XIII
"Let's go talk to Lucy, tell her what we found," Mulder said as they walked hand-in-hand back along Smuggler's Cave's mostly empty streets towards the resort. It was such a nice day that it had seemed almost criminal to drive the half-mile or so to the newspaper office. "Isn't she at the tour office today?"
They had managed to get a look at the tour guides' schedules on the day they'd taken theirs. "I think so. I really don't want to do another cave tour but let's hit the gift shop there and see if she's around."
"Sounds like a plan to me, Mrs. Fox," he said and though she was looking the other way and couldn't see his face, she knew he was grinning. The tension between them, whether it was sexual or personal, seemed to be gone for the time being, to her relief.
When they entered the tour office/gift shop they separated, unobtrusively looking for Lucy before quickly realizing that the long, narrow store was empty of other customers or workers other than the man behind the main counter who was sorting magazines. Mulder went over to the brochure rack while Scully checked the schedule, seeing that there was a tour out but it wasn't Lucy's. She was scheduled to lead a hard-hat tour when the present one returned in about half an hour, and Scully didn't look forward to hanging around the store until then but wasn't sure what else to do.
She noticed a display near the back of the store and wandered over that way. It was medium-sized round table with a leaf-patterned tablecloth scattered with lifelike, autumn-colored oak leaves and acorns which featured a sizeable stuffed coyote standing on a large piece of driftwood. Around it was a variety of single-use cameras, canteens, rain ponchos, water bottles, insect repellant, and other hiking equipment with a few hand-carved walking sticks leaning against it, price tags prominently displayed. It was very eye-catching and artistically done, unlike most of the other rather tacky displays in the store. There were two small cards on the table and Scully leaned closer to read the first one: 'Common North American Coyote (canis latrans) shot by Bill Marple July 1997/Mount by Binder's Taxidermy, Elizabethtown KY.' The second, smaller one behind the coyote read: 'Display designed by Lucy Burley, Smuggler's Cove KY.'
That was odd, she thought as she straightened up. Who got credit for designing a store display if they weren't a professional interior designer? Unless that was what she was trying to get a job doing, she thought. It was well-done enough to be professionally designed, Scully had to admit. She'd have to ask Lucy about it after they told her about her grandmother's bizarre 'curse'.
As she was heading back to where Mulder was standing the bell over the door rang and a tall woman in a long black dress and bonnet came in carrying a medium-sized cardboard box that, by the printing on its outside, had once held bags of frozen O'Brien potatoes but was now clearly much lighter. She took it to the front counter where she was greeted in a friendly manner by the clerk there, and began lifting small newspaper-wrapped bundles out of the box. Scully watched unobtrusively as she pretended to look over a rack of zodiac keychains as they unwrapped each small bundle to reveal hand-thrown and fired clay vases and pots, most about the size of a closed fist but some smaller and one or two larger. When the box appeared to be empty there were more than a dozen lined up on the counter and the two began to haggle over them.
Scully glanced around the shop and noted a mostly-empty glass shelf over a display of folded t-shirts that held a couple of similar pots and realized that the woman, obviously Amish, was a vendor who sold her homemade wares here. She glanced up as Mulder joined her, fingering an Aquarius keychain, and said low, "Lucy's coming up the street, let's wait until she leaves before talking to her." He tilted his head briefly in the direction of the front counter.
"She's got half an hour before her tour," Scully said in a similar voice. "We should have enough time. Did you see that display at the back of the store? Lucy designed it, and it's damn good."
She stayed put while Mulder went over to check it out, and his eyebrows were raised when he returned. "You're right, that's fine work," he agreed low. "I wonder, was she trying to branch out since she wasn't selling much at the farmer's market?"
Nodding, Scully turned from the keyring rack to a freestanding display of coffee mugs with supposedly witty sayings on them, though she found most of them either outright stupid or unbearably kitschy. But it was a few steps nearer to the door, and she wanted to catch Lucy as soon as she came in.
"Hey, Sally, I should get you this one," Mulder said in a normal voice loud enough for the other two to hear, holding up a coffee mug that had 'Kentucky is for Lovers' emblazoned on the side in bright red with tiny pink hearts all around it.
"I thought Virginia was for lovers," Scully countered, shaking her head. "Or does any state that wants it claim the slogan?"
Just then the bell dingled again and they both looked up to see Lucy walking into the store looking downcast and upset. But then she looked up and saw the Amish woman at the counter, who was pocketing a small roll of bills, and a smile wreathed her thin face. "Mary, did you bring new pots?" she said, apparently not noticing the couple nearby as she went over to the counter. They noted, however, that the clerk behind the counter moved away, leaving the two women there alone.
"I did, Miss Burley, and I have some of those brown ones you particularly like," the tall Amish woman smiled down at the younger one. Unlike the townspeople it seemed like the religious sect, or at least this one person belonging to it, didn't shun Lucy despite the suspected connection between she and the deaths of their members. As the two began to look over the pots Scully was just barely paying attention, mostly listening for their conversation to end so she and Mulder could intercept the young woman and tell her what they'd found in their guise of supernatural-loving newlyweds. She was certain that Mrs. MacMurray from the bar had spread word far and wide around the town and, most likely, Lucy had heard about their little hobby by now.
Just as it looked like Lucy and the Amish woman were wrapping up, the bell jangled sharply again but this time the door was thrown back against its stop, causing the upper window to shatter. Everyone in the store turned towards it but before anyone could react, the heavyset woman with disheveled hair standing in the doorway cried out, "There you are, you unlucky bitch! Was you who killed my Frank and it'll never happen again!"
The loud blast of the shotgun she held was deafening in the confines of the long thin store and its echoes were dying away by the time either of the undercover federal agents recovered from their shock and went into motion. "Mulder, call an ambulance!" Scully cried, falling to her knees beside Lucy, who lay at the base of the counter and whose chest was now a red smoking hole. "Lucy, hang on, help's coming!" She yanked a white t-shirt off of a nearby shelf as it was the closest material at hand and wadded it up against the wound, but blood continued to pour out from beneath it even as it soaked through and turned bright red.
It was then that she realized that someone was screaming and looked up to see the Amish woman standing over them, arms crossed over her narrow chest and blood splattered across the front of her dress and partly on her face. "Would you shut up and give me another t-shirt?" Scully snapped, putting pressure on the sopping shirt-bandage even though she knew it was a lost cause. A shotgun slug at that distance had probably blown up Lucy's heart the moment of impact. But when she looked down at the young woman, she was startled to see Lucy looking back at her with glazed eyes. The screaming finally lessened to where she could hear Mulder's voice calling for help on his cell and that of the girl on the floor.
"Okay… it's okay…" the young woman coughed, a freshet of bright red blood pouring from the side of her mouth. Scully saw that her teeth were red, meaning that most of what she choked up was going right back down. "Take… take care of… of Bo," she managed to utter, and then her eyes slid shut and Scully knew that she was gone.
Mulder appeared kneeling next to her, reaching for Lucy's head, probably to lift it into his lap. "Don't bother, Mulder, she's gone," Scully said dispiritedly as she lifted her red hands from the blood-soaked t-shirt on Lucy's chest and dangled them between her thighs. "She didn't have a chance."
In the distance they heard a siren warbling. "God damn it!" Mulder said forcefully. "The woman that shot her got away; I made the call and shut up that loudmouthed bitch instead of going after her."
"I know her, it was Missus Williams!" the clerk behind the counter cried in a high-pitched, excited voice. "Shot her, she did! Shot that Lucy Burley dead right in front of us!"
"Would both of you shut up!" Scully yelled, sitting back on her haunches and glaring back and forth between the babbling clerk and the Amish woman, who was braying sobs around both hands clasped over her mouth which didn't do as much to muffle the sound as she'd have wished. "Mulder, give me a shirt to wipe my hands off with."
Now that the emergency was over Scully felt her calm professionalism slipping as it always did in the wake of a crisis. This was the time she had a hard time keeping the ice wall up and it was all that she could do not to let the tears slip for the wasted life laying in a pool of blood before her. She gazed down at Lucy's peaceful face, hoping that she had, indeed, found a better place where she was not shunned and reviled for unknowingly being nothing more than her grandmother's descendant.