Home V: Obsession -- 14/?
by Nan Smith
Previously:
Deirdre was covered in a layer of trash and snow, but she was breathing, and he could hear her heart beating -- slowly, much too slowly, but still beating. He scooped her out of the dumpster bare seconds ahead of the robot. She was unconscious, and her breathing was hoarse and ragged. Lori and Barry Marston rounded the corner as he carried the woman away from the bot and stretched her on the ground.
"Dee!" He heard Barry's shout, but paid no attention as he fanned her from head to toe with low-level heat vision, listening to her body's response as he did so. The snow around her melted at once and the water began to steam. He could hear her heartbeat begin to speed up as her body warmed, and her breathing grew infinitesimally stronger.
"Dee!" Barry flung himself to the ground next to her. "Ohmigod! Is she --"
Clark glanced quickly at Lori and then returned instantly to his task of sweeping Deirdre repeatedly from head to toe with heat vision. "She's alive," he said. "She's hypothermic, and has frostbite, assorted bumps and bruises, and a broken ankle. I'm going to take her to the emergency room." As he spoke he stooped, lifted her gently in his arms and rose smoothly into the air with all the care at his command. Behind him, he heard Lori speaking.
"Barry, why don't you head for the hospital. I'll go get Clark and we'll catch up with you."
**********
And now, Part 14:
Lori wrapped her coat more tightly around herself and started in the direction of the apartment entrance. Barry had already disappeared at a run toward the slidewalk. She would wait five minutes, she decided, and follow. Clark would undoubtedly be back within a few minutes, and could follow the slidewalk in order to catch up with her. The heavy snow would be no barrier to Superman's eyesight.
She hadn't really wanted to wait by herself, but she had needed to avoid the circumstance of Barry discovering that Clark was no longer in Deirdre's apartment.
Speaking of which, she'd better lock the place up again, or at least see to it that no one realized that it was unlocked. Lori entered the apartment house and made her way toward the creaky elevator in the small, shabby lobby.
This particular establishment was very similar to the one where she had lived in the months following her graduation, during the period of Clark's and her courtship. She smiled at the old-fashioned term, but that was what it had been. Clark had cautiously and gently courted her, winning her heart over a period of a few weeks, although, Lori acknowledged, he'd had a good start on it within a few days of their first meeting. He'd come to her rescue over the article she had written in the school paper that blasted NTSU's security measures and embarrassed the school administration. Regardless of how true it had been, the people in charge hadn't liked it one bit, and if it hadn't been for Clark she would, she acknowledged now, have been in the proverbial soup. Clark's intervention had saved her a good deal of embarrassment and possibly her career. She couldn't have been more grateful.
Of course, she knew now that he'd had an agenda of his own. On their first meeting, when Superman had saved her from an assailant on the university grounds, he had recognized her as his soul-mate, returned again. He'd been determined from that minute on to find some way for Clark Kent to get to know her, but it didn't really matter what his reasons had been. He would, he told her later, have stepped into the situation anyway, because the university's administrators had been unforgivably careless with the safety of their students for far too long. Still, it had led to a great deal more than Lori had ever imagined in those early days.
The elevator doors opened jerkily, and Lori entered, then waited while they closed again, and the conveyance jolted into motion. By the time the doors opened on the second floor, she had begun to wonder if the thing had stalled, and was contemplating calling for her husband to rescue her.
Glancing at her wrist talker, she was surprised to see that in actuality barely three minutes had passed. Still, that was a long time for a stupid elevator to take in getting from the first to the second floor. Deirdre Monitor's unit was at the end of the hall and to the right as she exited the elevator. Lori half-ran down the corridor, turned down the short, intersecting hallway and found the room. The door was ajar, and she reached out to grasp the knob.
And at that instant, she became aware of footsteps coming down the main hallway toward her, light, quick footsteps that somehow had a stealthy quality to them.
She froze. The footsteps stopped as well, as if the owner had paused, perhaps also listening.
It was probably nothing, she told herself. Someone had come home and was undoubtedly unlocking the door of his unit to go inside. Why would anyone have followed her here? There were far too many people around to try to kill anyone in the hallway of an apartment building. The killer was sure to be caught.
But there was no clink of keys, no sound of anyone turning a lock. The locks on these ancient apartments were the mechanical sort. The managers, as with her place, had not seen fit to go to extra expense for the benefit of the tenants. The silence had a listening quality to it that made her skin crawl. Lori strained her ears, listening, and the unwelcome thought occurred to her that if anyone *was* home in this place, that they were extremely unlikely to open their doors to the sound of a stunner, or even a scream. People in apartments like this tended to mind their own business.
On the thought, she pushed the door wider, praying that Deirdre had recently oiled the hinges, and stepped inside.
If it was the killer, he had the key to this place, she knew. Instead of trying to lock the door, Lori stepped behind it and left it ajar, flattening herself to the wall.
The footsteps resumed, coming closer. Again they paused, just outside the room, only feet away. Lori held her breath, her heart hammering so hard in her chest that she was afraid that the person who stalked her might hear it.
This was silly, she told herself again, even as she couldn't force herself to move. If it was the apartment manager and he found her hiding behind the door, he would have every reason to call the police and have her arrested as a trespasser and possible burglar. The smart thing to do would be to step out there and explain her presence.
The thought of doing any such thing nearly froze her in place. Some instinct that she wasn't even aware of seemed to have paralyzed her muscles. All she could do was to press herself even tighter to the wall, breathing as silently as she could, and hope that whoever it was didn't decide to search the premises.
A board creaked outside the room, and something brushed the door. It swung lightly toward Lori, and she stopped breathing. Another creak, and the tip of something became visible past the edge of the door. The nose of a stunner. Lori had seen enough of them in the past couple of years that there could be no possibility of a mistake.
Of course, some area of her mind assured her wildly, the manager could have armed himself if he was afraid of facing a burglar.
Her more rational side told her to stop making excuses. This wasn't the manager. This was their killer, who might have been watching the entrance of the apartment for Deirdre to come home, or who might have been following her and Clark from the Daily Planet. They had taken the slidewalk; following them in the dense snow would have been absurdly easy, especially since they hadn't even thought of the possibility that someone might be following.
The nose of the stunner advanced another inch. She could see the knuckle of a finger wrapped around the trigger. Lori gathered herself. If the killer came any farther into the room, she intended to slam the door into him -- or her, that pedantic part of her mind reminded her -- with everything she had.
Somewhere, through the pounding of blood in her ears, she heard the sound of more footsteps; several pairs of footsteps, she thought, approaching the intersection of the main hallway with the one that led to Deirdre's apartment. There was a rustle of motion and the stunner withdrew abruptly. The intruder's footsteps retreated. Lori waited for the count of ten and followed.
An older woman and two children somewhere in their early teens rounded the corner as she approached. Lori pushed quickly past them to peer down the hallway that led to the elevator, but all she could see was the door to the narrow stairwell that led to the other floors closing the last few inches. She turned quickly. "Did you see the person that just passed you?"
The older woman turned curiously. "Are you talking to me?"
"Yes, please! Did you see the person who just went past you?"
She nodded cautiously. "Are you a cop?"
"No, I'm a reporter. The person -- can you describe him?"
The woman shrugged. "Not really."
"Was it a man or woman?"
"I didn't really notice. He was wearing a coat and a hat. And a muffler."
Great, Lori thought. Whoever it was had taken precautions against witnesses. Of course, if he -- or she -- had just come in out of the snowstorm, it made it easy to be anonymous. "Did you notice the height?" she asked, without much hope.
"Nope. I think he was taller than I am," she said. "Sorry I can't help much. Come on, kids. Get your teeth brushed. The appointment's in barely an hour!"
"Aw, Grandma! I don't wanna --"
Dental appointment, Lori surmised. That was probably why the kids weren't in school. She turned toward the elevator again, feeling a not-unreasonable reluctance. Still, she told herself, the killer wouldn't dare try anything out in the open, and maybe she would catch a glimpse of a familiar face.
But standing in front of the apartment house, two minutes later, all she could see were the clouds of falling snow, and here and there the occasional indistinct figure making its way through the storm. Any of them could be the killer -- and probably was, she thought morosely. But there was no way she was going to identify him from here.
A whoosh of air alerted her, and she turned to see Lara touching down on the stationary sidewalk beside her. She let out her breath in a half-gasp of relief.
The tiny superwoman didn't miss a thing. She glanced around quickly. "What's the matter, Lori?"
"I'm all right," Lori said.
Lara lifted an eyebrow in a gesture very like her father. "Right," she said, "that's why your pulse-rate is over a hundred and fifty. What happened? Clark asked me to come by and check on you because of the neighborhood. I'm sorry I took so long. I wasted time looking for you on the slidewalk route to the hospital."
Lori glanced at her wrist. "It's only been about twelve minutes since he left."
"Uh huh. I've noticed before that a lot can happen to you in twelve minutes. So what *did* happen?"
"I think the killer was here," Lori said, reluctantly.
"Killer?" Lara said. She rolled her eyes in exasperation. "I'll teach Clark to leave out details! Come on. If there's somebody around that's trying to kill you, I'm not leaving you alone. I'll give you a lift to Metro General. You can tell me about it on the way."
**********
The email was from an address that John had never heard of, and was labeled "URGENT" in capital letters. That, in itself, wouldn't have convinced him of anything, but he leaned forward to read it. Within a sentence, he devoted his full attention to it. He'd received uncomplimentary emails about some of his reporters before, but this one was something out of the ordinary, even for someone unhappy with the behavior of one of them. Lori had definitely gotten under someone's skin, he thought, as he continued to read, his eyebrows rising higher and higher as he progressed. By the time he had finished, he was as sure as he could be that the person Clark and Lori were hunting had made the mistake of trying to undermine his best female investigative journalist. He glanced at the miniature vidscreen on his desk. "Police Department," he said. "Velma Chow's office."
**********
Lara touched down on the stationary sidewalk in front of Metropolis's largest hospital, a short distance from the emergency department, and set Lori carefully on her feet. "I think you should be safe here," she said. "Nobody could have made it here as fast as we did unless he flew. Tell Clark I've got a few words for him when I see him again."
"Lara, it wasn't his fault," Lori said. "Deirdre needed to get here as fast as possible. He expected me to follow him. Besides, he couldn't have known the killer would show up at her apartment. I didn't think of it, either."
"I don't know why not," Lara said. "He showed up in the parking garage." The diminutive superwoman surveyed her with a tiny smile. "Trust your sense of responsibility to get you in trouble. Look, Lori, until this guy is caught, do my blood pressure a favor and stay where a lot of people can see you. If something happened to you, Dad wouldn't be the only person devastated. And not just because of my newest sibling." She smiled more widely. "I like you, too, and so do CJ, Annie, Jon and Ronnie. And a lot of other people as well."
"I know, even if I'm not sure why," Lori said. "I'm pretty high maintenance."
Lara didn't try to deny it. "True. You're also brave, honest, idealistic, and determined to do the right thing, and you protect my dad like a tigress. Most important, he loves you and you make him happy. You're good for him, Lori. You're so much like Lois that sometimes it's scary."
"Really?"
Lara nodded emphatically. "After my mom died, Dad changed. He was still my dad, but he wasn't happy. Something vital went out of him, and none of us could replace it. Without her, he was desperately lonely -- until the day he walked in and announced that he was taking a job in Metropolis. Whatever had been gone had come back and we could all feel it. It was the morning after he met you." Lara was smiling at her. "Dad didn't know it, but we had a phone conference that day -- all four of us, and the other relatives who live in Metropolis. We decided that whoever you were, we had to help Dad win you any way that we possibly could." She was grinning now. "You never stood a chance."
Lori giggled. "I'm glad I didn't," she said. "Clark is everything I ever wanted, and then some."
"Good," Lara said. "I'm calling him now -- and I'm not leaving until he's with you again." She paused. "He says he went to get Barry -- is that Ms. Monitor's boyfriend? -- and he'll be here in a minute."
"Yes, it is," Lori said. She fell silent, thinking about what Lara had said. She had felt a little like an intruder into the super-family in the beginning. After all, how could she, a mere mortal, possibly compete with Lois Lane? The feeling had passed fairly quickly after meeting Clark's children but now she knew that she needn't have worried. All of them had been rooting for her and Clark from the start. Did Lara know about the past lives thing? Probably not, she thought. It wasn't something that you would tend to talk about, unless you wanted people to think you were a complete wacko.
She found herself staring at Lara's profile as Clark's daughter glanced away for a second, squinting at something that Lori couldn't see through the snow. The diminutive superwoman stood two inches shorter than she, but you didn't think about her height. Her personality was electric and tended to sweep all before it. Lara had inherited Lois's personality, Clark had told her, and for just an instant, Lori saw a small, determined girl with Clark's eyes and the same firm chin, then the vision vanished and she was Superwoman again.
Lara was watching her curiously, her eyebrows raised, Lori realized suddenly, and felt herself flushing.
"What's the matter? Do I have a smudge on my nose?" Lara asked.
"No. I was just thinking how much you look like Clark."
"Dad tells me I act like my mom, though," Lara said. "It's a good thing I inherited Dad's powers or I'd have gotten myself in more trouble than you can imagine."
"You didn't have them when you were little, though, did you?"
Lara shook her head. "No. I never got sick, though, and I tended to be a daredevil. It used to give Dad heart failure on a regular basis."
Lori giggled. "I guess we'll need to keep a close eye on this one," she remarked, patting her middle.
"Probably," Lara said. "If you're lucky, maybe it will be a boy. All the women in our family tend to be handfuls. They all take after Mom. I doubt any daughter of yours will be any different."
Lori giggled. "Well, at least I'll have some super-powered baby sitters. Maybe that will help." She laughed suddenly. "I guess it *is* hereditary, now that I think of it. I just found out last night that I'm Lucy Lane's great-great grand daughter."
Lara stared at her and then began to chuckle. "It figures," was all she said.
"What figures?" Clark, wearing his heavy coat and muffler, appeared out of the whirling snow.
"I just told Lara what Dad told us last night," Lori said. "How's Deirdre?"
"They've got her under heat lamps right now, and IVs and a bunch of other hideous things," Clark said. "They think she'll be okay. I left Barry with her."
"That's a relief. I guess while we're here we'd better go see Carla," Lori said.
"Probably," Clark said. "Thanks for picking up Lori," he told his daughter.
"No problem," Lara said. "Next time it might be helpful if you *tell* me she's being stalked by a killer, though -- although I should have realized something dangerous was going on. It usually is where Lori's concerned."
"Sorry," Clark said. "Why?"
"Lori will tell you about it," Lara said with a slight grin. "I have to run -- or fly. You're coming to dinner with us next week, aren't you?"
"Sure," Clark said.
"We'll be sure to have lots of Lori's favorite foods," Lara said with a wink. "Bye."
She lifted off, and a moment later was gone into the whirling snowflakes.
**********
tbc
