August 16th
The Morris Residence
12:57 P.M'
"Thank you, Mrs. Morris, you have been strong for your husband."
"Yes, thank you very much."
Mrs. Morris nodded half-heartedly to Scully, and Scully looked toward Mulder and let her eyes yell "we need to leave." Mulder had spoken to the widow for almost thirty minutes, taking her in his arms at one point and actually letting her cry on his shoulder. It was one of those things that most cases didn't bear witness to and that most reports didn't show, but Mulder had a soft side that she noticed from time to time. She had seen him secretly reflect his pain when he saw children and when he heard about their cases, and she always thought his early work had been because he connected with victims on some level. Perhaps it had something to do with a feeling of shared loss because of his sister or perhaps it was something deeper, something more humane, about the person some people called "spooky Mulder."
Whatever the reason, the results were impressive.
Scully actually admired the skill that Mulder had shown with her, because he not only pulled a woman away from her husband's wake but he had also made it sound like he was doing her a favor while asking her some rather bizarre questions. He even added statements to his interview that made it sound like he was going to track down whatever had done this. In their line of work, nobody made promises and yet Mulder came close.
Sometimes Dana believed Fox actually thought he could do this for everyone, that he was going to rip down the walls to each and every conspiracy. She could understand that because she had seen him proving his case and because she had seen him working out details. The ideas involved were, strange, but the reasoning behind them was almost always sound.
However mad he sometimes seemed, she applauded that about him.
As they went to leave, Scully thought about how happy she was that they blended in somewhat, their attire not standing out too terribly much. That was one of the good things about the F.B.I.; you might not be seen as part of a Keg party, but nobody thought twice about you when you were at the scene of a crime. Mulder seemed to get the message and started heading for the door.
Something changed his mind.
Mumbling something about a restroom, Mulder motioned to Scully and started wading deeper into the house. Amongst all of the people present, it was like being carried deeper and deeper into a sea of faces. Nobody fought or complained. Well, almost nobody.
Everything was open.
Mulder looked over at her, excitement in is eyes.
"Did you hear what she said, Scully?"
"The fact that you made an accident sound like a murder or the fact that you made a woman believe that there was something behind her husband's death?"
"Well, those too, but the other thing..."
"No, Mulder, what other thing?"
"What she said about his room."
Scully thought back to the conversation she had overheard, looking for oddities in any of the details. She also scanned the people in the crowd, trying to see if any of them were listening. It bothered her to sometimes hear the ideas about monsters and mayhem, mostly because the Bureau looked insane for hiring someone like Mulder. Seeing nobody was listening, she turned back to the exchange.
At first one of detail slipped by but then she remembered.
"You mean the room right?"
She could see Mulder's hands moving in a minute clapping motion.
"Yes!"
As Scully thought mentally sifted through the conversation, there were a few parts of her she had chalked up to grief. One of those had been on her bedroom and her husband's last, seemingly desperate acts. The widow had even paused, allowing some words to drift out and into the endless ether.
Apparently every idea didn't bear repeating - something Scully thought Mulder could learn.
Apparently Mulder seemed to be thinking the same thing, because the two of them took the long way out of the house - leading them up some stairs and around a corner and into the room he had been found in. The design was not amazing, and the area surrounding them made Scully wonder what had truly happened here.
If, for example, the man managed anything upstairs then it had to be before his death. Otherwise, he would have had animals chasing him up the stairs and around corners, something even the guests apparently didn't think civil.
As they walked upstairs, they found three bedrooms and a bathroom. Two were opened and had storage items in them and the bathroom door was ajar. Only the one door was closed - the one Mulder had now propped open and was staring into.
Mulder motioned to Scully.
"See anything strange?"
Besides the hunting decor and the bear skinned rung on the bed, there were lots of little items that stood out. A stuffed squirrel playing golf, a fish smiling with dentures; odd hobbies seemed to abound. On one door, however, there was something that seemed to scream at them to be looked at, a padlock on the closet that seemed like it was meant for keeping something in.
Mulder invited himself in for a look.
As Scully looked on, Mulder seemed to do everything but actually lick the lock. He mumbled items like length, iron content, and weight to himself, and he also mumbled directions. From what Scully heard, Mulder wanted to knock down the door to see what was inside. He kept looking at it like it was something out of a pirate story, with a little "x" scribbled into its oak finish. He even ran his fingers across it once or twice, and Scully kept wondering if he would make a sound that noted some miraculous discovery.
"I don't know what's going on in that head of yours, Mulder, but we've overstayed our welcome."
Still, she knew what was rattling around in his brain.
It seemed almost absurd to think he would want to knock it down by force or drag that poor woman here to ask her questions, but Mulder sometimes forgot the delicate balance between curiosity and rules. His reports were rife with mistakes that went against Bureau procedure, some simple rules infractions and some violations of national laws. That was the way Mulder found the big answers he rationalized and how Scully found the strange phenomenon that she somehow ended up with on a weekly basis - knocking down doors just like this one.
"Just a little peek, Scully, that's all I'm asking. Just a little one."
He seemed like a kid standing just outside a candy store, enough so that she wanted to let him in, too, if only for a moment.
More to the point, she somewhat agreed with him. It was a strange revelation and one she wanted to lock away in her mind time and again, that there was definitely something strange going on in this home. Having a lock of that nature on a door fabricated to specs, hoping to hold in something with locks that went well beyond the strength a bank would use...paranoia and overkill were one thing, but on a closet?
Something was off here and Scully knew it. And while it seemed like there had to be some sort of answer for the what and the why, what it could be?
Secretly Scully wondered if the local police department had looked at this and had seen it as something out-of-the-ordinary, or if they had just put it down as one of those weird things people do before they are mauled by animals?
Were people here accustomed to seeing locks like this, or was there some sort of leash law in Tennessee that said you had to lock up dogs over 100 pounds?
Had there not been a wake going on in the building, Scully got the sense that Mulder would have gone down and asked the widow if he could get into the closet.
Possible because he asked her if he "should go back down there and ask her if she had a key."
Sensing his mood elevation, Scully grabbed Mulder by the hand, snapping him out of some sort of daydream, pushing him toward the door. He struggled and huffed, doing his "big bad wolf" impression on everything except the door itself, as if he expected huffing and puffing to blow the house in.
Scully was about to speak when Mulder interrupted, his train-of-thought branching out.
"You see that one, Scully, the house we came looking for?"
Scully panned over to a place with bricks stacked, seemingly more of a ruin than anything else.
"Its hard to miss, Mulder. It still has its foundation and all its walls."
"I wonder if there is something like what we found in there, too, hidden from the world?"
As Scully soaked that in she wondered something else, something more sinister, about this whole place. She wondered if all the houses had secrets like that in there as well and if the people around here had gone to extremes to hide them all.
Was Mulder rubbing off on her?
