CONNER COVE, MAINE.

It had been a long drive. They had stayed overnight in a hotel in Portland, and set off at the crack of dawn. It was still morning when they found themselves a few miles outside Conner Cove.

"Never been this far north and east in the state", mused Mulder. "We used to vacation in Maine when I was a boy. Bar Harbor, mostly, just like everyone else, but we'd do it off-season, after the leaves had fallen and the tourists had all gone home. We'd stay in a housekeeping cabin and have things pretty much to ourselves. It's like a totally different place then, with all the shops shut up for the winter, but there were these great, raw, overcast days that were perfect for beachcombing while listening to the roar of the Atlantic surf. Feels kinda weird being up here in the spring, actually."

At the wheel of the car, Scully smiled slightly but said nothing. She enjoyed listening to Mulder wax lyrical.

Five minutes later they topped a rise and there was Conner Cove below them. It looked like any number of other small towns along the cost of Maine, but more prosperous than many. There were several boats bobbing within the protective arms of the harbor walls, most of which seemed to be pleasure craft of various sorts rather than the fishing vessels that would once have been associated with the area. The harbor took up one end of the cove, a shingle beach sweeping around the rest of its curve. Driving down the hill and into the town proper, Scully noted that all the houses were freshly painted, their small gardens well-tended. If not affluent, Conner Cove was certainly getting by in reasonable comfort.

Parking their car on the main street, Mulder and Scully made the local sheriff's office their first port of call. Outside the office, a man in a deputy sheriff's uniform was taking stacks of leaflets from a box and stuffing them into a wire display rack. As they neared it, he ducked into the office without having seen them. Mulder picked up one of the leaflets and started to read. It had a photograph of a dolphin on the front.

"According to the brochure, Conner Cove started out as a fishing village back in the late 1770s. It pretty much stayed that way until the late 1950s, gradually growing until the town had a population of several hundred. The fishing industry wasted away for the usual reasons, leaving the town in pretty parlous economic straits. Population gradually shrank as people moved away until it stabilized at the current couple of hundred. The town's salvation was first that it became a sort of artist's colony in the 1960s and, more recently, that it's begun attracting tourists in reasonable numbers. That last is due primarily to Greg Prince and to Billy the dolphin."

"Billy the dolphin?"

"Yeah," chuckled Mulder. "Seems this dolphin decided to adopt the town. He's been coming back every spring for the past six years. Stays in the cove until late summer. People love swimming with dolphins and the town hasn't been slow to take advantage of that fact. It's inspired them to look into whale-watching boat trips as well, apparently. Three cheers for eco-tourism, I guess. Then there's Greg Prince."

"Wait! You mean he's *that* Greg Prince? I just didn't make the connection."

"Yeah, he's that Greg Prince. Writer of big novels of modern horror set in picturesque New England towns and villages not unlike Conner Cove itself. Every new book goes straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and most are optioned by Hollywood for seven-figure sums before they're even published. His fans make the pilgrimage from all over the world to camp outside his home and seek out locations he's used in his books."

"They sound like just the sort of books you'd enjoy."

"Not really. They're much too fanciful for my taste."

Scully gave her partner a quick sideways glance. His delivery was so deadpan she could never be sure when he was pulling her leg.

"So as well as Billy, the town has been making what money it can from having a famous author move there?"

"Pretty much, only Prince didn't relocate to Conner Cove; he was born here. The Princes have been with the town pretty much from the beginning. Apart from a few years spent at college in New York, Greg has lived here all his life."

Mulder stuffed the leaflet in his pocket and they entered the office. They set a bell over the door ringing when they opened it. Inside, a pretty child with long blonde hair was sitting on a chair, stroking a cat and swinging her legs back and forth. The sheriff's deputy emerged from the rear office carrying another box of leaflets.

"Just got this season's tourist brochure's in from the printer in Brunswick," he said, "and Conner Cove being as small as it is it falls to me to put them on display every year. So, can I do somethin' for you folks?"

"We're from the FBI," said Mulder, showing his ID. "I'm Agent Mulder and this is Agent Scully."

"Ah good" We been expectin' you." he said, shaking their hands. "I'm Deputy Sheriff John Nottingham, and this is my daughter, Callie."

Mulder tried to suppress a smile, but he caught it.

"That's alright, Agent Mulder," he chuckled, "I'm used to people finding it funny that someone called 'Nottingham' would end up in a sheriff's office. Of course, this is just a local sheriff's office set up under the town's original charter. We don't usually have much to do with the county sheriff's office."

"Until recently." said Scully.

"Yes, ma'am, until recently. Alright, Callie," he said, turning to the little girl, you run along now and go see if Billy's got here yet."

"OK, Daddy." she said, leaping off the chair and dashing out the door.

"What a pretty little girl," said Scully. "How old is she?"

"She's just coming up on seven. Fortunately, it's her mother she favors in the looks department. Now then, before we go any further, there's something I need to show you folks."

He opened a filing cabinet drawer and took out a sheriff's uniform, sealed in a plastic bag.

"This was found on the shore earlier this morning. It's Sheriff Turton's. And that's not all. When I arrived in the office there was a message waiting for me on our computer."

Going over to his desk, he tapped in a password then swivelled the monitor around so they could read the message:

John - By the time you read this I will have ended it. You know what I've been struggling with these past few months so you'll understand better than most why I've decided to do this. It's not a decision I came to lightly. That's why I disappeared these past three days. I had to go somewhere to be alone, to sort things out in my head and be absolutely sure I was making the right decision. And I am sure, John. I've left an envelope on my TV containing $10,000. Please pass this along to Susan Prentice. And please see that Hoover is taken care of. It's been an honor and a privilege knowing you and working alongside you. Looks like you're the new Sheriff. No one deserves it more. Your friend, Dan

"'Hoover'?"

"His cat. That was him with Callie."

"And Susan Prentice?"

"Just one of the townswomen. She used to work for the Princes. Funny thing him leaving her that money, though, because he'd never been that close to her. Dan got along with pretty much everyone, but there were people he was closer to than Susan."

"Do you believe the note to be genuine, deputy?" asked Scully.

"Yes. ma'am, I do. Only Dan and I had keys to this office, and only we knew the password to get into the computer. But the real clincher is where he says I know what he'd been struggling with the past few months. I do, and he never told another soul. Dan had terminal cancer. The specialist he saw in Portland figured he had maybe three months left. And it was gonna get bad at the end. I certainly understand why he did what he did."

"Did he have a wife or children, or other loved ones?" asked Scully.

"Nope. Dan was a lifelong bachelor. Just him and Hoover in that little apartment of his. Dan was a helluva nice guy, Agent Mulder, and everyone liked him, but there was always a secret sadness about him, as if maybe he'd somehow missed out on a big part of life. He was the town's sheriff for almost thirty years. For a lot of us it seemed like he'd been there forever. It's going to be strange not having him around. We threw a big surprise party for him on his sixtieth birthday last year. That's a picture of him at the party on his desk."

Mulder picked up the framed photograph. It showed the sheriff surrounded by friends in party hats. He was tall and portly, with thinning grey hair, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He was smiling, but his eyes seemed to be hiding something. Mulder could see what John Nottingham meant about his 'secret sorrow'.

"Assuming, for now, this is all kosher, let's move on to this thing with the bodies. Firstly, what can you tell us about Lucy Prince."

"Greg married her about five years ago. He met her during a book-signing in Boston and fell for her immediately. Ever since we were boys together, Greg had been telling me he had dreams in which the face of his soulmate, the woman he was going to marry, would appear to him, and that they were going to make each other very happy. Greg always talked like that. He was a great believer in the supernatural, in destiny and 'the mysterious hand of fate'. I used to laugh at him when he got like that, but he's the one that used that stuff to make millions and here I am a lowly sheriff's deputy. Still, I don't begrudge him his success. Greg's another one of those really nice guys that no one has a bad word for, just like the sheriff was.

Anyway, as soon as he set eyes on Lucy Jensen he knew he was seeing that face he'd seen so often in his dreams, or so he told me. They had a whirlwind romance and the wedding was a lavish affair at Greg's house - that big one on the hill overlooking most of the cove - that the whole town was invited to. Conner Cove had never seen anything like it. I think maybe Greg set too much store by those dreams, though. Lucy's a nice enough girl and all, but they just never struck me as being all that compatible. Greg doesn't talk about it much but he hasn't seemed all that happy the last few times we talked.

Over the past year Lucy has been spending more and more time away from Conner Cove. When she returned last time, about a month ago, she had her brother, Frank Jensen, in tow. I didn't like him at all. He stayed up at the house, used Greg's cars all the time and generally acted like some sort of big shot while he was here. I'm sure the money he was flashing around was Greg's, too. He was particularly taken with Greg's powerboat and would spend hours zooming around the waters of the cove in it. I was curious why he hadn't been at their wedding, particularly as he's just about Lucy's only close relative, so I did a little digging of my own. Turns out he couldn't be there because he was doing time in Massachusetts for fraud and for manslaughter. The authorities were convinced it was murder, but they could only get Frank for manslaughter. Nice to find out your instincts are sound, but I wasn't happy we had a man like that in our community. Fortunately, he left after seven or eight days. It was two weeks after this the first body turned up."

"Who found the body?" asked Scully.

"A couple of local kids who'd gone down to the shore to make out after dark. They spotted something in the surf, went to investigate, and found the body of a naked woman. When me and the sheriff got there we recognised her immediately. It was Lucy Prince.

Neither of us was looking forward to being the one who told Greg his wife was dead. As it happens, he was out of town that evening, though we didn't know that at the time. You can imagine our surprise when we drove up to the house and it was Lucy herself opened the door to us, alive and well. Not that the sheriff showed his surprise; he knew better than that. Lucy called us in and he asked her if she had a twin sister. She was startled by that, and instantly denied it, but the sheriff and I could both tell by her manner that something wasn't right. We told her about the body and she agreed to come back with us and identify it. Boy, was she spooked by that body! She kept saying 'I don't believe this, I don't believe this'. Now, OK, it must be a pretty freaky thing to come face to face with what looks like your own dead body, but the sheriff was convinced there was more to it, that she had some inkling what was going on.

After we took her home we waited outside in the car, with our lights off. The sheriff was playing a hunch, and it was a good one. About an hour later we saw Mrs Prince come out of the house carrying a shovel and a flashlight. She headed into the woods up behind the house and we followed. Local kids have been playing in those woods like forever. I played in them as a boy and my Callie loves to play in them too, so I knew them pretty well, but they look totally different in the dark. Since we obviously didn't want to be seen, we couldn't use our own flashlights and so had to follow by the light from hers in the distance. We kept tripping over tree roots and the like and she soon got ahead of us. We lost her completely, but we stopped and listened and eventually we picked up the faint sound of her digging some distance further on. We followed the sound, crept up on her, and arrived just in time to see her digging up a body. That's when we drew our guns, turned our flashlights on her, and shouted 'Freeze'. I've always wanted to shout that. When we investigated and saw whose body she was digging up we thought we'd entered the Twilight Zone. It was another Lucy Prince. This one had had the back of her head caved in. We arrested the live Lucy Prince, of course, but she refused to tell us anything about the dead ones. As we were leading her out of the woods, Greg arrived back at the house. He demanded to know what was happening, so we showed him. He was completely dumbfounded, and who wouldn't be?"

"So how does the fourth Lucy Prince figure in all this?" demanded Scully.

"I'm just getting to that part. After we'd shown Greg the bodies and he'd finally left, the sheriff sent me back to the woods to mark off the body there and cover it with a tarp until the forensics boys could get here from the county sheriff's office. He took his flashlight and said he was going back to the shore to see what he could find. The tide would be coming in before it got light and he didn't want any evidence being washed away. So I did as he asked, waited 'til the forensics boys could get to the wood, which was after dawn, then I went home to bed. Didn't get back in to the office 'til early the next afternoon. There was no sign of Dan. So I picked up something Callie had left in the office the day before and headed up to the wood. They'd just finished their work and were loading the body into the county coroner's van. The body from the shore was already in there. They took the bodies away, and the county sheriff took the live Lucy Prince off to the county lock-up.

Back at the office, there was still no sign of Dan, so I caught up with my paperwork. There was a lot of that to go along with everything that had happened in the past day. About 8pm, just as I was about to close up the office, I received a call from Greg who needed me to meet him at his house. So I drove up there, he let me in, and who should be sitting in a big chair in the main parlour, nursing a brandy, but Lucy Prince.

Thinking she'd escaped custody, I started drawing my gun but Greg stopped me. 'No John' says he, 'this isn't the same woman. This is the real Lucy. The woman you arrested is an imposter who had Lucy locked away in the attic for the past two weeks'."

"Locked away in the attic?" said Mulder.

"That's what they claimed. Greg heard noises from the attic when he was upstairs, went to investigate, and found Lucy trussed up on a portable cot, surrounded by the remains of the meals the imposter had been bringing her."

"And you believed this story?" said Scully.

"I had no reason not to, ma'am. The way Greg and Lucy were together, the way they looked at each other, well I hadn't seen that since the early days of their marriage and I was real happy for them. I guess it took the shock of what happened to make them look at each other again and maybe realize what they almost lost. And that's pretty much it. I reported all this to the county sheriff's office, filed a missing persons report on Dan, and they got back to me to let me know they were calling in the FBI. In the meantime, Dan came back from wherever he'd been, typed that suicide note, and went off and drowned himself. Some of the local men have been out searching in their boats, but we haven't found his body yet.

So, does the FBI have any more idea what's going on here than we do? Because I have to tell you, we're stumped."

"'Fraid not," said Mulder, "but we'll do our best to get to the bottom of this. I think we need to start off by talking to Susan Prentice."