AUTHOR'S NOTE: Apologies once again to Chris Carter and his team for having robbed the X-Files to pay its fans in this scene. Just call me the Robin Hood of fan fiction :P
Dean had gone behind a tree to answer a call of nature. That was what he was calling it, so that was what they were calling it. He absolutely had not upchucked his lunch in the Slough Municipal Cemetery.
He'd been OK, just about, until the fire. But then something about the combination of death and the smell of smoke, maybe even the smell of his own slightly cooked finger tips, had pushed past his defenses.
As Dean returned to the car Sam looked like he might be about to say something but Dean silenced him with a look before he could ask any stupid questions. Instead Sam focused his attention on the laptop that was sitting on his knees.
"I've been doing some background checking on the Kelly family," he informed Dean as he casually handed him a bottle of water. "Sarah's daughter, Andrea, is a postgraduate student at CU Slough. Check out her dissertation title." He turned the screen toward Dean.
Dean took a swig of the water, swilled out his mouth and spat out of the door. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his suit and just caught a grimace of disapproval from Sam as he was turning back to study the screen.
"Dualism and the Supernatural in Kabbalah," he read. "What's Kabbalah?"
"A branch of Rabbinic Judaism concerned with mystic practices," Sam replied.
"Well, that can't be coincidence."
Sam nodded. "I'm betting that this will turn out to be a Hebraic text."
The smell of smoke reached Dean's nostrils as Sam lifted the book and flicked through the singed pages and he took another hasty swig from the water bottle. "So, the Kelly family next, then?" and he sighed when Sam gestured confirmation. "Great. More grieving relatives. And you've managed to find us a case with not one, but two dead mothers. Good job, Sam."
Sam fixed him with a searching stare and wound up asking the stupid question after all. "Are you OK, Dean?"
Maybe it wasn't so stupid. If they were about to conduct an interview Sam needed to know Dean was on the case. "Just drive," he growled.
Sam studied him a moment longer then dropped the laptop – Dean's laptop – on the back seat.
"You're welcome, by the way," Dean grumbled under his breath.
"What?"
"Nothing."
As luck would have it, both Andrea Kelly and her father, Jeffrey, were at home when they called. Even to Dean, they both seemed a little withholding. Perhaps it wasn't surprising since their last visit from the police had concluded with them being forced to agree to the exhumation of Sarah's body. They were resentful, particularly Andrea. She hovered protectively at her father's shoulder, arms crossed defensively across her body. Jeffrey looked tense and harassed. Doubtless Sam drew his own conclusions about their reticence but Dean didn't think either of them looked like the masterminds behind a homicidal monster rampage.
He had to admire Sam's interrogation method, though. Either that or he hated him a little for it. He wasn't sure which. Sam didn't bring up the subject of the book straight away. He began with the routine questions they'd have answered for the PD, lulling them both into a false sense of security before he started closing the traps. They couldn't explain the fingerprints. They knew of no motive for Samantha's murder. They acknowledged the friendship between Michael and Colby. The boys had been around each other's houses and Michael had met Colby's mother, naturally, but they denied that Sarah and Samantha had any contact.
"Can you be sure of that?" Sam pressed.
Jeffrey hesitated. "No. I suppose I can't be sure," he acknowledged. "But, to my knowledge, they never met."
"So you know of no reason why your wife might have harboured any ill will toward Samantha?"
"Isn't it academic?" Andrea snapped. "My mother's dead. To suggest she had anything to do with Samantha Ford's death is absolutely bizarre!"
"Someone seems to be suggesting it," Sam responded quietly. "We're just exploring who might have a motive for doing so. Do you know of anyone who bears a grudge against either of your families? Is there anyone, perhaps, who might want to see the boys separated?"
Andrea's eyebrows settled into a deeply perplexed frown.
"Why would you ask such a question?" Jeffrey asked.
"Just examining all the possibilities, sir," Sam replied. "I understand your wife took her own life," he continued.
Dean cleared his throat rather loudly and toyed with the hair behind his ear.
Sam ignored him. "Are you able to tell me the cause of her suicide?" he persisted.
Jeffrey hesitated again and swallowed hard before replying. "My wife was a deeply troubled woman. She had suffered from bouts of acute depression for many years. It's hard to say what single factor triggered her suicide. Possibly it was a combination of many things, but the illness itself would have been foremost among them."
Dean glanced from Jeffrey to Andrea then fixed on her face as he saw distinctly the marks of pain and anger etched on her features. Bullshit, he thought. He expected Sam to leap on that so he was surprised when, instead, Sam changed tacks completely.
"Ms Kelly, I understand you're a student of Kabbalah," he said.
The frown on Andrea's face evened out and was replaced by a look of surprise and puzzlement. "That's correct."
"I wonder if you'd be able to identify this book for me." He drew out the scorched volume and placed it on the table in front of father and daughter. The pair exchanged a mystified look then Andrea reached forward and, with understandable reluctance, picked up the sooty object and leafed through its pages. Her features instantly fell into an expression of shock.
"Where did you get this?" she demanded.
"You recognize the book?"
"Why, yes it's . . ." she hesitated then assumed an attitude of academic objectivity. "It's called the Sepher Vetzirah, The Book of Creation: it's the earliest known Hebrew text of man's mystical communion with the divine. It treats on various aspects of esoteric Judaism and mysticism."
"Is there anything special or unusual about the book?"
"In what way?"
"Have they ever been known to spontaneously combust?" Dean interjected.
Andrea glanced at Dean and regarded him with a slightly supercilious sneer. "No. It's a book on mysticism, not mysticism itself."
Sam shot Dean a tight glare of admonishment and continued with his questioning. "Can you think of any way it might have found its way into your mother's coffin?" he asked.
Her attention shot back to Sam. Her eyes were wide. "Is that where you found it? How is that even possible?"
"Did anyone other than the family have access to your mother's body prior to interment?"
Andrea and her father exchanged questioning looks. "Other than the undertakers, you mean? No."
"And how well do you know them?"
Her mouth opened and closed for a moment and, again father and daughter exchanged bewildered looks. "Well, hardly at all, but I wasn't suggesting . . ." Then she appeared to reach the end of her patience. "Look, I have no idea how the book got there or why anyone should want to put it there. What is all this about?"
"As I said, Ms Kelly, we're just exploring all the possibilities," Sam stood and picked up the book from the table, replacing it inside his jacket pocket. He waited to see if Andrea might say something more, but she remained silent. "I think we have everything we need for the present," Sam concluded.
He and Dean started to make their exit and Andrea escorted them to the door but on the threshold of the living room Sam paused and turned back to the father.
"Oh, just one other thing, sir . . ." he said, as if he were prefacing a casual afterthought, "What was your relationship to Samantha Ford?"
Jeffrey blanched and Andrea's mouth tightened into a hard line. Yahtzee.
"My – my relationship? I d-don't understand . . ."
"Did you ever meet her or have any contact with her?" Sam elaborated with apparent innocence.
"Er . . no." The man tucked a stray wisp of hair behind his ear. "No, I never did."
"I see. Well, thank you very much for your time, sir . . . ma'am."
"Well, get you, Columbo."
Another allusion whizzed over Sam's head but he chose to press on regardless. "So, what do you think?" he asked Dean.
"I think our Jeff was banging Samantha."
"And Andrea knew about it, which might give her a reason to want Samantha dead."
"Except she looked genuinely shocked when you showed her the book. I don't think she put it in the coffin."
"She wasn't telling us everything she knows, though, and she's not the only one in that family who might have been upset to learn Jeffrey was having an affair."
Dean felt his insides turn cold at Sam's bald suggestion. Not like he hadn't thought it himself, but his heart shunned the idea of a young teenage boy engineering murder. But then he recalled twelve year old Colby burning to avenge his mother's death, and it wasn't like Dean couldn't understand the feeling.
At that moment Dean's cell buzzed in his pocket and he could hear Sam's tone as well. Both men snatched at their cells and checked the images from the camera Sam had set up. It turned out that the little party was breaking up and several people were leaving. Two adults remained who were taking care of Colby, but both Sam and Dean shared a sense of unease.
"I think we should get back there," Sam said. "But we should come back here and talk to Michael when we can."
"Is it worth checking out the undertaker angle?" Dean asked, knowing that, in all probability, he was clutching at straws.
Sam held Dean with a steady gaze for a moment and Dean sensed he knew what he was thinking. "That, too," he agreed.
Andrea Kelly watched as the two agents got into their car and drove away.
"They know," said her father.
She didn't respond.
"Does it make any difference, really?" he persisted. "I'm tired of lying to these people."
After a moment she replied, quietly, "and yet, you found it so easy to lie to mother."
"Andrea, can't we get past this?" His voice was sad and exhausted. "It was so many years ago."
"The lies weren't years ago. The lies never stopped." She turned to confront her father. "It was the lies that killed her!" she spat. She hurried out of the room and up the stairs. Once in her own room she allowed hot, harsh tears to fall freely for a while but eventually she staunched the flow, and then she moved toward her desk and the book shelves that lined the wall above it. The draft of her latest dissertation chapter, a discussion of golem lore, sat on the top of the desk where it had lain neglected for weeks. Her focus moved upward and a chill washed over her flesh when she found the gap where the Sepher Vetzirah should have been. Perhaps even more disturbing was the discovery that the English translation was also out of place.
Outside the house, in the deepening shadows of the bitter winter evening, a figure waited. The moonlight picked out the pale glow of a woman's arm resting against a tree. Inscribed on the back of the begrimed hand were three characters from the Hebrew alphabet; the letters Aleph, Mem, and Tau.
