Here's Part 3 -- Remember to watch the date/time/place designators -- more jumping around. And the ##### signify radio broadcasts.
Hope you can follow. Again thanks to so many people who keep supporing me.
From Part 2 --
The figure from the future smiled, knowing that all was the way it should be; and he quickly took to the sky.
Behind a tree on the other side of the field, yet another spectator was watching the melodrama unfold. Miss Libby Barton, now forty years of age regarded the scene spread out in front of her. “Not again,” she whispered. “It can't be happening again.”
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Now for Part 3
Smallville, Kansas
Sunday,
October 30, 1938
7:11 p.m. CST
“Aunt Lavinia!” Libby insisted. “Tell me what’s going on!”
Lavinia Barton, being totally unacquainted with anything at all scientific, was about to open her mouth and protest that she didn’t understand what was going on, when the two in the living room heard the front door open and then slam shut.
Linus Barton, the younger brother of Lavinia and Leticia slowly entered the family home. He was dragging a large shovel and was covered from head to foot with dirt.
“Don’t you get any of that dirt on my carpet!” Leticia called out as she entered the hallway from the kitchen.
“No, Letty,” Linus said slowly. “I was just doing what you told me to do. I dug them holes in the cellar and I...”
“Yes, yes,” Letty interrupted quickly. “Just you take yourself out and come in again the back way. Then go wash up.”
“Yes, Letty,” Linus replied, nodding.
“Uncle Linus,” Libby yelled out. “Do you know anything about meteorites?”
“Huh?”
“Stop child,” Leticia said to her niece. “Leave the man be. You’ll have to ask your Uncle Lloyd. He’s the science expert.”
“But Aunt Leticia,” Libby implored. “Uncle Lloyd has been gone for over a year, and you said he was going away for a long, long time this time. And the man on the radio said...”
“Hush, your Uncle Lloyd...”
The music on the radio stopped once again and the announcer’s harried voice was heard once more as it interrupted Leticia’s comments.
##### ANNOUNCER TWO: Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. Toronto, Canada: Professor Morse of McGill University reports observing a total of three explosions on the planet Mars, between the hours of 6:45 P. M. and 8:20 P. M., eastern standard time. This confirms earlier reports that were received from American observatories.
Now, nearer home, comes a special bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:10 P. M. a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty miles from Trenton. #####
“Well that’s New Jersey for you,” Leticia retorted. “We have no business being concerned. Now turn it off and just forget it.”
But Libby moved closer to the radio as the announcer continued.
##### ANNOUNCER TWO: The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth, New Jersey. We have dispatched a special mobile unit to the scene, and will have our commentator, Carl Phillips, give you a word picture as soon as he can reach there from Princeton. In the meantime, we take you to the Hotel Martinet in Metropolis, where the mellow sounds of Bobby Millette and his orchestra are offering a program of dance music. #####
Swing music filtered its way through the radio into the living room of 417 Maple. Libby guessed there was nothing to worry about, since the radio started to play music again. She picked up Jinx who had started mewing, and headed toward the kitchen to get the cat something to eat.
The kitchen was warm, and the aroma wafting throughout was enticing. Aunt Leticia was making her elderberry and raspberry preserves.
“Hmmmmm. Smells good,” Libby said to her aunt.
The back door opened, and Jinx hissed and jumped out of Libby’s arms.
“It’s just Uncle Linus,” Libby told the cat.
“Not at all.” said a sadistic voice. “It’s your Uncle Lloyd!”
Lavinia scurried into the kitchen just in time to see what sort of looked like her brother Lloyd brandishing a rifle.
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Smallville, Kansas
Monday,
January 10, 1994
2:00 p.m. CST
Lois Lane, English teacher, turned away from the black board and faced her American Literature Class.
“Welcome back,” she said smiling. “I certainly hope you all had a great holiday. I know that I did,” Lois told them.
She, indeed, had had a completely wonderful holiday. She glanced quickly at the ring on her finger and sighed. Lois Lane, independent career woman, activist, was now engaged to be married to the most wonderful man in the world. Somehow sensing his presence, she looked over at the door to her classroom as Clark Kent, history teacher and secret superhero walked by.
Clark Kent stopped and glanced through the glass window of the door to his fiancée’s classroom and saw her look up and smile at him. She was incredibly lovely. How much luckier could one man be. He smiled back and looking around the deserted hall, he mouthed the words “I love you”.
Clark turned and walked down the stairs and toward the administrative offices of Smallville High School. This was his free period and he had hopes of getting some time to himself to make some lesson plans. He was behind in his paper work as his alter ego, Superman, had been quite busy the last few weeks. Besides the occasional catastrophe or crime, he had become somewhat of a celebrity and had been requested to visit hospitals, orphanages, nursing homes and the like around the holidays.
Clark found that these last events were rejuvenating in a way, but very time consuming. Lois had been so gracious and understanding every time he had been called away. Their holidays had been wonderful, but they had been interrupted frequently. The moments he had shared with Lois, however, were filled with gradually mounting passion, and he was finding it difficult to maintain their agreement of waiting until their wedding night. <Five more months> he thought. It was going to take super strength to make it through.
He entered the administrative offices and saw Principal White’s secretary, Beatrice Drake, busy as usual making copies. She looked up and smiled at the son of her life-long friend, Martha. “Your Mom left these for you,” she informed him. “She said that you forgot to take them with you on Saturday.” Beatrice smiled at him. “Looks like a interesting one.”
Clark looked at the posters that Beatrice had handed him.
..............*=*=*=*=*=*=*................
..............Smallville Players.................
............Announce Auditions................
.........................for..............................
..........“Arsenic and Old Lace”...........
..........A comedy about murder!.........
.....................3:00 p.m........................
..........Sunday, January 16,1994.......
...Smallville High School Auditorium..
............*=*=*=*=*=*=*.................
“You going to audition, Beatrice?” Clark asked her.
“Of course,” she replied.
Well, you had to hand it to his mother, to select a play about murder so soon after the killing of Lex Luthor, School Board Superintendent. He picked up the posters and wandered back to the teacher’s lounge. Had it really been less than two months ago that Bill Saxon had stabbed Lex Luthor to death.
And now Bill had been.... Maybe after Saturday’s tragedy, his mother would want to change...Clark sighed as he thought back on the prison riot. He had gotten there as quickly as he could, but not soon enough. He was able to isolate the perpetrators and stop additional mayhem, but he couldn’t save the guard and the one prisoner who had been killed during the first hail of bullets. Ironically, the one dead prisoner was fellow teacher and thespian, Bill Saxon.
Smallville was shocked over Bill’s death, just as they had been by Bill’s act of vengeance two months before--the act that had promulgated his incarceration after he had pled guilty to the slaying of Lex Luthor. Granted Luthor had been an evil man, even Clark, Mr. Goody-two-shoes, could admit that. But the community still found it difficult to believe that the man they had known for years could have resorted to murder.
Clark got a cup of coffee and his planning sheets and sat down at the table. But his mind was no longer on his classes. He thought back to that Saturday night in mid November when the Smallville Players had been stopped right at the climax of their presentation of “Murder on the Orient Express” by the real-life murder of Lex Luthor. And, just like that detective thriller they were enacting, they were stuck by a snow storm in the Luthor Bank Building as they rallied to solve Luthor’s murder.
Clark remembered how they all had looked to Bill to explain why a retired schoolteacher and friend to all of them had utilized the play’s atmosphere to kill Lex Luthor.
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Smallville, Kansas
Saturday,
November 19, 1993
10:20 p.m. CST
“I guess I was really getting into my role,” Bill said to all the actors in the room. “I have been sort of playing detective,” he explained as he took the floor from the real detective, Inspector Henderson, and faced his audience. Bill Saxon, who had depicted Hercule Poirot so eloquently, was now in his element. He was an actor and he was portraying the role of a lifetime.
“And, what I found,” he continued, “was a whole lot of wonderful, courageous people whom I loved, and who had been pushed to the brink of doing something incredibly stupid,” he said emotionally, tears welling up in his eyes. “So,” he sighed. “I decided to take matters into my own hands and do it first as a way of stopping all of you,” he continued.
“Lex Luthor was a depraved and corrupt man. He was responsible for our pain and for the deaths of people we all loved. His destruction is a blessing for our community and for each of the lives he attempted to defile.”
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Smallville, Kansas
Monday,
January 10, 1994
2:45 p.m. CST
Clark looked back at the papers in front of him, lifted the cup to his lips, took a swallow and grimaced. The coffee was cold. As no one else was in the teacher’s lounge, he pulled down his glasses and heated up the coffee. He looked at the clock above the teacher’s copy machine and realized he had been musing over Luthor’s and Bill’s death for more than thirty minutes. Clark knew that there was something else he needed to do. He walked down the hall to Barb Friskin’s office and knocked.
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Continuing to look at her ring, Lois’ mind quickly ran through her life changes since she arrived in Smallville. <Had it only been four months ago?> she thought. Clark had been appointed her mentor to help her adjust to the new school, but it was being cast opposite Clark in the Smallville Players’ “The Male Animal” where they had been “forced” to spend many hours rehearsing love scenes that had altered Lois Lane forever. She smiled again as she remembered how their love had been sparked by their devotion to the social justice issues of that play and the problems of Keith Haley, who had spoken out about his sexuality.
Her love for Clark had grown over the weeks and then one night, Lois Lane, city woman, found herself on a hayride being beautifully kissed by a man she had once thought of as a “farmboy”. And, later under the soft theatre lights, he had confessed his love and had asked her to be his wife; and then, incredibly, told her he was Superman. She smiled to herself as she remembered his fear that she would reject him; but Lois, knowing that she would follow her favorite author’s advice and “love more”, fell into Clark’s arms.
Although, almost thwarted by Lex Luthor, Clark had remained true and steadfast, and was ready to share his entire life with her. He loved her. And Lois Lane loved Clark Kent. How could she not? He was so...
“Miss Lane?” Tom Mock, one of her students, asked.
“Oh, yes.” she responded, shaking off her wonderful reverie. “Uh...we...we had a very interesting first semester in this class using the 1960s classic novel ‘In Cold Blood’ as the foundation for analysis, discussion and debate.”
The students of the class looked around at each other.
Lois smiled as her eyes met those of her students. She realized how far the class as a whole and each individual student had come since the beginning of the previous semester--how they had gained a new appreciation for diversity and commitment. They looked up at their teacher and anxiously awaited the new and exciting assignment.
“This semester, we’re going to look at something a little older. We’re going to study Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘House of the Seven Gables’,” their teacher told them.
The class looked at each other once again and groaned.
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Just as Clark heard Barb Friskin yell out “Come in,” he heard another call, a call for help. He made his way quickly down the hall and ducked out the door that faced the back of the school, Clark looked around and noting that all was clear, spun into his suit and took off into the sky.
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Barb Friskin, seeing no one enter, rose from her chair and walked over to the door of her office. She opened it and looked out into the hall. Shaking her head in wonder, Counselor, Barb Friskin, walked back to her chair and sat down. She picked up a file from her in basket, and opened it. She glanced quickly at the intake assessment she had written when she had met with the student for the first time in early December. She wanted to renew her notes before she saw her again right after school.
This was going to be a complicated case--childhood sexual abuse always was. <Families!> Barb thought. They can be so caring, so nurturing, so necessary. They can also be so violent. Dysfunctional was a mild word for some families.
Could she even address this young girl’s issues, when her experience with families was so far removed from functional as it could get? Her father had left the family when she and her sister were very young, leaving their mother to raise them and change into a bitter old women while still very young. Barb’s sister had been killed by her own husband. She herself had been through a messy divorce. And now she had been reunited with her nephew and father only to have one imprisoned for murder and killed in a riot while the other had truly taken on the role of the sadistic scion to a corporation founded on deceit, betrayal and evil.
Barb opened the drawer of her desk. Was it only three months ago that she had considered using the gun that glinted up at her to kill Lex Luthor? Her father had done it for her, so the gun remained unused. But was there more to be done? Barb slowly closed the drawer.
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Smallville, Kansas
Sunday,
October 30, 1938
7:16 p.m. CST
“Is that you, Lloyd?” Lavinia asked.
“Yup, had a little work done to my face. But it’s me all right.”
The family members looked at the rifle in Lloyd’s hands. “Put that damn thing down,” Letty shouted at her brother. “You aren’t going to kill anyone.”
Leticia Barton walked up to Lloyd and took the rifle. She opened the broom closet and shoved the rifle inside. Closing the closet, she turned toward the rest of the family. “I decide who gets murdered around here,” she told them.
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Smallville, Kansas
Monday,
January 10, 1994
2:45 p.m.
“I make the decisions, now!” Jaxon Luthor told the staff that stood in front of his desk. “I’m in charge and you’ll do what I say. Now get out, all of you!”
Jaxon Luthor picked up the telephone and pushed a button. “Get in here!” he yelled into the receiver and slammed it down. Jaxon rose from his chair and began pacing. The door opened and Sheldon Bender, attorney at law, entered the office.
“Where are those papers?” Jaxon hissed in a somewhat poor imitation of his father.
“Here they are, sir,” the lawyer said, handing them to him. “I just filed these at the court house. Happy Birthday, sir.”
“So, it’s all legal, now?” Jaxon asked, perusing the papers. “I’m eighteen and I have full power. My father’s attorneys no longer control anything.”
“That’s right,” Bender told him. “You’re in control of it all.”
Jaxon smiled. “All right, leave me alone.”
Lex Luthor’s son waited until the attorney had left and reached for the telephone once again. “Murder her!” he said to the person at the other end and put the phone back in its cradle. He slowly turned 360 degrees in the swivel chair, smiling to himself. Stopping, he opened a drawer, took out a box and lifted the lid. Once again he stared at the green glowing rock. “Soon, soon.”
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Linda Botts, assistant director, properties manager, costumer and general gopher for the Smallville Players, knocked on the front door of 417 Maple. She looked up at the old house and felt a shiver go through her. She wondered why Martha had asked her to do this errand and why Miss Libby was interested in the Smallville Players. When no one answered, she left the script in the mailbox and left.
Miss Barton looked out of the window of her bedroom. As soon as Linda had left, she went down stairs, took the script out of the mailbox and returned to her bedroom to sit in the chair by the window. ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’, a comedy about murder. Miss Barton smiled to herself. “That ought to be fun,” she said aloud and then opened the script and began reading.
Aunt Abby: And for pity’s sake stop worrying. We told you to forget the whole thing.
Mortimer: Forget! My dear Aunt Abby, can’t I make you realize that something has to be done?
Aunt Abby: No, Mortimer, you behave yourself. You’re too old to be flying off the handle like this.
Mortimer: But Mr. Hotchkiss---
Aunt Abby: Hoskins, dear. Hoskins.
Mortimer: Well, whatever his name is, you can’t leave him there.
Aunt Martha: We don’t intend to, dear.
Aunt Abby: No, Teddy’s down in the cellar now digging the lock.
Mortimer: You mean you’re going to bury Mr. Hotchkiss in the cellar?
Aunt Martha: Oh, yes, dear--that’s what we did with the others.
Mortimer: No! You can’t bury Mr.----*others?*
Aunt Abby: The other gentlemen.
Mortimer: When you say others--do you mean--others? More than one others?
Aunt Martha. Oh, yes, dear. Let me see, this is eleven. [To Aunt Abby] Isn’t it, Abby?
Aunt Abby: No, dear, this makes, twelve.
Libby Barton raised her head and put down the script. “Twelve,” she said out loud.
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“Come on guys,” Lois Lane said to her students. “This ought to be fun. Everyone reads Hawthorne’s ‘Scarlet Letter’; we’re going to do something a little different. And your concurrent assignment will be something I think you can all get into. ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ is a romance. It’s a gothic romance about love and murder,” their teacher explained.
“So is our concurrent assignment to get romantic with someone or to kill someone?” Tom Mock queried.
The students laughed.
“No,” Lois said, ignoring the laughter, as she picked up a book, opened it and read.
*******“Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm....
...the story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries, ...a connection with the long past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete--which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life. Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.” *******
Lois put down the book. “What do you think that means?” she asked the class.
“Well,” said Keith Haley. “It sounds like by learning about a house and who lived in the house, we get to know about the people who live there now. And that if evil people lived there, the house and the people in it now would be influenced by that evil, too.”
“That’s what it says,” Lois declared.
“Do you believe that, Miss Lane?” Cindy Brady asked.
“I want to know what you think,” their teacher explained. “So the concurrent assignment is to form into six groups and each take one of the houses I’m going to list on the board, and to investigate its history. You’re job is to research what was going on when it was built, who built it, the architectural style, and most importantly the story of the people who lived there.”
“How did you choose the houses.” Tom asked her.
“Yes, Tom. Yours is one of the houses, but I’m going to ask that you be on one of the other teams.
“Hey, no fair,” Tom responded.
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In response to the cries for help, Superman landed outside the back entrance to the hospital, where firefighters were already at work dousing the flames. Hospital workers were bringing out gurneys, rolling hospital beds and escorting walking patients out to the parking lot.
“Superman,” the fire chief said gratefully. “Glad you’re here. There was an explosion in the laboratory. We’re having a tough time controlling the fire. Can you...”
Before the chief could finish his query, Superman flew into the window of the second floor laboratory and using his super breath, extinguished the fire.
Below watching the event was Coroner Gretchen Kelly, her wagon at the ready.
Through the smoke and haze, Superman was able to see two bodies lying on the floor of the lab. Superman checked and found Dr. Bernard Klein still breathing, but he was too late to save the other person crumpled upon the floor. Superman carried Dr. Klein to safety and then returned for the lifeless body of Dr. Antoinette Baines.
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Lois smiled at Tom and the rest of the class. The class had come a long way together since she first entered their lives in September. They all had grown--they as students and individuals and she as a teacher. They’re trip into activism, into celebration of diversity had made an impact on them all. And each and every one was all the better for it.
So now, as their comfort zone with each other had increased measurably, the students in the class found they could joke around, offer opinions and be creative without threat of reprisals.
“I spent part of the Winter Break down at the hall of records,” Lois told her class. “And I found six houses that were built before the turn of the century and that had been the homes of one or at the most two different families for its entire time.
Lois turned back to the black board and wrote the following names while the students jotted down the information.
Bash/Mock (circa 1860 523 4th Street)
Kent (circa 1862 807 Main Street)
Friskin/Clark (circa 1873 334 Elm Street)
Johnson (circa 1875 212 3rd Street)
Taggart (circa 1881 345 Maple Street)
Barton (circa 1887 417 Maple Street)
When Lois had written the last name on the board, the students gasped. Lois turned to face them. “Any problem,” she asked, remembering not too fondly, the reaction she had received last semester when she put the topics for discussion on the board. But what could possibly be controversial about this project?
“I’m waiting,” Lois asked the group.
“It’s the Barton house,” Emily Cox explained.
“What about it?” Lois inquired.
“Well,” said John Greene. “Old Lady Barton is the only one left living there now.”
“And?” she urged him.
“In 1938, Miss Libby Barton murdered everyone in that house.”
tbc
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