Title: Resurgam 
Author: Ophelia
E-Mail: OpheliaMac@aol.com
Rating: PG-13
Category: X, A
Spoilers: 7th Season, through "all things"
Keywords: MSR
Summary: Something very angry is haunting a tiny graveyard on the 
Vineyard. 
Archive: Anywhere you want. Just let me know where 
you're putting it so I can send you the complete version later.

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Disclaimer: Sing to "All Things Bright and Beautiful:" "All 
things dark and horrible, each hidden evil plot, all things weird 
and miserable, Chris Carter owns the lot.  Aaaaaa-men."

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After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,--
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.
               --Emily Dickinson, J. 1147 ("The Forgotten Grave")

The first question Scully had about the South Road Ghost was 
whether to classify it as a revenge or reenactment haunting.   
After seven years of working with Mulder's eccentric 
record-keeping system, this no longer seemed a strange question 
to ask.  She scanned the one-page fax while sipping her morning 
coffee, making small notations in the margins with a red pen.  

The fax had apparently come from a private citizen, a man named 
Irv Stuckey who wrote with an old typewriter ribbon and couldn't 
spell.  He complained at some length about how no one at the FBI 
or his local sheriff's office took him seriously or answered his 
letters.  Great. This kind of case was a nightmare to sell 
upstairs.  Scully wrote at the bottom, "Jurisdiction?" 

The relevant part of the letter read:

This aftrenoon at apprx.  3 pm Kristie Herron was found dead at 
foot of Wesquobsque Cliffs of a brken neck.  As you know the 
South Road gohst does haunt these clifts and you know what for.  
Kristie had all the marks encluding knife cuts on her hands and 
leg & it was the right kind of night very cold & windy.   

If you do the kind of work J. Luce, Jr. says you do and are not 
just wasting taxes you will come out and investegate the death of 
this poor girl.  Even with what happend in Boston she deserves 
better then to die this way & her mother is very broken up.  My 
ph. # is the same as the last letter I sent but since you 
proabably threw it out here it is again    963-0545. 

Sincereley,
Irv Stuckey

It wasn't the weirdest or most illiterate letter Scully had 
received while working on the X-Files, and she didn't let its 
eccentricities distract her.  Irv's description of Kristie's 
wounds intrigued Scully particularly.   He didn't seem to be 
a family member and he certainly wasn't a pathologist.  Where 
had he gotten his information?  She drew an arrow from his 
comment about knife cuts to the bottom of the page, where she 
noted sarcastically, "Clearly, falling over a cliff precludes 
the possibility these cuts were due to natural causes."  

She tapped her pen cap against the former break-room table that 
served as her desk.  Her options were to dismiss Irv's claims and 
round-file the letter, or accept the case and write it up as some 
kind of paranormal event.   For years she'd left this duty to 
Mulder on general principles, but eventually her protests against 
his bookkeeping methods began to feel childish, and now she wrote
cases up herself.

Should she go with reenactment haunting or revenge?  Irv had 
hinted that the ghost's appearance was recurrent, which any good 
paranormal investigator knew was typical of the reenactment type.  
And yet there were the supposed knife wounds to think of.  

Only Mulder would come up with a system that classified paranormal 
phenomena by motive.  //Fine -- eenie, meenie, miney, moe . . .   
Revenge haunting it is.//  Scully wrote the new case number across 
the top of the letter, "X-00-300.17-01."  The first vengeful 
ghost of the year 2000.  

At that moment the door to the office opened and Mulder came in, 
sipping coffee from his MUFON mug.  "'Morning," he said.  

"Good morning," she responded.  Though their words were 
restrained and their manner professional, their gazes met 
and held too long for mere courtesy.  

The familiar electrifying feeling began to build, and soon 
Scully looked away.  The Hoover Building had not been a 
friendly place for her in some time, and she felt too exposed  
when she allowed herself to experience powerful emotions 
while on the job.

The gossip about her and Mulder was nothing new, of course, 
except that now some of it was true. Worse, the rumors 
were circulated with a barely-veiled hostility that made 
them more than just embarrassing.  They were offensively 
intimate, like a dirty stranger peering in at the window.  
Lately she'd taken to saving up her photocopying until the very 
end of the day, when the copy room was likely to be deserted.

Holding out Irv Stuckey's fax, Scully said, "This came in early 
this morning -- a report of an unexplained death.  I've just 
officially made it a revenge haunting,"

"Really.  That's different."  Mulder stood behind her -- too 
close for propriety, as usual -- and looked over her shoulder 
at the paper.  

She repressed the urge to elbow him for teasing her.
Obliviousness to gossip was all very well for him -- Scully 
had previous experience with "discreet" romances, and knew 
popular opinion tended to be much harsher toward the woman.

She persevered in her attempt to remain businesslike. "The 
fax's author is writing from a place called the Wesqobsque 
Cliffs, although I'd be lying if I said I knew where those 
were.  He seems to know you." 

For some reason, that information took all the playfulness out 
of Mulder.  "Wesqobsque?" he asked, taking the fax from her hand.

"What?" she asked, turning to look up at him.  A fine line had
appeared between his brows -- a look of pain.  

"You all right?" she asked.  Office protocol forgotten, she rested
her hand on his arm.

He did not meet her gaze as he edged out from behind her table and 
walked over to his desk.  All intense focus now, Mulder set the fax 
down and began rifling through papers in a drawer.  "Irv's a local 
crackpot -- most of his stories are worth their weight in crap.  With 
luck, this one's as much garbage as the rest of them."  

She got up and followed him.  "Mulder, I don't understand," she 
said.

After a moment he stopped rummaging around and looked up at her.  
"I grew up near the Wesquobsque Cliffs.  They run along the 
Vineyard's South Shore, from Chilmark to Aquinnah.  The story 
of the South Road Ghost is just an old myth from that area, 
local color that plays well to kids and tourists.  I doubt Irv 
even believes in it -- he's just using it for his own purposes."  
After that he went back to digging through the drawer 
again, cursing softly as he dropped handfuls of bent business 
cards and Post-It notes onto the blotter.   

"Did you know her?  The girl who died?" Scully asked softly.  

He continued his search as he spoke.  "A little -- just a 
little bit.  Really I know her mother, or I used to.  Patty Todd 
used to baby-sit us when we were little -- her mom was 
a friend of my mother's.  Patty sent me a card when my dad 
died . . . "  Frustrated, Mulder slammed the drawer back in the 
desk.

In the violence of the gesture, Scully sensed how much he was still 
suffering over the recent loss of his mother, as well as his grief at
learning the truth about what happened to Samantha.  She reached out
to him again, offering a steadying touch.

Whether he noticed her outstretched hand or not, he knocked it away
while straightening up.  "Jesus, Kristie died down there 
on the beach and Irv wants to blame it on the South Road Ghost?  
He's such a little shit."  

"Mulder, you want to tell me what's going on?" she asked.  He still 
had the irritating tendency to draw her into his tortured inner 
monologues without quite acknowledging her presence.

"Sorry," he murmured.  Mulder dropped down into his chair and
ran his fingers through his hair, as if trying to soothe himself.
"I'm looking for Joey Luce's number at the Chilmark police 
station.  If anybody knows what's going on, he should.  I hope 
he'll tell me Irv's full of it."

Still confused, Scully tried focusing on the basics.  "So you're
saying I shouldn't bother with this case.  This isn't an X-File -- 
it's just some guy on Martha's Vineyard who likes to stir up 
trouble." 

Mulder sat back in his chair, as if forcibly relinquishing
some inner tension.  At last he looked up at her, and his 
expression was very sad.  "I'm not saying you shouldn't bother.  
It's . . . complicated.  The story of the South Road Ghost has 
a meaning -- there's a moral to it."

Scully sat down on the edge of his desk, willing to listen.

As she suspected, Mulder couldn't resist the chance to tell a good 
creepy story, even in his current distressed state.  "Supposedly, 
the ghost is a widow named Mary Brown who was executed during the 
winter of 1778.  That was a bad winter for the Island -- bad all 
around."

"That was the winter George Washington spent at Valley Forge," 
Scully said. Images from her childhood history books came to 
mind -- soldiers with black, gangrenous feet, shivering around 
the fire where they boiled shoe leather for food.

Mulder nodded.  "Boston didn't have enough naval power to defend 
the islands off the Cape, and the British had them under siege.   
There was a lot of hunger, a lot of disease.   Mary Brown's 
husband went down with his whole crew in Nantucket Sound when he 
tried engaging a British war ship in his fishing boat."  He 
must have seen Scully's look of amazement because he added, "They 
say the Vineyarders were brave on the water -- no one ever said 
they were smart.  

"After Captain Brown died, Mary gave birth to another baby and 
apparently something just snapped.  She probably couldn't feed
the kids and . . ."   He seemed to be backing away from a too-
accurate reconstruction of the woman's misery.  "Anyway, she went 
nuts.  Killed both her children with a kitchen knife and tried to 
cut her own throat."  

Mulder fell silent a moment.  He rubbed the back of one hand with 
his thumb, as if trying to wear away something unpleasant about 
his boyhood home. "From our vantage point we can say, 'Oh, it was
post-partum psychosis brought on by stress.  Nowadays she might get 
off with manslaughter.'  The Chilmark fathers didn't see it that 
way.  The women of the town nursed her back to health and a few days 
after the new year, they hanged her.  They say her ghost wanders the 
land along the South Shore with her head held up like a lantern.  
I guess the townswomen didn't do as good a job of healing her as 
they thought."  

Scully's medical training offered her a graphic image of the 
likely effects of hanging on a near-severed throat.  "That would 
have been bad," she said.

"It must have been.  She's supposed to appear on cold, windy 
nights to women who've grievously wronged their own children.  
Some say she slashes the mothers up with the murder knife, and 
some say just looking at her drives guilty women mad, and they 
kill themselves.  It's a Lovecraftian, inversion-of-the-natural-
order sort of thing.  Very Freud, very Brothers Grimm.  The only 
problem is that there's nothing to the story.  No one's ever 
found a record showing that Mary Brown even existed, and I've 
been over every inch of those woods along the South Shore -- 
daytime, nighttime, summer, winter.  The house I grew up in is 
about three-quarters of a mile from the South Road Burying 
Ground.  There's nothing out there."

"So Irv Stuckey is implying that Kristie Herron deserved to die 
because of something she did to harm her own child?" Scully asked.
"You're right, he is a shit."  She hoped that Irv's little theory 
hadn't made it back to Kristie's family.  "Do you think that's 
what he meant by 'what happened in Boston' -- something involving 
child abuse?  Child neglect?"

"I don't know what he meant by that," Mulder said.  "As far as I 
know, Kristie didn't have any kids.  It sure doesn't seem right
that Patty's old enough to be a grandmother.  Christ, that makes
me feel ancient."

"Don't remind me," Scully groaned.  Only two months ago, she had 
spent her 36th birthday among a gaggle of relatives, most of them 
with sticky-fingered toddlers and baby carriers in tow.  A cousin 
had managed to produce the first female Scully child in over 15 
years, a red-haired, blue-eyed baby named Emily Christine.  The 
coloring was the predominant one for their family and the name 
a coincidence -- "Emily" was one of the top ten most popular 
girls' names in the country.  And yet, the experience had called 
to mind with terrible sharpness the passage of time and what 
might have been.

"You've got a long way to go before you're old, Red," Mulder said.
He caught her little finger in his hand.  Their relationship was 
still in flux, but there were moments of tenderness to anchor it, 
like stones at the edges of billowing fabric.  
 
At last, Mulder managed to find the much-bent card he was seeking, 
wedged in the cramped space where the drawer's side met the desk 
wall.  He smoothed it out against the desk with the side of his 
hand, and Scully saw it read, "Sergeant Joseph A. Luce, Chilmark 
Police."  

Mulder dialed the phone, and after a moment began the introduction 
she'd heard a thousand times.  "Good morning, this is Special 
Agent Fox Mulder of the FBI and I --"  He didn't get any farther 
far a long time.  

"On hold?" Scully mouthed.

He shook his head and gave her a pained look.  Eventually he 
said, "Great, Doreen, thanks.  Listen, is Joey--"  Apparently 
he'd been cut off again.  Several seconds passed.  Mulder pushed 
the speaker phone button and suddenly the air was full of 
verbiage.

"--and she only just came back from off-Island and was going to 
meetings and she met a nice guy and everything and it seemed like 
she was getting her life back together when suddenly *this* 
happens and people are saying suicide but they'd never say that 
if they knew her like I did--" Blessedly, Mulder hit the speaker-
off button and Doreen's voice ceased.

"Wow," Scully said.  

Doreen must have taken a breath because Mulder said, "I need to 
talk to Joe."  Another pause.  "*Chief* Joe, no kidding.  Well, I 
need to talk to -- . . . Doreen . . .  For crying out loud, Dori, 
would you just put me through to --  Thank you."  Mulder glanced 
up, looking slightly embarrassed. Holding his hand over the 
mouthpiece of the phone, he whispered, "Inbred."  

Scully looked away, trying very hard not to laugh.  She had long 
been accustomed to the odd combination of nostalgia and 
distaste Mulder felt toward the one-stoplight town where he 
was raised.  
 
After a few moments, he said, "Hi, Joe, this is Fox Mulder.  
Yeah, I heard -- that's why I'm calling.  Actually, I hoped 
you'd tell me Irv was just hitting the hash pipe and it was 
all a mistake.   No, he faxed us late last night -- early 
this morning, really."  Glancing up at Scully, he added,
"Listen, my partner's here, would you mind if I put this 
on speaker phone?  Great."  

Mulder touched the speaker button again and said, "Chief Luce, 
this is Special Agent Dana Scully."

"Hello, Chief," Scully said.  

"Good to meet you, Agent," Joe said.  His voice sounded slightly 
canned coming through the speaker. "So, Fox, what exactly did 
Irv want?  Don't tell me it was just to spare Patty the grief 
of telling you herself."

"He wants to bring the South Road Ghost into it," Mulder said.  

A second or so of silence followed, and then Joe said, "Aw, 
Hell."  

"Actually if there was a South Road Ghost he'd have called the 
right place," Mulder said.  "My partner was about to classify 
this as another X-File."

"Refresh my memory . . . an X-File is a what again?" Joe asked.

"We investigate paranormal phenomena," Mulder said.  He shot 
Scully a mischievous look and added, "You know, chasing ghosts, 
Big Foot, lake monsters . . ."

"Not all of which turn out to be what witnesses claim," Scully 
pointed out.

"Right, right . . . you did the monster-man thing, the Chernobyl 
guy Dori says washed up out of Nantucket Sound." Joe said.

Scully felt a surge of dismay that yet another person had read
her out-of context quotes printed in the Midnight Inquisitor.
A quick change of subject seemed to be best.  "Chief, I thought 
it was a little odd that Mr. Stuckey knew so much about the
manner of Kristie's death," Scully said. "He wasn't at the scene, 
was he?"

Joe sighed.  Scully imagined him rubbing his eyes in weariness.  
If he'd been up as late as Irv had, he wouldn't have gotten much 
sleep.  "No -- Irv took a job as an orderly at the hospital 
four nights a week.  When things get slow he hangs out in one of 
the ambulances and listens to the emergency band channels.   Gets 
all the good dirt on the neighbors that way.  He must have heard 
someone from Crime Scene Services making arrangements to transport
the body.   Jesus, he knew Kristie was dead before her own mother 
did, and the first thing that crosses his mind is that old ghost 
story.   Man, he's a creepy old SOB.  I'll have to see that he 
doesn't harass Mark and Patty.  I'm sorry he bothered you."

"No, not at all," Mulder said.  "If there's anything Agent Scully 
or I could do to help we'd be glad."  He seemed to hesitate a 
moment, then asked, "Do you have anything to go on?  Any 
suspects?  Dori was saying something about Kristie going to 12-
step groups and meeting a new boyfriend . . ."

"Yeah, there's a guy named Randy Akers she was seeing.  
We haven't talked to him yet -- apparently he was out last night.  
He's not a suspect at the moment.  Actually we don't have *any* 
suspects.  Right now this is just an equivocal death 
investigation," Joe said.

"Can you give me an idea what happened?"  Mulder asked.

"I can tell you Kristie left her parents' house sometime after 
12:30 a.m., Thursday, wearing a real light jacket and her mom's 
shoes.   It wasn't a nice night to go for a walk, either  -- 
just above freezing with falling sleet."

Mulder was chewing on his pen cap, something he did when he was 
concentrating and didn't have any sunflower seeds.  "She didn't 
have a fight, did she?  Anybody hear her talking on the phone?" 

"Her family says no.   Her youngest brother's still living at 
home -- it's possible the two of them got into it over something 
and he was too ashamed to say so.   Still, she had a car, she 
could have driven somewhere if she wanted to get out of the 
house.  Her mom says running off on foot in the cold like that 
is out of character for her."  Joe paused for a moment, then 
said, "The Herrons probably won't mind my telling you this -- 
it's not uncommon knowledge anyway.  Kristie got into some 
trouble over in Boston last year.  Drugs."  

Mulder made a soft noise of dismay.  

"She drew two years' probation, since she had no record and 
was able to give the DA's office some information on a guy 
they'd been looking for.  The judge let her report over in 
Edgartown provided she stayed with her parents.  It's only been 
about six months."

"And everybody's thinking the worst, right?"  Mulder asked.
Scully heard his own family's experience with Vineyard 
ostracism in the bitterness of his tone. 

"I never said that, Fox," Joe said.  "I honestly think she was 
done with the drug scene.  I do.  I'm just wondering if there was 
somebody in Boston who wasn't done with her.  Someone sure put 
her through hell Thursday morning.  She had a lot of what looked 
like knife cuts on her hands and a through-and-through stab wound 
to one leg."

"Defensive wounds?" Scully asked.

"Probably.   There wasn't the kind of mutilation you sometimes 
see with a victim who's crossed a drug lord, but maybe he was 
just gearing up.  I haven't discounted the possibility that she 
ran over the cliff in a panic while trying to escape," Joe said.

"Who's doing the autopsy?" Mulder asked.

"They're doing it in Boston, I don't know who specifically.  
Sergeant Tihkoosue from the Sate Police barracks in Oak Bluffs 
was going to attend, so he'd know as soon as anybody.   I can ask 
him if you want," Joe said.  

Mulder looked over at Scully.   He didn't even need to say the 
words.  "Could you give us just a minute, Chief?" Scully asked.
      
"Sure," Joe said.  Scully hit the phone's mute button.

"Mulder, the Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner is Dr. Clarence 
Kreger.  He's got a teaching position at Harvard Medical School 
-- he's been an international pathology lecturer.  Any District 
Attorney would leap at the chance to work with him," she said.

"I don't care if he does 'pahk his cah in Hahvahd Yahd,' he 
hasn't seen the things you have," Mulder said.

"I thought you said there was no X-File here," she said.

"I said there was no South Road Ghost.  In case you hadn't 
noticed, a connection to my family isn't exactly the key to great 
longevity.  If there is anything strange about the way Kristie 
died you'll figure it out.  If you say her death was 
straightforward then I'll be satisfied.  Besides, if Kreger's 
schedule's as full as you say it is, he'll probably have some 
staff underling doing the autopsy.  I'd rather have you do this 
than some overworked path resident," Mulder said.

Still sitting on the edge of his desk, Scully bent her head, 
her hair forming a thin screen against his hopeful look.  
Neither spoke of his mother's death.  "Mulder . . .  some 
news comes better from someone unconnected with the family.
If I have to tell Kristie's parents something they don't want
to hear, it could put you in a very difficult position."

"They can't ask for more than the truth, Scully.   They shouldn't 
have to settle for less," Mulder said.  

She looked up at him.  Only two nights ago she'd been awakened by 
his bone-wracking sobs.  His mother had shut him out in death as 
she had in life, and it had wounded him in a way that simply 
being orphaned couldn't have.  He'd pulled Scully into a crushing 
embrace and asked, "Why didn't she tell me?"   As always, Scully 
had no answer.  She could only hold him until his ragged gasps 
quieted and he was able to sleep. Afterward she'd lain awake a 
long time, replaying Teena Mulder's autopsy again and again in 
her mind.   What if she'd missed some tiny forensic clue that 
would have allowed her to come to any conclusion other than 
suicide?

"I trust your judgment."  He spoke gently, as if to reassure her.  
"If you tell me bad news it's only because it's true."

Scully released her breath slowly.  "I'll volunteer and let the 
family decide," she said.  She hit the phone's mute button and 
asked, "Chief, are you still there?"

"Still here.  What's going on?" Joe asked.

"I'm a forensic pathologist," she said.  "Mulder thought I might 
be of help to the investigation.  I'm willing to do the autopsy 
if you and the family think my experience would be useful."

"She's investigated a lot of strange deaths," Mulder said.

"Well . . . no offense, but I think the State ME has seen his 
share of strange deaths too," Joe said.

"Not like Scully has.  Has Dr. Kreger ever seen a Level 4 
biological agent crawl out of a rock, through the seal of 
somebody's space suit and into a body cavity?" Mulder asked.

"Good God . . .  I hope not," said Joe.  "Look, if you really 
want to help, I can mention your offer to Kristie's parents and see 
what they think.  You should call Patty too -- she'd be glad to 
hear from you."

"I'll have to do that.  I appreciate you talking to me, Joe," 
Mulder said.  

As Mulder reached toward the disconnect button Joe said,  "Hey, 
Fox?  You know there's no hard feelings, right?  My uncle and I 
didn't have the same opinions on everything."

"Sure.  Talk to you later," Mulder said. 

"Yeah, bye," Joe said.  Mulder hung up the phone.

"What was that about?" Scully asked.

"It's a long story," Mulder said. "One of these complicated 
things that happens in small towns where people get cut off from 
the world during the winter."  He started gathering up the pile 
of bent cards and notes and pushing them back in his desk drawer.

"Such as?  Are we talking Donner's Pass or what?" Scully asked.  
She saw a flicker of amusement cross his face.

"Not quite."  He shut the drawer and looked up at her.  "Joey's 
uncle -- whose name was also Joseph Luce -- was the Chilmark 
Chief of Police back in the 70's.  He never thought much of my 
family's story about how my sister disappeared."

"He blamed you," Scully said.

"He blamed my father, actually. No charges were ever filed but we 
became personae non gratae with the neighbors pretty quick.  I 
had to listen to a lot of bullshit when I went back to the 
Vineyard to visit my dad.  At one point Joey actually accused me 
of helping to cover up my sister's murder, so I punched his 
lights out for him.  It didn't exactly endear me to the Island's 
premier law enforcement family."

"I bet not," Scully said.

"When my father was murdered, Joseph Luce, Sr., was Dukes County 
Sheriff," Mulder said. "Unfortunately he hadn't forgotten me."

"He called me," Scully said, remembering suddenly.  "He left 
about three messages a day on my answering machine when I was in 
New Mexico."

"He called me too.  He and Liz Hawley of the West Tisbury PD 
figured I was looking pretty good for the only up-island homicide 
in 20 years.  Then you managed to trace the gun back to Krycek and 
the investigation stalled out over a literal shadowy one-armed 
man.  I can imagine that went over real well with Sheriff Luce."  

"He couldn't have wanted you to be guilty," Scully said.

"No," Mulder said.  "It was the law of averages that bugged him.  
Do the Mulders: A., have the worst luck in history, or B., have 
connections to dangerous people they shouldn't?   I think he had 
us pegged as an organized crime family.  Might not have been far 
wrong, really."

"Mulder, that is completely unfair to your parents.  Your father 
died trying to expose the men who killed him," Scully said.

"Yeah," Mulder said, as if unwillingly conceding the 
point. "Joe called me after what happened with Roche.  He was 
with the Chilmark Police by then.  He wanted to know why I'd let 
a sociopathic child killer loose on his island.  I never called 
him back.  What was I going to say?"  

"The Luce family aren't your judges, Mulder," Scully said.

"No, but Cheryl Luce used to be Samantha's best friend.  Maybe 
Joey was mine -- I don't know.  We spent a lot of time at their 
house in the months before my sister was taken.  Home wasn't so 
great just then.  My dad wasn't working so hard to expose the men 
who killed him at the time."

"I'm sorry," was all Scully could think to say.  She still felt 
awkward at moments like this. She was a fixer by nature.  It was 
Mulder himself who'd helped her understand that suffering was 
normal, that a person could hurt without being broken.  She kept 
silent and hoped she was a soothing presence.

Finally he said, "I lied to you -- the Vineyard is haunted.  But 
only by the past."  He got up and walked out into the hall.  She 
repressed her urge to follow.  When he wanted her, he knew where 
she'd be.  

******

A few hours later Scully got a message asking her to go up to 
Skinner's office.  Mulder's presence was not requested.  Though 
she couldn't think of anything she'd done lately that would get 
herself in trouble, she went with a sense of trepidation.  When 
Skinner's secretary showed her in, she said, "You asked to see 
me, sir?"  //Please don't let this be about anything Mulder did . 
. .// she thought.  She hated it when their superiors tried to 
play them against one another.  

"Have a seat, agent," Skinner said, gesturing toward an empty 
chair.  This was never a good sign.  Scully smoothed her skirt 
under her and sat down.  "I just received a call from the Cape 
Cod and Islands District Attorney's office," Skinner said.  "They 
said you'd volunteered to do the autopsy of a young woman in 
Boston."

"Yes -- is that a problem?" Scully asked.  

"No.  In fact I think it's a wonderful idea," Skinner said.

"Sir?" Scully asked.  Something was up.  Skinner never called 
anything she and Mulder did "wonderful."  

"Agent Scully . . . there are people in the Bureau who don't 
appreciate the work you and Agent Mulder do.  They don't see its 
value.  This would be a good time for you to perform a service 
they can appreciate.  I can have you in Boston tonight so you can 
do the autopsy first thing in the morning.  Volunteering to do 
work outside of normal office hours will reflect positively on 
your next performance review," Skinner said.

As usual, Scully was left scrambling to read between the lines.  
"Is the validity of my and Agent Mulder's work being questioned 
more than usual, sir?" she asked.

"Why would you say that?" Skinner asked.

"You mentioned this would be 'a good time' to perform a service 
others can appreciate," Scully said.

"It's always a good time for that.  Your flight leaves at six."  
When she didn't move at once, he added, "If you need to pack a 
bag you might want to get going."

A few minutes later she was back in the basement, slamming the 
door to the office.  Mulder stood up behind his desk.  "What 
happened?  What'd he say?" he asked.

"We're in trouble," Scully said.  She pulled her purse from its 
usual place in a file drawer and dropped it on her desk.  

"For what?  I haven't even broken my cell phone lately," Mulder 
said.  He crossed the room to stand by her side.

"I don't know.  He was dropping hints about us needing to do PR 
work to appease the powers that be.   I get really tired of these 
guessing games.  Why can't he be straight with us for once?"  She 
retrieved her Dictaphone's batteries from where they sat charging 
on a shelf and tossed them into her purse.  

"He might be trying to do us a favor," Mulder said.

"Maybe.  I can never tell.  And he doesn't even ask me, 'Is a six 
o'clock flight convenient for you?'  It's, 'If you want to pack a 
bag, you'd better *go.*"  Scully recalled it was supposed to rain 
that weekend.  She strode toward their lopsided hat rack to grab 
her umbrella.

Mulder caught her by the wrist, gently turning her toward 
him.  "Hey . . . hey, calm down.  When was the last time you were 
in Boston?" he asked.

"It's been a long time," she said.  It was actually for his 
father's funeral in 1993, but she thought it best not to mention 
that.

"Well, when you get done with the autopsy I'll show you around.  
It's a great city if you don't mind homicidal drivers," Mulder 
said.

"Mulder, you're not going," she said.

"Yes, I am," he said.

"No, you're not.  Skinner made it clear he was authorizing one 
plane ticket.  It was only by being an Assistant Director of the 
FBI that he guaranteed me a flight out tonight at all."

"I can drive," Mulder said.   She thought he was trying not to 
laugh.  It really bugged her when he thought she was funny.  
"It's a six hour trip -- four, if I drive like I'm already in 
Boston."  He gently shook her wrist.  "Come on," he said.

"I'll be doing the autopsy into the afternoon and then we'll just 
have to turn around and come home," she said.

"Why?  You think somebody's going to tell on us if we don't?" he 
asked.

Scully found herself fighting a smile.  "I'll actually need to 
sleep before I do this autopsy," she said. 

"You'll sleep," he said.  He bent and kissed her gently just 
below her ear.  She was surprised and therefore vulnerable.  She 
felt her breath catch in her throat.  "Between bouts of 
screaming, wall-pounding sex."  He placed his next kiss low on 
her cheek.  If she let him go on long enough he'd make it around 
to her mouth. 

"We're at work," she pointed out, but she didn't back away. 

Mulder had always shown a perverse enjoyment of getting her 
excited in public places where the chance of release was nil.  
She turned and rested her hand against his cheek.  His pupils 
were widely dilated circles within rings of hazel-green; 
arousal was like a narcotic.  

Scully brushed her lips against his.  He tasted faintly of salt, 
faintly of the lemon he put in his tea.  When he tightened his 
arms around her ribcage she could feel the speed of his pulse in 
his neck.   Their physical relationship was very new and at times
its intensity was overwhelming.  

Their kiss was interrupted by the distant whirr of elevator doors 
opening and the squeal of unoiled cart wheels.  A lot of old but 
serviceable equipment was kept in the Hoover Building basement, 
and Bureau support staff were frequently sent to bring it up to 
the "inhabited" levels.  

Coming to her senses, Scully squirmed out of Mulder's embrace 
and brushed her tousled hair back behind her ears.  It wasn't 
even four o'clock yet, and the night seemed a long way off.  
"Okay, that's enough.  You're terrible," she said.  

For a moment there was a wild look in Mulder's eyes, but 
it soon faded to one of longing, like a man relinquishing 
something long desired. Then that was gone too and he became 
his everyday self, giving her his mock hurt routine.

"That's not what you said the other night," he said.  

She pitched a wad of paper at him.  Mulder picked up his coffee 
mug and started speaking to it.  "Did you like that, Cancer Man?  
Huh?  That turn you on?" His clowning did not completely 
dissipate the tension.  It was still there, like thunder in the 
distance.  

"Mulder, they are not bugging your coffee cup," Scully told him.

"You're right -- it's probably the electrical outlet that doesn't 
work."  He bent over to shout at the offending outlet, "Better 
than 'Celebrity Skin,' isn't it Krycek, you pervert!"

Scully rifled through filing cabinet drawers, picking up the 
things she would need in Boston.  She told herself to get the 
stupid grin off her face before she went down into the parking 
garage.  What was she so happy about, anyway? It never paid to 
get too happy.  Something was bound to happen and make things 
worse than ever. 

When she had everything she needed she stood on her toes to give 
Mulder a little kiss, a decent kiss, on the mouth.  "Goodbye," 
she said.

"See you," he said.  She felt his eyes on her as she went out the 
door.   Maybe she'd have time to take a cool shower before she 
got on the plane.

**********

As it turned out Scully did not spend the night screaming and 
pounding the wall.   She did dissolve into fits of giggles when 
Mulder scooped her out of bed and attempted to fold her into a 
fairly gymnastic sexual position in the tiny closet.  He hit his 
head on the mass of coat hangers and made them jangle.   She 
told him he had been alone with his porn collection for far too 
long. 

In the gray hour just before dawn Scully lay in bed with her head 
resting in the hollow of Mulder's shoulder.  He'd been asleep for 
more than an hour, but sleep eluded her.  She lay watching the 
green numbers on the clock as they counted their inexorable way 
toward 7 a.m.  //Typical.//  She placed her hand on his left 
chest, felt the slow beat of his heart below the ribcage.  

Her thoughts turned to Daniel.  Neither quite awake or asleep, 
her memories played themselves out as images and sensations.   

It seemed that she was once again an ambitious young pathology 
Resident, sitting in a lecture hall while Daniel addressed his 
first-year med students.   He strode back and forth before the 
first row of seats, sometimes climbing up into the risers.  All 
his notes were in his head, so he was free to make eye contact 
with as many students as possible.  He smiled; he joked with 
them.   A few of the less charismatic staff members derisively 
called him Dr. Elvis.  It didn't matter.  In a class of 100 
students, every one of them would go home feeling as if Daniel 
had been speaking to him or her personally.  

That afternoon he had been speaking about an outbreak of 
hemorrhagic fever in Bolivia.  Not exactly romance novel stuff.  
And yet the sunlight poured through the tall, narrow windows, 
gilding away the gray in his hair and flashing off the cuff
studs of his blue-and-white striped shirt as he gestured.  
He spoke so passionately that she almost felt as if she were 
in church, watching a fiery preaching of the gospel.  

Scully's first crush had been on a young deacon who helped 
celebrate youth Masses near the Texas naval base where her 
family lived in the late 70's.   

In Daniel's classroom  she felt like a wicked schoolgirl once
again, and relished every moment of it.  All she had to do 
was look attentive and innocent.  No one had to know about 
the desire in her heart.

Daniel knew.   They held one another's gazes too long when he 
said things like, "burning with a terrible fever," or "tossing 
and turning in bed."  He'd said, "It's nothing you'll ever 
forget, is it, Dr. Scully, watching a man literally eaten from the 
inside out, begging for relief with every breath?"

She'd said, "No, Dr. Waterston, it isn't."  

The elation, the sense of conquest, hadn't lasted.  He was 
married, of course.  His protestations about his unhappy marriage 
sounded weak even to Scully's besotted ears. 

She had given something away that afternoon in the lecture hall.   
Too late, she realized it was the part of herself that guarded 
her integrity and self-respect.    Those qualities were much 
harder to reclaim than they were to lose.

Her dream state shattered at the sound of the bedside clock:  " . 
. . fifty degrees and raining on this gloomy April Saturday.  
Approximately 800 customers in western Barnstable County are 
still without power due to the storm that blew through early 
Thursday morning --"  

Mulder moaned and rolled over to beat the alarm into silence.  
He squinted at the clock's numbers and said, "Oh, God.  I'm sorry 
I ever got you into this."

"Don't worry about it," Scully said.  "How can I resist the 
opportunity to perform a service the Bureau can 'appreciate?'"  
She slowly rolled up until she was sitting on the edge of the 
bed.  She wanted coffee.  Maybe that would dispel the troubling 
dream images in her head. 

"Thank you," Mulder said.  She turned and looked at him.  In the 
darkness his expression was unreadable, but he reached out and 
caressed the small of her back.  He clearly wanted the justice 
system to do its best by the daughter of his old friend, and he 
believed Scully was the best.  That kind of faith was sobering.  

"If having me do the autopsy helps the Herrons feel better, then 
it's the right thing to do," Scully said.  "I know what it's like 
to lose someone, and then feel like the whole system is working 
against you."

"You all right?" Mulder asked. 

"Yeah," she said.  "Just need to switch gears.  I have to be in 
pathology mode now."  

He seemed to accept her explanation at face value. "Girlfriend, 
you go *be* pathological," he said, swatting her lightly on 
the behind.

She got up and went into the bathroom.  When she turned on the 
lights they made her squint.  Soon she was under the spray of the 
shower, washing the musky scent of lovemaking off her body.  
//Mulder.  Not Daniel, not Jack.// she reminded herself.  //This 
is a different situation.  You're a different person.//  

She was afraid she wasn't different enough.

Scully did not like herself when she was in love.   Over and over 
she'd started by giving away her heart, and ended up giving away 
her soul instead.  

Why did her love always seem to turn to self-betrayal?  

Well for one thing, she tended to pick men who had other interests 
more compelling than she was.  Daniel had his wife, Jack had his 
own ambitions and career at the Bureau.  Mulder had his aliens.  
No, that wasn't fair -- Mulder had shown a marked preference for 
her over aliens on several occasions.  Of course, that wasn't 
exactly a ringing endorsement.  She could just hear Father McCue 
saying, //"Do you, Fox, swear to prefer Dana to aliens on most 
occasions as long as you both shall live?"//  She pressed her 
hands to her eyes.  "Oh my God, I am *nuts,*" she said.

*****

She decided to walk the few blocks to the ME's office rather than 
contend with Boston's tangled nest of one-way streets.   The 
morning was cool, and purple-gray rain clouds hung low in the sky.  
Except for a few pigeons, Scully had the wet sidewalks to 
herself.   The sound of her footfalls was like a meditation.

The night's fevered thoughts and desires fell away as she walked 
among the stately red brick buildings of Boston University 
Medical Center.  This was the realm of learning and reason.  //"Hic 
locus est ubi mors gaudet succerrere vitae" -- Here is the place 
where death delights to give aid to life.//  Here she felt 
competent and in control.  

When she arrived at the Medical Examiner's Office the door was 
locked and the windows were dark.  She glanced at her watch and 
found she was about 20 minutes early, so she composed herself to 
wait.   A few moments later the door opened.  A heavyset man 
whose pink face was splotched with spidered blood vessels leaned 
out.  Scully's overwhelming impression of him was that he was at 
a high risk of developing melanoma.  "You must be Dr. Scully," 
the man said.  "Hi, I'm Rob Conlin, the morgue attendant.  Come 
on in."  Scully noted the dropped r's and flattened o's of the 
classic Boston accent in his speech.

"Thank you," she said, following him inside.  "That's one of the 
friendliest greetings I've ever had at a morgue."

Rob had a slightly wheezing laugh.  "Oh, well, usually we have a 
secretary out here, but right now it's just you and me."

That worried her slightly.  "I am having a path assistant, aren't 
I?  And I thought the State Police detectives were coming."

"Sure, the police boys'll be here any time.  As to the PA, I 
don't know.  This was all arranged kind of suddenly.   Don't 
worry about it though, Dr. Scully, I'll hold the flaps while you 
sew," Rob said.

He showed her to the women's changing area, where she put on 
green scrubs and folded her clothes carefully into a locker.  The 
place smelled like Lysol with just a hint of formalin.  It was 
the smell of science and it helped focus her.  

When she walked into the body storage area itself she found Rob 
there, already suited up.  "We're doing C-3 today, aren't we?" he 
asked.  He checked the name card on the drawer.  "Herron, Kristie 
Ann?"

"That's right," Scully told him.

"Want me to get her out for you?  No sense waiting for the 
detectives just to get her on the table," Rob said.

"Sure, thank you," she told him.  Drawer C-3 made no sound as Rob 
slid it open.   In one smooth motion he lifted the silver-gray 
body bag from the drawer and laid it on a gurney.  Scully was 
impressed.  Due to lack of muscle tone, cadavers were not easy to 
move even when the decedent was light.  Most morgue attendants 
hauled and pushed bodies like sacks of potatoes.  Clearly, Rob had 
been at this job a while and knew his business.  

The autopsy bays were on the second floor, and since none had 
been assigned Scully appropriated one.  All the room's cabinets 
and counters were the same gleaming stainless steel as the 
autopsy knives.  The severity was relieved somewhat by a single 
window, a nice change from the hospital basements Scully was used 
to.  Unfortunately, the tinted glass made the day outside look 
even gloomier.  

Rob helped her weigh the body and get it onto the autopsy table.  
In extremis, Kristie Herron was 159 centimeters long and 102 
pounds, close to Scully's own height and weight.  Other than 
that, it was hard to say what the girl had looked like in life.

A series of catastrophic impacts had shattered her skull, causing 
her head to sag like a half-deflated balloon.   The body had 
clearly lain on its face for several hours.  Deep-red livor 
mortis colored most of what facial skin wasn't abraded away, 
except for odd blanched spots where some irregularity in the 
ground had provided enough pressure to keep blood from settling 
in the tissues.  Kristie was dressed as Joe Luce had described 
her, in a neon yellow windbreaker, blue T-shirt and jeans, and 
one inexpensive women's sneaker with no socks.  Her bare foot, 
which was perfect except for the livor on its anterior side, had 
silver-painted toenails.  The police had placed paper bags over 
both of her hands.

Scully gently probed some of the wounds with her gloved fingers 
while Rob stood by.   Suddenly he turned his head and said, 
"There's the back door buzzer.  That'll be the detectives.  I'll 
go let 'em in."  

Scully hadn't heard a sound.  It had been a while since she'd 
worked with an old-time morgue attendant like Rob -- the kind 
who'd spent 25 years learning the morgue's rhythms and who seemed 
to hear everything, see everything and know everything.  It was 
perhaps a bit disturbing to be with a person whose greatest 
comfort level was among the dead.   

A few minutes later, Rob led two men into the autopsy bay, 
one in plainclothes and one in the blue uniform of the 
Massachusetts State Police.  "You haven't started yet, have 
you?" the plainclothes man asked sharply.

"I'm just doing a very general external examination," Scully 
said.  //Don't let this guy start telling me how to do my job,// 
she thought.

"I'm Detective Ron Davis," the plainclothes man said.  "This is 
Sergeant Ken Tihkoosue from the Oak Bluffs installation on 
Martha's Vineyard."  Davis was a tall, balding man with a russet-
colored mustache. Ethnology was not Scully specialty, but she 
thought Tihkoosue's features looked Native American, perhaps 
Iriquois.

"Good to met you.  Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI," she said.  
She peeled off one of her latex gloves to shake hands.   Cops 
never hesitated to shake her hand when she was in the middle of 
an autopsy.  Civilians tended to stare down at her hand and look 
ill.  Trying to make conversation, she said, "My partner's from 
Martha's Vineyard."

"Really, what part?" Tihkoosue asked.

"He grew up in Chilmark and West Tisbury.  His name is Fox 
Mulder.  You might know him," She said.

Tihkoosue shook his head and said,  "By reputation only." Scully 
hoped Mulder's reputation on the Vineyard wasn't as bad as he 
thought it was.  

Despite her concerns, both police officers were helpful during 
the autopsy.  Tihkoosue photographed the body's hands while 
Davis held a small ruler next to the incised wounds.  The cuts 
were angry, red-brown furrows that ranged in length from a 
centimeter-and-a-half to more than seven.  Most were about half 
a centimeter deep, well into the muscle layer without involving 
bone.  In a way that was a shame, since cut bone retained a much 
more accurate impression of a weapon's blade than flesh did.  

"These are all consistent with defense wounds," Scully said.   
She moved her gloved fingers over the body's hands without 
touching them.  Paler subcutaneous tissue shone dully between 
the edges of Kristie's slit skin.  "Notice the roughly parallel 
cuts between the left wrist and the little finger.  That's a 
classic blade-deflecting pattern."  To illustrate, she swept her
left hand outward as if knocking away a knife with the side of 
her palm.  "The Y-shaped collection of wounds over here," she 
pointed to the much-cut webbing between Kristie's right 
forefinger and thumb, "was likely caused by blocking or grasping 
an edged weapon." It was almost as if she were teaching forensic 
pathology at Quantico again.   Her voice was confident, 
dispassionate, miles away from the emotional turmoil she'd felt 
that morning.  Even Davis had grown quiet and attentive.

"What about those diagonal cuts across the palms?  They look 
almost ritualistic," Tihkoosue said.  He pointed to a deep cut 
that ran across Kristie's right hand, then to its near mirror-
image on the left.   The two wounds angled away from the body at 
precisely the same degree, like the wings of a deadly butterfly.  

"Here," Scully said.  She picked up both wrists and rotated the 
hands 180 degrees.  When she held them palms up with the thumbs 
together, they approximated a blocking gesture in front of the 
abdomen.  "Pull the fingers back," she said.  Davis did so.  The 
wounds' inner edges met.  They were not two cuts but one, formed 
by a single slash across both hands.  "All the hand damage 
suggests the knife was held low or at a distance of several 
inches.   When a blade is closer people tend to block with their 
forearms," Scully said.  "Actually, I'm surprised there aren't 
more sharp-force injuries to the rest of the body."

"It's hard to tell with the head and neck in the condition 
they're in," Davis pointed out.  "You think the damage from the 
fall could have obliterated any obvious knife wounds?"

"I suppose it's possible.  The internal exam will tell," Scully 
said.   She doubted there were hidden knife wounds in the tissues 
of Kristie's throat.  The flesh there was abraded and torn -- 
cracked, more precisely, in the manner expected when a body 
struck a hard object with tremendous force -- but the wound edges 
were jagged and irregular, not the signature smooth cuts of a 
knife.  

She turned her attention to the only other sharp-force injury on 
the body, the through-and-through stabbing injury to the left 
thigh.  The entrance wound bore the purplish stamp of a hilt mark 
above the slightly squared-off superior edge.  Scully had been 
able to form a general picture of the weapon: a long, thin, 
single-edged knife that was honed quite sharp.  It would be a 
kitchen knife rather than a hunting or military model.  

The scenario developing in her mind was that of a crime of 
passion.  The knife was a sort that might be grabbed from a 
counter on impulse, the vicious wounds on Kristie's hands bore 
witness to the attacker's fury.  What had stopped him or her 
from delivering a lethal blow?  

There was a fine line between crime scene reconstruction and 
psychological analysis and Scully knew she should not cross it.  
Establishing motive was the duty of the detectives and the 
District Attorney.  Still, long association with Mulder had 
gotten her in the habit of asking "why" as well as "how."

"I want to look at her clothing again," she said.   

Davis set the ruler aside and went to open the paper bags that 
Kristie's clothes had been neatly folded into.  Scully exchanged 
her bloodied latex gloves for clean ones and followed him.  "What 
are you thinking?" Davis asked.

"The wound pattern's so unusual I want to make sure I'm not 
missing something," she said.  She watched as Davis laid out the 
jacket, T-shirt and jeans on a stainless-steel counter.  
Forensically, the jacket was the most useful.  Its rip-stop nylon 
resisted puncture by semi-sharp natural objects like roots and 
stones, but a fine blade drawn across it even lightly would fray 
and part the fibers.  Scully switched on the light beneath the 
overhead cabinet to get a better view of the fabric, which was 
crumpled and dried hard with blood and sea salt.  

She'd noted before the clothing was removed that it bore far more 
slash marks than the body did.  This was normal and could result 
from a number of things, such as near-misses or a blade passing 
through more than one layer of fabric.  What she wanted to verify 
was that all the cutting and scoring marks were in the middle of 
the body, between the approximate level of Kristie's breasts and 
her knees.  Scully ran her fingertips over the jacket's upper-
left chest, usually a prime target for an attacker wielding a 
knife.  Even probing and stretching of the cloth revealed no 
defects.  

"Is it possible the attacker was crouching or kneeling down?" she 
asked.  "Or maybe he has a disability of some kind, a limitation 
in the movement of his shoulder?"  She sensed Davis and 
Tihkoosue's glance at one another.   She looked up at them.

Tihkoosue said, "The man Kristie informed on to the DA in Boston 
is a mid-level coke dealer.  He took a bullet in the gut once and 
it wrecked his spine.  He uses a wheelchair now."

"I suppose that could account for this wound pattern, depending 
on the length of his reach and the nature of his injury.  How 
accessible is the crime scene location?" Scully asked.  From the 
photos they'd shown her the area looked very wooded and wild.

"To a man in a wheelchair?  It's not.  That's the problem," 
Tihkoosue said, shaking his head.  

"There are chairs designed to go off of paved surfaces," Scully 
said.

Davis leafed through the folder he'd brought and removed several 
crime scene photos.  He held them fanned in front of her like a 
hand of cards.   Even from looking at the partially-covered 
images Scully could see there was no track cut through the 
underbrush such as a heavy-duty wheelchair would make.  "Whoever 
Kristie met out in those woods, they didn't roll there," Davis 
said.  "We're keeping the guy in mind though.  His name is John 
McBer, but on the street they call him 'Frosty,'"

"The snowman.  Of course," Scully said.  She considered whether 
to discuss her findings in detail with Mulder.  One the one hand, 
his behavioral science background might help him make sense of 
the strange wound pattern.  On the other, Kristie was the 
daughter of his boyhood friend.  Hearing the grisly minutiae 
might be excruciating for him.  

In the end, Mulder made the decision for her.  Scully was 
examining tissue samples under a microscope when she heard his 
familiar footsteps in the hall.  She glanced up and saw that Rob 
had left his task of stitching the body's skin back over the 
skull.  He must have gone to answer the back doorbell.  Once 
again, Scully had never heard it ring.  

When Mulder appeared in the doorway, she darted past the 
detectives and planted herself in front of him, her 
hands pressed against the jambs.  "Don't -- it's bad," she said.  
Mulder looked startled at her protectiveness, but not as startled 
as the morgue attendant behind him.  Mulder had an FBI badge; how 
could Rob know he shouldn't have admitted him?

"I knew it would be bad," Mulder said.  He was wearing his off-
duty clothes, a black sweater and jeans, which made him seem more 
out of place, more vulnerable.  He put his hand on her shoulder 
and gently pushed her aside.  

"Help me cover her up," Scully snapped at Rob.  The attendant 
looked bewildered.  "He knew her," she said.  Rob hurried to grab 
a sheet from one of the steel cabinets.  The body block had been 
removed from beneath Kristie's back, and the great, Y-shaped 
incision in her torso closed.  But all of Rob's careful stitches 
could not repair her crushed skull or conceal the larval activity 
in her wounds.  

Scully and Rob draped a sheet over the body up to its shoulders.   
At least the covering gave the poor dead woman some dignity.  
Mulder gazed down at Kristie as he pulled on a pair of latex 
gloves.   His expression was almost puzzled, as if he were trying 
to connect the ruin on the table with the child he had once 
known.  

"She's somewhere better -- this isn't her," Scully said, trying 
to explain away the horror.  

Much of the dead girl's hair had been shaved away so Scully could 
examine her skull injuries.  What hair remained was shoulder-
length and had perhaps been light brown in life.  Mulder gently 
smoothed the strands away from Kristie's face.  "She was born in 
the summer of 1973," he said.  His voice had a strange, singsong 
distance to it.   "My sister fell in love with her at first 
sight.  She said she was going to baby-sit Kristie when she got 
older.  It was her turn to be the big girl.  She brought over all 
the baby toys she didn't play with anymore . . . started 
pestering my mom for a little sister."  Mulder cupped the side of 
Kristie's face and caressed her bloodied cheek with his thumb. 

He looked up at Scully.  His hazel eyes were pained but clear.  
"Homicide?" he asked softly.

Scully hesitated.  The mode of death might be complex, since it 
was unclear how Kristie had come to tumble off the cliff.  Still, 
the knife wounds had been no accident.  She gave him the short 
answer.  "Yes.  Homicide."    

He continued to stroke Kristie's matted hair for some moments.  
The room was silent.  When a car passed on the wet street outside 
the sound was an intrusion.   At last Mulder turned away and 
peeled off his gloves.   He looked at the detectives and said, 
"I'm going to help you find who did this."  

Davis held his gaze as if seeking for meaning there.  He turned 
to Scully with a wordless question in his eyes.

"Detective Davis, This is my partner, Agent Mulder," Scully said.

He nodded to Mulder and said, "Thanks, Agent.  I appreciate the 
offer."  He seemed respectful of Mulder's loss, but Scully heard 
politics in his voice.  The man thought Mulder was a nut.  

"You'll want me later.  Scully can tell you how to contact me," 
Mulder said.  He threw his gloves in the trash and strode out the 
door.

Everybody stared after him for a second.  Then the men all looked 
at Scully.

"He'll be all right," she said, suddenly uncomfortable.  It was 
as if the atoms in the air had picked up a charge.  What had been 
a slow, objective procedure performed in the name of science had 
become something else, something with the keen edge of a crusade.   

Mulder tended to have that effect on people.  

*****

Later, she and Mulder sat in a restaurant near Boston Common.  It 
was a quasi-Italian bistro that had apparently been something 
different and better when Mulder was young.  Even in 
midafternoon the place was kept very dim.  Candles in teardrop-
shaped glass holders sat on every table, giving off a dull yellow 
glow.

Mulder seemed particularly quiet and morose.  Scully let him be, 
as much from fatigue as consideration.  Few non-pathologists 
appreciated the amount of mental and physical energy it took to 
perform an autopsy under even optimal conditions, and that day's 
conditions had been far from optimal.  Her greatest desire was to 
finish eating and take a very long nap.  

"I visited my parents' graves this morning," Mulder said.  "Both 
of them, on opposite sides of the city.  Just the way they would 
have wanted it."

"I guess it's been a hard day," she said. 

"I'd never visited my dad's before," he said.

"You're kidding," she said, then regretted how insensitive that 
sounded.  He didn't seem to notice.

"I never saw the point of going. I met my father's spirit in the 
New Mexico desert . . . or maybe it was a hallucination.  I don't 
know.  In any case my dad's out *there* . . ." he gestured at 
some indeterminate location in the distance.  "Wherever 
semi-reformed Men In Black go when they die.  He's not under a 
stone in Parkway Cemetery."

Scully repressed her urge to lecture him on filial duty.  "I 
think he'd be glad you went," she said. 

"Maybe," he said.  An awkward silence of several seconds passed.  
Scully poked at the too-oily vegetable penne she didn't intend to 
finish.  Since it was Lent she was avoiding meat, but she didn't 
seem to be benefiting from it spiritually.  Maybe it was because 
Easter was so late this year that it didn't feel like Lent.  

Maybe it was because she was living in sin with her partner.  

Mulder gazed down at the table.  Actually he seemed to be gazing 
through it at some distant image she could not see.  "Albert
Hosteen called the vision I had 'the origin place.'  I saw my father
there, and I asked him whether Samantha was with him.  He said, 
'No.'"  Mulder shook his head.  "Why didn't they tell me?"

Scully thought Alex Krycek had answered that question in the most 
violent and cruel way possible, but she didn't say so.  It wasn't 
the answer to the question Mulder was really asking anyway.  "I 
don't know," she said.  "Mulder . . . do you want to go out to 
Martha's Vineyard?  Do you need to see Kristie's family and Joe 
Luce?  They seem to care about you."  She thought that at the 
moment, he could use all the family he could get.

"My sister is the JonBenet Ramsey of Dukes County," Mulder said.  
"You know what that means?  None of us was ever shown to be 
guilty of what happened to her, but we'll never be innocent -- 
not to the people out there." 

"Joe seemed to regret ever thinking you were guilty," Scully 
said.

"If so, he's a pretty lonely voice," Mulder said.  

They were both silent while he poked at his pasta marinara.  
The piped-in muzak was some cheerful tune played on a wheezy 
accordion.  Scully avoided looking him in the eye as she 
said, "I think you'd feel better if you helped."

He released a long breath, and some of the tension seemed to 
leave his shoulders.  "Kristie was a cute little baby, you know?
I didn't give a damn about babies at the time, but I could tell
she was cute.  Or maybe I just thought so because I had a 
thing for her mother. I don't know."

She nodded, then glanced up at him.  This time he looked away.  
She'd known him long enough to understand that he sometimes cast 
her in the role of his spiritual counselor.  Taking a page from 
his own list of psychological techniques, she kept her expression 
as blank as possible, knowing he'd read into it whatever he needed 
to see. 

He rubbed at his eyes, as if very tired.  "I should go out there.
If nothing else, I owe it to the Island people for letting Roche 
loose on them.  Kristie didn't meet with some ghost out in those
woods.  It was a flesh-and-blood guy that I should help put away
if I can."

Scully remembered the results of the autopsy and didn't quite 
know how to reply.  The investigator in her wanted to tell Mulder
all the ugly details; the lover and friend in her wanted to 
protect him as much as possible. 

Apparently misreading her reticence, he said, "I'm sorry.  I was 
going to show you around Boston."

"No -- it's not that."  She hesitated, but in the end she could
keep nothing from him.  "Mulder . . . Kristie miscarried at 
some point in the last several months.  The internal damage was 
considerable, though there's some evidence of medical 
intervention, which probably saved her life.  I found pitting 
typical of parturition scars on her pelvic bones.  That means she 
was at least into her second trimester when it happened.  The 
fetus might have been viable, at least at first."

Mulder looked puzzled.  "She lost a child?"

"I think Kristie suffered from placenta abrupta, the sudden 
detachment of the umbilical cord from the uterine wall.  
It's a common complication in pregnancy among women who abuse 
cocaine," Scully said.   

She could tell the moment he remembered the faxed letter from Irv 
Stuckey.  His expression became one of deep compassion.  He 
quoted Irv, "'What happened in Boston.'"

"Joe Luce said she'd been drug-free six months.  The scarring 
looked more recent than that, but people who've badly abused 
themselves heal slowly.   She'd damaged her heart, her arteries . 
. . it's amazing that she survived the birth, given the amount of 
hemorrhaging that was apparent.  A child born under those 
conditions would have a very poor chance of survival," she said.

"And the first thing that comes to his mind is the South Road 
Ghost story.  What a bastard," Mulder said.

"He may not have been the first to think of the story," Scully said.  
"If Kristie knew it as well, someone could have used it to 
frighten or confuse her.  She must have been emotionally fragile 
as it was.  Panic is as good an explanation as any for how she 
fell off the cliff, barring some undiscovered evidence that she 
was pushed."  

Mulder nodded.  He seemed lost in thought.  Scully continued, "If 
we do go out to Martha's Vineyard we'll have to remember to be 
particularly sensitive around the family on the subject of the 
child.  Since Irv Stuckey knew about the pregnancy I expect 
Kristie's relatives know too, but it's possible they don't.  Irv 
could have abused his access to hospital records or simply heard 
rumors.  Actually he's seemed entirely too involved with this 
case from the beginning."

"Irv gets the dirt on everyone in town and repeats it to make them
sound as bad as possible.  Since he has no good qualities, it's the
only way to make himself look better," Mulder said.

"Everybody has some good qualities," Scully said.  

He gave her a look that made it plain she could keep her comments 
on forgiveness and redemption to herself.  "Sorry," she said.  
Every so often she found herself turning into her mother, who was 
relentless in her pursuit of finding something pleasant to say about 
everybody.   She even liked Mulder, which for one of Scully's 
relatives was saying something.  

"At least I can tell Kristie's family that she was drug-free when 
she died.  All the blood tests were negative," Scully said.  

"Ironic, really," Mulder said.  "It's like the guy who gives up 
smoking and then gets hit by a speeding bus."

Scully wasn't about to argue with him when he was in this frame 
of mind. "Are we going out to Martha's Vineyard?" she 
asked.

He appeared to consider for a moment, and then said, "Yes."

"All right," she said.  

The rest of their meal was quiet.  Whatever was behind Mulder's 
silence was hidden from her.

********

A couple of hours later Mulder sat behind the wheel of his parked 
car, one of the few vehicles on the deck of the Woods-Hole-to-
Vineyard-Haven ferry.  Scully was asleep in the tilted-back 
passenger seat.

Rain ran steadily down the windows and Mulder didn't bother 
running the wipers to dispel it.  The glass had misted over 
inside from their breath, anyway.   Car motors had to be turned 
off during the crossing so turning on the heater was out of the 
question.  The ferry boasted a glassed-in shelter with padded 
bench seats, which were good for sightseeing but bad for napping.  
Scully had chosen the chilly crampedness of the car without 
reservation.  

Mulder fidgeted.  The forced inactivity worsened the restless 
ache inside him.  He wanted to turn on the radio.  He wanted to 
wake Scully up so he would have someone to talk to.  He felt a 
dull sense of . . .  what?  Dread.  Dread lay in his soul like a 
block of lead as they approached the Island.  

The rocking of the waves in Vineyard Sound and the slow chugging 
of the steam ship were too familiar, like an unwelcome caress.  
He had an eerie sense of the past overlaying the present.  

He hoped this wasn't a seizure aura.  Ever since Dr. Goldstein had 
drilled holes in his head as an aid to repressed memory recovery, 
Mulder had sometimes experienced near-hallucinatory flashbacks of 
his past.   Not all the flashbacks were of traumatic events, but 
the experience itself was disturbing.  Stress made the problem 
worse.  Scully was of the opinion that he suffered from minor 
seizure activity due to brain lesions.  

Whatever the ultimate cause was, Mulder felt that if he shut his 
eyes he might open them to find himself sitting behind the wheel 
of the rustbucket Nova he drove back in '78 and '79. On the 
way to the Vineyard to visit Dad.

Mulder had always felt a certain dread when returning to the 
Island after his sister disappeared.  He'd associated it with his 
father, with whom he had a conflicted relationship at best.   But 
Dad wasn't out there anymore, and the dread remained.  It must be 
something else then.   Mulder tried to focus on the present 
moment: the sensation of his fingers pressing against the 
plastic of the steering wheel, Scully's soft breathing in the 
seat next to him. 

He rubbed a hole in the windshield fog and turned on the car's 
electricity so he could run the wipers.  Cold air rushed in 
through the vents, and Scully stirred.  Mulder shut the useless 
heater off.  The outdoors was visible now, an endless expanse of 
iron-colored water beyond the ferry's white railing.  It might 
have been November rather than April.  A good day to stay 
indoors.

**
The flashback came on like a blow to the stomach.  

The car around him receded to dim awareness.  He was ten years 
old, maybe eleven, lying on the floor of Mrs. Luce's back room 
in Chilmark.  Rain fell from a leaden sky and ran down the windows.
The Luces had baseboard heat, which made even the thin, hard carpet
a cozy haven.

The air smelled like warm crayons.  The Mulder and Luce children 
lay sprawled on the floor, drawing pictures on the backs of old 
forms Joey's uncle brought over from the police station.  Mrs. 
Luce was in the kitchen, talking to herself.  Really she was 
talking to Mr. Luce, who was in heaven.  That's why Joey and 
Cheryl had an uncle instead of a dad.  Sometimes Cheryl talked to 
her daddy in heaven, too.  Joey didn't.  Instead he drew pictures 
of Jesus.  

Fox looked over at Joey's drawing.  It was of Jesus deflecting 
bullets with his hand like Superman.  He was protecting a group 
of cops from some bad guys.  Everybody in the picture was 
frowning and looking mad.  Crosses hemmed the drawing like a 
fence.  Fox sensed that Joey's SuperJesus pictures were about 
being scared.  They were about Mrs. Luce talking to the air in 
the kitchen, about what was on the front side of some of the 
forms they drew on.  

The children liked the murder scene investigation forms the best 
because there was a body outline you could color in and draw 
clothes on.  Cheryl and Samantha cut the paper bodies out for 
dolls for a while, but that bothered Mrs. Luce for some reason 
and she told her bother-in-law to quit bringing those over.   Fox 
and Samantha's mom said that was just as well.  

Fox was drawing a picture of the tree fort he and Joey were 
building out in the woods by the little cemetery along South 
Road.  Fox had told his mom they were going to spend the night in 
it, but she said no.  Samantha said she would be too scared to 
stay there all night because of ghosts, which just showed what a 
baby she was.  There was no such thing as ghosts, and anyway if 
dead people started to scare you, you could just talk to them 
like Mrs. Luce talked to Joey's dad.     

Samantha was doing one of her usual dumb rainbows-and-flowers 
drawings, but this was worse because she was copying off of 
Cheryl.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  "Do your own 
drawing," Fox told her.

"This *is* my own drawing," Samantha said.

"You're copying off of her," Fox said, pointing at Cheryl.

"We wanted to draw the same thing," Samantha said.  She glanced 
up and he saw the flash of anger in her pale green eyes.  (Had he 
forgotten that there was something in her as hard as gemstone)?

"Kids, be nice," Mrs. Luce called from the kitchen.  

Fox stifled his resentment at his sister's unoriginality because 
you had to act better in other people's houses.   He added a 
picture of a stupid-looking girl to his drawing.  

Joey was clearly concentrating hard as he drew details on the 
police cars, right down to the whip antennas.   Fox never 
questioned why a boy without a father in the house should feel 
afraid.  On nights when his dad was gone, which was a lot, his 
mom would pull the curtains closed on every window in the house.  
Sometimes she took the phone off the hook, and no matter how many 
times her kids hung it up again, she'd take it back off.  Somehow 
it was not something Fox or Samantha ever asked about.  Once, 
Fox's dad had shown him how to use the revolver he kept up high 
on a shelf.  Dad said he should never try to use guns until he 
was older, but he showed him how it worked anyway.  Fox was glad.  
He believed in bad guys like in Joey's picture, but he wasn't too 
sure he believed in SuperJesus.

The flashback was over as quickly as it began.  In its aftermath 
Mulder felt weak and sick.  Somehow the present still seemed 
unreal.  The weight and mass of his adult body felt wrong.  The 
opening of "Slaughterhouse Five" floated up from the dark well of 
his brain: "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."

Scully stirred.  Had he spoken aloud?  He reached out and took 
her hand.  Her small, manicured fingers felt very warm against 
his palm.   Her eyes fluttered open at the touch.  "Mulder?  My 
God, your hands are icy . . . are you all right?"  Whatever she 
saw in his face made her sit up straight.  She hooked an errant 
strand of her hair behind her ear as if to smooth away the 
vulnerability revealed by sleep.  She looked intently into his 
eyes -- a doctor now rather than a lover, probably checking the 
relative size of his pupils.

"I'm all right," he mumbled.  In a few minutes that would be 
true.   He knew the sense of dull shock, the faint unfamiliarity 
about her would fade, and with that knowledge came a sense of 
loss.  Perhaps the worst thing about being periodically thrust 
into the past was his reluctance to return.  He turned away from 
her and gazed at the fogged-over windshield.    

"You need to see a neurologist," Scully said.  She'd never 
articulated the accusation that underlay her words, but Mulder 
heard it.  She still hadn't forgiven him for drilling holes in 
his head in the first place.

"I don't need a neurologist.  It's emotional," he said.  If he 
really was having seizures, the Bureau would park him at a desk 
and the state would suspend his driver's license.   He'd rather 
be considered neurotic.  

"See a psychiatrist, then," she said.  "When you come out of one 
of those . . . trance states you look horrible, like you're going 
to pass out."

"I'm not going to pass out."

"What if that happened while you were driving?  You could kill 
someone."

"I'm fine," he said.

"Mulder, an altered state of consciousness with nausea and 
weakness is not fine," she said.

"I said I'm all right.  Would you drop it?"  

He saw hurt on her face, and then the shield of 
anger went up.  "Whatever," she said.  She turned to the 
passenger window, shrugging into the seat.  After a few seconds 
she dug a stack of papers out of her bag in the back seat and 
flipped through them as if looking for something.  Mulder could 
tell she wasn't reading.

His hands slid down the sides of the steering wheel.  He'd told 
her once that the night she slipped beneath the covers of his bed 
and kissed him awake was the happiest of his life.  For days 
afterward he'd lived in a cloud of bewildered euphoria, expecting 
to wake up from the dream at any moment -- probably in a cell 
somewhere with wires running out of his brain.  

How long had he waited for her to come to him?  He'd been like a
man who sits motionless with his arm outstretched, hoping a 
little wild bird would hop into his hand.  

Of all times, why had she picked now to fall in love with him?  
Now, when he'd lost everything else that made life worth living?  
There were days when he barely felt like a man.  She deserved so 
much better.  He looked over at her and saw she was still 
ignoring him.  Good.  All the more excuse to stare.

There was almost no trace left of the fresh-faced girl in the 
ugly blazer he'd first met -- the supposed spy sent by The 
Powers That Be to discredit him.  She was thinner now, sparer.
It was as if the cancer had worn away everything but the 
essential.   At times she seemed almost translucent, like an 
ivory comb after much use. 

He'd noticed the ugly blazers vanished after her sister died.  
That happened sometimes in families, where one sister was 
beautiful and the other went out of her way to be plain.   
Although Scully still grieved for Melissa, she'd bloomed when she 
was no longer in her sister's shadow.   Would something like that 
have happened to Samantha if Mulder had been taken instead?  Had 
she left qualities for him to inherit?   

The tightness in his throat was painful. "She was happy.  
Happier than I ever was," he said.

Scully looked over at him.  "Who?" she asked.  

"Samantha. There wasn't a lot in our lives to be happy about, 
even before . . ."  He did not say the words.  Let that memory 
sleep.   He swallowed past the tightness and tried again, "She 
enjoyed little things I missed."  

Samantha's dusty and water-stained diary was the most harrowing 
book he had ever read.  In it she described how she practiced 
loving things to make sure she remembered how: a blue willow
beetle, a dandelion, fuchsia nail polish dried to the side of 
its glass bottle.  A kid's treasures.  Junk.  She seemed 
afraid of loving anything bigger than she could hold in her 
hand.   Who could blame her?

"In my memories she seems so real to me," he said.  "More real 
than she did when we were growing up.  It's as if I know her 
better now than I ever have."

For a few moments the only sounds were their own breathing and 
the hypnotic humming of the ferry engines.  Scully reached over 
and touched his shoulder.  She knew what he meant about the dead 
being more present than the living.  She'd had that feeling after 
her father and Melissa died, but it was strongest after she lost 
Emily.  For months afterward, Scully met the child everywhere: in 
a church, in a car, in the faces of strangers' children.   Her 
sense of  Emily's presence was so strong that sometimes she felt 
sure the girl would be there waiting for her when she turned the 
next corner.   Scully believed in heaven but not in ghosts.  She 
considered her experience phantom pain, like that of a man who 
still feels the wounds in his amputated leg.                  

What could she say to Mulder? "It will pass?"  Part of him 
wouldn't want it to pass.  Of course he'd want to hold onto that 
emotional connection -- what else did he have?  He didn't even 
have a faith to turn to.  All she could think to say was, "You'll 
be all right."  She reached up and ran her hand over his hair.  
"You'll be all right."    

*****

Scully's first impression of the town of Vineyard Haven was of 
its eclecticness.  Modern glass-and-steel structures stood across 
the street from Victorian houses with an embarrassment of 
gingerbread carving along their eaves.  Old and new, commercial 
and residential, all seemed to have been mixed together.  Easter 
decorations were displayed on many doors, and here and there were 
a Hebrew Passover inscriptions in silver cardboard.  

On a less gloomy day the place was probably charming.  Still, 
Scully felt a faint sense of letdown. She thought it was 
probably because "the Vineyard," as residents called it, had 
acquired such a mystique of power and tragedy, first through its 
link to the Kennedy family, and then reinforced for her 
personally by her association with Mulder.  But in reality 
Vineyard Haven was quite like what she had seen of Cape Cod.  
Just a nice New England town in the rain.  

She watched the buildings: brick; stone; clapboard and concrete; 
as they passed, and tried to imagine how the town looked when 
Mulder was a boy -- the Vineyard Haven Samantha had last seen. 

Images from her own childhood came to her: little girls in pink 
swing coats and shiny black shoes led by the hand up the steps to 
church; blue-suited boys purposely stepping in the puddles that 
formed on the worn risers and being scolded in a whisper by their 
parents.  That was Easter as Scully had known it.

It seemed quite natural when they passed a church bulletin board 
that read, "Look, your king is coming to you: humble, and mounted 
on a donkey."  They had traveled most of a block before the 
context of that Bible quote sunk in.  

"Oh, God, Holy Week starts tomorrow," Scully said.  She dug for 
her planner among the junk in the back seat and confirmed what 
she'd just realized -- tomorrow was Palm Sunday.

"Is that a problem?" Mulder asked, glancing over at her.

"No.  Yes.  I don't know," she said.  Her family only demanded 
her presence on Easter Sunday, a full week away.  What really 
alarmed her was that Holy Week had snuck up on her.  Had it 
really been so long since she attended Mass?  She'd obviously 
given up the wrong thing for Lent.  Had she given up, say, her 
cell phone, she'd have been counting the days until Easter.   "Do 
they have a Catholic church out here?" she asked.  She'd made no 
arrangements, no inquiries.  

"Only when the Kennedys are in town.  The rest of the time it's 
the high school gym," Mulder said.  He must have caught her look 
of panic because he added, "Of course they have Catholic churches 
out here. Relax."

She leaned back against the seat, but could not relax.  Faith had 
meant so much more to her since she lost Emily.  During the worst 
of her grief she had attended Mass nearly every day.   Perhaps it 
was an exaggeration to call it a balm to her soul.  It was more 
like a tourniquet, something to slow the massive internal 
bleeding.  

Was she going to toss that faith aside now that things were going 
better?  She didn't want to be that kind of Christian.  In the 
dark days of early 1998, she had practiced a religious orthodoxy 
that was totally foreign to her former life.  She'd even dug out 
the ruby-glass and silver rosary her great aunt had given her on 
her Confirmation, a gift that had been reverently packed away in 
tissue paper and never used.  

She couldn't help glancing sidelong at Mulder.  Sleeping with 
your sort-of-atheist, angry-at-God partner was not compatible 
with Thursday night Mass and confession every first Saturday of 
the month.  When push came to shove, it was the Church she edged 
out of her life.  

In her heart of hearts, Scully was not convinced that God 
condemned everyone who bought a package of condoms or that the 
Blessed Virgin really needed prayers to undo the damage of 
affronts to her Immaculate Heart.   But she felt a need for 
connection to a wise, benevolent Being, and she was too much a 
Catholic to worship in isolation.  For her, history and tradition 
forged the connection between man and God.  She seemed to be 
slowly relinquishing that connection, and it frightened her.  

One obvious solution was simply to get married to Mulder.  
Presuming she truly repented her prior behavior, she would be a 
Catholic in good standing again.   She felt little doubt that 
Mulder *would* agree to marry her, at least once he regained his 
emotional balance -- or whatever passed for balance in his 
peculiar psyche.   Yet something in her sensed that rushing into 
marriage was not the best way to serve Mulder or God.  

Perhaps her problem was that she had never given all of herself 
to anything or anyone -- except Emily, who had left Scully's life 
almost as soon as she entered it.    

In her current situation she could use Mulder to distance herself 
from God and God to distance herself from Mulder.  How convenient.  
How safe.  

Jesus had not held back anything.   This week marked the 
anniversary of the day he gave his life, and she was afraid to 
give even her whole heart?  But she was a human woman, not God.  
She looked on emotional self-immolation with terror.

She sighed deeply and lifted one of Mulder's hands from the 
steering wheel, pressed his knuckles to her lips.  

"You all right?" he asked, probably surprised at the 
uncharacteristic impulsiveness of her act.  

"I'm fine," she said softly.  Lies like that kept him from 
getting too close.

****

Yheir destination was the Captain Nehemiah Nye House, an inn 
near the Wesquobsque Cliffs in Chilmark.  Mulder had explained 
that it was less than a mile from the scene of Kristie's death, 
but Scully was still surprised and dismayed to find its gravel 
parking lot entirely filled with police vehicles.  Few of the 
cars were marked, but the ramming bars and whip antennas were 
dead giveaways.  

Mulder ended up parking near a flooded ditch alongside the road.  
At least it had mostly stopped raining by the time they got out 
of the car.  

"I know the family that runs this place, or at least I used to.  
We'll see if that helps," he said. 

Nye House turned out to be like something out of a Jane Austen 
novel.  The lobby had clearly once been Captain Nye's drawing 
room, and it was arranged much as he must have left it.  The 
small cast-iron stove that once heated the room still stood in 
one corner, and the furniture arranged in the waiting area had 
the light, streamlined style favored in the early 19th century.  
A shining brass ship's clock hung on one blue-and-gray papered 
wall.  It was almost exactly how Scully would have decorated her 
own home if she'd had a lot more money and rather less 
practicality.

At the far end of the room sat a light secretaire desk, its 
surface covered in mounds of paper.  Scully noted the key rack 
hanging on the wall beside the desk was entirely empty.  Mulder 
walked up and rang the hand bell anyway.  After a moment a stout 
lady with short, salt-and-pepper curls came in through the room's 
rear door.  "Do you have a reservation?" she asked.

Mulder fished his Bureau ID out of his inner coat pocket and held 
it out to her.  The woman's back stiffened.  "I'm sorry, but I've 
told everything I know more than once.  You people really have to 
start talking to one another.  I have a business to run here."      

"Leigh," Mulder said.  

Leigh's glasses magnified her brown eyes, which made her look 
owlish when she blinked at him.   She took another look at the ID, 
glanced at Mulder's face, and her eyes went even wider.
  
"Well, *hello!*  Why didn't you tell me you were coming?  It's been 
so long -- here I was thinking you were another one of these 
mainland detectives.  I'm just about embarrassed to death," she 
said.  She walked around the desk and hugged him.  To Scully's 
surprise, he returned the embrace without awkwardness.  In her 
experience, he was uncomfortable with physical affection in all 
but the most intimate relationships.  

"I didn't know I was coming until just a few hours ago," Mulder 
said.  

Leigh stepped back and said, "Then you heard?"  Mulder nodded.  

"Isn't it awful?" Leigh said.  "I still can hardly believe it -- 
that poor girl.  The Island's really changed for the worse, Fox.  
More people coming and going all the time . . .  some of them not 
the sort I like to see around.   The traffic means more business, 
but I'd just as soon have it back the way it was 15 years ago.   
It was safer.  Speaking of which, it must've been at least that 
long since I last saw you."

"More like 20 years ago," Mulder said.  "The last summer I spent 
here was the one before I went away to school."

"Has it been that long?" Leigh asked.  "It must've been.  It 
must've been.   Tammy was just a little thing then.   Now she's 
grown with a baby of her own."  Leigh seized the opportunity to 
pull a photo album from amid the clutter on the desk.  "Here, 
this is a picture of my granddaughter . . ."

It turned out to be more than just "a" picture, but Scully looked 
through and praised them all.  Emily's death had left a dry ache 
in her that was soothed somewhat by talking about other peoples' 
babies.   As a result, Leigh Williams soon had a very high opinion 
of her and was determined to find room for her and Mulder in Nye 
House.   

Leigh looked mildly scandalized when Mulder explained that one 
room would do fine and neither agent had to be installed in 
Tammy's old room.  At that point Scully put her hand on his arm 
and drew him aside. "Maybe it would be better if we didn't stay 
together," she said quietly.  "This place is crawling with police 
officers.  It wouldn't reflect well on the Bureau."

"The Bureau?  The *Bureau?*"  Mulder looked appalled.  Leigh 
tactfully found something to fuss with on her desk.  In a low 
voice Mulder asked, "At a time like this you're worried about 
what the Bureau would think?  We're off duty.  Officially, I'm not 
even here."

"Nobody else knows that," Scully said.  She plead for his 
understanding with her eyes, not wanting to explain in the 
earshot of others.  She had not forgotten the whispers and icy 
stares of her classmates in medical school and the FBI Academy.  

*Scully slept her way to the top* had been the conventional 
wisdom.  The fact that it wasn't true, and that at least in Jack's 
case the affair was licit, hadn't made any difference.  There 
weren't many new lows for her career to sink to, but Scully 
didn't want to see a look of delighted disgust in her colleagues' 
eyes.  The look that said, "I don't have to respect you now, and 
I'm glad."     

"Fine," Mulder said.  "Whatever."

"I'd be glad to stay in your daughter's room, Mrs. Williams," 
Scully said.  Leigh clearly thought Scully had fallen from 
heaven.  

Mulder looked as if the whole conversation made him want 
to wash.

**********

Upstairs in his room, Mulder tossed his few packed belongings 
onto the shelves of the armoire, mostly for an excuse to slam the 
doors.   He knew that he was more upset at Scully than the 
situation really warranted.  

So she wanted to sleep downstairs.  So what?  It would be no 
different than when they were working -- which in fact Scully was.

No, this *was* different.  He needed her, and she cared about the 
Bureau's opinion of their personal life?  "Why are you 
surprised?" he asked himself aloud.  He dropped down on the bed 
and pressed his hands to his aching eyes.  Scully had always been 
skittish around issues of authority.  She'd flouted rules to come 
through for him before, but only after justifying herself by 
appealing to her conception of a higher law.  Apparently the 
current situation wasn't worthy of such an exception.

//Were you so stupid that you thought she'd change just because 
she started sleeping with you?//   Such a hope was truly pathetic 
-- the mindset of a neurotic fifteen-year-old.  The only response 
his exhausted mind could offer was, //But I love her.//  

If he'd learned anything during the last several months, it was 
that love, for all its virtues, was powerless to affect the 
actions of the beloved.   Christina Mulder, beloved mother, had 
taken her own life without so much as mentioning her terminal 
illness to her son.  Kristie Herron, beloved daughter, had chosen 
a dangerous life amid the drug culture of Boston that might have directly or 
indirectly led to her death.  Scully would do what she would do, 
and his choices were to walk away or hang on and hope for the
best.  Really, it was no choice at all.  "You could at least try 
to meet me closer to halfway," he said aloud.  

He lay down, and hypnagogic images swam before him when he shut 
his eyes.  He saw faces mouthing incomprehensible words.  He 
hadn't had any more sleep than Scully had, and his mind was 
considerably more troubled.  When he fell asleep it was to 
unsettling dreams -- a horror stalked him through familiar 
rooms.  The thing itself was never seen, but he recognized 
the sound of its slow footfalls as it followed him through 
the empty house.  Whatever it was had been with him a long time.

It was dark when the phone's ringing startled him awake.  He'd 
developed a horrific headache in his sleep and he groaned as he 
reached over to pick up the receiver.  "Hello?"

"Fox?" came a woman's voice.  Mulder struggled to place it.

"Yeah?" he said.

"It's Patty," the woman said.  Moments from the past, sharp and 
fragmented, spilled through his mind: a long, shining wave of 
chestnut hair; a young woman's soft laugh; a green-and-white 
bicycle with reddish Vineyard clay caught in its tire treads.  

"Patty . . . How are you?"  He regretted the words as soon as 
he'd spoken them.  //How do you think she is?// 

"You heard?" she asked.  He knew the emotion behind her nearly 
calm voice.  Grief left a person like the softened walls in many 
of the Island's oldest buildings, where cracks in the plaster merely 
hinted at the disintegration of the concrete behind.   One touch 
and the whole structure would crumble.

"I heard.  I'm sorry," he said.

"I don't understand it.  She was fine.  She'd had a little 
trouble and she was doing so well . . ."  Her words fluttered up 
and up, like frightened birds before a storm.  

"Do you want me to go over there?" Mulder said.

"It's late, Fox -- no," she said.

"You sure?"

"No," she said, very quietly.

"Give me twenty minutes," Mulder said.

*************

Scully was lying on the narrow bed, resting her eyes. The rooms 
the Williams family lived in were near the surprisingly modern 
kitchen, in what Scully suspected had once been the maids' 
quarters.  Tammy's room was quite small and her mother had 
apologized, explaining that lodging would be gratis if Scully 
chose to stay.   The little room lacked the romance of the guest 
areas, but she found something soothing about the teen-girl 
furnishings.

She was a good ten years older than Tammy, but the peeling 
posters of 80's pop icons, the grainy photos of prom night and 
graduation tucked into the mirror frame above the vanity, could 
have come from one of her own college dorm rooms.  She remembered 
a time when she'd had girlfriends, before shadowy men and the 
terrible light that haunted her dreams made her too afraid to 
befriend anyone.  For a few moments between sleep and waking, she 
felt her sister's presence very near.

Minutes later Mulder knocked on the door.  It had to be Mulder.  
In hotels, strangers had a polite little knock -- an I-hope-I'm-
not-disturbing-you knock.  Mulder just gave the door two sharp 
raps, the knock of a person who believes he has the right to 
enter, but knocks anyway for good manners' sake.  "Hang on," 
Scully said groggily.  She rolled off the bed onto her stocking 
feet.  When she opened the door the light in the hall seemed too 
bright, and she squinted up at her partner.  He had his coat on.  
"What is it?" she asked.

"I'm going over to the Herrons'," he said.

She knew it was as close to an invitation as she was going to 
get.  She glanced back at the bedside clock and saw it was after 
ten.  "Now?  You want me to talk about the autopsy results?" she 
asked.

"No," he said.  She waited for further explanation and got none.  
He just wanted her presence.

"Let me find my shoes . . ." she said.  She'd been dumb enough to 
bring nearly-new shoes and she felt all the tight spots as her 
feet slid back into them.  In her head, she heard what her sister 
would say: //Why do you follow him around like that?  If Mulder 
jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?//  
Then she heard her own answer, //Probably.//   

Scully fought to repress a smile that was completely 
inappropriate for a condolence call.  Mulder clearly saw it
anyway.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said, lifting her still-damp jacket from where it 
lay folded over the vanity chair.  "Let's go."  

Scully did not know what to expect as they pulled up outside the 
secluded house near Menemsha Harbor.  Like many houses she'd seen 
on the western part of the island, the Herron's unpaved driveway 
wound quite a distance into the trees -- or maybe it was unclear 
where the driveway started and the dirt road stopped.  Scully was 
a little surprised at how undeveloped much of the land was.  When 
Mulder had told her his parents were next door when his sister 
was abducted, she'd thought of "next door" in terms of the 
cramped military housing units of her own youth.  Here, "next 
door" was not within the shouting distance of a young boy.  The
knowledge helped bring home to her how alone and helpless 
Mulder had felt as a 12-year-old all those years before.

Scully used the porch mat to scrape red, clayey mud off her shoes 
while Mulder rang the doorbell.  She heard footsteps inside, and 
a young man's face appeared briefly in the door's window.  There 
was no sound of a latch being undone before the door opened.   
The boy in the doorway looked about 17 or 18, tall but still 
gangly.  His hard, red-rimmed eyes seemed incongruous in his 
youthful face.  That was the magic of grief -- overnight it could 
make a high school boy look like a bitter old man.

"Yeah?" the boy said.

"I'm Fox Mulder.  I'm here to see Patty," Mulder said.          

The boy closed the door.  Scully heard him shout, "Mom!"

"Wonderful kid," Mulder muttered.  

"He's just lost his sister," Scully said, then realized how 
churlish it sounded to imply he didn't know what that was like.  
He kept his eyes on the door as if he hadn't heard.  

The misting rain was deceptively fine.  The air clung like a damp 
sponge.  In the short amount of time they stood on the porch, 
Scully began to feel wet all the way through and very cold.  
Soon the door was opened again, this time by a tall woman, 
perhaps ten years older than Mulder.  "Fox," she said.

"Hi, Patty," Mulder said.  

"Come in -- I'm sorry," Patty said, stepping aside to let them 
into the warm house.  She called out to her unseen son, "Matthew, 
what's the matter with you?   Why did you let them stand out in 
the rain?"  There was no reply.  "He's upset," she explained.  "I 
think the boys are looking for someone to blame -- it's hard with 
the police investigation up in the air.  Maybe they blame me, I 
don't know."

Scully tried to give her a reassuring smile, but she didn't 
feel very reassuring.  How many times had she played this exact 
role -- a bearer of bad news, intruding on other people's grief.

Once they were all in the foyer, Scully noted a brief moment of 
awkwardness between Mulder and Patty.   Apparently they were not 
so close that an embrace felt natural, but under the 
circumstances a handshake would have been barbarous.   Patty 
reached out her arm, almost apologetically, as to a sympathetic 
stranger.  Mulder took it and pulled her against him.   Suddenly 
all strangeness between them was gone.  She cried into his 
shoulder, and he spoke to her all the half-nonsense words that 
Scully had murmured to him so often since his mother's death: 
"You'll be all right.  You'll be okay.  You'll get through this."

"I won't.  I'll never be all right.  You don't know what it's 
like to lose a child.  It's like dying every second," Patty said.

Scully knew what it was like.  It was a memory she wanted to 
distance herself from.  She walked a few paces down a narrow 
hallway defined by the staircase wall on one side and the kitchen 
wall on the other.  Framed photographs hung on both sides, but 
the dim overhead light consigned many of them to obscurity.  It 
was just as well -- it helped Scully avoid the eyes of the Herron 
children, young and smiling beneath plates of dusty glass.   

She stopped before a picture of the young Patty Herron -- Patty 
Todd, Mulder had called her, the girl Fox and Samantha had known.   
She was quite pretty -- brown hair like a smooth autumn river 
framed a shield-shaped face and brown eyes.  The picture was from 
the bust up, but Scully guessed Patty had had the sort of lanky, 
athletic figure that Mulder preferred.   She imagined him as a 
too-tall grade-schooler, smitten with the pretty teen girl who 
thought of herself as his babysitter.  Scully wondered how he had 
felt the day Kristie was born, the day Patty tied herself 
irrevocably to the adult world, and to an adult man.  

She heard the creak of a floorboard as someone entered the hall.  
She looked up to see a tall young man whose brown eyes were the 
image of the young Patty Herron's.   The lower half of his face 
was obscured by what was probably the first real beard he'd been 
able to grow.  "You're Dr. Scully?" he asked.  There was a touch 
of challenge in his voice.

"Yes," Scully said.  "Mr. --"

"Herron.  I'm Rich Herron," the man said.  "You did the autopsy?"

"Yes," she said.  Mr. Herron, I'm very sorry for your loss.  This 
must be a difficult time--"

He seemed barely to have heard her.  "How did my sister die?" he 
asked.  

Scully knew the hopeless quest of a murder victim's relatives -- 
the desperate search for answers which brought no comfort.  "She 
fell," Scully said.  "She died from a head injury.  It was 
instantaneous; she felt no pain--"

"The police said she was stabbed.  Now she fell?  Nobody is 
giving us a straight answer," Rich said.

In defense Scully went into investigator mode.  "It's really very 
early in the investigation.  The police need time to be thorough-
-"

"Rich, please," Patty called.  She appeared at the other 
end of the hall, wiping her eyes with her fingers.  "Please come 
sit down -- I'm sorry," she said to Scully, gesturing toward 
the living room on the other side of the staircase.   

Scully followed her, trying not to feel the weight of Rich 
Herron's glare.  Once in the living room, she down on the 
end of a blue-and-white flowered couch.  A defeated-looking 
Matthew sat on a smaller couch with his hands clasped on 
his knees.  On a table beside him were a few nautical-themed 
knickknacks, including a model of a Banks schooner -- once an
emblem of New England.   Sailor's daughter that she was, 
Scully's attention was drawn to the other model ships in the 
room: an old-fashioned three-masted frigate, a second schooner,
and a sleeker modern racing yacht.  The pictures on the walls 
were of ocean views, except for one that 
showed the smiling Herrons on a dock, all wearing matching polo 
shirts and navy slacks -- a work uniform.  The family must have a 
business near the harbor.

Mulder sat down next to her and put his hand over hers.  His 
touch felt very warm and she realized she was still chilled 
through from the night outside.  Reflexively she glanced up to 
see if anyone noticed the display of intimacy.  Matthew met her 
eyes without showing any particular interest.  //Let it go,// she 
told herself.  There was being a private person, and there was 
being paranoid.  If she was too reticent to be close to Mulder in 
public, he'd think she was ashamed of him.  Still, it felt very 
strange to sit holding his hand in front of strangers.  

"Is there anything I can get you at all?"  Patty asked, as if it 
were quite natural to play the hostess under these circumstances.
   
Mulder's cousin Debbie had said the same thing over and over at 
his mother's hastily-arranged memorial.  Mulder himself had 
refused to speak to anyone in more than monosyllables.  

"We're fine, Patty," Mulder said.

Rich and a man who was probably his father walked into the room.  
Mark Herron couldn't have been much past his mid-fifties, but he 
moved as slowly as an old man as he sat down in an armchair.   
His hands, loose at his sides like a sleepwalkers',  bore the 
nut-colored tan that old sailors never lost.  Suddenly Scully was 
glad that her own father had not lived to see Melissa's murder.  

She looked up at Patty and said, "Mrs. Herron, I lost my own 
daughter two years ago at Christmas.  You're right -- it is like 
dying every second.  All I can tell you is that in time, it 
becomes more bearable."  She sensed Mulder looking at her.  Self-
disclosure was hardly her usual style.  Perhaps it was the somber 
mood of Lent that made her speak.  Perhaps it was this family's 
connection with the sea -- she didn't know.  

However, for the first time, some of the terrible vacantness left 
Patty's eyes.  Scully saw that her face, though heavier beneath 
her practical short haircut, was still pretty.  "Thank you," 
Patty said.  

Mulder pressed her hand between both of his, and she didn't pull 
away.  It was as if the wind were coming from a new direction -- 
suddenly she and Mulder were not the insensitive investigators, 
here to ask intrusive questions and give no information in 
return.

"Dr. Scully  . . . what happened to our daughter?" Mark asked.

"Mr. Herron, if anybody really knows what happened to her, 
they're not cooperating with the police.  All I can give you is a 
medical opinion -- a very incomplete answer," Scully said.  

"She says Kristie wasn't stabbed -- she fell," Rich said.

"An accident?" Patty asked.  She sounded almost hopeful.  

"I don't think so," Scully said, as gently as she could.  "She 
had experienced some sharp-force injuries, probably from a knife.  
The wounds were relatively minor, but they show that she met 
someone who intended to do her harm."

"She was afraid of knives," Matthew said.

Mulder turned toward him, and Scully sensed a new tension through 
her partner's skin, like a slack wire suddenly drawn taught.  
Spooky had a lead.  "Why do you say that?" he asked.

"From watching movies with her, mostly, or hearing campfire 
stories . . . the kind about maniacs, you know . . ."  Matt 
avoided mentioning "in the woods," but Scully understood, and felt 
cold inside.  "When it got to the knife part she could never 
watch," Matt continued.  "She'd kind of curl up and put her hands 
over her eyes.  She told me once she wasn't afraid of guns, 
because getting shot was quick, but a knife would be the worst 
way to die."  Patty made a soft noise as if her breath had been 
choked off. 

"Matt, did anybody else know she was afraid of knives?" Mulder 
asked.

"I don't know . . . maybe.  Probably.  She used to go to the 
horror movies when they came out, you know, but at the knife 
parts she'd turn away.  Some guys like that -- when a girl gets 
scared," Matthew said.

"Did she often date guys who liked it when she got scared?" 
Mulder asked.  

Scully watched the family's reactions as they made the 
connection.  Mark and Patty glanced at one another.  "We didn't 
like a lot of the boys she saw -- off-islanders, mostly, party 
guys," Mark said.  "Some of these people have a lifestyle you 
wouldn't believe."

"They're not all bad just because they have money," Matthew said.

"I don't care -- I didn't want them hanging around my daughter," 
Mark snapped. "We had her working with us down at the marina 
during the summers, and she'd meet these guys when they brought 
their boats in.  They'd start giving her that oily smile, and I'd 
try to discourage them . . . I suppose that just made them more 
attractive to her.   Maybe we should have taken her out of the 
boathouse altogether.  She wanted to spend those six weeks in 
Alaska -- do you remember?"  He glanced up at Patty.

Patty did not meet his eyes.  She said, "Mark . . ." 

Mark Herron's wave of pain was palpable.  Scully did not look at 
him, and she sensed that others did not either, until he cleared
his throat and said, "Anyway . . . we didn't let her go.  We 
needed her here, or we thought we did.  And then . . . then she 
was gone, and there was nothing we could do."  He pressed his 
great, square hand over his eyes and wept.

Scully felt sympathy warring with embarrassment for how the man 
must feel, or perhaps it was for how a man like her father would 
have felt if he cried in front of strangers.   From respect as 
much as discomfort, she kept her gaze on the toes of her shoes.  
Mulder did not seem to feel awkward.  He, more than any man she'd 
known, was comfortable in the presence of people in tears.   He 
pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and offered it, but was 
ignored.

Patty stooped to put her arm around her husband's shoulders, 
their heads pressed together.   The Herron brothers were still 
and silent, Rich standing like a guardian behind the couch where 
Matthew sat.  They were circling the wagons, as Scully's own 
family had -- as Mulder's strangely had not at his mother's 
memorial.  Teena Mulder's wake had not been so much a gathering 
of the clans as a collection of grieving persons who all just 
happened to be in the same room.  

At last Mark said, "I'm sorry," then got up and walked out of the 
room.  A spell seemed to have been broken.  Both Rich and Matthew 
immediately left as well, one heading for the kitchen and one 
walking upstairs.  Patty dropped down into the chair her husband 
had just vacated.  

"Are you sure it gets better?" she asked Scully.

"I turned to God," Scully said.  "It helped a little."  

"Patty, I know you've been over this before, but is there 
anything, or anyone, that stands out in your memory as being 
possibly related to Kristie's death?" Mulder asked.

Patty shook her head slowly.  "There was Brian Griffin, the man 
she was dating when they were arrested, but they convicted him 
under the three strikes law.  He's doing life in prison.  She 
was going to testify in the trial of John McBer, and I've told 
the police all I know about him, which isn't much.   I didn't 
think this new boyfriend, Randy, was much of a step up from 
Brian, but he never seemed threatening at all.  These last few 
months were so ordinary, Fox.  So relatively normal.  I wouldn't 
let myself hope at first.  She'd quit drugs and relapsed before -
- she'd never made it past 90 days.  But when three months 
passed, and then six . . . I began to hope.  I thought, 'She's 
finally making it.  God wouldn't take her from us now.'  I guess 
that shows you how much I knew."

"Unlike Agent Scully, I tend *not* to turn to God when things get 
bad," Mulder said.  "It's kind of like wearing a huge 'Kick Me' 
sign on your back."     

Scully worked not to take offense at his comment.  He made it no 
secret that he thought organized religion in general was stupid 
and Christianity even more so.  She was aware that he had his 
reasons.  Still, it wouldn't kill him to show her faith a little 
respect.

Scully looked up at Patty and said, "Kristie died drug-free, Mrs. 
Herron.  At least God let her have that victory."  

"Thank him for that," Patty said.  Some of the tension seemed to 
leave her body, but it left her looking even more broken and 
vulnerable.  Scully remembered the days after she lost Emily, and 
wondered if tension wasn't all that was keeping Patty together. 

"We don't want to overstay our welcome, but would you mind if I 
looked around just a little bit?" Mulder asked.

"You're welcome to, but the detectives turned the place upside-
down," Patty said.  "I went over her room again myself, looking 
at every scrap of paper I could find for a name, a phone number . 
. . anything." 

"We won't stay long," Mulder assured her.

At his request Patty led them upstairs to what had been Kristie's 
room. Once they were there, she left them.  

The place had already begun to have a vacant feel, probably because
the room had clearly been "processed."   The sheets were gone, 
likely sent to Boston for hair and fiber analysis.  That alone 
told Scully that the boyfriend was a suspect.  Depressions in 
the beige carpet showed that every item of furniture had been 
moved and placed back slightly wrong.  A few small, everyday 
traces remained of Kristie's life: two empty kitchen glasses 
on the desk near a fist-sized clutch of keys; a book splayed 
open under the bed, a smiley face, clearly old, painted with 
nail polish on the side of a bookshelf.

Mulder started poking around in the bookshelf. Scully stood out 
of his way near the door.  Before long she was leaning against 
the door frame, repressing an urge to slide down onto the floor 
and close her eyes.   When she'd volunteered to help, she'd had 
no idea this case would be so exhausting or emotionally 
harrowing.  The fact that Mulder was taking such an active 
interest in the investigation when he wasn't even part of it was 
starting to irritate her.  "What are you looking for?" she asked.  
When he didn't answer immediately, she added,  "Don't tell me, 
Let me guess.  You don't know."   

"Okay, You can guess.  I won't tell you," he said.

The silence stretched on.  Scully looked at her watch.  "It's 
nearly midnight," she said.  "We should let these people get some 
sleep."

"Give me two more minutes," Mulder said.  He was pulling out each 
of the books on the bookshelf and examining their spines.  In 
Mulder terms, "two minutes" could be interminable, so Scully gave 
up and began pulling out books too.  

"Tell me what I'm looking for," she said.

"A book where the dust jacket doesn't match the book inside," he 
said.

The third book she pulled out had a jacket that was slightly too 
tall, causing the paper to be crushed back over the cover.  "You 
mean like this?" she asked.  She slipped the jacket of an 
English-French dictionary off the book, and revealed the words, 
"Narcotics Anonymous" stamped in gold on the cover.

"Nice shooting, Tex," Mulder said.  "A lot of recovering addicts 
don't like to be seen carrying this around.  Even some ex-
alcoholics look down on the guys trying to kick coke or heroin.  
That's why you see decorative book covers or things like this."  
He took the book from her and opened it.  Inside the front cover 
were dozens of names and phone numbers written in a rainbow 
assortment of ballpoint pen ink.  One name, Brenda, was circled 
with a star next to it.   

Mulder flipped the page and found a note on the other side: 
"Happy 6 month anniversary, baby!  Never forget we're 
powerless.  Love, Randy."

"Joey'll love this," Mulder asked.   

"You're hot all right," she said.   He continued to page through 
the book.  Scully asked, "Can we go now?"  He looked down at her, 
seemed hesitant.  The discovery had revived his spirit and 
energy, and she knew he would have happily worked through the 
night.  "It's late," she said. "I *am* going to church tomorrow."

"Right -- right, okay," Mulder said, folding the book closed.  To 
his credit, he said goodbye to Patty and drove Scully back to 
Nye House without betraying any resentment.  But he was quiet on 
the slow, jostling ride through the rain.  Scully thought she 
knew what he was thinking.  Their work as FBI partners was as 
seamless as it could be, but to become true partners in a 
personal sense would require a lot of sacrifice and effort.     

When they got back to the inn he did not press her to come 
upstairs with him, and she was glad.  She needed time to sit with 
her thoughts and center herself.   Exchanging her damp wool 
blazer and skirt for her pajamas was like striking off a ball and 
chain.  As she returned from brushing her teeth in the Williams 
family's bathroom, she ran into Leigh.  The little proprietress 
was more than happy to give her a tourist guide that showed the 
locations of various island churches.  St. Paul of Tarsus in 
Vineyard Haven seemed to be marginally the most convenient, and 
Scully set her sights on the 11:30 service, somewhat less than 12 
hours away.   

Perhaps it was weariness that clouded her judgment, or else a 
deep ache for the glow of the Presence candle at Mass, but 
something impelled her to slip back into the bathroom and remove 
the little tea light in a glass bowl that was serving as a night 
light.  Cradling it in both hands, she carried it back to her 
room and set it on the dresser.  When she turned out the electric 
light, the mirror on the dresser reflected the little candle's 
illumination, doubling it.  Candlelight is the kindest of lights, 
and Scully was briefly surprised by her own image in the mirror.   
The half-light showed her skin smooth and translucent as a young 
girl's, and it lent a jewel-like depth to her eyes.  The 
reflected face seemed to have come from another time.  It was 
certainly worlds away from the Agent Scully who worked under the 
unforgiving glare of florescent bulbs, often up to her elbows in 
a body that even wild dogs would avoid.  

She turned away from the haunting image in the mirror.  It was no 
more she than the unflattering photo on her Bureau ID was.  She 
fished out of her purse the little cloth bag containing the 
rosary her great-aunt had given her many years ago.   She lay 
down on the bed and opened the bag.   The ruby-glass beads 
spilled out into her hand like so many little drops of blood.  
Some small, prideful part of her was still embarrassed to be 
carrying this symbol of Catholicism's medieval legacy.  The 
modern Church, the 21st century Church, had a renewed confidence 
in science and scholarship.  The orthodox faithful were engaged 
in debates about world politics and biomedical ethics at the 
highest levels.  That was a faith you could proclaim in public.  
The soft rattle of beads and whispered prayers in the dark were 
like the presence of an eccentric elderly relative  -- something 
that could neither be disavowed nor discussed with outsiders.  

And yet, and yet . . . .  There was something very soothing about 
the simple, repeated prayers.  Mulder, and Melissa, for that 
matter, had pointed out the rosary's similarities to Buddhist 
prayer beads and the practice of chanting the Sanskrit name of 
the Lotus Sutra.  The comparison used to annoy her, but after 
having experienced a profound sense of the Divine in a Buddhist 
Temple, it no longer did so.  If the Christian "peace which 
passeth all understanding" was related to the Buddhist 
Enlightenment, then so much the better for Christians and 
Buddhists.  

She ran her thumbs over the tarnished silver crucifix, trying 
to come up with some profound prayer intention that fit her 
somber assignment and the season.  Eloquence failed her, and 
the best she could do was offer up an anguished identification 
with Mary as the mother of a murdered child.  More in emotions
than words, she asked God to take care of Emily, Melissa, 
Kristie, and Kristie's poor baby, born too soon.    Suddenly 
it occurred to her to add to the list the murdered children of
Mary Brown, purported South Road Ghost. The thought surprised 
her, since she'd almost forgotten about the story that brought
her and Mulder out here in the first place.  

Maybe it was the primitive glory of the candlelight that inspired 
her, or the fact that the wind had picked up outside and was 
making a thin screaming noise in the trees.   In any case, her 
thoughts called up disturbing images.  Scully crossed herself and 
began a whispered recitation of the Creed of Nicea, more 
beautiful than the shorter Apostles' Creed: // . . . God from 
God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made 
. . .//  

The more than 36 hours she'd gone without good sleep caught up 
with her quickly.  The last thoughts she had before 
unconsciousness claimed her were the Creed's final words: //We 
look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world 
to come.//

Something awakened her deep in the night.  Scully lay with her 
heart pounding, her hands gripping the sheets.  The candle had 
gone out and the room was in darkness.   A dream?  No -- she had 
the dim awareness of a sensation, a sound, that had awakened her.  
She remembered the look of calm, inexorable madness on Donnie 
Pfaster's face, and fought panic.  Where had she put her weapon?  
On the chair by the desk -- too far to reach.  Had someone 
entered the room and picked it up, ready to use it against her?

She heard stumbling footsteps outside in the hall.  "Power's out.  
Where's the damn flashlight?  I thought you lit the candle in 
here, Leigh."

"I did," Leigh said.  

Scully glanced up at the dresser.  What had possessed her to take 
the candle from the bathroom?  

"Here -- Jim, don't just walk into things, stand still.  The 
flashlight's up in the cabinet somewhere."

Scully had a small flashlight attached to her keys.  Where were 
they?  Then she heard the noise that had awakened her -- a 
shriek, high-pitched and far away, but human and terrified beyond 
reason.  The cry trailed up and up, past the range of a woman's 
voice and far past that of a man's.  

//Oh, God, it's a child.// She rolled out of bed and onto her 
feet, finding her keys and the flashlight on the desk by touch.
With the light on she could see to open her bag and pull out 
clothes.  She pulled pants and a jacket on over her pajamas and 
stuffed her feet into her autopsy shoes, which were easier to 
run in than heels.  Finally she clipped her gun onto her 
waistband and strode out the door.  

"Agent Scully?" she heard Leigh call.

"There's somebody out in the storm -- I think it's a child.  
Tell Agent Mulder.  He'll know what to do," Scully called back.  
She didn't stop to answer more questions as she walked through 
the front room and out the door.  

The damp iciness of the wind nearly took her breath away.  She 
could see pellets of sleet in the narrow beam of her flashlight.   
A moment of indecision seized her -- should she wait for help?  
This was no night to become lost.  She glanced up at the inn, 
thought of Mulder and the other officers in there.  There were no 
lights in any of the windows.  As she hesitated she heard the cry 
again, and that answered her question.  

The sound seemed to be carried on the wind, which was coming from 
the south.  Holding her jacket closed with one hand and her 
little flashlight with the other, Scully set off across the 
sleet-encrusted meadow behind Nye House, heading toward the 
cliffs and the Atlantic Ocean.    


*****

Mulder was having a bad night.  Once the rush of starting a new 
investigation wore off, the miserable familiarity of his 
surroundings began to weigh on him.  The power outage denied him 
even the dubious pleasure of watching late-night TV as he lay in 
bed.  In darkness and silence, he was prey to his memories.  The 
last time he'd been on this island was when he'd inadvertently 
set Roche loose.  The time before that was the night his father 
was murdered.  His soul yearned for Scully and for his mother 
with a dual intensity that would have warmed the twisted heart 
of Sigmund Freud.  

It still surprised him that losing his mother was a heavier blow 
than learning his sister was dead.  It was the way his mother 
died, really.   

Teena Mulder had gone to the grave organized -- he'd give 
her that much.  She'd contacted a lawyer to help her get the right 
papers signed and the disposition of her estate all planned out.  
The nurse who'd come to the house during her final days even knew 
what clothes she wanted to be laid out in.  The one conspicuous 
lapse was her failure to inform her son that she intended to kill 
herself -- or even that she was sick.   He was angry at her -- 
in truth he was furious, and that was what was killing him.  She 
had no right to shut him out of the end of her life, as she'd 
shut him out of so many things she wanted to keep secret.  She 
hadn't even trusted him to pick where she'd be buried.  Maybe she 
expected that he wouldn't show up at her funeral, since he had 
missed his father's.  

Scully insisted that his mother had been trying not to burden 
him, that the over-planned suicide wasn't the rejection it 
seemed.  Maybe she was right.  Still, he doubted he could have 
been hurt more if his mother had actually tried to kill him 
instead.

This morbid train of thought was disturbed by someone banging on 
his door.  "What?" he called out.

"Fox?" it was Leigh.  "Fox, we've lost power due to the storm.  
Your partner says that she can hear someone lost out there, and 
she's going to help.  She said you'd know what to do . . ."

Mulder got up and walked to the door in his T-shirt and boxer 
shorts.  He opened the door and found Leigh there, holding a 
flashlight and looking small and owlish in her bathrobe.  

"She didn't go out there by herself, did she?" Mulder asked.  

"I think so.  I don't know.  She seemed to be in a hurry," Leigh 
said.

"Do you know which direction she went in?"  Mulder asked.  He did 
not like the idea of Scully wandering the countryside in this 
storm.  The up-island terrain was difficult enough under the best 
of circumstances.

Leigh shook her head.  "She just took her flashlight and left.  
She didn't look dressed properly for the weather," she said.

Mulder swore.  "Thanks for telling me.  See if you can get Joey 
on the phone and ask him to send some people who actually know 
their way around the woods out here," he said.

"All right.  What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I'm going to go find my partner before--" he stopped himself 
from mentioning the state of poor Kristie's remains after she'd 
fallen over the cliff.  "I'm just going to find her."   

*****

Scully struggled down a steep wooded hill about a mile from Nye 
House.  The heavy clay soil was little more than half-frozen mud, 
and her feet were continually sliding.  After considering the 
odds of a predator being loose in the woods, she carried her gun 
in her right hand.  She'd put away her flashlight to free her 
other hand for holding onto saplings and branches as she walked.  

At first she'd heard the child's cries on every strong gust of 
wind from the south, but as she traveled the voice seemed to grow 
more distant.   Now she was unsure if she were following a human 
voice at all.  The wind keening in the bare branches could sound 
human to someone who wanted to hear signs of life badly enough.  

She made maddeningly slow progress down the hill as she picked 
her way from tree to tree.   It occurred to her that she might be 
better off if she sat on her butt and slid.  

Unexpectedly, she got her wish.  A rock rolled under her shoe, 
then the muddy earth beneath her feet began to give way.   She 
grabbed the closest tree -- a dead pine sapling.  The trunk 
cracked off and fell with her.  

Sliding and tumbling amid a hail of earth and stones, Scully 
shielded her head with her left arm as best she could.  Branches 
scratched her and mud-clotted leaves struck her face as she tried 
desperately to keep the barrel of her gun pointed away from her 
body.  The weapon was ready to fire, a bullet lying in the 
chamber.

Her other worry was a great tree trunk, directly in her path.  
She scrabbled at the soil for a root, a stone, anything, but 
could get no purchase.   When she hit the trunk a flash of sparks 
dazzled her eyes, and her breath was driven out of her.  Dimly, 
she was aware of the little dead pine landing on her back.  For a 
moment she swum in darkness.

She lay dazed in the icy mud, feeling a dull pain in her ribs 
with every breath.   Several seconds passed before she became 
aware that her hand was touching something warm and damp.  Scully 
struggled to look up.   Among the pine's branches were eyes, too 
close together to be human, shining yellow in the faint, 
directionless glow of the sleety night.  The creature whined.  

She realized she lay beside a wet animal -- a large dog, its ears 
laid back and its belly pressed to the ground in terror.  She 
felt its muscles tense at her movement.  Suddenly the dog turned 
and bolted, showering her with wet leaves.  Shaken, she watched 
it tear away up the slope in the direction she had come.

Some irrational inner voice whispered that she'd come to a bad 
place, an uncanny place.  Scully firmly pushed that thought out 
of her mind.  Not even Mulder thought there were ghosts here.  
There might be violent people and treacherous footing in these 
woods, but the place itself was ordinary.   

She could just imagine what Mulder would say if he were here.  
//You practically killed yourself and all you have to show for 
it is a traumatized dog.   Terrific.//  She rolled painfully 
to her knees, then with an effort she stood up and combed the 
filth out of her hair with her fingers.   

Scully pulled her flashlight from her pocket and hunted for her 
gun, which the impact had jerked from her hand.  Before long 
she saw the glint of metal in the flashlight's beam.  She 
picked up her mud-covered SIG near the foot of the hill, and 
did what she could to clean the dirt out of its barrel.   Her 
stiff, shaking fingers were not suited to the job.  

She was peripherally aware of plastic tape flapping and rattling 
on the nearby trees.   In her near-exhausted state the noise 
didn't seem important, but eventually the rustling sound 
triggered associations -- the tinny static of two-way radios, the 
staccato lightning of flashbulbs.  She shone her light at the 
trees.   Their trunks were bound with yellow crime scene tape.

This was where Kristie Herron had died.  Scully had not expected 
to be this close to the cliffs.  How close had she come to the 
edge without noticing?   She hesitated, considered waiting for 
Mulder to catch up before continuing.   Even if the woods hadn't 
been physically dangerous, she would still have to consider the 
possible damage to evidence if she blundered around in the 
cordoned-off area.   She had just about made up her mind to wait 
when she caught the sound of ragged sobbing, carried on the wind.   
This time she was sure her ears were not deceiving her.  The 
noise was human.

"I'm Agent Scully with the FBI.  I'm here to help.  Where are 
you?" she called.  Her side ached with the effort of shouting.

She got a response -- a word with long, drawn-out vowels, she 
thought it was "Mama."  The accent was on the second syllable, 
giving the cry an oddly foreign sound.   Did the child speak 
English?  Mulder had mentioned the Vineyard's Portuguese 
population.   It didn't matter.  The caller's grief and despair 
were plain.  No mother, much less one who had lost her only 
child, could hear such a sound and be still.  

"Keep talking, sweetheart, I'm coming," Scully said.   She ducked 
under the crime scene tape and passed into the shadows of the 
trees.    She kept speaking as she walked, trying to encourage 
the child to make some sound, any sound.  Privately she prayed 
that her fall had done nothing to jam the workings of the SIG.  
She couldn't shake the feeling that the dog beneath the tree had 
been frightened by something else before she nearly ran over it.  
Thinking back, she realized that its eyes had not been on her at 
all.  It had been staring past her, at something in these woods 
at the bottom of the hill.

*****

Mulder strode across the frozen field, his Mag Lite casting a 
powerful beam ahead of him.  Scully's trail was fairly easy to 
follow.  The line of broken grass stalks and depressions in the 
sleet-covered ground led straight toward the South Road Burying 
Ground, and beyond that the cliffs.  Every so often he'd hunt up 
three rocks and place them in an arrow indicating the direction 
he'd gone in.  Joey, who'd once played a long-suffering Tonto to 
Mulder's Lone Ranger, would be able to follow those signs.  

Mulder couldn't figure out what had possessed his partner to do 
something this foolish.  A traveler lost in the woods?  Why didn't 
she call 911?  Why didn't she walk up the goddamn stairs where a 
dozen peace officers were sleeping, one of whom had spent the 
first 12 years of his life running around these very woods?  If 
Scully had not been the least supernaturally-inclined woman ever
born, he would have suspected her Irish sailor's blood of 
succumbing to the glamour of the Lorelei -- spirits that haunted 
cliffs by the sea and lured men to their destruction.    

This had to be about Emily.  Leigh had said she thought Scully 
mentioned something about a child.  She'd acted out of character 
at the Herrons' house, going out of her way to talk about her 
personal loss.  At the time Mulder had been touched by her 
openness.  He should have recognized that something powerful had 
to be going on beneath the surface for Scully to do something 
like that.  This was somehow about Emily and God and this being 
Easter and about sleeping with Mulder and him not being the solid 
Catholic guy she'd always envisioned herself with.  

He increased his brisk walk to a jog as he neared the woods.  He 
didn't need to fool around analyzing her trail; it was as 
straight as a beeline.  She was headed for the place where 
Kristie had been murdered.  He supposed that was logical in a 
certain way, if Scully was worried that someone else was in 
danger from the same predator.  

Yet the long-time paranormal investigator in him was uneasy that 
her track was as straight as a line on a surveyor's map.  There 
was a packed-dirt bicycle path that went roughly in the direction 
she wanted to go, but she had walked straight across it without 
swerving.  //Don't let this be another Skyland Mountain . . .// 
Mulder thought.  

Memories returned unbidden.  He recalled sitting across a Stratego 
board from his sister, bickering about what to watch on TV. A light 
came through the window, casting long shadows behind the game 
pieces. Samantha looked up, puzzled . . .

He shook his head, refusing to be drawn *there* of all places, 
but some part of his mind wouldn't let the image go.   Mulder 
plead with it:

//That was a long time ago.//

//Your neighbors all thought Chilmark was too insignificant for 
paranormal events to occur there, too.//

//This is different!  There's nothing *in* the South Road Burying 
Ground.//

//Before November 27, 1973, there was nothing in your living 
room, either.//

Mulder broke into a run.


*****

Scully pressed through a dense area of the forest.  The rain had 
not washed away all the snow here, and she found herself walking 
up to her ankles in powder-fine flakes, like the snow of 
midwinter.  The wind had died and she could hear the child's 
crying very clearly.  It only spoke one word, "Mama," again and 
again. There was such grief and longing in its voice that she 
feared she would find the mother lying dead in the snow, perhaps 
murdered by the same person who killed Kristie Herron. 

"Keep talking, honey," Scully said, though the child gave no sign 
that it heard.  The two of them had simply been reciting their 
respective litanies as she picked her way closer and closer.  
When she at last forced her way through a vine-filled thicket, 
she stood at the edge of a clearing.  Moonlight dazzled her eyes.   
It was as if the storm had never been -- a full moon shone among 
sailing clouds and turned the snow into glittering diamonds.   
She stared a moment, disoriented.  Three or four rustic buildings 
stood away to her right, and in the shadow of the largest one a 
figure huddled, small and pale against a big, dark stain in the 
snow.  

She ran closer and realized that there was not one child but two.  
One was a long-haired girl about three years old.  The other was 
a young baby, wrapped in a bloodied cloth and held clutched to 
the older child's chest.  It was clear the infant wouldn't live.  
Its throat had been slashed nearly through, but its eyes remained 
open and there was a continual wet wheezing sound as it tried to
draw breath.  A wound like that on a living body could only be 
seconds old.  Scully fired once into the air, to draw the 
attention of rescuers and to run off who or whatever had just 
done *that.*  

"You're all right.  I'm a doctor.  The other officers will be 
here any moment," Scully said, loud enough that anyone hiding 
nearby should be able to hear. Could she carry both children and 
still be able to use her gun?   She'd have to.  

The girl's gray eyes had the fixed stare of shock and her clothes 
were soaked in blood.  Whether it was hers or the dying baby's 
Scully didn't know, and there was no time to examine her.  Scully 
reached to scoop the children up but something checked her hand, 
too fast to have meaning for her. She felt a burning sensation 
followed by cold wetness on her fingers and looked down.  Her 
hand was bleeding.  

Slowly it dawned on her that the child was holding a long, thin 
knife.  "It's all right," she said, her mind too dazed to make 
anything of this except the girl believed she was defending 
herself.  Scully grabbed for the little elbow in what should have 
been an easy disarm, but instead the knife laid open the skin of 
her palm.  There was no time for this -- the baby was dying and 
the killer was still close.  "I have to get you out of here," 
Scully said, her desperation rising.

"No," the child said softly.  "Stay."  

The strange plea made her hesitate, and she was struck by the 
loneliness in the child's pale little face.  It was familiar, 
like an image from a half-remembered nightmare, and it echoed in 
the broken places of her soul.  

*****

After what seemed like an eternity of thrashing around in the 
briars, Mulder reached the South Road Burying Ground.  The tiny 
cemetery consisted of seven headstones, listing like drunkards, 
and two rocks. The enormous willow he remembered was still there.  
Scully was not.  

He was beginning to feel the stirrings of panic when a shot rang 
out from deeper in the woods.  Mulder wasn't enough of a firearms 
expert to identify the sound of a firing SIG, but when he heard 
the eerie whistle of the bullet he knew the weapon was no low-
powered hunting rifle.   "Scully!" he called out.  He struggled 
through the underbrush in the direction he'd heard the gun fire, 
trying to stay within the cover of large trees.  The last thing 
he needed was to get his head blown off.  

His flashlight beam illuminated little and made everything around 
it seem darker.  At this point the only reason to keep it on was 
the hope it might draw Scully to him.  Of course, it might draw 
other things as well.  No longer carefully tracking, he was 
moving as fast as he could through the undergrowth.  

The weaving flashlight beam began illuminating orange flags stuck 
in the soil -- evidence markers.   This was the spot Kristie had 
met her attacker.  A moment later the light revealed a bloodied 
shoe.  Over the shoe was a leg.  Mulder stopped short and angled 
the beam up.  There stood Scully, her face gray as a corpse's, 
watching blood run down her hands.

Mulder had the feeling he was looking at a dead woman.  He asked 
softly, "What happened to you?"

She looked up, and he saw her pupils were dilated even in the 
bright beam of light.  Her brows drew together as if she were 
trying to place him.  "She was just here," she said. 

"Who was just here?" Mulder asked.

"A little girl," she said.  She began looking at the ground 
around her.  "There was snow . . ."  She turned away from him and 
began to wander off among the evidence markers.  That alone was 
enough to convince him something was terribly wrong.  Scully had 
never fouled a crime scene in her life.  

"What is it?" he asked.  "What did you see?"

"There was a house . . . there were little children.  They were 
wounded, and I wanted to help, but I couldn't.  She wanted me to 
stay with her . . ."

"You're hurt.  You need to get out of here," he said.  He put his 
hand on her arm to draw her toward him.  She resisted at first, 
then turned and curled against his chest.  He took her hands in 
his own and balled them into fists, pressing the cuts on her 
palms closed.   Her fingers were as cold as death despite the hot 
blood that ran between them.

*****

Hours later Mulder sat by Scully's bedside in the ER of the tiny 
hospital in Edgartown.  Scully slept, and every so often an 
orderly would arrive to spread a freshly-warmed blanket over her.  
She'd been unwilling or unable to explain how she became injured out 
in the dark woods.  All he knew was that she'd found wounded 
children somewhere southeast of the graveyard and was reluctant 
to leave the scene, blood loss and hypothermia be damned.  She'd 
only consented to come away after Joe Luce and another officer 
arrived, and she'd kept her gaze toward the graveyard even as 
Mulder led her toward the road.
 
He reached out and touched her fingertips, the only part of her 
left hand that wasn't bandaged, and was relieved to feel that her 
skin was warm now. 

"What did you see out there?" he asked softly.  Deeply asleep, 
his partner did not reply.
 
He heard the sound of approaching footsteps.   This person was 
wearing hard-soled shoes, not the orthopedic footwear of the 
hospital staff.  "Fox?" came a voice.

"Joey," Mulder said.  He stood up and opened the curtain that 
walled off Scully's bed.  The first thing that impressed him 
about Joe Luce was how much he looked like the little kid he 
had known.  The big dark eyes were still there, and so was the 
hair that refused to take any kind of decent part.  The
stuff still sat on Joe's head like twists of brown winter grass.  
Afterward Mulder's mind filled in the unfamiliar.  Manhood had 
squared Joe's jaw and broadened his shoulders, and he wore a 
Chilmark Police Chief's uniform, just as his uncle had.  It was 
fitting, somehow.  

Joe had clearly just come from outside.  Half-melted sleet 
pellets rested on his shoulders and in his hair, and cold 
radiated from his clothes.  

"How's your partner?" Joe asked.

"She'll be all right," Mulder said.  "What did you find?"

Joe shook his head. "We didn't find any kids, Fox.  Some of the 
guys from Crime Scene Services came out with their dogs, and we 
still came up with nothing. That shot you heard -- you think it 
was from her gun?"

"I can look," Mulder said.  He walked over to the chair where 
Scully's things had been neatly folded.  He drew her service 
weapon out of its holster and examined it.  There were powder 
streaks around the barrel -- something Scully never would have 
tolerated for longer than it took her to get to her cleaning 
supplies.  "It was hers," he said.  Guessing Joe's next 
question, Mulder said, "Scully's not trigger-happy, and she 
doesn't imagine things."

Joe held his hands up in a conciliatory gesture.  "I'm not 
suggesting that," he said.  "I'm just trying to figure out what 
happened.  You sure she said there were buildings?"

"Yeah -- houses or little shacks," Mulder said. 

"That's what's bothering me, because there aren't any buildings 
out where you found her.  I know, because I've been combing those 
woods for days," Joe said.

"There's the Gelbemanns' place," Mulder said, without great 
conviction.  The house was several hundred yards to the east of 
where he found Scully.

"It's hard to see how she could have come from there," Joe said.  
"She'd have had to cross the creek, and there's no bridge.  We 
did check on the Gelbemanns just to be safe, but they never heard 
or saw anything.  There sure were no pools of blood around their 
house.  Did Agent Scully say anything else to you? Did she give 
you a landmark . . . anything at all?" Joe asked.  

Mulder gazed over at his sleeping partner and motioned for Joe to 
follow him into the hall.  He stopped at a spot that seemed far 
enough from the triage area to be discreet. "Scully told me the 
buildings showed up against the snow in the moonlight," Mulder 
said.  

Joe looked surprised and slightly embarrassed.  Mulder could see 
this news shifted his attitude toward the whole situation.  Sleet 
could pass for snow, but there had certainly been no moonlight 
out in the storm.  "I don't know what she saw out there, Joey.  
But if you knew her, you'd know that she wouldn't just imagine 
something like this," Mulder said.

"I believe you," Joe said.  

"If you did you'd still be out there," Mulder said.  

"Fox, the CSS guys are willing to switch off in teams until 
someone can do a flyover at dawn.  I'm on call if they need me.  
There's not a lot more we can do," Joe insisted.

"How do you think she cut her hands?  On a twig?" Mulder asked.  

"It's being taken care of," Joe said.  "Look, can I get you a 
cup of coffee or something?"

"I've got some," Mulder said, gesturing toward the Styrofoam cup 
of now-cold coffee sitting on the table by Scully's bed.  
"Where's Irv?"

"Irv?" Joe asked, looking surprised.  

"The little shit that got us into this in the first place.  
Scully said he seemed too interested in this case from the 
beginning," Mulder said.

"I'm not sure if he's working tonight.  This is his secondary 
job -- he and Emma still run that photography store during the 
day," Joe said.

"You're kidding.  They couldn't stand each other," Mulder said.

"They still can't.  Actually they're divorced, but they live 
together.  It's his photo business but he's running it out of her 
house.  I guess they figured putting up with each other was 
easier than dividing up the stuff," Joe said.

"If he's here I want to see him," Mulder said.  He went to the 
nurses' station and convinced the woman behind the desk to page 
Irv, and then Irv's supervisor.  As Mulder stood waiting for a 
response to the pages, he listened to Joe answer a staticky call 
over his two-way radio.  The reporting officer told him that the
dogs had found no other trails besides Mulder and Scully's.

"I thought you were off-duty," Mulder said, forestalling any 
comments Joe might make.

"Never," Joe said, as he replaced the receiver on its shoulder 
strap.  "I'm a full 25% of Chilmark's finest."

"Just like your uncle," Mulder said.

"I'm not my uncle," Joe said.

The phone behind the nurses' desk trilled softly.   The desk 
attendant took it and said, "I see.  Thank you."  When she hung 
up she said, "That was the transporter's room.  Irv Stuckey isn't 
scheduled to work tonight."

"Thanks," Mulder said, and turned to go back to Scully's bedside.  
Joe caught his elbow.

"Hey, Fox, c'mon.  If I don't get some coffee I'm going to keel 
over," Joe said.

Mulder repressed the urge to shrug Joe's hand off.  "Isn't Sue 
expecting you?" he asked.

"No," Joe said.  The bleakness in his voice made Mulder pause.  
For the first time he realized his former friend might have 
other reasons for not wanting to return home.

"I'm sorry," Mulder said.

Joe shrugged and looked away.  "These things happen. Three out of 
the four people on the Chilmark force are divorced now.  Our 
job's not exactly 'NYPD Blue,' but the hours . . . you know.  The 
sad thing is that now that I have court-regulated visitation, I 
think I see my daughter more often." 

Joey's words did a lot to dissolve the resentment Mulder had been 
feeling toward him. Mulder had felt in a one-down position due to 
his own personal failures, and in his mind Joe's confession 
brought them to the same level. "Coffee'd be great," Mulder said.  
He allowed himself a last look at Scully, still sleeping and safe 
for the moment, before walking past the nurses' station and out 
into the hall.

The hospital corridor was all gleaming white surfaces.  "The 
place looks better.  It used to be such a dump," Mulder said.  He 
remembered cracked floor tiles and walls painted sickly pea-green 
to the height of a child's eye-level. 

"They've done a lot with it.  They had to -- the Island 
population outgrew it. Every bed was filled all the time.  No -- 
wrong way," Joe stopped Mulder as he turned a corner.  "The 
cafeteria's this way now."  He pointed in the opposite
direction.

"Right," Mulder said, and followed him.  It was odd to feel like 
a newcomer here.  

The cafeteria was deserted except for a listless-looking family 
in one corner and a couple of maintenance guys hunkered over 
their soda cans.  Neither Mulder nor Joe spoke as they bought 
overpriced cups of oily-looking coffee and walked back out into 
the dining area.  To Mulder's surprise, Joe headed straight for
the glass doors that led outside.  Mulder followed him out onto a 
concrete slab with a few snow-covered tables on it.  This was the 
coldest part of the night, and the damp sleet had finally 
crystallized into tight little flakes that settled on their heads 
and shoulders.  Mulder blew steam off his coffee and gazed into 
the woods that began at the bottom of the hill.  

For a while the only sound Mulder heard was the wind in the trees 
and his own breathing.  There was a waiting quality to their 
silence, but it wasn't awkward.  Among people who have known each 
other more than 30 years, silence is also a form of 
communication.  

At last Joe said, "I'm sorry about what I said back when we were 
in high school.  About blaming you for what happened to your 
sister."

Mulder shrugged as if the incident no longer bothered him.  "I 
guess I shouldn't have slugged you in the head."

"No, I deserved it," Joe said.  He rubbed the eye socket that had 
taken the long-ago punch and said, "Nothing up there worth 
saving, anyway." 

"You were just repeating what you'd heard," Mulder said.

"The town's not against you, Fox.  It never was," Joe said.

"It was against my parents, then," Mulder said.

"No, it's just . . . it was so weird how it happened.  My uncle 
said it gave him a funny feeling.  He wondered how a stranger in 
a town of 600 people would go unnoticed.  Your house wasn't even 
visible from the road.  How'd some guy know there would be two 
kids home alone?" Joe asked.

"They'd been watching us a long time," Mulder said.  Though Joe 
stood just out of his field of vision, Mulder sensed his startled 
movement.

"You know what happened?" Joe asked.

"Yes," Mulder said.  The word came out very quietly, and at first 
Mulder wasn't sure Joe had heard. 

"It was bad?" Joe asked.  Mulder heard the slight break in his 
voice.  Samantha had been his friend, too.  

Mulder let his eyes fall shut against the memory of that dingy 
house on an abandoned military base.  Better to think about 
afterward, when he saw the lost children shining in the 
starlight.  "She's better off now.  She's safe.  They can't hurt 
her anymore," he said.

"Oh, Jesus.  Oh, Christ," Joe asked.  His job might not be NYPD 
Blue, but he was a cop.  He'd know there were child abductors and 
then there were child abductors.  

"It's all over now.  It was over a long time ago," Mulder said.  
He spoke as if to soothe, but whether he was comforting himself 
or Joey he didn't know.  

"I'm sorry, Fox.  I'm so sorry," Joe said.

"You knew, didn't you?  You always knew she wasn't coming home," 
Mulder asked.

"No.  I mean, when the weeks and months go by and there's 
nothing, not even a ransom note, you get a real bad feeling.  But 
no, I didn't know," Joe said.  

"After a while you wouldn't look me in the eye when I talked 
about her.  And you knew my family was involved.  I think you 
must be a hell of a cop, Joe," Mulder said.

"What do you mean, your family?" Joe asked.  Mulder looked over 
at him and felt gratified that Joe appeared truly shocked.

"It had to do with my father, with his work.  He knew they were 
going to take her, and my mother at least suspected.  I think my 
dad tried to fight them at first, but something changed his mind.  
Maybe he thought he was doing the right thing.  I don't know," 
Mulder said.

"That's why your dad was murdered?  Because of his work?" Joe 
asked.

"Yeah.  He wanted to tell me something, get it off his 
conscience, but they wouldn't let him.  My mother wanted to tell 
me something too, and I lost her in February," Mulder said.      

Joe set down his coffee on a snowy tabletop and put his hand to 
his head. "What are you telling me, Fox?  This is terrorists?  
Ex-KGB?  What?" 

"You don't really want to know," Mulder said.  He hadn't meant to 
give so much away.  

"Aliens," Joe said.  "You used to talk about aliens."

"I still do," Mulder said. "And I'm one of the few who wasn't 
silenced real quick."

After a few moments Joe asked, "Fox . . . do you think what's out 
there, what your partner met in the woods, is related to what 
happened to your family?" 

Mulder released a long breath that steamed in the cold.  "No. 
No, I don't think so.  I'm starting to think it may be 
paranormal, though."

Joe gave his a strange look as he asked, "You mean there's a 
real headless lady wandering around by the cliffs?" 

Mulder remembered wide-eyed, credulous Joey, the kid with a Cub 
Scout scarf around his neck and no front teeth.  He repressed a 
childish urge to mess with him.  "Scully didn't see any headless 
ladies," he said.  

"So this is what you do, right?  You investigate this kind of 
thing.  How do you stop something paranormal from killing 
people?" Joe asked.  

"That depends on what it is," Mulder said.  "It helps a lot if it 
has wrists you can handcuff.  Our record with spectral phenomena 
hasn't been that good."

"Terrific," Joey said, turning away again.  "I'm actually praying 
there's a homicidal maniac loose in the woods."

"Would you really believe me if I said there was something out 
there? Something not human?" Mulder asked.

"You? I might.  Yeah, I just might," Joe said.

"How come?" Mulder asked.

Joe seemed to consider this. "You always were a fucking freak," 
he said.

"Thank you," said Mulder, with no trace of sarcasm.  After a 
moment's hesitation he rested his hand on Joe's shoulder. 

Joe clapped his hand over Mulder's and said, "Go on back to your 
partner."  

"Sure," Mulder said.  He turned and opened the glass door, 
leaving Joey to his thoughts and the night.  

*****