Part XII - 9: Fate and Luck

After spending way too much time in the bathroom the next day and a half, I decided that I was wasting my time and figured I might as well be asleep while I wasn't doing any good. The twins felt how upset I was, and seemed to agree that this would be a very good time to try Margaret. I guess I was boiling over with emotions, and they knew Margaret would be almost as hard as Joey had been.

They were right, too. Without their sisters' help, it took two tries to wipe it all out. And I can't tell you how hard it was to actually mount Margaret the first time. She was Joey's mom, and even though she didn't look like the woman I grew up with, it was very hard to keep erect before penetration. I also prayed that Joey would forgive me. I had at one time sworn to him I'd never fuck his mom.

When I woke up from the twenty hour nap I had taken after Margaret's second wipe, I called Suzi's house and talked to her mom. Suzi was starting to remember things from before her brainwashing, but she still had pretty intense emotional periods, and her mom gently told me I would have to wait a few more days before they would risk allowing her to see me.

I finally put the phone in its cradle ten minutes after she had hung up. I felt stiff and numb, but once I started to move, I didn't waste any time going back upstairs, dragging the twins out of bed and taking them to Tom's room.

Honey mounted Tom while I mounted Joy, and as soon as I felt the familiar connections form, I insisted they let me do all the work. Fuck, they had to let me, for they wore themselves out just trying to keep my beam focused.

That's when we made the big discovery. You see, empathic controls and telepathic commands don't usually conflict with each other unless the telepathic command produces intense emotions. Steven had used my command in Joey's head as a base to build the loyally to him and his family. I could have wiped Joey, then removed the command easily, but doing it the other way around had been devastating to Joey, and had been very difficult to do in the first place.

But Tom... He had sort of the opposite. As I was blasting his mountains away, I came across a mountain that was invulnerable to my beam. After spending a few minutes on it, I left it and finished blasting the rest away, then with a great deal of difficulty, I tried to work on it again.

The twins and I finally had to give up, and after sleeping it off, I scanned his distant memories to find the source of his impenetrable emotions.

I quickly traced it back to...

"Sarah... "

Tom had layers and layers of emotional memories piled up from after her death. It took me several hours just to wade through it all, for they seemed to all lead right back to another which I had already examined. I literally kept going around in circles, and finally I had to call an expert in.

My dad may not have the strongest ability, but he had long ago refined it to such an extent that he could reorganize a person's memories without them knowing it or it affecting them in the slightest. Joey never even detected the hidden slave within Penny's mind, and quite frankly I had missed a few of them myself. I knew enough now to detect them if I looked for them, but most of the time I wasn't looking.

Dad spent almost a half hour before finally finding the branch that lead to the source. I was actually learning a few things from him, and he seemed very pleased to pass on anything I wanted to know about his old hobby. So we weren't really concentrating on what we were looking at, dad having gone off telling me this really interesting story of this woman who had multiple personalities. Shit, he never did finish that one.

Anyway, we were kind of both startled when the trace ended at the memory of Tom identifying Sarah's raped and slightly mutilated body. It was the fear left on her face that had caused Tom's emotions to overwhelming him for years afterwards. I could understand why he had insisted on cremating her before any of his family could see her. It would have haunted me too.

Dad and I even felt a little sick from the image, but then my dad noticed something and said, "Wait a minute... "

I sensed him sending out hundreds of probes that was focused on the memory itself. After another ten or so minutes, he finally announced, "Tim, this memory... It's not real."

"What? Are you sure? It doesn't feel... Wait, I think... I think I can see what you mean. You said when you move a memory from one part of the mind to another, you always have to make sure all the other memories that point to it are changed to point to its new location."

"Right. But this memory doesn't have anything pointing to it, just away from it. Go get Margaret. I want to use her memories to find what happened before this one was planted in his."

Dad knows his stuff. It took him less than two minutes to find the nearest memory of something they had both experienced shortly before the time in question. And then all he had to do was follow the trail until...

"Hmm, whoever it was didn't really know what they were doing. Right before the planted memory was supposed to take place, the pointers are skewed. But I think... That's it. The real memory is here, but it's fragmented to hell. Looks like they just scrambled the real memory figuring no one would find it anyway. This will just take a minute."

I waited patiently, feeling his mind send probe after probe out, then finally felt a few commands mixed in. I didn't dare attempt to probe what he was doing, for he had already told me that my probes interfered with his own because his were incredibly sensitive.

"Okay. You better take a look at this while I go get your mother."

"Is it that bad?" I asked as he got up.

"Look for yourself," he said going out the door.

As I began my own probing, I easily found the memory he had reconstructed. Shit, I couldn't miss it. It was like he had place a big lit up arrow pointing directly to the spot where it began.

Dad had pieced enough of the memory together to figure out what had happened, but hadn't actually reconstructed the entire memory. It was more than enough, however.

Tom had been met by a tall man and a college aged girl when he had entered the police station. He followed them back to a interrogation room without saying a word, then sat there for at least fifteen minutes while the pair or probably more like the man apparently planted the memory and then scrambled the real one.

Afterwards, Tom left believing he had identified his dead daughter and that gruesome image had haunted him ever since. The implanted memory was the source of that impenetrable mountain, but before we could take it out, we needed to figure out what to replace it with.

Strangely enough, I didn't realize what had to be the most important detail to come out of finding that memory until my mom stated it after examining the memory herself.

"If she is alive, how are we or they going to find her?"

"Who?" I said right before it hit me. "Sarah? Oh! She has to be alive, doesn't she! I gotta go tell Joey!"

"STOP!" my mother commanded verbally. "I'm sorry Timmy, but he's not ready to see you yet. He's getting there, but he's not there yet."

"But... If I can't go see Suzi, and I can't see Joey, what's there to do? How soon do you think it would be before I can see him?"

"At least another day, probably more. Joey's just starting to remember me. Oh, honey. Now don't go all gloomy again. He's going to be fine, and so is Suzi. I know! How about you calling up that girl that gave you Midge? You've been through a lot the past couple of months. You need to have some time to get back to doing what you want a little instead of what you think you need to do. Go have some fun for a day or two, and hopefully when you get back, they'll be ready to see you again."

And that's exactly what I did. It took seven phone calls to reach someone to give Holly a message. She called me back that night and we talked for nearly three hours long distance. While Holly never actually said it out loud, she dropped enough hints to let me know she was still interested in trying out my trailer.

The next day was a Saturday, and I got up really early to load Midge up into her matching blue and red striped trailer hitched to the back of my Formula.

It was nice to just get in the car and drive again. I hadn't realized how much I enjoyed driving my car until I had gone without it for a while. Of course I'm a people person, and with the drive going to be something like eight hours long, I was starting to feel pretty bored and lonely after the first two.

I stopped at a rest area and took a leak, then as I was walking out, I ran right into this chick who I instantly felt was in a panic.

After we made our apologies, I watched her looking around the side of the building then she turned and saw I had seen her.

"Was there a really big guy with a moustache and a cowboy hat in there?" she asked in a southern accent, thumbing the men's room.

"Nope. But if you give me his name I'll find him for ya," I said.

"Oh, ah... Bert... Bert... Oh, what did he say his last name was... Bert somethin'" she said peering around the other side of the building, then shielding her eyes from the sun as she scanned the rest of the area visually.

"Bert. Well, I guess there couldn't be that many Berts around," I said, mostly to myself.

I began building up energy for a pulse, then when it was ready, I let it go.

"Found him. Whoops, found two. Nope three. Shit. Bert must be more popular than I thought. Okay. Which is it? Bert Johnson, Lutz, or Ziegelmeyer?"

"Ziegelmeyer!" she said amazed. "How'd you do that!"

"Just a trick I... Uhm, I hate to tell you this, but he's already five miles up the road."

"Shit!" she said, stomping her foot. "He's taken off with my stuff! The lyin' son of a bitch!"

"Uhm, you want some help?" I asked her, seeing he was still within my range to stop him, and it was on my way.

"Thanks, but how could help me? He drives a big truck, and unless you got a shot gun or know karate, he's break us both in half. Shit! I knew he'd pull this!"

"Hey. I think he's having some engine trouble, and I just saw one of those state police cars go by. I betcha the cop stops to help, and if we hurry, we could make it before he leaves."

"Oh... Alright. But I'm warning you to keep your hands to yourself. I can take care of myself if needs be."

"But I am grateful for the lift," she added with a smile when she saw the scowl on my face.

I sighed and said, "Come on. We better hurry," then led her to my car which she whistled at.

I grinned back when she said, "Okay, Bandit. Let's go get that Smokey."

"If I wasn't pulling Midge, we could catch up with him really easy," I said as I started the engine. "But the trailer can only go about seventy before she starts to bounce back and forth on her wheels."

"You sound as if you've tried it," she said just as I put it in forward gear.

"You're right," I said as I pulled out a little faster than you might expect a car with a trailer attached should.

"What's your Daddy do?" she asked as we pulled out onto the highway.

"Er, business stuff, I guess. He dabbles a lot, stocks, mergers, runs a private financial firm, shit like that. Why?"

"Oh, I just wondered. You gonna follow in his foot steps?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. Probably not in the way you're thinking. I don't know what I want to do yet."

"I know what you mean. I'm still trying to figure that one out for myself. Before my daddy died, I thought I wanted to be a singer. But now that I've tried it, I guess it was my daddy's dream, not mine. Oh. My name is Betty Ruth Thompson, by the way."

"Tim Brandton," I replied. "Hey, looks like we're in luck." I said nodding towards the truck and cop car along the side of the road.

"Now how did you know he was having trouble? Not nobody could have known that. Nobody but God, that is. But you're not God are you?" she asked.

It wasn't a serious question, and she didn't seem to care if I answered it at all. Betty Ruth believed deeply on the existence of luck, and when something odd happened to her, she apparently didn't expect there to be an explanation. She already had convinced herself that I hadn't known, and it was just coincidence that it had happened like that.

"Hey! That's MY stuff!" she yelled to the cop through the window as I had pulled onto the shoulder. The car wasn't even at a full stop when she got out, then I watched her ass as it hustled to get to the cop before Bert could.

I helped her convince the cop that he had her stuff, and after scanning Bert, I decided to not give him a hard time about it since he had just got the truck driving job after getting out of the state pen for grand theft auto.

After cleaning his act up for him, I waited patiently as Betty Ruth actually tried to get him arrested for stealing her forty three dollars and her small bag of belongings. But Bert claimed he though she had gone off with another trucker and didn't know she had left her stuff in his cab. It was a lie, but the cop couldn't tell for sure, and since Betty Ruth admitted she had gotten everything back, he told her it was pretty much his word against hers.

She didn't waste anymore energy on it, figuring it was just the way her luck had turned. Betty Ruth really believed her life was controlled by her luck, and that it would always take care of her no matter what she did.

As she walked back to the car with her bag over her shoulders, I could sense her indecision about what to do next.

"I don't mean to impose on your kindness," she began, "but could you give me a lift to the next town? The officer said he could, but he's kind of a horses ass, if you know what I mean. He didn't even believe me when I told him Bert knew I was goin' back down to Memphis and he was my ride."

"Actually, if you want, I can take you the whole way. I'm going there myself to have a little race with a friend of mine."

"Oh, I wouldn't want to trouble you," she said getting in. "I mean, I tend to blabber on a lot, and some people don't care for that much talk on a trip."

"Believe me when I say it's no trouble. I think I'd go nuts driving for six more hours by myself. Besides, if I get tired of you, I'll just kick ya out of the car," I said with a grin. "You'd still be closer to your destination than you were, if just a bit more dusty from your landing."

"Well, I'll try and keep the conversation interesting then," she said rolling up the window as we pulled out.

"What are ya pulling back there? It's not a horse trailer, and you're too young and it's too small for a race car. Let me guess first... Uhm... Shit... Okay I give up. Oh wait. It's a... It's a... "