7~

She felt prone.

As she ascended into damp consciousness, the previous darkness she fell into became a gradually lifting gray fog.

Marcie's eyes, even bespectacled, were unfocused as she opened them and tried to get her bearings. Head starting to clear, she recognized the trappings of a living room, a couch, and a full-figured woman sitting by her, watching her recover.

"Mrs. Dinkley?" Marcie managed to say, but her body was as a ragdoll's, immobile and weak from her earlier psychosomatic withdrawal symptoms at home.

"Yes, dear," Angie said quietly. "I'm here, and you're in my house."

"I...am?"

"Yes, sweetheart. Now, why is that?"

Marcie stared past the woman blankly. She couldn't understand why she was in Mrs. Dinkley's home at such an hour or in her current condition, and when she tried to remember, she couldn't access the memory.

"Why am I so wet?" Marcie asked.

"I found you in Velma's room," Angie explained. "And, I'm afraid, you became quite unhinged, so I splashed you with the melted water from my ice bucket. And then, you passed out."

"I did?" Marcie pinched and rubbed the tiredness from her eyes. "I don't remember anything except being so tired that day after school. It was so hot that day. I went into an alley to cool off and take a nap...and then, I saw Ringleader!"

"The hippy criminal on the news?"

"Yes, and then, nothing."

"Hmm...It sounds like you might have had your memories suppressed somehow," pondered Angie. "With your permission, I'm going to try and put you under, so I can bring these missing memories back. Will you let me?"

'Hypnosis?' Marcie wondered. It reminded her distantly of when she was invited to Velma's tenth birthday party. Although she was thoroughly entertained, the girl felt it a bit far-fetched when Mrs. Dinkley had supposedly hypnotized her husband to bark whenever he heard the number 10.

Hence, the hilarity when they all would sing 'Happy Birthday' to little Velma, and her father would bark whenever his daughter would answer the question of how old she was.

No harm was done, there were even scientific papers written about the subject, and in the back of her mind, little Marcie did wonder how Mrs. Dinkley was able to control another mind so thoroughly without the use of chemicals.

In any event, Marcie needed answers and closure. If hypnotic suggestion was the key to her finding them, what had she to lose?

"Of course, Mrs. D," Marcie allowed. "I trust you. I have to know what happened to me."

"All right, dear."

Marcie watched Mrs. Dinkley reach towards her chest and hold up a gold medallion engraved with the Masonic symbol of the Egyptian pyramid centered with the All-seeing Eye. She took it from around her neck and swayed gently in front of Marcie's face.

"Now, I want you to relax and watch the pretty necklace," Angie instructed calmly.

"Okay..."Marcie said, already exhausted.

"See the triangle in the middle? Focus on that. Watch it swing, back and forth. Keep your eyes on it."

"Okay..."

After a few quiet minutes, Angie ventured to ask the girl softly, "Are you relaxed, Marcie?"

"Yesss..." Marcie droned, barely awake.

"Back and forth...back and forth...back and forth."

Marcie's perception floated in the cottony twilight between the conscious and subconscious, and the only sound she could utter was a whispering "Uhhhh..." She was ready.

"Listen. Understand," Angie quietly told her. "Your mind is like a book. Everything you say and do is written in the pages of this book. Now, I want you to turn those pages back. Look at every page until you reach the page of you in the alley."

Marcie's brain obeyed. Unconnected thoughts slowly began to detach from the murk of her absent-mindedness and bobbled back to the surface of her mind, clarifying, gradually, as they ascended.

"Look at every page in your mind," Angie whispered.

The breaking into Velma's room, her talks with Daisy, her father, and even Ringleader in his "church." Those thoughts congealed together to form more precise moments.

"Look at every page in your mind," Mrs. Dinkley repeated.

From those clumps of moments, they gradually amalgamated into ever more coherent events. The thefts. So many brazen thefts...

"Look at every page in your mind."

From those events, after long minutes of stumbling recollection, sorting and resorting the times of her illicit doings, comings, and goings, Marcie finally took a cleansing breath and could remember her run-in with the wretched Ringleader in the dark alley.

"Ringleader! He hypnotized me in the alley! He made me a member of his cult! I...I can remember, now," Marcie said gratefully, her memory strengthening more readily. "And I'm starting to feel like myself again. Thank you, Mrs. D."

Angie swung up and casually caught her medallion before putting back around her neck. "You're welcome, dear. I'm glad I could help. Now, do you remember why you were in Velma's room? In case you didn't know, she left with her other friends to go on a field trip a few weeks ago."

"I know, Mrs. D.," Marcie admitted wearily, sitting up on the couch. "And the reason I was in her room was that I...missed her."

Marcie felt more red-faced shame in her reasons for the break-in than for the break-in itself, and the more she thought about her admission, as hard as it was to say, the more pathetic she felt under Mrs. Dinkley's quizzical gaze.

"I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking clearly, what with the brainwashing and all," the girl continued with some effort. "It's just that she's my friend, and for weeks, I just couldn't understand why she would just up and leave like that. I tried to be understanding and patient, but...do you know when she's coming back?"

Mrs. Dinkley sat still on her stool and ruminated what she heard, her usually upbeat manner becoming visibly diminished, slightly. But, if she had any anger towards Marcie for her transgressions, it was replaced with quiet sadness.

"I don't know, Marcie," she said in a voice that to Marcie sounded almost like defeat. "I suppose we're in the same boat. Dale and I trust Velma to do the right thing, and I know she has a good head on her shoulders, but maybe we were wrong. Maybe we should have been more controlling and said no to her regarding the trip."

Marcie had no inkling about parenting and wasn't about to debate the matter. So, she simply bowed her head in commiseration and said, "I guess, Mrs. D."

Perhaps because the topic felt too hard to discuss and she wanted to change the subject, Mrs. Dinkley sighed, perked up, and asked in a gossipy voice, "So tell me, how did you feel when you became an evil, brainwashed pawn of a criminal puppetmaster?"

"Free. Powerful," Marcie said. "Like I could do anything I wanted."

"Did taking things from people make you feel powerful?" Mrs. Dinkley continued as though she were a psychiatrist trying to get to the root of some deep neurosis.

"It did," Marcie admitted. "But if that was so, then why I was so shaken when I-"

"Went into Velma's room? You may know the answer to that better than I, dear."

Marcie sighed. "I guess my mind was telling me what it felt like to lose something important, like everybody losing their property. V's my best...my only friend in the world, and I guess because I've been so used to Velma being around that when she left, I was really hung up on it."

Mrs. Dinkley looked deeply at Marcie. She had known her a long time, almost like family, but this was the first time she saw the teen with truly sympathetic eyes.

"Well, when we've been with people we care about for a long time, Marcie, we sometimes live in extremes and tend to either take them for granted or see them as a crutch to get through the day," she said. "By the by, why do you always say that."

"Say what?"

"That Velma is your only friend. I'm sure you've known quite a few people in your lifetime. Could they be your friends?"

Marcie looked to the side, afraid to show vulnerability. She knew who Mrs. Dinkley was talking about. Them. Velma's other friends.

"Maybe," Marcie mumbled begrudgingly.

"Am I a friend?" Mrs. Dinkley asked out of the blue.

That caught Marcie completely off-guard. 'Unfair, Mrs. D!' she thought. 'How could you think otherwise?'

"Of course, Mrs. D!" Marcie said quickly, to squash any offense, as well as to bolster her own defense. "You've been like a mother to me when I lost my own. You were always nice to me. I just meant that Velma's...uh," She lowered her head again.

Mrs. Dinkley chuckled perceptively. "More like you. I understand, Marcie. Sorry to put you on the spot like that."

Marcie exhaled relievedly. "No, Mrs. D. I do think of you as a friend, but I certainly didn't act like one by breaking into your home tonight. I had a choice not to do it, but I did it, anyway. There's no excuse for that, and you're right...about earlier. I suppose I took her leaving me too personally. Almost like I've been-"

"Pining for her?"

Marcie snapped a look of stone-faced fear at her. Any pretense at wondering if she knew how she felt about her daughter fled from her, like her courage.

But Angie Dinkley just masterfully diffused the tension by smiling that perky yet worldly and enigmatic smile of hers.

"Marcie, your friendship with Velma is such a wonderful and precious thing, and the most important thing about it is that my daughter knows it is, too. I know how hard it will be to wait until she comes back. I'm her mother, and I miss her something terrible, too."

"Then how do I...I mean, how do we deal with it, Mrs. D?"

"With faith, love...and a good long-distance service plan," she quipped with a chuckle, but then added, more seriously, "I'm glad that my daughter has you for a friend, Marcie. You came and told me the truth, so you have nothing to apologize for, and I have nothing to forgive, but if you really want to honor Velma's friendship, then do your best to stop this Ringleader and help return all of the things that were stolen."

A thunderbolt struck her from within. Not just for justice but for Velma.

Never had Marcie thought of having that as motivation before, but for the first time that night, she fixed her host with a determined glint in her eyes.

"I swear on my friendship with Velma that I'll shut Ringleader down," Marcie vowed, her mind already trying to make up for lost time, processing on the possible connection from the few clues she had collected so far.

Mrs. Dinkley calmly stood up from her stool. "Thank you, dear. I'll give you a ride back to your house. It's too late at night for me to give her a call, but if you ever get the chance to talk to her over your computer, tell her that her "parental units" said hello and that we miss her very, very much."

Marcie gave the kind woman a grateful hug. "Thank you, Mrs. D. I knew you would understand."

In good spirits and turning away to leave the living room, Mrs. Dinkley chirped, "Oh, sweetie, think nothing of it. I was young once, myself."

As she watched Angie Dinkley get the keys to the family sedan, Marcie gave her a reverent look.

Once again, without complaint of inconvenience, she had become the mother Marcie had always needed.


The damaged cardboard box sat on the table in Marcie's lab, next to the clay fragment of the smoke bomb sphere she found in the mall. She placed them together in the hopes that she could find sense in them, but so far, nothing came to her.

"What was it Velma said I could do the last time we webcammed?" Marcie asked herself while staring at the objects and brooding on her stool.

"Gather evidence to build a case I could send to the sheriff? I'd better. Accusing Ringleader of anything short of jaywalking, without hard proof, isn't going to fly with Sheriff Stone, no matter how incompetent he is. He's still a fellow Crystal Cover? Covian? Covite? until proven guilty."

She sat some more, feeling that there was a connection between the box and the broken sphere that would tell her the secrets of the universe if she were persistent enough.

Her eyes began to tighten. She was getting tired, and staying up on a school night was a surefire way to oversleep tomorrow.

She reached over and picked up the box, turning it in her hands, not believing it would yield any answers, but at least doing something different with the box before she turned in for the rest of the night.

"Way to go, Miss Observant," she chided herself. "Obviously, the bombs that blew up Joanne's store were in these boxes. A hole in only one side? Definitely a shaped charge to focus the blast in only one direction, in this case, the front of the store. That's why the back of the store was untouched."

She scratched the back of her unkempt hair in thought. "But what does this have to do with Ringleader? I can't help put him away on some rinky-dink vandalism charge. What am I missing? What's the real mystery?"

Marcie gave a stretch and looked out of one of the lab's windows into the night. 'Not a good idea,' she figured, as the stars made the sky look so tranquil.

"Well, what to do?" she sighed. "Do I spend the rest of the night wracking my brain trying to find the evidence I need? Or do I crash and try to get it all done tomorrow?"

Nothing ever got done by sleeping, her father would tell her, so the answer, to her, was clear. She went over to a counter, where a cd player sat next to her laptop.

A disk was already inside, so she hit the Play button, and the first track of Rude Boy and the Skatastics' third album, 'The Ska's The Limit,' came through the speakers loud and clear.

Bopping her head to the downbeat, she opened a cabinet and produced a mug and a half-empty bottle of caffeine-rich Collision Cola. Placing them on the counter next to the lab's sink, she turned on the hot water to rinse the mug.

"Well, Marcie," she said, psyching herself up while washing out her cup, listening to Rude Boy's voice suddenly starting to fade, and feeling her knees give way, "It's gonna be a long night."

She collapsed on the lab floor, snoring, while Rude Boy sang on.


"Marcie!" Winslow called out from the kitchen the following day between bites of toast. "I'm getting ready to go. Do you want me to drop you off at school?"

No answer came from anywhere in the house.

Winslow gave a cautionary glance at his watch; he had to leave. "She must have gone to school early," he concluded. "That's my little hard worker. Takes after her old man."

He got into his car, closed the driver's side door, and pulled away from the house. The sound of a car accelerating away was the signal Marcie waited for to open the door of her lab and check for any paternal sounds. None were heard.

With a sigh, she closed the door and open the windows to let in the invigorating morning air to clear the cobwebs out of her head.

"That impromptu nap did me a world of good," she said to herself with a stretch. "And now, with some breakfast forthcoming, I'll be ready to bring my first criminal to justice."

She walked from the lab to the rear entrance to the house, pondering on last night's event.

"I haven't felt that sleepy since..."

Marcie stopped in her tracks, the sudden epiphany tearing the lead cotton of ignorance from her brain by yards. The connection. It was so complete and unbending that it shamed her for not seeing it sooner.

She looked down at her wrist.

"Joanne's bracelet. I've been wearing this thing for days and hadn't taken off since...I was attacked by Ringleader! Have I been looking at the wrong clues in this mystery? Is the bracelet a clue?" she gleefully questioned in the backyard to no one in particular.

She ran into the kitchen, eager to whip up a sandwich and grab some orange juice to take back to the lab. Solving problems always gave her a hell of an appetite.

While she began assembling the components of her sandwiches in the kitchen, Marcie began to think about Joanne. The woman gave the bracelet to her, and then Ringleader attacked. He attacked Joanne in the mall, as well. The coincidence seemed unlikely, so was the bracelet a connection to both of them, somehow?

The criminal wore several bracelets on his person, she recalled. Was her bracelet something that he wanted?

A quick examination showed nothing special, a thin, golden band topped with a ruby-like costume gem. If he wanted it, then why didn't he just take it when she was at his mercy? It didn't add up. There was definitely some connection, but it seemed too subtle for these easy lines of questions to uncover.

Before she could ask herself another question, the doorbell chimed.

She stopped her sandwich-making and walked towards the front of the house with growing unease. What if it was Ringleader or one of his minions? What if he somehow found out that she had broken his mental hold on her and came to her, personally, to reestablish it, or worse?

Marcie crept up to the front door quietly, desperate not to give herself away.

The doorbell rang again.

Nervously picking up an umbrella from its stand by the side of the door, she breathed out and swiftly opened the front door. The umbrella's pointed end was jabbed into the face of a perplexed postman, who roared in pain and frustration.

Marcie lowered the Bumbershoot and gave a good look around the front lawn for reinforcements. None were there. She then gave an apologetic glance at her victim.

"I'm so sorry, mister. I thought you were somebody else."

Holding the high side of his face, the government worker growled, "I feel sorry for that 'somebody else.' Here!"

He hefted a brown paper-wrapped package at her, roughly the size of a portable TV set, which she accepted sheepishly.

"Thank you, sir," Marcie said to the mailman's back as he stomped back to his truck, curses and unflattering comments about her ancestry filling his mind.

As he drove off, Marcie looked at the package, inspecting it for anything untoward. A block of writing off one corner of the parcel caught her eye. It was addressed to her, from, of all people, Daisy Blake.

She brought it inside and put the package on the dining room table. Tearing the wrapping away, Marcie saw a note fall onto the table's surface. She picked it up and read the missive.

'Dear Marcie,

Picked this up while I was diving around Darrow U the other day. Can't believe they'd throw this out just because they've got something else that's shinier. I saw some teachers have these in their classes. Figured a whiz kid like you could have a use for it.

Enjoy!'

Marcie cleared the rest of the wrapping off to reveal a twenty-year-old spectroscope. It resembled a computer made to a scale more comfortable for a kindergartener, a small, boxy monitor sitting on top of an equally small, thick, rectangular control base.

Despite its age, Marcie's face automatically beamed with an eager smile. If it worked, it could simplify her chemical analysis work a hundredfold. She had to do something to return the favor.

It was then that her mind came up with the perfect gift. Thinking back, she remembered her little chat with the other Blake Sisters back at Groovitations and wondered, with newly cold dread, if they ever succeeded in dragging Daisy down into Ringleader's lair.

Taking her cell phone out of her jacket pocket, she tensely dialed the Blake Mansion. After two rings, Daisy's voice came clear from the other side of the receiver. As a recording.

After the message beep, Marcie said in response, "Daisy, you were right. Your sisters are acting strangely because they were brainwashed by Ringleader. I'm free of him, now, but you'll have to watch your back until I can get to them. I think ice-cold water is the key to shocking them out of their brainwashing, so I'll try that. Oh, yeah, I got your gift just now. I love the spectroscope. I hope it works. Bye for now."

She then pocketed the phone and carried the instrument into the kitchen to finish making her breakfast and tackle the rest of the day.

As Rude Boy was jamming on his second run on her cd player, Marcie, mouth full of food and drink, examined the bracelet with a magnifying glass under a bright, adjustable lamp.

So far as she could ascertain, nothing looked amiss. Despite her happiness at being the proud owner of her own spectroscope, she wished she had an electron microscope thrown into the mix to help her with the examination.

She twisted the bangle slowly between her fingers, trying to angle as much light and magnification into the band as possible. If there was a link between Ringleader and Joanne, it had to be in the jewelry somewhere.

Marcie stopped her angling when she thought she saw something different in the color of the inside of the band, where the wrist would rest.

She believed that it was a distortion caused by the magnifier. Still, she saw it again when she brought the bracelet up closer to the lamp, a dulling of the band's interior surface compared to the overall gilded gleam of its outside.

"I guess the wasn't gold at all, just discolored by sweat, probably," she mumbled to herself. "Well, maybe there's something in the discoloration. It wouldn't hurt to check."

Reaching over to a plastic container filled with tall handled cotton swabs, she plucked one out, ran a little water over one of the absorbent heads, and carefully rubbed off a sample of the dull patina inside the band.

She then walked over to her spectroscope, pressed its On button, and gave a silent prayer that it still worked.

The smallish monitor flickered to grainy life as a green-tinted screen with archaic, blocky graphics jumped, pulsed, and eventually steadied into reasonable resolution.

Marcie, breathing relievedly, tapped the tiny, specialized keypad to place the instrument's dated computer to its new settings, smeared the sample into the control base's small entry chamber, and then slid it into the device's still surviving micro-furnace.

Crossing her fingers, she heard the heating element inside buzz as it burned the sample. The once-solid matter transformed into a contained gas that was then lit by its interior light so that its unique emission line spectrum could be read by the unit's hearty photosensors to determine the sample's make-up.

A dark green graph appeared on the screen, a horizontally-banded bar with the odd line radiating from certain bands to denote specific elements that composed the sample.

Marcie peered closely at the screen, attempting to get used to the visual quality, or lack thereof, took out a small notepad from her jacket and thankfully scribbled the elements displayed. She then cleared the screen of the graph and, after taking another bit and another swig went to her laptop and called up Goggle.

Typing the list of elements into the search bar brought forth web page summary after web page summary of related subjects. Some giving information about the individual elements, others detailing chemical compositions that had some of the features present. Marcie resigned herself to read them all.

Two hours into the search, Marcie stopped and rubbed her eyes.

"I can't believe I'm playing hooky for this," she groused while closing another website and returning to the current Goggle page. "I thought my Goggle-fu was strong."

She inched the screen further down and was about to clean her work area and get some more o.j. when a lax glance at the page flashed something to her.

It happened so quick, she stopped and had to scan the articles featured there to find it again, but when she did, she smiled to rival the morning sun.

The summary headline was innocuous-looking enough since the article the web page carried came from an old newspaper story from years back. All of the chemicals' names that could fit the summary were shown in bold letters beside a single word. Snoozex.

But the three words Marcie focused on in that abridged headline made everything she went through in the past few days worth it.

Dr. Joanne Barlow.