We made out way down the stairs gingerly. Every where we looked there was the litter of wrecked furniture, strewn clothes, broken glass from dishes and vases...it looked as much like a tornado had hit as it had sounded. The mattresses from our room where in the doorways, bleeding stuffing. It made us worry about the bags and equipment that we'd left down in the entry way when we'd left in our haste. Every time we had to step over another broken or ripped item, our surety that we'd leave the island with no evidence grew.

So it was to our utter surprise that we found the bags neatly piled in one corner of the room. Mulder grabbed at the nearest bag, and began to go through it quickly. " Looks like nothing is broken." He sounded awed.

Scully had picked up the other bag by then. " This stuff looks fine too."

I gave the last two bags a puzzled look. One was the cooler, which had been left in the kitchen. The other was Markie's baby bag, which I'd used the night before to dress Markie up in the bedroom. " That's just odd..." I murmured.

" What is?" Mulder asked. He must have good hearing.

" Well, the cooler and the baby bag...they were in other rooms last night. Yet here they are with the film and photography equipment bags."

Scully raised an eyebrow. I wish I could do that. I had a friend in college who could do it perfectly. " That is odd." She agreed.

Mulder just shrugged. " Maybe they knew the stuff was ours."

" What do you mean?" I asked, confused.

" Maybe they realized that our stuff didn't belong to the house, so there was no sense in looking through it and destroying it while trying to find the gold." He explained.

Scully shot him a look. " Are you implying that they may not have bothered us, and that we hid for no reason?" He voice rose, and she looked angry.

" I don't know." He said reasonably." But I do know that I'm glad that we didn't take the chance. That they didn't bother our stuff because it's just a theory, anyway. Maybe they didn't bother it because it's modern."

" But we're not." I pointed out.

Unfortunately the point was lost. " What?" They both asked.

" We're not modern. I mean, yeah, sapiens are the latest model, but people have been people like this for thousands of years. We wouldn't be any different in design than the man who stole their treasure over one hundred years ago." They both nodded slightly, but I knew they didn't get what I meant. I shrugged internally. That's not an unusual outcome to the conversations I engage in

" Anyway... I think we should scout out our rooms and see if they left our clothes intact too." Scully said abruptly. They had, so we got dressed as soon as we were able to pull them out from under the things they ruined. Wrinkled, but not ripped, they were an improvement over the nightclothes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not long after that we decided that we could no longer stand to be inside, so we grabbed our things and went out. Toughly sick of being in someone's arms, Markie demanded to be put down. Since the terrain was rough, Scully and I each took one of his hands, after stowing our bags on the porch, and allowed him to toddle around the island to his heart's content. He didn't seem to mind our attempts to figure out how to get off the island while he did it. Mulder was soon acting like a little boy himself, as he bent to point out shells and other things of interest to my son. Before long Scully and I got into the spirit of it, squatting down with them to take a look at things too.

Which is why it scared the hell out of us when " Hallo!" floated across the island. My heart skipped a beat, and for a second I thought it was one of the ghosts, back to finish us off. The sheepish looks the agents wore suggested that the same thought had crossed their minds as well.

" Back here!" Mulder called to the unseen man.

An elderly man wearing galoshes and a quilted plaid jacket stomped around to where we were. " Thought it must be you. Saw your stuff up theyah on the porch."

" I didn't know anyone was looking for us." Scully said, self-consciously brushing at her slacks.

" Oh, ayuh. The boat came back last night all on its lonesome, so we figured either you drown or you was on one of the islands. Had to wait til daybreak to look for you, sorry to say." I instantly identified him as a Mainer. That wasn't too surprising, Maine was only a few miles from where we stood.

" I told you someone would come looking for us." Mulder said cheerfully.

I shot him a look. He also told us we were going to die, so he didn't have much to brag about when it came to being right. " Thank you so much for looking for us." I told the man instead.

" Oh, wasn't any trouble. I was just going to be fishing anyway." I think he only caught sight of Markie then when he stepped forward to speak to me, because he bent down suddenly. " Oh, who's this little fellow? You're a cunnin' one, aintcha." He said, gently clucking Markie's chin." No one mentioned there was a little one with you." He added, looking dismayed.

" He did ok. Liked the adventure, didn't you?" I asked him, tickling the baby to make him giggle. " It's something that will be wicked hard for the rest of us to forget, that's for sure." I added with a smile.

" I'm George, by the way." He mentioned, studying Mulder and Scully.

" I'm Shannon, and this is my son, Markie. And they're agents Mulder and Scully."

" City folk." George said with a faintly disdainful tone. " Not you two, though."

" No. We live in New Hampshire. Just doing our part to help the FBI out." I told him.

" Someone's got to help people from away, or they get themselves killed instead of merely stranded." He muttered, which amused me, but not the agents. He gave Mulder a look that suggested he held him personally responsible for our spending the night on the island, which I didn't disagree with. " Come along, now, I'll drop you on the mainland."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A short time later we were standing at the boat launch, within sight of Mulder's rental car. We thanked George profusely, and explained the situation to the boat's owner, who wasn't angry. His manner suggested that he was glad that we were safe, and must have thought we'd all drowned, which would be on his conscience.

Once we headed back to the car, Agent Mulder paused. " I'm dying to know something..." He said to me.

" What?"

" Why did George know that Scully and I are 'city folk' and you're not? It can't be clothes, since we're in casual attire today. And you don't have his accent..."

I shrugged. " I don't have a discernible accent because I moved a lot between Massachusetts and New Hampshire growing up, so neither really stuck, but I speak the same words he would, if not with the same accent."

" Ah." He said. " Vocabulary and syntax. Interesting." I rolled my eyes.

" Maybe we should stop for frappes on the way back to my house." I teased.

" Ice cream in October?" Scully asked with a shudder.

" More proof you're from away." I laughed. Up here we like our ice cream all year round, no matter how perverse that seems.