After Davis' question about her, Scully quietly retreated to the
room's tiny bathroom. She stood at the old-fashioned sink,
unwinding the gauze around her hands while the two men talked in
the doorway. She felt very fragile, like a pane of glass. If
someone pushed her she felt she might fall to the floor and
shatter.
Scully looked at her reflection in the mirror with grim dismay.
Her skin was very pale and dark circles stood out underneath her
Eyes. The ashy contrast made her eyes seem too bright, as if she
had a high fever. She remembered what Dr. Neumann in the ER had
said about getting a CT scan done. Gingerly, she pressed her
fingertips against the flesh around her eyes and nose, the area
that had once concealed the tumorous mass. Her examination
caused her no pain or bleeding. If the cancer had returned it
might have gone somewhere else, perhaps deeper into her brain.
The priest at Our Lady of Refuge had offered her the Sacraments
of Communion and Anointing of the Sick early that morning, and
her refusal of both seemed very strange even to herself. If she
was going to refuse the Sacraments, why had she gone to the
church in the first place?
She'd been seeking comfort, safety . . . no, it was more than
that. She'd been seeking a connection to something beyond the
suffocating limits of everyday experience -- something like the
power she had touched out in the woods. Yet the Sacraments were
so bound up with life's prosaic milestones that she feared they
would pull her back into the circle of ordinariness, away from
the numinous edge she was contemplating.
When she shut her eyes she could still see the woods by the
graveyard -- moonlight sparkling on new-fallen snow, the pale
little figures huddled in a spreading dark stain. "Stay," the
girl with the knife had said. Scully still felt the pull of her
call. The vision's icy desolation spoke to her in a language
she'd never heard outside her own dreams. The child's loneliness
was Scully's own. It reminded her of the words of the psalm:
like "deep calling to deep."
When Scully lost her daughter and any future chance of
motherhood, it was like having half of herself cut away. The
tiny children in the woods had lost their mother. They needed
her. The three of them fit together, like fingers into a glove.
Despite all reason, Scully ached to feel those small, chilled
bodies nestled against her own, filling the terrible space Emily
left.
She heard Mulder come back into the room, reciting a line from
"Mission: Impossible" to himself: "Your mission, Mr. Phelps,
should you choose to accept it . . ."
"What was that about?" Scully asked. Somewhat to her surprise,
she sounded almost like her usual self.
"Detective Davis just asked me to help interrogate John McBer,"
Mulder said. "Getting a confession out of him is going to be
like selling Perrier to a drowning man." He walked into the
bathroom and Scully moved over to give him space at the sink.
"How are your hands?" he asked.
"They're fine," she said.
He glanced down at her bruised and stitched skin and said, "In
that case 'fine' doesn't look too good." He unzipped the small
traveling case resting on the back of the sink and pulled out his
electric razor.
There was something bizarre about the two of them sharing a sink
while calmly discussing murder and mayhem. Just another morning
in the Twilight Zone for Mulder and Mrs. Spooky. "I'll be all
right," she insisted.
"If you're not, will you call me? It doesn't matter if I'm still
in with McBer. Davis says they can get along without me anyway,"
Mulder said.
"I'll call you," Scully said.
He stopped unwinding the razor's cord and looked down at her.
"Promise?" he asked.
She managed the three-fingered Girl Scouts' salute with her
unbandaged right hand. "Scout's honor," she said.
Mulder reached out and gently folded her first and fourth fingers
down so she was flipping him off. "That's what you're really
trying to tell me, isn't it?"
Scully smiled despite herself, and for the first time she felt
truly present in the room with him. "I'm not the one who said
it," she said. "I think you should talk less and shave more.
You've got a lot of Perrier to unload."
He seemed to relax at the change in her manner. "So I'll throw
in one of those little drink umbrellas," he said. She slipped by
him as he hunted for an electrical outlet hidden in the dizzying
Victorian pattern of the wallpaper.
Scully sat down in the little round-backed chair by the window
and waited until Mulder's razor started buzzing. Once he was
occupied, she used her cell phone to call Martha's Vineyard
Hospital and ask if any injured children had been admitted late
in the night. None had. She wasn't all that surprised; she'd
already begun to suspect that the bloody little girl with the
gray eyes had been beyond human help for a long, long time.
Scully hit the "end" button and sat with her hands in her lap,
folded around the black rectangle of the phone. The knuckles of
her right hand were swollen and discolored, with a line of black
stitches like barbed wire marching across them. She lifted her
left hand and looked at the cuts across the palm. They were
nearly identical to the defense wounds found on Kristie Herron's
body.
She felt she understood that troubled young woman, who in all
likelihood had given birth to a stillborn child. Scully wondered
if Kristie had also felt called toward the darkness beyond the
graveyard. Had she known the risks and gone anyway, hoping what
dwelled out there would fill the hollow space inside her?
Mulder's razor switched off, and Scully quickly replaced her
phone on a trunk at the end of the bed, among her bloodied
clothes. There was no real reason to keep her activities secret.
Why should it bother Mulder if she called the hospital?
The truth was she wanted to avoid his questions. She feared he
would sense her thoughts and be horrified. Then he'd hover
around her like a mother hen and keep her from -- Scully shied
away from thinking, //returning to the bloodied spot among the
crime scene markers.// She told herself Mulder's well-meaning
attention would simply get in her way. She had a personal stake
in this investigation now, too. There were people she wanted to
interview, and Irv Stuckey was high on the list.
She made herself very busy putting on the less-soiled articles of
her clothing as Mulder came out of the bathroom. "Are there any
drug stores open on Sunday around here? I want to get the script
for antibiotics filled as soon as possible. Having my hands get
infected is the last thing I need," she said.
He looked a little taken aback by her sudden hurry to leave.
"Probably not around Chilmark. You could try down-island,
Edgartown or Oak Bluffs," Mulder said.
"All right, I'll do that. Are you riding with Detective Davis, or
do you need the car?" she asked.
"I guess I don't need it," Mulder said. He picked up his keys
from the little oval nightstand and offered them to her.
"Thanks," she said. She stood on her toes and kissed him gently.
He said nothing, but she felt his eyes on her as she gathered her
things together and headed out the door.
"See you," he called.
*****
Mulder felt uneasy as he watched his partner go. Something was
bothering her and she didn't want to talk about it, that much was
plain. He repressed his urge to follow and badger her into
talking to him. //If she wants privacy that's her prerogative.
She doesn't have to tell you everything,// he thought. The last
thing either of them needed was for him to turn possessive out of
fear of losing her.
He gathered the few things he would need for the coming police
interview with McBer: the Narcotics Anonymous book Scully had
found in Kristie's bedroom; his reading glasses; his cell phone.
As he locked up the room and walked down the hall to meet
Detective Davis, he tried to keep his mind focused on the task
ahead. Scully was better at staying out of trouble than he was.
She said she was fine, and he'd have to take her at her word.
Davis was standing at the foot of the stairs. "I talked to
Suffolk County. Most of the information you want is in Concord,"
he said, naming the state prison just outside Boston. "McBer was
there between '93 and '95 for cocaine possession. They had him
on intent to deliver too, but the court reversed the conviction
on appeal. The arrest wasn't as clean as it should've been."
Mulder walked beside the detective as they crossed the front
room. "This time it has to be done right," Davis continued.
"They call that lawyer of McBer's 'Jaws,' and it's not just
because he's a legal shark. The guy mouths off to the media a
lot and gets them circling around an investigation. He's gotten
a couple of acquittals by essentially putting the arresting law
enforcement agency on trial. I think it's only fair to warn
you."
Oh, great. Skinner was going to love this. Mulder stopped at
the front door and said, "Being the scapegoat's nothing new for
me, but I think it's fair that *you* know I'm not officially
working this case. I'm just here with my partner."
"Actually, you are working," Davis said. "Your A.D.'s been
enthusiastic about having you guys involved with this
investigation. He left us an off-hours contact number Friday
afternoon, and I got your official participation approved five
minutes ago."
"Skinner did what?" Mulder asked. Skinner hated bad PR, and he
was willing to officially assign Mulder to a job like this?
There was no question that Scully's misgivings were confirmed --
something big was about to go down in D.C.
Davis' look of satisfaction was unmistakable. Mulder figured he
was happy to have the FBI between him and the first volley of
crap that the media was likely to throw. "A.D. Skinner said he
has the utmost confidence in you. Back in Boston you yourself
said we were going to want your help. You getting cold feet?"
the detective asked.
Open mouth, insert foot. "No," Mulder said. "Let's get going."
He followed Davis out to the car, wishing he'd gotten more than
five hours of sleep the night before. //You used to love doing
this kind of thing under pressure,// he told himself. He'd
seldom experienced anything like the adrenaline high he got in
the BSU, doing work other people could "appreciate," as Skinner
put it. //Then again, there was the insomnia, the chain smoking,
the broken relationships . . .//
Once Davis pulled out of the gravel driveway and turned east
toward Edgartown, Mulder pulled his cell phone from his jacket
pocket and set Kristie's NA book on his lap. The book was still
wrapped in a battered dustjacket taken from a French/English
dictionary.
Davis glanced down at it. "What is that?" he asked.
"My partner and I found it at the Herrons' house last night,"
Mulder said. He opened the cover and revealed the handwritten
names and phone numbers that dotted the blank first page. "Have
you spoken to Brenda, Kim, Amber, Jane, Lisa, Kevin--"
Davis glared at him and said, "No. You might have let us know
you'd found that."
"It was a busy night," Mulder said. "I'm putting my first bet on
Brenda," he said, pointing to the circled name with the star next
to it. There were three numbers below, labeled "H," "W," and
"cell." He dialed the "H" number with his thumb.
He listened while the phone rang and rang. "Come on, Brenda," he
said. Finally there was a click and the answering machine picked
up. Mulder hung up and dialed her mobile phone, fidgeting with
the torn dustjacket while the phone rang. "This reminds me of
the night before Junior Prom," he said, which got no noticeable
reaction from Davis. Scully would have thought it was funny.
At last a woman answered. "Hello?" She said.
"Hi -- is this Brenda?"
A static-filled pause followed. "Who is this?" the woman asked.
Mulder got the impression that if he gave the wrong answer she'd
hang up and call the cops. He supposed a lot of ex-addicts had
people they'd rather not take phone calls from.
"I'm Special Agent Fox Mulder with the FBI. I'm helping
investigate Kristie' Herron's death and I wanted to ask you a few
questions," he said.
"This is a federal case?" For some reason she sounded pleased.
"Then you nailed McBer."
"What makes you say that?" Mulder thought he'd managed to keep
the excitement out of his voice. He wished to God he was
recording this phone call.
"You don't *know?* His connections to the 'Columbian export
business,'" Brenda said. She had a deep, husky voice, like that
of a woman who'd long been a heavy smoker. "I hoped you'd
caught whichever one of them did it."
"So you think McBer ordered a hit," Mulder said. Davis was
trying to keep one eye on the road and one eye on him. Mulder
wondered what the detective would have paid for a speaker phone
just then.
"She lived out here all her life. Don't expect me to believe she
walked off that cliff by accident," Brenda said.
"Did she say anything that made you think she was afraid?" Mulder
asked.
"Yeah, she did. When she called me Tuesday night," Brenda said.
"What time?"
"6:30 maybe -- no, 7, because it was already getting dark. It was
weird because just a couple days before she told me she wasn't
afraid of him anymore, that she was looking forward to putting
him away. Then all of a sudden she tells me she's not
testifying; she's backing out; she's calling the D.A. to tell him
the deal's off. I told her, 'Girl, this is your *life.* The D.A.
can reinstate those charges against you as fast as he dropped
'em,' and she said she'd rather go to prison than get shot in an
alley. I was sure McBer had gotten to her somehow. I asked her,
'Who called you, Kristie? Who's threatening you?' But she kept
saying, 'Nobody, nobody, nobody.' She never would tell me what
scared her so bad, but I got her to put off calling the D.A. I
wish I hadn't, now."
"You couldn't have known what would happen," Mulder said.
"No." Brenda's brash voice had grown quiet. "You'll get him,
won't you? He's not going to get away with what he did?"
"We're going to do everything we can," Mulder said. "Is there
anything else you can remember, something somebody said, even if
it didn't seem important at the time?"
"I've been trying to think, but I can't come up with anything
that would prove he did it. It's just a strong gut feeling.
Believe me, if I could hand him over to you on a silver platter
I would," she said.
Mulder thanked her and gave her instructions on how to contact
him in case she thought of anything else. He pulled a notepad
from his coat pocket and scratched a few notations into it.
Davis seemed to be having trouble focusing on the road. "Well,
what did you get?" he asked.
"Enough to make me really interested in what McBer was doing last
Tuesday," Mulder said, not bothering to look up from the paper.
He'd often claimed his inner child was a little shit, and he was
enjoying the detective's fidgeting immensely.
There was only one ferry company that made runs to Martha's
Vineyard during the off-season, and Mulder dialed its number from
memory. It didn't take long for the receptionist to find a deck
hand who remembered a man in a wheelchair driving a specially
modified Ford Prospector van. The van required a double-wide
parking space so the chair lift could operate, an accommodation
that might have been difficult on a more crowded run. The van
and its driver were so unusual that the ferry worker could give
the exact time and date he'd seen them: Tuesday, April 11, at the
10:45 a.m. Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven crossing.
Mulder shared this information with Davis, who made a few calls
of his own to determine Kristie's schedule on the 11th. Before
they reached Edgartown they had a critical window of time:
between 6:10, when Kristie clocked out at her job at a grocery
store in Aquinnah, and just before 7 p.m. when she arrived home.
The drive itself should not have taken more than 15 minutes.
By the time they pulled into the lot behind the Dukes County
House of Correction, Davis had stopped giving Mulder those dry,
knowing looks. Clearly, Mulder had come a long way from the
nutcase in the autopsy bay in the detective's estimation. As
they stepped out of the car into the cutting spring wind, Davis
asked, "What did you leave the BSU to do, again?"
"I work on the X-Files Unit," Mulder said, shrugging his coat
more squarely onto his shoulders. "I chase aliens. I thought
they'd told you that."
"Aliens," Davis said. He didn't seem sure whether Mulder was
serious or not.
"Aliens, mutants . . . we get a pretty good variety of cases,
really," Mulder said, leading the way toward the small, unmarked
door in the back of the building. The Dukes County Jail did not
look like a lock-up. One hundred and twenty-five years old, it
had been built to resemble a whaling captain's house, complete
with a fanlight over the door and imposing white columns at the
corners of the front porch.
Mulder hit the buzzer that would alert the jail staff that they
were waiting. He turned to Davis, who stood with his hands
tucked into his armpits. The bright sunshine gave hardly any
warmth at all. "I had a case similar to this once," Mulder said.
"A quadruple amputee who was able to master the art of astral
projection decided to settle some old scores by committing
several murders. I admit I was worried about how to get charges
filed, but one of his victims solved the problem by getting up
out of his hospital bed and shooting the guy. It's sort of a
story about overcoming obstacles."
To his credit, Detective Davis simply would not be shocked. He
squinted up at Mulder and said, "I suppose you're going to tell
me McBer can do this too?"
"Of course he can't," Mulder said, "It's obvious the cuts on
Kristie's body were made by somebody with limited strength and
mobility. You think that in his revenge fantasies McBer would
give himself the same physical disabilities he has in life? Come
on. That's why I classify paranormal phenomena by motivation
whenever possible. It saves so much time that might be wasted in
empty conjecture."
Whatever Davis' reply would have been, it was forestalled when
the door opened and a brown-shirted corrections officer leaned
out. "Agent Mulder and Detective Davis?" the officer said.
Mulder and Davis produced their badges. "Follow me," the c.o.
said.
The room beyond was a kind of wire-mesh cage with a bank of metal
drawers along one wall for officers to lock their weapons in. As
they disarmed, Davis glanced up at Mulder and muttered something
about the Justice Department that ended with, "Only under
Clinton."
The c.o. produced a jangling collection of keys and opened the
door to the cage, then the ordinary wooden door that led to the
jail's cramped office space. Among the too-numerous desks stood
large group of officers, some wearing the browns of the Sheriff's
Department and some in the blues of the State Police. Joe Luce
caught his eye and nodded at him. Joe was in civilian clothes,
jeans and a sweatshirt printed with the logo of a local marina.
He looked about as tired as Mulder felt.
"Mr. Mulder," a woman said. Mulder looked over and saw Liz
Hawley, late of the West Tisbury PD, wearing the star-shaped
badge of the Dukes County sheriff. Hawley had been one of the
people most interested in charging Mulder with the murder of his
father. She was a heavy woman and the close-fitting shirt and
slacks of the Sheriff's uniform didn't suit her, but there was
clearly muscle under her bulk. Mulder wouldn't have wanted to
tangle with her in a dark alley. She was giving him a cold stare
right out of "High Noon."
"Sheriff Hawley," Mulder said.
"Chief Luce here tells us that your background at the FBI may
help us pull a couple of investigations out of the fire. If you
have any ideas, we'd sure like to hear them," she said.
//And then one of the boys'll git us a rope . . .// "Give me half
an hour with McBer's file. I'll be able to give you
recommendations after that," Mulder said.
Hawley said, "I hope so."
Mulder pretended not to notice the chilly looks the local
officers gave him while a c.o. went to pull McBer's information
off the fax machine. There were people who could see past the
death of Mulder's father, but no Island cop was going to forget
John Lee Roche or what had almost happened to an eight-year-old
mainland girl. Under the circumstances, Mulder accepted their
hostility as his due.
The returning corrections officer handed him a stack of papers
about the thickness of a small phone book. Mulder appropriated a
desk for himself and settled his reading glasses on his nose. As
he read through the blurry third-generation copies, he began to
piece together the strategy he would use with their murder
suspect.
Soon his apprehensions began to fade. The case was not
impossible, and as he would have told anyone who asked, he was
very good at what he did.
*****
Scully did not get out of Nye House as quickly as she wanted to,
mostly because there was nowhere to go. Her phone inquiries
revealed that every store east of Vineyard Haven was shut down
between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning. She had to ask
Leigh for some gauze for her hands, which were throbbing despite
the Tylenol-3 tablets the ER doctor had discharged her with. The
little proprietress not only produced a first-aid kit but would
not hear of her leaving without clean clothing. Most of the
clothes Scully had with her were spattered with dried blood from
the night before. Unfortunately, Leigh was about Scully's height
but much heavier, while her daughter Tammy was considerably
taller. Scully stood quietly by while Leigh rummaged in Tammy's
closet, coming up with dusty clothes the young woman hadn't worn
since high school.
Leigh was more than happy holding up both ends of the
conversation as she reminisced about her youth and Mulder's
childhood. "He was a great favorite of my mother's. She used to
have him recite "Annabelle Lee" for her. He could memorize
practically anything if he read it once or twice."
"Not Poe's "Annabelle Lee?" Scully asked, holding up a shapeless
white sweater.
"Oh, yes. I remember one evening we were out with our guests in
the garden, watching the fireflies come out. Suddenly I heard my
mother say, 'Aha!' and I turned to see her pull Fox from a clump
of her raspberry bushes, still sucking juice off his fingers. He
was about eight or nine years old, just a skinny little fellow in
shorts with scratches on his knees. Mother pretended to be very
cross and explained that this was little Fox Mulder from up the
road and that he'd been into her raspberries again. She said,
'Fox, I won't scold you on one condition -- you must recite
"Annabelle Lee" for everyone.' We thought she was joking and
everybody laughed. Then he actually began reciting it. He got
such a smile on his face when he saw how amazed we were."
Leigh shook out a dusty pair of stretch pants and said, "It *was*
funny, hearing a fidgety little boy with two of his teeth missing
say things like, 'this maiden she lived with no other thought,
than to love and be loved by me.' I'm sure he had no idea what
half of it meant. 'The sepulcher there by the sea' indeed! He
was simply glad for all the attention and that he wasn't in
trouble."
Mulder had not retained that innocence for long, and Scully felt
a pang of tenderness for him that was almost grief. "He never
told me that story," she said. "He doesn't talk about his
childhood much at all."
"He may prefer not to think about it," Leigh said. "For a while
he was a terribly, terribly unhappy boy. He did odd jobs for my
parents when he came to stay with his father. He'd had some kind
of falling out with the children he used to play with, and there
really wasn't much for him to do except get into trouble -- and
he was very good at doing that. Not that it was all his fault.
There probably wasn't anywhere on the Island he could go without
meeting with the kind of attention he didn't want.
"Once I found him in reading a comic book in the loft of the
utility shed. The picture on the cover was horrible -- bloody,
screaming people running away from some kind of spaceship
shooting fire. The way he was hiding with it made me think he
wasn't supposed to have it, but he didn't seem to be enjoying it
at all. How can I describe the look on his face? Like a man
looking through the newspaper for an obituary he doesn't want to
see. He seemed truly frightened, which was odd because he was a
great big boy and here it was broad daylight. I didn't have the
heart to tease him about it. All I asked was, 'How can you sleep
at night after reading things like that?' He looked up at me and
said, 'I can't.' I believed him. His face was so pale and he had
dark circles under his eyes. Had it been any other boy I'd have
thought he was into drugs, but somehow not Fox. He was quite
rational, quite lucid . . . just so very frightened when there
ought to have been nothing to fear. It was a little disturbing,
really." Leigh shook her head. Her thick glasses magnified her
eyes so that they looked like a sorrowful bug's. "I can't say I
was pleased to hear that he'd gone off to England to study the
criminally insane. I hoped he'd grow out of this . . . morbid
phase. But he never has, has he?"
"Not exactly," Scully admitted.
"I know it can't all be my mother's fault, but I don't expect all
that Poe at such a young age could have been good for him," Leigh
said.
"I've never heard him complain about it. Besides, Mulder finds
what he does very rewarding. Well, he usually does," Scully
said. There had been notable exceptions, the Siberian gulag and
so on, not that she was going to mention such things. Even still,
Leigh did not seem overly reassured.
In the end Scully selected one of the least dusty-looking
outfits, a pair of black stretch pants and an oversized white
button-down that would have been the height of fashion in about
1988. She thanked Leigh profusely for her help but insisted she
had to do errands before the pain in her hands and bruised ribs
became too much for her. Leigh let her go somewhat reluctantly.
It seemed the detectives and technicians who made up the rest of
Nye House's current clientele weren't any fun to talk to.
As Scully walked out to the car in the icy sunlight, she wondered
if Leigh had tried to tell stories about Mulder's childhood to
the other officers, too. For his sake, she hoped not.
*****
room's tiny bathroom. She stood at the old-fashioned sink,
unwinding the gauze around her hands while the two men talked in
the doorway. She felt very fragile, like a pane of glass. If
someone pushed her she felt she might fall to the floor and
shatter.
Scully looked at her reflection in the mirror with grim dismay.
Her skin was very pale and dark circles stood out underneath her
Eyes. The ashy contrast made her eyes seem too bright, as if she
had a high fever. She remembered what Dr. Neumann in the ER had
said about getting a CT scan done. Gingerly, she pressed her
fingertips against the flesh around her eyes and nose, the area
that had once concealed the tumorous mass. Her examination
caused her no pain or bleeding. If the cancer had returned it
might have gone somewhere else, perhaps deeper into her brain.
The priest at Our Lady of Refuge had offered her the Sacraments
of Communion and Anointing of the Sick early that morning, and
her refusal of both seemed very strange even to herself. If she
was going to refuse the Sacraments, why had she gone to the
church in the first place?
She'd been seeking comfort, safety . . . no, it was more than
that. She'd been seeking a connection to something beyond the
suffocating limits of everyday experience -- something like the
power she had touched out in the woods. Yet the Sacraments were
so bound up with life's prosaic milestones that she feared they
would pull her back into the circle of ordinariness, away from
the numinous edge she was contemplating.
When she shut her eyes she could still see the woods by the
graveyard -- moonlight sparkling on new-fallen snow, the pale
little figures huddled in a spreading dark stain. "Stay," the
girl with the knife had said. Scully still felt the pull of her
call. The vision's icy desolation spoke to her in a language
she'd never heard outside her own dreams. The child's loneliness
was Scully's own. It reminded her of the words of the psalm:
like "deep calling to deep."
When Scully lost her daughter and any future chance of
motherhood, it was like having half of herself cut away. The
tiny children in the woods had lost their mother. They needed
her. The three of them fit together, like fingers into a glove.
Despite all reason, Scully ached to feel those small, chilled
bodies nestled against her own, filling the terrible space Emily
left.
She heard Mulder come back into the room, reciting a line from
"Mission: Impossible" to himself: "Your mission, Mr. Phelps,
should you choose to accept it . . ."
"What was that about?" Scully asked. Somewhat to her surprise,
she sounded almost like her usual self.
"Detective Davis just asked me to help interrogate John McBer,"
Mulder said. "Getting a confession out of him is going to be
like selling Perrier to a drowning man." He walked into the
bathroom and Scully moved over to give him space at the sink.
"How are your hands?" he asked.
"They're fine," she said.
He glanced down at her bruised and stitched skin and said, "In
that case 'fine' doesn't look too good." He unzipped the small
traveling case resting on the back of the sink and pulled out his
electric razor.
There was something bizarre about the two of them sharing a sink
while calmly discussing murder and mayhem. Just another morning
in the Twilight Zone for Mulder and Mrs. Spooky. "I'll be all
right," she insisted.
"If you're not, will you call me? It doesn't matter if I'm still
in with McBer. Davis says they can get along without me anyway,"
Mulder said.
"I'll call you," Scully said.
He stopped unwinding the razor's cord and looked down at her.
"Promise?" he asked.
She managed the three-fingered Girl Scouts' salute with her
unbandaged right hand. "Scout's honor," she said.
Mulder reached out and gently folded her first and fourth fingers
down so she was flipping him off. "That's what you're really
trying to tell me, isn't it?"
Scully smiled despite herself, and for the first time she felt
truly present in the room with him. "I'm not the one who said
it," she said. "I think you should talk less and shave more.
You've got a lot of Perrier to unload."
He seemed to relax at the change in her manner. "So I'll throw
in one of those little drink umbrellas," he said. She slipped by
him as he hunted for an electrical outlet hidden in the dizzying
Victorian pattern of the wallpaper.
Scully sat down in the little round-backed chair by the window
and waited until Mulder's razor started buzzing. Once he was
occupied, she used her cell phone to call Martha's Vineyard
Hospital and ask if any injured children had been admitted late
in the night. None had. She wasn't all that surprised; she'd
already begun to suspect that the bloody little girl with the
gray eyes had been beyond human help for a long, long time.
Scully hit the "end" button and sat with her hands in her lap,
folded around the black rectangle of the phone. The knuckles of
her right hand were swollen and discolored, with a line of black
stitches like barbed wire marching across them. She lifted her
left hand and looked at the cuts across the palm. They were
nearly identical to the defense wounds found on Kristie Herron's
body.
She felt she understood that troubled young woman, who in all
likelihood had given birth to a stillborn child. Scully wondered
if Kristie had also felt called toward the darkness beyond the
graveyard. Had she known the risks and gone anyway, hoping what
dwelled out there would fill the hollow space inside her?
Mulder's razor switched off, and Scully quickly replaced her
phone on a trunk at the end of the bed, among her bloodied
clothes. There was no real reason to keep her activities secret.
Why should it bother Mulder if she called the hospital?
The truth was she wanted to avoid his questions. She feared he
would sense her thoughts and be horrified. Then he'd hover
around her like a mother hen and keep her from -- Scully shied
away from thinking, //returning to the bloodied spot among the
crime scene markers.// She told herself Mulder's well-meaning
attention would simply get in her way. She had a personal stake
in this investigation now, too. There were people she wanted to
interview, and Irv Stuckey was high on the list.
She made herself very busy putting on the less-soiled articles of
her clothing as Mulder came out of the bathroom. "Are there any
drug stores open on Sunday around here? I want to get the script
for antibiotics filled as soon as possible. Having my hands get
infected is the last thing I need," she said.
He looked a little taken aback by her sudden hurry to leave.
"Probably not around Chilmark. You could try down-island,
Edgartown or Oak Bluffs," Mulder said.
"All right, I'll do that. Are you riding with Detective Davis, or
do you need the car?" she asked.
"I guess I don't need it," Mulder said. He picked up his keys
from the little oval nightstand and offered them to her.
"Thanks," she said. She stood on her toes and kissed him gently.
He said nothing, but she felt his eyes on her as she gathered her
things together and headed out the door.
"See you," he called.
*****
Mulder felt uneasy as he watched his partner go. Something was
bothering her and she didn't want to talk about it, that much was
plain. He repressed his urge to follow and badger her into
talking to him. //If she wants privacy that's her prerogative.
She doesn't have to tell you everything,// he thought. The last
thing either of them needed was for him to turn possessive out of
fear of losing her.
He gathered the few things he would need for the coming police
interview with McBer: the Narcotics Anonymous book Scully had
found in Kristie's bedroom; his reading glasses; his cell phone.
As he locked up the room and walked down the hall to meet
Detective Davis, he tried to keep his mind focused on the task
ahead. Scully was better at staying out of trouble than he was.
She said she was fine, and he'd have to take her at her word.
Davis was standing at the foot of the stairs. "I talked to
Suffolk County. Most of the information you want is in Concord,"
he said, naming the state prison just outside Boston. "McBer was
there between '93 and '95 for cocaine possession. They had him
on intent to deliver too, but the court reversed the conviction
on appeal. The arrest wasn't as clean as it should've been."
Mulder walked beside the detective as they crossed the front
room. "This time it has to be done right," Davis continued.
"They call that lawyer of McBer's 'Jaws,' and it's not just
because he's a legal shark. The guy mouths off to the media a
lot and gets them circling around an investigation. He's gotten
a couple of acquittals by essentially putting the arresting law
enforcement agency on trial. I think it's only fair to warn
you."
Oh, great. Skinner was going to love this. Mulder stopped at
the front door and said, "Being the scapegoat's nothing new for
me, but I think it's fair that *you* know I'm not officially
working this case. I'm just here with my partner."
"Actually, you are working," Davis said. "Your A.D.'s been
enthusiastic about having you guys involved with this
investigation. He left us an off-hours contact number Friday
afternoon, and I got your official participation approved five
minutes ago."
"Skinner did what?" Mulder asked. Skinner hated bad PR, and he
was willing to officially assign Mulder to a job like this?
There was no question that Scully's misgivings were confirmed --
something big was about to go down in D.C.
Davis' look of satisfaction was unmistakable. Mulder figured he
was happy to have the FBI between him and the first volley of
crap that the media was likely to throw. "A.D. Skinner said he
has the utmost confidence in you. Back in Boston you yourself
said we were going to want your help. You getting cold feet?"
the detective asked.
Open mouth, insert foot. "No," Mulder said. "Let's get going."
He followed Davis out to the car, wishing he'd gotten more than
five hours of sleep the night before. //You used to love doing
this kind of thing under pressure,// he told himself. He'd
seldom experienced anything like the adrenaline high he got in
the BSU, doing work other people could "appreciate," as Skinner
put it. //Then again, there was the insomnia, the chain smoking,
the broken relationships . . .//
Once Davis pulled out of the gravel driveway and turned east
toward Edgartown, Mulder pulled his cell phone from his jacket
pocket and set Kristie's NA book on his lap. The book was still
wrapped in a battered dustjacket taken from a French/English
dictionary.
Davis glanced down at it. "What is that?" he asked.
"My partner and I found it at the Herrons' house last night,"
Mulder said. He opened the cover and revealed the handwritten
names and phone numbers that dotted the blank first page. "Have
you spoken to Brenda, Kim, Amber, Jane, Lisa, Kevin--"
Davis glared at him and said, "No. You might have let us know
you'd found that."
"It was a busy night," Mulder said. "I'm putting my first bet on
Brenda," he said, pointing to the circled name with the star next
to it. There were three numbers below, labeled "H," "W," and
"cell." He dialed the "H" number with his thumb.
He listened while the phone rang and rang. "Come on, Brenda," he
said. Finally there was a click and the answering machine picked
up. Mulder hung up and dialed her mobile phone, fidgeting with
the torn dustjacket while the phone rang. "This reminds me of
the night before Junior Prom," he said, which got no noticeable
reaction from Davis. Scully would have thought it was funny.
At last a woman answered. "Hello?" She said.
"Hi -- is this Brenda?"
A static-filled pause followed. "Who is this?" the woman asked.
Mulder got the impression that if he gave the wrong answer she'd
hang up and call the cops. He supposed a lot of ex-addicts had
people they'd rather not take phone calls from.
"I'm Special Agent Fox Mulder with the FBI. I'm helping
investigate Kristie' Herron's death and I wanted to ask you a few
questions," he said.
"This is a federal case?" For some reason she sounded pleased.
"Then you nailed McBer."
"What makes you say that?" Mulder thought he'd managed to keep
the excitement out of his voice. He wished to God he was
recording this phone call.
"You don't *know?* His connections to the 'Columbian export
business,'" Brenda said. She had a deep, husky voice, like that
of a woman who'd long been a heavy smoker. "I hoped you'd
caught whichever one of them did it."
"So you think McBer ordered a hit," Mulder said. Davis was
trying to keep one eye on the road and one eye on him. Mulder
wondered what the detective would have paid for a speaker phone
just then.
"She lived out here all her life. Don't expect me to believe she
walked off that cliff by accident," Brenda said.
"Did she say anything that made you think she was afraid?" Mulder
asked.
"Yeah, she did. When she called me Tuesday night," Brenda said.
"What time?"
"6:30 maybe -- no, 7, because it was already getting dark. It was
weird because just a couple days before she told me she wasn't
afraid of him anymore, that she was looking forward to putting
him away. Then all of a sudden she tells me she's not
testifying; she's backing out; she's calling the D.A. to tell him
the deal's off. I told her, 'Girl, this is your *life.* The D.A.
can reinstate those charges against you as fast as he dropped
'em,' and she said she'd rather go to prison than get shot in an
alley. I was sure McBer had gotten to her somehow. I asked her,
'Who called you, Kristie? Who's threatening you?' But she kept
saying, 'Nobody, nobody, nobody.' She never would tell me what
scared her so bad, but I got her to put off calling the D.A. I
wish I hadn't, now."
"You couldn't have known what would happen," Mulder said.
"No." Brenda's brash voice had grown quiet. "You'll get him,
won't you? He's not going to get away with what he did?"
"We're going to do everything we can," Mulder said. "Is there
anything else you can remember, something somebody said, even if
it didn't seem important at the time?"
"I've been trying to think, but I can't come up with anything
that would prove he did it. It's just a strong gut feeling.
Believe me, if I could hand him over to you on a silver platter
I would," she said.
Mulder thanked her and gave her instructions on how to contact
him in case she thought of anything else. He pulled a notepad
from his coat pocket and scratched a few notations into it.
Davis seemed to be having trouble focusing on the road. "Well,
what did you get?" he asked.
"Enough to make me really interested in what McBer was doing last
Tuesday," Mulder said, not bothering to look up from the paper.
He'd often claimed his inner child was a little shit, and he was
enjoying the detective's fidgeting immensely.
There was only one ferry company that made runs to Martha's
Vineyard during the off-season, and Mulder dialed its number from
memory. It didn't take long for the receptionist to find a deck
hand who remembered a man in a wheelchair driving a specially
modified Ford Prospector van. The van required a double-wide
parking space so the chair lift could operate, an accommodation
that might have been difficult on a more crowded run. The van
and its driver were so unusual that the ferry worker could give
the exact time and date he'd seen them: Tuesday, April 11, at the
10:45 a.m. Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven crossing.
Mulder shared this information with Davis, who made a few calls
of his own to determine Kristie's schedule on the 11th. Before
they reached Edgartown they had a critical window of time:
between 6:10, when Kristie clocked out at her job at a grocery
store in Aquinnah, and just before 7 p.m. when she arrived home.
The drive itself should not have taken more than 15 minutes.
By the time they pulled into the lot behind the Dukes County
House of Correction, Davis had stopped giving Mulder those dry,
knowing looks. Clearly, Mulder had come a long way from the
nutcase in the autopsy bay in the detective's estimation. As
they stepped out of the car into the cutting spring wind, Davis
asked, "What did you leave the BSU to do, again?"
"I work on the X-Files Unit," Mulder said, shrugging his coat
more squarely onto his shoulders. "I chase aliens. I thought
they'd told you that."
"Aliens," Davis said. He didn't seem sure whether Mulder was
serious or not.
"Aliens, mutants . . . we get a pretty good variety of cases,
really," Mulder said, leading the way toward the small, unmarked
door in the back of the building. The Dukes County Jail did not
look like a lock-up. One hundred and twenty-five years old, it
had been built to resemble a whaling captain's house, complete
with a fanlight over the door and imposing white columns at the
corners of the front porch.
Mulder hit the buzzer that would alert the jail staff that they
were waiting. He turned to Davis, who stood with his hands
tucked into his armpits. The bright sunshine gave hardly any
warmth at all. "I had a case similar to this once," Mulder said.
"A quadruple amputee who was able to master the art of astral
projection decided to settle some old scores by committing
several murders. I admit I was worried about how to get charges
filed, but one of his victims solved the problem by getting up
out of his hospital bed and shooting the guy. It's sort of a
story about overcoming obstacles."
To his credit, Detective Davis simply would not be shocked. He
squinted up at Mulder and said, "I suppose you're going to tell
me McBer can do this too?"
"Of course he can't," Mulder said, "It's obvious the cuts on
Kristie's body were made by somebody with limited strength and
mobility. You think that in his revenge fantasies McBer would
give himself the same physical disabilities he has in life? Come
on. That's why I classify paranormal phenomena by motivation
whenever possible. It saves so much time that might be wasted in
empty conjecture."
Whatever Davis' reply would have been, it was forestalled when
the door opened and a brown-shirted corrections officer leaned
out. "Agent Mulder and Detective Davis?" the officer said.
Mulder and Davis produced their badges. "Follow me," the c.o.
said.
The room beyond was a kind of wire-mesh cage with a bank of metal
drawers along one wall for officers to lock their weapons in. As
they disarmed, Davis glanced up at Mulder and muttered something
about the Justice Department that ended with, "Only under
Clinton."
The c.o. produced a jangling collection of keys and opened the
door to the cage, then the ordinary wooden door that led to the
jail's cramped office space. Among the too-numerous desks stood
large group of officers, some wearing the browns of the Sheriff's
Department and some in the blues of the State Police. Joe Luce
caught his eye and nodded at him. Joe was in civilian clothes,
jeans and a sweatshirt printed with the logo of a local marina.
He looked about as tired as Mulder felt.
"Mr. Mulder," a woman said. Mulder looked over and saw Liz
Hawley, late of the West Tisbury PD, wearing the star-shaped
badge of the Dukes County sheriff. Hawley had been one of the
people most interested in charging Mulder with the murder of his
father. She was a heavy woman and the close-fitting shirt and
slacks of the Sheriff's uniform didn't suit her, but there was
clearly muscle under her bulk. Mulder wouldn't have wanted to
tangle with her in a dark alley. She was giving him a cold stare
right out of "High Noon."
"Sheriff Hawley," Mulder said.
"Chief Luce here tells us that your background at the FBI may
help us pull a couple of investigations out of the fire. If you
have any ideas, we'd sure like to hear them," she said.
//And then one of the boys'll git us a rope . . .// "Give me half
an hour with McBer's file. I'll be able to give you
recommendations after that," Mulder said.
Hawley said, "I hope so."
Mulder pretended not to notice the chilly looks the local
officers gave him while a c.o. went to pull McBer's information
off the fax machine. There were people who could see past the
death of Mulder's father, but no Island cop was going to forget
John Lee Roche or what had almost happened to an eight-year-old
mainland girl. Under the circumstances, Mulder accepted their
hostility as his due.
The returning corrections officer handed him a stack of papers
about the thickness of a small phone book. Mulder appropriated a
desk for himself and settled his reading glasses on his nose. As
he read through the blurry third-generation copies, he began to
piece together the strategy he would use with their murder
suspect.
Soon his apprehensions began to fade. The case was not
impossible, and as he would have told anyone who asked, he was
very good at what he did.
*****
Scully did not get out of Nye House as quickly as she wanted to,
mostly because there was nowhere to go. Her phone inquiries
revealed that every store east of Vineyard Haven was shut down
between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning. She had to ask
Leigh for some gauze for her hands, which were throbbing despite
the Tylenol-3 tablets the ER doctor had discharged her with. The
little proprietress not only produced a first-aid kit but would
not hear of her leaving without clean clothing. Most of the
clothes Scully had with her were spattered with dried blood from
the night before. Unfortunately, Leigh was about Scully's height
but much heavier, while her daughter Tammy was considerably
taller. Scully stood quietly by while Leigh rummaged in Tammy's
closet, coming up with dusty clothes the young woman hadn't worn
since high school.
Leigh was more than happy holding up both ends of the
conversation as she reminisced about her youth and Mulder's
childhood. "He was a great favorite of my mother's. She used to
have him recite "Annabelle Lee" for her. He could memorize
practically anything if he read it once or twice."
"Not Poe's "Annabelle Lee?" Scully asked, holding up a shapeless
white sweater.
"Oh, yes. I remember one evening we were out with our guests in
the garden, watching the fireflies come out. Suddenly I heard my
mother say, 'Aha!' and I turned to see her pull Fox from a clump
of her raspberry bushes, still sucking juice off his fingers. He
was about eight or nine years old, just a skinny little fellow in
shorts with scratches on his knees. Mother pretended to be very
cross and explained that this was little Fox Mulder from up the
road and that he'd been into her raspberries again. She said,
'Fox, I won't scold you on one condition -- you must recite
"Annabelle Lee" for everyone.' We thought she was joking and
everybody laughed. Then he actually began reciting it. He got
such a smile on his face when he saw how amazed we were."
Leigh shook out a dusty pair of stretch pants and said, "It *was*
funny, hearing a fidgety little boy with two of his teeth missing
say things like, 'this maiden she lived with no other thought,
than to love and be loved by me.' I'm sure he had no idea what
half of it meant. 'The sepulcher there by the sea' indeed! He
was simply glad for all the attention and that he wasn't in
trouble."
Mulder had not retained that innocence for long, and Scully felt
a pang of tenderness for him that was almost grief. "He never
told me that story," she said. "He doesn't talk about his
childhood much at all."
"He may prefer not to think about it," Leigh said. "For a while
he was a terribly, terribly unhappy boy. He did odd jobs for my
parents when he came to stay with his father. He'd had some kind
of falling out with the children he used to play with, and there
really wasn't much for him to do except get into trouble -- and
he was very good at doing that. Not that it was all his fault.
There probably wasn't anywhere on the Island he could go without
meeting with the kind of attention he didn't want.
"Once I found him in reading a comic book in the loft of the
utility shed. The picture on the cover was horrible -- bloody,
screaming people running away from some kind of spaceship
shooting fire. The way he was hiding with it made me think he
wasn't supposed to have it, but he didn't seem to be enjoying it
at all. How can I describe the look on his face? Like a man
looking through the newspaper for an obituary he doesn't want to
see. He seemed truly frightened, which was odd because he was a
great big boy and here it was broad daylight. I didn't have the
heart to tease him about it. All I asked was, 'How can you sleep
at night after reading things like that?' He looked up at me and
said, 'I can't.' I believed him. His face was so pale and he had
dark circles under his eyes. Had it been any other boy I'd have
thought he was into drugs, but somehow not Fox. He was quite
rational, quite lucid . . . just so very frightened when there
ought to have been nothing to fear. It was a little disturbing,
really." Leigh shook her head. Her thick glasses magnified her
eyes so that they looked like a sorrowful bug's. "I can't say I
was pleased to hear that he'd gone off to England to study the
criminally insane. I hoped he'd grow out of this . . . morbid
phase. But he never has, has he?"
"Not exactly," Scully admitted.
"I know it can't all be my mother's fault, but I don't expect all
that Poe at such a young age could have been good for him," Leigh
said.
"I've never heard him complain about it. Besides, Mulder finds
what he does very rewarding. Well, he usually does," Scully
said. There had been notable exceptions, the Siberian gulag and
so on, not that she was going to mention such things. Even still,
Leigh did not seem overly reassured.
In the end Scully selected one of the least dusty-looking
outfits, a pair of black stretch pants and an oversized white
button-down that would have been the height of fashion in about
1988. She thanked Leigh profusely for her help but insisted she
had to do errands before the pain in her hands and bruised ribs
became too much for her. Leigh let her go somewhat reluctantly.
It seemed the detectives and technicians who made up the rest of
Nye House's current clientele weren't any fun to talk to.
As Scully walked out to the car in the icy sunlight, she wondered
if Leigh had tried to tell stories about Mulder's childhood to
the other officers, too. For his sake, she hoped not.
*****