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Blue Moon 6.2

by Donna Lamb

Upstairs, the level of the street, contained a living room, dining room and master bedroom, all with doors onto the wide deck. It also had a big modernized kitchen and a small cluttered office. Jo booted up the computer in the office while Richard looked through the small pile of mail under the mail slot in the wall.

"The place seems pretty clean," he remarked.

"Um?" said Jo. "P-password." She tried a few things, including password. The sleeves of the leather coat Richard loaned her got in her way, so she pulled the coat off and draped it around her shoulders. The house wasn't warm but it wasn't cold either.

Richard looked at an envelope. "Apparently your last name is spelled, 'T-h-i-e-r-r-y'. Is that French?"

"Mais oui," said Jo. She typed that into the password box, too, then began picking things up and looking at the underside of the objects on the desk.

"I love it when you speak French," said Richard in a Raul Julia growl.

Jo suppressed a giggle, looked at him sideways then typed, "bluemoon" into the password box. It worked. "This is M-melody's dad's computer. He's ... he was an executive at Sony," she said after a bit.

"Pictures, Music or Electronics?"

"P-p-pictures," she said. "Columbia Licensing Office, whatever that means. Looks like he dealt with, um, cable stations showing old m-movies."

"Cool. Explains the nice house." Richard put some envelopes in front of her. "You don't seem to have picked up your mail all week."

Jo rubbed her forehead. "M-m-merde," she said.

Richard laughed then looked concerned. "Your mom said you've been getting headaches."

"Yeah, right behind my eyes. Maybe we should try to find my glasses?" She stared at one object on the desk, a framed photograph of a tall, dark haired man with a woman on one arm and a teen-age girl in a cheerleading costume on the other. "Double shit," she muttered when she realized who the girl must be.

"Hey," said Richard, noticing where she was looking. "Is that you? You were a cheerleader?"

"M-m-melody, not m-me!"

"Still," said Richard. "Bet you --she-- was popular, so cute." He admired the picture, thinking, Oh yeah.

Jo frowned, remembering Joel's high school years. He'd been a pudgy kid before he suddenly shot up in the summer before his junior year. Shy, pimply, nerdy, his one taste of popularity had occurred when the neighborhood garage band he'd joined had won a band competition. Then he'd dropped out of the band, he remembered, and that had been that -- back to the obscurity of computer club and D&D on Friday nights.

"There's other pictures on the wall," Richard pointed out.

Jo looked. Melody wearing a bright blue leather mini with a sparkly pink top, fronting at keyboards for a band that might have been the one Joel had played with except the kids had different, older faces and better, more expensive equipment. The drum had a logo, Melodie and Harmo-Noise. Another picture showed a younger Melody in Elizabethan costume. A pre-teen Melody in a tutu and one in a Brownie uniform. "Triple shit," said Jo, "I don't remember any of this stuff!"

They stared at one another a moment. "Yeah," said Richard, "do-doo-do-doo do-doo-do-doo."

"The w-w-worst of it," said Jo, trying not to cry again. "I know they loved her."

"Melody? Yeah." He pointed at a glass case against the wall, filled with the sort of memorabilia one collected during the life of a favored child. Award plaques, graduation pictures, odd little sculptures made by immature hands. "You even won a dance contest," Richard noted.

"I can't dance!"

"Who's the dude with the liplock on you?" asked Richard. A framed picture on top of a case showed a teen-age couple dressed for a prom, kissing; the girl, Melody, wore her long, ginger hair in a braid and her green gown matched her eyes; the boy wore a tux in a peculiar violet shade and stood an inch or so less than the girl in her heels.

"That's not m-m-me!" Jo protested again.

Richard stopped himself from pointing at another picture. "Let's go see what's in the kitchen," he suggested.

Jo got up from the desk and quickly left the room.

* * *

"Artifacts without substance, none of these things existed," Ted pointed out. "Melody never led a band or joined the cheer squad or went to a prom with a boy named Kevin. The past we created for her had nothing so dramatic in it that we would have had to change memories to accommodate."

Sophie nodded. "Paper trail only, records have been altered but no memories. People trust records more anyway. Well, this is like that, right? I just made a few mementos to back up the records."

Ted frowned, "You're up to something."

"Nil vulnero, nil turpis; in alveobolos, veritas," Bill Z. Bubb commented from the driver's seat.

"What? That's atrocious. Dog Latin, and bad dog Latin at that."

"In atrocite, veritas," said Sophie. She laughed.

"Bolos isn't Latin, it's Greek, and it doesn't mean ball, it means lump," Ted complained.

"Relevo, Theo," said Sophie, smirking.

"Oh, lighten up, yourself. You're trying to set up a gambit, I can smell it." He shook a finger at her. "How would you like to contemplate calendar reform, hm? Thirteen months of twenty-eight days each with an inter-calendar yule. No more Strangefellows Days, no more walkng the Earth in that - that costume!"

"Never happen," said Sophie quickly. "Mortals are a lot more contrary than that. Your precious free will and all; they like things messy."

"I'm watching you," said Ted the Clarence.

"Ohh, Ted!" she cooed.