Scott was clearly frustrated and felt the need to get back up. As he paced the room, Lois could feel the anger radiating from him and she prepared herself to hear something devastating.
“He …
took advantage of her.” He kicked the edge of the dresser and let out a growl causing Lois to jump.
Lois felt the blood drain from her face and sat down on the bed. This was beyond anything she was expecting. That Lex could even authorize such depravity surprised her and, at the same time, brought back to mind her own predicament. As the nausea crept back up, she reached for a glass of water on the table beside the bed.
“This was a specific test. One Luthor ordered … to test the limits …” He trailed off, swallowed, and took a deep breath before trying to continue again. “After he … uh …”—Scott cleared his throat—“he used the device on her.” Scott slammed his white knuckles into the wall. “Then he brought her home to see if I could tell,” his said as his voice cracked. He rubbed his knuckles with his other hand.
“Oh my God,” she said under her breath.
“You know she died of pancreatic cancer. We tested on cancer patients, but not late stage. I don’t know if it was the treatment or the cancer or some song playing in the hall at the hospital or what, but she remembered. There at the end, she became so miserable.” He paused and swallowed hard. “I thought it was just the cancer, the pain, knowing she was dying. But that last day … she told me … all of it … And I could see she felt relieved to tell me. I promised I would stop Hightower, stop Lex.”
“Oh, Scott,” was all she could say. The times in her life when Lois was left speechless were few and far between but the sullen air hovering around them and the despicable nature of what she’d just learned stunned her for a moment.
“She knew everything,” he added. “Hightower told her everything about what we were doing and whose idea it was before he…”
She walked over to him at that moment and placed her hand on his shoulder to offer support. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” He shook his head and reached for the charm on his wrist. “I hope you can at least be sure you can trust me now.”
“I didn’t need this to be able to trust you.” Nodding to the charm, she asked, “Is this why you wear that?”
Scott nodded and, standing straighter, seemed to shake himself out of the somber mood that had taken over. “She wanted me to keep it.” A sad smile spread across his face.
“She would be proud of what you’ve already done.”
Scott paused before he nodded again and let out a deep breath. “Let’s go get some food.”
***
“And here’s the records I got from the doctor last week.” Alexia handed Jimmy a file folder. He flipped through the pages of this set of records and the paper copies from two months ago, scanning for anything that stood out.
“And what was the procedure your brother was supposed to go in for?”
“Asthma tests,” David, her brother, said. “I’d been having some trouble breathing lately. After I exercise. So, I went in and they did all these breathing tests.”
“Wait, you remember all this?” Jimmy asked with his brow furrowed.
“Yeah, this morning. It was the weirdest thing.” David shook his head and took a sip of his drink before continuing. “So, we were on our way home this morning, from our parents in Vermont. We stopped at this diner to get some breakfast and as soon as I walked in, I started to feel … weird, kind of like when they put the laughing gas mask on you at the dentist, but without thinking everything is funny.”
“He looked like he might pass out,” Alexia added. “I helped him sit down and after a few minutes it was gone.”
“Everything got all foggy, and I remembered something that happened that morning and then the asthma tests, like I was reliving it all. Then it was over.”
Jimmy looked between the two with his eyebrows raised. If more of the patients were able to remember, they might be able to piece together something to figure out what was really going on. “Do you have any idea what caused you to remember?”
“I don’t know,” David said. “Maybe the smell of the food? I’ve heard smells can trigger memories.”
“Have you talked to your lawyer yet?” Jimmy asked.
“It’s on our list of things to do this afternoon,” Alexia said.
“I’ll be interested to hear how that goes.” Jimmy jotted down a reminder to follow up with them later. “Is there anything else you can remember about the diner? Anything at all? Sometimes sights and sounds can trigger memories.”
“It was kind of old-fashioned-country themed,” said Alexia. “They were playing a lot of Nat King Cole songs. I had a veggie omelet and he had waffles.” She shrugged. “Not sure if any of that helps.”
“Me either, but you never know.” Jimmy smiled at them both as he rose from his seat to leave.
***
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