Author's Note: There's only a couple of chapters left, believe it or not. My original goal was simply to get Booth and Brennan through the first few days. This is day three, where the seeds of a solution are being planted even as Pelant's plot is being unraveled.

Speaking of plot, you remember when I hinted that Booth knows something that only Brennan would understand...? Sometimes you just need to know which question to ask.

~Q~

Third Day

After securing Christine into her car seat, Brennan had settled herself into her customary place beside Booth with care, glancing around with an unusual level of alertness that had not escaped his attention. The notion that she had fully caught on to their situation within such a short time filled him with amused pride, though he also worried there would be a heavy cost if Pelant thought he'd tipped her off. That unqualified 'yes' yesterday, for example.

As they pulled out of their neighborhood, Brennan fiddled with the armrest restlessly and then looked over at him with a held back thought. He always knew that look, the way her eyes narrowed on him, and her jaw dropped a little as if wanting to open but it was always her lips that stubbornly held her mouth shut. He could see the strain around her lips from holding words back, the struggle in her eyes that begged him to ask.

So he obliged her. "What's on your mind, Bones?"

Another quick, darting glance outside and then her eyes flew back to his. "Did you know marriage practices vary widely among different cultures?"

"Uh..." Like he'd ever spared even one second towards a thought like that one... But she never brought anything up without a reason so he waited to see where she was going with this line of conversation.

"Hand-fasting, for example."

"Fasting? What, like eating with only your mouth instead of your hands?" Her brows curdled up and he chuckled at his own joke. When she gave a long-suffering sigh he relented and took the bait. "What is hand-fasting?"

"In ancient Celtic lands and throughout much of Medieval Europe, a couple was considered married if they held hands and exchanged vows before witnesses. Fast is an archaic term meaning to securely attach or fix into place. The custom fell out of favor when the Catholic Church invalidated marriages that weren't made public first by a calling of the Banns and then performed by a priest."

What was she getting at...? "Yeah, okay..." He waited for the punchline.

"And in several hunter-gatherer cultures of central Africa, a man claims a wife by bringing a gift of game to a woman's family. If they accept the gift, she becomes his wife and goes to live with him."

Picturing a skin-clad hunter dragging off an unwilling female, he objected, "Wait, didn't she have to agree or something?"

"No." She shook her head, surprisingly casual about the wife's lack of consent. "The point is, marriages have often been arrangements between families or individuals with no involvement from a civil government. They've traditionally been private affairs."

Glancing sharply at her, Booth noted her studied lack of attention to the topic, her words angling around the edges and telling him something without actually saying anything. The way they so often did, she was waiting for him to read the subtext.

"So, if I go shoot a deer and take it to Max, that would make you mine?"

"Only if he accepts it," she countered smoothly. Arched a brow. Quirked her lips at the idea of Booth dragging venison to her father.

"He'd probably demand a hundred," Booth snorted.

Taking his hand into hers, Brennan traced her thumb over his knuckles. They had stopped at an intersection and now waited for the green light to go ahead. "Don't worry, Booth. I'm already yours."

He turned to look at her, then down at their clasped hands. "Good, because I doubt you'd forgive me for killing Bambi over you."

Solemnly, she squeezed his hand. "I don't want blood shed over me, even if it means I never get married. It's just an archaic ritual anyway."

"Between two people," he agreed. And turned back to the green light with a much lighter heart.

Another minute passed before he realized. "Hey, aren't you going to tell me you've never heard of Bambi?"

Brennan gave him a scandalized glare. "Of course I've heard of Bambi. It's a classic children's book by Felix Salten."

"What? There's a book?"

~Q~

When they met Sweets for lunch in the same niche as the previous day, the younger man looked troubled. He took his seat with a sheaf of papers in hand: addenda added to the notes he'd jotted during the previous night's reading.

Taking his own seat next to his partner, Booth regarded the psychologist's troubled demeanor with concern. "What's wrong?"

Instead of answering, Sweets glanced over his notes and then looked directly at Brennan. "If you had to guess, do you think Pelant is more like Jared, or Max?"

"Me?" Startled at the question, Brennan bit her lip, uncomfortable with the idea of attempting any kind of psychological analysis. "I'm ... I don't do motive or ... I don't know."

"Who was Max in your story?"

"Why are you asking," Brennan deflected, uneasy as the reason for his questions sank in and made her abdominal contents churn again.

"Because the last chapter is missing. Did you reveal who the Max character really was?"

"Yes." She glanced away and clenched her fidgeting hands and then asked her own question. "How long has he been watching me?"

"I don't know for certain, but probably since mid 2011."

"Almost two years," Booth barked, growing even more uneasy.

"Possibly. Definitely since January 2012."

That first case that had drawn them all in and then implicated the FBI as a source of corruptions. Booth growled and sank back again, knowing Sweets probably was right about how long they'd been in Pelant's sights.

Nodding, Brennan also resigned herself to that reality and then, slowly, answered the question he'd asked. "In my story, Max was the mastermind. He sent Arastoo to make offers on the club, he sent Worstenbach, and he sent Jared."

"Can you remember anything else about that last chapter?"

"Max Keenan escaped consequences as I recall. I wrote it four years ago, however, and I haven't read it since." And while she possessed a superlative facility for recollection, this particular book she had deliberately pushed to the back corners of her mind.

"But two years ago, it may have still been intact," Sweets suggested. "I believe Pelant may have given himself a role in your story. If he sees himself as Max, then he's in control and that makes him even more dangerous. If he sees himself as Jared, then he is an antihero who tried to save you from a larger danger than himself. He would have given you clues to help you clear your name, just like the Jared character did."

Booth stirred and asked quietly, "How would we determine that?"

Sweets engaged Brennan, essentially asking her to think. "He would have signaled you in a meaningful way, giving clues to make you think of this book. Has he ever done that?"

The change in expression washed over her immediately. "Yes. He ... he said motherhood made me less intelligent."

"He gave you that Marigold flower," Booth added, though he didn't remember flowers being in the book.

Sweets scribbled more notes, looked up. "That's good. Did you ever feel that he left something behind for you to find?"

Other than the evidence from his various murders...? Brennan shook her head to indicate she'd never knowingly received a message.

Booth, on the other hand, looked positively stunned. "He was in our house. He left something in our house."

"What?!" She spun to look at him. "When?"

"The day you left, the day Christine was baptized."

Horrified, she repeated, "He was in our house? Why didn't you tell me that?"

"It didn't come up," Booth defended, but he was halted before he could finish.

"What did he do there," Sweets interrupted sharply, throwing a silencing hand Booth's way.

"It's in the case file," Booth answered angrily. "Flynn didn't follow up."

"What did he do?" Sweets repeated urgently.

"He was just trying to scare us," Brennan suggested uneasily, but the thought of Pelant being in her home made her skin flicker as if insects had begun crawling over it. She barely resisted surging urges to begin scratching and brushing at herself.

"No, he was leaving you a message, Doctor Brennan, only you weren't there to receive it." Turning back to Booth, shuffling through the files he had on hand, Sweets asked again. "Tell us exactly what he did." By now he had the file out and had flipped it open to see if he could find the narrative notes from that incident.

Booth rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling, fishing details out of his memory. "Okay, he walked through a lot of rooms, he went into Christine's room and looked in the crib. He took a photo of it."

"He did that at Angela's house, too," Brennan recalled uneasily, wondering why Pelant was targeting their innocent babies. It had to be an intimidation tactic, showing them what damage he could do on a whim. "He left flower petals around Michael Vincent in his crib. That's about the same time that he said motherhood made me less intelligent."

"Okay, good." More scribbled notes. "What else?"

Another stunned expression was followed immediately by Booth leveling a curse. "The clock! Damn, that's where I saw it!"

Two puzzled faces waited for him to explain. He shook his head, wondering what this meant. "When I got home, Bones, the way I knew something was wrong was your alarm clock was malfunctioning. It was flashing the time 4:47. So I went to check the security camera and that's how I spotted him. He'd switched your clock for one that said nothing but 4:47."

"Oohhh..." That might have been enough, Brennan realized with shock. Being framed, the baby, and the time: she might have thought of the book under those circumstances.

"Where is that clock," Sweets demanded. "He left something in that clock for her to find."

"It's in evidence at the FBI."

~Q~

The evidence room at the Hoover was a large storage bunker in the basement. The three retrieved the clock (unplugged, sniffed for explosives, bagged, labeled and languishing ever since) and set it down on a table while Booth filled out a form requesting a transfer of evidence to the Jeffersonian. "I want Angela to take a look at it first," he explained.

Brennan agreed that was a wise course of action. Sweets poked through the other items contained in the box with the clock, pulling up a Polaroid snapshot of Christine's cradle. "Where was this recovered?"

"In the crib." Booth snatched it out of Sweets's hand but then didn't know what to do with it.

"Doctor Brennan, is there anything in that photo that means something to you?"

Taking the photo cautiously, she examined it closely and when she saw it, she gasped. "A wolf."

"What? Where!"

Booth took the photo back and peered at it where Brennan pointed. "There. That's not Christine's plush toy."

"It wasn't there when I got home, Bones. Only this photo was."

"Why a wolf?" she wondered.

Sweets cleared his throat. "A wolf in sheep's clothing after your baby, perhaps. Ethan Sawyer seemed to be a threat to her. And Ethan Sawyer was killed by wolves."

"We gotta find out what's in that damn clock." Booth turned back to the transfer form.

~Q~

Author's Note: Now why did Pelant go to all the trouble of breaking into Booth and Brennan's house ... staring up at the security camera from Christine's room ... and what did he do to their clock? Was it all simply scare tactics, or did those actions mean something only Brennan would understand...?