Extracted - Chapter 27 – Where’s Ponce de León When You Need Him – Part 2 of 2

 

Extracted

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 27 – Where’s Ponce de León When You Need Him – Part 2 of 2

 

A dark blue checkered skirt.  A white blouse.  A fake necktie.  Dark blue knee socks.  Comfortable shoes.  And a dark blue blazer with the school logo patch on the pocket.  That’s what Nancy wore as she got out of the car and walked with her mother into the school.  The security guards at the gate checked her and her mother against a list and allowed them through, escorting them directly to the school’s office.

“Nancy!” a woman inside exclaimed the moment she saw them.  She came around from behind the counter and immediately gave Nancy a big hug.  “Oh,” she said.  “I was so sorry to hear you were kidnapped!  So sorry!  I’m glad you’re back now, even though I understand you’re still having a few…issues.”

“Issues?” Nancy said.  “I can’t remember anything.”

“So I understand the woman said.  She stood up and faced Wanda.  “Hi Mrs. Stiller.  How are you?”

“Better than I was,” Wanda admitted.  “Is Mr. Parker in?”

“Yes, he’s expecting you.  Follow me.”

The woman led the way to an office where she opened the door and poked her head in.  “Mrs. Stiller and Nancy are here,” she told whoever was inside.  She held the door open and Wanda led Nancy in.  Nancy saw a bald man sitting behind a desk.

“Ah.  Mrs. Stiller.  Welcome!”  He looked down at Nancy.  “Nancy,” he said kindly.  “Good to see you again too.”  He turned back to talk to Wanda.  “Before I give Nancy here a tour of the place, I’ve asked our school psychologist to sit in on a meeting and let us talk with Nancy here so we can try to get some indication of just where she is.  Would you mind?”

“No,” Wanda told him.  “I was expecting something like this.  May I be there?”

“Of course,” the school principal agreed.  He led the way out of his office to what appeared to be some kind of meeting room.  Nancy was guessing it was for the teachers.  Moments after they got there, another man and a woman joined them.

“Nancy!  The woman said as soon as she walked in.  Good to see you again.”

“Uh…yeah,” Nancy replied.  Did this woman think she recognized her?  That was impossible.

“Do you know me?” the woman asked.

“Sorry,” Nancy replied.  “Not a clue.”

The woman nodded sadly.  “I’m Mrs. Forest.  I was your teacher last year.”

“Sorry,” Nancy told her.  “I don’t remember that.”

“Let’s all have a seat,” Mr. Parker suggested.  When they were seated, he introduced the man who had come in.  “This is Mr. Greenwich, our school psychologist.”

“Mrs. Stiller,” Greenwich said, greeting Wanda.  He looked to Nancy.  “And Nancy.”

Nancy made no reply.

“Mrs. Forest,” Parker said.  “Would you like to ask Nancy here a few questions so we can get some indication as to how much of her memory she’s lost?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Forest replied.  She turned to Nancy.  “Last year, we studied the Chronicles of Narnia,” she said.  “Do you remember that?”

“Narnia?” Nancy said.  “I don’t remember ever studying it, but I think it was about some kids that went into a magic land or something.  And there was a witch and…a lion I think.  Sorry, but it’s a bit vague.”

“That’s fine,” Mrs. Forest said.  “At least you remember that much.  How about your math skills,” she said.

Nancy was subjected to question after question, most of which she was able to answer fairly easily.  Some she couldn’t answer at all.  Eventually though, it was over.

“What do you think/” Parker asked, already guessing the answer.

“What she remembers is…a bit off from what I expected,” Mrs. Forest told him, “but I guess that’s just due to her memory loss in general.  Still, there’s no doubt that enough of it is there that I can’t see any reason why she shouldn’t be allowed into the seventh grade where she belongs.”

Parker turned to Mr. Greenwich who hadn’t said a word though any of it.  “Mr. Greenwich?” Parker asked.

“She seems to be adapting well enough,” Greenwich decided.  “There’s no doubt she’s got a few social things she’s not comfortable with, but she appears to be dealing with them.  I say give it a try, but we might want to watch her closely for a bit just in case.  We’re talking a lot of mental stress here on top of what had to be the worst psychological trauma possible to cause that kind of damage.  Still, as I said, she seems to be coping.  I’m amazed that after what she’s gone though that she would even want to try.”

Parker nodded.  “Very well.”  He turned to Wanda.  “Since she obviously doesn’t recognize us, or I guess the school, maybe we should begin with a tour.”

“I think she was very interested in that,” Wanda agreed.

Mr. Parker himself showed Wanda and Nancy around the school.  From the gym to the science labs, from the art studios to the music room.  From the first-grade classroom up to the seventh-grade room.  He would have continued on, taking them all the way to the high school rooms as well where Emily would have been in class, but as they passed the seventh-grade classroom, the door was open.  Nancy stopped in the hallway just for a quick peek.

“Look!” a girl shouted from inside.  “It’s Nancy!”

In seconds pandemonium broke loose as every girl in the room ran out and surrounded Nancy, all of them led by Chrissy and Diane.

“You’re here!” Chrissy shouted excitedly.  “You decided to come!”

“I just…”

“Come in!” Diane said as she grabbed Nancy and started dragging her.

Nancy looked to her mother and the principal.

Wanda nodded.  “Go.  I’ll pick you up after school.”

Nancy allowed herself to be dragged into the classroom where Miss Sanderson introduced herself as her teacher.  Nancy was given a desk but she didn’t get any books.  It seemed all the kids had tablet computers instead.  Mrs. Sanderson told her she’d get her one before she went home.

And so seventeen year old Stephen Marsh began school again in the seventh grade.  As a girl.

Life was so strange!

 

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Ben and Judith both regretted everything they had done.  Everything!  But neither of them caved to the intense questioning they were subjected to.  Questioning that was leveled at them for hours and hours at a time, for days and days on end, until they were both sleep deprived and ready to pass out.  It was pure torture.  But neither of them gave in.  The only information they gave out was that they developed a water system, nothing more.  They did admit that they were part of a group that enjoyed discussing ghosts, but they couldn’t elaborate any more than that about some process to extract someone’s soul with a machine designed to clean up polluted water.

A team of ten physicists and engineers went through every inch of the water system prototype.  They put the entire thing together.  They tested it in every way they could, but they couldn’t see any sign of it being able to capture someone’s soul.  They even had volunteer prisoners brought in who they put into the machine while they turned it on.  But the machine did nothing to them since there was no water flowing through it.  But with a thirty-inch central pipe, that much water flowing through it would drown anyone in seconds.

Two months of research later, they concluded that the water system was indeed a very good, if not a very interesting one since it could collect so many different needed particles, but there was no sign that it could possibly do anything else.  It especially couldn’t pull someone’s soul from their body and capture it.

Holfstrom and his team of engineers were glad to be done with the project.  The information had come from a drunk.  The government should have known better.  Nobody said anything about that, but they all were thinking it.

Judith and Ben were taken from the black site in the middle of the night and unceremoniously dumped on Judith’s front lawn.  Two days later, the water treatment prototype was dropped off on her front lawn in the middle of the night too.

Judith and Ben never bothered to tell anyone that the defective part that made the soul extraction possible was simply buried in the flowerbed behind Judith’s house.

 

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Eleven Years Later

 

Nancy smiled and waved at the seemingly thousands of people who packed the large room.  She stood next to her sister, who stood next to her husband, who stood next to Nancy’s mother, who stood next to her father.  Her father held his hand in the air in victory, a gesture that brought cheers from the people packing the room and hopefully from the millions of people who were watching it all on TV.  The numbers had proven it.  Enough votes had been counted now to prove that her father was going to be the next President of the United States.  The entire family was now lined up on stage with him, all smiling and waving to the entire world.

It was a long time before things died down enough that Nancy could leave the stage.  When she did, she found Stephen, looking nothing but fantastic in a dark blue suit that showed off his muscular body.  Stephen, who was Nancy, and she who was Stephen very, very deep inside, had grown up now.  They were both adults.  They were both different people than they once were.  But deep, deep down, they still knew who they had once been.  Not that it mattered anymore.  They had grown up.  They were different people.

Stephen’s wife joined him and congratulated her as well.  She hugged the woman who had married the handsome body that had once belonged to her…and then she had to move on to speak with someone else.  It was all part of the game.  All part of the process.  All part of a machine in which she was not just a part of, but a central figure.  Nancy was one of the driving forces behind her father’s political machine now.  And she knew for a fact that as young as she was, she was already a figure to be reckoned with.

The machine would continue to operate for as long as her father was president, then, gradually, most of it would die away.  Not completely though.  Parts of it would remain forever.  Nancy though, was already eyeing that distant future.  As soon as her father’s presidency was over, she had every intention of running for her father’s old seat in the House.  And who knew, maybe eventually run for president as well.  She already had the contacts.  She already was a known figure.  She was young and had already built a name for herself.  She already knew she had everything it took.

“Nance!”

She turned and found her friends Chrissy and Diane coming towards her.  Both of them looked great in their designer dresses.  Her own life now seemed to revolve around designer dresses and designer everything.  It was part of what was expected of her now.  Part of the game that had to be played, and over time she had come to love the ins and outs of it.  She hugged her two best friends and accepted their congratulations as well.

“Hi babe!”

She turned and saw Clint, her latest lover.  Since high school had ended, she had gone through a long string of them.  Clint was simply the latest.  She liked him a lot, but she knew she didn’t love him.  Besides, she was too busy with politics to really get involved.  She just needed…affection once in a while.  She hugged him and gave him a quick kiss that was probably photographed and would grace websites around the world.  Clint would have his fifteen minutes of fame.  She didn’t care.  She had been photographed with a number of different men.  Most of whom now lived in relative obscurity again.

Her father was the president…or soon would be.  Her mother was going to be first lady.  Her sister was married and two months pregnant.  And she was a major force in her father’s political machine.

Her mind though couldn’t help but think about Stephen.  Over the years, the two of them had become close, but never lovers.  Never!  They both refused to go that far and make love to themselves.  They were too important to each other.  Steve was married now anyway and had become a lawyer.  Instead of working in the District Attorney’s office like he once thought he would, he now worked as a corporate lawyer instead.  Nancy approved of that move.  So far, Steve seemed to like it, and she was guessing he was good at it.

Life had moved on, and so had she.

And she was determined to be one of the movers and shakers who moved life for everyone on the planet.

 

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Michael Stiller walked into the oval office for the first time as President of the United States.  There were a lot of things on his new desk that he had to take care of immediately, so it wasn’t until the next day, day two of his administration, that he was able to send for Mr. Curmett, one of the countries National Security Advisors from several presidents before him.

With Curmett finally in front of him, Mike Stiller said, “I want to see it.”

“Sir?” Curmett asked.

“I want to see all of it.  Everything you have on the memory transfer thing that happened with my daughter.  And I mean everything!  Including whatever black op I’m sure you cooked up to take out me and my family.”

“But sir…”

“Get it Curmett.  Bring it to me as soon as possible.  Every last scrap of paper.”

It wasn’t until the next day that Curmett was able to deliver the required materials.  President Stiller dug out the black ops plan first that would murder his entire family and the entire Marsh family.  He noticed that it would even include FBI Agent Rosenberg and that Philadelphia detective Nolan.  After reading it thoroughly, with Curmett watching, he ripped the papers in half.  “This is now cancelled!  You’re lucky I don’t cancel you.  Get out!  I’ll find someone else to take over whatever you’ve been doing about this, which I have no doubt is a lot of nothing.”

 

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Judith’s head was spinning so badly it was crazy.  She couldn’t stand it.  She opened her eyes and the room spinning around as well made everything worse.  As much as she hated the spinning, she also didn’t mind it.  Through everything spinning, she could see that she was in her own room.  Her own room in her own house.  She had made it.  She had survived.

As far as anyone knew, she was now Angela Lomax, twenty-two year old private nurse and the nurse Judith had hired to live with her and take care of her for the last year and a half.  In that time, Judith had gotten to know practically everything there as to know about Angela.  Things she was going to need to know…for a while.  Just until her real body died, which was the reason she had done what she did.

Poor Angela never knew her food had been drugged to knock her out.  She never knew what fate Judith had planned for her since they first met.  And now, Judith was Angela.  Judith was now only twenty-two years old instead of eighty.  Judith was now as healthy as a woman could get instead of wracked with cancer.  Judith was…reborn.

As soon as her real body got around to dying, she, now Angela, would inherit absolutely everything that had belonged to Judith as a reward for taking such good care of her for the last eighteen months.  And at her side would be Benjamin, soon to be reborn as well, this time as twenty-five year old Ronnie, the handyman and gardener Ben had hired to take care of his home.

Ben had helped her with the memory transfer machine, and she would soon help him.  And together, they would live for many, many more years together.  Possibly, forever.

As soon as Ben became Ron, they would remove the defective part from the machine in the basement and once again bury it where only the two of them knew about it.

When Ponce de León had searched Florida for the fountain of youth, he had searched in the wrong place.  He had looked for it in Florida.  The fountain of youth wasn’t in Florida, it was right here in Philadelphia.  And only she and Ben knew about it.

 

The End