Let's play a game, shall we? It's called Spot the Star and if you win… well, I can't give you a really cool prize. But the self-righteousness you get from winning will be better than anything I can serve up, eh? Yes, I'm cheap.

Chapter Five ; Guilt, Go Ahead and Eat Me Up Inside

A warm place, when you got right down to it that was all Sam had ever wanted. Jessica had been his warm place, the beating heart he had been searching for all his life, but that was all robbed from him now. He no longer had that heart, the one he listened to underneath his ear all of those nights to lull him to sleep, and he no longer had a warm place.

Adrift at sea, that's how Sam felt all the time now. Drifting, drifting, holding onto the desperate hope that made up his raft; the desperate hope that eventually he'll see land… but land never comes, only more water and more water after that. There's fire, too, starting up out of nowhere and replacing the moon and the stars. Fire above him, black cold water below him, suffocating for no reason other than the fact that he doesn't seem to want to breathe. If he doesn't breathe, then maybe he can find his warm place again. And it almost happens, him rejoining that warm place, but then he'll breathe.

Then he'll breathe and he'll hear Jessica talking to him. He can't exactly hear her, but he knows she's there and he can understand what she's saying all too well. Sam doesn't love her anymore, she'll say, he doesn't want to be with her like he once told her he wanted to be. In his defense he'll start screaming at her, yell and pound his fists and tell her that he never meant to breathe. He loves her, he wants to be with her so much it hurts, but every time he's on the threshold and is about to take her hand his brother has to yank on his diaphragm and make him inhale.

Here Dean was, doing it again. Like a cockroach that just wouldn't die, Dean was always there. Maybe Sam was thankful for that, but maybe he wished that his brother would go away for a while and let Sam be. Of course, that would never happen.

So there Sam stood, holding his breath as he stared at a white door with slightly peeling paint, and knowing full well that at any moment Dean was going to clap him on the back. When that happened, Sam would be ready to rip that pretty boy's arm off and shove it down his throat.

"You worry me, Sammy" were the words that replaced a slap on the back. Apparently Dean was a mind reader and even if he wasn't, if he just didn't want to pound on his brother's back in a public place and get arrested for abuse, it worked just as well.

As the front door to the Weiss home opened, Sam took a rather explosive breath in. His vision pixelated for several moments, but he was still able to make out a white haired woman of average height, average build, with few wrinkles and a loud flower blouse that clashed horribly with her skin tone.

"Ma'am," Dean nodded. "This is Sam Krueger and I'm Dean Baker. We're with The New York Times and if it's all right, we'd like to ask you a few questions for the piece we're working on."

Gweneth's foundation title: Apprehension. "Shouldn't you boys be over talking to Matthew and Julia Sanders? Most other journalists have congregated around them like flies to a corpse."

Sam's head was no longer thought itself a balloon that wanted to sail away. "That's a very interesting picture, Ma'am, but actually we'd like to give them a little time to grieve before we go ringing their doorbell. They only lost their son this morning."

After a pause, one in which she didn't lose a speck of her startchy tone, Gweneth eyed the brothers carefully. "What do you want to know so badly that you come here all the way from New York?"

"Anything you can tell us, that's what we'd like to know," Dean put point blank.

Gweneth Weiss didn't seem too happy with that statement, but she must have figured that Sam and Dean wouldn't be getting off her porch anytime soon because eventually she moved aside and let them through the door. "I was just making some tea," she offered – or did she? Her tone was so dry it was hard to tell if she was simply stating a fact or putting fuel in her hospitality float.

Both the brothers nodded and threw out various forms of "Thank you, Ma'am".

"Please, call me Gweneth. As long as you're in my house you might as well call me by my name," she explained as she disappeared through an archway. "Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen."

Though the house was a two-story, the square footage went straight up. When Sam closed the front door it didn't take any effort at all to walk into the living room, four of five feet at the most. He sat down next to Dean on a period sofa under a north facing window and, for no other purpose than to look professional, took a notebook and pen from his coat pocket. "I hope we're not keeping you from anything," he said politely.

"Oh, no, not at all," Gweneth could have cooed from the kitchen. There was another archway that connected the small cook station to the living room, so the boys could see and hear her easily from their posts. "Now that Earl's gone away on business I spend my days knitting or at Church, visiting with the grandchildren."

"Were any of yours part of the group we saw down by the lighthouse?" Sam asked, staring down at the notepad in his hands with an "I'm so excited to be taking notes again" expression on his face. To Dean's horror, his brother wasn't being sarcastic.

"Goodness, no," the elder laughed and came out of the kitchen with a platter in her hands. She set it down on the coffee table in front of the sofa and poured three cups full of drink with a tea pot, all of which had been carried on the serving platter. Taking one of the Robin's egg blue cups in her hands, Gweneth settled down into a high backed chair to Sam's left. "Stephanie's in her late twenties and Craig's not far behind. They're a little too old for hopscotch and hide-and-seek, though they are fond of squabbling like children about her hair. Poor thing, Craig says it's liable to fall right out if she keeps on dying it the way she does. You know," she chuckled, "it was green the last time I saw it. Looked like a lime vomited all over her head, but don't you tell her I said that."

Dean's face had surely turned as green as lime sick knowing that his convenience store clerk lady friend was this woman's granddaughter. Sam, on the other hand, smiled and shook his head.

"No, of course we won't," he replied softly. In truth he had been hoping to speak with Stephanie again about what she knew about the case, but how was he going to do that if she was told he was visiting an uncle he didn't have in Georgetown and had now shown up at the doorstep of her grandmother's? Oh well, maybe he wouldn't need to speak to her again.

Trying to get the sour taste from his mouth, Dean snatched up a tea cup and took a sip that burnt off the first three layers of his tongue. He frowned and set it back on the coffee table. "Can you tell us anything about what's going on, Ma' – Gweneth? It seems like no one really knows anything, not the reporters, not anyone."

"No one knows where to start, I suppose. This is a very small island, as you can tell, and when strange things begin to happen it's hard to make sense of them."

"Strange?" Sam repeated. "How?"

Gweneth seemed totally calm, like this conversation was about the proper way to cook a lobster instead of mysterious deaths. "On an island with little over 470 people, there's bound to be some type of clue somewhere, a lead, or someone who was told something. There's none of that kind of thing here, never has been. Not even a single drop of blood anywhere on this island."

Sam, though he didn't need to take them, jotted down notes anyway because that's what reporters do. "Dean and I, we heard a… song, if you could call it that. I don't know if you've heard of it, but the children said–"

"'You scream for no one to hear'?" Gweneth finished like she had just recited a line from a Fraggle Rock episode. "Yes, I've heard it before. In fact, I used to sing it when I was a little girl. It's true, however, that no one has heard so much as a pin drop during the murders. One child slept in the same room as another one that died, didn't even hear the sheets rustle."

"But how can that be? How can no one hear anything? The killings, they're so grisly…. You say you've sung the rhyme when you were younger, so you mean to say that these slayings have been occurring for that many years?" Dean asked, honestly not meaning to sound insulting.

Nodding, Gweneth took a drink of her tea. "We were just as clueless back then as well."

"Shouldn't that mean you at least have a suspect, theories?" Sam prodded.

"Of course we do, have theories. They run the whole gamut, but that doesn't mean it's gotten us anywhere."

Sam tapped the tip of his pencil against his notepad. "One of them, I assume, has to do with this Doctor Meyers in the song you used to sing. He was mad, at least they say?"

Gweneth, like she always did when she wasn't sipping on her drink, set the cup down smoothly in her lap. "Gentlemen, Doctor Meyers isn't a real person. He's in the song as something to rhyme pliers with. Neither is old man Guhl while we're on the topic."

"But I've heard of several articles mentioning a Doctor Meyers and this island," Dean tried to egg the old woman on.

"People make blockbuster movies about false legends and the fabricated people who die in the woods whilst pursuing said legend," Gweneth expounded simply. "I don't see why a television show set on the mystery buff part of the population wouldn't make something up about this island either."

Dean's tongue was still stinging and it hurt even more when he had to admit his brother was right… again. Dammit. "They mentioned something about a Doctor Meyers coming to this island with his wife, performing surgeries on the residents here much the same way as the children here are being killed. That's a pretty risky thing to make up."

"You reporters do it all the time," Gweneth replied, her voice lifeless as sandpaper once again. "It's not unheard of to fabricate something in order to bring your television show, your newspaper back from the brink. It puts that town under a spotlight we don't want or need, but as long as you get a boost in your ratings it's a-okay."

Sam knew that if he showed his frustration the whole island would hear about this episode in more detail than they ever needed to know. Every door would be locked to them if they weren't careful about how they acted. "I'm sorry if we're upsetting you, that wasn't our intent. Sometimes we believe too much in what we read."

Dean was ready to protest, but found the toes of his left foot being crushed under his brother's heel. It wasn't pleasant at all and shut him right up. Let's see: he had spider guts on his pants, a burnt tongue, this woman was related to that gas station bitch, and now his toes were broken. Well, his day just kept getting better and better!

"That's all right," Gweneth seemed to lie, but for the moment she wasn't kicking the boys out of her house.

Trying to approach his question as painlessly as he could, Sam stopped hurting his brother to lean forward in his seat. "I've read a notice that you and some other residents have written. Do you feel as though it's helped at all?"

"People are still dying, Sam. It hasn't helped in the least, but what else were we to do?"

The last thing he and Dean needed was a sign stapled to their foreheads, but in order to get any information that was a chance Sam was simply going to have to take. "Gweneth, I'd like for you to tell me what happened to your mother. You mentioned her in that notice and I'd like to know if you saw or heard anything that you think you might not have."

It had been a short acknowledgment, not even two sentences, but it stood out like a sore thumb. Gweneth Weiss's mother, as far as Sam knew to date, had been the only victim that had been married with children. She had been the oldest too, in her forties, when she died. It went completely against the grain of all the other killings, something had to be special about it – if it had even been a supernatural murder at all.

"There isn't anything I can tell you. I left to go to a friend's birthday party that night, said good-bye to my mother. When I left she had just been settling down to take a nap on the couch, when I came back I found her dead in that same spot. My father had been at work, what siblings of mine still lived at home off at school activities or football practice. No one was there when it happened."

And, of course – as the Dresden Dolls once sang – it is a lie. Sam knew because Gweneth was looking at her tea when she said that, just as she did when she was talking about the doctor who "didn't exist".

But she now was able to meet the brothers' eyes, looking quite angry in fact, and stood up. "I want you two to go now. You can walk yourselves to the door."