Okay, I had a conversation with someone who didn't think that you could combine shows that were very different in style, content and decade produced with each other into a cross-FF story. So I thought I would doodle a little bit with combining Matt Houston, a detective show from Aaron Spelling in the 1980s with Northern Exposure, a slice of life dramedy from the 1990s. Actually, they go together pretty well and so I'm working on a story to prove that they can. It's totally apart from the others in storyline.

I don't own the characters from either story and I won't be making any money from this experiment of sorts. I hope you enjoy it. I promise it won't be a zillion chapters long, lol. I'm still working on the others ones but this one will be updated as it goes along.

Los Angeles, California

She approached the grave from behind a grove of trees, after the ground keeper at the cemetery had cleared away the vestiges of ornaments sprinkled on various sites over the holiday. Dressed in black, she carried her flowers with her to the spot where a grave had been dug several weeks before. Few people milled around the cemetery this morning unlike that day when hundreds of people had witnessed the burial. Today, a couple with a small child sat near a grave marker laying fresh carnations and a toy truck in front of it. Another woman held a handkerchief tight in her hand, standing a distance away in front of another grave.

She took a deep breath watching the people around her looking for someone who didn't belong as she neared his grave. The grave stone had just been added several days before and she knelt before it on the grass, touching it with her fingers. He had been young when he had died, far too young when his life had been taken right in front of her. Much too quickly for any final words to be said between them. But what would you say in the final seconds of someone's life even if you saw it coming? How do you end a lifelong relationship in a few words? She hadn't been able to figure it out then and she couldn't now. She just knew she missed him too much for someone who wasn't coming back.

She lay the flowers down in front of his headstone and sat beside it for a while, trying to find the right words now to say goodbye. After she left the cemetery, she would be leaving L.A. now a city of bad memories to start a new life far away somewhere where people didn't know her or the man she had lost. She had submitted her resignation from her job and had said all her goodbyes this morning. This would be the final one before she moved on without looking back.

She had spent hours at the library searching for small towns off the beaten path to serve as her next home, careful not to do her investigation on any computers that could be traced by anyone else. A week ago, she had chosen the perfect town that a woman with a secret could hide in and build a new life for herself. Thousands of miles and a whole world away, it was a place where no one would come looking even as they might search everywhere else for any sign of her.

Reaching into her coat pocket, she pulled out a folded envelope and placed it next to the flowers. Inside were papers stained by her tears when she had folded them after writing forever it seemed.

C.J. fingered the head stone again and felt tears burn the corners of her eyes. She kissed her fingers and then touched it again.

"Goodbye, Houston."

A month later… Cicely, Alaska

Business boomed at the Brick as it usually did early in the mornings, as the town of Cicely woke up to face a new day. Shelli the waitress who was wearing an apron over her baby bump buzzed around tables carrying trays of food to the customers who settled for drinking coffee and trading anecdotes about their lives while they waited.

"Sorry for the wait," she said breathlessly as she handed some men dressed in hunting gear some omelets and fried potatoes, "The grill had to be cleaned last night after the party."

No further explanation was really necessary, she knew. Everyone in town had been there, well almost everyone she thought looking again at the young woman sitting by herself at a table in the corner. No one knew much about her or even when she had first arrived in Cicely, they just knew they liked her. Much of the town had just looked at Bricks one morning and saw her there among the regulars and a handful of tourists. At first, she had kept to herself except there were rumors that she had signed an open ended lease for one of Maggie's spare cabins and that she had visited Joel Fleishman the town's transplanted doctor not long after she arrived. No one in Cicely would dare even think of breaching the doctor-client confidentiality which they viewed to be almost sacred. Everyone at Cicely's equivalent of a water cooler just hoped she was feeling okay. Even when she started mingling among them, there was so much they didn't know and they didn't press her to tell them. They just waited patiently especially during times like this morning.

"She's always sitting there," a voice said, "looking as sad as the day before."

Shelli looked up.

"Ed, what are you doing here," she said, "I thought you were shooting a movie on the history of Cicely."

Ed grabbed a milk that one of the cooks gave him.

"She wanted a job," he said, simply.

Shelli's brow furrowed and she swept back her hair.

"Who wanted a job?"

"The woman sitting over there," he said, "She's going to help me gather our town's history. She's been busy for a while already but she doesn't talk much."

Shelli scratched her head.

"Now how can she do that," she asked, "She's not even from here."

Ed looked back at where she sat, nibbling at her eggs.

"She's very sad," he repeated, "but she used to work as a lawyer and did a lot of investigating where she's from."

"Did she say where that is?"

He shook his head.

"It must have been a big city," he said, "She must have lost someone there. Someone she loved and who maybe loved her back."

Shelli studied her.

"Yeah, she does look like that," she said, "It's not the hangdog look you so often see when women drop by here. It's a, I don't know, forlorn look like she's survived some unbearable tragedy like in one of those Harlequin…novels."

Ed nodded.

"Like Kate Winslett at the end of the Titanic," he said, "after she's been rescued and she's thinking back to her lost love."

"But Leo DiCaprio drowned in the freezing water after saving Kate's life," Shelli said, "He saved her life in more ways than one in that flick."

Ed looked at Shelli thinking that was an astute observation coming from someone whose taste ran in telenovelas and those new reality shows which had bombarded even the air waves of Alaska in the past several years.

"Maybe it's an example of real life imitating art right here in Cicely," he said.

Shelli couldn't disagree. After all, it wouldn't be the first time...